While the World Stands Still: Remembering the Swelling River

Tiffany Chung

If water has memories, it will remember what I remember, even in fragments.

1978

New Economic Zone / Mekong River / tropic migrations / floodplains.

Every afternoon, a child sits on the windowsill of her new home, far away from the home of her childhood. Her Siamese fighting fish swims in a jar next to her, both staring at the rising sea of brown water that swallows what it can. People no longer walk, only boats move in and out of homes. Her mom’s long black hair floats in the room every morning. Memories of water stay with the girl between her sleeping and waking hours for many years to come.[1]  

Examining the 1978 Mekong Delta flood in a larger sociopolitical context points to complex and inextricable links between nation building, economic policy, political complexity, the physicality of place, and extreme climate impact. A series of disastrous sociopolitical and economic experiments implemented in post-1975 Việt Nam by the new government set the prologue to an epic refugee exodus from the country.[2] Decades after the historic 1978 flood, I began to look into the policy of Xây dựng các vùng kinh tế mới or the New Economic Zones (NEZ) program. This program was the post-1975 communist government’s key policy to restructure South Vietnamese society, redistributing population from the urban areas to develop new agricultural frontiers in the western highlands and the Mekong Delta.[3] One of these zones in Đồng Tháp Mười (Plain of Reeds) was where my mom, my sister, and I were forcibly relocated in 1978.

Describing the NEZ program as a “redistribution of labor,” Vietnamese officials said the zones would provide jobs and food to those in need.[4] The targeted candidates were former South Vietnamese soldiers and government officials and their families, along with well-to-do southern Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese merchants whose property was confiscated as the new regime launched the “anti-comprador bourgeoisie” campaign in September 1975. Pushing these groups to the NEZs, the resettlement program was a political move designed to isolate the southern population.[5] By “providing work,” the government indeed utilized this labor force in clearing land, digging canals, improving irrigation, and growing crops. In fact, these ambitious land reclamation and hydraulic projects led by People’s Army units and Thanh Niên Xung Phong (Youth Volunteer Corps) appear to have precedents in Việt Nam’s history throughout the precolonial, colonial, wartime, and postwar eras. Anthropologist Erik Harms and historian David Biggs have extensively studied and mapped the continuing and overlapping activities and politics of such nation-building efforts in Việt Nam’s history.[6]

Despite their similar policies, the country’s nation-building projects throughout history are by no means a series of cohesive and concerted efforts. Việt Nam’s national narrative imagines a unity of peoples and regimes, as evinced by historical and contemporary texts on “khẩn hoang, dựng làng” (clearing wasteland and establishing villages), especially in the nam tiến (march to the south) movement: “Up until the last years of the seventeenth century, the Viet migrants, together with the Chinese and the Khmer, had come to settle and clear the land over the broad and wide entirety of a region extending from Mô Xoài to Sài Côn–Bến Nghé.”[7] Concluding and justifying the most “successful” urban development megaproject in District 7, a rural area of the former Sài Gòn, the developer Phú Mỹ Hưng Corporation writes: “We are connected to the pathways of our ancestors, who cleared the wastelands, intent on transforming the low-lying saline mangrove lands in the south and southwest of the city into modern urban zones. These zones carry the spirit inherited from those people who went before us and are also full of the innovative spirit of the children of the contemporary city.”[8] As a challenge to this perspective, scholar Keith Taylor points out that “there is evidence of conflict in the territories thought to have been inhabited by ancestors of the modern Vietnamese” and that “these conflicts offer opportunities to think about traces from the past in reference to time and terrain rather than narrative, whether the narrative be of the nation, of a religion, or of a historical process.”[9]

1980

Saigon in the wee hours / darkness / crowded bus / vomiting / Mekong / river ferry. The girl and her little sister step down from the bus, walking into the misty fog. Autie cô Năm / country home / Mom / crying / us / waving / off we go.

The water embodies sleepless nights as it watches people’s shadows submerge in darkness. The boat departs from Cửa Đại river mouth, finding its way to international waters. Hanging on the edges of our boat / vomiting / fainting / time passing.

