In China, there is off-shore cool and mainland cool, HK cool and SH cool.
There are the various versions of Indian cool, which revolve largely around themselves (Tollywood, masala movies, kurtas with tight leggings), just as there are a vast range of Japanese cools, including everything from computerized pets ("Aibo") to stylized asexual drifting ("hervibores").
While Japanese cool takes elements of the foreign and transforms them without giving the rest of the world much of a look in, Korean cool is basically export-oriented; its main products are candy-coloured t-shirts, bloodless teen comedy and I-left-my-brain-at-home girlbands:
In all of Asia, serious money has been made in recent history, sometimes in obscene quantities. And the purchasing power of those who did the making has kick-started the sorts of commercial arts, the competitive displays, the restless imitation and change that make more things seem cool or uncool in the first place.
Being cool in Asia normally involves taking a splash in global culture – hence the fascination with the standard Western accessories, tv formats and pop-music genres. Hence also the uncoolness of a lot of Asian Cool in the minds of formidably cool Westerners who, when in Asia, tend to idealize precisely what they despair of back home in the West (oversized urban jungles, poverty) or what Asians despair of in Asia (hidebound traditions, sleepy country ways).
Hence also one of the advantages of Asian Cool: because it takes its lead a lot of the time from a kind of super-culture, global culture, it mainly avoids splitting itself into a hopeless muddle of subcultures the way Western culture does. Cool is something it is almost impossible to be in the West – what is cool in one corner of the social landscape is boring, weird or incomprehensible in the next. (Who over the age of 23 is really cool anyway? etc) To be cool in Asia all you need, at least to get started, is enough money to spend at an upmarket shopping mall.
At its worst, Asian cool is a game of catch-up with the West, played with a conformism that is pretty hard to take. At its best, cool is also what renovates homegrown Asian tradition in any way that seems attractive, interesting or fun. And what Vietnamese girls and boys find cool is no exception.
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The latest thing to become cool in Vietnam is dancing.
Do Vietnamese kids think they can dance?
Having been taught at school to hold everything in, most are not sure whether they can, but watching other people who can (or who are trying) is definitely a whole lot of fun.
The second-latest thing to become cool in Vietnam is singing. Most Vietnamese, in their upbeat moments – and all Vietnamese men in their drunken moments – think they can. They don’t need American tv formats to convince them they can. But the imported formats (and the imported speaker-systems) definitely give the whole show a huge boost.
The thing that became cool the day before yesterday is – Korean stuff. (South Korean stuff of course. There is nothing cool in the minds of young Vietnamese about fat underage dictators or armies of goose-stepping zombies.) Vietnamese girls, particularly in Hanoi, swallow Korean fashions whole. So at the moment they go for the “boyish” look (long baggy trousers and short hair):
(The sporty look, of course, has nothing to do with any sort of interest in sport. Most Vietnamese girls would break into a sweat at the idea of breaking into a sweat.)
Korean pop music (Bigbang, Psy, Girls Generation) effortlessly conquers the hearts and minds of Vietnamese teenagers, while the Korean film industry is considered a model for the local industry. There are essentially three types of Korean film that find their way into Vietnamese cinemas: quirky comedies, quirky horror films and quirky “historical” films – the latter being thinly disguised comedies in which ancient Korean princes talk like witty Seoul teenagers.
Compare Korean historical films with the vast quantities of historical pastiche being churned out in HK and SH. In Vietnam, Chinese historical dramas are basically fodder for retirees and car-park attendants. Full of the same bitchy princesses, the same growling monarchs, and the same endless Ang-Lee-inspired effects, they have a relatively small following which doesn't let on too much about its Sinophilic habits. Such is the enmity between the two countries, no matter how rich the Chinese get, the Vietnamese are never going to accept that the Chinese are cool in any essential way.
While there’s no question of them bumping the Koreans for the top spot on the list of cool Asian nations, the Thais are definitely also getting cooler in Vietnam. It’s a little difficult to know how this happened. Plenty of middle class Vietnamese go to Thailand for holidays. To many of them the Thais seem more relaxed than the folk back home. They make better films than the Vietnamese (slightly better films). They have less hang-ups about sex. Not being a nation of ethnic purebreads, many Thais look Asian in a less hard-boiled way; Vietnamese admire them their longer noses and deeper-set eyes. And though Thai politics, like Vietnamese politics, involves some hefty prohibitions (never saying mean things about the king, etc), it lacks the heaviness of Vietnamese politics. Hey, the teams are colour-coded, just like an old-fashioned game show! Until the junta moves in . . .
