Remembering "the nation" through pageantry: Femininity and the politics of Vietnamese womanhood in the Hoa Hau Ao Dia contest

Much has changed as a result of the Vietnamese migration overseas, but the ao dai forever remains the same, like our love for freedom and democracy and our love for the homeland of Vietnam.1

-Nam Loc Nguyen, Vietnamese songwriter and cohost of the 18th Annual Hoa Hau Ao Dai Long Beach Pageant.

Beauty contests may appear frivolous and trivial, but as a cultural practice they stage complex struggles over power and representation. Some feminists have argued that beauty contests are ideological regimes that reinforce dominant constructions of gender and idealized forms of femininity. Yet these organized events are much more complicated than just outright attempts to objectify, control, and commodify women's bodies. Scholars of beauty pageants have begun to bring forth the contradictions inherent in the beauty contest by situating them in multiple systems of culture, struggles for power and control, and discursive fields of practice.2 While many have located beauty pageants in dominant discourses of nationalism all over the globe, few have addressed the significance of local "ethnic" beauty pageants.3 What happens when racially and ethnically marginal immigrant communities organize their own local beauty pageants to commemorate their version of "the nation"? Which elements are different and which remain the same? How can we make sense of this need for beauty pageants in immigrant communities, and what do the pageant contestants come to represent?

Despite the increasing accommodation toward multiculturalism and the crowning of nonwhite contestants in American national and state beauty pageants, racist practices remain prevalent in beauty pageants in the United States. As Sarah Banet-Weiser points out in her study of the Miss America pageant,

"The presence of non-white contestants obscures and thus works to erase the racist histories and foundations upon which beauty pageants rests."4 Moreover, because mainstream pageants tend to reaffirm whiteness and dominant understandings ofAmerican citizenship, they can sometimes conflict with cultural goals and beliefs of ethnic and immigrant communities. As such, beauty pageants in general serve different purposes for ethnic and racialized communities in the United States. And though some aspects of "ethnic" beauty pageants replicate larger American national and state pageants, they also simultaneously articulate alternative cultural practices that counter the dominant discourse from which they are excluded.5 To resolve these exclusionary practices that disqualify Asian women from representing the "nation" by virtue of their race, Vietnamese Americans have organized their own separate beauty pageants to provide alternative spaces in which "ethnic Vietnamese" women have the opportunity to participate and to reign as beauty queens for their ethnic community.6

The Pageantry of the Ao Dai

What distinguishes a Vietnamese American beauty pageant from all other beauty pageants is its incorporation of the traditional Vietnamese dress called the ao dai into every pageant.7 The basic ao dai for women is a long flowing dress worn over long full palazzo pants. Although it varies in style, the formal dress most often worn for competition is a form-fitting tunic that slits into front and back panels from slightly above the natural waistline down to below the knees. The ao dai was originally worn by royalty, but by the early twentieth century it became a fashionable clothing item for the "modern" Vietnamese woman. Because the garment is difficult to work in, middle-class women and adolescent schoolgirls most commonly wore it. Others, including men, only wore ao dai on holidays and special occasions.

Though the ao chi's familiar mandarin collar and panel designs reveal remarkable Chinese and French influence, the Vietnamese insist that the ao dai is uniquely and authentically Vietnamese. Symbolically, the ao dai invokes nostalgia and timelessness associated with a gendered image of the homeland for which many Vietnamese people throughout the diaspora yearn. Journalist Nguyen Hoang Nam has observed that the meanings associated with the ao dai have "been perpetuated by countless puppy-love, maudlin poems and novels that engraved, for the most part, the traditional Vietnamese concept of female beauty: innocent, frail, chaste, shy, and soft-spoken."8 The ao dai conjures up romantic images of a Vietnamese past that is pure and untainted by war.

Vietnamese ao dai beauty pageants are one of the most visible examples of Vietnamese immigrants trying to negotiate the process of assimilating into bourgeois American culture while remaining ethnically Vietnamese. These pageants have become permanent fixtures in Vietnamese American festivals and celebrations since the late 1970s. Their cultural origins, however, are not from Vietnam. Rather, they are an invented cultural tradition created by Vietnamese immigrants in the United States.9 Beauty pageants in Vietnam tend to place emphasis on a woman's physical appearance. Vietnamese American ao dai pageants, however, recognize the "overall beauty" of young women. This includes her public speaking skills, her appearance and gait in ao dai, and most importantly, her ability to retain her ethnic and cultural heritage. Unlike the beauty pageants that take place in Vietnam, Vietnamese Americans celebrate their cultural difference as immigrants in a collective effort to preserve "Vietnamese culture and tradition through beauty pageants."10