Title Bùi Khánh Minh - UC Berkeley - Writing Sample.docx ✅

Bùi Khánh Minh Writing Sample Abstract This thesis examines the history of the Communist Government and the rehabilitation of prostitution in Sài Gòn (Hồ Chí Minh City) from 1975 to 1985, with four research questions to answer. First, what were the sociopolitical motivations behind the city’s Communist administration’s commitment to abolishing prostitution and rehabilitating sex workers after the end of the war? Second, what measures of abolition and rehabilitation did the administration use to achieve these goals? Third, how did the postwar exigencies transform sex work in the city? Finally, what were the outcomes of the Communist government’s efforts to abolish and rehabilitate after the first post-war decade? This research consults multiple archives and libraries in Hồ Chí Minh City and Hà Nội to examine municipal documents and journalistic reporting on sex work and the rehabilitation campaigns implemented in the city from 1975 to 1985. Another component of this project is to examine both English and Vietnamese written memoirs of civilians, testifying the significance of prostitution and the rehabilitation campaign during the decade before economic liberalization. This thesis is written in three chapters. The first chapter, “Prostitution and Brothel Culture in Sài Gòn (1955 – 1975),” examines how wartime prostitution developed in Sài Gòn under the Republic of Vietnam, and became a cultural vestige that the new Communist government wanted to eradicate. The second chapter, “Prostitutes in Rehabilitation – Actors of Socialist Sài Gòn,” investigates the municipal policies of rehabilitation and political rhetoric concerning prostitutes under “the old regime” and “the revolutionary government”. The final chapter, “The Other Side of Rehabilitation,” examines how the postwar political and economic policies displaced and subjected women, resulting in the rise of prostitution to survive socialist organization. Prostitution persisted in the city despite the government’s the rehabilitation project, undermining the larger struggle in erasing the “old society” of the RVN era and making Sài Gòn a new socialist city.
Bùi Khánh Minh Writing Sample 2 Introduction: “Converting Mistaken Girls” [Cải hóa gái lỡ lầm] in Socialist Sài Gòn (Hồ Chí Minh City) (1975 – 1985) Three days following the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam [hereby referred to as RVN] on April 30, 1975, the capital Sài Gòn – Gia Định received its new governmental body: the Military Administrative Committee of Sài Gòn – Gia Định [Ủy Ban Quân Quản Sài Gòn – Gia Định – hereby referred as UBQQSG]. Comprising the committee were prominent veteran South Vietnamese communist leaders of the Liberation Army of South Vietnam and the Central Office of South Vietnam [Trung ương cục miền Nam Việt Nam – hereby referred to as COSVN] – the Southern based Communist branch of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party that worked in tandem with the Politburo in Hanoi during the war. Replacing the defunct government body of the city, the new administration was set to “quickly stabilize security order in the city, build the new revolutionary order, reinforce the people’s right of ownership’’ and “quickly restore and stabilize the normal life of various castes of kinsmen in Sài Gòn – Gia Định city.” 1 Almost immediately, the UBQQSG began the reorganization of the capital. In less than a week, the new administration launched the city’s first ever official Communist–run newspapers – Liberated Sài Gòn [Sài Gòn Giải Phóng – hereby referred as SGGP]. On May 6, 1975, the second daily issue of SGGP published the first communiqué from the UBQQSG – “On Preserving Security Order in The City” – providing bullet points of regulations regarding activities of the RVN government’s staffers, soldiers, and notably, the operation of sub–cultural hubs. Item number 7 of the communiqué specified: “All activities of prostitution brothels, dancing bars, smoking bars and all enslaving, depraving American–styled cultural activities are prohibited.” 2 1 “THÔNG BÁO VỀ VIỆC THANH LẬP ỦY BAN QUÂN QUẢN THÀNH PHỐ SÀI GÒN–GIA ĐỊNH,” Sài Gòn Giải Phóng, May 5, 1975. On the establishment, the configuration, and the function of the Ủy Ban Quân Quản Sài Gòn – Gia Định, see Antoine Lê, “Pre–Unification Transition in South Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh City Military Administration (1975–1976),” Russian Journal of Vietnamese Studies 5, no. 1 (December 2021): 11–22, https://doi.org/10.54631/VS.2021.S–11–22. This research uses the author’s translation of the organization’s title as “Military Administration Committee” as well as the abbreviation of the committee as “UBQQSG’’.
Bùi Khánh Minh Writing Sample 2 This categorization by the new Communist leaders of “prostitution” to be a “cultural activity” originating from America shall persist long after the Communist victory of the Vietnam War and the reunification of the southern region under the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, which officially took place in July 1976. In 1980, Đỗ Thị Duy Liên – the city’s first Director of the Department of War Invalids and Social Issues [Sở Thương binh và Xã hội] after 1975 and vice chairwoman of the city’s Vietnamese Women’s Union – published a monograph titled Love and Moral Conversion [Tình thương và Cảm hóa]. The publication is an anthology of the city’s rehabilitation of drug addicts, prostitutes, and juvenile criminals since the Communist victory in 1975, divided into two sections: a collection of municipal reports of the government’s progress in rehabilitation the social delinquent], and a selection of journalistic articles from previous SGGP issues, dedicated to the biographies of successfully rehabilitated individuals of “social evils”. Đỗ Thị Duy Liên is a contributor herself to this collection, providing a report from the Department of War Invalids and Social Issues titled “Converting Mistaken Girls” [“Cải hóa gái lỡ lầm”], which details the history of prostitution in the city as well the efforts of the “revolutionary government” in rehabilitating prostitutes – the titular “mistaken girls” – within the last five years. In attributing to the cause behind prostitution, Đỗ Thị Duy Liên denounces that the American military attacks in the countryside during the wartime had caused displacement of women and pushed them to the cities where American military bases located. Sài Gòn was another example, as Đỗ Thị Duy Liên explains: “The unruly life in Sài Gòn under the American time was torrential; depraving recreational habits were unleashed and attractive to the youth: skimpy clothing, sexual music, nudity in cinema, pulp fiction.” 3 2 “ THÔNG CÁO SỐ 1 QUY ĐỊNH VIỆC GIỮ GÌN TRẬT TỰ AN NINH,” [“COMMUNIQUÉ NO.1, ON PRESERVING SECURITY ORDER IN THE CITY] Sài Gòn Giải Phóng, May 6, 1975, Library of General Sciences of Hồ Chí Minh City. 3 Đỗ Duy Liên, “Cải Hóa Gái Lỡ Lầm,” in Tình Thương và Cảm Hóa, by Duy Liên Đỗ (Hồ Chí Minh City: Nhà xuất bản Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh, 1980), 33.
Bùi Khánh Minh Writing Sample 2 As a result, since 1975 until 1980, the city’s prostitutes had been routinely enrolled in state–run specialized establishments for social rehabilitation, namely the Schools for Women’s Dignity Restoration [Trường Phục hồi Nhân phẩm Phụ nữ] that were established in the city’s outskirt; or relocated to perform manual labor in designated rural communal camps under New Economic Zones [Vùng Kinh Tế Mới] program. According to the report, not only did the rehabilitating prostitutes receive treatment of venereal diseases and received vocational training, but they also merited from political training to “the enemy’s conspiracies and the old temptations, habits that require[d] vigilance,” “the traditional, glorious power [and] talent of the race [giống nòi], the forefathers,” “the value of labor,” “their own mistaken guilt,” “the loathsome consequences of social illnesses.” 4 The mixture of direct reporting and politically charged explanation in “Converting Mistaken Girls” was not an arbitrary stylistic choice of the author. Quite a contrary, it was exemplary of the post-1975 Communist government of Sài Gòn, or later named Hồ Chí Minh City, and its political and municipal reckoning with one of the most infamous legacies that the Vietnam War had engendered: prostitution. On the one hand, prostitution had been prohibited since October 1954 by Ngô Đình Diệm during his last days as Premier of the State of Vietnam before his proclamation of the Republic of Vietnam and his position as its first President. 5 The prohibition remained effective throughout Ngô Đình Diệm’s following presidency and his ousting (1955 – 1963), and until the last day of the republic in April 30, 1975. 6 However, the prohibition was compromised by the continuing fighting in the countryside between the Army of the RVN and the Communist guerrilla, which resumed almost immediately after the country’s partition of 1954. The development led to a collateral disruption of livelihoods in the rural areas and subsequently an exodus of migrants and 4 Đỗ Duy Liên, “Cải Hóa Gái Lỡ Lầm,” 43. 5 Ngô Đình Diệm, “DỤ SỐ 64 Ngày 17 Tháng 10 Năm 1955 Bài Trừ Nạn Mãi Dâm” (Hồ sơ phiên họp Hội đồng Liên Bộ ngày 04/10/1965 v/v thiết lập Trung tâm Khang Lạc để giải quyết vấn đề mãi dâm năm 1965, October 17, 1955), 1916, Bộ Công chánh và Giao thông, National Archive Center II. 6 Amanda Boczar, “Morale, Morality, and the ‘American Brothel,’” in An American Brothel: Sex and Diplomacy during the Vietnam War (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2021), 55.