Politics of Memory: (Re)Construction of the Past in Post-Socialist Vietnam

POLITICS OF MEMORY: (RE)CONSTRUCTION OF THE PAST IN POST-SOCIALIST VIETNAM

A Thesis Submitted to the Committee of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Science

TRENT UNIVERSITY

Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

Cultural Studies Ph.D. Graduate Program

January 2017

ABSTRACT

Politics of Memory: (Re)construction of the Past in Post-socialist Vietnam

Nguyễn Thị Thanh Hoa

In dialogue with the critical scholarship on war and remembrance, my research deals with the construction, contestation and negotiation of collective memory in contemporary Vietnam with a focus on commemorations devoted to dead soldiers.

Utilizing the methodologies of cultural studies and ethnography, this research seeks to comprehend the politics of memory which characterize collective memory as a social phenomenon whose meanings, interpretations and forms are variedly constructed from a certain social group to the next. Empirically, in this research, constitutive elements of

Vietnamese postwar memoryscapes including the hero-centered discourse sanctioned by the Communist Party and the Socialist state, the family remembrance rooted in religious and kinship mandates and the newly emerged online ecology of memory are examined in their own nature as well as in their complicated intertwinements and constant interactions with each other. Case studies and specific methods of individual interview, participant observation and cultural analysis enable the author to approach and identify a wide range of forms and intersections between official and vernacular practices, between oral and living history and institutionalized and cultural presentations of memory. While considering these issues specifically in the Vietnamese context, my dissertation contributes to the increasing theoretical debates in the field of memory studies by

i exploring the relation of power and the symbolic struggle within and between different social agents involved. As it emphasizes the dynamic and power of memory, this research furthermore situates the phenomenon of collective memory in its dialogues with a broader cultural political environment of postwar society, which is characterized as a hybrid condition embracing processes of nationalism, modernization and post-socialist transformation. Significantly, during these dialogues, as demonstrated in this research, memory works embrace presentism and future-oriented functions which require any social group who is involved to negotiate and renegotiate its position, and to structure and restructure its power. Last but not least it must construct and reconstruct its own versions of the past.

Keywords: Dead soldiers, war martyrs, war remembrance, Vietnam, the politics of memory, Socialist state, family memory, online commemoration, postwar society.

Dedication

To my mother and In memory of my father

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This has been a long and challenging project and I could not have completed it without the help of many people along the way.

I would firstly like to thank my dissertation supervisor, Professor Emeritus Ian McLachlan. It is difficult to express how much I have appreciated and learned from your thoughtful advice and guidance throughout my dissertation process. Thank you for generously sharing your own experiences, patiently helping me organize my thoughts, and providing me with your endless encouragement. I could not have made it this far without your incredible support, confidence and positivity.

A heartfelt thank you goes out to my committee members, Dr. Alan O’Connor and Dr. Van Nguyen-Marshall. Alan – I am very grateful for your kindness. Thank you for providing me with a wide range of support, from helping me navigate the Cultural Studies Ph.D. Program during my first year at Trent to inspiring me with your thoughtful feedback on my present research. Van - thank you so much for your critical attention and your useful comments that continually prompt me to write more clearly, and think more deeply about my work.

A special thank you to Dr. Jonathan Bordo – Director of Cultural Studies Ph.D. Program. Thank you for being supportive of my work. Without your help in navigating administration and funding matters, my work would have not been made possible.

I am thankful to my participants who were willing to be part of my research. Particularly, a big thank you goes to Mr. Nguyễn Duy Sơn and other residents of Tân Lộc commune, Mr. Nguyễn Sỹ Hồ, Ngô Thị Thúy Hằng, and other administrators and members of nhantimdongdoi.org, lietsivietnam.org, nguoiduado.vn and nhomai.vn. Your kindness and support are essential to my work. To my precious informants - thank you for making my work possible!

A heartfelt thanks to my family. Thank you to my sisters and my brother for being patient and incredibly supportive throughout my years of education. To my beloved mother - thank you for being my role model and showing me the significance of not giving up. Mum, words hardly express how much your love and support mean to me.

To Patricia Wilson – my beloved landlady - thank you so much for providing me a place that I call “home” in Canada. Thank you for spending your precious time proofreading my lengthy writing. Your input made the final product better.

Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to the Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training and the School of Graduate Studies at Trent University for their financial support during my doctoral studies.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract i Dedication iii Acknowledgments iv List of images vii Abbreviations viii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: THE PAST DOESN’T PASS: MEMORY AND THE STATE IN POST-SOCIALIST VIETNAM 36 Soldiers and War 38 “Certificated” Memory 54 Modernizing Memory and Its Discontent 74 Conclusion 103 CHAPTER 2: LIVING WITH THE DEAD: FILLING ABSENCE AND LOSS IN FAMILY COMMEMORATION 106 When the presence of absence is felt 110 Ancestor, ghost or hero? How should I remember him? 123 “I am connected to you, but I’ve never met you…” 145 Conclusion 157 CHAPTER 3: DIGITIZING DEATH: REMEMBERING IN THE VIRTUAL SPACE 160 Once physical, now virtual 169 “Hello, father. It’s me again.” 183 Beyond the screen 193 Conclusion 210 CONCLUSION: THE POLITICS OF MEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY VIETNAM 213 REFERENCES 219

LIST OF IMAGES

Image 1: "Speedy operating to unify the country - Where there is an enemy we will crush him” 47

Image 2: “Ensure the roads are open for the victory” 53

Image 3: Graves of war martyrs at Trường Sơn national cemetery 67

Image 4: Bắc Sơn Monument-Ba Đình Square – Hanoi 72

Image 5: War Martyr Memorial in Tuy An District – Phú Yên Province 85

Image 6: War Martyr Memorial in Thanh Xuan Commune – Soc Son District- Hanoi 85

Image 7: Memorial to War Martyrs at the Road 9 Cemetery 86

Image 8: Monument to ten young female volunteers in Đồng Lộc T-Junction Historic Site 88

Image 9: The Statue of Victory - Đồng Lộc T-Junction Historic Site 89

Image 10: Bến Dược War Martyr Temple – Củ Chi Historic Site – Hồ Chí Minh City 97

Image 11: Stele House and Monument for War Martyrs in Tân Lộc Commune 99

Image 12: Five Tổ Quốc Ghi Công certificates hung above an ancestor altar 116

Image 13: Front page of Cemetery Online at www.nhomai.vn 170

Image 14: Front page of www.lietsivietnam.org 172

Image 15: Front page of www.nguoiduado.vn 173

Image 16: A memorial profile on lietsivietnam 185

Image 17: Offerings at a war martyr’s tomb on www.nhomai.vn 188

Image 18: Photo of offerings at the real tomb of a war martyr being displayed on the online counterpart at www.nhomai.vn 189

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ABBREVIATIONS

CIHC Center for Investigation into Human Capabilities

DRV The Democratic Republic of Vietnam

LSVN Lietsivietnam.org

MN Nhomai.vn

MOLISA Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs

MOND Ministry of National Defense

NĐĐ Nguoiduado.vn

NTĐĐ Nhantimdongdoi.org

PAVN The People’s Army of Vietnam

RVN The Republic of Vietnam

UIA Technology Union for Applied Informatics

VOV The Voice of Vietnam (Radio station)

VTV Vietnam Television

YSB Youth Shock Brigades

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Introduction

“. . . whatever takes place has meaning because it changes into memory.” (Milosz 2001)

“Memory has always had political or ideological overtones, but each epoch has found its own meaning in memory.” (Hacking 1995)

It was the last day of my summer vacation in 2010. I sat in the waiting room at the bus terminal, browsing through my Facebook’s News Feed. For the past ten days during the trip, I had logged off the social media world. Now, as the vacation was almost over, I eventually felt a need to catch up on what I had missed out there. Instead of contributing new posts to the newsfeed or checking out unread messages and comments, I just took a quick glance at the most recent updates from my friends. A stream of written posts, photos of friends and families, links to journal articles and advertisements for trendy travel destinations kept coming up when I was scrolling down the screen. A great deal of excitement emanated from those updates, resonating with the raw memories of my recent trip. They held my attention until I finally spotted something different.

I noticed a scanned black and white photograph of a man dressed in a full military uniform. The caption accompanying the photo read: “Celebrating the special day of my grandfather. I’m very proud of you”. A good of number of scratches and uneven fading evidently told of the photo’s age. Those time damages, however, did not prevent me from catching a glimpse of the soldier’s portrait. The man adopting a formal pose was noticeably young; he couldn’t have been older than twenty at the time. He was skinny

1 and his eyes were looking straight at the camera. Underneath the calm surface of his gaze, however, I could sense a flicker of anxiety.

I was struck, but not very sure by what - the young face of the soldier or the event for which the photo had surfaced in front of my view. As I looked at the small

Facebook’s date indicator telling the day on which the photo was uploaded, I found the date “Tuesday, July 27, 2010”. I could figure out how special it was for the soldier and the people who had known him. It was the day when the celebration of Vietnamese War

Invalids and Martyrs Day was observed.

Kim Hương, the Facebook user, who uploaded the photo on her Facebook page, was one of my acquaintances. I met and knew Kim Hương briefly when we both participated in some voluntary work in 2009. In her mid-20s, Hương introduced herself as the Secretary of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union of a Hanoi-based university where she recently worked at as a lecturer. We have connected through

Facebook ever since then; however, we have rarely interacted with each other on this social networking site. We are not close by any means, but still friends.

A few minutes left before the bus departed. As I was about to log out Facebook and leave for the bus, I scanned through the comment section beneath the photograph of the soldier. Kim Hương just replied to a friend’s comments with snippets about her grandfather’s life history, adding to the story she had revealed to the public: “He sacrificed when he was 21”.

***

It was my constant encounters with visual records of dead soldiers that made me decide to carry out this research which aims to explore the politics of postwar commemoration in contemporary Vietnam.

In the early 2000s while travelling across the country, I remembered seeing rows after rows of graves in the war cemeteries passing by my bus window. In every city, town and rural commune where I visited, I saw endless lines of names of deceased soldiers engraved on war memorials and cemeteries dotting the landscape. At that time, my encounters with such graves, memorials and names were mostly unplanned. I did not have any intention to see them in the first place, yet they were so ubiquitous, almost everywhere, that I couldn’t help but let them fall into my sight. While I observed them passively, my encounters with visual traces of the dead had become more often afterwards. The names and faces of the dead popped up in my daily newspaper alongside colorful advertisements of luxurious commodities. There were new sections in newspapers designated for people who were seeking help to find long-missing soldiers.

Then, one day in 2010 remembrance of the war dead intruded into my social network site. This was the time, as I mentioned previously, I saw a photograph of a dead soldier on my Facebook News Feed, which was proudly shared by a “friend” of mine.

It would be unrealistic to say that, before these encounters, I had been wholly unfamiliar with the existence of war memorials in Vietnam or that I had never ever seen any photographs of dead soldiers. I was born in a country where wars have raged decade after decade, causing millions of soldiers to lose their lives on the battlefield. During my school years, I was repeatedly taught about the wars Vietnam fought in great details, along with analyses of military tactics and the glorious victories of the Vietnam people’s

3 army. Besides school textbooks, I had also seen a constant stream of work about the war being produced by artists and scholars. Because of this fact, instead of feeling unfamiliar with representations of war, I embraced an impression that I have heard and listened too much about the war. Memories of war had been produced ad nauseam, and yet they had been alienated from me at the same time. I did not find any real connection to them.

Thus, I started my academic adventure with a clear intention that I would not do any research on war-related topics. My reason was based on my perception that the war was a finished project whose details had fully been covered in the media and academia both inside and outside Vietnam. It seemed to me that we had gone far enough into the war in Vietnam, positioning it at the central focus of academic discussions long enough for the past decades. Now, as a new era had come - the comprehensive renovation program known as Đổi Mới had been launched for more than ten years - it was about time to move on from the war and delve into something different and more indicative of my generation’s concerns.

I was still uncertain about how “different” I wanted the pursuit to be; and there came the aforementioned encounters. They were specific faces and names. They were not impersonal statistical figures that I had learned in history textbooks. More importantly, many of those faces and names were made visible by ordinary people with individual stories being attached to them. I looked at them, still as a bystander silently observing people I did not know personally but collectively as war martyrs. Nevertheless, I started to be curious and wanted to know more about them. There must be reasons for their persistent and more frequent presence despite their several-decade-long death. So naturally, from being curious and more than curious, I have engaged and been compelled

4 by it. I have consequently shifted from unplanned encounters to planned ones, aiming to satisfy my curiosity.

As such, I came to the writing of this thesis which addresses the practice of commemoration dedicated to dead soldiers in Vietnam. To be more specific, much of my thesis is about the remembrance of soldiers of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), who fought under the flag of the Vietnamese socialist state and its Communist Party. In my writing, the war, even though it is not a central focus, is a crucial start from which the designation of a special social group of the dead, and consequently, a remembrance nuance are originally set. Nevertheless, I have not given up the idea of seeking to link my research with the most recent concerns and interests raised by people in Vietnamese present-day society to which I feel more related.

***

Needless to say, the war involved not only soldiers; millions of civilians including women, children, the young and the old lost their lives during the war in Vietnam. Such horrific human consequences of war and its memories have been the impetus for many academic works over the past decades. Some of those works focus on the death and war memory of civilians, which have been assimilated into the daily-life ritual of survivors in the postwar time (Heonik Kwon, 2006, After the Massacre); others embrace an inclusive memorialization of all war dead through the lens of religious tradition (Heonik Kwon,

2008, Ghosts of War in Vietnam; Mai Lan Gustafsson, 2009, War and Shadow).

I encountered those books only when my research was already underway. I understand the concern of these scholars. Their academic focus, either the inclusiveness of all war dead or non-armed civilians, is necessary to challenge the popular idea found in

5 traditional media and artistic representations, that equates war with soldiers and with men. Before carrying out my research, I also thought that there was excessive attention being paid to soldiers, given the ubiquity of memorial projects of various kinds dedicated to them, as mentioned previously. However, I then found the biased centrality and exclusiveness entailed in the dead soldier remembrances themselves intriguing. As a new student in the field of memory studies, such inherently problematic issues and their consequences were of my initial interest.

Indeed, the contemporary theory on collective memory introduced in Maurice

Halbwachs’s work in the 1920s has already hinted at the unavoidable domination of social dynamics in the human practice of remembering. “No memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections”

(Halbwachs 1992: 43), writes Maurice Halbwachs in his book On Collective Memory.

Specifically associating those frameworks with the role of social groups, Halbwachs emphasizes the crucial aspect of memory as socially and collectively constructed. On the one hand, even though it is always the individual who remembers, their memories of past events, both in terms of what are “memorable” and how they should be remembered, are framed and influenced by collective thoughts and interests of certain social groups to which they belong. On the other hand, as social groups exist in vast numbers, collective remembering consequently involves a multitude of different social frameworks of recollection as well as collective memories and representations of the past. Collective memory, therefore, is not referred to as an instance where all members of a collectivity who have lived through the same event perform an act of collective remembrance.

Instead, collective memory is a metaphor used to indicate the whole set of externality of

6 the past which is reconstructed, transmitted and disseminated by different media, materially and spiritually, through which contemporary populations express their attitude and relation to the past. To put it in Misztal’s words, collective memory in a

Halbwachisan perspective is “both a shared image of a past and the reflection of the social identity of the group that framed it” (Misztal 2003: 52).

While leading the reformulation of memory studies scholarship with a new focus on “social aspects of remembering and results of this social experience” (Misztal 2003:

6), Halbwachs’s theory furthermore situates memory within a presentist perspective.

Rather than being unconsciously recollected, the collective construction of memory is deliberately shaped by the needs, interests and understandings of the present: “It is one framework that counts – that which is constituted by the commandments of our present society and which necessarily excludes all the others” (Halbwachs 1992: 50). From

Halbwachs’s point of view, collective memory, whether that means socially framed individual memory or cultural memory that is individually appropriated, embraces the primary task of conceptualizing and explaining various manners in which social groups

(and individuals as group members) appropriate the past in light of, in terms of, and on behalf of the present. Memory, therefore, is not a static construction; it is otherwise changeable and is continually revised over time to fit the most recent needs of the group.

“Society from time to time obligates people not just to reproduce in thought previous events of their lives, but also to touch them up, to shorten them, or to complete them so that, however convinced we are that our memories are exact, we give them a prestige that in reality they did not possess” (Halbwachs 1992: 39). Halbwachs, however, does not go too far in investigating the dynamic of collective memory (Misztal 2003); he instead is

7 insistent in his affirmation that the very end of such constant construction and reconstruction is the creation of a shared image of the past which is in accord with the group’s dominant thoughts and its solitary power order.

Preliminary yet inspirational, Halbwachs’s theory has gained deserved attention since the 1980s. Inheriting Halbwachs’s idea of linking memory with the most crucial social aspect of power relations, many successive scholars have importantly taken a step further from the problematic relationship between social groups and individuals, which is centered in Halbwach’s work. They have expanded their scope of investigation into the issue of how the variation of memories sustained by different groups is dealt with in society. From “invented traditions” in Eric Hobsbawm and his colleagues’ anthology The

Invention of Tradition (1983), through bodily practices and commemorative ceremonies in Paul Connerton’s book How Societies Remember (1989), and lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) in Pierre Nora’s vast project on French memory (Nora et al. 1996, 1997,

1998), numerous mnemonic devices through which collective memory is constructed and represented have been placed under the close scrutiny of the authors.

The difference in their studied geographic contexts aside, these scholars generally find themselves in an agreement regarding the impossibility of the equal access of all collective memories in the public. Within the society as a reality sui generis, practices of memory are simultaneously diverse and hierarchical with the most important role being credited to the nation-state who, through the mean of citizenship, imposes the dominating position of an all-encompassing social group over both the individual and collective actors. The nation-state speaks on behalf of its encompassed category and therefore also has the power to form the collective memories according to its own understandings.

“Seen from below, the state increasingly defined the largest stage on which the crucial activities determining human lives as subjects and citizens were played out. Indeed, it increasingly defined as well as registered their civil existence (etat civil). It may not have been the only such stage, but its existence, frontiers and increasingly regular and probing interventions in the citizen’s life were in the last analysis decisive.” (Hobsbawm 1999: 62) Lying at the heart of this line of inquiry, the selective nature of collective memory pointed out by Halbwachs has been continuously adopted. Moreover, as Misztal insightfully reminds us, later work in the field has suggested “more directly who is responsible for memory’s selectiveness and points to causes of this selectiveness”

(Misztal 2003: 56). Here, when it comes to the role of the nation-state, the selectiveness is more clearly political. As Connerton points to us, with the state apparatuses stretching out widely, from the educational system to the media and public space planning, the nation-state can be able “in a systematic way to deprive its citizens of their memory”

(Connerton 1989: 14). Connerton’s statement shows that he has gone beyond the organized remembering mechanism shared by Hobsbawm and scholars following the

“invented tradition” perspective, which emphasizes the pivotal role of rediscovering and incorporating “irrational” and “useable” elements of the past into present-day construction. For Connerton, the systematic management of collective memory essentially and simultaneously embraces the mechanism of organized forgetting. “When a large power wants to deprive a small country of its national consciousness”, writes

Connerton, “it uses the method of organized forgetting.” (Connerton 1989, 14). Ernest

Renan shares the similar thought when he says that: “forgetting […] is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation” (Renan 1982).

It is, in fact, that socially organized remembering and socially organized forgetting are inseparable mechanisms, being constitutive for a deliberate selection of sources and interpretations of past events, which is driven by the current needs of those in power. Once memories of certain events which are convenient in a given historical moment are selected and incorporated, inconvenient others are excluded or “forgotten”.

Thus, to function successfully, memory, even though it is claimed to be collective, needs the art of forgetting as much as it needs the art of remembering (Connerton 1989). This dual strategy of manipulative framing and representing the past by the nation-state is a

“naturalization, idealization, and de-particularization” process (Alonso 1991:17-266-

267).

