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Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 3823), pp 467±492 October 2007. Printed in the United Kingdom. E 2007 The National University of Singapore doi:10.1017/S0022463407000227 Everywhere incense burning: Remembering ) ancestors in „oÃiMoÂ'i Vietnam

Kate Jellema

This article explores `ancestor worship' from the viewpoint of villagers in the Red River Delta, as a meaningful practice reverberating across spiritual, social and moral realms. I describe two cases of what is locally termed `remembering the moral debt to our grandparents'. The first case involves the personal interactions of an older unmarried woman with her deceased parents, while the second focuses on the re-incorporation of a prominent local lineage organisation. I then analyse how war, revolution and reform have shaped the way villagers `remember the debt' at home and in lineage halls.

`In recent years, a new phenomenon has appeared in Vietnam', reports social scientist NguyÅn Thanh HuyÁn: `everywhere incense burning on the days of festivals, death anniversaries; everywhere people building [and] looking after tombs.'1 Offering incense is often described as the one consistent and non-negotiable aspect of worship in Vietnam, the most fundamental ritual act. The phrase `with a sincere heart I offer this stick of incense' long ago became a naturalised element of religious life in Vietnam, write the Buddhist authors of DaÃng h°¡ng [Offering incense]: `Although simple, this short phrase encompasses all the cultural and ethical meanings of becoming a moral person in Vietnam.'2 Every day, the fragrant smoke wafting through temples dedicated to the likes of Buddha, the Holy Mothers ,ThaÂnh M«u), The Lady of the Treasury ,BaÁ ChuÂa Kho) and the HuÁ ng Kings indicates the breadth and reach of the religious revival occurring in „ÕiMÛi ,Renovation-era) Vietnam.3 The smoke is also thick these days

Kate Jellema is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Correspondence in connection with this paper should be addressed to: [email protected]. I am grateful to the Social Science Research Council, the Rackham School of Graduate Studies and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation for support during the dissertation research and writing process. I would also like to thank Karen Boutelle, Michael DiGregorio, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Seth Harter, Ken Maclean, Oscar Salemink, Tak Watanabe and John K. Whitmore, as well as Bruce Lockhart and two anonymous reviewers for JSEAS, for their helpful comments and suggestions regarding this article. My deepest appreciation is reserved for the villagers of „õÁnh B£ng, and especially the NguyÅnTh¡c, for their generosity and assistance. 1 NguyÅn Thanh HuyÁn, `Ancestor worship: A typical characteristic of the Vietnamese people's psychic life', Vietnamese Studies, n.s. 43, 3 ,1994): 27±53. 2 ThõÂch Thanh DuÇ,Qu£ng TuÇ and TuÇ NhaÄ, DaÃng h°¡ng: T­ptåcvaÁ nghi lÅ [Offering incense: Customs and rites] ,Hanoi: VaÆn hoa ThoÃng tin, 1995), p. 5. 3 On religious revival in „ÕiMÛi Vietnam, see for example, Modernity and re-enchantment: Religion in post-revolutionary Vietnam, ed. Philip Taylor ,Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, in press); Taylor, Goddess on the rise: Pilgrimage and popular religion in Vietnam ,Honolulu: University of Hawaii 468 KATE JELLEMA above familial altars and in lineage halls. Although much scholarly and bureaucratic effort has been expended to determine how `ancestor worship' in Vietnam should be classified ± whether as a religion, a tradition, a belief, a superstition or an ethic ± to practitioners bringing joss sticks to the altar, such distinctions are largely beside the point. In this article, I put aside taxonomic dilemmas to explore ancestor worship from the viewpoint of villagers in the Red River Delta, as a meaningful practice reverberating throughout the spiritual, social and moral realms of their lives. To illuminate life with the ancestors as experienced and understood by practitioners, I describe in detail two cases of what the Vietnamese know formally as thÝ cuÂng tÕ tieÃn, `worshipping the ancestors', or informally as nhÛ ¡noÃng baÁ, `remembering the moral debt to grandfather and grandmother'. The first case involves the personal interactions of an older unmarried woman with her deceased parents. The second focuses on the reinvention of a well-connected and well-funded lineage organisation called the NguyÅnTh¡c. I became familiar with these two cases during my dissertation fieldwork in the wealthy village of „õÁnh B£ng ,B¯c Ninh province) when I lived there for six months during 2001 with a family from the NguyÅnTh¡c lineage.4 While I lived in „õÁnh B£ng, the ancestors were a near-constant presence: part of the everyday domestic routine, a considerable household expense, the guests of honour at family gatherings, a frequent subject of conversation and stories, a vehicle for making social connections, moral exemplars for children and a focus for prayers. Villagers in „õÁnh B£ng often describe ancestor worship as a `tradition' ,truyÁn thÑng) and stress its connections to `ngaÁyx°a' ,`then', `in the past'), an undated moment in the past which stands in marked contrast to `ngaÁy nay' ,`now', `these days'). At the same time, they recognise that traditions are never complete, but must be continually renewed, even re-created, by each successive generation. Elders exhort the youth to `phaÂt huy truyÁnthÑng oÃng cha', that is to `bring the traditions of your father and grandfather into play'. In the second half of this article, after I describe ancestor worship in today's village, I will step back and put it in historical context, analysing how war, revolution and reform have shaped the way `remembering the debt' has been `brought into play' over time and across generations in „õÁnh B£ng. I have chosen these two cases, unfolding side-by-side in the same village, to suggest the range of practices enacted in the service of `remembering the debt'. The quiet devotions of a single woman in her home provide one example of the elaboration of a private religion focused on moral self-cultivation, the creation of a sense of home, and

Press, 2004); Shaun Kingsley Malarney, Culture, religion and revolution in Vietnam ,Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), pp. 189±207; John Kleinen, Facing the future, reviving the past ,Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999), pp. 161±89; and Kirsten W. Endres, `Culturalizing politics: „ÕiMÛi and the restructuring of ritual in contemporary rural Vietnam', in Vietnamese villages in transition: Background and consequences of reform politics in rural Vietnam, ed. Bernard Dahm and Vincent J. Houben ,Passau: Passau University Southeast Asian Studies Centre, 1999), pp. 197±222. 4 In this article I have assigned pseudonyms to people like Mrs Thu y and my host family whom I met in informal, private settings, while I have retained the real names of officials and lineage leaders who operate in the public sphere and spoke with me on the record. Due to their unique histories and their current prominence in the media, as well as their leaders' interest in raising their international visibility, village and lineage names have not been changed. REMEMBERING ANCESTORS IN „ Ô IMÚ I VIETNAM 469 intimate, individual transactions with the spiritual world. In contrast, the re- establishment of the NguyÅnTh¡c and other lineages exemplifies a trend whereby social organisations originating outside the government are taking an increasingly active role in public life, filling a vacuum left by decollectivisation and the emasculation of the local-level socialist infrastructure. Despite their differences, it would be a mistake to see personal devotion and lineage work as mutually exclusive practices; it was common for the same villagers to participate at one moment in private rites at their home altars and the next moment in public celebrations for the ancestors, if not within the framework of a lineage then certainly in the form of family parties to mark important death-day anniversaries. The article concludes with some reflections on how the practice of ancestor worship defies easy categorisation precisely because it is so central to so many realms of everyday experience, including both spirituality and social life, both public status and personal morality.

Ancestor worship as personal devotion Each morning a woman I will call Mrs Thu y lights three sticks of incense with a lighter until they smoke. Standing in front of the chest-high wooden bureau that serves as her ancestral altar, the sturdy grey-haired woman places the incense in a blue and white ceramic urn and artfully situates fresh fruit on a plastic plate. Once she is happy with the arrangement, she takes a step back and presses her hands together in front of her heart. She closes her eyes and lowers her head. Gently, she bows her joined hands three times in front of the altar. For several minutes, she stands with her eyes closed and her hands held in front of her heart, murmuring softly. Normally Thu y performs her daily devotions alone, without an audience, but one morning I arrive early for a visit, and she assures me she does not mind if I watch. Near the end of the ritual, her 19-year-old nephew Nam joins me, preparing a pot of tea as his aunt continues to address the altar in low tones. Later Thu y gives me synopsis of the prayers she directs to her deceased parents. She begins by telling them the current date and her name and location, from the hamlet name up to `the Socialist Republic of Vietnam'. She invites them to come home and enjoy the offerings she has brought them. She prays for the good health and safety of her living loved ones, and may end with a special request, for example that Nam might pass his exams at the College of Sports where he is a struggling first-year student. After a few moments, Thu y falls silent. She steps off to the side of the altar, where she lets her posture relax and her hands fall to her side. She waits quietly while the incense burns; during this slow, reflective time, the ancestors enjoy the offerings. Some women, like the perpetually busy and exhausted entrepreneur HoÁang, my host mother in „õÁnh B£ng, will leave the altar during this waiting period and complete a few household tasks, returning only when they know the incense will be burned out, but Thu y prefers to stay close by, in the soulful presence of her beloved parents. In the poetic words of scholar NguyÅn„aÆng Duy: `Every time incense is lit, worldly affairs are left behind; one gathers sacredness around oneself; the heart remembers profoundly; the living and dead are as if they had never been parted; the past and the present meld into one another.'5 Burning from the top down, the fragrant sticks curl in a lively dance

