ASIA PACIFIC

Punch Lines and Laughs As TV Show in Vietnam Mocks Government Policy

By MIKE IVESFEB. 20, 2015

HANOI, Vietnam — The Kitchen Gods were asked by the emperor’s assistant: “What curves gently?”

The gods wore flowing robes fit for mandarins in a 17th-century royal court. But they were actors in a television studio this week.

Four potential answers flashed on the screen, in the style of the game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” One read: “A newly built road.”

Nguyen Ba Tien, a driving instructor, was watching the broadcast in his living room on Wednesday in Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital. He said the road answer was funny because it alluded to a widespread rumor that the path of a real-life Hanoi road had been altered in order to bypass the homes of government officials.

The show, called “Meeting Each Other at Year’s End,” addresses “hot topics in society,” Mr. Tien said. “It reflects how Vietnamese people think.”

The closest thing Vietnam has to “The Daily Show,” the program airs on state television every Lunar New Year’s Eve. Highly anticipated and widely watched, it is famous for slyly lampooning government policies and passing wry judgment on some of the country’s thorniest social problems, including systemic corruption and a widening gap between rich and poor.

“It really strikes a chord,” said Jonathan London, a sociologist at the City University of Hong Kong who studies Vietnam. “This is a reminder that even the political cultures that exist within the state are varied and complex — and animated by diversity in a way that we shouldn’t overlook.”

In real life, the actors portraying the Kitchen Gods are part of Vietnam’s state apparatus, and the zingers they utter are far less critical than the political dissent coursing through Vietnamese political blogs. But unlike the blogs, whose primary audience tends to be politically engaged intellectuals, the show is hugely popular among ordinary Vietnamese, especially in the northern part of the country, who mainly follow current affairs through the filter of the state-controlled news media.

In a one-party state where the ruling Communist Party exerts significant control over daily life and the economy — and stands accused, by international advocacy groups, of regularly jailing its domestic critics — some observers see the show as an informal bellwether of Vietnamese public opinion.

Scholars say Vietnam’s traditional Kitchen Gods represent a blend of Chinese and domestic folk traditions. On Kitchen God Day, the 23rd day of the last month of the lunar year, the typical Vietnamese family burns three votive Kitchen God figurines at home and releases three fish — which also represent the gods — into a lake or river. Those rituals are said to facilitate the gods’ trip to heaven, where they issue reports to a celestial emperor about the family’s behavior over the preceding 12 lunar months.

“Meeting Each Other at Year’s End,” which first aired in 2003, is a creative interpretation of what happens when the Kitchen Gods arrive in heaven: Instead of reporting on an individual family, they assess the state of the nation. They are dressed like votive figurines, but many Vietnamese consider them loose caricatures of government ministers.

The gods often make clumsy excuses for the bribery and official mismanagement that pervade Vietnamese society. One of the show’s most popular refrains, for example, is the “Song of the Envelope,” a sendup of the graft common in many Vietnamese public hospitals.

This year’s program took subtle aim at the country’s slow-burning banking crisis, which analysts believe is linked to speculative property investments by state-owned enterprises and to poor oversight in the financial sector. The joke began when a Kitchen God charged with reporting on earth reported that the property market had improved in 2014.

“So does that mean bad debts have been reduced?” one of the emperor’s assistants asked.

“Bad debt? Ask the Metal God,” the Earth God replied, apparently passing the buck to the state-dominated financial sector.

Still, another prominent controversial topic in Vietnam last year, the country’s standoff with China in the South China Sea, was ignored.

Le Van Lan, history professor emeritus at Hanoi National University, said the military and the Communist Party were never directly mocked on the show because that would be too politically sensitive. But that is hardly surprising, he noted, in light of the official connections of Tran Binh Minh, deputy director general of Vietnam Television.

In 2011, the Communist Party’s online newspaper reported that Mr. Minh was a member of the party’s 175-member Central Committee, which included the current Vietnamese president, Truong Tan Sang, and the party’s current secretary general, Nguyen Phu Trong.

“That’s the big problem of this regime — everyone’s an official!” Professor Lan, 80, said with a laugh.

Indeed, Vietnam’s state-controlled news media has described tensions between the show’s creators and government officials who bristle at its jokes. Last year, the Culture Ministry ordered the Communist Party’s propaganda department to “tightly supervise” the show, according to a report in the newspaper Thanh Nien.

Just before this year’s broadcast, the online news website VnExpress quoted Mr. Minh of Vietnam Television as saying that ministers always ask the show’s management to make the Kitchen Gods script “gentle.” And in response to rumors that this year’s show might be the last, a Facebook group popped up to save it.

The show’s director, Do Thanh Hai, declined repeated interview requests, and members of his cast could not be reached for comment.

Peter B. Zinoman, a professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor in chief of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies, said the Kitchen Gods show had never struck him as particularly innovative — and certainly not now, at a time when so many Vietnamese writers are going online to voice razor-sharp critiques of government policy. He said the rumors that the show might be canceled could have been a marketing ploy.

However, Professor Zinoman added that the show may function as a “safety valve” for the airing of grievances about low-level malfeasance.

On Wednesday, several Vietnamese watching the show on a narrow lane near Xa Dan Road in Hanoi said they had been looking forward to it all year.

“It’s criticism, but in a funny way,” said Pham Minh Hieu, a university student who watched with his mother, father, a cousin and a grandfather. He said the show had become part of their New Year’s Eve routine, along with ancestor worship and a viewing of fireworks at midnight.

A neighbor, Mong Thi Chien, said the show was not only about entertainment; she was always interested to know what policies and events it would define as good or bad, and what “hidden questions” it might raise about government accountability, or lack thereof.

Nguyen Ba Tien, the driving instructor, admitted he was not sure whether the show was censored, much less whether it was trying to make a larger point about government policy.

But, he said, “The jokes are funny because they’re true.”