Therefore, theoretically accepted, collective memory, at least in its public representations, is always biased toward certain forms and contents. With the large mnemonic entrepreneurs, especially the meta social group in the name of the nation-state, working to impose official frameworks and sanctification over others’, national memory, or the collective past of the nation, has given rise to and been characterized as a special nuance of mnemonic practice. More importantly, while conceptualizing collective memory and its underlying operational mechanisms, the aforementioned authors closely link their theoretical work to the actual experience of Western countries, which stretched back from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The approach, hence, provides readers with not only theoretical frameworks but also practical references.

Hobsbawm describes the rise of interest in collective memory paid by political leaders as well as personnel in academia as a response to the rapid social transformations which were underway during the nineteenth century. Specifically, the industrial revolutions and

10 the shift into the modern world caused the newly emerged nation-state to face a certain break with the previous past while having to struggle to define itself at the same time.

“Quite new, or old but dramatically transformed, social groups, environments and social contexts called for new devices to ensure or express social cohesion and identity and to structure social relations. At the same time a changing society made the traditional forms of ruling by states and social or political hierarchies more difficult or even impracticable. This required new methods of ruling or establishing bonds of loyalty. In the nature of things, the consequent invention of ‘political’ traditions was more conscious and deliberate, since it was largely undertaken by institutions with political purposes in mind” (Hobsbawm 1999: 61). Pierre Nora, based on his observations in France, also claims that "a will to remember" (Nora 1989: 19) is consequently facilitated through various sites of memory when “great changes take place in society and rupture the existent flow of events” (Nora

1989: 7). For instance, industrialization and its replacement of peasant culture led to the study of peasant culture as the repository of collective memory.

Memory, therefore, is beyond an abstract subject-matter in the theoretical field; it plays the role of an instrument as well as an object of power legitimation and social hegemony, which is undeniably necessary in the time of dramatic transformation. In the nineteenth century’s Europe, as the new system of authority and order had emerged, an agreed past shared by all members was expected to strengthen a sense of belonging, needed to the monolithic “imagined community” (Anderson 1991), establishing and securing a continuity between the past and the present. This empirical observation explains the rise of a common pattern of collective memory promoted by the nation-state, which deliberately prioritized coherence and glory past over controversial facts and conflicting memories.

When we look through the lens of these classic nationalistic and instrumentalist paradigms, the existing popularity of commemorative constructions dedicated to dead soldiers within the domain of war memorialization can be seen as an expected result of purposeful selection and staging exercised by state authorities and their supporters. In his frequently quoted book by the title Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World

Wars, George L. Mosse (1990), for instance, describes the proliferation of the “cult of fallen soldiers” in early twentieth century Europe. Mosse notes that, during the time of his study, while the prevailing moral norm in European societies tended to privatize death, keeping war death from having a public presence, the modern-state has made images of dead soldiers become more and more visible in the public. Their tombs were located in national cemeteries; their names were inscribed on public monuments and pictures were printed in celebratory postcards. The dead soldiers’ collective status was enhanced and privileged more than ever before, because it embraced the new concept of citizen-armies, its duty of fighting for the nation and its respective posthumous commemorative agenda designed by the state. The purpose of the state in transforming private memories of soldiers’ deaths to public memories, integrating them into religious languages, rituals and architectures, as Mosse claims, was to produce and reinforce nationalism. By attaching solemn and momentous meaning to the death of the soldiers through commemoration, modern Western European nation-states found further benefit: the glories accruing to the dead appealed to the common people, thus underwriting recruitment and enhancing enthusiasm for the war.

From discussing the experiences of Western countries, I now move back to the context of Vietnam where, as I have argued, the overflow of dead soldier

12 commemoration has existed as a reality. If the paradigms of national framework and the dominating role of the nation-state worked for Western European countries in the early twentieth century, are they applicable to the case of Vietnam as well? Here, given the fact that Vietnamese political culture is characterized by the monopolistic rule of the

Communist Party and its Socialist state, one may say that the state is far more successful at usurping the dead soldier narrative. In her 2002 book, Patricia M. Pelley shows that since its commencement in 1945, the Vietnamese state has been constantly trying to craft a national narrative of a uniquely Vietnamese society that has always been united and hegemonic. More than anything else, various struggles against foreign invaders, stretching back from ancient times to 1975, have become the most crucial factor in consolidating national unity among different social classes and ethnic groups. Pelley writes: “Armed with this new paradigm, official historians discerned the “spirit of resistance against foreign aggression” all around them in the present and throughout the past….. Embedded within the “spirit of resistance against foreign aggression” was “the spirit of unity”, which ran like a “red thread” throughout Vietnamese history.” (Pelley

2002: 143)

The grand social framework consequently has determined the selection and even invention of appropriate symbols and other mnemonic devices, of which the death of soldiers who bravely fought the war are the most outstanding. Among a vast number of transformations in cultural and ritual practices resulted from the revolutionary efforts of the Communist Party from the early 1940s through early 1990s, Shaun Kingsley

Malarney, in resonance with Mosse’s study mentioned above, points out the significant role of the state in giving rise to the modern cult of fallen soldiers in contemporary

Vietnam. Situated in the specific setting of a northern village, Malarney’s ethnographical research provides a brief description of the way in which dead soldiers are commemorated through official projects designed by the Vietnamese state. Malarney moreover traces the underlying motivation behind those attempts. The extensive attention to the dead soldiers, as Malarney asserts, aims to give “noble and meaningful” status to their deaths, which is constitutive for the official narrative highlighting Vietnam’s history of repelling foreign aggression (Malarney 2001: 46).

It is worth noting that, to the best of my knowledge, Malarney is the first scholar who directly deals with the issue of dead soldier commemoration under the regime of the

Vietnamese socialist state. He moreover does it in a relatively comprehensive way. With two chapters published consecutively in 2001 and 2002, one in the anthology The

Country of Memory, and the other in his own ethnography entitled Ritual, Culture and

Revolution in Vietnam, the influential contribution of Malarney lies not only in his description of several dimensions of surveyed subject matter but also in his theoretical premise addressing state power as a determinative driving force of such mnemonic practices. Setting his empirical research in a local village, Malarney illustrates the instrumentalist approach explaining how the state has incorporated familial and communal memories and turned them into instruments of social integration and political control. The memory of the dead soldiers has been used in contemporary Vietnam as a unifying and motivating event for the nation.

Taken together, earlier theoretical reasoning and practical experiences, both within and outside Vietnam, have insightfully shed light on my current path of delving into the politics of memory. The state, the nation, the continuity between the past and the

14 present, hegemony and power are salient key words which help me to conceptualize and address my initial curiosity. Strangely, reflecting on my own experience after going through this set of reading and observations, I found none of these concepts totally new for me. Instead, for years, I had repeatedly heard these interpretative codes, albeit with

Vietnamese interpretations and variations. Terms such as “our nation”, “our fatherland”,

“our history”, “our tradition”, “our party”, “our glorious victories”, and “our heroic war martyrs” have indeed been indispensable vocabulary constituents of the authoritative narrative of Vietnamese national past which had been told to us in schools, through the media and during public ceremonies. For decades of being constantly instilled by a single and unified discourse, the majority of the Vietnamese population who was born after the war, including myself, have taken these concepts and the master discourse they represented for granted. We unconsciously accepted them as legitimated realities without seriously questioning the reasons for and the manner through which they had gained such status. Other than that, there had been very little chance for us to think about any alternative interpretations or criticize the given model of thoughts and memory construction, provided that the distinctive Vietnamese social dynamics did not allow any public debates of those kinds. Admittedly, the Vietnamese state had been once successfully in controlling collective memory in Vietnam. It, as a memory machine, had not only governed the means of remembering but also prescribed rules for how the past should be remembered.

My impression that all stories about war are similar and have been told numerous times has changed, eventually and fortunately. I have recently seen, as I mentioned in the beginning of this writing not only the terms “our heroic war martyrs” but also stories of

15 specific soldiers told by ordinary people in a different kind of language. The questions drove me to this research regarding the constant proliferation of dead soldier commemoration in recent Vietnamese society primarily had their root in my observation of such transformation. The imperative of comprehending a recent phenomenon has motivated me to engage with the field of memory studies, delving into the continuous flux of “memories” shared by countless scholars. Some of them are more related to the case of Vietnam, providing me with insightful suggestions than others. The whole process of establishing my own framework, more importantly, gives me a strong sense that I actually experience and practice what has been named as the presentist nature of collective memory.

From the perspectives of classical instrumentalist and nationalist approaches, I have found a significant starting point to understand the primary dynamics which, in the first place, give rise to the prevalence of the surveyed category. Yet, while these paradigms strongly emphasize the determinative role of powerful nation-states, they seemingly neglect the response from subaltern groups to this top-down dominance. The observation that the public space dedicated to commemorations of dead soldiers has been incorporated not only by the state but many other social actors as well may not be fully examined due to this weakness of the previous approaches. The demand on account of the recent surfacing of some memories and their relation with pre-existing constructions which have been powerfully conventionalized and widely accepted has pushed me to take a step further.

If examined though the lens of Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony theory, the state’s position in controlling public mnemonic projects aiming to establish a hegemonic official

16 past is never simply achieved. Instead, in Gramsci’s sense, hegemony implies a struggle in which the ruling power bloc has to win over the “spontaneous consent” (Gramsci

1971: 12) of the populace at large in order to get particular understandings and worldviews linked to it to become accepted and internalized by other social actors.

Without the consent granted by the majority of the populace, neither does the state successfully generate its own version of the past, nor does this version become prevalent.

Responses from the subaltern groups toward the actions of the state, therefore, play a salient role in the achieving of the hegemonic memory, characterizing this process as a challenging and complicated task, not a simple one determined solely by the state’s will.

At times and during certain special circumstances, however, the official interpretation can gain absolute acceptance, and responses from ordinary people are silenced, voluntarily or forced into silence. Interstate wars, for instance, normally promotes a discourse revolving around the conflict between the Self and the Enemy, which helps the state generate an internal cohesion and mobilize the whole population’s support for war (Carpentier 2007: 2). In Soviet Russia or even in the case of Vietnam as described above, during the time when the closed system of authoritarian rule was at its peak, freedom of expression and actions were severely limited, not only in the public sphere of media and national rituals but also in the personal communication within families (Merridale 1999). Consequently, nothing other than the presence and voice of the powerful state could be seen and heard in a monolithic representation of memory. In this situation, the silence or lack of public presence of other social groups implied their consent to whatever they had been offered by the state.

As Michel Foucault (1977) suggests, however, the subaltern’s silence does not necessarily mean consent. Instead, he refers to such silence as a representation of

“counter-memories” which are constructed from the bottom up and embrace possibilities of recovery even after a long period of silence. This idea of Foucault is detailedly described by Bouchard in his introduction to Foucault’s book Language, Counter- memory, Practice, in which he refers to counter-memory as ‘other voices which have remained silent for so long’ (1977: 18). More importantly, counter memories and the recovery of these voices illuminate a tendency of resistance against the dominant/official ones to emerge even after (or especially after) a long period of time. For Foucault, the difference in memory matters whether it is visible or not.

Charlotte Linde, in her book on Midwest history, also affirms that silence is a way of resistance. She offers the reader the metaphor of “noisy silence” which is used to describe a past that is not saliently presented but remains understood and secretly discussed by members of a group. “Noisy silences are matters of contested concern, matters that officially may not be spoken of but that must be discussed nonetheless.”

(Linde 2008: 197)

As such, even though the publicity of memory is normally incorporated to celebrate official concerns, this does not mean that differences and confrontations are completely removed from the discussion over memory. Foucault once argued that “where there is power, there is resistance” (Foucault 1976: 95). Collective memory as a socio- cultural domain therefore is an operational arena requiring struggles from both the dominant group and the subordinate others.

The contestation in memory, its manners and intensity, obviously, do not remain the same over time. They are changing as much as collective memory is constantly revised due to the transformation from one social political context to the next. And the chance for many social groups to recover their memories from silence is possibly realized when crucial shifting moments happen during this constant flux of time. The postwar era in Europe, especially from the second half of the 20th century, has witnessed the blooming of commemorations which depict the war through the lens of loss and traumatic experience rather than through the mandate of nationalist patriotism (Winter

1995, Winter and Sivan 1999). The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 also marked the recovery of the “right to memory” for people in countries under the former regime, which eventually has served as a catalyst for the revival of memories which confront those propagating or supporting self-congratulatory national histories (Judt 1992; Wyrda 2007)

Vietnamese society, in a similar trajectory with the above cases, has embarked on a crucial shift since the late 1980s, transforming into the post-socialist era. Alongside attempts from other countries, the shift in Vietnam has been deliberately carried out as a solution to the common crisis currently faced by the socialist world. The transition has been a long and ongoing process, but it began with a special kind of “revolution”. While the New Era which centered upon the “Reform and Opening Up” program accelerated in

China in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Vietnamese Communist Party also approved its economic renovation initiative called “Đổi Mới” at the Sixth Party Congress in

December 1986. Đổi Mới was designed to transform the Vietnamese economy from a socialist, centrally planned economy to one driven by the market. During the implementation of these reformations, besides the prerogative of a single-party and its

19 agents, privatization and opening the country to foreign investment have been gradually carried out. Civil society and non-state organizations have been given more space. Thus, postsocialism, in other words, is the overlap between the socialist state-form and the era of capitalist globalization.

The post-socialist condition in Vietnam, from which all memory practices contemporarily have occurred, therefore is complicated and controversial. Unlike many former socialist countries in Eastern Europe and Asia where “postsocialism” and

“postsocialist” are used to label the “social circumstances and way of life” which are legacies of an ended or collapsed regime (Verdery 1991; Chari 2009), postsocialism in

Vietnam is defined as “a hybrid extension of socialism” (Nhu 2009; Raffin 2008), embracing both continuity and discontinuity with the “orthodox” socialist model. It is not an end or rupture of actual existing socialism, but a transitional process leading to “a complex result, that is, becoming something other than socialist” (Chari, 2009: 11).

In such an environment where the control of the state over memory has been loosened as a result of the process of political liberalization, various interpretations and representations have emerged. The revival of traditional religious practices and the significance of kinship and genealogy in the social life of the populace have added more catalysts into the modern practice of dead soldier commemoration. A new concept of publicity has also been created through the integration into the global network of the

Internet, providing people with more space to practice and express their perception of the past.

Having said that, like elsewhere all over the world, Vietnamese society has been moving toward the diversity of mnemonic practices, resulting from the prolonged

20 resistance of various social agents, which demands re-evaluating and transcending the conventionalized dominant formations of reality. Amid the “commemorative fever” which emerged to celebrate this crucial transformation, many scholars have voiced the need to focus on the ethics of memory, asking for the inclusiveness of collective memory.

Viet Thanh Nguyen designs his research on war memory in Vietnam based on James

Young’s conceptualization of collective memory: “Collective memory, or collected memories, are credible only if they are inclusive of whichever group by which they are defined, however large or small” (Young 1993: xi). Nguyen, therefore structured his new book with three tripartite approaches, international, multicultural and interdisciplinary, aiming to examine memories of men, women, soldiers, and civilians, both in Vietnam and their counterparts in America. Other researchers whom I have mentioned at the beginning of this writing have exploited the chance given by the transformation in

Vietnam to delve into less spoken memories of the war in Vietnam.

I however stick to a certain category of dead soldiers whose stories somehow have been already examined thoroughly in the scholarship of war commemoration.

Despite that fact, the surveyed category and the intensive attention it has gained provide me with an excellent case study of how core factors of collective memory, namely social agents, contexts, and power relations, work together and change over time. Specifically, through examining the biased rendering of history embodied in the symbolic and cultural presentations of dead soldier memories, I hope to gain an understanding of the nature and dynamic of Vietnamese memory politics within a broader cultural political environment of postwar society with a hybrid condition embracing processes of nationalism, modernization and post-socialist transformation. From a one-dimensionally monolithic

21 version of the past to heterogeneous interpretations of memory, I seek to comprehend the functions of memory which require social groups to negotiate and renegotiate its position, and to structure and restructure its power in order to get its own versions of the past

“publicized” to a wide range of audience.

Even though power relations and the politics of memory are the main concerns of this research, I do not confine the investigation within the typical dichotomies of dominant memory – counter-memory, official – unofficial, orthodox – vernacular, central

– marginal. Instead, interactions, negotiations, contestations will be seen both within and between different social groups involved. I, thus, look for the plurality of memory. By plurality, I mean different memories given rise not only in the relationship between the state and subaltern groups but also within each of them. Official memory has different versions as much as any of the so-called unofficial memory does. Collective memory, to put it more precisely, the group-specific way in which the meanings of past events and participants are framed and interpreted, embraces the struggle which is not merely of memory against oblivion, but of memory against other memories.

Social groups are the unit of analysis in this research, yet they are not pre-existing entities already “out there” in the world. Individuals as active agents make up different social groups with their particular dynamics, past, present and future. The focus on the collectivity of memory in the name of the state’s discourse, family memory, voluntary groups’ performance, does not necessarily eliminate the significance of individuality.

Individual memory is a socially-framed construction, but personal behavior and attitude toward the past contribute a salient role in the process of how such memory is recalled, recollected and represented. The conduct of this research itself reflects this issue. My

22 engagement with war memories in Vietnam, learning about them through the lens of different collective frameworks, has been first and foremost motivated by the change in my personal concern rather than by anything else. I therefore contend that we must look at concrete individual practices if we wish to catch a glimpse of the collective in social life.

To accomplish the objectives mentioned above, I develop my arguments in three main parts with which my dissertation as a whole is organized. The first chapter explores the construction of an official memory of dead soldiers having been carried out by the

Vietnamese state1 and how this agenda has affected the social and cultural life thus far. It will describe many social and cultural innovations, such as the designation of a special social category of the dead and the linkages made between the past and contemporary struggles. As an overview and foundation for later research, my central aim in this text is to introduce the reader to Vietnamese legitimated paradigms and practices of memory at the public level.

In the second chapter, I’ll examine memory practices conducted in a more private way within families and kinship network. In the dialogue with the previous chapter, my concern in the second project is to question how can memory, which is mainly based on

1 The Vietnamse state which is the subject of this research is today’s Socialist Republic of Vietnam and its predecessor, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam, 1945-1975). During 1955 – 1975, there was another independent Vietnamese state, the Republic of Vietnam, existing in the south of Vietnam. Commemorative activities of the Republic of Vietnam are not the primary subject matter of this research. Given the specific case of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the term “state” used in my research basically refers to a collectivity of agents including the government, the National Assembly, the Communist party, and their subordinate institutions of officials. For detailed reviews of the Vietnamese political system, please see: - Kerkvliet, Benedict, 2001, "An Approach for Analysing State-Society Relations in Vietnam." Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, Vol 16, no. 2 (Special Focus: Negotiating the State in Viet Nam): p.238-78. - Dixon, Chris, 2004, “State, Party and Political Change in Vietnam” in McCargo, Duncan (ed.), Rethinking Vietnam, pp.15-26, London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon.

23 the views of the state elites, apply to the grassroots experience? How has the attempt of the state to create public, official acts of remembering been supported or contested by the bereaved who, based on traditional perspective, consider the issue of violent loss of life to be an intensely private matter among the martyrs' loved ones? Furthermore, what I’m most interested in is to seek to examine the families’ own interpretations and ways of remembering the dead. I begin with the families of the soldiers who suffered the losses, and with the multiple forms of associational life which had as their focus the commemoration of the dead. I also pay attention to practices which belong to the realm of spiritualism – a reaching out of the living towards the dead, and metaphorically of the dead towards the living.