5 NguyÅn„aÆng Duy, VaÆn hoÂaTaÃm linh [Spiritual culture] ,Hanoi: VaÆn hoa ThoÃng tin, 2001), p. 204. 470 KATE JELLEMA until at last they crumble, scattering gray dust over the edge of the urn and onto the wooden bureau. When the smoke fades away completely, it is time. Thu y returns to her erect position in front of the altar, her feet close together, her back straight, her head lowered, her elbows lifted and her hands pressed together again, with enough pressure for the muscles in her arms to harden even as her eyes gently close and her face softens into an expression of internal peace. Thu y bows her hands slowly and deliberately three more times, then comes to stillness for a moment before opening her eyes and lowering her hands. The food presentations can now be removed from the altar and shared amongst the living. Thu y tells me that her mother liked pomelo, so she buys it whenever she can for her altar. At the same time, she admits that she and her young nephew also favour the fruit. `This grapefruit is to serve my parents [phåcvå oÃng baÁ], but it's also for us to eat', she laughs, passing sticky sections to me and Nam. Thu y was born in „õÁnh B£ng in 1941, as the storm clouds of the Second World War were gathering above Indochina. Before the revolution, her father served as a low- ranking civil servant for the French, but his modest achievements did not fully insulate his family from the tumult of the times. Their lives became increasingly precarious during the terrible famine of the mid-1940s, then were turned upside-down by the First Indochinese War ,1946±54), when French forces set up a military encampment at „õÁnh B£ng to take advantage of its strategic location near Hanoi, straddling the major north± south rail line. Soldiers flattened half the village with bulldozers and replaced the destroyed neighbourhoods with a heavily fortified garrison, forcing the local population to double up in the remaining houses. Thu y remembers how her father, having joined the anti-colonial struggle, spent his time at political meetings and strategy sessions, while she stayed closer to home and helped her mother take care of the cramped household, which over the years grew to include Thu y's three younger brothers and two younger sisters. Though she rarely saw him in those years, Thu y was devoted to her father, and fondly recalls evenings when he was home for dinner and she would prepare his favourite dishes. As the First Indochinese War gave way to the Second, Thu y completed a teachers' training course and was eventually posted to another village about 20 kilometres away from home. She fell in love with a young man at her school, and they became engaged shortly before he enlisted in the army. Tragically, he was killed within his first year of service. Saddened, but determined to advance the struggle for liberation, Thu y combined her work at the school with homefront support for the war effort, while also trying to help her mother and nurse her father, who had become seriously ill. In the evenings, she would often ride her bicycle the 20 kilometres back to „õÁnh B£ng, only to return to work the following dawn. Once a bomb from an American plane fell so close to her that she was thrown off her bicycle into a ditch, narrowly escaping mortal injury. During these years, with long hours and barely enough food to eat, she became haggard and tired. `I used to be plump and attractive, with rosy cheeks', she told me. `But then in the war I lost my beauty. I became so skinny! It was a very hard life. By the time the war was over, I was already too old.' After the war, young men were in high demand. Thu y was never courted again and never married or had any children; she split her time between the school and her natal home, continuing to take care of her widowed mother until the elderly woman died in 1993. REMEMBERING ANCESTORS IN „ Ô IMÚ I VIETNAM 471

When I met Thu y, she had entered a new and happier phase of her life, and had found many ways to compensate for her social isolation. Retired from her job at the school, she is now an active participant in village social and religious life. She helps organise special services at two local temples, she teaches exercise classes to the elderly, and once a year she takes a vacation with a group of women friends. Before her mother died, Thu y and her siblings pitched in to finance a new house for her in the village. Thu y now lives in this small, comfortable two-storey villa, alone but for the companionable presence of her parents on the altar, and now and then the more boisterous company of one of her many nieces or nephews.

`As the yang, so the yin' Vietnam has a dual kinship system. A patrilineal or `male-oriented' model coexists with a bilateral or `non-male-oriented' model in which women are accorded more social and legal respect and more decision-making power.6 Ancestor worship, especially as practised in lineage halls, has generally been associated with the male-oriented model and is often understood as the ritual reinforcement of a patriarchal, patrilineal kinship system, marking the double submission of son to father and individual male to the corporate lineage. Viewed in this light, women are incidental to the practice and participate only as ancilliaries to their husbands, or as mothers to sons.7 How then can we understand the everyday devotion to ancestors by Thu y and many women of her age, married and unmarried, across the village? For some, these displays of devotion may be little more than displays, bids for the social capital that accrues in the Red River Delta to those deemed to possess hi¿u, filial piety; but for most, ideas about filial duty are inextricably mixed with deeply held feelings of love, moral debt and a desire to maintain connections with their parents even after death.8 For Thu y, the exchange at the altar each morning continues an unequal but intimate relationship which began with her conception; from that moment, her parents began making sacrifices on her behalf, enduring the pain of pregnancy and childbirth, then undertaking the toil of disciplining and educating her. In return for the

6 Hy Van Luong, `Vietnamese kinship: Structural principles and the socialist transformation in northern Vietnam', Journal of Asian Studies, 28, 4 ,1989): 741±56; Insun Yu, `Bilateral social pattern and the status of women in traditional Vietnam', South East Asia Research, 7, 2 ,1999): 215±31; John K. Whitmore, `Social organization and Confucian thought in Vietnam', Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 15, 2 ,1984): 296±306; Ta Van Tai, `The status of women in traditional Vietnam: A comparison of the code of the Le Dynasty ,1428±1788) with the Chinese codes', Journal of Asian History, 15, 2 ,1981): 97±143; Nguyen Tu Chi, `Preliminary notes on the family of the Viet', in Sociological studies on the Vietnamese family, ed. Rita Liljestrom and Lai Tuong ,Hanoi: Social Science Publishing House, 1991), pp. 57±68. 7 Helle Rydstrom, Embodying morality: Girls' socialization in a north Vietnamese commune ,Linkoping, Sweden: Linkoping University, 1998); Phan Van Bich, The Vietnamese family in change: The case of the Red River Delta ,Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1999); Shaun K. Malarney, `Ritual and revolution in Viet Nam' ,Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1993), pp. 58±68; John Bryant, `Patrilines, patrilocality and fertility decline in Viet Nam', Asia-Pacific Population Journal, 17, 2 ,2002): 111±28. For comparative perspectives on women's psychocultural roles in contemporary societies within the `Confucian core' ,China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Singapore), see Confucianism and the family, ed. Walter H. Slote and George A. DeVos ,Albany, NY: SUNY Albany Press, 1998). 8 It should also be noted that in Vietnam maternal ancestors are often worshipped on domestic altars and as we will see with regards to the NguyÅnTh¡c, are sometimes included in official lineage histories ,Malarney, `Ritual and revolution', p. 55; Yu, `Bilateral social pattern'). 472 KATE JELLEMA unrepayable gifts of sinh thaÁnh, birth and upbringing, Thu y lives her whole life with a moral debt to her parents, a debt that binds her to them in love, gratitude and an unending obligation to pay them back, however incompletely, with her care and support through sickness, aging, death and the afterlife.9 Although both her parents are now deceased, Thu y continues to address their material needs and inform them about family and village events. In return, they offer her support, spiritual succour and companionship. Thu y brings fresh fruit and water for her deceased parents each morning, and more substantial meals on feast days. When special needs arise, she burns votive paper representations of material goods. As long-time cultural observer Toan A nh explained:

We believe that d°¡ng sao aÃmv­y [as the yang, so also the yin]: whatever the living need, the dead need the same and however the living lead their lives, the dead do the same. The dead have a `life' in the underworld, just like the life of people on earth. To put it differently, dead people also need to eat and drink, they need to spend and they need a place to live, just like living people.10 Twenty-first-century descendants provide food, water, and paper representations of clothes, jewellery, entertainment centres and mopeds to keep their ancestors comfortable in the next world. In an ethnographic study published in 1930, NguyÅn VaÆn Khoan reported that people went to great lengths to see to the material needs of their ancestors; for example, if an ancestor smoked opium, the family would send opium pipes to the afterworld.11 Although since the 1950s the government has condemned votive paper burning as meà tõÂn ,superstition), the practice is now quite common; in a small survey about the cult of ancestors conducted in Hanoi in the early 1990s, about two-thirds of the respondents admitted to burning votive papers for the dead.12 The ancestors eat the food and drink the water provided by their descendants, but their act of consumption has a magical capacity for augmentation. Food offered to the ancestors is transformed from ordinary fare into something called lÙc, a blessing or gift from the other world which carries not only nutritional value but also spiritual beneficence. When Thu y and her nephew eat food from the altar, they absorb lÙc from the dead. They incorporate the talismanic benevolence of their ancestors into their own bodies and thus carry the ancestors out from the worship service into their daily lives.

9 The idea of intergenerational moral debt has wide currency throughout the Sinic world. For a thorough discussion of the meanings and practices mobilised by moral debt in mid-century Japan, see Ruth Benedict's classic ethnography, The chrysanthemum and the sword ,Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1954). In the rural Hakka community in post-Mao China studied by Ellen Oxfeld, attention to moral debt continues to `encompass' the pursuit of social status as the main concern shaping mourning rites; Ellen Oxfeld, ```When you drink water, think of its source'': Morality, status, and reinvention in rural Chinese funerals', Journal of Asian Studies, 63, 4 ,2004): 961±90. 10 Toan A nh, Phong tåcViÇt Nam: ThÝ cuÂng tÕ tieÃn [Vietnamese customs: Worshipping ancestors], reprint edn ,Hanoi: Khoa hÍcXaÄ hÙË, 1991), pp. 19±20. Toan A nh was born in 1915 and was an avid researcher and prolific writer on matters of Vietnamese culture for several decades. 11 NguyÅnVaÆn Khoan, `Essai sur le 2Áõnh et le culte du geÂnie tuteÂlaire des villages au Tonkin', Bulletin de l'EÂcole FrancËaise d'ExtreÃme-Orient, 30, 1±2 ,1930): 107±39. 12 NguyÅnKh¯cViÇn, `About the cult of ancestors', Vietnamese Studies, n.s. 43, 3 ,1994): 7±11. REMEMBERING ANCESTORS IN „ Ô IMÚ I VIETNAM 473

Meanwhile, when the dead eat offerings from the living, they ingest some of the vitality of the visible world and bring it back to the spirit realm. Despite the centrality of material goods to the renovated rites, in 2001 villagers repeatedly told me that the actual content of the offerings did not matter much; all that was really important was a `sincere heart' and a constant attention to recognising and remembering the moral debt ,bi¿t ¡n, nhÛ ¡n) owed to ancestors. Many villagers say burning incense, th¯ph°¡ng, is the only non-negotiable aspect of `remembering the debt'. Mrs Thu y explained to me: `If you are very poor, then you can just th¯ph°¡ng. Fruit is extra. [White] rice and sticky rice are extra. Everything else is extra.' Others told me that if a family is impoverished, a cup of water and a single stick of incense would be enough to properly commemorate the dead.

