Van Nguyen’s case could have incited racist sentiments, grounded in negative media stereotypes of young Vietnamese-Australian men involved in drugs and crime. However, his Australian lawyers, Lex Lasry and Julian McMahon, played a powerful mediating role in shaping representations of Van Nguyen and mobilising protest against his execution. White, male, middle-class and middle-aged, they conveyed the values of respectability, dependability, passion and humanity. From early days, they influenced the media coverage by soliciting the cooperation of the media, as well as family and friends, to remain silent until the appeal process was completed.[22] When they finally talked to the media, reports of their passionate commitment helped to endow protests against Van Nguyen’s execution with a sense of sacred purpose. Drawing heavily on comments by Lasry, a Canberra Times article showed a photo of Van Nguyen with the caption: ‘Changed man, Nguyen Tuong Van, sentenced to be hanged in six days time’.[23] The ‘change’ referred to his conversion to Catholicism during his imprisonment, as well as to his increased maturity and remorse. This article was accompanied by another, sub-titled ‘Lawyer’s crusade to save Nguyen’s life draws to an unfortunate and unhappy close’.[24] The term ‘crusade’, used figuratively, means an ‘aggressive movement against public evil’, and signified that his lawyers were heavily invested, emotionally and politically, in opposing the death penalty.[25] Their commitment functioned as a model for readers — they too could promote a vision of Australia as a ‘humane society’ by protesting against Singapore’s draconian laws. The literal meaning of ‘crusade’ — ‘a Christian expedition to recover the Holy Land’ — is also significant, as Christian symbols were subtly but frequently used to give meaning to the case, which had the effect of constructing Van Nguyen as a martyr.
During the week leading up to Van Nguyen’s execution, the media repeatedly used images of his suffering mother, Kim Nguyen, which further endowed protests against his execution with ‘sacred’ meaning. In these aestheticised images, which both hide and draw attention to her grief, a scarf covers her head, and she is often supported. Her eyes are cast down, oblivious to the camera, and she looks deeply distressed. These images were accompanied by emotive headlines such as ‘[m]ore agony for Nguyen family: No visiting on weekends’, and on the penultimate day: ‘Still not known if mother will have her last embrace’.[26] The caption for a similar image reads: ‘Desperate Times: Kim Nguyen leaves Changi prison yesterday’.[27] On the day of the execution, several newspapers printed the same photo of her — wearing a flowered scarf that covered her head and shoulders, stepping out of a car, her face barely visible but conveying profound grief. This image was accompanied by captions such as: ‘The hardest visit … Kim Nguyen … prepares to say goodbye to her son yesterday’,[28] ‘A mother’s last touch’[29] and ‘Love and anguish, Nugyen Tuoug Van’s mother Kim arrives at Singapore’s Changi Prison for a final visit with her son …’.[30] The media’s use of phrases laden with pathos — ‘more agony’, ‘last embrace’, ‘desperate times’, ‘hardest visit’, ‘say goodbye’, ‘last touch’, ‘love and anguish’, ‘final visit’, ‘regrets’ — figures the case primarily as a maternal melodrama, typically associated with the private realm of domesticity, rather than a judicial execution with widespread political and moral significance.[31] Why were such intimate images used to mediate a death-penalty case, and what effects might they have?
Kahane observes that the trope of the suffering mother and the vulnerable child is often used to figure trauma, to mark moments of social breakdown or crisis, and to convey affect.[32] As she reminds us, however, even when scenes of mother and child separation have a historical referent such as the Holocaust or the Stolen Generations, their translation into text ‘asks us not merely to experience their painful affect but to question their function within the context of cultural representation and the social effects of their transmission’.[33] Images of Kim Nguyen functioned in at least three ways. Firstly, as letters to the editor attested, poignant images, framed to convey her anguish and to solicit the viewer’s pity, compelled readers to identify with her and share in her suffering at the cruel loss of her son. One reader commented: ‘Every mother’s heart bleeds for Kim Nguyen.’[34] Another stated that while he has ‘little sympathy for any person supplying death drugs to other people’, he has ‘sympathy for the mother’.[35] Secondly, images of the ‘suffering mother’ discursively positioned Van Nguyen as a ‘beloved son’. In turn, the media represented him as a ‘faithful son’, who regretted the pain he was causing his mother, conveyed through headlines such as ‘Unspoken truth exposed: Nguyen wrote of his regrets, and of mum’.[36] Thirdly, and most significantly, images of Kim Nguyen’s suffering, like the lawyers’ crusade, infused protests against the death penalty with sacred meaning, conveyed in part through Christian iconography. Her pained visage, together with her silence, implicitly suggested references to Mary, mother of Jesus, an iconic ‘suffering mother’ whose son was a martyr.[37] This Christian connotation was intensified by reports that Van Nguyen held a rosary at his execution, that he received solace from frequent conversations with the prison chaplain, that the Pope appealed on his behalf, and that he believed in the afterlife.[38] Through such laden images of his mother, the media sacralised the mother-child relation, and signified the death penalty as a ‘callous violation’ of it.[39] Of course, not everyone facing judicial execution has a young, photogenic mother who can be used to mobilise sentiment against her son’s (or daughter’s) death. The well-known Australian case of Lindy Chamberlain serves as a powerful reminder that individuals can suffer injustice if they do not conform to gendered stereotypes of ‘proper mourning’.[40]