The last chapter will be about a relatively new manner of collective remembrance which is generated and placed in computer-mediated communication. Online commemoration in the Vietnamese context, as I argue, is a sufficient alternative source of remembrance to fill in the gap left by the official state-sponsored projects. In this chapter, through a close scrutiny of selected websites specially created to commemorate dead soldiers, I will examine the transformation of collective memory and its constitutive factors within a new realm of social technological relations. I also focus on the socio- cultural role and contribution of a newly emergent civil society in the practice of war commemoration in contemporary Vietnam.

***

I have greatly benefited from a rich body of academic work focusing on war memories in general and the case of dead soldiers in particular. Apart from those I have mentioned previously, prominent work including Paul Fussel’s The Great War and the

Modern Memory (1975), Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995), Martin

Evans (edited) War Memory in the Twentieth Century (1997), and Peitsch et al, European

Memories of the Second World War (1999), have provided me with significant background upon which I developed my arguments. Many other books, journal articles written about the memories of interstate wars and conflicts running from the late 20th century until recently in many countries all over the world have also contributed significantly to the conduct of this research. Various reference frameworks can be found from such a large number of publications, ranging from the role of the state, to conflicts and democratization of memory, and the traumatic aftermath of facing and remembering the deaths of the soldiers.

In the context of Vietnam, I was expecting even more publications; I was confident that there has been a sea of publications documenting how the war in Vietnam has been remembered. The dominator running through the works produced by

Vietnamese scholars, however, is their descriptive reiteration of the official linear narrative framed by the state. This conventional and predictable paradigm has dominated

Vietnamese academia for decades given the close dependence of education and research institutions on the governmental management and funding in Vietnam.

While domestic scholars seemed content to follow the old-fashion strategies,

Vietnamese studies specialists from Western countries, in contrast, have introduced a wave of new approaches to the field since the late 1990s. As a fortunate result of the Đổi

Mới program, Vietnam has opened its door to the outside world, becoming an interesting research ground for a large number of foreigners and Vietnamese overseas scholars.

Authors such as Pelly, Malarney, Schwenkel and Ho Tai Hue Tam, have paid more

25 attention to critically analyzing the underlying dynamics and mechanisms which facilitate and shape the crystallization of war memories in Vietnam. More importantly, many of them have helped to redirect the academic focus away from “the strangling obsession with identity and continuity mandated by the nationalist faith” (Taylor 1995:6) and the dominant status of the nation-state as a unit of analysis.

Amid the increasing war commemoration scholarship, I nevertheless found an interesting paradox regarding the status of dead soldiers as a research category. While being criticized for getting more attention and treatment than other categories of war dead, dead soldiers and how they are remembered ironically have not been the subject matter of any comprehensive study. The aforementioned work of Malarney is remarkably important because of this fact. However, Malarney limits the time scale of his study to not later than the early 1990s when the Đổi Mới program had just been launched. Many dramatic transformations in Vietnam in general and in the memorialization of dead soldiers in particular, therefore, have not been appropriately covered in Malarney’s research. Kirsten W. Endres is another author who has expressed certain interest in the commemoration of dead soldiers. Especially, in her recent article “Psychic Experience,

Truth, and Visuality in Post-war Vietnam” (2011), and the book chapter “Contests of

Commemoration: Virgin War Martyrs, State Memorial, and the Invocation of the Spirit

World in Contemporary Vietnam” (2011), Endres investigates the issue from the framework of family and religious traditions, seeing how these frameworks contest the one promoted by the state.

Apart from a small number of publications that have positioned dead soldier remembrance at their central focus, which are noticeably all written by non-Vietnamese

26 authors, there has not been any academic work produced by Vietnamese researchers on this topic. The lack of rigorous academic attention, therefore, stands in stark constrast to the rhetorical interests dedicated to the dead soldiers in the cultural representations in media and public practices of commemoration.

My research, therefore, will contribute to the existing body of literature as an attempt to fill in the current gap. Utilizing the methodology of ethnography widely applied in cultural analysis, this empirical study approaches and identifies not only the historical emergence of memory practices related to fallen soldiers, but also their transformations and implications in the most recent context of Vietnamese society.

Moreover, moving beyond the limit of descriptive ethnography, this research’s critical approach will contribute to the theoretical discussion that may be helpful for future studies on collective memory in transitional contexts.

The transformative nature of an ethnographic methodology combining textual analysis and fieldwork practices allows me to move back and forth between the world of book and the realm of practical exploration, between hours of immersing myself in the reading and socialization meetings with people in actual and virtual communities.

Moreover, the emphasis on the dynamics of collective memory which is produced by active human agents guides my selection of practical methods and strategies. For instance, the official remembrance framed by the national discourse and interpretation is explored through analyzing government policy documents, and professional historians’ works. The collective memory of various local groups’ members is examined via analysis of qualitative interviews which help identify how individuals perceive, interpret and respond to the official way of remembering. In other words, I seek to investigate the

27 intersection and overlapping between national frameworks and those of encompassed categories through examples of socially framed individual memory.

Summer 2013 marked the inception of my empirical study with my visits to several major war cemeteries and memorials in northern and central provinces of

Vietnam. I did not carry out any in-depth interview during my trips there; I simply observed the material construction of the sites, gathering available documents about their history and current situation. Intervals between these trips were spent on library research through which I collected government policy documents, census and statistical reports on dead soldiers. The major work produced by Vietnamese professional historians were gathered along with data from newspapers, and mass media. The National Library of

Vietnam and the Social Science Library, both located in Hanoi, were primary institutions from which I retrieved the necessary data. Other small follow-up library research was also conducted throughout my fieldwork process and during writing-up.

In September 2013, I was back in Canada, writing up the draft of my first chapter and preparing for my next fieldwork trips. My second and third chapters were designed mainly as community-based research which focuses on the recent practices of late soldier commemoration at local levels. Therefore, the selection of research sites should be seriously taken in consideration. I finally chose Tân Lộc, a rural commune in the central region of Vietnam, as the main field-site of the investigation where data related to family and kinship commemorative practices devoted to dead soldiers would be collected. I was introduced to Tân Lộc by my friend who was born there. With the brief information given by my friend, I realized that the community of Tân Lộc has been deeply affected by the human loss and other legacies of the war. Over three decades of war, 165 Tân Lộc

28 soldiers died and were recognized as war martyrs, 159 others returned home with wounds and became war invalids.

As I had decided to carry out my research in Tân Lộc, between December 2013 and January 2014, thanks to the introduction of my friend, I established the first contacts with some local officials of Tân Lộc commune. These officials, mostly members of the

People’s Committee of Tân Lộc commune provided me with general information about the community as well as about the required documents for obtaining the permission to do my research there. During that time, our conversations were carried out through the telephone.

My fieldwork in Tân Lộc officially started in May 2014 and lasted until the end of

August the same year. At the commencement of the fieldwork in the locale, as a required procedure, I had to visit the office of the People’s Committee of the commune, presenting my credentials to the administrative officials there. Because of my preliminary contacts through which I had already introduced the purposes, duration and methods of my research, I quickly gained the permission from the local authorities to stay in the commune and recruit informants for my research.

I did not stay in Tân Lộc for the whole four months. Instead, my fieldwork was divided into several short trips (3 weeks at a time). A close relative of my friend hosted me in her home for all of the time I stayed in Tân Lộc.

Staying with the research community allowed me to build a rapport with local people and use different methods and strategies of ethnographical practice in a flexible way. For instance, I could directly observe day-to-day activities of the commune’s residents, the landscape with different sites dedicated to dead solider remembrances,

29 including their location and “interaction” with the community’s daily life routines. In a typical Vietnamese rural community like Tân Lộc, where all residents know each other very well, staying with a local family, also enabled me to optimize the advantage of snowball strategy in recruiting informants. The first key informants were introduced to me by the officials of the commune, especially by the cultural and social officer who was in charge of all issues associated with the war dead. Direct relatives of dead soldiers such as parents, spouse, siblings and children were set on the top of the list given by the officials. The first participant I approached was a brother of a dead soldier, who afterwards introduced me to his neighbor – a son whose father died in the battle field in

1968. My host family also contributed to the expansion of my research network in Tân

Lộc. During our casual conversations, they told me stories about the history of many families in the commune, which they thought might be of interest to me and relevant to my research. Many people from the same hamlet as my host family also came to visit me when they heard about my presence in the commune. As they briefly knew about the reason for my stay there - a student looking to talk with dead soldiers’ relatives in order to complete a school project - they enthusiastically suggested to me to meet certain people. I then, of course, met and interviewed some among those introduced by my host family and their neighbors.

The sampling even though it prioritized direct relatives of the dead soldiers, did not limit my approach to other informants who belong to the generation born after the war and do not know the dead soldiers personally. The participants were purposely sought to include a range of ages, any ages over 18, occupations and both genders. Apart from members of dead soldiers’ families, informants included active members of the

30 local community such as veterans or social officers. Twenty interviews were conducted finally.

My first interview was conducted when I had been in Tân Lộc for only a week, a course of time that made my presence in the locale to become familiar with residents there. Before conducting my interview I met my informant in advance and asked for his consent. We talked about my research for several minutes, then the conversation shifted to asking about me, where I live, what my parents did, how many siblings I had and whether or not I had a boyfriend. It was very normal, especially in a rural community, to ask someone you meet for the first time such personal questions. My first meeting lasted about thirty minutes, and the informant, a man in his mid-60s, graciously accepted my request to be interviewed two days later in his home.

This strategy of gaining official consent and arranging interview schedules was applied for all interviewees in Tân Lộc. Individual consent was collected in oral form.

Given the fact that the majority of informants in the Tân Lộc commune were peasants and elderly, asking them to review and sign forms that have an air of officialdom about them might be uncomfortable for them. Moreover, in Vietnamese rural culture, signing any kind of documents may evoke political and administrative concerns in the participants. I approached participants in advance of their interviews to explain about my research and seek their agreement. I let them have enough time to consider whether to take part or not. Some people agreed to take the interview right away, others asked me to come back on another date.

The interviews were individually conducted and in face-to-face conversation. The duration for each interview was about 45 minutes to close to two hours. Interviews were

31 mostly carried out at the homes of participants and at the most convenient time for them.

Before we started our conversations, I always explained to the informants that their participation in the study was voluntary, and they could withdraw from the study at any time with no negative consequences to them. I also asked for their permission to audio record the interviews.

The interview was designed in a semi-structured format. I did not use any academic terms that I thought unfamiliar to the informants. Instead, I facilitated our conversations with straight-forward questions about the informant’s family history, his/her relationship with the dead member, how often the family visited the dead person’s grave, and how the family organized his/her annual death anniversary. In almost all cases, the interview topic then spontaneously shifted from the family history and activities to the issue of official remembering. From visiting national cemeteries and memorials, watching television programs, reading news in the newspaper to attending public ceremonies, I asked the informants about their own connection with official memory through concrete examples. The open-ended questions enabled me to access not only the respondents’ interpretations of official representations of the past but also how relevant and emotionally engaging these memories were to them.

In additional to direct observation and in-depth interviews, in selected cases, participant observation was applied. I was granted permission to fully participate and observe several family rituals organized to commemorate the dead soldiers. From joining family members to visit the deceased’s gravestones to attending ritual-planning meetings, and accompanying my informants to a distant war cemetery, I gained desirable

32 experiences of doing an ethnographical research as well as strengthening the rapport with my informants.

In the intervening times of my trips in Tân Lộc, when mostly staying in Hanoi, I took part in another fieldwork whose main activities interestingly happened in the virtual world. Four websites were selected for my third chapter which focuses on the commemoration of the dead soldier in the realm of the Internet. The first contacts with founders and administrators of these websites, including the online database www.nhantimdongdoi.org (searching for former comrades) and the virtual memorial www.lietsivietnam.org (Vietnamese war martyrs), the War Martyr Cemetery at www.nhomai.vn and Mr. Nguyễn Sĩ Hồ’s website www.nguoiduado.vn (the ferryman), were made via email in early February 2014. Information sheets which explained details of the study were also sent off to these key informants. They then granted permission and helped me post this information sheet on the websites in June 2014 so that users and visitors of these sites would acknowledge my “presence” and notice that their activities on the sites might be observed. While I mostly focused on doing my fieldwork in Tân

Lộc, my online research was only limited within the use of the observation method.

Different material traces on the websites allowed me to trace and observe activities of their users. Those traces, for example, included textual conversations, messages left for the dead, photos, and music videos posted by users. When in Hanoi in early July and

August 2014, I also conducted some interviews with three founders of selected websites.

Another three founders, administrators and fifteen users were interviewed via email afterwards during the time from September to November 2014, when research for the

33 third chapter was carried out more intensively. I kept observing the websites and doing small follow up interviews until early April 2015.

Internet-based qualitative research simultaneously embraces conveniences and methodological difficulties. I, for instance, could easily observe a wide range of activities conducted by people on the sites, tracing the changes on a daily basis as long as I was connected to the Internet. The flexibility and multiplicity of communication media prevailing in the digital network allowed me to meet and interview my informants despite our geographical distance. Being mediated as an essence of online interaction, moreover, enabled me to invisibly present on the sites, lurking to observe others’ activities without influencing their intentions or behavior and disrupting the normal dynamic of online communities. As I moved back and forth between doing fieldwork in Tân Lộc and the so- called fieldwork on the Internet, I juxtaposed the methods and found myself amazed by the difference between two ways of observing cultural practices. While the traditional, classical concept of the participant observation took me to a far-away field, “out there” in the society, online observation brought another field, the virtual one, closer to me through my computer.

While it was widely accessible yet strongly mediated, online observation, however prevented me from accurately capturing emotional expression accompanying

Internet users’ activities. The interpretation of my informants’ responses which mostly in form of textual medium require more serious consideration, normally led to several follow-up conversations in order to clear things up. In addition, the time lapse between thought and writing as in speech gave interviewees time to think and organize their answer. Therefore, in contrast to the spoken interview in which the direct answer was

34 directly and immediately given, written answers might be filtered and did not totally reflect the actual attitude of the informant. Last but not least, with a wide range of users whose real identities were hardly revealed, it was difficult to determine the research population using conventional criteria of demographic information.

Thereafter, above all divergences, ethnography both in actual and virtual fields, is an interesting transformative experience that forces the researcher to grapple with not only methodological but also ethic issues. Since the very first days of my research, I have never seen the relationship I have with my informants as a simple subject – object one. I have gained from them not “data” for my analysis but an intersubjective construction of knowledge. For the fulfillment of my academic task, I am privileged to hear and reveal to the public the stories of many people which are meaningful for them as much as for myself.

Chapter 1

The Past Doesn’t Pass: Memory and the State in Post-socialist Vietnam

“Between life and death, nationalism has as its own proper space the experience of haunting. There is no nationalism without some ghost.” (Jacques Derrida 1992)

****

With very few reliable sources available, producing an exact counting of military casualties suffered by the Vietnamese during the wars in the 20th century has been an extremely difficult task (Hirschman et al. 1995). While the number of Vietnamese military deaths in the war for independence from the French (1946 – 1954) has not been documented any where, accounts for North Vietnam military casualties in the two subsequent decades of the American war have varied from one source to another. The frequently quoted figures in American reports differ, ranging from 666,000 deaths during

1965-1974 (Lewy 1978: 450-452) to 1.158 million during the time between 1960 and

1975 (McNamara 1991: 111). On the Vietnamese side, historians and journalists have recently cited a figure which was released by the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids, and

Social Affairs, claiming the loss of 1.1 million soldiers during the wars from 1954 to

1975 (Phạm, Hồ 2008: 436; Vũ 2014; T. Long 2014). Moreover, the report from the

Vietnamese government also includes deaths of soldiers killed in less mentioned conflicts

36 such as the Sino-Vietnamese war (1979) and the confrontation with the Khmer Rouge

(1979 - 1989); both conflicts claimed the deaths of forty thousand other PAVN soldiers.2

These quantitative findings matter, despite slight differences they may bear. They all hint at a crucial impetus for remembering – a requisite response to the massive loss of lives. More than any human tragedy, war-related deaths call for a much greater effort to mask and transcend them during and after the war. Here, with particular focus on the

Vietnamese modern state, this chapter examines responses and efforts from the agent whose leadership and nationalist doctrine have played vital roles in the operation as well as implications of all aforementioned wars and conflicts. On the one hand, as the actor who has waged and led the warfare, the state undoubtedly has to bear the responsibility for losing a large number of its citizens’ lives. On the other hand, it possesses the privilege of selecting and imposing on the public a dominating paradigm of memory. The intersection of these two strands of the state’s authority is of critical importance for understanding the memory of dead soldiers and its respective socio-cultural implications.

The state-sanctioned agenda to commemorate soldiers primarily revolves around the conceptualization of the posthumous identity of war martyrs as a special social category. To comprehend this problematic selectiveness of remembrance, this chapter begins with a brief discussion of the foundational context of Vietnamese soldiers and their military lives during the wars. The specific strategy of guerrilla warfare employed by the Vietnamese during the war characterized a peculiar status for the soldier both within the operation of war and the military-civilian relationship. The death of the soldier

2 I haven’t found the original report of the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs, yet this figure has been quoted in many Vietnamese and foreign articles since 1995. In 2014, the Vietnamese Government published a project proposal on establishing the national database on social security system, in which the above figure of military casualties was directly mentioned. 37 caused significant transformation to this status, especially once his/her death was incorporated by and for the state’s objective of constructing an official way of remembering.

Beyond the context of wartime, other significant parts of this chapter are dedicated to connecting the practice of commemoration to recent historical transitions of the country, such as modernization or the shift to post-socialism. While presentations and articulation of dead soldier’s memory have always occupied a significant position in contemporary Vietnamese socio-cultural landscape, it is expected that the recent transformations in social fabric have tangibly and intangibly brought certain new effects to them. The most recent needs of “memory creators” usually call for new stories about the past and new methods in which they are to be shared and employed. To put it in a more specific way, I am not only interested in evaluating the state’s motives for incorporating the memory of dead soldiers, but also in understanding how such memory has been deployed and how its meanings have shifted.

Under my scrutiny, memory, even in the institutionalized paradigm produced by the state authority, therefore, is not fixed and definitive. This chapter, which resonates with arguments made by previous authors, contends that the top-down approach conducted in Vietnam is prevailing but never absolute. I further suggest that behind the construction of official narratives of the past, there exist the discursive-ideological struggle and confrontation within the state itself.

Soldiers and War

Despite its anticipatable consequences normally seen in mass destruction and bloody violence, it is said that war sometimes is an unavoidable reality. At the center of

38 this paradox between the undesirability and unavoidability of war, as Nico Carpentier

(2007) points out, lies the crucial role of the ideological model of war. Defined as sets of ideas that dominate a social formation, and are supported by a set of discourses, rhetoric and narrations, the ideological model of war aims to make meaning of war involvement and to legitimize the use of extreme military violence as a real necessity (Carpentier

2007: 2). By generating the dichotomy between the Self and the Enemy and emphasizing the apparent “threat to the survival of the state and its citizens (and soldiers)” (Carpentier

2007: 1), the ideological model of war, thus, transfers the violent practice of war into the legitimated task of self-defence, and converts the actions of soldiers into the process of hero making. More importantly, because it is institutionalized and repeatedly articulated, the ideological model of war influences not only the perception of war of those who have directly experienced it, but also how the war will be understood by future generations.

In the Vietnamese context, under the rule of the Communist Party, both of the greatest wars in the 20th century, the French and American wars, were built on similar ideological mappings.3 Instead of simply calling them wars (chiến tranh), the official discourse specifically denotes these conflicts as the heroic revolutionary struggles of a unified nation against the invasion by foreign powers. The French war, or the First

Indochina war, is known by the Vietnamese as the “resistance war against France”

(Kháng chiến chống Pháp) (1946-1954); whereas the American war, or the Second

Indochina war, is described as the “War of National Salvation against the Americans”

3 See, for instance, Mark Bradley’s book - Vietnam at War (2009), for detailed outline and analyses of Vietnamese experience in wars during the 20th century.