Ancestral benevolence from beyond the grave When I asked Thu y to talk about the living's relationship with the dead, her first impulse was to provide a secular answer focusing on respect, a virtue much-favoured in Party treatises on ancestors, but later she introduced the potentially subversive idea of thieÃng, a word meaning `awe-inspiring' and `able to comply with prayers'.13 Thu y explained that when oÃng baÁ were alive, they were khoÃn ,wise, sensible, judicious); after they died they became thieÃng. `Alive khoÃn, dead thieÃng: the ancestors support their children, and when a need is requested in prayer, then of course oÃng baÁ will provide help and support.'14 Thu y believes the ancestors can step in to protect people at their most vulnerable moments, when they are separated from other forms of social support. During the Second Indochinese War, shortly after Thu y's father had died, one of her younger brothers joined the army and subsequently lost touch with the family. As Thu y describes that difficult time, her recently deceased father played a critical role, not only safeguarding her enlisted brother but also serving as an important messenger able to bring dispersed members of the family into contact with one another.

I called the soul of my father during the year TaÃnHãi [1971]. My brother had been in the army for a year and had not returned and hadn't sent any word at all. We began to burn with impatience after he was gone a year. A year ago he had gone into the army to fight America, and he had not returned! After a year, I was so worried, and I asked this woman to take me [to a medium]. Thu y and her mother followed directions to a `place on a mountain' where they found a medium able to channel the soul of Thu y's father. They began to ask the soul about Thu y's missing brother. Her father told them to go home and await the young

13 On the concept of `thieÃng' see NguyÅn„aÆng Duy, VaÆn hoa taÃm linh, pp. 190±5; Nola Cooke, `The myth of the restoration: Dang-Trong influences in the spiritual life of the early Nguyen Dynasty ,1802± 47)', in The last stand of Asian autonomies: Responses to modernity in the diverse states of Southeast Asia and Korea, 1750±1900, ed. Anthony Reid ,New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), pp. 275±8; and HuyÁn Giang, `ThÝ cu ng tÕ tieÃn, mÙtneÂt 2¹p trong 2ÝisÑng taÃm linh ng°ÝiViÇt' [Ancestor worship: A beautiful feature in the spiritual life of the Viet people], in Nhïng v¥n 2Á taÃmly vaÁ vaÆn hoÂahiÇn 2¡i [Issues in modern psychology and culture], ed. „·ng Ph°¡ng KiÇt ,Hanoi: VaÆn hoÂa ThoÃng tin, 2000), pp. 450±62. 14 See NguyÅnVaÆn HuyÁn, Ancient civilization of Vietnam ,Hanoi: Th¿ giÛi, 1995), pp. 60±1. 474 KATE JELLEMA soldier's return: `Go on home. Wherever my son goes, I protect him, so there's no problem. He was hit by a bomb, but it just grazed him. He is about to come home; he'll be there before the end of the month.' Their anxiety having been alleviated, mother and daughter descended the mountain, and were relieved when the young man came home as predicted. As soon as she saw him, Thu y asked her brother if he had been injured.

He said: `Yes, I was hit and was in the hospital for three days. A cluster bomb entered my leg right here, and I still have a lot of shrapnel in my leg.' He said that. He said that! He didn't say that his leg was [seriously] wounded. He just said that he was hit but it only grazed him, there's no problem. He said that. Her story finished, Thu y gave me a penetrating gaze. Referring to the communique from her deceased father, she asked me rhetorically: `So, was it right or not?' In reply, I repeated a line I had heard her say before: `Wherever the child goes, the parents follow.' She nodded gravely. `Yes, the ancestors always follow ,oÃng baÁ v«n 2itheo), the ancestors always protect and watch over their children. It's as if they give cover to them.' Thu y explained to me that she often talks with her parents at the grave and the altar, informing them of family events and asking for their assistance. When she wants to hear a more expansive reply from the yin world, she visits a spirit medium. For example, on the 100th day after her mother's death, Thu y visited a medium who called her mother's soul. That day, her mother entered the medium and began to speak. At first her mother proved her identity by revealing certain information that only she could know, then she told Thu y she needed warm clothes in the afterlife. `So then we had to burn a warm sweater to offer to her. We made a wool sweater out of paper. Then we did the rites¼' Thu y described throwing the paper sweater into fire of golden flames. After that, she asked her mother ,through the medium) if she needed anything else. `She [the medium] said, ``Mother already received the sweater and doesn't need anything else''.' I repeated back to Thu y: `Your mother said that she already received it.'

Yes, she didn't need anything else [Thu y confirmed]. Generally speaking, there are a lot of things ¼ some say that they are superstitious [me tin], but it turns out [these things] are right. A lot of things are right. Thu y's comments suggest that although she is aware of the government campaign against superstition, she nonetheless puts more faith in her direct experiences than in Party treatises. She heard her mother speaking through the medium, saying things only her mother would know, and these basic facts are to her correct and incontrovertible. Thu y is a good and compliant citizen with a fine revolutionary record, and yet she feels she cannot bend the facts, gathered through direct experience with the dead, to fit state doctrine. When she evaluates specific customs she knows raise Party eyebrows, such as consulting spirit mediums or burning votive papers, she privileges her own first-hand experiences over the official line, reasoning that no policy can contravene the evidence of her own eyes and ears.15 Nonetheless, she is neither anti-state nor anti-Party, or at

15 Ironically, Thu y's dependence on sensory evidence to `prove' the existence of ancestral spirits is actually in keeping with the state promotion of a scientific, materialist approach ± what Tine REMEMBERING ANCESTORS IN „ Ô IMÚ I VIETNAM 475 least not in any straightforward way. She treasures her wartime commendations from the state, keeping them with other family heirlooms in the chest beneath her ancestral altar, even while she blames the war for robbing her of a family of her own. Tellingly, as we will see below, Thu y's ultimate tribute to her parents was to build them a grave designed to evoke the mausoleum of HÓ Chõ Minh. The survey on ancestor worship conducted in the Hanoi area in the early 1990s suggests that Thu y's attitude towards the posthumous capabilities of the ancestors is not unusual. In response to a pointed question about whether ancestor worship represented an `ethic' of filial piety or a `belief' in the efficacy of the dead, all respondents said they regarded ancestor worship as a system of ethics, but two-thirds said they also believed ancestors have a supernatural capacity to impact daily life. Many informants explained their answers by recounting personal experiences, dreams or omens. Although aware that the state takes a dim view of meà tõÂn behaviour, many people ultimately put their faith in the evidence of their own direct experiences.16

The most beautiful grave in the village Thu y's private worship at home, usually out of sight and out of earshot of any living observers, highlights the sentimental and moral significance of ancestor worship and leaves little doubt that something more than grubbing for social prestige is at work in her attention to the ancestral cult. That said, even Thu y's sweet devotion to her parents has an aspect of public display to it, as one story about the family grave helps to illuminate. Several years before I came to the village, Thu y and her siblings had raised money to build a new grave for their parents. After I got to know Thu y, she asked me to visit the grave with her so that I could photograph it. We travelled by bicycle to the cemetery, a crowded and seemingly hodge-podge jumble of cement headstones at the edge of the village rice fields, arranged according to the subterranean logic of geomancy. Although many of the graves showed signs of recent embellishments, the one Thu y pointed out to me stood above all the rest as the most imposing edifice in the cemetery. The resemblance of this austere, sharp-angled black-marbled pavilion to HÓ Chõ Minh's mausoleum in Hanoi was not coincidental, Thu y told me:

It's black because that's the color of mourning. Other colors don't look beautiful, and they don't match with this structure. People praise this as beautiful, harmonious, respectful ¼ the right color. It seems suitable, whereas red would seem resplendent and is not the color of a grave. Am I right? Black means sorrow, death and grief. The grave of HÓ ChõÂ Minh is also black. Yes. So people praise this grave as beautiful.17

Gammeltoft terms an `epistemology of seeing' which `privileges the optic as the basis for reason and knowledge, considering only the materially existing and visible world ``real'''. Armed with sensory evidence including portents in the physical world, visions and voices from beyond, many villagers would take issue with the idea that ancestral acts should be classified as what Shaun Malarney labels `non- empirically verifiable'. See Tine Gammeltoft, `Abortion conventionalized, abortion ritualized: Competing perceptions of fetal life in contemporary Vietnam', paper presented to the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Chicago, 2001; and Malarney, Culture, ritual and revolution, pp. 79±107. 16 NguyÅnKh¯cViÇn, `About the cult of ancestors'. 17 Thu y's assertions are striking given that traditionally white has been the colour of mourning in Vietnam. Hue-Tam Ho Tai has developed a typology based on the public commemorations of HÓ Chõ Minh found in Hanoi's Ba „õÁnh Square. By selecting the monumental Soviet-built mausoleum as her 476 KATE JELLEMA

