ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 offers a case study of the relationship between television dramas and collective nostalgia as seen in the two early Vietnamese dramas Hanoian (‘Ngườii Hà Nội’, 1996) and The City Stories (‘Chuyện Phố Phường’, 2002). Hanoian presents a memory dispositif that bitterly recalls what is presented as a simple but righteous life during the socialist wartime to express moral dissatisfaction about the corrupting power of money in contemporary situations. In contrast, The City Stories skips any recall of the socialist past to seek a ‘better yesterday’ that can ethically engage viewers with the present of marketization and globalization, to which the socialist past embedded in Hanoian is no longer compatible. Although adopting divergent paths, both dramas use ordinary stories of family conflicts to connect personal memories with national histories to offer different ways of living the present and anticipating the future.