For anyone in the market for darker experiences, there's no denying that Japanese manga taps authentic feelings of anxiety, plus a whole lot of raw desire, that other cool products - and the wider scene of Vietnamese culture - don't give much of a look in. Some of it crosses teenage fantasies of desirability and violence in fairly obvious ways:
Some of it muffles its anxiety in camp gesture or cheap romanticism:
But a lot of the time it speaks the boredom and pain of being young, Asian and middle class in pretty pure form.
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Korean music and Japanese manga are very cool in Asian terms. But the more time you spend in Asia, the more you realize a lot of Asians find being Asian a bit déclassé. It’s Western bodies and Western souls a lot of Vietnamese kids really want – soul referring here to two things: among 20-somethings to the possibilities of deep romantic experience, among teenagers to the upended version of the concept, with 2.5 emotions: love, hate and m’eh, all on the outside.
In Vietnam, looking too Vietnamese is definitely uncool. The aim of the Vietnamese girls who care about these things – which is a lot of Vietnamese girls – is to adapt classical Vietnamese standards to the main Western ideals of beauty and attractiveness. (This does not mean junking classical Vietnamese ideals of beauty. Some of the time it means redoubling the force of classical imperatives and prohibitions.)
They also love going out for coffee and cakes – bad, pseudo-Western iced-coffees with turrets of whipped cream which they drink with bad, pseudo-Western cakes, mass-produced on South Korean machine lines. Thank God the homely Viet version of the coffee date is still an option for young couples. Kicking back beside a canal in a double-deckchair with your boyfriend and a delicious glass of straight Vietnamese coffee is still considered normal and can be done in a cool sort of way.
In the movie stakes, Koreans supply the spooks but Americans supply the explosions - and the repetitious fantasies of moral redemption, which Vietnamese teenagers are much less interested in than the explosions. In the music stakes, a lot of youngsters take a passing interest in Bruno Mars, Brittney Spears or Lady Gaga. Having little idea what these people are trying to assert the coolness of – and no idea what the lyrics mean – most go back to listening to Vietnamese pop music pretty quickly.
Western clothes are considered very cool. And, I have to say, they are very cool. But why?
To a Western eye, the first night nerves young Asians experience on the stage of global history, the light air of formality that informs their everyday ways, seem beautifully offset by a denim jacket or a flannelette shirt.
The general rush to borrow from the wardrobe of Western style doesn’t mean traditional Vietnamese costumes are looked down on though. No Vietnamese girl finds being a bridesmaid boring - traditional Vietnamese áo dài are the best dress-ups ever, almost as cool as mini-skirts and stilettos:
Tattoos are probably the most controversial aspect of Vietnamese cool, especially for girls.
The first thing to remember here is that in Vietnam there is a deep-seated taboo that girls are breaking in getting a tattoo. Tats fly in the face of the traditional East Asian belief that when you die you’re supposed to deliver your body whole and unblemished to the realm of the spirits if you want your spirit to rest in peace. So for most older Vietnamese, tats are for unsavoury characters who are not interested in the fate of their souls - gangsters, hookers and the like.
From a negative point of view, tats might seem like a long-winded exercise in pissing off parents and a self-reinforcing statement of your identity as fashionable and free: if, as a progressive Vietnamese 23 year old, you went through the pain of getting the thorn-anklet (the muscly love heart, the slowly blue-ing slogan, etc), then what you say about being different from your parents must be true, right?
The debates about tattoos that take place in Vietnamese social media are not that different from the ones Westerners were having with their parents over Xmas lunch late in the past millennium. What Vietnamese girls with tats argue online in their own defense rings pretty true. In short, they say, quite believably, that they continue to love and respect mum and dad, in spite of their thorn anklet - that the thorn anklets are there to express to the world the beauty of their souls.
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So if that’s pretty much what’s cool in today’s Vietnam, what do Vietnamese girls and boys find uncool?
This is where the broad differences between Asian cool and Western cool come out.
Tattoos aside, one of the main differences between Vietnamese cool and Western cool is that rebelling against your parents is not considered cool in Vietnam. (Vietnamese Cool, you’d have to say, is not yet Rebellious.)
As in the West, in Vietnam no one’s parents are cool. In the West, that’s basically because the engines of fashion have been turning over quite fast for decades, leaving anybody who seriously adopted cool stuff from previous decades feeling light years behind what is being adopted by the kids of today, or, at best, feeling admired by the kids of today for the 30 seconds it takes to recycle the styles of the past and then move on.
In Vietnam, the reason no one’s parents are cool is very different – because everyone over 30 was brought up during the war or during the period of post-war austerity.
In the West, no one’s parents are cool. And they’re a little difficult to love because of that. Giving them and everything they stand for a good little kick in the teeth, especially if they stand for jobs, mortgages, values-based education and nutritious food, has been considered a pathway, if not to long-term self-respect, then at least to a certain social cred, for numerous generations.