(Chiến tranh chống Mỹ cứu nước).4 This prevailing construction of the Vietnamese ideological model of war, which highlights the intensity of the struggles and the just cause of protecting the country from foreign aggression or liberating it from occupation has significantly contributed to the legitimization of the state’s military efforts during the wartime. Moreover, by primarily stressing the binary opposition between the Self and the Enemy, the official narrative aimed to blur the internal differences within the imagined community of the nation. It called for the strong focus of all the populations on the political center led by the state and the Communist Party, uniting them to create

“impenetrable frontiers between “us” and “them”, between the Self and the Enemy”

(Carpentier 2007: 2). The concrete implication of such ideological construction was a peculiar and unique doctrine that was titled the “people’s war” by the Vietnamese

Communist Party throughout the struggles. General Võ Nguyên Giáp, Commander-in-

Chief of the People’s Army of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV)5 has described this type of war as following:

4 In the official accounts written by Vietnamese historians, the American war is described as a struggle of the Vietnamese to fight against the American troops who invaded the Southern part of the country. The ultimate goal of the war, therefore, was to liberate the South and to unify the country. To support this official discourse, Vietnamese historians conceptualize the existence of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) in the South mainly as a political instrument with which the Americans exercised their gorverning over the Vietnamese. The government of the RVN did not represent the will and interests of the Southern Vietnamese; instead, they were “pupets” created and controlled by the Americans. In my present research, I accept the official narrative of “fighting against Americans and their puppet” as a significant starting point from which I examine the ideology of war from the vantage point of the Vietnamese Socialist state. However, it is necessary to point out that this official discourse does not sufficiently present the complexity of the American War. This war should be seen as a civil war as much as it is always described as a war against the U.S. The conflict among the Vietnamese regarding the rule of the Communists was essential to the premise and dynamic of the war. In its very essence, the existence of the RVN did represent the political stand of many Vietnamese people, who did not desire to be part of the Communist regime. The involvement of the U.S in Vietnam and their support of the RVN brought the civil conflict to a higher level of being a proxy war framed by the Cold War trajectory. 5 The national military force of Vietnam is known as the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN). The history of PAVN began in the last days of World War II in a Vietnamese mountain cave near the Chinese border when a thirty-two-year-old Hanoi history teacher named Võ Nguyên Giáp and thirty three others, mostly middle class, three of them women, all on the run from the French, banded themselves into what they called Armed Propaganda Team. Under Giáp’s careful husbandry and the guidelines of Hồ Chí Minh, the army of 40

“Hence it is a revolutionary war waged by a whole people on all planes, a revolutionary war fought by a small nation in a narrow and thinly populated country, having an under-developed economy, relying on the strength of an entire people united in struggle.... Moreover, the out-standing characteristic of the people’s war in our country at the present stage is that, in its very process, armed struggle and political struggle are very closely co-ordinated, supporting and stimulating each other. Therefore, the slogan “mobilize the entire people, arm the entire people and fight on all fronts” has become a living and heroic reality” (Võ 1966: 29-30).

Strongly reflecting General Võ Nguyên Giáp and his fellow Communist leaders’

“determination to win [the war] at all costs” (Võ 1962: 46), the doctrine of people’s war aimed at the total mobilization of human forces. It gave no space for the separation between soldiers in combat uniform and patriotic civilians without uniform, between the combat units and the rural villages. Instead, it was only to encourage a “monolithic solidarity” (Võ 1962: 108) of the army and the people who “were of the same heart” and shared the same interest of saving the country. Such unity between soldiers who directly faced the enemy at the front and the populace in the rear gave decisive advantages in the strategic deployment of guerilla warfare. General Võ Nguyên Giáp further described the distinctive military-civilian relation in the Vietnamese guerilla warfare through the metaphor of “fish and water” (Võ 1962: 108). “In fact”, wrote General Giáp, “the people and army are together in the fight against the enemy to save the Fatherland, and ensure the full success of the task of liberating the nation and the working class. The people are to the army what water is to fish” (Võ 162: 49).

thirty four began to grow, initially as a political force with guns into a semi-guerrilla army, then into a full twentieth century armed force. 41

The military doctrine of the people’s war in Vietnam was partly acknowledged to be an application of the lessons taught in modern Chinese and Soviet military academies

(Pike 1986); yet more importantly, its core elements and ideology were affirmed by the

Party leaders and military experts to be rooted in the Vietnamese several-century-long martial heritage (Pike 1986; Võ Nguyên Giáp 1962, 1966). They initially found the evidence of this tradition in various legends of ancient and feudalist heroes whose main strategies in rebellions or wars of resistance against foreign invaders were to strengthen the population’s will to fight and to turn every inhabitant into a soldier. The most outstanding legends including the Trưng Sisters, who overthrew an infinitely superior

Chinese force in A.D.39, general Trần Hưng Đạo, who repelled three major Mongolian invasions in the thirteenth century, and Lê Lợi, who battled the Ming in the fifteenth century. All shared a common military ideology and emphasized this fighting prowess.

The contemporary struggles in modern times were theorized in the same model as these people’s wars, and thus, had a historical continuity with these earlier struggles. Going into battle and dying to save the nation were articulated as an honorable pursuit, “a sacred obligation (nghĩa vụ thiêng liêng) of the people”, and “a prestige that has historically accrued to those who protected the country from foreign aggression or liberation”

(Malarney 2001: 47). The linkages made between the past and the present and the ideological status given to soldiers as successors of legendary heroes turned the meaning of the war as well as the death of those involved into a cause with a higher purpose.

The realization of people’s war ideology, hence, became a legitimate cause for the leaders’ attempts to mobilize and thrust their citizens into the midst of war. It also drastically transformed the structure of Vietnamese society. In 1945 the manpower of the

People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) stood at several tens of thousands. By 1955 it numbered 200,000 (Pike 1986: 2). Decades of war allowed the step by step development of the PAVN from a small band of armed guerrillas into a regular army (Võ 1962: 40).

However, as Douglas Pike insightfully points out to us, Vietnam’s army in its early modern stage during the French war “was never what could be called professionally militaristic, as that term would be applied in the West” (Pike 1986: 281). Instead, the mass mobilization taking place in a poor agricultural country where the peasants made up the great majority of the population resulted in a fact that the majority of men who served in the military during the war were no other than peasants in uniform. Moreover, with no formal conscription process being used in the French war, most of those peasants voluntarily took the position of soldiers fighting in the front. Such volunteering peasant soldiers and their changing lives during the French war were vividly captured by revolutionary poet Chính Hữu in his 1948 written-in-the-trench poem entitled

“Comrades”:

Your birthplace is awashed in brackish waters, And my poor village is just full of pebbles and rocks. You and I were strangers from faraway places Who have never dreamt of an encounter. Gun beside gun and head beside head, Sharing a blanket in wintry nights, you and I quickly become close friends. Comrades! Your land you trusted it to your close friend to till And the empty hut you left to the torturing winds, The water well and the banyan tree missed the volunteering soldier. You and I have experienced bouts of fever, Quivering all over with foreheads dampened with sweat. Your shirt is torn at the shoulder And my pants are patched here and there.

Our smiles are exposed to icy cold And our feet are shoeless. In warm friendship we hold each other hands. Tonight, amidst a quiet jungle in frosty fog You and I stand side by side waiting for the enemy to come. On the muzzles hangs the moon.

As such, embodying the martial tradition treasured as a Vietnamese heritage, a man’s military virtue was not manifested in “trappings, panoply or an emphasis on a military way of life”, but mainly in his mindset or attitude (Pike 1986: 281). From the perspective of Vietnamese communists, the fact that the People’s Army of Vietnam had gained the eventual victory in the nine-year struggle against the French despite the lack of professional expertise and material equipment, confirmed the virtue of the people’s war strategy. Compared to the French war period, the manifestation of war efforts was much more intensive during the American war.

The collapse of French colonialization in 1954 simultaneously led to the international recognition of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), an independent state in the north of Vietnam. Consequently, the newly emergent state started to replace voluntary with compulsory military service. The pilot test of military conscription was launched in 1957 and lasted for two years in four provinces in the north of Vietnam.

After the test was completed, the official law was enacted in April 1960. Consequently, all male citizens from every section of society had to register for military service when they turned eighteen. They then were expected to be drafted within 18 months following registration.

After years of carrying out the policy of compulsory military service, the armed forces of the DRV developed in both quantity and organizational structure. By 1965 the

44 size of PAVN was estimated to be 400,000. Bearing the responsibilities of “safeguarding peace and socialist construction, to help in making the North a strong rampart for the peaceful reunification of the country” (Võ 1962: 51), conscription become more than a citizen’s obligation regulated by law, soldiers were taught that joining the army was prestigious. Nationalist fervor, politically created and strategically fueled by the

Communist Party during the French war, continued to play an important role in ensuring the success of Vietnam’s mass mobilization in the struggle that followed. Especially since the escalation of war in 1965, with U.S large scale military interventions, the nationalist sentiments were raised to the maximum by Communist leaders in order to gain the populace’s commitment to the military struggle of the socialist regime. The honour mission of supporting fellow countrymen in the South to fight against U.S troops called for higher willingness from the people.6 Consequently, in accordance to the Wartime

Mobilization decree signed by President Hồ Chí Minh on 27 April, 1965, the DRV extended draft eligibility for men aged 18–25 to those aged 16–45 (Bradley 2009: 132).

It seemed, however, in contradistinction to the development in structure and organization of the PAVN, which was claimed to be becoming a modern and standardized army, the prototypical, or composite Vietnamese soldier did not change

6 The main theater of the Second Indochina War was in the south of Vietnam where Vietnamese Communists fought against the regime of the Republic of Vietnam and its American supporters. To mobilize people in the insurgency, South-based Communists established the National Liberation Front (NLF - Mặt Trận Giải Phóng Dân Tộc) in 1960 and its armed forces – the NLF’s People’s Liberation Armed Force (PLAF). Both leadership and equipment of NLF and PLAF were supplied by the Communist Party and PAVN. In the early stage of the war, however, due to their commitment to the Geneva treaty, Hanoi-based leaders always denied their association with PLAF and articulated that it was an indigenous force of Southern Vietnamese. Later on, and as recorded in official history books nowadays in Vietnam, the Communist Party reversed its claim, affirming that both the North and the South armed forces were always a single unity. Consequently, a large number of North soldiers was sent to the South and several PAVN “filler packets” in PLAF units were created, which rapidly developed into entire PAVN divisions and infantries in the South from 1965 onward.

45 much. The ordinary foot soldier in the early 1970s in the description of Pike and their predecessors were quite alike.

He was 23 years old, born and raised in a village, a member of bần cố (poor for many generations) class, unmarried, with less than five years’ formal education. His rural, agrarian background was probably the dominant influence on his thinking. He was one of five children who lived his pre-army life in an extended family arrangement that included several generations and collateral relatives…..His limited schooling did not seem to him to impose any particular difficulty in coping with army life, except in attaining technical work. He was raised as a nominal Buddhist, but has always been subject to many direct and indirect Confucian and Taoist influences. He was singularly uninformed about the outside world, even other parts of Vietnam. (Pike 1986: 281-282)

Once enlisted, the men received infantry training and learned how to use weapons such as automatic rifles, machines guns, anti-tank and anti-aircraft rockets. All weapons were supplied by Russia and China. The combat skill training was normally given during the daytime, and at night, the soldier and his comrades received political education classes. At those special classes, the company’s political instructor enlightened them about the ultimate leadership of the Communist Party, the doctrine of people’s war, the responsibility as well as the honour of belonging to a people’s army. They also learned about the war situation and the glorious task of being involved in it. After the preliminary training, most of the soldiers were sent to the Southern Front (Pike 1986: 150-61). The duration of preparation for the actual involvement in the war varied, depending on the period of conscription. It lasted about two years for those who enlisted before 1965, but was only about two months for the subsequent enlistees. The wartime conscription rules also set forth an unlimited period of serving for the PAVN soldiers; they served the army as long as necessary. As a result, throughout the long war, those discharged were only the badly disabled and some who had reached age fifty (Pike 1986: 308)

Image 1: "Speedy operating to unify the country - Where there is an enemy we will crush him” – A propaganda poster depicts the operation of Vietnamese soldiers from North to South along the Hồ Chí Minh trail. Undeniably, for hundreds of thousands of young men who had been siphoned off to the regular armed forces, their lives were changed, mostly in a dramatic way. Yet, given the comprehensive nature of the Vietnamese-styled people’s war, regular citizens who were involved in combat activities accounted for an even greater number of combatants, and with undoubtedly drastic transformations within the Vietnamese society.

Historically, paramilitary forces have formed significant components of the

PAVN (Võ 1962, 1966; Pike 1986). Self-defense units (tự vệ) whose tasks were to ensure public security and order in rural villages and to form a reserve defense force, were set up in the early 1940s in the liberated zone of Việt Bắc, prior to the official emergence of the

PAVN. With the shortage of regular forces during the early years of the French War, the self-defense force was considered a significant part of the revolutionary army. Over time, self-defense units in rural villages grew into local armed groups, or armed platoons, and became freed or partially freed from food production. Their prioritized task was shifted from ensuring internal order within villages to fighting the enemy as soon as he arrived at

47 their villages. The situation and position of the self-defense force within the PAVN during the French war was described by General Giáp as follows:

“Should the enemy attack the regions where our troops were stationed, the latter would give battle. Should he ferret about in the large zones where there were no regular formations, the people would stay his advance with rudimentary weapons: sticks, spears, scimitars, bows, flint-locks. From the first days, there appeared three types of armed forces: para-military organizations or guerrilla units, regional troops and regular units. These formations were, in the field of organization, the expression of the general mobilization of the people in arms. They co-operated closely with one another to annihilate the enemy (Võ 1962: 44-45)

From localities in the liberated zone of Việt Bắc, the network of self-defense units spread to districts in urban centers. In addition to groups of self-defenders set up in every residence unit, factories, schools, and hospitals were instructed to organize self-defense groups themselves. Thus, recruits of those self-defense units were in fact villagers, teachers, students, factory workers equipped with rudimentary infantry skills and improvised weapons. Among them, many were females and adolescents.

When peace eventually came to the people of North Vietnam, local self-defense units were enhanced by the participation of volunteer soldiers demobilized from the regular force. They now had an additional task of organizing a reserve force ready to join or rejoin the permanent army while taking part in production and ensuring the security and defense of their localities. Young men, thus, were inculcated into self-defense units two years prior to their official enlistment. A typical way of understanding a self-defense unit’s function can be retrieved from the recollection of a PAVN veteran, Tran Thanh, in his interview with an American writer:

“After elementary school, I returned to my village in 1954 and became a farmer working in rice paddies and coffee plantations. As with all the males between sixteen

and fifty-nine, I joined the “self-defense force” in 1955. The self-defense force was a local militia organization. Based on the rice-rooted, traditional “village self-defense team”, it was well established in the rural area across North Vietnam. The self-defense force in my village was under the command of a self-defense committee. The county committee was commanded by the provincial self-defense committee. In my village, each family had two or three militia members. Three families formed a group, three groups became a team, and three teams served as a section. All the section leaders sat on the village self-defense committee. I remember that we drilled regularly with light weapons, and that we provided local security and emergency or rescue services. Women and children under sixteen were encouraged to participate in some or our training and activities.” (Tran Thanh in Li 2010: 42)

After two years of farming and training in his village self-defense unit, Tran

Thanh was drafted in 1958 and then sent to the South in 1960. His path of military experience started and developed in a manner similar to that of the majority of PAVN regular soldiers. Nevertheless, given the fact that Tran Thanh’s story took place in the early 1950s, immediately following the peace, it may not give sufficient description of membership of self-defense units in general. In fact, rather than being encouraged to participate in some training and activities, as Tran Thanh stated, women played a more significant role in self-defense forces, both in training and combat in wartime.

Even though exact demographic data regarding self-defense force membership during the war is not available, there is strong evidence that women played a crucial role in the network of grass-root self-defense forces. A large number of wartime propaganda posters depicted images of women who carried sickles in their hands and rifles on their backs. More than that, official accounts from historians have provided stronger evidence for the issue (Phan and Turner 1998; Taylor 1999). For instance, the metaphor of “long haired warriors” is widely used to refer to all-female self-defense units developed and

49 spread throughout the Southern provinces since 1960.7 Nationally, the level of engagement of women at the grass-roots level of the defense system was significantly increased through the conduction of “three responsibilities” (Ba Đảm Đang) campaign launched by the Women’s Union in 1965. The tenets of the campaign, which was specifically aimed at women, included: (1) to take over production and the jobs of men fighting at the front, (2) to assume control of the household in the absence of husband or sons, and (3) to take charge of any help needed at the front and be prepared for battle.

Without any doubt, the “three responsibilities” campaign was to encourage women to devote themselves more fully to the family, the war and society (Vietnam’s Women

Union, 1965).

In addition to men and women in regular armed forces and self-defense units, the appeal for national liberation made by the Communist Party was also responded to by a large number of young Vietnamese who participated in the Youth Shock Brigades8

(Thanh Niên Xung Phong - YSB). Specifically aimed at young people, the YSB was established on May 3, 1950 with the primary mission of dealing with rear service activities such as “opening, repairing and rebuilding roadways; transporting of military

7 In January 1960, an uprising led by Nguyễn Thị Định – a female Communist, took place in Định Thủy Commune, Mỏ Cày district, Bến Tre province in the South Vietnam. The uprising rapidly spread throughout the South and Southern Central regions, facilitating a movement called Đồng Khởi (The Simultaneous Uprising). The most famous participants in this movement was the Long Haired Army, a fighting unit with all female members led by Nguyễn Thị Định. In 1966, in his speech at the 20th anniversary of Vietnam Women’s Union, Hồ Chí Minh praised the long haired army and urged women throughout the country to follow Nguyễn Thị Định and her female comrades. In 1968, Nguyễn Thị Định published her memoir entitled Không Còn Đường Nào Khác, which was translated into English and published in the U.S in 1972: Nguyễn Thị Định, 1972, No Other Road to Take, Elliot, Mai (transtralor), Southeast Asia Program Publications, Ithaca, New York.

8 The Vietnamese phrase Xung Phong is equivalent to assault or shock in English. It is a strong term that suggested readiness to launch an attack, as well as a mixture of volunteerism and patriotism. YSB is translated literally by Douglas Pike as “Youth ‘rush to the front’ organization.” (Pike1986: 328) 50 material and of the wounded; and locating and identifying the positions of delayed- action bombs and underwater mines” (Ministry of National Defense 2004: 926).

Under the direct supervision of Hồ Chí Minh and his personal secretary, membership in YSB swelled from 225 in 1950 to between fourteen thousand and twenty-three thousand recruits, according to different military estimates, in 1954

(Guillemot 2009: 20). Significantly, during this period of time, members of YSB units successfully transported a hundred tons of arms and food to the isolated revolutionary bases in the Northeastern mountainous region (Văn Tùng 1990:7). With the lack of vehicles, opening roads and transporting such a huge amount of supplies was extremely grueling. Furthermore, in preparation for the campaign of Điện Biên Phủ, besides handling the logistical tasks, eight thousand volunteers from the YSB brigades were sent directly to the battlefield to compensate for losses inflicted on the regular forces of the

PAVN. As a result, one-fifth of the forty-two thousand troops engaged at Điện Biên Phủ were drawn from the ranks of YSB (Guillemot 2009: 21).

The evolution of the YSB took an enormous step during the war that followed. In

1965, as an urgent response to the escalation of the war, units of YSB launched a large- scale recruitment. Unlike the governmental pattern in the French War, most of the YSB units in the North during the time of 1965 – 1975 were placed under the administration of the Ministry of Transportation. Those located in the South were led by the National

Liberation Front which was established in 1960.

Pivotally, as a historical coincidence, all main campaigns of mass mobilization of the DRV government were launched at the same time as the recruitment to the YSB units. In addition to the abovementioned “Three Responsibilities” campaign, the “Three

Readies” (Ba Sẵn Sàng) movement started on August 9, 1964, and was strategically aimed at young people nationally, urging them to be ready (1) to join the armed forces in battle, (2) to tackle all problems and intensify production, work, and study, and (3) to go where the country needed them (Võ 1966: 21-23).