To prepare for the photo session, Thu y kicked off her plastic slippers and climbed up on the mausoleum. Cursing the rats that had defiled the marble roof, she dampened a cloth with water from a recycled soda bottle and polished the surface until the imposing structure glowed. Next she slashed the overgrown weeds and grass around its base. At last satisfied, she straightened her pantsuit, tucked stray hairs into her bun, stood up tall, then lit incense and bid me to take pictures as she bowed her head in prayer. As soon as the grave photographs came back from the developer, Thu y chose a laminated enlargement to hang in her living room, just to the side of the ancestral portraits of her parents. Judging from her choice to hang the photo over the altar, intended viewers include both her deceased parents and her living visitors. Each morning when her spectral parents visit the altar, through the smoke of the incense they see the picture of their lavish mausoleum and are reminded of their daughter's generous attention to their needs, which perhaps predisposes them to be forthcoming with ancestral beneficence. Living visitors also draw lessons from the photo; whenever friends or neighbours come to sit with Thu y in her parlour, she draws their attention to the photo and solicits their reactions. `Many people praise it as the most beautiful grave in the village', Thu y told me with pride. To these visitors, the elaborate grave depicted in the photo might communicate several messages at once. First, it demonstrates Thu y's exemplary fulfilment of her filial duties, in turn signalling her responsible nature and virtuous character. Second, since the grave clearly represented a significant cash outlay, it suggests her economic success, while the contrast between the lavish new grave she built for her parents ,depicted in the photo) and the relatively modest new house she lives in ,containing the photo) speaks favourably once again of her selfless and filial nature. Third, given that Thu y herself lives on a small government pension and a few sideline jobs, the grandiosity of the grave proves to knowledgeable viewers her involvement in a larger social network, a generous and attentive family which must have pooled its resources to undertake the commemorative project depicted in the photo. This information helps mitigate the stigma attached to Thu y as a childless old maid assumed to be structurally lonely and isolated.18 Finally, given that the very economic security required to build such a fine grave to her parents suggests that she must have a good relationship with benevolent ancestral spirits, the mausoleum stands as a monument to the mutually beneficial and loving exchange which sustains both Thu y and her deceased parents. Concerns with status thus mingle with concerns about filial indebtedness, as they must in a village society where the local moral economy rewards virtue with increased prestige and where heightened status brings both increased ritual obligations and elevated expectations of moral rectitude. symbolic touchstone, Thu y evokes not the warm-hearted familial `Uncle HÓ' but rather `Chairman HÓ Chõ Minh', the national leader and international Communist statesman. See Hue-Tam Ho Tai, `Monumental ambiguity: The state commemoration of Ho Chi Minh', in Essays into Vietnamese pasts, ed. K.W. Taylor and John K. Whitmore ,Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1995), pp. 272±88. 18 In a recent survey, 86 per cent of Vietnamese respondents said a woman needs to have children to fulfil her role; Russell J. Dalton et al., `Social relations and social capital in Vietnam: The 2001 world values survey' ,Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 2005, published online at www. worldvaluessurvey.org/upload/104_social_relations_vietnam.pdf). REMEMBERING ANCESTORS IN „ Ô IMÚ I VIETNAM 477

Renovating the dead In unexpected ways, the magnificent new tomb points to a certain moral anxiety about Thu y's family's increased wealth, even as it seeks to put their prosperity on display. Her parents lived much of their adult lives in times of poverty and war, and in particular, her father, who died young, left this earth without experiencing any relief from the deprivations of the revolutionary era. Now she and her siblings live in relative comfort, Thu y in a new house, with plenty of food to eat, nice clothes and annual vacations. Thu y, in common with all who survived the Revolution and its grim aftermath to see the relative ease of the Renovation era, adds to her ordinary filial debt an additional historic burden, the burden of a generation whose peaceful and prosperous times were built on the blood and tears of their parents. She seeks to address this generational imbalance and correct for her parents' hardships during their lives by elevating their lifestyle after death, making sure that their material standing keeps pace with her own, or even exceeds it. Two days after our trip to the cemetery, I sat with Thu y in her meticulously clean parlour to interview her about ancestral practices in the village. Thu y supplements her small pension by doing piecework for a local cigarette manufacturer. On top of her polished tile floor, she had laid out a clean mat for us to sit on, and on top of the mat, she had set a basket heaped full of discarded cigarette butts. As we talked, Thu y worked methodically through the basket, extracting the filters for reuse. When I finished my planned list of questions, I asked Thu y if there was anything else she thought I should know about Vietnamese graves. `It's each according to his ability', she began, slicing through cigarette stubs:

If you're rich, then make [your parents' grave] beautiful and big. If you're poor, make it small. If there are many children who can contribute a lot, then make it big. If there are few children who can only contribute a little, make it small. That's it. There are no hard and fast rules. If you're poor and you build a very simple grave, would people accuse you of being unfilial ,b¥thi¿u)? I asked. No, that's not being b¥thi¿u. That is due to your circumstances, due to your situation ± it's not about the heart, so it can't be called b¥thi¿u. For example, if a man has plenty to eat and drink and the means to live comfortably but the grave of his father or his mother is really miserable, then people would call him b¥thi¿u. But even today there are people living on the edge who don't have enough to eat, and if they build a miserable grave, or even if they can't build [a cement one] yet and just make an earthen mound, no one dares to ridicule them. It's a question of economic means. Despite Thu y's putative focus here on those too poor to build a nice grave, it is clear that she also has moral concerns about those who have done well for themselves, `who have the means to live comfortably' but let their ancestors languish in poverty. The grave is the house for the dead, she told me on another occasion, and it would be immoral to build yourself a nice new house before you had first built a better post- mortem abode for your ancestors. The polished mausoleum in the village cemetery, reminiscent not only of HÓ Chõ Minh's final resting place but also the pillared estates of the nouveaux riches, elevates her parents' posthumous social standing and thereby restores a sense of intergenerational balance in her moral world. 478 KATE JELLEMA

To aid with the redressing of generational disparities in wealth and class, the computer manipulation of ancestral portraits is growing in popularity. The new technology allows descendants to grant the dead an upward economic trajectory impossible during their lifetimes. Ragged peasants from hard-scrabble backgrounds are outfitted after death in the sumptuous costumes of the old feudal mandarinate. To achieve this retroactive class advancement, a photographic likeness of the deceased's face and hands are digitally retrofitted into stock images evocative of imperial and colonial privilege, like that of a self-confident scholar regally presiding over an elegant writing desk, an ample older woman swathed in voluminous silk and seated in a carved wooden throne, or a lithe younger woman in a tightly fitted ao daÁi peering out over a white balcony towards a distant tea plantation. Thu y's altar features two portraits. On the left side her mother is in full colour, photographed shortly before her death. On the right, in a grainy black and white shot, her father stands alone, proud and elegant in the black silk tunic favoured by pre- revolutionary mandarins and village dignitaries. Once when I was visiting, Thu y pulled the prototype for her father's ancestral portrait out of the bureau beneath the altar. I was surprised to discover that it bore little resemblance to the photo on her wall. In the original, a small black and white snapshot, the family posed as a group. `Mother, father and sister Thu y, 1951', one of Thu y's siblings had noted on the back. Her father, standing slightly behind the rest, wears not silken robes but rather a simple peasant shirt of a coarse, heavy material. Thu y explained that she had hired a computer technician in Hanoi to create the new altar image for her, cropping her father's face from the family snapshot and superimposing it over a stock image of a scholar. In death, then, Thu y has created for her father the career she felt he deserved to have in life.

Ancestor worship as civic engagement On the twentieth day of the third lunar month in 2001, just a few lanes over from Thu y's house, another retired schoolteacher addresses his ancestors. Dressed in the same rumpled grey tweed jacket he favoured in his math classroom, NguyÅnTh¡c Sung kneels and prays on a woven mat in front of an altar. His kinsmen crowd in around the edges of the mat; they press against one another, sleeve to sleeve, in reverent silence under the small tile-roofed temple, curious about the unfamiliar rites and eager to make their own prayers. Lunar 20/3 marks the death anniversary of the NguyÅnTh¡c's apical ancestor and as such is the largest event of the year for the newly restored lineage, attracting more than 200 guests in 2001. As the oldest living male of the most senior branch of the ancient family, Sung serves as tr°ßng hÍ, lineage head, a position he will hold until his death, when he will be succeeded by his eldest son.19 After Sung completes his opening sacrament, three men in embroidered ceremonial robes step forward onto the central mat. Despite their ritually assertive garb, the men seem shy and uncertain of their roles. One clutches a piece of lined

19 One of several lineages in the village, the NguyÅnTh¡cof„õÁnh B£ng count approximately 1,000 members, or around one-tenth of the total village population. For a detailed account of the ideal type lineage organisation in pre-revolutionary Vietnam, including explanations of the leadership structure, see NguyÅnVaÆn HuyÁn, Ancient civilization, pp. 20±6. REMEMBERING ANCESTORS IN „ Ô IMÚ I VIETNAM 479 paper, torn from a school notebook, and mumbles the words of the ballpoint pen script. In between ceremonial steps, the men consult with one another, and occasionally glance over to Sung, now on the sidelines, for approval. Once there is a misstep, and an older man from the crowd calls out, `No!' A hurried consultation resolves the issue and the formal rites proceed to their conclusion. As soon as the robed trio finish, the formal rites end and the mood lightens. Outside in the courtyard, a crowd gathers around a slight man in a windbreaker, who holds in his hands a bound copy of the newly translated and computer-printed family history, the gia ph£. Originally written in Chinese characters, the first version of the NguyÅnTh¡c gia ph£ dates to 1733. It has been updated periodically, including twentieth-century additions in 1905, 1933 and 1998. In 1999 it was translated into vernacular Vietnamese at the HaÂn-NoÃm Institute in Hanoi. Once a sacred heirloom written in an obscure language and protected in a lacquered box on the sacred altar of the lineage temple, the gia ph£ now moves in more mundane circles, mass-produced by digital reproduction in everyday Vietnamese script, bound in plastic, and passed amongst an enthusiastic lay readership.20 Eventually the worshippers relocate to a relative's house a couple of kilometres away for a feast. The banquet doubles as a business meeting; once the guests have been seated, the meat butchered and distributed according to strict rules of seniority and the local rice wine poured, Mr Sung takes the microphone and provides some welcoming remarks, addressing first the ancestors, then the local earth god, then his living kinsmen. Next he introduces the three men featured in the morning's ceremony, now dressed in everyday clothes, explaining that they are a delegation from NghÇ An province, some five hours away, and are today requesting formal admittance into the lineage. It turns out that in the 1750s, shortly after the first draft of the family gia ph£ was written, one member of the Th¡c lineage won a position as a military mandarin in the royal guard and was posted to the village of S¡nLaÃm in NghÇ An.21 As explained by a member of the visiting delegation, the mandarin married a local woman and they remained in NghÇ An, as did their descendants, most of them poor but honest peasants. Eventually they lost their connections to „õÁnh B£ng. Not until the „ÕiMÛi period did the NguyÅnTh¡cofS¡nLaÃm learn that they had distant cousins in B¯c Ninh. Mr NgaÁ from NghÇ An told the assembled guests:

For countless generations, the NguyÅnTh¡cofS¡nLaÃm went about their business, observing the family rites and ancestral customs, believing that there were only the NguyÅnTh¡cinS¡nLaÃm. Only with the development of mass media and modern transportation did the NguyÅnTh¡cofS¡nLaÃm learn that there is still a NguyÅnTh¡c line in „õÁnh B£ng ± the original line, bigger than our line.

