Life Is Long and Messy

I have not paid attention to high-profile trials in Vietnam for many years because I have no desire to come off as a dog that slobbers over any old bone. After all, every shred of information we consume about these cases originates from a single source: Vietnamese state media. In this space, slices of truth are portioned like cuts of meat, thick or thin based on the specific meal that is being prepared and the discretion of the chef. Non-state media, even during its heyday years ago, never attained the status of an authoritative news provider; it always relied upon state media, which it supplemented with analysis and commentary. As of today, the campaigns to neutralize independent Vietnamese-language media inside the country have achieved their goal. The few remaining bases of resistance are currently being hunted down and snuffed out. All influential journalists are either locked behind bars without hope, stuck at home in a state of Daoist inaction, or living in exile overseas in a condition of utter irrelevance. The surviving market of non-state information available on social media is dominated by commerce and entertainment. The “oppositional political content” offered in this space is increasingly worthless because of its low quality, dubious sourcing, and tediousness. The most easily spread “counter-hegemonic” content in today’s straightened circumstances is allegedly top-secret information leaked to the reading public online at the eleventh hour. Or memes mocking snippets of speech by mid-level bureaucrats. Or expressions of anger, within the limits prescribed by the state, toward trifling political scandals. Or the belated exposure of old news by retired grandees of journalism. Or the squirt of a single drop of sadness into the dry well of human affairs where everyone earnestly claims to be on the side of the downtrodden.Moreover, I have trouble distinguishing between various high-profile trials in the same way that I can’t tell the difference between prequels, sequels, triquels, paraquels, and interquels in the DC and Marvel universes. In the recent rescue flight drama, it felt like I had already met many of the unfortunate broken-winged angels standing trial. But this was not just a feeling. These figures were not obviously different from defendants from previous cases: from their external appearance to their basic mannerisms, from the way they spoke to the way they seemed to feel. Perhaps some of them will disappear after this episode. But even then, everything will likely remain the same. The political climate in Ba Đình Square will continue to fluctuate from rain to shine. The new guys who replace the convicted guys also harbor their own ambitions and wait eagerly at the starting rungs of the social ladder, but they are just as likely, to someday join the ranks of the prison population. Such is life!The old line still holds: “I know! What a pain! Shut up already!”1 These trials are like all our collective public rituals: they remain messy no matter how serious they try to be. Every two minutes, someone stands up or sits down, enters the trial space or leaves it. The courtroom door opens and shuts unceasingly. The microphone works only intermittently. Electrical cords hang untidily from the wall and lie helter-skelter on the ground. Electric fans are plopped in the middle of the courtroom. The many uniformed police officers—some clustered together, some sitting alone—cover the courtroom in irregular blotches of green. The officers exhibit a wide variety of postures and poses: some place their hands on their hips; some wiggle their buttocks; some stand on one foot, leaving the other foot free for whatever; some wear their full uniform with cap and face mask; some go hatless; some have a paunch; some shake their legs; some shake their crossed legs; some look around; some narrow their eyes; some hunch their shoulders and doze off; some lean their head against the wall; some lean back and relax on their chair; some put their feet on their chair; some take their shoes off to cool their feet; some pick their nose; some crack their knuckles; some surf the internet; one comrade squats down.In addition, there is nothing quite remarkable about the defendants. They still speak Vietnamese in a nói ngọng [a coarse regional dialect] style,2 like people of the north have spoken for ages. One teacher, promoted to principal, then to the director of Hà Nội’s Education and Training Bureau, and finally to the vice chairmanship of the capital, begged the judge “for your pardon” [xin ăn năn hối nỗi]. Others were deeply divided: one group tried hard to do good; the other group hardly tried to do bad. Some viewed the payments they received not exactly as a bribe, but as run-of-the-mill business revenue. Others claimed that they tried their best to bring home their compatriots from abroad without stiffing them even a little bit.3The most brilliant theorist among the defendants, himself a former head of a police investigation unit, challenged a statement by a former police lieutenant general that incriminated him, eloquently countering the investigation’s conclusion—as well as evidence about four furtive meetings that cast him in a suspicious light.4 He denied the allegation that he had received a briefcase full of dollars. He confirmed the accuracy of the timeline provided by the driver who saw him get into his car and shift to another task. He demanded that the court make certain documents public, including an itemized list of his phone calls. He insisted that others not currently on trial should be charged with fraud and criminal negligence.The percentage of nói ngọng speakers within the police, from the lowliest speed-trap traffic cop to the lieutenant general and vice director of the capital force, is surely the highest among all the professions. The new Vietnamese upper classes, with Marxism-Leninism in their hearts and US dollars in their pockets, according to the deputy minister of Foreign Affairs, “cannot distinguish between a monetary gift of gratitude and a criminal act.” Like the police, they too cannot distinguish their “n’s” from their “l’s.” But I guess they should be acquitted of this serious constitutional crime of poor pronunciation.Once when translating for a trial in Berlin, I heard the prosecutor propose a prison sentence. In response, the Vietnamese defendant recited a line of poetry which he attributed to “our Uncle Hồ”: “A day in prison equates to a thousand autumns on the outside.” But the judge in this case did not appreciate President Hồ’s poetry. Under the pressure of time, my translation was doubtlessly overly dramatic—tausend Herbste [thousand autumns] or