“…Melodrama is used to make norms, facilitate transitions, establish new orders. It is in fact is a critical mode of action in sites in Asia, where the nation is constructed through conceptualizations of women, family, and socialist realist regulations about personal and sentimental expression (see Dissanayake, 1993;Chi, 2003;McHugh and Abelmann, 2005;Zwickler, 2006;Rofel, 2007;Ito, 2008). Within renovation Vietnam, melodrama offers coherence and totality to a diffuse system mediating socialist ideology, capitalist values, and state interventionism by negotiating relations between the personal and political.…”