In Vietnam, though no one’s parents are cool, kids, in the main, still adore their parents. Of course, there is tension and, occasionally, tragic conflict, when parents stand on the side of convention and kids find themselves drawn to unconventional ways of life. But systematic spite, or stylized gestures of defiance, are not encouraged and not in general circulation. Young Vietnamese who seriously don’t like the deal served up to them by their parents usually fly the family nest and get on with living cooler, more open-ended lives without making a big deal about it.
Next, there is sex, drugs and rock n roll. None of these three is particularly cool.
In Vietnam, sex, you could say, is not yet cool.
True: flashing the flesh has definitely become a huge social phenomenon in Vietnamese cities, where shorts have been getting shorter, jeans tighter, necklines rakinger and shoes kinkier for the better part of the last two decades. (Good manners, on the other hand, went out of fashion in 1997.)
And true: actually being hung-up about sex is uncool. One of the more serious reasons parents are considered uncool is because of the anxiety that older Vietnamese people feel about free-form social relations between men and women – any sort of free-form public relations between men and women, not just free-form sexual relations. Traditional Vietnamese culture is considered hopelessly backward, especially by some young Vietnamese women, because of its obsession with female chastity and domesticity – the traditional insistence that the main social role of women is to be masters of “gia chính” - an interesting word which can either mean “domestic arts” or “household chores”.
But none of this means that sex itself is considered particularly sexy. Vietnamese girls do not talk to each other, let alone to boys or anyone else, about how much they’re getting. 95% of Vietnamese girls would never kiss a boy experimentally with no thought for the future, and no Vietnamese girl would loudly have sex with her boyfriend in her bedroom to teach her parents a lesson. Vietnamese teenagers are not primed to think of sex as the most meaningful experience of their lives. They do not obsessively contemplate the ritual of losing their virginity. Nor are they encouraged by Vietnamese pop culture to pretend that they know more about sex than they “ought” to.
All the stories run by Vietnamese Cosmo about the mysteries and thrills of sex seem irrelevant, a little pretentious. They are contained in a section called – in English, not Vietnamese – “Love and Lust”. If you ever get really good at Vietnamese and try reading this stuff (which I don't recommend) then you’ll quickly realize that the rather Western backstory of the love/lust distinction is lost on Vietnamese 20-somethings. Who the hell are Adam and Eve? In which James Cameron film were they the main item?
Young Vietnamese men probably consume about as much pornography as men in the rest of the world and many of them probably pick up dumb ideas about huge racks and shaking booty as a result. (Those ideas seem particularly dumb in Vietnam, given how slender Vietnamese women tend to be.) But with the majority of high-speed internet connections still found in very public places, boys still tend to get most of their kicks from online violence rather than online sexual depravity.
The sexualized antics of Vietnamese stars – everyone from Elly Trần and Angela Phương Trinh to Hồ Ngọc Hà – are seen by both boys and girls as entertaining, rather than impressive. The most credible of the three, Hồ Ngọc Hà (a singer, below), looks mainly like an upmarket calisthenics instructor:
Alternative sexual practices, it must be said, have quite a lot of cool potential. Vietnamese gay and lesbian folk have their own styles and their own stereotypes, which have been captured memorably in some very good Vietnamese films. (For an intro, try this one and this one). There's even a minor cult of gay love among certain straight (slightly bent) Vietnamese girls. What we are talking about are imported Japanese novels, both literary and graphic, that canvass a full range of issues, from wistful glances across flowing streams to full-blown pillow-biting of the Richard Amory variety.
While many younger Vietnamese are quite comfortable with the idea of homosexuality, but quite anxious about the possibility of actually being gay, mainstream Vietnamese culture is just anxious and in denial. Possibly the worst aspect of the situation are the insults Vietnamese movie directors deliver to the LGBT community in mainstream films on a regular basis. Every year sees the release of a couple of home-grown comedies whose main character is a cheap caricature of an ugly, not very intelligent woman - and whose plot inevitably involves him/her having to get over a crush on the straight male lead.
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Unlike in the West, drugs are unambiguously very uncool in today's Vietnam.
Very few Vietnamese kids feel the need to unwind with a spot of weed or bend their Friday nights into interesting shapes with Ecstasy. (Quite cool Vietnamese kids approve of the death penalty, which the Vietnamese government makes regular use of for drug offences.) Likewise, very few people in Vietnam fall for the bohemian argument that drugs are a laudable, really rather sexy, form of protest against bad social reality or a vehicle of personal expression or in some sense mind-expanding, “philosophical”.