Van Nguyen’s position as a ‘beloved son’ was intensified through representations of the relationship between him and his lawyers. Readers were told that Van had only met his biological father once, and his step-father beat him and his brother when they were children. In contrast to these ‘bad’ fathers, Van Nguyen’s lawyers were represented symbolically as ‘good’ fathers. After seeing him for the final time, McMahon stated that ‘he is a beautiful young man. Cheerful, because he is composed … he is completely rehabilitated, completely reformed, completely focused on doing what is good and now they are going to kill him.’[41] Similarly, Lasry commented that Van’s legal team ‘look into the eyes of a healthy young 25-year-old with so much to offer who is going to die a violent death’.[42] In these representations of the ‘beautiful’, ‘cheerful’, ‘rehabilitated’, ‘focused’ young man, an aesthetic of youth and beauty is opposed to the violence and barbarism of hanging. The sacralising of his life implicitly invited readers to condemn Singapore for its seemingly capricious destruction of this valued, and therefore valuable, life. While well-intentioned, such comments tended to fetishise Van Nguyen as an exceptional individual who, if spared, would contribute to society, which subtly undermined a critique of the death penalty on grounds of universal principle, independent of the personal characteristics of the prisoner.
Alongside images of Kim Nguyen’s grief, newspapers featured ‘human interest’ stories about her son’s life, from his birth in a refugee camp on the Thai-Vietnamese border to his young adulthood. These biographical features were accompanied by family photographs of Van and his twin brother, Khoa, as young boys. Through such personal narratives and domestic photographs, Van Nguyen was positioned not only as a ‘beloved son’ but as a ‘vulnerable child’. Journalist Steve Butcher titled his profile, published in The Sydney Morning Herald, ‘When they were two little boys’. The sub-header read: ‘[t]hey are the twin sons of a refugee. One had a troubled path to adulthood; the other led a blameless life until committing a terrible crime to aid his brother’. The caption for the accompanying photographs connoted an inalienable bond between the brothers, which contributed to the sacralising of family: ‘Brothers in arms … the Nguyen twins, Van and Khoa, inseparable and indistinguishable. Van’s mother decided he should be the eldest as he weighed more.’[43] These captions invite readers to infer that but for ‘the tragic accident’ of his brother’s troubles and debts, he would not be facing execution, implying that Van Nguyen was morally if not legally ‘blameless’. This focus on the relationship between the brothers, their differing fates in their new homeland, and how the remaining twin would cope once his brother was executed all added a tragic, melodramatic dimension to the case.
Images of the suffering mother and the vulnerable child not only mobilised sentiment against Van Nguyen’s execution, but also produced meanings about Australian national identity and ‘belonging’. Alongside the story of Van Nguyen’s childhood ran a story about the Canberra vigil, accompanied by an image of a young Asian boy, connoting innocence and hope.[44] The pathos aroused by the lost promise of Van Nguyen’s childhood, conveyed through this image, covered over social, economic and ethnic differences in Australia, and thereby reinforced a belief in the equalising power of ‘national sentimentality’. As Berlant proposes, the popular belief that ‘national sentimentality’ is an unqualified civic good allows the public to believe that ‘a nation can be built across fields of social difference through channels of affective identification and empathy’.[45] In reporting in the subjunctive mode, the media produced a collective identity of Australia as a ‘good’ society that valued life, youth, health, and the possibility of rehabilitation, and invited Australians to imagine themselves as part of this community.[46] Photographs of Van Nguyen as an ordinary Australian child connote that, despite being born to a recent Vietnamese migrant, he is just like the rest of 'us'. He was a child once, who has a brother and a mother, who went to a primary school in Melbourne, whose teachers remembered him, who has friends and who did ordinary things like go to the beach. Family photographs enabled ‘us’ to identify with him, thereby allowing ‘Australia’ to congratulate itself on its multicultural diversity and tolerance. One journalist, for instance, declared that ‘our’ support for Van Nguyen and his family showed that Australia was not a racist country, as many in Southeast Asia believed. These comments are based on the assumption that ‘we’ are predominantly Anglo-Australian, rather than Asian Australian — so at the very moment of celebrating diversity, the media was also producing ‘Anglo-Australian’ as the norm. Moreover, they constructed Singapore as brutal, ‘barbaric’ and ‘undemocratic’, reinforcing stereotypes of Asia and producing Australia as ‘non-Asian’ in its core values. While images of Van Nguyen as a Vietnamese who belonged enabled Australians to feel good about Australian inclusiveness, they required forgetting the demonising of ‘boatpeople’ in the media and in government policy, and the government’s controversial refugee-detention policy, which undermines the life, health and youth of refugees.