20 On the gia ph£ as treasured and protected heirloom, see Nguyen Trieu Dan, A Vietnamese family chronicle: Twelve generations on the banks of the Hat River ,Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 1991). There is now a booming trade in how-to books to help families write or recreate their gia ph£; see, for example, Ph¡mCoÃnS¡n and Tr°¡ng SõÄ ThaÆng, Gia ph£ [Family annals] ,Hanoi: VaÆn hoÂaDaÃntÙc, 1999). 21 All male members of this lineage have the family name NguyÅn and the `middle name' Th¡c. They are thus referred to as either the `NguyÅnTh¡c' or `Th¡c' lineage. 480 KATE JELLEMA

In 1990, a small delegation from S¡nLaÃm travelled to „õÁnh B£ng and re- established relations. Connections grew throughout the 1990s. In 1997, Th¡c representing many different branches gathered in Hanoi for a meeting, and in 1999, a delegation from „õÁnh B£ng travelled to S¡nLaÃm. At last, on lunar 20/3 in 2001, elders from three of the four branches of the S¡nLaÃm NguyÅnTh¡c met with lineage elders in „õÁnh B£ng to officially participate in the solemn remembrance of their shared apical ancestor. `Finally today', NgaÁ tells the guests, `we have the chance to visit and make lineage relations ever closer. We say, ``listening one hundred times is not the same as seeing just once'', and indeed the chance to visit in person and exchange ideas within our NguyÅnTh¡c lineage is truly great.' He adds his hope that future generations in both places will work together to `bring into play' the traditions of their forefathers. To close the annual meeting, the delegation from NghÇ An contributes a new poem inspired by the day's rituals: `returning here to search for the origins of our lineage, with sincere hearts we light incense and approach the altar of our ancestors¼'

Thac daughters and brides AccordingÇ to the 1733 version of the NguyÅnTh¡c gia ph£, the founding ancestor of the lineage, remembered on lunar 20/3 each year, was an honest, upright and compassionate man named NguyÅnTh¡cBaÂc. Only two additional facts are recorded about this man: first, during the Leà dynasty ,1428±1788) he encountered a famous geomancer named T£ Ao who helped him choose an auspicious building site then made a favourable prophecy about his family; and second, he sired two children, a girl called NgÍc Long and a boy called CaÆn. The girl became a concubine and the boy a duke in the service of TrËnh KiÃm ± an influential official whose descendants would become de facto rulers of northern Vietnam under the Leà emperors ± in the mid- sixteenth century. From then on, the gia ph£ records, the lineage developed according to the geomancer's predictions: `After that, the results matched the prophecy. Many people from many generations in our lineage, one after one another, studied, passed the civil service exams, and became mandarins. They were promoted and the court awarded them titles and honours. Generation after generation achieved high positions.' Anointing NguyÅnTh¡cBaÂc the apical ancestor avoids offending anyone's sense of patrilineal propriety, but in the twenty-first century reconstruction of the lineage, he remains a shadowy figure. In contrast, his daughter, Princess NguyÅnThË NgÍc Long, features as a central protagonist in the family imagination. In the first and most colourful story lineage head NguyÅnTh¡c Sung told me about his family, ancestor BaÂc serves mainly as a prop to make a double introduction: first to the prophecy, read from the hidden geomantic properties of the land, and second to Princess NgÍc Long. In Sung's narrative, young NgÍc Long's marriage to the eminent Lord TrËnh KiÃmisa partial fulfilment of the geomancer's prediction. The union is indeed remarkable, given that when they met, NgÍc Long was a humble village girl cutting weeds with a scythe and TrËnh KiÃm was the most powerful lord in the Red River Delta, travelling across the country with his entourage. As Sung tells the story:

In 1559, when TrËnh KiÃm was passing through this area, he saw a girl cutting grass. She said something, a line of poetry: `In my hand I hold an immense half circle. One REMEMBERING ANCESTORS IN „ Ô IMÚ I VIETNAM 481

hundred blades of grass surrender to my hands.' Lord TrËnh KiÃm saw something very strange: wherever the maiden went, a mass of clouds, with a radius of about one meter, followed her above her head. Seeing such a strange thing, the TrËnh Lord called the girl to him. He discovered that her face was extraordinarily beautiful and her repartee clever, so the TrËnh Lord bade her climb up into his carriage and he took her to the ancient capital ThaÆng Long [to be a concubine].22 Sung attributes to the princess not only a fetching beauty, poetic abilities and conversational fluency, but also a mysterious aura hinting at supernatural abilities. In this colourful version of the lineage's foundational story, Sung has NgÍc Long's brother CaÆn enter the royal court on his sister's coattails:

Meanwhile the girl's younger brother was out ploughing his field. He heard that a group of mandarins had kidnapped his sister! Immediately he shouldered his plough and raced after them. Lord TrËnh KiÃm thus saw that this man was extremely brave, and made him a military officer. Consequently, the man became a very talented general and was awarded the title of `duke' ,qu­ncoÃng). He became a second-ranked mandarin in the court. You could say my lineage continued from there¼ One evening in the middle of the village festival, the day before the annual lineage meeting on 20/3, my host mother HoaÁng grabbed my hand and pulled me out the door. `We're going to the Princess Temple!' When I asked why, she said only, `it's a gathering of Th¡c wives and daughters!' and handed me a plastic bag full of imported red grapes. The night was cool and damp, and women wrapped in scarves and dark blazers filled the temple courtyard. Inside, a few older men from the lineage sat at the only table, drinking tea and recording monetary donations in a ledger book. Warm candlelight bathed the three altars, each piled high with colourful offerings of fruit, cones of rice wrapped in red paper, and pretty green and gold boxes of coconut cookies, the offerings arrayed around ancestral tablets and a lacquered statue of Princess NgÍc Long. As I watched, HoaÁng arranged her grapes on the altar and lit incense for the ancestors. We went outside to the courtyard and sat on woven mats with dozens of women and a smattering of men, joining in their gossip and laughter until the incense burned out and the offerings were ready to reclaim as lÙc. Over the course of the evening, people offered different explanations for the event which had gathered them together. Some called it a ngaÁygi×, a death anniversary, and others identified it as a phång caÂo, the ritual equivalent of a press release designed to alert the spirits of the death anniversary to take place the following day. Everyone

22 Originating with an account in the gia ph£, the story of NgÍc Long and TrËnh KiÃm cannot be corroborated by less partial historical sources, and several details call into question its veracity. Although TrËnh KiÃm did travel north of Hanoi in 1559±60, his base was then in Thanh HoÂa province, not ThaÆng Long as Sung implies. ThaÆng Long was at that time in the hands of the M¡c, a rival family. ,Thanks to Bruce Lockhart for calling these facts to my attention.) TrËnh KiÃm's own life story resonates in fascinating ways with the tale of CaÆn and NgÍc Long: like NgÍc Long, KiÃm married `up' from a peasant background into a powerful political family; he initially impressed his patron with his bravery; his wife's name was NgÍcB£o, very similar to `NgÍc Long' and also to the names of NguyÅnTh¡cCaÆn's two wives, NgÍcMÇnh and NgÍcTh°ãng; and as in the NguyÅnTh¡c tale, both a famous geomancer ,NguyÅnBÉnh KhieÃm) and a brother-sister pair ,NgÍcB£o and her brother NguyÅn HoaÁng) feature prominently in TrËnh KiÃm's life story. 482 KATE JELLEMA agreed that whatever their official designation, the evening rites were a tribute to the women of the lineage. `Tonight, the daughters and brides of the Th¡c lineage make offerings here', one male elder told me. When I asked why, he said `Because Th¡c daughters and wives have a lot of merit with the lineage.' Sung used an anachronistic application of socialist rhetoric on gender to explain the tradition: `The ancestors had the idea that men and women must be equal to one another.' The story of Princess NgÍc Long circulated that night. She was given credit for the successful career of her brother, which in turn gave rise to a long line of successful Th¡c mandarins. `NguyÅnThË NgÍc Long, the princess, brought her younger brother in [to the court] so he could rise up and become a duke. Even though he was talented and lucky, if there had been no princess, then of course he would not have been able to take the title of duke', Sung reasoned. Women of the lineage continue to generate merit, he said, most recently due to their business acumen as evidenced by their fancy homes.

The daughters and daughters-in-law of the Th¡c family have advanced the good reputation of the lineage. That's still the case today. Up till now, you'd have to say that the girls of the Th¡c lineage are talented and skillful. Many of the multistoried villas around here are owned by Th¡c women. According to another tale shared that evening, NgÍc Long built the very temple where we now sat, known as the `Princess Temple', to worship her parents and grandparents.