…Gunshots. Shadow-less people push one another towards the fish compartment. Please get off my chest / out of breadth / little sister / pleading / in darkness / bottom of the boat. The night feels heavier with the lack of oxygen. In between breathless breaths she hears the sound of jewelry and watches being dropped into a tin can. Bodies frozen / souls restless / mouths muzzled. Border patrols wait until all valuables are stripped off in the blackness of the night and airtight compartment. Suddenly, silence breaks into bodies rushing to emerge from the bottom, hurriedly inhaling a gulp of fresh air… spirits spiraling downward into the bottomless pit of despair… The sea embraces those who dive into it, leaving the imprints of their bodies in the water’s memories.[10]

The force of memory is as powerful as the force of water, sweeping through time and space to shorten distances and collapse boundaries. Trauma seeps through our subconsciousness and persistently demands that we negotiate with the past. Such force can also activate an intellectual curiosity that extends beyond the personal to the global. One of the most notable conflicts that Taylor references is the mid-twentieth century war in Việt Nam—a civil, ideological, and proxy war between North and South Việt Nam, with the U.S., U.S.S.R., and P.R.C. involved.  

The aftermath of this war was marked by the above-mentioned refugee migration that I was a part of. The body of brown water in the Lower Mekong Basin that I have carried with me across continents into my adulthood is in fact the lifeblood that over sixty million people depend on for food, health, income, culture, and identity. Today, there are fifty-six existing hydropower infrastructures in the Mekong River Basin—with an additional thirty-one dams under construction, seventy-four planned dams, and twenty-three proposed ones.[11] This ongoing hydropower development will further aggravate poverty in the region. Dams alter the flow of water and sudden fluctuations in water levels disrupt fish migration and spawning. Constricting water flow also means trapping the nutrient-rich sediment needed to fertilize rice paddies, feed fish, and replenish alluvial soil to prevent sinking deltas and from saltwater intrusion. Reservoirs cannot replace the natural habitats essential to many of the more than five hundred aquatic species native to the Mekong River. Flooding due to dams, as well as rising sea levels due to climate change, will exacerbate the negative impacts of stagnant ecosystems. Chronic flood projections in Climate Central’s October 2019 study warn that rising seas could affect all Asian coastal cities—and even erase some of them—by 2050. Southern Việt Nam, including Sài Gòn, could disappear under the sea, while Shanghai, Dhaka, Bangkok, Mumbai, and Jakarta are also imperiled. Land currently home to three hundred million people could fall below the high tide line in thirty years.

Human progress around the world has shown that the twin forces of annihilation and transformation go hand in hand. The 1930s Dust Bowl marked the decline of the Great Plains in the U.S., with severe dust storms rolling through the region after periods of drought and decades of land misuse. Twenty-five million hectares of land were destroyed, and three hundred thousand people migrated west during the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl epitomizes humankind’s short-sightedness and the limits of civilization when facing the forces of nature. Japan is another crucial case study on progress and decline. Living in Japan in the mid-2000s and frequently returning thereafter for field studies, I was confronted with the wreckage of modernization in a post-industrial country. Beyond the flashy neon-signs of bustling Tokyo, Japan is characterized by quiet bed towns, an aging population, abandoned homes, and industrial ruins. After the rapid growth brought about by the Meiji Restoration and Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, small towns all over Japan are now nostalgically marked with shuttered shotengai (shopping arcades). Much of my work between 2010 to 2016 was largely informed by case studies of Japan’s various transformation processes: the social transformation during the Taisho Democracy, notably the 1918 Kome Sodo uprising; the frantic spatial shifts after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, 1945 air raids, and 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and fires in Kobe that burnt the town of Nagata to the ground; the diminishment of agricultural and industrial towns and their populations as exemplified in the case of Mine-shi, Yamaguchi Prefecture following the closure of coalmines in the region; and the magnitude of destruction after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, as well as the resulting Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Climate and economic crises coupled with political and armed conflicts have produced and will continue to produce refugees. As a battlefield of the U.S.-led war on terrorism, the ongoing civil-turned-proxy war in Syria and the displacement of its population continues to drag on indefinitely, evoking other historical memories. Việt Nam, globally known as a geopolitical quagmire and a major theater of the Cold War, produced the largest refugee migration in the latter half of the twentieth century. Tracing the history of U.S. economic interest, political influence, and military interventions in Latin America explains migration movements to the U.S. from the region, especially migration from the Northern Triangle of Central America.