As ‘ritual’, newspapers were effective. Through their framing of the case, they invoked and mobilised collective sentiments about the value of Van Nguyen’s life, and ‘energised partial social solidarities’ about the moral wrong of the death penalty in his case. They enabled those who opposed the execution to demonstrate shared sentiments by participating in ritualised forms of protest and support, such as the candlelight vigils that were held around Australia, and the exhibition of protest letters written on coloured hands and displayed at the State Library of Victoria.[47] But there are issues stemming from the media’s use of a sentimental aesthetic that should concern us. By using images of the suffering mother, the media shifted the focus from the direct victim of the death penalty, the violation of his human rights, and the physical violence that would be done to him, to the indirect ‘victims’ (his mother, brother and friends) and the psychological impact the execution would have on them. These images of mother and son functioned as a ‘screen memory’, to distract our attention from the horror and brutality of the death penalty.[48] Moreover, a sentimental aesthetic is based on exceptionalism — the life of Van Nguyen is valuable because he is a beloved son and brother, and a valued member of a community. An aesthetic of sentimentality works only in cases where the convicted criminal can be represented sympathetically — as a ‘good son’, as having regretted his crime, as being rehabilitated — and thus only offers empathy to the selected few.
Perhaps most disturbingly, public reaction to the media coverage indicates that a death-penalty case is more likely to receive at least momentary attention when it is framed in terms of ‘painful feeling’ rather than through the political discourse of justice and human rights. As Berlant observes, those on all sides of politics, despite their differences, demonstrate a ‘sanctifying respect for sentiment’.[49] This respect for sentiment was manifested in newspaper reports about the emotional responses of political leaders to Nguyen’s execution. Prime Minister John Howard and government ministers including Alexander Downer and Attorney General Philip Ruddock not only expressed their opposition to the execution, but their feelings for Nguyen and his family. In a representative statement, Labor Opposition leader Kim Beazley was quoted as saying: ‘I’m very sad for him, I’m very sad for his family, very sad for all of us.’[50] The case enabled Ruddock, a defender of contested policies such as detaining asylum seekers, to show a humane face to the public. As Berlant suggests, demonstration of ‘feeling’ by politicians indicates that questions of justice and human rights ‘are now adjudicated in the register … of sincere surplus feeling: worry about whether public figures seem “caring” subordinates analyses of their vision of injustice’.[51] ‘Sincere feeling’ was further demonstrated, in the days just prior to Van Nguyen’s execution, when public debate shifted from the death penalty to questions of empathy and proper mourning. Some Australians viewed the Prime Minister’s refusal to cancel a cricket match scheduled for the day of the execution as a failure to show proper respect for Van Nguyen’s death. Controversy erupted over whether a minute’s silence should be officially observed to mark his death, with detractors arguing that this ritual should be reserved for men who had been killed in service to the nation, and not used to glorify a convicted criminal. Debating these issues gave the public the sense that we could do something — we could properly mourn Van Nguyen, even if we could not influence Singapore’s decision.
While expressions of ‘feeling’ appear to neutralise ‘differences’ and operate as an equaliser amongst citizens, ‘sentiment’ may have a discriminatory effect. A sentimental aesthetic is linked, I suggest, to Australia’s pragmatic double standard towards capital punishment. A number of journalists and members of the public commented on Australian hypocrisy in the Van Nguyen case, pointing out that Prime Minister Howard and other Australians did not protest against the execution of Amrozi, the Indonesian mastermind of the Bali bombings in which 88 Australians were killed.[52] Howard’s unapologetically pragmatic response to these different death-penalty cases led to claims that Australians did not object to the death penalty on principle, but only when one of its own citizens was facing execution abroad.[53] We need not look to cases of unpopular foreigners, such as Amrozi, to appreciate how limited ‘sincere feeling’ is as the basis for a political strategy and pursuit of justice. The danger with a sentimental campaign is not only that it will be confused with, and substitute for, a political campaign to abolish the death penalty and other forms of state terror. Ultimately, the Van Nguyen case, as it was mediated through newspapers, functioned as a screen by enabling Australians to protest against Singapore’s cruelty and barbarism, without having to confront cruelty and barbarism within Australia.