Medium-ranking police officials on the other hand get interviewed on tv by breathless junior reporters whenever they conduct successful drug raids. The job of the reporters in such situations is to express a certain sort of frisky admiration; the job of the cops is to sound as if no one has ever put one past them in the history of the world. Coolness is something it is obviously pretty easy to exude when you have a 20 year-old intern getting het up about what you had for breakfast on the morning of the big bust. Plain-clothes police in Vietnam are definitely quite hip.
As for rock n roll – well, some middle-aged Vietnamese folk have heard of The Rolling Stones and Queen, but frankly as a nation Vietnam was up to slightly different stuff during the heyday of Western pop culture - fighting major wars and picking up the pieces for example. Most of the various sub-moods that were minted by the greats of American pop and rock had lost most of their attraction before Vietnam was ready for them.
Rock n roll at its best, you might say, helped Western 20-somethings express a range of negative truths about how angry or disillusioned life made them feel in the gilded cage of Western society from the 60's onwards. It captured certain heroic sensations of quixotry, desolation. It gave voice to a bit of rogue male tenderness of heart (or at least offset the blasé cult of male toughness that a lot of other rock n roll was about). It also let loose the eloquence, intelligence and general sassiness of women who wanted to make up their own lives.
None of these cultural gestures means that much in a Vietnamese context. Vpop – which is the overwhelming exception to the rule that Vietnamese cool comes from outside Vietnam – hardly bothers with minority emotions or negative truths. About the only sensation it is interested in is teenage love gone bad; year after year, the Vpop machine churns out the same old videos of gym-fit boy-men emoting into the stratosphere:
Oh, and quite a few of Hồ Ngọc Hà doing what the idea of love gone bad makes Hồ Ngọc Hà want to do – close her eyes, shake her glossy mane and go round and round in circles. . .
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As this list indicates, what’s cool today in Vietnam hardly invests at all in the deeper attitudinal complexes of Western cool and maybe this is what gives it its special air of groundless drifting, pure spectacle. Depending on how you look at it, you can see it as a playful, purely aesthetic phenomenon, or as a particularly self-absorbed form of consumerism. Asia, it has to be said, has known its floating worlds before, but nothing even vaguely like this.
For better or worse, one of the other main things that is not cool in Vietnam is irony. Like sex, irony, you’d have to say, is not yet cool – the Vietnamese, at this stage of developments, are not yet ready to mock their own drift into materialism, and they are still too attached to the communist idea of the nation to mock seriously at political authority. Vietnamese humour still has something gentle and positive about it - something that to Westerners feels totally before the fall. In general, if you put your tongue too far in your cheek in Vietnam nowadays, the kids will just not get it. Saying one thing and meaning another is neither cool nor uncool, it’s incomprehensible.
Last of all, there's politics. One of the complicated issues it is definitely worth pointing out about Vietnamese social life nowadays is how uncool politics has become. Yes, a lot of young Vietnamese feel an abstract admiration for the achievements of the nation under Communist leadership (mainly – winning the war). Yes, they appreciate that Uncle Hồ and General Giáp had their understated style and their robust political beliefs – and a considerable willingness to stick up for them. Maybe some younger Vietnamese have fond memories of the fun they had as kids at Party-sponsored jamborees. But all of this is coupled with a nigh-on total lack of interest in either the politics or the policy-settings of the Communist Party.
No section in a Vietnamese bookshop goes more untouched than the corner devoted to political doctrine. No subjects within the school curriculum are considered more deadly than the introduction to Marx and Lenin and the drills in Communist history which all Vietnamese kids get put through.
The standard response you’ll get from a Vietnamese 20-something, if you ask what the slogan on one of the million big red banners actually means is – Who knows? Why are they always 50-feet long? The Vietnamese Communist Party doesn’t seem to have adjusted to one of the basic conditions of urban living – that an idea or image, to be lodged in the mind of casual passers-by, has to be compact enough to be taken in with a quick sweep of the eye.
Membership of the Party is still something Vietnamese go in for in order to realize worthy social goals, not just because it’s the best way to move up in the world. But imbuing the party with any of the attributes of cool is the last thing on their minds – either on the minds of Vietnam’s leaders, or the country's politically rather mellow citizens.
There’s almost certainly a method to this. Live in Vietnam for a couple of years and you might find yourself thinking that the Vietnamese Communist Party is happy to seem as boring as possible because it doesn’t want to be subject to the iron law of cool: that what is cool one day will become uncool the next.
Vietnamese cool, like Asian cool in general, has a very definitely bearable lightness. Political ideals, let alone political realities, are by comparison unbearably heavy. Vietnamese cool floats along on the assumption that both the ideals and the realities can be safely put to one side. And in this it's pretty similar to other regional versions of Asian cool too.
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