HIPSTER-STYLE Vietnamese food has become popular in Australia of late. But a Vietnamese restaurant in Brisbane was forced to change its name from “Uncle Ho”, after Australian Vietnamese protested against it as an insensitive slap to the many who had lost family or fled their country because of the communist dictator and the North’s conquest of Southern Vietnam. Before the name change, Uncle Ho was a kind of Marxist Colonel Sanders in replica propaganda art on the walls. After the furore, the restaurant became Uncle Bia Hoi, and is now Aunty Oh.
Communist kitsch is nothing new in Australia either. In Sydney a now-gone bar called Starlyn had a Soviet theme and attracted criticism from those who found the joshing references to a murderous tyrant in poor taste. Drinkers have been able to sip an Imperialist Running Dog cocktail while gazing at Chinese propaganda on the walls for nearly 15 years at Melbourne’s Double Happiness. There have been no protests at Double Happiness—but Chinese migrants do not have the same history as their Vietnamese counterparts do. Bui Cuong of the Brisbane chapter of the Vietnamese Community in Australia told the Sunday Mail in Brisbane that while people were free to support communism, “Uncle Ho” was a mass murderer, whom nearly all the Vietnamese community in Australia had fled. The Vietnamese diaspora in the West is often virulently anti-communist at a time when few others still worry about communism at all.
The name would be offensive in Vietnam for converse reasons: you do not name simple restaurants for national heroes. But oddly enough, communist kitsch has a place in Vietnam itself. Cong Ca Phe, once a hole-in-the-wall outlet, is now a chain of cafes popular with the country’s young artistic types. Menus are written on recycled volumes of Le-Nin and staff wear military-style khaki. Another restaurant in the capital recreates the old state-managed food-ticket system the older generation would prefer to forget. In 2006 the briefly-lived nightclub Hanoi Alcohol University had a logo with a fist clenching a beer in place of a hammer-and-sickle logo.
The communists, of course, can be unironically kitschy themselves. An odd clock with psychedelic rays radiating from a beatific image of Ho’s face (pictured) is common in Vietnam. In China and parts of South-East Asia, like Vietnam, “Pyongyang” restaurants are frequented, operated by North Koreans as an attempt to project soft power. When this writer ate there in 2007 the bustling restaurant, staffed by tall and pretty young women, was largely catering to curious South Koreans, and tables needed to be booked in advance. They are not meant ironically, even as songs about food may conjure a more bitter irony all things considered. Food, for that matter, was largely standard Korean fare.
Communist kitsch is acceptable in a way fascist kitsch is not; in Berlin, East German memorabilia is around every corner, while Nazi stuff is banned by law. For survivors of communist atrocities, and families of the millions who did not survive, this may feel like a gross joke: commenters in Brisbane noted the lack of Uncle Adolf restaurants. Nazis might sometimes be figures of fun, but they must be the butt of the joke, and never even ironically glorified. But that is not the only difference. The communist regimes in China and Vietnam have survived to become more capitalist and less violently oppressive, even if they are still authoritarian, whereas the fascists died out and calcified in memory as murderers. For young hipsters, playing with the mix of freedom and oppression may be invigorating; for the survivors, it is understandably quite a different matter.