Biography of a temple One version of the history of the Th¡c lineage can be told through its buildings. The lineage came into being as an institutional presence not with the birth of the obscure NguyÅnTh¡cBaÂcin„õÁnh B£ng, but rather with his daughter's decision to return to her natal village and erect a temple to commemorate in perpetuity her parents and grandparents. Later more temples were added to the lineage's holdings, their fate closely intertwined with that of the family.23 If the best-loved `Th¡c daughter' is Princess NgÍc Long, the most treasured `Th¡c bride' is a woman named NguyÅnThË NguyeÃn, who, like the princess, made her mark on the lineage through an architectural undertaking. Her story begins with NguyÅnTh¡cL°ãng, the last of the seven generations of Th¡c men to pass the civil service exams and enter the elite ranks of the imperial Leà bureaucracy under service to the TrËnh Lords. L°ãng was the picture of success; the Th¡c gia ph£ describes him as `not only elegant and refined but also wealthy'. While serving in the province of Thanh HoÂa, mandarin L°ãng met and married a local girl named NguyÅnThË NguyeÃn. According to Sung, the blushing bride willingly gave up her natal home and her property to follow her husband wherever his career took him. However, she would not let L°ãng forget his own home village. Sung explained, `She had a wish: to return with her husband to his native place in order to build a village community hall.' To get this visionary project off the ground, she donated dozens of massive columns made of lim,

23 On the intimate relationship between lineages and their buildings, see Emily Martin Ahern, The cult of the dead in a Chinese village ,Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973), ch. 6. REMEMBERING ANCESTORS IN „ Ô IMÚ I VIETNAM 483 an extraordinarily hard and durable ironwood. The lim columns, each six metres tall and more than half a metre in diameter, were harvested in her native Thanh HoÂa and transported, mainly upstream, by a network of rivers to „õÁnh B£ng. In difficult spots, the logs were tethered to teams of horses who dragged them upstream. Begun in 1700 and completed in 1736, the „õÁnh B£ng communal hall ,2Áõnh)isa nationally recognised masterpiece of vernacular architecture; one folk saying lists it among the top three such halls in the country. To prepare for this monumental construction project, mandarin L°ãng and his wife first commissioned a number of smaller `practice' halls, built in the same style as the planned communal hall but on a more modest scale with less decoration. These practice halls became the property of the lineage, to be used for worship, housing and storage. The grandest of the practice halls, now known as the Th¡c Lineage Temple ,të 2°Ýng hÍ Th¡c), took 14 years to build, from 1686 to 1700, and was designed to accommodate the lineage head and his family. A fine example of traditional wooden homes, the temple attracted the attention of the colonial scholars; French scholar Pierre Gourou devoted several pages in his social geography of the Red River Delta to drawings, photographs and descriptions of the hall, classifying it as the home of those with `a much higher degree of wealth' and complimenting its `simple but elegant' construction.24 Sung remembers living in the ancestral estate when he was a young boy. `The Vietnamese, like the Chinese, say that a house with four generations is very blessed. Here is such a house. My great-grandparents, my grandparents, my parents and I all stayed here, thus it was four generations together.' He remembers the central room, holding the ancestral tablets, seemed `cold and frightening' to him as a young boy, a sacred space off limits to children and non-lineage members. The estate also included a large courtyard, a water cistern and a fish pond. Beginning in 1932, his mother launched what became a very successful cloth weaving and dying operation, located in the ancestral compound. She eventually employed more than 20 workers and traded her cloth as far away as Saigon. Everything changed during the First Indochinese War, when French forces occupied „õÁnh B£ng village. French officers were garrisoned in the Th¡c lineage temple from 1949 to 1954. Sung's family fled, first to a resistance zone in ThaÂiBõÁnh province and later to Hanoi where they stayed until the Vietnamese victory. Against all odds, the Th¡c temple emerged from the war relatively unscathed, a miracle Sung attributes in part to ancestral blessings, in part to French aesthetic sensibilities:

Maybe this building has a special character, that's why the French didn't destroy it, even though they mined every other house around here. ¼ Only this building survived, and the two other Th¡c halls over there. Perhaps this was due to our great blessings, and perhaps also because the French saw the beauty of the architecture and it penetrated

24 Pierre Gourou, Les paysans du delta tonkinois: EÂtude de geÂographie humaine ,Paris: Les E ditions d'Art et d'Histoire, 1936), pp. 294±5. See also „aÁoHuÁ ng, `NhaÁ cÕ߄õÁnh B£ng' [Old houses in „õÁnh B£ng], X°avaÁ Nay, 95 ,2001): 16±18. The folk saying is `Thé nh¥tlaÁ 2õÁnh „oÃng Khang, thé nhõÁ „õÁnh B£ng, v» vang 2õÁnh DiÁm' [First is „oÃng Khang's 2Áõnh, next is „õÁnh B£ng's and the glorious 2Áõnh of DiÁm]. The note next to this saying on a placard in „õÁnh B£ng's communal hall does not fail to mention that the first of these three, in the village of „oÃng Khang, has been destroyed, leaving little doubt as to which is the most notable extant 2Áõnh in the country. 484 KATE JELLEMA

their soul, so they didn't dare destroy it. When we returned to the house to resume its care, all the rooms were preserved in their original state. Only a few roof tiles were missing. The lineage fared less well under the postcolonial regime. During the land reform of 1957±8, family and lineage fell on hard times, and the Th¡c lost some of their holdings.25 Sung's parents, though once quite well-off, managed to avoid classification as `landlords' because their personal wealth came from business, not from land. They continued to live in the lineage hall, but for some time had to share the space with a new weaving factory set up by outsiders, until at last Sung's great-grandfather got fed up with the constant noise of the enterprise and cried, `I revoke my permission for you men to work here! Go somewhere else!' Whether out of respect for the lineage and his great-grandfather's age or for other reasons enmeshed in local politics, Sung recalls the factory immediately packed up and moved out. The lineage ceased operating as a collective entity from 1949 until its restoration in the 1990s. Rites were observed sporadically and in greatly simplified form, often by no one other than the lineage head. During the First Indochinese War, the French occasionally allowed Sung's father to slip back into the village to conduct rushed, bare- bones prayers at the ancestral altars on major death anniversaries; Sung at one point hinted that this privilege was extended to his father because his mother used her trading networks to procure special goods coveted by the colonial soldiers. After the French left, the Revolution and the ensuing war demanded a single-minded devotion to liberation and the creation of a new society; it did not allow resources, time or energy to be sapped by extraneous causes like the lineage. `From 1954 until peace was re-established, you had to contribute absolutely everything to the cooperative', Sung explained. „ÕiMÛi, the wide-ranging reform movement initiated in the late 1980s, has meant not only the reinvention of lineage rites and customs, but also, simultaneously, a revitalisation of temples. In the mid-1990s, shortly after normalising diplomatic relations with Vietnam, Japan began investing in Vietnamese cultural preservation. Japanese researchers from Showa Women's University in Tokyo surveyed 676 traditional houses in B¯c Ninh province and ultimately singled out the Th¡c lineage hall as the first phase of a US$1 million project, funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency, to restore B¯c Ninh's most valuable traditional dwellings.26 The Th¡c temple was selected not only for its historical value and fine workmanship, but also because Gourou's meticulous drawings from the 1930s facilitated an accurate restoration to the pre-revolutionary form. Working with the Th¡c leadership, the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture and Information's Department of Conservation and Museology, and Vietnamese craftspeople, and relying heavily on colonial documenta- tion, the Japanese-led team completed the renovation of the hall in mid-2001. This

25 On the impact of the land reform on lineage holdings, see Nguyen Tuan Anh, `Social capital and kinship relation in a Northern Vietnamese village since economic reform' ,unpublished paper); Nguyen Trieu Dan, Vietnamese family chronicle; and Kleinen, Facing the future. 26 Viet Ha, `Japanese project to save Vietnam's architectural past', Vietnam News, 3 Apr. 2001; `Japan steps in to help preserve traditional wooden houses', Vietnam News, 1 June 2000. REMEMBERING ANCESTORS IN „ Ô IMÚ I VIETNAM 485 work led in turn to the inclusion of the Th¡c lineage temple in a group of six restored Vietnamese `folk houses' recognised in 2004 with an `Award of Merit' from UNESCO's Asia Pacific Heritage programme.27 International involvement has meant recognition, money and scientific expertise for the Th¡c, but also a certain loss of autonomy. During the preservation process, decisions were made through a consultative process involving many parties. One of the conditions of the renovation project was that the Th¡c hall would serve as a teaching tool to help other Vietnamese communities learn how best to preserve their own architectural treasures, and except during the 20/3 rites, study groups, foreign researchers and tourists generally outnumber lineage members visiting the hall. Laminated photocopies of treasured Th¡c royal certificates now hang on the wall; the originals are locked away to protect them from theft and vandalism. Concerned that the hall might slip out of their hands into the public domain, in May 2001, shortly before the completion of the restoration project, the leaders of the lineage drafted an official document regarding `The delegation of power for the management of the NguyÅnTh¡c Lineage Hall', addressed to the national and provincial offices of the Ministry of Culture and Information. In this document, Sung and the five other Th¡c branch leaders asked that `the keys of the temple be returned' to the lineage, so that in accordance with the traditional rules of the lineage and with ancestral wishes, the lineage might take charge of the `care and protection' of the hall. In the last line, the authors implore: `Don't allow just anyone to live [in the hall] or use it for private purposes!' Several months later, Sung bristled when I suggested that the Antiquities Management Board of „õÁnh B£ng village might have some oversight responsibilities with regard to the hall. `No, in the case of managing other antiquities like [nearby] „oà temple or the 2Áõnh, the village does some of the work, but in the case of the lineage halls ± that's the lineage's responsibility'. `Only the lineage's?' I asked for clarification. `Only the lineage's, not the village's. Not the village's. Here, the lineage decides everything.' Time will tell whether Sung is right.

