Cashing in on ‘propaganda posters’

Hanoi / DPA

Pham Thi Minh Thinh, a 52-year-old Hanoi native, spent her early childhood amidst the backdrop of catastrophic American bombings against her home city. Born in 1965 at the onset of the US-Vietnam War, she clearly remembers hiding in underground shelters as explosions rocked the surface.
“It was a very painful time because the bombs nearly killed my entire family,” says Thinh, recalling a day when her family returned from the shelter to find their house destroyed.
Today, Thinh makes her living selling replica vintage propaganda posters celebrating the past war effort against the Americans.
Her small shophouse, located in Hanoi’s Old Quarter between pho noodle stalls and backpacker hostels, sports a blunt sign advertising “old propaganda posters.”
Having celebrated its 87th birthday on February 3, the Communist Party of Vietnam has a grip on power that is hard to miss in the country’s cities. Hammer and sickle flags are flown alongside the national flag, itself a communist yellow star on a red background.
And the face of Ho Chi Minh, the revolutionary leader who led Vietnam to victory against French colonialism in 1954, can be found everywhere from public squares to movie theatre box offices.
For Thinh, trade in vintage communist posters is her livelihood. Yet her customers are not loyal party members, but Western tourists drawn to the mystique of the imagery.
A small poster of a Vietcong soldier sells for around five dollars, while a large portrait of former US president Richard Nixon as a Godzilla-like monster sells for around 20 dollars.
Patrick Horn, a 25-year-old tourist from the US state of North Carolina, says he is interested in learning about his country’s history from the other side.
“In America, it’s their side versus the Vietnamese side,” he says, adding that he appreciated seeing the opposite perspective.
The grandson of a US veteran of the Vietnam War, Horn says he isn’t bothered by the blatantly anti-American propaganda, which included stylistic paintings of captured pilots and destroyed B-52 bombers.
“I don’t think any of it is offensive. I want to see how it is represented,” he says.
Today, anti-Americanism is shunned by the Communist Party, which gave a warm state welcome to former US President Barack Obama in 2016.
While the war is commemorated as a historic victory against a superpower, US flags are frequently spotted in the streets as decorations or fashion accessories.
Thinh says she holds no ill will towards the country that bombed her hometown during her youth. None of the propaganda in her store, she says, reflected contemporary Vietnamese views toward America.
“I can see my American customers’ feelings, and they are a little bit reserved, but it is fine now because that was the war, those things happened in the past,”
she says.
Across the street from Thinh’s shop is a nearly identical store staffed by Le Thi Kim Lien, a 24-year-old Vietnamese woman. Lien, who speaks fluent English, was born in 1993, nearly two decades after the war ended in 1975.
Despite having a father and grandparents who fought against the Americans, she had little interest in her country’s recent violent history before getting her
current job.
“It’s just the old people who want to relive their memories of the past. Most young people don’t know about the propaganda,” says Lien, adding that most young people consider the past boring.
She says American tourists in Vietnam are fascinated by the colourful propaganda, which was designed by young artists employed by the state during the war.
“Some young people say their fathers or grandfathers took part in the war in Vietnam, and they just want to buy them as presents for them,” says Lien.
Since taking her job at the shop, Lien says she too has grown interested in the old art. Her favourites are those celebrating the 1975 reunification, which brought southern Vietnam, which had been its own republic under American patronage, under the control of the communist north.
Thinh says the war propaganda served as a reminder of her painful childhood in a war-torn country and that she prefers the posters celebrating the peace that followed. “Peace – I really like any poster about the peace,” she says.