Mr. Tien's Battle Scars: Authenticity as Commodity in American Vietnam War Tourism

Contemporary travel packages to southern Vietnam often include an overnight excursion out of Ho Chi Minh City to the Mekong Delta, where foreign tourists may enjoy a “home stay” with a former member of the Viet Cong. American visitors hoping for a night in the home of a rural Vietnamese family are surprised to find air conditioned, thatched-roof bungalows and an elaborate regional feast served on a private patio. The quest for an “authentic” experience is met not with the accommodations, then, but with the host himself. Over rice wine, conversation eventually turns to the American War, and Mr. Tien gamely lifts his shirt to reveal grotesque abdominal scars, presumably from shrapnel wounds suffered long ago. This little drama has been reenacted several times, for multiple travel narratives by American visitors describe the exact same encounter. Mr. Tien seldom says anything about the war, letting the scars fill the silence that inevitably follows. The scars authenticate not only his experiences, but also those of American tourists (and especially Vietnam veterans) seeking an exotic encounter with a former enemy. Mr. Tien’s battle scars are at once a product, a marketing strategy, and a telltale sign of how American tourists have shaped public Vietnamese expressions of a shared and troubled past. While Mr. Tien’s enterprise is privately owned, his understanding of the American market is shared by curators at state-run tourist venues like the War Remnants Museum in HCMC and the infamous Cu Chi Tunnels, where exhibits have been altered to accommodate foreign guests. Using travel narratives, tourism advertisements, and onsite field research, this paper will address how the Vietnamese tourism industry straddles the line between confrontation and conciliation, as scars both literal and metaphorical are placed on display and sold to American visitors eager for an authentic war-related experience.