Placing renovation in historical context In tandem with the sweeping political, economic, legal and diplomatic reforms of the „ÕiMÛi era, and often with explicit encouragement from the government, Vietnamese people are bringing back into public space a wide range of practices with religious elements, from seances to village festivals. While social scientists are quick to concede that these revitalised customs have been changed to fit „ÕiMÛi realities, few have explored the ways that they might also be shaped by their practitioners' experiences during the period from 1945 to the onset of Renovation in the mid-1980s. We have tended to treat the revolutionary era as an absence rather than a presence in the field of religion, a period of suspended animation. Although many of the practices now filling the air with incense smoke have strong connections to pre-revolutionary cultural life, it would be a mistake to see them simply as re-awakenings of untouched or pure traditions that spent the high socialist era unchanged, in hibernation, awaiting

27 UNESCO Bangkok Office, `Vietnamese traditional folk houses win award of merit in the 2004 UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Awards', UNESCO News, 24 Jan. 2005. 486 KATE JELLEMA a more hospitable moment in which to re-emerge. Neither are they purely new inventions born sui generis out of the exigencies of the present moment. As I will show with reference to family and lineage ancestor worship in „õÁnh B£ng, the meanings and practices of rituals now in play in Vietnam were shaped in important but subtle ways by socialism and its collapse, and their development continues in new directions in response to market reforms. Both scholars and the state tend to view ancestor worship as a `national tradition', meaning that it has a long history in Vietnam and that it is practised almost universally across the country.28 Despite its avowedly atheistic stance, the socialist government in Hanoi has always been tolerant of ancestor worship and in recent years has even encouraged it as a salutary tradition of the people.29 However, during the revolution, ancestor worship, along with other forms of religion in northern Vietnam, became increasingly private.30 The atomisation of religious practice happened for three main reasons. First, hoping to redeploy all available human and material resources for national liberation and socialist construction, the government discouraged costly religious and familial ceremonies, while the population's grinding poverty undermined the material foundation of public rituals. Second, as mentioned above, the Party embraced a scientific secularism and launched a campaign to eliminate `superstitious' practices, sending customs like spirit mediumship and votive paper burning into back alleys and secret rooms. Third, families and communities were scattered by war, poverty and political strife, making it increasingly difficult to convene large groups of celebrants in one place. Due to all these factors, during the revolutionary period, quiet prayers uttered alone in stolen moments, often in hidden-away corners with the simplest of props, became a common form of religious expression for men and women alike. Given the inward trend of religion during those decades, Thu y's quiet daily vigils at home are as much a continuation of wartime practices as they are a „ÕiMÛi innovation. If the Th¡c are any indication, the impact of the Revolution on lineage organisations was complicated. The First Indochinese War filled the Th¡c hall with foreign soldiers and forced the absent lineage head to strike covert bargains with the enemy in order to maintain the barest semblance of the annual ritual cycle. After the

28 HuyÁn Giang, `ThÝ cu ng tÕ tieÃn'; NguyÅnKh¯cViÇn, `About the cult of ancestors'; Mai Huy Bich, `A distinctive feature in the meaning of reproduction in Confucian family tradition in the Red River Delta', in Sociological studies on the Vietnamese family, ed. Liljestrom and Tuong Lai; James W. Trullinger, Village at war: An account of conflict in Vietnam ,Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 6±8; NguyÅnVaÆn HuyÁn, Ancient civilization of Vietnam, pp. 51±3; Ann Helen Unger and Walter Unger, Pagodas, gods and spirits of Vietnam ,New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997), p. 15; and NguyÅn„aÆng Duy, VaÆn hoÂaTaÃm linh, p. 186. 29 Kate Jellema, `Returning home: Ancestor veneration and the nationalism of „ÕiMÛi Vietnam', in Modernity and re±enchantment. 30 Anthropologist Yunxiang Yan makes a similar case about the privatisation of the family during the Mao era in China, noting that under collectivisation many of the public functions of the family were appropriated by the state, resulting in the privatisation of the familial realm. However, in contrast to the revitalisation of the lineage as a major public player in Vietnam, in post-collectivised China the familial mode of social organisation has not been restored and the family has continued as a private realm; Yunxiang Yan, Private life under socialism: Love, intimacy, and family change in a Chinese village, 1949± 1999 ,Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). REMEMBERING ANCESTORS IN „ Ô IMÚ I VIETNAM 487 anti-colonial war, the government redistributed lineage property, requisitioned its wealth and overtook its civic functions. At that time, the Th¡c corporation dissolved into its constituent parts. Members of the once rich and powerful lineage were reborn as undifferentiated peasants and workers, then reabsorbed into agricultural cooperatives, the army, the Communist Party and Party-backed mass organisations. Even in the face of revolutionary ambitions to completely overturn power structures, research in China and Vietnam shows that former leaders have an uncanny ability to eventually re-emerge on top.31 Individual Th¡c found their way back into leadership positions in the commune under socialism. Most significantly, a charming and capable NguyÅnTh¡c named Vinh returned from the American War and rose up through the ranks to become the head of the agricultural cooperative, at the pinnacle of the local redistributive system. Vinh's loyal public service at the height of the collectivised era allowed him to step into the highest position in the commune after Renovation, where he spearheaded efforts to transform „õÁnh B£ng into a model of post-collective entrepreneurial success. When the government relaxed its restrictions on religious activities in the 1990s and a few lineages around the country began to reorganise, the Th¡c were particularly well-positioned to make a new beginning. They emerged from the revolutionary period with multiple advantages, including an insider serving as commune chairperson, an extant physical infrastructure and an exemplary history of public service. The fortuitous survival of the Th¡c temples may have kept the idea of the lineage alive across the decades, and even given members a sense of an ongoing flow of ancestral blessings. It also helped that the lineage was based in „õÁnh B£ng, a village that for a variety of reasons enjoys excellent relations with provincial and central authorities. These same advantages attracted Japanese researchers seeking to launch a major restoration initiative, and so with Japanese funding and scientific expertise, French drawings and Vietnamese support, the lineage has entered the twenty- first century poised to become a major player in local and perhaps even extralocal civic life. While there is no space here to allow a full treatment of the historical development of spiritual practices in the reform era, the example of „õÁnh B£ng points to four ways in which recent socioeconomic developments have affected religion in general and ancestor worship in particular. First, more disposable income and increasingly relaxed social and cultural policies have created favourable conditions for religious revival. Second, as suggested by Thu y's anxiety about the disparity between the comfort of her own life now and the impecuniousness of her parents' before, the market economy brings with it a host of moral ambiguities and social tensions for which some seek relief at the altar. Third, the slow disintegration of the socialist infrastructure has led to a partial vacuum in local civic and social life, leading on the one hand to the `intensification of kinship' and a greater focus on family life as evidenced by the enthusiasm for ancestral rites and especially large death anniversary gatherings, and on

31 Jun Jing, The temple of memories: History, power, and morality in a Chinese village ,Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Gregory A. Ruf, Cadres and kin: Making a socialist village in west China, 1921± 1991 ,Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Trullinger, Village at war. 488 KATE JELLEMA the other hand to an explosion of new ,or reinvented) social clubs like the lineage.32 Finally, with modernised channels of communication and the re-acceptance of Vietnam into the international community, socio-religious networks in the „ÕiMÛi era are expanding into regional, national and even global realms, as suggested by the merger of the long-separated B¯c Ninh and NghÇ An branches of the Th¡c lineage and the coordination of the lineage with foreign experts and international funding agencies.

How the ancestors matter In Guangdong in the late 1980s, anthropologist Helen Siu found that young people who engaged in funerary rituals did so without an interest in `the supernatural' but only because they hoped it would help them get a leg up in the cut-throat world of the living. More than a decade later, Xin Liu discovered a similar disregard for the ancestors demonstrated by the mourning rites of farmers in the impoverished rural community of Zhaojiahe, Shaanxi:

There is no sense, as in the traditional ideology of kinship, that it is crucial for the living to seek the protection and blessing of the dead. What has to be done for the dead reflects only the relationships among the living themselves.33 As I will discuss in this section, the situation in modern Vietnam is more complex. The cult of ancestors has a public face and does play an important role in the relationships among the living, conveying culturally coded messages about status and merit while also providing a privileged arena for friendships and alliances. At the same time, in Vietnam the ancestors themselves continue to matter in myriad ways, not only to the practice of ancestor worship but also to everyday life. For most people in today's „õÁnh B£ng, ancestors are potent spiritual beings. Villagers like Thu y describe them as thieÃng: efficacious, able to answer prayers. They help her in myriad practical ways, from protecting her in traffic on the accident- plagued National Highway 1 to reconciling her feuding brothers, from helping her nephew pass his exams to alleviating the recurrent pain in her neck. The `practical benefits' Thu y expects as a result of her devotional practices return to her as a product of her personal relationship with her mother and father, another step in the ongoing cycle of nurture and remembrance which binds children to parents and descendants to ancestors long after biological death.34 In the uncertainty of the transitional era, when the state no longer makes any guarantees about taking care of the basic welfare of the

