During one of our free afternoons in Hanoi, I visited the Vietnamese Women’s Museum with two other classmates. The museum had just reopened in 2010 following a four year renovation period, and it was clear from the quality of the exhibits that it had received a large amount of funding. Of all the museums I had visited on the trip, this one was by far the best designed, and the presentation of the various exhibits was excellent.

The museum was divided into three sections: Women in Family, Women in History, and Women’s Fashion. I spent the most time in the history exhibit, which focused on women’s participation in the revolutionary struggle from 1945 to 1975. The museum put the tens of thousands of women who fought in the wars at the forefront, highlighting those individuals who made extraordinary contributions to the national cause and who served in leadership positions. Women comprised a large proportion of the soldiers who fought for the North Vietnamese, and the exhibit recognized many of them as war heroes on par with their male counterparts.

The inclusion of these women’s narratives was a welcome change from the other museums and monuments we had visited, which only peripherally gave attention to the high level of involvement of Vietnamese women during the conflicts, but the depiction of women left me feeling very ambivalent about the museum’s message. The Women’s Museum’s website contains a short but accurate description of the general tone of the exhibits: “Visitors have the opportunity to learn and understand traditional culture, marriage customs, childbirth and family life, traditional women’s clothing and the role of women in the defense of the nation”. The family and fashion sections associate women with the traditional and with domestic life, and while recognition of women’s lives is important, these exhibits limit topics important to understanding the Vietnamese woman to restrictive gender roles.

In the history section, women are presented simply as actors in the broader fight for Vietnamese independence. They are heroic and important to the struggle, but their stories do not deviate from the government’s official narrative of Vietnam rising up against foreign oppressors and their domestic puppets. These women are important because they embody the revolutionary ideal, not because they advanced women’s status or advocated for change. In the entire museum, I found only one reference to women’s rights in a short description of a female political leader’s past accomplishments, which included work with a women’s rights group. The Women in History exhibit did not portray women’s history, but rather Vietnamese revolutionary history as carried out by women.

The Vietnamese Women’s Museum failed to portray women as independent actors with their own aspirations outside of traditional gender roles and outside of the state’s political agenda. This type of exclusion of alternative narratives was a recurring theme in museums and official commemorative sites throughout our trip in Vietnam, though; the Women’s Museum was not the only manifestation of this tendency to ignore competing ideas. These omissions, of course, cannot solely be attributed to the particularities of Communist Party rule in Vietnam. Gaping holes in official narratives exist everywhere in the world, including the United States. Visiting a country with national memories I have not been habitually exposed to just made the ideology and strategy behind the museums and monuments easier for me to see.

Going into our visit to the John McCain Memorial in Hanoi, my classmates and I weren’t sure what purpose a tribute to an American prisoner of war could serve in present day Vietnam. Now, after a few days to think about the monument and to talk to my classmates, its meaning is still unclear to me. We began our last full day in Hanoi with a visit to the Hoa Lo Prison, which was used from 1964 to 1973 to hold American prisoners of war, including John McCain. A section of the museum inside the former prison was dedicated to this period of the building’s history, and McCain’s flight suit and personal effects were featured prominently in the exhibit. There were also two photos of him: one depicted Vietnamese soldiers and civilians removing McCain from the Truc Bach lake, where he fell when his plane was shot down, and the other showed a doctor treating his wounds at the prison.

After finishing our museum visit, we drove to the memorial. The bus stopped at the side of the road by the Truc Bach Lake and we all walked over to the monument. It included a sculpted image of McCain alongside a brief description of his position in the U.S. Navy and how he was shot down while on a mission to bomb a power plant. The image showed McCain with his hands raised, though the meaning of the posture was ambiguous; he could have been falling from his aircraft, being lifted from the lake, or surrendering. In all three scenarios, however, McCain is in a position of weakness in relation to his captors, as well as to the modern Vietnamese state. Particularly given the level of political prominence he assumed in the 1990s and beyond, portraying him as helpless suggests the relative strength of the northern Vietnamese army and their modern-day successors.

While American tourists who have been exposed to John McCain’s accounts of his experiences during the Vietnam War might be interested in seeing the monument, it was certainly not very accessible for foreigners. It is just a small statue on a sidewalk a bit out of the way of many common tourist areas, and the Vietnamese inscription is not translated to English. The Lonely Planet’s Vietnam guidebook includes Truc Bach Lake as a tourist site, but makes no mention of the monument. The memorial was also erected sometime between 1975 and 1985, prior to the reopening of relations between Vietnam and the United States, so it certainly was initially intended for a Vietnamese audience.

McCain began his national political career in the early 1980s, so the monument presumably was designed to celebrate the capture of a “celebrity” POW. A quick Google Image search yielded a bizarre photo of John McCain and other members of an American delegation smiling next to this monument celebrating his own imprisonment – very obviously a photo op intended to represent a renewal of friendship between the United States and Vietnam at the political level. McCain has made highly publicized allegations of severe torture during his time in Hoa Lo Prison in the years since the photo was taken, sparking some controversy and anger in Vietnam.

This complicated relationship between John McCain and Vietnam made visiting the monument today feel all the more strange. Different people can have such different interpretations of it; Vietnamese visitors perhaps see in it a national victory over an occupying power or may feel the sting of McCain’s more recent public remarks, while American tourists – if they even realize what the monument is – may be more likely to recall McCain’s personal wartime accounts or other common American POW narratives. With the opening of relations between the two countries, both at a political level and in terms of rising tourism, the ambiguous message of the memorial seems more and more confused. McCain’s vacillation between supporting reconciliation and accusing his captors of torture, contrasted with the consistent argument in the Hoa Lo Museum that the American prisoners were treated fairly, also complicates the history that the monument represents. Does the monument today and the memories it engenders promote further understanding of the war, or deepen divisions by recalling a point of strong contention between many common Vietnamese and American narratives? Does it have any obligation to address these issues as remembrance of the war changes over time? With so many implications to the various interpretations of the monument, I find it difficult to come to any definitive conclusion about the purpose it serves or the real impact it has. The memorial itself may be physically unassuming and contain a simple narrative of the sequence of events leading to John McCain’s capture, but as with all of the representations of war history we came across in Vietnam, the meanings behind it become infinitely complex.