Áo dài for the Vietnamese Diaspora

For the Vienamese diaspora, the áo dài invokes nostalgia for the homeland. The story of Bích Vân, a Vietnamese American married to a Caucasian, highlighted the search for her roots through wearing the áo dài in a spring fan dance club in Iowa:

“The other Vietnamese Americans had recently arrived in the United States through family sponsorship; their last celebration of Tết in Vietnam was still fresh in their minds. Whereas their Vietnamese was fluent, I could only stutter a few words from lack of practice, for I had grown up in a town where my family was the only Vietnamese family… What linked me to my new Vietnamese American friends was the áo dài. Participating in their efforts to maintain our Vietnamese culture and tradition, I was inspired to rekindle the culture that still permeated my house, but which was only discernible to my parents.”

Nhi T. Lieu, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, noted that the annual holding of the áo dài beauty pageants among the American Vietnamese diaspora as “one of the most visible examples of Vietnamese immigrants trying to negotiate the process of assimilating into bourgeois American culture while remaining ethnically Vietnamese.” However, in a sense, the áo dài pageants are also an act of defiance against what the Communist government back in Vietnam suppressed, which can only be performed in a place that is beyond of their reach.

In essence, the áo dài should not only be seen as a national costume but also a symbol of the national character and the Vietnamese spirit that is represented by the lotus flower: “Under any circumstances, people develop human quintessence and get rid of bad things to further promote beauty and maintain independence”.


References:
Ao Dai: Women’s Long Dress, Frequently Asked Question about Vietnamese Culture (Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 2006).

Nhi T. Lieu, “Remembering ‘the Nation’ through Pageantry: Feminity and Politics of Vietnamese Womanhood in the Hoa Hau Ao Dai Contest” in Linda Trinh Vo (ed.) Asian American Women: The Frontiers Reader (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).

“Ao Dai: Vietnamese Traditional Dress”, Tran Quang Hai, http://tranquanghai.multiply.com/journal/item/313/AO_DAI_Vietnamese_Traditional_Dress (accessed on 02 April 2010).