Although there have been constant and endless cycles of expansion and dispossession, settlement and displacement, throughout human history, discussions on the terms of refugees only began in the twentieth century. International initiatives to assist and repatriate WWI and WWII displaced refugees were first appointed by the League of Nations, then the United Nations (as the League reconstituted itself.) By 1950, many Western countries realized that “refugees were not simply vestigial remnants of the Second World War but a far more intractable, and growing, problem,”[12] thereby giving rise to the UNHCR. Extending the definition of “refugee” beyond those uprooted by WWII and its aftermath, the 1951 Convention still limited protections to those affected by events occurring before January 1951, namely those in Europe. In 1957, the UNHCR was authorized to assist non-white refugees for the first time— the Chinese refugees in Hong Kong—although they were not “of concern”[13] to the agency. The 1967 Protocol removed the above restrictions despite the disagreement of some signatories. In 1975, the UN General Assembly finally affirmed in Resolution 3454 the significant role of the refugee agency in providing protection for refugees and displaced persons.[14] That year, the UNHCR expanded its presence in Southeast Asia to handle the “Indochina refugee crisis,” following the 1973 Paris Peace Treaty when the agency pledged and offered aid to over eleven million war refugees and internally displaced persons in Laos and Việt Nam.

As human migration can be traced back to ancient times, the layered negotiations between different groups of people and between people and the environment can be exemplified in every part of the world. An in-depth examination of life conditions in post-1975 Việt Nam reveal that the effects of war-making, nation building, rapid development, natural and anthropogenic disasters, and extreme climate impact are often interwoven. Within the framework of such complexities, forced displacement and global refugee migration are inextricably tied to political, social, economic, and environmental processes. “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule… Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency.”[15] What Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940 on the struggle against fascism still rings true today, especially in the Global Souths.

We cannot make whole again the fragments of the past—but if after hope comes action, then the future depends on what we do in the here and now. The complexity of identifying one single cause of refugee migration asks that we revisit the conversation on what constitutes someone a refugee. Broadening the refugee law frameworks to provide international protection and humanitarian needs for displaced people in the context of conflict and climate disaster related movements is the defining issue of the twenty-first century. Among many things that the COVID-19 pandemic teaches us is that we live in a fluid world, local crises can become global at any given moment.

April 2020

While the world stands still / we slow down, listen, and count / our days are numbered.
Spring comes quieter / sunrays blur and the sky glooms / of impending doom.

As choreographed / achingly and awkwardly / we step left and right.
We move up and down / in a quagmire of progress / of ruins and rubble.
Tomorrow is here / the angel of history / awakens the dead.

Cities at a pause / thoughts / secrets / unfinished loves / are six feet under.
Behind glass windows / we breathe in the silence of / our befallen world.

Endnotes

[1] Tiffany Chung, “Border,” in Connectedness: An Incomplete Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene, ed. Marianne Krogh (Copenhagen: Strandberg Publishing, 2020), 84.
[2] This refugee migration also includes people from neighboring Laos and Cambodia.
[3] Wikipedia, s.v. “Xây dựng các vùng kinh tế mới,” https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/X%C3%A2y_d%E1%BB%B1ng_c%C3%A1c_v%C3%B9ng_kinh_t%E1%BA%BF_m%E1%BB%9Bi (accessed March 2, 2021).
[4] William Chapman, “Hanoi Rebuts Refugees on ‘Economic Zones,’” Washington Post, August 17, 1979, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/08/17/hanoi-rebuts-refugees-on-economic-zones/a26c10ab-3791-4d76-9c4a-db4f7d48be32/.
[5] Nguyen Van Canh, Vietnam Under Communism, 1975–1982 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press of Stanford University, 1983).; Chapman, “Hanoi Rebuts Refugees.”
[6] David Biggs, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010) and Erik Harms, Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1kc6jz5 (accessed February 11, 2021).
[7] Huỳnh Lứa, et al., Lịch sử khai phá vùng đất Nam bộ [History of Opening up and Clearing the Southern Lands] (Ho Chi Minh City: Nhà Xuất Bản Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh, 1987), 50.
[8] Phú Mỹ Hưng, Vươn lên từ đầm lầy [Rising from the Swamps] (Ho Chi Minh City: Phú Mỹ Hưng Corporation, 2005), 9.
[9] K. W Taylor, “Surface Orientations in Vietnam: Beyond Histories of Nation and Region,” The Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 4 (1998): 954.
[10] Chung, “Border,” 84.
[11] Wikipedia, s.v. “Hydropower in the Mekong River Basin,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydropower_in_the_Mekong_River_Basin (accessed October 31, 2019).
[12] Yefime Zarjevski, A Future Preserved: International Assistance to Refugees (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 16.
[13] W. Courtland Robinson, Terms of Refugees (London: Zed Books, 1998), 7.
[14] Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UN. General Assembly (30th session: 1975–1976), Resolution 3454, 92, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/189615?ln=en (accessed February 3, 2021).
[15] Walter Benjamin. “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968,) 257.

Published Summer, 2021