The appealing atmosphere of national mobilization, thereby influenced the results of the Youth Shook Brigade recruitment. While more than 140.000 youths voluntarily participated in the YSB between 1950 and 1975, nearly half were recruited during 1965-

1967 (Nguyễn Văn Đệ 2002: 198-204). These “youth volunteers” were “mostly youth from agricultural cooperatives, students from middle and vocational schools, and children of cadres” (Văn Tùng and Nguyễn Hồng Thanh 2002: 279). They were incredibly young at the time of recruitment, as Guillemot notes, mostly between 15 and

20 years old, and even as young as 13 (Guillemot 2009: 27). More importantly, a large portion of recruits were females who typically comprised from 50 percent to 70 percent of the total membership of every unit. Specially, it was not difficult to find units that were made up almost exclusively of young girls (Nguyễn Văn Đệ 1997: 66-70).

Enlisted at a very young age, many of these “teen-soldiers” (Guillemot 2009: 27)

“had never left home before” or “not used to walking more than five to seven kilometers” (Nguyễn Văn Đệ 1997: 57-58). They unsurprisingly lacked all required military skills. When joining the unit, they were equipped with simple tools, such as pickaxes and shovels, and were immediately sent to the front lines. Like earlier generation of youth volunteers in the French War, young girls in the YSB during 1965-

1975 were assigned to deal with the tasks of opening roads, transporting supplies from the North to the South, disposing of delayed-action bombs, and filling bomb craters.

Many of them also worked as emergency nurses. In a contradistinction to prevailing images of young female volunteers bearing bright smiles seen in DRV propaganda pictures and the nick name given to them as “flowers on the front lines”, typical missions assigned to the YSB were physically difficult, arduous and dangerous. In reality, the challenges were even more intensive for those who performed the tasks along the Hồ Chí Minh trail, which runs along the Trường Sơn Range and was covered with jungle (Guillemot 2009). As a result, young girls of YSB were often unable to avoid enemy contact and had to be directly involved in combat activities and face-to-face encounters with the enemy.

Image 2: “Ensure the roads are open for the victory” – A Shock Girl on the Hồ Chí Minh trail. (Source: http://dogmacollection.com/gallery/the-ho-chi-minh-trail/ensure-the-roads-are-open-for- victory.html)

The involvement of YSB girls and numerous other Vietnamese women in the war effort is briefly yet tellingly summarized in the statement “even the women must fight”

(Turner- Gottschang and Phan 1998). In the scope of this research, moreover, this statement implies broader relations, such as those of male-female and military-civilian. In the special context of Vietnam in which the intensive operation of a people’s war model had “erased entirely the line between military and civilian” (Pike 1986: 111/175 -1), fighting the war was never the exclusive domain of men and regular soldiers. Instead, people’s war in reality is a process of militarization in which “responsibility, technology, and training can transform a citizen into a warrior; passion, patriotism, and belief can also turn an ordinary individual into a soldier” (Li 2010: 9). The peculiar integration of the regular army and the militia leads to the fact that the identification of soldiers is highly complicated concept to describe. Consequently, constructing a monolithic collective memory of soldiers in war would be a very challenging.

Above all the complexity and contradiction, for all ordinary-people-turned-into- soldiers, the war obviously changed their lives in a multitude of ways. Unfortunately, many of them, encountered the most salient transformation – death – which put an end to their human experience in the war theatre. The mass ending of lives, in turn, has complicated the ways in which the wars would be remembered.

“Certificated” Memory

Based on his observation of the First World War in European countries, Mosse introduces the notion of “the Myth of War Experience” that was constructed by the involved nations through the process of adopting memories of the veterans who saw the war as containing positive elements. The Myth of War, thus, transformed the reality of the war experience into a masked, legitimated and sacred memory of this reality, in which the cult of the fallen soldier played a central part (Mosse 1990: 6-8). Through the

54 elaboration and propagation of the nation-states, especially their missions of the burial of the fallen soldiers and the commemoration of the war, the Myth of War Experience became the predominant discourse, transforming the death of soldiers into a symbol of the glorious past shared by the nation as a whole.

The (re)construction of memory in Vietnam, however, has occurred in the opposite direction as the generalized framework for construction, representation, and interpretation of memory has been previously established by the state and authorized agents. Individual and collective memories then are expected to fit into this hegemonic mold. The state decides not only what to remember but also how to remember.

It was on 27th July, 1947, at a time when the French War had just begun, that a meeting was held in a commune of Thái Nguyên province. Participants including representatives of some crucial state organizations and localities approved the proposal offered by the Department of Politics of the Vietnam National Defence Army, designating 27th July as the National War Invalids Day (Ngày Thương Binh Quốc Gia).

One year later, the event was renamed the War Invalids and Martyrs Day (Ngày Thương

Binh Liệt Sĩ). Hồ Chí Minh, President of the newly established state of The Democratic

Republic of Vietnam, also expressed his consent in his letters sent to the 1947 meeting and the ceremony in 1948. The 1948 letter read:

“They have determinedly sacrificed their lives to protect the lives of their compatriots. They have sacrificed their families and properties to protect their compatriots’ families and properties. They have risked their lives to fight the enemy so that our Fatherland and compatriots are alive. Among them, many have left parts of their body on the battlefield. Many have died on the battlefield. They are war invalids and martyrs.

For whom have they sacrificed? War invalids and martyrs have sacrificed for the Fatherland and compatriots. To repay them for their meritorious efforts, our people must eternally record and remember the sacrifice of war invalids and martyrs. We must constantly study their courageous spirit to transcend all difficulties and tribulations” (Hồ Chí Minh 1948 in Nguyễn, Lê 2003; 508).

The designation of the War Invalids and Martyrs Day, together with Hồ Chí

Minh’s statement may be seen as the beginning of commemorative projects dedicated to those who belonged to an exclusive group called war martyrs. Due to the primary relevance which emphasizes the manner of the subject whose death is elevated to the level of sacrifice, “war martyr” has been used to render into English the Vietnamese phrase liệt sĩ. However, this translation, I argue, inefficiently represents the complex history of the original phrase the meaning of which has constantly been defined and redefined by the revolutionaries. While martyrs in post World War I Europe, as Mosse

(1990) described, received their designation from Christian doctrine, Vietnamese liệt sĩ had nothing to do with any religious origins. The term “liệt sĩ” is Sino-Vietnamese, and is derived from the Chinese lieshi (烈士). Though the concept of lieshi had existed across several dynasties preceding the modern era in China, its martyrdom gloss as only added in the 20th century under the influence of revolutionary movements and Communism.9 In

9 In a discussion among members of the Vietnam Studies Group (VSG), Liam Kelly who is an expert in Chinese history helpfully provided information about the semiotic evolution of lieshie in ancient times. According to Kelly, the term has been in use for more than 2,000 years in China, originally referring to someone who was upright and of good moral character. In the first few centuries A.D. it seemed to have taken on another related meaning of someone with the ambition to establish a great meritorious enterprise (i.e. to establish a record of loyal service to a dynasty, etc.). Therefore, in neither of these cases did lieshie have anything to do with dying. These aspects only came in the 20th century, especially when semantics of lieshi were linked to the cause of revolution and war, and the term officially took on its martyrdom gloss (Liam Kelly). In modern use of the term, Chang-tai Hung (2008) originally introduced the concept of lieshi as “red martyr” in his discussion of Communist remembrance of those who sacrificed their lives in the war of 56 addition to honoring individual’s moral values, the new semantics of lieshie “placed a novel and weightier emphasis on the revolutionary dead as models for the living to emulate” (Hung 2008: 280). Thus, in the new usage, lieshi applied to individuals who had died in support of the revolutionary cause. Examples of the first lieshe as modern, or

“revolutionary” martyrs were revolutionaries who died fighting against the Qing dynasty in the Xinhai Revolution (辛亥) in 1911. Their commemoration was then extensively promoted by the Tongmenhhui (同盟会) and the Guomingtang (國民黨) in the late

1910s. Hung (2008) and Hall (2010), however, argue that only under the regime of

Chinese Communism in the 1930s and 1940s, was the concept of lieshi, and its martyrdom and commemoration developed as a “cult” (Hung’s treatment) or as a

“meme” (Hall’s treatment), with a wide range of practices and deeper immersion in national ideology.

The significance of Communist martyr remembrance, from what these authors articulate, lies in its power to promote a particular “political agenda” through “carefully manipulated politics of commemoration” (Hung 2008: 281). That the phrase liệt sĩ came into official usage in Vietnam was not only a consequence of Chinese linguistic influence but also a common model of remembrance practice shared by many socialist nations. Of course, similar to the fate of lieshie in Chinese, the semantics of Vietnamese liệt sĩ has been changed over time under the effort of the state. In a 1957 government document, a

resistance against Japan in the late 1930s. For Hung, red martyrs are defined predominantly through their sacrifices for the cause of patriotic resistance. Jared Hall (2010), however, traces back the emergence of China’s first red martyrs to early 1920s. His study focuses on the February Seventh martyrs as a way to show that Communist martyr remembrance had earlier origins than the war of resistance against Japan. Although the specific term “red martyr” is only used sporadically in Chinese, Hung employs “red martyr” primarily as an analytical category aimed at distilling Communist remembrance of “revolutionary martyrs” as distinct from Guomindang and earlier anti-Qing manifestations. 57 liệt sĩ was characterized as “a person who devoted himself for the revolutionary struggle against imperialism and feudalism and died gloriously on this field of honor since 1925”

(Vietnamese Government 1957 in Nguyễn, Lê 2003: 42). By including those who died in nationalist movements in 1925, before the Vietnamese Communist Party was founded, the statement clearly underlined the primacy of the struggle for national independence as the principal metric for determining martyrdom. It generally indicated liệt sĩ as someone who had died performing noble deeds serving the revolution regardless of their social class, religion and political point of view (Vietnamese Government 1957 in Nguyễn, Lê

2003: 42).

Later on, in February 1960, the Ministry of Home Affairs issued a new decree, aiming to provide more precise criteria for defining liệt sĩ. Accordingly, “HAVING

DIED GLORIOUSLY” (Capitals original, Vietnam Ministry of Home Affairs, 1960) was reemphasized as the primacy of a liệt sĩ’s virtue. The decree clearly stated that “the purpose of offering official recognition to liệt sĩ is to heighten our national tradition of heroic struggle” (Ministry of Home Affairs, 1960). Within this principle frame, it was necessary to carefully evaluate and verify circumstances of individuals’ deaths in order to determine whether they would receive the war martyr classification. Hence, individuals who died while tenaciously and courageously struggling despite the dangerousness of the circumstances that they were involved in would qualify for the title of liệt sĩ, a model for the living to emulate. Otherwise, in similar circumstances, those who died without presenting these principal virtues would not be recognized as liệt sĩ.

There was, in principle, an inclusiveness embraced by the term liệt sĩ;the category was supposed to consist of both combatants and non-combatants. The actual

58 application of such state-sanctioned schema over decades has facilitated a relatively different implication otherwise. Military casualties have made up the majority, if not the whole, of the Vietnamese liệt sĩ category. It is revealing that greater attention has been paid to soldiers than to non-combatants. Eventually, in both official Vietnamese documents and in daily use, the phrase liệt sĩ is most commonly referred to soldiers who were killed in battle.10

This change and its eventual results are understandable when considering that the construction of the war martyr category was strongly framed by the Vietnamese ideology of heroic war. Together with other political strategies to form a coherent agenda, it was deployed to serve the most prioritized appeal for military engagements during interwar years. The category, hence, established a central position for soldiers whose political status as carriers of sacred revolutionary missions had been claimed at the beginning of their military involvement. However, upon closer scrutiny, the absence of official recognition for civilian deaths in the category of liệt sĩ revealed a conceptual paradox of the widely-claimed model of people’s war. Millions of Vietnamese civilians killed in the war are collectively called “victims of war” (nạn nhân chiến tranh), connoting their deaths as passive ones in comparison with the noble deaths of soldiers. The ideological distinction between these two kinds of deaths is in contrast with the conceptualization of an inseparable unity of soldiers and people propagandized through the metaphor of fish and water. Moreover, in reality, the guerilla warfare of Vietnam could have not been conducted without the indispensable support provided by the populace to the soldiers

10 For instance, in the report published by the Vietnam’s Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs as quoted in the beginning of this paper, authors originally used the phrase liệt sĩ (war martyrs) to indicate Vietnamese military casualties in wars. 59 who were dependent on them. On both theoretical and practical levels, therefore, this paradox loudly speaks of the problematic manipulation by Vietnamese authorities. They

“unite civilians and the military in wartime and then divide them when memorializing the war” (Kwon 2002: 68).

The controversy shown in the relationship between the Vietnamese state and its perished citizens is equivalent to what Jean Baudrillard means in his statement: “The power of the State is based on the management of life as the objective afterlife”

(Baudrillard 1993: 144). The adoption of war ideology resulted in an official framework conceptualizing the special status of soldiers and its continuity in commemoration after death. More importantly, by establishing a centralized authority assisted by a top-down administrative system, the state, to a certain extent, was able to systematically monopolize the realization of this framework in the public space of commemoration.

The Ministry of War Invalids and Martyrs was established in 1947 to facilitate the government’s policies and practices related to war martyrs. The structure of the Ministry, like any other ones in Vietnam, possesses a complex institutional apparatus. From headquarters in Hanoi, its departmental offices radiate to the mid-points on provincial and district levels and from these down to the commune.

The agenda of war martyr commemoration conducted through this system during the years between 1950s and 1980s, as detailed by Malarney’s in his accounts, was heavily politicalized (Malaney 2001, 2002). Specifically, upon the death of a soldier, two special documents, the “Death Announcement” (Giấy Báo Tử) and a diploma entitled

“the Fatherland Acknowledge the Merit” (Tổ Quốc Ghi Công) were issued to confirm his/her death and verify the state’s recognition of his/her posthumous status as a war

60 martyr. The documents were then given to the next of kin of the soldier. They, as evidence of the state’s honour to a noble citizen, then became essential paperwork for the family to get further financial and social aid from the government.11 Together with rewarding certificates and other support provided to the family, an official memorial service called Lễ Truy Điệu also came into existence. In Malarney’s description, the memorial ceremony, which was exclusively designed to replace the traditional funeral ceremony for war martyrs, even though it often took place in the dead soldier’s home, was conspicuously attended by local officials. The purpose of these special guests’ presence at the ceremony was to hand out the Death Announcement and the Tổ Quốc Ghi

Công certificate to the family. An official speech was also made by the Social Officer who spoke on behalf of the delegation, paying tribute to the deceased and urging the living to learn from him (Malarney 2001: 54-58; 2002: 175-179).

Throughout Malarney’s accounts, the Vietnamese state is presented as a powerful agent who, through the employment of a complex bureaucratic system, had extended its reach to even the most basic grass-roots units of the family and local communities. More significantly, aiming to insert its version of memory into the lives of as many citizens as possible, the state turned local spaces into the main locus of its commemorative projects.

Beside the memorial service for the dead soldiers, Malarney provides us with other examples of this commemorative strategy, such as the celebration of the War Invalids and

Martyrs Day and the creation of the cult of the individual for certain war martyrs

11 In the years between 1950s and 1980s the dispensations given to families of war martyrs were substantial. Their family members were helped in finding jobs, their children’s tuition was subsidized, and they were assisted in their work-related operation and agricultural tasks. The government aid also included preferential admissions to hospitals and easier admission to the Communist Party for members of their families (Nguyễn, Lê 2003; see also Pike 1986: 315). 61

(Malarney 2007: 521-524). Practices of these repertoires were seen in every local commune where the state’s cadres played the significant role in determining their form and content. These local officials, who followed the same instructive protocol designed by their superiors in Hanoi, tended to turn all the events organized throughout the country into formalized and stereotyped performances.12 In doing so, and by intensively localizing its national framework, the state did not seek to develop regional or national level events involving thousands of people, instead it mobilized the populace through countless small-scale engagements.

Arguably, given the Vietnamese context during the war, the commemorative sanctions exercised by the Vietnamese authorities, while deliberately limited within selected spaces and scales, was effective. It helped the state gain crucial attention to their aims which then expanded from the direct families of late soldiers to other local residents. The task of shaping an institutional memory was conducted by redirecting the focus of the people from a soldier as someone they knew to an abstract image of that soldier as a national hero. This connection was crucial, since it tied the objectives of the official remembrance project to the local community and the living space of all

Vietnamese.

Commemorating the dead, however, do not only involve the construction of the ideological meanings of their lives and deaths, but also directly involve the issue of their materiality – the bodies. During the war, for instance, in the U.S media there was an increasingly graphic portrayal of soldiers wounded and killed in combat. Capturing the

12 Celebration activities included presenting gifts to the families of war martyrs and giving laudatory speeches recording their sacrifices. The commemorating for the fallen was then expressed by observing a moment of silence and through wreath offered by the ceremonial participants at the war memorials. Some of the state and party leaders would pay visits to local ceremonies or to the families of war martyrs. 62 tragic side of the war, which was seen in how soldiers and their bodies had been obliterated violently, these images partly aided the shift in the American public attitude toward the war and its aftermath collective memories. On the Vietnamese side, nevertheless, such details about the death of soldiers were considered inappropriate to and conflicted with the preferred doctrine of heroic war, and so were never officially displayed, at least before the 1990s. Even the number of military casualties, as mentioned previously, was only revealed to the public in 1994.

In addition to the censorship regarding the accessibility to images of soldiers’ dead bodies, the deaths of a large number of soldiers also led to a specific burial practice: as there were no formal resting places for the dead, soldiers were buried where they fell.

Graves were marked with temporary markers and the locations of these cursory burials were recorded. Amidst the chaos of the war, nothing was more applicable than providing the dead soldiers with this simple postmortal care. Yet, when the war finally came to an end, producing a new context of shaping collective memory, the issue of soldiers’ bodies has called for greater attention from the living.

Generally, mass excavation and reburial of the dead has been seen as the most immediate task for nations-states in the postwar peace process. Corpses of fallen soldiers are removed from their temporary graves and transferred to military cemeteries. The designation of exclusive burial places for soldiers, separated from those of civilians’, as

Mosses observes, was first initiated by European countries in post World War I era. The practice aimed to serve a dual purpose - to lessen the pressure on government from families who had been demanding proper burials for their beloved ones, and to create commemorative spaces for national remembrance of the fallen. Above all, compared to

63 the neglect of dead soldiers in preceding regimes, the chief motivation in the creation of military cemeteries in post World War I lay in the elevated status of soldiers who had become the central agents in modern nationalism and a new ideological model of war

(Mosses 1990: 46).

Vietnamese authorities eventually joined the practice of building up military cemeteries, embracing similar objectives to those of their foreign counterparts. In

October 1955, a year after the Geneva conference that had arranged a ceasefire in

Vietnam, the Ministry of War Invalids issued a circular to provide guidelines in exhuming and reburying war martyrs’ remains. Accordingly, remains of soldiers would be removed from their current temporary places to cemeteries in the nearest communes.

In such residence units, dead soldiers would be reburied in areas separated from civilians.

They would be gathered in their own burial places, which should be located at the center of the communes. Apart from those cemeteries managed by local administration units, military cemeteries would also be established at the sites of former battlefields which possessed specific historical meanings.

The outcome of the state’s policy on constructing war martyr’s cemeteries during the 1950s was the emergence of a thousand small burial sites across the country. Like other repertoires of commemoration sponsored by the state, physical sites for the remembrance of dead soldiers were built mainly on small scales. The only three national sites built in the 1950s are those dedicated to soldiers who died in the Điện Biên Phủ campaign. The A1 cemetery is the resting place of 644 soldiers whose remains were reburied at the cemetery from 1958-1960. The Độc Lập cemetery, whose construction was started in 1957 and was completed in 1958, consists of 2,432 graves. The Him Lam

64 cemetery was established during 1957-1960 and contains 869 tombstones. All of the three cemeteries are located on former battlefields of the historic Điện Biên Phủ; their sizes range from 17,000 to 33,000 square metres. As they are located not very far from each other, the three cemeteries are linked together to form a complex of grave sites, gardens and squares.

After a long disruption during 1960-1975, the campaign of constructing war martyrs’ cemeteries was resumed in 1976. Several hundreds of thousands of soldier graves were exhumed and reburied in local cemeteries; while an equal number of others were gathered in cemeteries in provincial and national-levels. The largest cemetery in

Vietnam to date is the Trường Sơn National Cemetery whose construction was started in

October 1975 and completed in April 1977. Located in Quảng Trị province, the cemetery covers almost 14 hectares and includes a war memorial located at the top of a 32-meter- hill. It is the final resting place for 10,333 regular soldiers and volunteers who died along the Hồ Chí Minh trail in the American War.

In the early 1990s, another wave of war cemetery construction was facilitated.

Particularly, in December 1993 a decision signed by the Prime Minister urged people to put more effort into the work of locating war martyrs’ graves and constructing war cemeteries. It was a time when the 50th anniversary of the War Invalids and War Martyrs

Day was approaching, so the Prime Minister believed that this campaign would be the best to express the government and people’s gratitude towards the country’s heroes. The government’s decision instructed people to cease building new war cemeteries in local communes. Instead, the majority of new investment would be used to establish larger ones at historical sites of former battlefields and renovate existing cemeteries.

From 1995 to 1997, as part of this the government’s plan, the national cemetery of

Road 9 was constructed. Located in the town of Đông Hà, Quảng Trị province, the cemetery, whose size is 13,000 square metres, is home for 10,500 war martyrs. Beside the newly emergent Road 9 cemetery, a vast number of existing cemeteries has been renovated since 1994. Three of the Điện Biên Phủ sites were redeveloped in 1995, the

Trường Sơn cemetery got was ungraded in 1999, and from 2011 to 2014, the Road 9 cemetery was also refurbished. The renovations that were conducted throughout the country mainly focused on adding more components, such as parks, gardens and monuments, into the existing structure.

Consequently, decades after the war, war martyr cemeteries have been dotting the country. By 2005, there were 2,918 war martyr cemeteries in Vietnam. Of those, 2,439 were established in local communes and contained 783,368 graves of war martyrs (Tạ

2006). In Quảng Trị province13 alone there are seventy cemeteries exclusively dedicated to the Vietnamese who died along the Hồ Chí Minh trail.

In all local sites and those in higher levels, the tombs of war martyrs are stylized and distinguishable; each grave has a small headstone on which is displayed a red star above the deceased’s name, rank, and death date. In national cemeteries, the graves are divided into different zones based on the native communes of the dead. Each cemetery has a specific zone where the tombs of unknown soldiers are placed.

13 Quảng Trị province has a significant geographic position as the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and the crossway between the North and the South, which was set by the Geneva conference in 1954, run through its land. Quảng Trị was one of the most intensive battlefields during the American War. 66

Image 3: Graves of war martyrs at Trường Sơn national cemetery. (Photo by author – August 2012)

The agenda of designating and developing special burial spaces for dead soldiers in Vietnam, therefore, follows the prevailing pattern seen in almost all postwar societies.

Mosse emphasizes the nationalized nature of this practice, in which military cemeteries are not only the resting places of the fallen but also the “shrines of national worship” and

“focus of public’s attention” (Mosse, 1990: 80). The particular application in the

Vietnamese context resonates well with Mosse’s confirmation, yet it underlines even more significant implications. The widespread placement of war martyr’s cemeteries evidently shows that state-sanctioned “sites of memory” have been extended beyond the limited sphere of local communities. Unlike what happened during the interwar years, broader landscapes have been recently incorporated to develop massive commemorative projects. The shift from wartime to peacetime undoubtedly has provided the state with more convenient conditions to nationalize their memorialization initiatives with larger scales and with more diverse practices. Yet, the peacetime has also posited pivotal challenges to the state. The real human cost and other negative sides of the war that were

67 kept unknown for a long time has been gradually revealed. Questions about the fate of millions of men and women who died in the name of the country have been the central concern of many people, especially since the early 1990s. This transformative environment has generated the intensification in the domain of war dead commemoration, which aims to reinforce the legitimated framework of heroism.

Consequently, beyond the scope of ritual engagement limited in local homes and communes, the existence of war cemeteries has provided people with both symbolic and physical connections to the dead. On the one hand, it sends out an instructive message, asserting that the dead, as heroic fighters who have fulfilled the mission of protecting the country, deserve prestigious resting places with permanent care. On the other hand, cemeteries as sites of memory that deal with the most pivotal element of the death – the dead bodies and their postmortal care - allow mourners actually to feel, see and touch material objects during their remembrance of the dead. Consequently, they therefore have drawn greater attention from the public. Every year, for instance, Trường Sơn cemetery alone, receives more than 4 million visitors who come to pay tribute (Vinh Phong 2014).

National and provincial events to mark the anniversary of the War Invalids and Martyrs

Day have also been occasionally held at major cemeteries, attracting the participation of thousands of people (Linh An 2007; Nhật Lam and Anh Đào 2015).

The significance of war cemeteries for the nationalization of memory, thus, is obviously marked. Cemeteries provide opportunity for people to pay homage to the specific dead, whose corpses buried underneath the ground and names engraved on the markers, while still emphasizing their collective identity as members of a community of comrades. However, core material objects in war cemeteries, such as names and graves,

68 are somewhat insufficient for the objective of memorializing the whole community of soldiers. There raised a question of how to integrate more than 200,000 soldiers whose names are unidentified and 300,000 soldiers whose remains are still unfound into the national landscape of remembrance. Such a salient issue calls for further attempts from the living, and results in the erection of numerous memorials.

Concurrent with the construction of war cemeteries, the erection of memorials was also begun soon after the end of the French War in 1954. The first official memorial built by the socialist state to commemorate fallen soldiers was erected in the capital in

1955. The memorial was built of wood and included a single standing pillar with a curved top. The most outstanding feature of this structure was the phrase “The Fatherland

Remembers Your Sacrifice” vertically inscribed on the pillar. Erected in the Ba Đình

Square, a historical site of Hanoi where Hồ Chí Minh read the Proclamation of

Independence of the DRV on September 2, 1945, the memorial immediately attracted the attention of the public. Its design also become the model for many war memorials in the

North of Vietnam in the 1950s-1960s. The memorial was dismantled in 1957, and rebuilt with bricks at the Mai Dịch cemetery several years later.

In addition to those in the capital, a huge number of war memorials, memorial halls and monuments have been built throughout Vietnam, especially since the reunification of the country in 1975. These memorials are now visible in nearly every commune and district in the lowlands. They accompany war martyr’s cemeteries to form architectural complexes of commemoration. In local communities, the designs of memorials built during 1980s-1990s were relatively simple; often tall spires adorned with a red or gold star at their apex, and the words “The Fatherland Remembers Your

Sacrifice” or “Eternally Remember the Moral Debt to the Martyrs” written across their base. Normally, local communes did not hold a competition; they directly assigned the task of designing the memorials to certain architects or companies. Some even made their choice from catalogs offering ready-made memorials. The Ministry of Culture, through their local representatives, provided decisive supervision on the whole process of choosing design proposals and constructing the memorials.

In their very essence, by interweaving aesthetic and commemorative aspects, memorials elevate the function of tangible objects of reminders of the past events or participants into symbolic and abstract representations. In local communities, all of these commemorating sites are called by a common name, Memorial to War Martyrs. Hence, within the landscape, they leave an impression about experience shared by a larger body of people rather than memorializing some specific individuals. Specifically, they provide continued public acknowledgment to those who have laid down their lives for the country. Through incorporating aesthetic codes prevailed by the socialist regime, those memorials, moreover, symbolize and universalize dead soldiers as the embodiment of socialist characteristics and ideals.

The erection of these monuments and the subsequent acts of commemoration carried out at them are of importance to the national memory. They are supposed to provide families of the dead, whose remains have not been found or are buried in faraway cemeteries, with tangible devices to commemorate them (Trigg 2007). However, as prevailed in Communist countries during 1960s-1980s, the practices associated with personal bereavement were overshadowed by higher political ones. These sites were primarily treated as a focal locus of “political indoctrination” (Hung 2008: 285) that

70 formed the predominant way of seeing the deaths in war. To put it into Tarlow’s words, these memorials were examples of the deployment of material culture in the propagation of manipulative ideologies of nationalism (Tarlow 1997: 119).

In early 1992, the Vietnamese government decided to erect a national memorial dedicated to war martyrs in the capital city of Hanoi. A competition was announced to invite architects nationwide to submit their proposals. There is no documented report on how many proposals were sent to the selection committee. Yet, the story that was recently revealed by architect Lê Hiệp shows a slight disagreement among members of the committee at that time. As Lê Hiệp recalled, his proposal was initially rejected; he was only granted the runner-up position. After the decision had already been made and announced to all competitors, Võ Văn Kiệt, who was then the Vietnamese Prime Minister showed his disinterest in the already selected design and wanted to choose another instead. He then requested that the architects whose proposals had scored second and third places to make another round of presentations. Eventually, Võ Văn Kiệt himself selected Lê Hiệp’s proposal and discarded the previous decision of the committee (Lê

Hiệp in Đào Anh Tuấn 2015).

The memorial is officially named “The Memorial to Heroic War Martyrs”. It is located on Bắc Sơn road, directly across the historical Ba Đình square and Hồ Chí Minh mausoleum. The location itself reflects the significance of the memorial. The construction started in April 1993 and was completed in May 1994.

Constructed in the context of early 1990s, Lê Hiêp’s design for the memorial was distinguishable from existing ones in local communities. There are no inscriptions or the incorporation of either a star symbol or a Vietnamese flag. Instead, the design reflects the

71 features of a more traditional shrine including decorative details such as multilayers of clouds. With gold-inlaid walls and a large incense burner placed at the center of its interior, the memorial invokes the feeling of veneration. The memorial is not of a massive size; it is only 12.6 metres in height. It is centered in a 12.000 square metres plot of land and is surrounded by small lawns. Lê Hiệp describes the memorial as “an architecture without a precise theme. It is neither anything nor anyone.” (Lê Hiệp in Đào Anh Tuấn

2015)

Image 4: Bắc Sơn Monument-Ba Đình Square – Hanoi (Photo by author, December 2015)

Many more memorials have been erected after the construction of Bắc Sơn monument. Embracing the common commemorative fever started in early 1990s, monuments have been developed in both scale and form. Many of them, such as those in

Trường Sơn cemetery or the monument in Củ Chi historical site, cost dozens of billions of Vietnam Dong. Finance for all commemorative projects is mostly sponsored by the

72 state with the remaining funded from domestic and overseas organizations, businesses and individuals.

At the heart of the Vietnamese national memory, therefore, dead soldiers have been commemorated through a shared identity transcending all their social differences.

They embody the positive essence of larger-than-life heroes who have been willing to sacrifice not only their lives, but also their death and bodies for the country. Such collectivized identity of soldiers has been shaped and articulated through a vast array of commemorative acts officially sanctioned by the state. In the context of the wartime, the ideal image of the fallen soldier accentuated a message that such death must be honored, not be seen in vain. These commemorations helped the state strengthen military and civilian morale, thereby serving its doctrine of people’s war. Such official discourse has been continued and even intensified in the postwar peace with a further focus on validating the legitimacy and outcome of the past struggles.

The politics of commemoration, as seen in the nuance dedicated to dead soldiers, is not something unique to Vietnam; it is ubiquitous throughout the world. The distinction in the case of Vietnam, as it has been crucially molded by socialist and communist mandates, is the careful control of the state over a wide range of practices and in all public spheres. The top-down system did not construct dead soldiers as a singular commemorative object but also turned all the population into a monolithic commemorative community practicing uniformed repertoires.

However, the top-down approach conducted in Vietnam is never absolute, as the government sometimes has to face the challenge both within itself and from other local agents. The challenge has become more obvious since the post-socialist shift happened in

73 the late 1980s. Due to crucial changes having happened within the ideological fabric and political cultural domain of Communism and Socialism during the late 20th and the early

21st centuries, dead soldier remembrance has remained (and remains) constantly subject to integration of new practices and meanings.

Modernizing Memory and Its Discontent

Many studies on memory have suggested that presentism has a critical role in shaping social memory (Hobsbawn 1983, Connerton, 1989; Halbwachs, 1992, Huyssen

2003). However, as Hue-Tam Ho Tai suggests in her writing, memory also has a significant future-oriented role; the past is shaped by the future as much as the future is shaped by the past. “Memory creates meanings for particular events or experiences by inscribing them in a larger framing narrative. Whether implicitly or explicitly, in this large narrative is embedded a sense of progression and vision of the future for which the past acts as prologue” (Tai 2001: 2). Such future-oriented function of memory is most noticeable in the context of revolution, which often involves the rapid dismantling of symbols of the past regime and replacing them with new ones. In the case of war martyrs who, to use Hall’s words, “struggle on behalf of the party to overthrow an unjust system of power”, they are also “conceptualized as instruments of the new status quo” (Hall

2010: 79). They exemplify the values of a new emerging regime. The martyrs, of course, retain their legitimate function only insofar as there is widespread belief that the new regime is of a fundamentally different character than the old (Hall 2010: 16).

Emerging in 1945 as a result of the decades-long struggle against foreign colonization, the formation of the DRV, the first modern state in Vietnamese history, was believed to signify the rupture between the colonial past and post-colonial present. From

74 this moment, with the new state that had come into existence, Vietnamese leaders decided to transform and purify the way the nation was imagined. The immediate goal of this process was to construct a fixed vision of Vietnam that truly removed the influence of the former French colonizers. In order to decolonize the past – to narrate it in new ways – postcolonial leaders felt compelled to pinpoint new origins and reconstruct them as a new idea of Vietnam. “The commitment to reconstruct the past and to symbolize the nation and the state in Vietnam during wartime”, Pelly comments, “was purely political”

(Pelly 2002: 10). Simply put, official historians were obligated (by party and government decrees) to produce a “new history” of Vietnam14 that was constructed under the “new type of analysis and new notions of causality”. Fundamentally, the “new history” referred to the inscription of the national past within a framework of what is variously described as Marxism – Leninism (Pelley 2002: 9). Hence, the new national history – the legitimized shared past, on the one hand, affirmed the unity of every member of an

“invented” or “imagined” community called Vietnam, and on the other hand, manifested the future commitment to the establishment of a socialist regime.

14 In December 1953, the Communist Party’s Central Committee issued a decree that formally established the Research Committee. Within this committee were three separate groups, one for each of the disciplinary divisions: history, geography, and literature. In 1959, the Research Committee was reorganized as the Institute of History. Although the Institute of History has functioned continuously since 1959, the wider institutional context has been revised a number of times: subsequent restructurations resulted in the Institute of Social Science in 1956, the Committee for Social Science in 1967, and the Academy of Social Sciences in later years. Whether they were institutionally linked to the government as opposed to the party, most committee and institute historians viewed themselves as faithful executors of the state’s will. Year after year, they compiled month-by-month progress reports that they forwarded to the Central Committee, directly or indirectly, depending on the institutional structure in place at that point. However, it should be noted that committee and institute historians did not monopolize historical discourse. Historians in the Department of History at the University of Hanoi, the textbook division of the Ministry of Education, the Committee for Party History, the Museum of History, the Museum of the Revolution, the Ministry of Culture, and so forth all published extensively on a wide range of topics. (See Pelly, 2002, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past for more details) 75

Alongside with a “new history”, a modern nation-state required a “new culture”

(Văn hóa mới) and “new life” (Đời sống mới). Three principles - nationalization, popularization, and scientism (dân tộc hóa, đại chúng hóa, khoa học hóa) - as the

“guiding concepts for the project of building a ‘new culture’ and a ‘new life”, were introduced in “Theses on Vietnamese Culture” promulgated in 1943 by the Vietnamese

Communist Party and fully implemented in 195415 (Ministry of Culture 1975, 2004: 48;

Malarney 2002: 58-62, Ninh 2002).

Paradoxically, while attempting to get rid of the French in particular and Western capitalism in general, the vaster process of decolonization – reauthenticating the nation –

Vietnam has embraced the process of modernization within the framework of socialism, which also is an inheritance of European Enlightenment rationality. Specifically, as

Schwenkel has observed, “in the DRV, a rhetoric of newness guides revolutionary cultural policy and its visions of a socialist order of progressive new socialist men and women, with new revolutionary ethics, new lifestyles, customs, and ideological

15 The Vietnamese ‘revolution’ was interpreted as a process encompassing three stages: a revolution in relations to production, a technological revolution and an ideological and cultural revolution. The main goal of the third revolution was to “eliminate the old culture, build up a new culture, a new morality, and new ways that correlate with the new regime” (Vietnam, Government 1962: 2). This idea of correlating with the new regime received even clearer emphasis when in 1981 another official stated, “building the new culture and carrying out the cultural and ideological revolution both have the principal goal of building the new socialist nation” (Tran Do 1986: 144). The new culture was described by a number of specific terms, and the most important one was “progressive”. By this term, party ideologues wanted to contrast the new culture, which was developed within the Marxism framework, with the pre-revolutionary “backward” or “feudal” culture. (Marlaney, 2002; Pelley, 2002). The Cultural Revolution was realized through many projects. One of them was New Ways, “an actual mechanics for changing local social cultural, and ritual life”. The campaign to implement the New Ways began on 3 April 1946 with the formation of the “Committee for the Propagation of the New Life”. One of the most important component of the New Ways was the campaign to secularize Vietnamese society and culture. The postcolonial Vietnamese state has made enormous administrative and political efforts to pursue this militant enlightenment of the way of thinking to battle against the traditional ritual customs and religious imaginations, first in the north after the independence of 1945 and then in the southern and central regions after the unification of the country in 1975. (Ministry of Culture 1975, 2004; Bùi Đình Phong 1998; Malarney 2002, 2007; Pelly 2002, Raffin 2008, Ninh 2002)

76 sentiments” (Schwenkel 2009: 112). Modern socialism is therefore affirmed as a national identity and the natural end to Vietnamese history (National Science Committee 1958;

Salomon and Vu 2007; Pelly 2002). This future commitment has been part of the framing narrative for the hitherto cultural practices of remembering.

What is of particular concern to me here is the application of socialist modernity and methods to the cultural practices of remembering in contemporary Vietnam. In fact, modern socialism in Vietnam has been part of the postcolonial experience, which was

“introduced to the population by the communist regime seeking to emancipate citizens through an authoritarian project of creating a rational society” (Raffin 2008: 341-2).

While modernization is a foreign concept, there is a question as to how has it been localized by the communist experience and by the Vietnamese who in the early decades of the 20th century still saw themselves unfamiliar to this way of thinking. Specifically, in this section, I will examine the ways in which such secular, rational projects of modernized commemorations set by the state, and their communication of political, national, and historical messages to the masses, converse with so-called “traditional” ways of remembering with a more religious and personal significance. What this means, simply put for now, is that I will treat modernity not in abstract terms but as an empirical object concretely manifested through cultural practices of memory such as rituals and the aesthetic devices of commemorative sites.

The idea of reforming Vietnamese society and culture was not wholly “invented’ by communists. Rather, it had already been proposed by some nationalist intellectuals in the early 20th century. Of these reformers, Phan Kế Bính, for instance, strongly criticized many familial and communal rituals of the Vietnamese for their “backwardness” and

“irrationality”. In his work on Vietnamese customs, he argued that these problems had their roots in Chinese influences, and they characterized a national shame for the country.

Phan Kế Bính then took a step further, calling his countrymen to “civilize” ritual their practices by learning from European secular and economic models (Phan Kế Bính [1915]

1990).

