1)London, March 2025

This text is structured as a series of footnotes that trail along a timeline that weaves in and out of the landscapes of Vietnam and Taiwan, as seen and unseen in Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s Letters from Panduranga (2015) and Tiffany Sia’s The Sojourn (2023). The former narrates fragments of Vietnam’s histories, from premodern to postcolonial, through a fictionalised exchange of letters between a woman based in Ninh Thuận (formerly called Panduranga, the spiritual heart of the matriarchal Hindu Cham indigenous people), and a man on a road trip through the ruins and rebuilding of postwar Vietnam. On the other hand, The Sojourn is a reconstructed film production diary disguised as a road movie, retracing iconic Taiwanese landscapes and location sets of King Hu’s Dragon Inn (1967). Authorship and auteurship come into question as the film goes off-course and brings an elementary school founded by the indigenous Taiwanese Atayal filmmaker and educator Pilin Yapu into the itinerary. I watch the films on my little laptop screen from London, while reels and reels of video of people and landscapes being eviscerated in Palestine, Sudan, and more, circulate endlessly online. The colonial project somehow hasn’t ceased to end, and even in places where it has seemingly ended, we’d be fools to think its ghosts aren’t haunting us still. These footnotes lie somewhere between forgetting and remembering, or being unable and unwilling to forget. In lieu of an introduction, this is the first footnote. 

2 Ninh Thuận, February 2025

In wanting to return to the original story Thi had set out to follow in the making of Letters from Panduranga, I find myself looking for news about the Ninh Thuận nuclear power project. The government plan to build two nuclear energy plants in the province as part of Vietnam’s transition towards green energy was first approved in 2011, and her film was released in 2015. A year later, the plan was stopped due to budget constraints and fears surrounding the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Reading the news in recent months, it seems the nuclear power project has since been resurrected with a relentless new goal to complete the construction of both plants by 2030, in time for the 85th anniversary of Vietnam’s declaration of independence from the French. I don’t know enough about contemporary Vietnamese politics to be able to pinpoint why exactly this sounds ominous, but it does. There has not been a good track record of the conjuring of ‘nation’ in relation to infrastructural development, has there? Even, or especially, in the name of green-anything (greenwashing). Often, it just means a community that means little to the modern nation state is about to be internally displaced from their land. 

3 Orchid Island / Miaoli County, 2016

2016 was a year of promises made and promises unfulfilled. Almost thirty years’ worth of nuclear waste was supposed to be removed from Orchid Island, the ancestral home of the indigenous Yami people, by 2016. Since 1990, the Yami people have been leading the anti-nuclear movement in Taiwan, calling for the stoppage and removal of nuclear waste dumping on their island. Taipower, the company responsible for the nuclear waste facility, was fined in 2016 for failing to dispose of nuclear waste from Orchid Island by the agreed deadline and for years of inaction on the issue, yet to date only one demand of the movement has been met. Yami elders have rejected financial compensation offered by the government and continue to insist valiantly on the removal of nuclear waste from their lands. 2016 was also the first time an official apology was made to Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, recognising four centuries of mistreatment, massacre, and cultural erasure, under different colonial administrations. “For 400 years, every regime that has come to Taiwan has brutally violated the rights of indigenous peoples through armed invasion and land seizure,” said then-President Tsai Ing-wen in her formal apology, “For this, I apologize to the indigenous peoples on behalf of the government.” Over in Miaoli County, when the Atayal filmmaker Pilin Yapu first transformed Daguan Elementary School into P’uma Elementary School in 2016, it became the first experimental elementary school for indigenous children in Taiwan. For the first time, Atayal children who lived in the area could go to a school which incorporated into its curriculum the disappearing cultural traditions of the land of which it is part. In the Tayal language, p’uma means to pass on. 

 4 Mỹ Sơn Sanctuary, 1999

One of the letters in Thi’s Letters from Panduranga was written from Mỹ Sơn Sanctuary, once the spiritual and religious centre of the Kingdom of Champa, now a place dead and distant from the surviving Cham people living in Ninh Thuận. Instead of the Cham language, indiscernible smatterings of Mandarin and English can be picked up in the soundscape of Mỹ Sơn; tour groups on a visit to a cultural relic. Mỹ Sơn Sanctuary, or what is left of it, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999. An area surrounding the temple complex was once used as a wartime Việt Minh base and thus became targeted by the American military. Within a week of bombing in August 1965 during the infamous Operation Rolling Thunder, the temple complex which once housed 71 majestic Hindu monuments was left largely in ruins. Whatever could be moved and rescued was transported to the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang, an institution originally named after its founder, the French archaeologist Henri Parmentier, and which has little to do with — and done little for — the actual living Cham. The twenty-year war that unfolded in Vietnam from 1955 to 1975 has had multiple names and narratives. Those who call it the Vietnam War will primarily have known of it as part of the American ideological battle against communism during the Cold War. In Vietnam, it is known as the American War, and many will have seen it as a second war of national liberation, this time from the American occupation in the South (the first being from French colonisation). Amidst it all, a lesser-known fight for independence was unfolding between historical Vietnamese imperialism and the indigenous Cham who lived in its shadow. Some of the indigenous Cham participated in their own independence and liberation armed struggles from Vietnamese rule, but were ultimately crushed by the newly unified communist government. 