something like that. Asian poetry translated into a Western language often sounds overly sentimental, but, more importantly, the least persuasive force within the German justice system is sentimentality. On the other hand, the dominant vibe within Vietnam’s courtrooms is kitsch. Legal kitsch and moral kitsch. Kitsch of the cadre and kitsch of the people. Academic kitsch and gangster kitsch. Family kitsch and corporate kitsch. Given the dominance of kitsch in Vietnamese legal culture, court procedures there tend to come off as ruthless, sentimental, vulgar, haughty, sloppy, arrogant, cold-hearted, corny, crude, or cheesy—anything but professional.In this trial, there was no Đinh La Thăng who delivered the line “in the dark night, a star still shines.”5 There was no Dương Chí Dũng who recited a maritime poem in a loud and clear voice.6 But the former vice chairman of Quảng Nam Province did manage to quote three or four lines from The Tale of Kiều.Others uttered a wide range of clichéd or absurd formulations: “like rain after a long drought”; “before I retire, I don’t want to waste my money at the late afternoon market”; “like a bird afraid of bent branches”; “feel consolation” after “witnessing so many smiles and happy tears” amid “the storm of the Covid pandemic”; “accidentally relaxing moral standards”; determined “to risk one’s life to prove one’s innocence”; “if you thrust the javelin, you must follow it”; “when you stand at the helm,” or “when you are caught up in the cycle of work,” or “when you don’t want to upset the rice cooker of others,” you “accidentally get your hand stuck in the cookie jar”; “suffer inconsolable torment”; “learn a life-and-death lesson”; some “bow their head and apologize to the party leadership, the state, and the people” (note one: apologies must be accompanied by a bowed head); some express a “sincere and deep awareness” (note two: sincerity must be accompanied by something deep); some claimed that they “sincerely admired” the “benevolence and humanity” (note three: benevolence must accompany humanity) and the “objectives and dialectics” (note four: objectivity must accompany dialectics) of the trial council, and asked for the law’s “leniency” following the principle of only “hitting those who run away, not those who return.”A lawyer even managed to defend his client’s commission of bribery as an act of gratitude consistent with the following national tradition: “when eating fruit, think of who planted the tree.” Vietnamese tout the virtues of dignity and morality at every place and time, but they are most eloquent on these topics when sitting in a defendant’s box or drinking at a draft beer hall. For them, being human means rolling with the punches. They are all filial children, especially when they can use expressions of compassion for their weak and old parents as a pretext to mitigate their criminal liability. This is also when they claim to care about their families, harbor sentimental feeling for their friends, and devote all their heart to the betterment of society. One inadvertently degenerate comrade even advised a comrade who had yet to acknowledge his degeneracy to stop denying it and accept it because “even prisoners should strive to maintain dignity.”Kitsch is a nightmare for art and a good friend of politics under any kind of political regime. Among free countries, American kitsch is the most extreme. Among autocratic countries, Singaporean kitsch is the most extreme, in my opinion. The entire country is smooth and shiny, because it features lots of high-quality materials and craftmanship—like a pure piece of kitsch by Jeff Koons. But in both paradises of kitsch, the one zone that most resists being kitschified is the zone of justice. Kitsch in developed countries can worm its way into any popular surface, or emotional space, but not the justice system. That system, despite all its shortcomings, is profound, complex, abstract, and completely rational. Hollywood has generously provided us with many examples of the strangeness of American justice. In Witness for the Prosecution, the killer is acquitted, but not because he committed the crime in “a context without precedent,” or because he himself was an emulation fighter [chiến sĩ thi đua],7 or because his wife won an award, or because his father was a wounded soldier, or his father-in-law was a senior scientist, or because his grandparents had contributed to the revolution, or because his family had a history of mental illness. Instead, the protagonist in this movie was acquitted thanks to the deployment of a sophisticated legal trap set by the witness, played by Marlene Dietrich.Fifteen or twenty years from now, maybe representatives of the Procuracy at our courts will no longer babble incomprehensibly or raise their voices to emphasize that they are in charge. They may no longer pronounce words boorishly, and they may learn how to speak in grammatically correct sentences. Perhaps the judge will no longer nói ngọng or behave harshly toward the defendants. The green patches at court may be replaced by a less comical color, and police officers may learn how to stand or sit properly. But as long as Vietnam’s neck is constrained by a political cangue and its feet shackled by chains of kitsch, every effort to reform Vietnam’s justice system will fail pitifully.Time passes. The public will have yet another new high-profile trial thrown at them. Some will enjoy watching the general secretary feed the furnace.8 Some will cover their noses and dismiss the trial as a joke because everything is rotten to the core. Others will sympathetically excuse the defendants as victims of a professional accident. Some romantics will place their hope in the appearance of a modern Bao Zheng.9 Others will fantasize about the emergence of genuine separation of power. Some will wait for a briefcase full of wine.10 And many will hope for the arrival of a black box that will reveal the secret head honcho behind our culture of corruption.And I myself am waiting to hear yet another painful philosophy of life. From the retired generals to the demoted generals and the generals stripped of their ranks, Vietnam lost many soldiers during the war and many generals during the peace. Lieutenant General Thuấn in Nguyễn Huy Thiệp’s short story “The General Retires” said, “naivete is the strength that allows one to live.” Lieutenant General Tuấn in the rescue flight trial said that he got into trouble because he believed too much in “brotherly love,” but “whether these are genuine brothers or not is another matter. Life is long and messy.”11

Cambodian History and Society · History · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies