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<\/a>The Launch of Vinasat-1<\/p><\/div>\n
On April 18, 2008, Vietnamese journalist Danh \u0110\u1ee9c was standing in the rain at the Kourou Space Center, the European Space Agency\u2019s spaceport in French Guiana, a territory that is, as an overseas d\u00e9partement<\/em>,<\/em> still an integral part of France.[1]<\/a>\u00a0 Eyes heavenward, Danh \u0110\u1ee9c was eager to witness the launch of Vinasat-1, the first Vietnamese satellite. Vietnam\u2019s Post and Telecommunications Ministry had previously rented space on other countries\u2019 satellites, but Vinasat-1, an indication of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam\u2019s growing economic strength, would not only save government money, but put \u201cVietnam in a more central role on the world stage.\u201d[2]<\/a> The economic restructuring polices of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in the late 1980s changed the landscape of the Vietnamese economy from a centrally planned to a market economy and had turned Vietnam into one of Asia\u2019s fastest growing economies.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n With the launch positioned as \u201ca memorable landmark in the country\u2019s development and integration [into the world community],\u201d[4]<\/a> Danh \u0110\u1ee9c had been sent to Kourou to write a firsthand account for Youth<\/em> newspaper, a H\u1ed3 Ch\u00ed Minh City-based paper with the largest circulation in Vietnam.\u00a0 Given the dearth of interaction between French Guiana and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and their radically different trajectories in terms of French colonialism, a Vietnamese journalist appearing in French Guiana was an unusual occurrence in itself.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In his later description of this momentous day, Danh \u0110\u1ee9c narrated: \u201cas I was standing in pouring rain watching the Ariane-5 rocket propelling the satellite into skies, I suddenly heard someone call out to me in French: \u201cAre you Vietnamese?\u201d Danh \u0110\u1ee9c turned to see an elderly security guard looking at him.\u00a0 He described the guard \u201cas having slightly dark skin but eyes sharp with joy. At that point the guard said to me in Vietnamese: \u2018I\u2019m Vietnamese too! \u00a0My name is Tr\u1ea7n V\u0103n C\u00e2n.”\u00a0Danh \u0110\u1ee9c\u2019s chance encounter with Tr\u1ea7n V\u0103n C\u00e2n was revelatory.\u00a0 Initially unable to fathom how a Vietnamese man came to be working as a guard in the Kourou Space Center, Danh \u0110\u1ee9c remembered from cursory historical reading that during the colonial period political exiles were deported to French Guiana after an uprising in 1930. He assumed Tr\u1ea7n V\u0103n C\u00e2n was descended from one of those exiles. \u00a0However, when Danh \u0110\u1ee9c questioned him, Tr\u1ea7n V\u0103n C\u00e2n related that actually his father had been born in French Guiana in 1922 after his grandfather had been exiled there at the end of the 19th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 He was the third generation of Vietnamese men all bearing the same name: Tr\u1ea7n V\u0103n C\u00e2n.\u00a0Danh \u0110\u1ee9c had no idea that Vietnamese deportation to French Guiana pre-dated 1930.\u00a0 In fact, Vietnamese prisoners being deported to different areas of the French empire dated from 1863 from lasted until 1941. Nearly ten thousand prisoners (both common law and political) were exiled to twelve different locales throughout the French empire.\u00a0 Some were indeed political prisoners but the vast majority had committed common law crimes.\u00a0 However, Danh \u0110\u1ee9c made no distinction in reclaiming these Vietnamese political prisoners.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As a result of this revelation, Danh \u0110\u1ee9c went on a tour of French Guiana to meet other descendants of Vietnamese prisoners.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He also visited Cirque Anguille, an area of French Guiana now referred to as the \u201cPenal Colony of the Vietnamese\u201d throughout the territory.\u00a0\u00a0 There Danh \u0110\u1ee9c lit incense for the ghosts of the dead convicts and claimed that the \u201cheady smell of fragrant incense drove away the cold of the jungle which had been forgotten for nearly a century.\u201d He also mentioned that he was keen to placate the spirits of the Vietnamese prisoners.\u00a0 He presumed they were now \u201chungry ghosts\u201d susceptible to the pain of, \u201ca wandering fate,\u201d (s\u1ed1 ph\u1eadn l\u01b0u l\u1ea1c<\/em>). \u00a0\u00a0Danh \u0110\u1ee9c\u2019s reference to the prisoners being forgotten for nearly a century has a certain historical accuracy. These exiles have been completely omitted in texts published in Vietnam, except for one brief historical survey published in 1957.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Exile in the Making of Vietnamese History<\/strong><\/p>\n How did the history of the deportees from Vietnam become so neglected?\u00a0 One reason is that unlike colonial prisons in Vietnam, the penal colony was not connected to the Indochinese Communist Party and its successor, the Vietnamese Communist Party.\u00a0 The largest shipment of political prisoners to French Guiana was connected to the Vietnamese Nationalist Party a potential rival to the Indochinese Communist Party.[6]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 After the closure of the penal colonies, prisoners could chose repatriation or to remain in the newly formed French dependency.\u00a0 Many who had married locally chose to remain.\u00a0\u00a0 In the 1950s and 1960s, a perception existed that given the opportunity to return to Vietnam from these overseas locales, patriots would do so; those who did not, were subsequently viewed with suspicion. The last convoy of Vietnamese prisoners left French Guiana in 1963.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n However, in the last few years, as Vietnam has become more economically powerful, interest in these diasporas has grown.\u00a0 From prisoners of patriotism, to overseas entrepreneurial magnets, the polyvalent nature of exile is put to different uses, but often to show the ingenuity of how Vietnamese interacted with the globe in the past.\u00a0\u00a0 The complexity that characterized transportation, making it a fraught and unpredictable experience over temporal, spatial, and racial lines, does not appear. Instead, much of the current efforts to recapture and respect exilic contributions to global Vietnamese identity are collapsed into essentialized concepts of unequivocal Vietnamese heroism that, miraculously, endure over time.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Satellites<\/strong> and Social Rituals of Remembering Exiles <\/strong><\/p>\n On his return to H\u1ed3 Ch\u00ed Minh City, Danh \u0110\u1ee9c held a meeting in the offices of the Youth <\/em>newspaper for the \u201cDescendants of Patriotic Prisoners of Guiana\u201d which had been announced through the newspaper and on their internet website.\u00a0 Approximately sixty people who were interested in the topic or were actually descendants of deportees attended. Various lecturers commented on the importance of these Vietnamese exiles, who were pioneers in a more global era of Vietnamese influence and experience: \u201cWe are coming together as those who love our country in exile everywhere; this also means that our blood has been pouring down in so many strange lands.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n After this meeting, Danh \u0110\u1ee9c chose not to write a book about the launch of the satellite Vinasat-1. Instead he edited a collection of essays about the Vietnamese in Guiana, [The Vietnamese Prison in Guiana<\/em>].\u00a0 Part travelogue and interviews, as well as short historical articles by various professors, Danh \u0110\u1ee9c recounted meeting Tr\u1ea7n V\u0103n C\u00e2n and other descendants, as well as traveling to sites connected to the Vietnamese around French Guiana. In the foreword to the book he suggested that without the satellite launch, these Vietnamese in French Guiana might have remained forgotten, implicitly linking Vietnam\u2019s emergent economic status with this reclaimed history.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In his contribution to the volume, historian and professor, \u0110inh Xu\u00e2n L\u00e2m, professor at the National University of Hanoi, concentrated on a comparison between the prison conditions in Guiana and those imposed by the Americans during the Vietnam War, mentioning how important he felt \u201cit was for the newspaper to explain the history of what should be a shared yet personal emotion.\u201d Danh \u0110\u1ee9c paraphrased the comments of other participants of this meeting, taking excerpts from their written comments.\u00a0 One participant wrote: \u00a0“<\/b>The French who invaded our country, exploited our resources, also sought to destroy the bravest, most elite of our nation, by pushing them to the most remote and dangerous areas of the world. \u00a0There they continued to exploit their labor force until they were exhausted and tried to destroy them both mentally and physically.\u201d Another participant was quoted as stating: \u201cWe understand more fully and deeply the stages of the heroic struggle for the independence of the nation, our forefathers, the sacrifices, the great losses in the patriotic movement of our ancestors which textbooks did not address fully when teaching.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In such descriptions the deportees are \u201cdesignated as the most brilliant and intelligent people that the French had to deport and work to the bone to destroy.\u201d \u00a0For one reader, the stories emerging from book show: \u201c[t]he idea of inspiring patriotism which is practical and meaningful, not just pages full of dry facts\u201d\u2014an implicit criticism of state-sponsored patriotism.\u00a0 The descriptions of where the prisoners were sent are lyrically written. They conjure deportation and exile sites as peripheries to Vietnam\u2019s new core, one person noting that it was \u201cthe islands in the middle of thousands of seas, this is there the French chose to place in captivity the most resilient and brave people.\u201d One reader wrote in to the newspaper to list some of the geographical locales\u2014 not just Guiana but also Madagascar and Tahiti, even Algeria. The reader\u2019s account then says that \u201cthe footprints of the Vietnamese revolutionaries are in strange lands, their blood and bones are located there.\u00a0 The Vietnamese today have a right and a need to know about them.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Such a vision of what being Vietnamese is, is notable as a departure from past eras in which such efforts were always inscribed within carefully controlled government-constructed nationalism. The center of which is the Vietnamese Communist Party.\u00a0\u00a0 In both the media surrounding the launch of Danh \u0110\u1ee9c\u2019s book and its aftermath, the satellite serves as a metaphor; it is the opposite of containment, and instead symbolizes a newly powerful Vietnam celebrating longstanding and even neglected accomplishments as portents of more to come.\u00a0 Instead of Vietnamese prisoners being forcibly shipped to French Guiana and contained there, Vietnamese satellites dominate the Guianan sky. Not merely the new horizons of nationalism, nor simply the demise of a more controlling Vietnamese state, it represents a reassertion of Vietnamese identity worldwide, and a claiming of that potential for contemporary audiences.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Notes<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Only five territories are still officially d\u00e9partements et territoires d’outre-mer<\/em> [overseas departments of metroplitian France]. The other four are Reunion Island, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Mayotte. All of the territories use the Euro and are considered part of France.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Vinasat-2 launched in July 2012.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a>There is an extensive literature on these economic changes. <\/em>For example, Socioeconomic Renovation in Viet Nam: The Origin, Evolution and Impact of \u0111\u1ed5i m\u1edbi<\/em> ed. Peter Boothroyd and Pham Xuan Nam, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2000.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Nh\u00e2n D\u00e2n<\/em>, newspaper, April 15, 2008.<\/p>\n