Communist leaders differentiated themselves from earlier nationalist intellectuals even though they shared with them a common acknowledgment of the revolutionary significance of reforming Vietnamese society. Their modernist conceptualization and methods were not something molded by the Western or European discourse in a general term. They, in a very particular way, only validated the socialist vision of revolution and modernization within the framework of Marxism- Leninism. Binns describes this mechanism of modernization and its socio-cultural implications as a “wholly modern revolutionary organization which achieve its logical culmination in Lenin's creation of an austere, disciplined and single-minded functional and a consciously encouraged system of “ritualistic” ceremonial, comparable in forms and scale to that of the major religions, but based on an atheistic belief-system” (Binns 1979: 585).

Consequently, for Vietnamese communists, modernization and its central task of reforming socio-cultural fabric meant reshaping not only the relation among living populations but also that between the living and the dead. The new culture and society promoted by the Vietnamese state during the 1950s and into the 1980s emphasized the role of sciences in truth claiming; it also championed atheism (Chủ nghĩa vô thần) in ritual practices, rejecting the notion that “anything other than empirically verifiable causality existed in human life” (Malarney 2002: 80). Most pre-revolutionary Vietnamese

78 rituals, nonetheless, were deeply immersed in religious, even magical, factors. The belief in the existence of the Otherworld, the afterlife, the souls of the dead, as well as the influence of ghosts and ancestors to the life of the living, prevailed in both consciousness and practices of the populace.16 The central role of religious discourse became more important in the case of war martyrs who, due to the Vietnamese moral imagination, provoked strong indebtedness and dependence in their living relatives.17

Such problems of religious regime - the living display their affection for and remember their debts to the deceased - as we can see in the previous section, were partly inherited by the socialist state as it tries to create a grand narrative of the glorious death of war martyrs. However, the Vietnamese state’s effort to reform ritual practice within

16 Like many Southeast Asian countries, the dead are important components in many religions in Vietnam. Most importantly, the religious significance of the dead derives from the belief in the afterlife and the theory of the body’s constitution which is defined by Durkheim and other scholar as Animism (Durkheim 1925, Tylor 1871). Most Vietnamese people believe that each body has one soul (hồn) and several life spirits (vía), normally seven for men and nine for women. When one dies, the life spirits die with the body but the soul lives on and transfers to the Otherworld (Thế Giới Khác). This ontology gives rise to two separate moral domains of the disembodied souls of the dead - ancestors and ghosts. The differentiation between the status as an ancestor or a ghost depends on many factors, among which the most important include conditions of the death and appropriateness of the rites of passage. Being advanced in years, having many children as survivors, dying quickly and painlessly, having one’s corpse complete, and dying at home all constitute a favorable end to an individual life. In addition to these factors, if funeral rites for the dead are correctly performed by the living, the soul will successfully move to the Otherworld and become a benevolent family ancestor who will care for the family and reciprocally be cared for by those it left behind. In contrast, many conditions such as dying young, childless, violently, away from home, and/or in such a manner that the corpse is mutilated or incomplete create the possibility that the soul will be unable to make its passage to the Otherworld to become a benevolent, cared-for ancestor. Instead, it will become a malevolent, wandering, hungry ghost who is doomed to eternally roam the earth. 17 The deaths of war martyrs often involve every possible dimension of bad deaths according to Vietnamese religious belief. Young, childless men died painful, violent deaths, usually hundreds of miles from home. The living relatives of dead soldiers, thus, have to experience the trauma of losing their family members, especially the painful feeling when thinking of them as hungry ghosts wandering the country. For this reason, it’s necessary for them to conduct special rites to pray for the souls of the dead to rest and send them to the Otherworld. Proper funeral rites include many special practices such as “calling the soul” (Gọi hồn), and “request for the soul” (Cầu hồn), which will be carried out by Buddhist specialists or spirit priests at the family ancestral altar, the portal, through which the soul begin its passage. Especially, in such rites, the living usually burn votive paper objects (Hàng mã). These objects, fashioned of colored paper wrapped around bamboo frames, represent gold, money, clothing, or other items for use by the dead in the Otherworld. They are offered during rituals, and then burned to transmit them, via the smoke, to the Otherworld (Malarney, 2002, Endres 2011).

79 the framework of revolutionary secularization and socialist atheism led to a number of powerful cultural dilemmas. The problem, as Endres argues, has its root in the state’s deliberate negligence on the most crucial issue of the traditional Vietnamese cultural way of conceptualizing and dealing with death. Specifically, the official commemoration, which was created to honour the dead on a more individual level, dedicating solely to the glorification their contribution to the noble cause of national independence and reunification, did not address the issue of the fate of the dead person’s soul” (Endres

2011: 129). On the contrary, many religious practices relating to the care of the soul of war martyrs then were classified as a complex of “superstitions” (Mê tín dị đoan).18

Under the secularization campaign of the socialist state, beliefs in supernatural forces and the soul’s continuous existence after death were to be replaced by a “scientific spirit” that sought truth from provable facts rather than through spiritual practices (Vietnamese

Government 1962; Malarney 1996, 2002). The traditional belief in the existence of ghosts and the traumatic feelings experienced by the bereaved of the war martyrs, however, were marginalized by the state in the official commemorative projects. The state considered the war martyrs as the “exceptional dead” (Malarney 2007), who mainly represented revolutionary and communist virtues such as “willingness for sacrifice”, and who embodied for the people the glory of the anti-foreigner tradition. The war martyrs

18 Superstitions, according to party ideology, were any practices that were either magical in nature or involved efforts to contact the noncorporeal world directly. Prominent here were ceremonies such as calling the souls of the dead (gọi hồn), the burning of votive paper objects (hàng mã) for the dead, and a range of post-burial ceremonies devoted to helping the soul of the deceased to make a successful transition to the Otherworld. To counter such ideas at the local level, the party launched a campaign against superstitions. The party strictly banned a number of common practices in which spirits or magic featured prominently, such as calling spirits (gọi ma), divination (bói toán), spirit mediumship and faith healing (đồng bóng), and the use of protective magical amulets (bùa). Finally, the practitioners who officiated in these ceremonies, such as spirit priests (thầy cúng) and diviners (thầy bói), and the spirit shrines (điện or miếu) where the practices were conducted, were all placed under surveillance to prevent the performance of the ceremonies. 80 were to be “respected” (Kính trọng) by people. However, such respect, according to the state, should only be showed to them through the act of remembering (nhớ ơn), not

“worshiping” (Thờ) (Taylor 2004: 204). When extending its reform policy to the domain of war martyr commemoration, as I have mentioned previously, the hands of the state reached down to the practices of ritual at the family and individual levels. The traditional funeral rites both for war martyrs and civilians were replaced by a one informed by socialist practice, in which all feudalist elements were purged and the rites were to be egalitarian; all elements of the supernatural were to be eliminated (Council of State 1975;

Malarney 1996, 2002). Additionally, an official commemorative service (Lễ Truy Điệu) was created with the participation of government officials whose speeches, based on the templates in government documents, to honour the death of war martyrs became the central part of the whole service. By the end of the 1960s, the government had succeeded in bringing all aspects of religious and ritual life under its control, first in the Northern half of the country. The campaigns were then spread across the regions after the reunification of the country in 1975. Such reformed rituals consequently removed the dead soldiers from the cosmological domain of religion and placed them in a secular pantheon of revolutionary heroes. War martyrs’ posthumous capacity was no longer to excise power or influence the lives of the living; instead they depended on the living, specifically the state, to grant them recognition and subsequent secular commemoration through which they were remembered solely as symbols of a new revolutionary regime.

The prominence of atheism and secularization as central elements of modernist cultural practice of remembering pervaded not only the rituals and ceremonies but also in iconography structures dedicated to the dead. During the 1950s-1960s, many sacred

81 locales, such as Buddhist temples, tutelary deity shrines and temples, except for those worshipping anti-foreign resistance heroes, were subject to attack and dismantling.19 In contrast, the following decades saw the landscape of the country dotted with war cemeteries, monuments and memorials that were defined by the secularist tenets of new socialist culture as “distinctly non-superstitious, national spaces of secular memory”

(Schwenkel 2009: 113).

In fact, public monuments and figurative memorials as secular aesthetic- commemorative practice did not exist in Vietnam before the French colonial rule (Dương

Trung Quốc 1998: 37). To the Vietnamese, the very first public monuments and memorials themselves presented a sense of “foreign” modernist remembrance. When they came to Vietnam under the so-called “Civilizing Mission” (Mission Civilisatrice), the French introduced and realized their ideas of urban planning and architecture, in

19 The ritual sites in the rural northern Vietnam normally include pagodas, communal houses and shrines. Buddhist pagodas (chùa) associate with the elderly female participants and major lifecycle ceremonies: funerals and remembrance rites. Whereas, đình (communal houses) rituals and ritual space relate to male responsibility and status in communities. From a western viewpoint, đình can be seen as combining a town hall, a church and a theatre. In Vietnamese rural society these functions are not separated as they are in the west, but are smoothly integrated. The đình is the place to meet and discuss all village affairs, to judge lawsuits, to impose fines, etc. in accordance with village norms, a place to worship the village deity, and the place to perform all kinds of theatre and songs, such as chèo (opera) or Hát cửa đình (singing at the door of the đình) (Hà Văn Tấn &Nguyễn Văn Kư, 1998). Though their position in the cultural life of the villages are not as important as đình, temples (Đền) and shrines (Miếu) also associate with the worship of the village deities, especially those who did meritorious work for the community, or someone who had supernatural capacity. Historically, the significant role of these public sacred sites came from their association with the cult of worshiping the village's tutelary genie. In Vietnam, especially for the Kinh (Viet) ethnic group, most of villages have their own tutelary genie. Some even can worship more than one genie. They can be male or female, depending on the legends of each village. Village tutelary might be a supernatural spirit from heaven like Phù Đổng Thiên Vương, a genie from the mountains like Tản Viên, or a military hero who made a great contribution to the country like Lý Thường Kiệt, Trần Hưng Đạo, Yết Kiêu, Hai Bà Trưng. For each Vietnamese person, the tutelary genie is the supreme power that regulates the life of the villagers; the genie protects and blesses the villagers with prosperity and health. The people of the village, generation by generation, live under the protection of the immortal tutelary genie, who represents the history of the village. Therefore, taking care of sacred sites where the village tutelary worshiped is an important issue for the whole community. The practice of worshiping the tutelary is by no means the worship for the village's regulations and manners of the community. It is also the invisible force that links all the villagers in solidarity and understanding; preserves the values of the village. 82 which monuments and hero statues were erected in the most important places in public space (Logan 2000, Boi 2005: 95-105). However, such French Neo-Classic styled structures in the 1920s – 1930s, were interpreted as representation of “decadent bourgeois art”, and were therefore rejected by the Communists in the DRV after they officially took power in 1954. Instead, the “new culture” of the new regime wholly advocated the aesthetic doctrine of socialist realism.20 In 1948, Trường Chinh, General Secretary of the

Party, described socialist realism as a “method of artistic creation that portrays the truth in a society evolving towards Socialism according to objective laws” (Trường Chinh

1948, quoted in Boi 2005: 135). By emphasizing “the truth”, Trường Chinh initially conceptualized socialist realism and its subsequent artistic practices as devices chiefly to serve political and ideological tasks rather than to convey aesthetic values. From here, socialist realism, which was shaped by the highly political and militarized climate of socialist construction and wartime efforts, rapidly permeated every aspects of the arts.21

Unsurprisingly, the specific responsibilities assigned to all art forms were to galvanize people into the great struggle waged by the Communist Party and the Socialist state.

Within this context, as they moved away from both religious sacredness and pure artistic representation, war memorials, occupying the central focus of the iconographical landscape in the socialist Vietnam, were expected to convey the “realistic” war

20 In his PhD dissertation on Vietnamese literature and Nationalism, Ngoc Tuan Nguyen made a distinction between socialist realism and critical realism. He then conceptualizes socialist realism as “a product of communism, formulated in 1932 and officially adopted in the Soviet Union in 1934, on the promise that a reflection of reality always combines an expression of communist ideals with the struggle for the victory of communism” (Ngoc Tuan Nguyen 2004: 22-25) 21 The influence of socialist realism in literature is examined by Nguyen, Tuan Ngoc, 2004, Socialist Realism in Vietnamese Literature: An Analysis of the Relationship between Literature and Politics, PhD Dissertation, Victoria University; that in the field of music is investigated by Nhu-Ngoc Thuy Ong, 2009, Governing music in Vietnam: From socialist to post-socialist use of nationalism. PhD Dissertation. University of California.

83 experience of the Vietnamese in general and of soldiers in particular to the mass audience. In doing so, as Trường Chinh instructed, they should use “immediately recognizable images” (Trường Chinh 1997 [1948]: 84) of related subject matters, not abstract and mediated representations of them.

In reality, socialist realism, promoted as Vietnamese national aesthetics, prioritized content over form, and propagation over creativity. Under the censorship that provided the strict directions imposed by the Party, the application of such doctrine significantly shaped the socio-cultural life of the Vietnamese with the exhaustive uniformity seen in the past several decades (Boi 2005: 135-8). Architecturally, the endurable imprint of this dictum, as previously discussed, is evidenced in the structural similarity shared by almost of all existing memorials to war martyrs, despite their vast number and scattered geographical allocation. The practice of installing a tall and slender obelisk at the center of commemorative memorials embraced the European iconography style that was very popular in the period following the World War I (Sherman 1999:

169). Yet, because it was introduced to Vietnam through the influence of the Soviet

Union, the conventional obelisk is often augmented with socialist symbols - most commonly is a red or gold five-pointed star. In some cases, the obelisk is also stylized as a lotus flower or a candle, or is erected in a complex including a panel in the shape of a waving flag standing behind it. With such visuality, the devotion to dead soldiers, which are supposed to be the foremost intention of these memorials, then is conveyed by adding the ubiquitous inscription that reads “Tổ Quốc Ghi Công” (The Fatherland Remembers

Your Sacrifice).

Image 5: War Martyr Memorial in Tuy An District – Phú Yên Province (Photo by author, July 2009)

Image 6: War Martyr Memorial in Thanh Xuan Commune – Soc Son District- Hanoi (Photo by author, August 2011)

Image 7: Memorial to War Martyrs at the Road 9 Cemetery – Đông Hà city, Quảng Trị Province (Photo by author, August 2013)

Consequently, the ubiquitousness of obelisk-shaped memorials in the Vietnamese contemporary landscape of remembrance emerged as an aesthetic reflection of socialist modernization during the second half of the 20th century. Specifically, through the introduction and influence of the Soviet Union, a Western conventional motif of memorialization was adapted by the Vietnamese, whose objective for both aesthetic and commemorative initiatives at the time, was to integrate themselves into “the orbit of international Communism” (Boi 2005: 132). In addition, as Schwenkel reminds us, the introduction of small and simple obelisks also has its root in the shortage of financial resource at the time. With a tight budget allocated by the government to a vast number of administrative units, the desire of memorializing dead soldiers could not be fulfilled with huge projects but only small and simple ones. This relative application of funds and its outcome also resonates with the widely-observed experience of European communities in post World War I era (Sherman 1999: 169). However, while in Europe, the monuments

86 were mostly built of high quality materials such as stone or bronze, the materials used in those in Vietnam – cement or concrete, are often of lesser quality.

Besides obelisks, relief panels and figurative sculptures are other popular memorial styles in use throughout the country, especially in crucial historical sites.

Normally, such monuments depict a battle scene behind a small group of sculptured soldiers, as typified in the monument in Đồng Lộc T-junction (Can Lộc District, Hà Tĩnh province). This monument was built to commemorate ten young female volunteers killed in 1968 while leveling craters and repairing the road in the Đồng Lộc T-junction, a strategic link between the North and the South during the American War. The commemoration site stretches from the road running between rice fields to a small park surrounding the monument. Within the park, one can find a complex including a small cemetery where the tombstones of ten martyrs are located beside a memorial shrine.

Across from the shrine, the main monument displays ten female volunteers attempting to level a huge bomb crater. Nearby is another small monument constructed from bomb shells.

Unlike simple impersonal obelisks, figurative sculptures are designed to serve as the humanizing face of the war. The stone sculptures of the ten girls in Đồng Lộc embody the realism aesthetic that is meant to portray the martyrs exactly as they existed during the war. Drawn on a grandiose background depicting a severely destroyed landscape, the ten female volunteers are shown immersing themselves in their work. Each has her own task, yet collectively they show a feeling of determination. Apart from their female attire, the poses of the sculptures – the raised hands and challenging poses - are similar to those often depicted in sculptures of male soldiers. Hence, from the first glance, the memorial

87 evokes a very explicit emotion of shared pride and an acceptance for the martyrs’ efforts and sacrifice, instead of an emphasis on the soldiers’ gender identity.

Image 8: Monument to ten young female volunteers in Đồng Lộc T-Junction Historic Site (Photo by author, July 2013)

The memorial to ten female volunteers was unveiled in August 2008, adding a new layer to the commemorative landscape of the former battlefield of Đồng Lộc. Prior to its construction, there had already existed another large project in Đồng Lộc site. The

Statue of Victory was erected in 1999 in the form of a tall obelisk topped with three figurative sculptures. The body of the obelisk is decorated with representations of bullets, smoke and layers of clouds. The first two of these symbols manifest the violence of the war; whereas the last one symbolizes peace. The figures that are placed on top the obelisk, one female and two male volunteers, are displayed in the popular assault poses.

The woman with her hand raising up, and the males with tightly-held pickaxe and shovel.

Here, compared to the memorial to ten female volunteers erected nine year later, the 88 theme, style and visual implication of the Stature of Victory does not bear great distinction. Both of them, together with the other physical architecture that is designed to commemorate the victory of the war, seemingly pose a contrast to the tragic context of

Đồng Lộc where ten unmarried girls were killed.

Image 9: The Statue of Victory - Đồng Lộc T-Junction Historic Site Photo: Đồng Lộc Historic site’s official website: http://ngabadongloc.org.vn/

Unfortunately, such paradox has not been confined within the physical boundary of Đồng Lộc or any other memorial sites in the country. The whole “modern” layer of remembrance, having been integrated into the Vietnamese memoryscape through agendas of ritual reformation and monumentalization, has elicited as much social disagreement as they have produced physical and ritualized uniformity. While appreciating the Western- driven democratic nature of commemorating dead soldiers through the strict uniformity seen in every war cemetery,22 many Vietnamese people have expressed their

22 Hồ Trung Tú’s article in 1998 – The first military cemeteries in Vietnam - is an exception since it traces the emergence of military cemeteries in Vietnam back to the late 19th century. The majority of research so far has affirmed that common soldiers in pre-revolutionary Vietnam were either not buried in their own 89 dissatisfaction with the removal of the dead from the traditional sacred realm of religion and with the overuse of “foreign” remembrance techniques in the secular commemoration.

In his short article published in the Journal of Vietnamese Architecture in 1999,

Hoàng Đạo Kính, former Vice-President of Vietnam’s Architects Association and former

Director of the Planning Centre and Preservation of National Heritage voiced his concern about the modern practice of commemorating and its application to the Vietnamese context:

“Our ancestors usually erected stelae or built temples. In our time, we consider them backward practices. Therefore, we tend to use Western-originated methods instead. However, producing memorials, artistic statues and grandiose sculptures is a very young artistic field (in Vietnam). Our ancestors installed statues or craved sculptures (of the dead) to worship, not either to display them at home as decoration or to place them on the streets to commemorate. To commemorate the dead, they burned incense sticks at their graves or at home altars; they did not lay wreath at memorials” (Hoàng 1999: 26).