5 In a car on the way to a popular student café, Taipei, 2020s/1960s

The actor Shih Chun sits shotgun in a car with Tiffany and an off-camera collaborator, on the way to a café popular with university students, somewhere in Taipei. Rain is pouring down the windows; Shih Chun says it is the tenth consecutive day of rain, constantly misty but not torrential. So much rain is unusual for Taipei, according to Shih Chun, so much so that wetness has started to seep into the walls of people’s homes. A few minutes earlier in the film, Shih Chun was confirming the location and time of the filming of a scene in King Hu’s iconic Dragon Inn (1967). It was shot in the afternoon, he said, and the mist was crawling uphill. Though staged to be located in a remote area near the northern border of China during the Ming dynasty, Hu’s martial arts epic was filmed in Taiwan a year after the acclaimed auteur left British Hong Kong. The film — in which a group of loyalist swordsmen swoop into the film’s namesake Dragon Gate Inn to save the innocent children of a woefully executed general from an evil eunuch who had overthrown the emperor — is read by some scholars as an allegory of the Cold War conflict between the two Chinas, namely the Chinese Communist Party’s Democratic Republic of China and the Nationalist Party’s Republic of China (Taiwan). In the same year that Hu arrived in Taiwan, thousands of other landscapes emerged as well, unveiled in Taipei’s new National Palace Museum at the end of a perilous thirty-year journey, dodging seizure by the Imperial Japanese Army and destruction during the Cultural Revolution, from Beijing to Shanghai to Nanjing and back, and onward to Keelung and finally, Taipei. Only 22% of the initial inventory of smuggled landscapes made the final crossing safely. In the café, against the din of student chatter, Shih Chun and Tiffany talk about the different Chineses. Tiffany shares that she speaks Cantonese to her parents, who in turn speak Shanghainese. “Thank you” sounds different in the two languages. Shih Chun remarks that other than the mountaintop of Huoyanshan and the glazed roof tiles of a temple in Tianxiang, all the other landscapes of 1960s Taiwan no longer look the same. 

6 Hanoi, 1945

All the French statues in Hanoi were pulled down in 1945. The communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh declared: “The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bảo Đại has abdicated. Our people have broken the chains which for nearly a century have fettered them and have won independence for the Fatherland. Our people at the same time have overthrown the monarchic regime that has reigned supreme for dozens of centuries. In its place has been established the present Democratic Republic.” Amongst the statues pulled down was “the open-dressed dame,” the colloquial name given to a miniature Statue of Liberty that has since been recast, along with the other bronzes, into a 10-tonne Buddha sitting in Ngu Xa Pagoda in a village in Hanoi, which the French army helped lift onto its base with their hydraulic jacks. Pictures of the giant Buddha feature in collection of archival photographs shown in the final minutes of Letters from Panduranga, along with images of Palestine, Africa, Angkor, and Champa from the Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris in 1930 and 1931, reframed into a composition of solidarity. 

7 Panduranga, from the future 

“I am sending you this landscape from the future,” the man says. The woman responds, “Her name is Panduranga. She lies somewhere between the Middle Ages and the 21st century, between the earth and the moon, between humiliation and happiness.” By way of these recitations, this is the last footnote. 

References

Andrew Chan, “Dragon Inn: Poised for Battle,” The Criterion Collection, 10 July 2018. Access online: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5787-dragon-inn-poised-for-battle? 

Ashley Thompson, “Calling the Earth to Witness,” Post: Notes on Art in a Global Context, 3 May 2023. Access online: https://post.moma.org/calling-the-earth-to-witness/ 

Ho Chi Minh, Selected Works, Vol. 3. Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960–62, 17–21.

May Adadol Inganawij, “Aesthetics of Potentiality: Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s Essay Films,” Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image, ed. Lucy Reynolds. London: Bloomsbury Academic 2019, 151–164.

“My Son Sanctuary,” UNESCO World Heritage Convention. Access online: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/949/ 

“News Release: President Tsai apologizes to indigenous peoples on behalf of government,” Office of the President, Republic of China (Taiwan), 1 August 2016. Access online: 

https://english.president.gov.tw/NEWS/4950#:~:text=To%20all%20indigenous%20peoples%20of,see%20no%20need%20to%20apologize 

Stephen Teo, “Great Directors: Hu, King,” Senses of Cinema, July 2002. Access online: https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/hu/ 

Tiffany Sia, On and Off-Screen Imaginaries, New York: Primary Information, 2024. 

“Nuclear waste in Orchid island, Taiwan,” Global Atlas of Environmental Justice, 14 October 2014. Access online:https://ejatlas.org/conflict/nuclear-waste-taiwan

Film still from The Sojourn (dir. Tiffany Sia, 2023). Courtesy of Tiffany Sia, Maxwell Graham, New York, and Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna.