Khai Thu Nguyen (2012) State reform and use of cải lương

Scholars have situated cải lương's development to the building of Vietnamese (particularly Southern) culture at the turn of  the century. Vuong Hong Sen, the author of A Diary of Fifty Years of Love for Singing, a memoir about cải lương in the early years of its formation, ties the birth of cải lương with a brewing sense of national identity emerging in the south during colonialism: "At that time, in the South there was a mysterious wind: 'the rise of patriotism.' We no longer resisted, because we could not defeat [the French] with force, we could no longer be revolutionaries, so patriotism boiled and brewed silently within us" (Vuong 1968: 26). Vuong Hong Sen attributes cải lương's ability to double as a pure form of entertainment as a means through which national identity could be (surreptitiously) imagined: "At first, singing and playing, mixing French into our language, playing at life, making fun. .., putting a love of country into an old performance, we kept on transforming, changing it, and cải lương was born unexpectedly, from what year no one knows for certain" (Vuong 1968: 21-22; see also Ba 1988). Cải lương was a means of "burying" the patriotic spirit "within a surface of enjoyment and play" that allowed the latter to develop (Vuong 1968: 18-19).

Philip Taylor writes that many of the Chinese stories, costumes, and choreographies were eliminated from post-1975 reformed cải lương, as well as "Western melodies, musical genres from the tango to love songs, eclectic foreign costumes, use of Western stories and motifs drawn from sources as varied as Ancient Rome, Egypt, India and the US Wild West" (Taylor 2001: 151). According to Taylor, revolutionary reforms in the south after 1975 tamed the "excesses" of cải lương by directing its emotional components toward the building of socialist and revolutionary values. The emotions of reformed cải lương expressed merely "fearlessness and optimism" (Taylor 2001: 152) and were stripped of personal components. 

Yet the reformed post-1975 cải lương plays did not abandon cải lương's historical relationship with sentimentality and narratives of the woman and family. In remaking cải lương, the state would borrow from the immensely popular form to create nostalgia for an original and coherent state, or "homeland," as a way to erase the loss of southern society and facilitate an imaginary of a united nation.

Khai Thu Nguyen (2012) A Personal Sorrow: "Cải Lương" and the Politics of North and South Vietnam, Asian Theatre Journal, 29(1): 255-275