32 Nguyen Tuan Anh, `Social capital'; see also Daniele Belanger, `Regional differences in household structure and family formation patterns in Vietnam', Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 31, 2 ,2000): 171±89; Dalton et al., `Social relations and social capital'; and Malarney, Culture, ritual and revolution, pp. 100±2. NguyÅn Thanh HuyÁn ,`Ancestor worship') makes a similar point from the other way around, tracing the revival of ancestor worship to the `restoration of the individual' enabled by the atrophy of the state. 33 Xin Liu, In one's own shadow: An ethnographic account of the condition of post-reform rural China ,Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), p. 153; Helen Siu, `Recycling rituals: Politics and popular culture in contemporary rural China', in Unofficial China: Essays in popular culture and thought, ed. Richard Madsen, Perry Link and Paul Pickowicz ,Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), pp. 121±37. 34 Ian Reader and George Tanabe, Practically religious: Worldly benefits and the common religion of Japan ,Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998). REMEMBERING ANCESTORS IN „ Ô IMÚ I VIETNAM 489 people, the ancestors can be counted on to `cover' their descendants. Of course the other side of this story is that should they be neglected, the ancestors might lash out and cause pain.35 Properly propitiated, ancestors can help the living, but the reasons the latter take care of the former go beyond simple instrumentalism to encompass deeply held notions about moral personhood. Ritual acknowledgement of the debt owed to predecessors is essential to living as an ethical adult human being, a fundamental `principle of becoming a moral person' ,2¡oly laÁmng°Ýi). For many Vietnamese, filial piety as expressed through ancestor worship is at the heart of moral personhood and can be summarised in the proverb `when you drink from the stream, remember the source' ,uÑng n°ÛcnhÛ nguÓn). Inherent in this philosophy is the belief that no one is self-made; all have a debt of gratitude to those who came before. `If there were no ancestors, there would be no you' ,nhÝ co tieÃnco tÕ maÁ mÛico mõÁnh), one saying puts it. Ritual remembrance of the merit of your ancestors and your own existential dependence on them `expresses the Vietnamese 2¡oly laÁmng°Ýi, the philosophy of ``uÑng n°ÛcnhÛ nguÓn'',' explains one book about religious practice.36 Historically, ideas about morality were closely linked to calculations of social status in Vietnam's `prestige economy' and even in today's market economy they are hard to pull apart.37 For example, the black mausoleum constructed by Thu y's family serves as an ostentatious display of economic power, and her proud assertion that `people praise it as the most beautiful' leaves little doubt that the grave plays into the competitive social politics of the village. However, the value of an elaborate grave for the dead, as opposed to a mansion for the living, lies in its marriage of buying power and filial devotion. The grave brings enhanced social status to Thu y and her family precisely because they gave it as a gift to their deceased parents; in this guise it represents the moral application of wealth.38 The grave demonstrates not only financial success in an unfeeling market but also generosity and humility within the familial cycle of moral debt. Meanwhile, Thu y's worship both at the grave and at home furthers her own personal project of self-cultivation. Taking care of her parents in the afterlife, she seeks to become a filial daughter, and by extension a good and compassionate person, recognised as such by her own standards as well as by those of the community. Meritorious contributions for the public good mediate the relationship between morality and status in Vietnam. Bettering the community, whether the family, the lineage, the village or the nation, generates a kind of merit called `coÃng' that elevates both the public status and the moral standing of the benefactor.39 At the same time, as

35 Malarney, Culture, ritual and revolution, pp. 92±5; Charlotte Ikels, `Serving the ancestors, serving the state: Filial piety and death ritual in contemporary Guangzhou', in Filial piety: practice and discourse in contemporary East Asia, ed. Charlotte Ikels ,Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 102±4. Malarney's informants in northern Vietnam told him the ancestors are the most likely of any type of spirit to punish the living for moral transgressions. 36 ThõÂch Thanh DuÇ et al., DaÃng h°¡ng, p. 13. 37 Neil Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam ,Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 28±37. 38 On remoralising wealth in `new Asian capitalisms', see Robert Hefner, Market cultures: Society and morality in the new Asian capitalisms ,Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997). 39 Kate Jellema, `Making good on debt: The remoralisation of wealth in post-revolutionary Vietnam', Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 6, 3 ,2005): 231±48. 490 KATE JELLEMA

Emily Ahern found in her ethnography of death rituals in a Taiwanese village, these contributions can cement a giver's membership within a lineage, transforming the anonymous dead into named and commemorated ancestors.40 The proper recognition of ancestral coÃng is in fact one of the major goals of lineage ceremonies. During Th¡c gatherings, living descendants repeatedly emphasise the coÃng of specific ancestors and the lineage at large, from the coÃng of Princess NgÍc Long, credited with launching the careers of seven generations of mandarins, to more recent members of the Th¡c family who generated coÃng by serving the nation in its wars of independence. CoÃng brings glory not just to the individual involved but also to the entire community, backwards and forwards in time. According to the Th¡c gia ph£, for example, the meritorious labour of mandarin NguyÅnTh¡cL°ãng `brings honour and glory to all preceding generations of ancestors and creates blessings for all succeeding generations of descendants'. While the construction of the communal hall by L°ãng and his wife might be construed as an act of self-aggrandisement for the couple, it benefited the wider community twice over, first by giving villagers a beautiful 2Áõnh and second by bringing lasting fame and recognition to „õÁnh B£ng. A poem in Chinese characters by L°ãng remains in the family's collection: `Blessed land, great halls, nothing private' ,rendered in vernacular Vietnamese as `2¥t phuÂc nhaÁ to ch³ng rieÃng t°'). Sung interprets this to mean that the grand buildings L°ãng built, including the communal hall and the lineage temples, were gifts for the community, not for his personal use. `He didn't covet honours or privileges at all', Sung told me. `Nothing private'. Struck by this idea, Sung later pointed out that nowhere in the 2Áõnh will you find mention of L°ãng's name. `It's not like these days when people have to have their names carved into every pillar', he said with a frown, referring to the current practice of allowing temple benefactors to `sponsor' specific architectural elements.41 The hunger for named recognition amongst today's donors might be a small sign that the post-revolutionary balance is shifting towards a more self-centred era, in which merit and status accrue to individual subjects, not to collectivities. Another sign of an individualistic trend might be Sung's mention of private multi-storey homes in his list of reasons why Th¡c daughters and brides are meritorious. These mini-castles of the new middle class seem to embrace a philosophy of `Blessed land, great halls, all for me!' ± the antithesis of mandarin L°ãng's more community-minded impulses. However, Vietnamese villagers do not necessarily equate the private wealth generated in the market with `ultra-utilitarianism' or the `rise of the uncivil individual', for two reasons.42 First, the success of any individual or family can still be rhetorically absorbed into the collective fate of the lineage and the village, contributing to communal stories of blessings and achievements. Second, wealth and prestige continue to carry with them

40 Ahern, Cult of the dead. 41 There is a long history in Vietnam of inscribing the names of temple donors on honour rolls called `b±ng ghõ coÃng'. Traditionally, however, each b±ng ghõ coÃng comprised many names and was posted on a specially designated plaque which served to record contributions made to a common fund used to construct and maintain a structure belonging, effectively, to the community at large. In current practice, sometimes an individual fronts all the money for some specific part of the whole, essentially `buying' that part of the building, and in return gets his or her name carved into that pillar, gate or spirit palanquin as its private `sponsor'. 42 Yan, Private life, pp. 217±36. REMEMBERING ANCESTORS IN „ Ô IMÚ I VIETNAM 491 a strong pressure to give back as a way to `remember the debt'. One of the most successful local businesswomen recently teamed up with her Th¡c husband, the village chairman Vinh, to fund the reconstruction of a ceremonial gate for the Princess Temple in time to warmly welcome the NghÇ An contingent on their visit to „õÁnh B£ng in 2001. As this gift suggests, even in an age of mega-houses and pillar-names, individual prestige in the village cannot be divorced from meritorious contributions back to the community made in a spirit of gratitude and humility, in recognition that no matter how successful you might be, `if there were no ancestors, there would be no you'. Finally, it should be noted that quite apart from questions of supernatural efficacy or status and merit, villagers praise the social benefits of ancestor worship, speaking in glowing terms of the chances participation gives them to make connections, develop friendships, share stories and work together on projects. Here, in communities linked by name, by the gia ph£, by temples and by rituals, villagers counteract the centripetal forces of modernisation and build a renewed sense of belonging in the post-collective, post-revolutionary age. During an informal dinner that brought together a dozen NghÇ An and „õÁnh B£ng lineage mates for a home-cooked meal and local rice wine, the most common toast was to tõÁnh c£m, warm sentiments, as people laughed, gossiped and solidified new friendships.43 Even in Thu y's quiet household, daily conversations with her deceased parents widen her social circle and provide her with loving companion- ship.44 As social companions, efficacious assistants, meritorious forebearers and moral examplars, the ancestors play many significant roles in villagers' daily experiences.

Where there's smoke¼ In this article I have examined two manifestations of ancestor worship in present- day Vietnam, linked by a prayer: `With a sincere heart I offer this stick of incense.' Thu y and Sung live less than a kilometre apart from one another in „õÁnh B£ng village. They both were born on the eve of independence, they both grew up during the French occupation of the village, and they both had long careers as school teachers. Today, they both devote a significant part of their everyday life to their ancestors. However, they demonstrate two different modes of meaningful practice, as Thu y nurtures a rich private relationship with her dearly departed parents while Sung oversees the re- establishment of a wide-reaching corporate entity. Taken together, these two case studies remind us not only of the `multiple pasts of a Vietnamese village', to borrow from Bernard Cohn, but also of its multiple presents and of the need to guard against teleological or monolithic explanations about the way macro-level socioeconomic transitions may impact locally experienced religion and family life.45 Ancestor worship takes many different forms in modern Vietnam. It is not now, and never was, a uniform practice with a uniform meaning, nor has it ever played only

43 For elaboration of the cultural meanings of tõÁnh c£m, see Malarney, `Ritual and revolution', ch. 4 and Rydstrom, Embodying morality, pp. 95±130. 44 NguyÅnKh¯cViÇn, `Enlarged family, lineage, cult of ancestors', Vietnamese Studies, n.s. 43, 3 ,1994): 15±16. 45 Bernard S. Cohn, `The pasts of an Indian village', Comparative Studies in Society and History,3,2 ,1961): 241±8. 492 KATE JELLEMA one role in people's lives. Is it a religion, a belief, an ethic, a national tradition or mere superstition? Taxonomic debate may contribute to our own analytical clarity but ultimately, to better understand what thÝ cuÂng tÕ tieÃn signifies to its practitioners, we need to follow the trail of incense smoke back to the altar.