NOSTALGIA OF THE HOMELAND AND THE IMAGINATION OF THE NORTH OF VIETNAM IN VU BANG’S THUONG NHO MUOI HAI

Abstract

This article chooses Vu Bang’s Thuong nho muoi hai as a case study to discover the ways in which landscapes are constructed in discourses, especially focuses on how mythologies of “home-land” were created in expatriate communities. Landscape of Ha Noi in particular (or Bac Viet in general), therefore, is not only analysized to reveal its imaginariness but also compared with other discourses about Hanoi to realize the mutual ideologies govern them. The article then tries to find out psychological mechanisms which led to the constructions of this landscape as a paradise of nature and human life. Traumatic historical upheavals, war and the devision of the country, the migration of northerners to the south, the nostalgia for homeland, all can be seen as historical and psychological conditions which brought about a system of presentations of Ha Noi/Bac Viet in this period, of which Thuong nho muoi hai is an expample.