In fact, Hoàng Đạo Kính never opposed to the installation of Western-styled memorials in Vietnam, as he claimed in another interview that “it is impossible for a modern city not to have monuments” (Hoàng Đạo Kính, 2001: 32). Of greater concern for Hoàng Đạo Kính was the unfamiliarity commonly felt by the mass audience toward such projects specifically devoted to the dead. For Hoàng Đạo Kính, it was not only the form or physical visuality that mattered, but more importantly, the attention that should be paid to the subsequent practices taken place at these sites, as well as their position within a broader scene of a living environment. Furthermore, as he explicitly prioritized a

cemeteries nor worshiped in the public rituals. At the time, only military leaders were worshiped individually in religious-based spaces.

90 more traditional way of commemorating the dead, in which the dead were individually worshipped in their assigned spaces distinct from their daily surrounding, Hoàng Đạo

Kính officially disapproved the dominant modernized model of death memorialization.

In the same 1999 article, Hoàng Đạo Kính also expressed his dissatisfaction with the lack of aesthetic quality prevailing in many existing memorials to war martyrs:

“In our main war cemeteries, there are normally two overlapping themes which, despite their logical relatedness, cannot be integrated. They are the sacrifice and the victory (..) Recently, I visited a national cemetery. After lighting some incense sticks at a grave which was placed among thousands of graves, I went to the main shrine. I stood still with my hand clasped to my chest and my eyes looking upward. And there I saw a gigantic statue of a soldier with his eyes and mouth all widely opened and his hand was stretching up to the sky. The background was a flag and two reliefs filled with people rapidly moving forward. At the moment I faced the status, I thought I might had come to the wrong place where worshipping the dead was somewhat irrelevant (Hoàng 1999: 27).

That Hoàng Đạo Kính, as an architect and a manager himself, publicly and straightforwardly expressed his disinterest is evidently indicative of complicated responses to official war memorials and reflects a lack of consensus within the population to the existing war martyr memorialization culture. Hoàng Đạo Kính’s point of view and the way he articulated it were remarkably important, yet they were not something unique given the context of the late 1990s. By that time, a slight relaxation from the state control had already allowed cultural producers and experts to “constructively comment” on the national memorialization agenda.

Until that time, the strict control exercised by the state had marginalized any alternative ways of remembering, forcing all voices outside the state to be silent. Yet such

91 forced silence had not signified a discretionary consent from the populace. In local communities, despite the state’s constant attempts to integrate war memorials into the locals’ ritual landscape and promote them as the prestigious space for the dead, these sites, by and large, remained vacant. People visited war memorials only when they were invited to participate in certain commemorative ceremonies held by local administrative units. The intended function of memorials as collective physical embodiment of soldiers’ dead bodies failed to get approval from most of the people within individual community.

While the Vietnamese perspective emphasizes, as Hoàng Đạo Kính points out, the connection between the living and the dead through their individual graves and home ancestral altars, memorials, whose structure has little to do with the dead individuals but is more about state and national values, could not fulfill the living’s desire to memoralize the dead. Indeed, relatives of the dead, especially those who did not have their beloved’s graves accompanying the local memorial, felt isolated from such material sites.

Consequently, many locales neglected or employed the secular space of state-created memorial for alternative social and economic uses, such as feeding livestock, drying and threshing rice or as a food preparation venue for wedding receptions (Tuấn Minh 2013).

The problem, however, is not unique to Vietnam. Mosse, for instance, also mentions the conflict between the sacred and profane in war remembrance, which speaks of a broader issue of the clash between traditionalists and industrialists in the early 20th century’s Europe (Mosse 1990: 99-100). Commonly, this tension is given rise from the diversity of agents participating in the act of remembrance, who unsurprisingly have their own answers to the questions of the most accurate way to remember the dead and the best place to do so. The consequence of such difference, as Mosse points out, may lead to

92 sustained attacks from one group (or groups) against others (Mosse 1990: 101). In the

Vietnamese postwar context, similar contestation mostly happened between state-created and popular patterns of commemoration. The difference, as Kwon (2008) comments, represents the binary opposition of function against that of the sacred. In a closer examination, however, the case of Vietnam is slightly distinct from what Mosse has observed in the European context. Public space in Vietnam once was exclusively reserved for the interpretation of the state who considered spiritualism as opposite to modernity and claimed to be secular. The national public space, therefore, was not permitted to accommodate the diverse views held by different populations, as well as the straightforward “attacks” against the dominant discourse created by the state. In not accepting what the state had given to them, the Vietnamese people commonly expressed their resistance by silently neglecting the state-imposed practices or by secretly conducting their own alternative ones.

During the period from the 1950s to the 1980s, while the state memorials mainly faded away from the ritual landscape of local communities, the household homes and other communal sacred spaces still witnessed the most important commemorative activities of the Vietnamese. Spiritual-based rituals were carried out in the dark rooms of families to send the dead’s souls to the Otherworld and pray for them to rest in peace.

Annual death anniversaries, with offering and secretly traded votive papers, were held by families to remind the living of their dead members (Malarney 2002). Village festivals as communal rituals to worship the village guardian deities were discreetly organized in the places where the destroyed pagodas, temples, or shrines used to sit (Luong 2007: 443).

As such, a simultaneous existence of rigid control and secret resistance characterized Vietnamese socio-political and cultural landscape for more than three decades of the 20th century. While this co-existence strongly supports the argument that collective memory, even it is claimed to be national, is never fixed nor agree upon, it did establish the condition for a further transformation in Vietnam in the following three decades. Specifically, in the mid-1980s, the modernization promoted by the Vietnamese authorities faced both conceptual and practical crises. The assumption that modernity was synonymous with socialism, especially that developed by the Soviet Union, was questioned. Eventually, the influence of the Soviet Union was greatly decreased, pushing

Vietnamese leaders to think about alternative ways of approaching and pursuing modernity. Consequently, the Đổi Mới (Reform) was launched in 1986, marking the shift to the new era of postsocialism in Vietnam.

Therefore, in a new context characterized by a shift from the struggles against foreign invaders to the integration into the international polity, the construction of national memory requires new forms and contents. On the one hand, as Katherine

Verdery insightfully indicates, post-socialist societies continue to employ and even elaborate their employment of the dead’s posthumous political life in the service of creating a newly meaning universe (Verdery 1999). On the other hand, the mission of mobilizing the population to a new context that emphasizes the significance of international integration requires the state to reconsider their methods of controlling and maintaining internal unity. The relaxation of the state’s control, which enables more social agents outside the state to contribute to the construction of national memory, has been considered a by-product of such comprehensive reform policy. Moreover, as Hy

Van Luong (2007) comments, the model of Vietnamese nationalism has shifted from a

Developmental to a Cultural Nationalism one, since various party and state documents in the past 15 years have affirmed the view that culture is an engine (động lực) for national socio-economic development.23 In a contrast that is far from the Cultural Revolution in the 1950s, a motto characterizes Vietnamese culture in Đổi Mới era - “an advanced culture imbued with national essences and traditions” (một nền văn hóa tiên tiến, đậm đà bản sắc dân tộc) - strongly emphasizes the role of “traditions” in shaping national identity.

In such transforming socio-cultural climate, many experts and cultural producers like Hoàng Đạo Kính have publicly shared their critique on the conceptualization, design and implementation of national sites of memory (Shwenkel 2009: 121-4). Most of them traced the aesthetic failure of state memorials to their ill-planned construction and their overuse of “non-traditional” and “unfamiliar” Western-influenced style and concepts.

These critics, whose discussions filled numerous articles in architectural journals and fine arts magazines since the late 1990s, simultaneously voiced their appeal towards the

“Vietnamization” and “traditionalization” of public monuments in order to enhance the aesthetic quality and cultural meanings of existing and upcoming projects (Tạ Mỹ Duật

1984; Nguyễn Đỗ Cung 1992). Additionally, from 1997 to 2006, over fourteen symposiums were organized in Vietnam, aiming to seek resolutions for the confusing binaries between aesthetic values and ideological function, and between modernity and nationality in planning and constructing public monuments. In 2004, symposium

23 In 2001, the Law on Cultural Heritage was approved by the Vietnamese National Assembly. This law emphasizes the role of cultural legacies in enhancing the “good” traditions of different ethnic groups within Vietnam and in the international arena (article 12).

95 discussions resulted in an addendum to the Ministry of Culture and Information’s 2000

Decision No.05/2000/QĐ-BVHTT, in which the need to merge ideological content with a higher aesthetic quality in monuments was affirmed and encouraged (Shwenkel 2009:

122).

Interestingly, while eager to reform public monument designs with a new representation of the Vietnamese traditional model, most of researchers, architects, cultural producers and managers have not found themselves in agreement about what are considered “traditions” and what “Vietnamese” style actually is. Seen in actual sites, the most common way to express the idea of traditionalizing “modern” monuments is to add cultural icons -such as dragons, lotuses, bronze drums, or crowns resembling sloped pagoda rooftops - to standard obelisk designs. The structure and image of Buddhist pagodas, temples and communal houses have also been incorporated to create spaces of remembrance that are “Vietnamese” and familiar to a mass audience (Shwenkel 2009:

130-6). Some of the most prominent exemplars of this movement include the Bến Dược

Memorial Temple in Củ Chi and the bell tower in Đồng Lộc. The Bến Dược Memorial

Temple was built between 1993 and 1995; it incorporates the structure of communal houses and Huế palaces with a signature curved roof and wooden pillars. Situated on

70,000 square meters of land, the temple is a massive project with several architectural components such as a three-door gate, a memorial stele house, a central temple, a nine- storey tower and a flower garden.

Image 10: Bến Dược War Martyr Temple – Củ Chi Historic Site – Hồ Chí Minh City (Photo: official website – Historic relics and Cu Chi tunnel complex http://en.diadaocuchi.com.vn/the- monument-temple-for-martyrs-of-ben-duoc-cu-chi-23.html)

Another important project in redesigning monuments for war martyrs can be found in the new bell-tower in Đồng Lộc T-Junction historical site. The construction of the bell-tower in Dong Loc T-junction began in July, 2010 with the total investment of

VND 27 billion. The bell-tower has 7 stories with a 6-tonne bronze bell that is 3.6m high and has a diameter of 1.92m. The structure of the bell-tower is familiar to the Vietnamese with curved roofs and wooden pillars. Historically, the bell-tower is the important structure in Vietnamese traditional Buddhist temple complexes, in which the most significant object was the bell which was always inscribed with the construction date and brief history of the pagoda. Thus, the Đồng Lộc bell-tower is described as an attempt to combine traditional values of religious architecture with a more modern context of remembering national heroes.

Recently, the appropriation of traditional religion-based architecture for commemorating war martyrs has been significantly spread into many war monuments and cemeteries with the insertion of stele houses (nhà bia).24 The stele house is easily recognisable as of traditional architectural style with a distinctive curve-shaped roof.

Placed inside the house are marble stelae engraved with the names and short biographies of dead soldiers. Biographical information engraved onto the marble slabs, such as name, village and years of birth and death, are either arranged chronologically according to

“year of sacrifice” or listed under one of three periods of war: the French War; the

American War; and Protecting the Nation, a category that refers to post-1975 conflicts with China and Cambodia (Shwenkel 2009: 131). By the end of 2002, more than 2,000 stele houses have been erected throughout the country.

24 In Vietnam, stelae (văn bia) have a very long history through which they have been used in multiple commemorative contexts. In pre-revolutionary eras, stone stelae were erected in pagodas, temples or shrines to record history of those places. They were also used to recognize names and biographies of individuals who had conducted heroic dead or made financial and other meritorious contributions to the community. In villages, many stelae were erected to mark certain historical even of the communities. In families, stelae were displayed on ancestral altars with names of the dead being engraved on them. (See more details in Ban Hán Nôm 1978, Đỗ Lai Thúy 1993)

Image 11: Stele House and Monument for War Martyrs in Tân Lộc Commune- Lộc Hà District - Hà Tĩnh Province (Photo by author, July 2013)

The significance of stele houses is worth noting since they possess similar function as that of the wall of names seen in memorials to the fallen erected widely in other countries (Laqueur 1994; Sherman 1999: 65-94). With names and brief biographies of the dead engraved on them, the stele integrate individuality into strongly totalizing discourse of war memorials. While memorials are erected in cemeteries to collectively commemorate the dead whose names or graves are not physical present at the sites, stela work the other way around. In comparison with practices observed in European countries in the early 20th century, in which walls of names were normally erected in the first place as indispensable components of war memorials, the recent insertion of stele into long-

99 erected memorials in Vietnam reveal remarkable differences between the two patterns of remembrance. Yet, above all, the common outcome of the combination of collective symbols and individual names seen in Vietnam as well as other parts of the world reflect a fundamental issue of collective memory – the demand to create a harmony of collectivity and individuality.

Admittedly, the integration of “traditional” symbolism and the concept of commemorating the fallen as citizens of a modern nation-state is not wholly new, since similar practices have been observed in many other modern Asian countries, such as

China and Japan (Hung 2008, Nelson 2008, Hall 2012). However, when linked to debates about “national identity” and to desires for more meaningful practices of remembering, such trends engender a more significant meaning within Vietnam’s current transition

(Shwenkel 2009: 134). Specifically, as cultural artifacts widely used centuries ago, the insertion of stelae, pagoda structures, temple images to martyr cemeteries and memorial signifies the continuity between past, present and future. More importantly, from exterior indication to interior arrangement with large altars containing incense burners, offerings of flowers and fruits placed at their centers, traditional-inspired memorial shrines, temples and towers greatly resemble spaces of worship. Their characteristics therefore increasingly confound the official discourse of the state instructing the people to

“remember” and not to “worship” martyrs (Shwenkel 2009: 135).

Therefore, the movement of redesigning and renovating commemorative landscape has not only affected the material presentation of national memory but also contributed to reshaping the way in which the living make meaning of past figures.

Religious implications have become more visible in the practice of death

100 memorialization. In a broader scene, religious resurgence has been one of the most striking phenomena in the Đổi Mới era: restoration of pagodas, temples and shrines has been witnessed in every local community, and families have been busy attending pilgrimages and organizing their own home rituals (Jellema 2007; DiGregorio and

Salemink 2007). The changes recently made in the sphere of war remembrance, which embraces the ambition of presenting an essentially Vietnamese style of memorialization, reveal the mutual perspective of many Vietnamese people in seeing religious culture as the most important manifestation of national identity and history continuity.

Significantly, such understanding has been approved by the post-socialist state and allowed to be publicized. Yet, the integration of religious elements into national sites of memory does not mean that the state has shifted its attention away from promoting secularism. Instead, the state has diversified its mnemonic devices, which in turn has assisted it to gain more attention from the public. For this reason, the state has not only accelerated the process of memorial production but has also been actively involved in organizing commemorative rituals that embrace both secular and religious meanings. One of the most prominent examples of this interwoven process is the increasingly popular

Buddhist requiem organized in war cemeteries and memorials. One requiem organized in

2012 was widely reported in mass media as follows:

On July 27th, 2012, at 6 o’clock in the morning, bells were rung in all Buddhist temples throughout the country, marking the inception of a day-long requiem which was part of activities to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the War Invalids and Martyrs Day. Buddhists, and relatives of martyrs and veterans from different parts of the country gathered at two main places for the simultaneous rites, Hoe Nhai pagoda in Hanoi and the Road 9 National Cemetery in Quang Tri province. Millions of people who could not attend the ceremonies in person would be able to watch them live on their television sets.

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The requiem commenced first at the Road 9 National Cemetery when the President of the Vietnamese State accompanied by delegations from the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of National Defense, the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, the Hanoi municipal Party Committee and the Hanoi municipal People’s Committee offered wreaths at the Martyr Memorial Monument and lit incense sticks at the altars. Monks then chanted, and the requiem lasted several hours. At 6.30 pm, thousands of paper lanterns were floated down the West Lake in Hanoi and the Thach Han river in Quang Tri. Finally, at 8pm, in 2,562 cemeteries in 63 provinces and cities, about 900,000 local youth lit candles to pray for peace for the soldiers. This was the first time a governmental agency, the Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs, officially cooperated with a religious association, the Vietnam Buddhist Sangha, in organizing a public ceremony to commemorate the war dead. The purpose of the requiem as claimed by Master Thich Duc Loi was to pay peace for the souls of soldiers who had fallen for the independence of the mother land. (Vietnam News, “National requiem for war martyrs”, 27th July 2012)

The intersection of different economies of memory, recently seen in the context of

Vietnam, reflects the country’s contemporary political condition, which, in Ho Tai Hue

Tam’s words, is “characterized by neither full-blown totalitarianism nor total democracy”

(Tai, 2001: 3). After several decades of exercising centralized authority and strict control in all the sphere of country’s social life, the state has loosened its grip, and given more space for individuals and local communities to bring their forms and practices into national commemorative projects. This movement has been affirmed as a “transformative dialogue” (Malarney, 1996); or a “dialogic restructuring of rituals” (Luong, 2007) happening between the state and local communities. It also presents the limits of state functionalism in secularizing ritual practice toward the dead (Malarney 1996).

I agree with these scholars in this approach; however, I argue further that the main purpose of the state in changing policy is exploiting the advantage of religious and ritual

102 practice in attracting and mobilizing the populace. Many practices could be defined as

“backward” elements, and unsuitable for the nation-making project in the 1950s -1980s; however, they are now good elements to attract the attention of the people to new commemorative projects. More importantly, since the late 1980s, along with the gradual opening of Vietnam to the international community, as in other Asian countries such as

Korea, Japan, and China, national folk tradition in Vietnam has been cast in opposition to

“Western things” (Kendall 2001; Endres 2002). For this reason, the state has begun to promote a new rhetoric of harmony between cultural values and the ideology of the socialist system.

Conclusion

Approaching from the perspective of the state, this chapter has examined different forms and practices through which the death of soldiers who were killed in the war have been given meaning, represented and remembered. As I have argued in this chapter, the most two fundament issues - the state-citizens relationship and the nature of collective memory – are transforming rather than fixed.

Presented at the first place, the war is the most crucial aspect that shaped the subsequent discourse of the state - not only as political imperative to gather forces but is also as a determinant of politics during its course of development. On the one hand, such war-born discourse tended to turn everything, including the death of individuals, into

“weapons” to serve the eventual goal of winning the war. On the other hand, this ideology emphasized and accelerated the process of homogenization of memory, which was not gained through negations and mutual agreement but through propaganda, censorship and orders from the government.

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Another factor that influenced the shaping of national memory in Vietnam is the interaction with other foreigners during the 20th century. Even though in most instances, those encounters involved violence, they have not only enabled a kind of war culture, but also gave rise to the cultural hybrid of modernity within contemporary Vietnam.

Commemorative practices were forced to shift from a sacred domain to a functional one during the 1950s-1980s; this happened as a function of the self-consciousness of the state about the rational nature of modernity.

The national memory as it has been created, promoted and represented by the

Vietnamese authorities under influences of the above mentioned factors has presented its legacy in most commemorative projects in contemporary Vietnam, where there has been peace for 40 years. However, over this period of time, attempts by the state to impose a single function or meaning on symbols and cultural practices has never been absolutely successful. And in fact, actual limits have been found during the implementation of institutional paradigms. While certain elements of such institutional memory did receive public acceptance, others were resisted. The inability of the state to do so was directly related to the polysemic, multivocal and malleable nature of memory practice. (Alonso,

1988; Bodnar 1992; Connerton 1998). Despite the state’s many means of and attempts at controlling publicity, the public nature of the official commemorations could not dismiss other ways in which different social groups memorialized the dead, and thus the collective memory was never entirely manipulated by state hegemony. Another reason for the failure of the state to control the meanings and values mobilized in memory can be seen in the structure and nature of the Vietnamese socialist state itself. Kerkvliet suggests that the most useful conceptualization of the “Vietnamese state” is one in which an

104 authoritarian and one-party state is nonetheless not a single, unified actor but rather a complex, multi-voiced system (Kerkvliet 2001, 182). My research therefore supports the argument that negotiating the “state” or “national memory” in contemporary Vietnam happens in everyday, ordinary circumstances and that negotiations are often conducted by what people do or do not do, typically in indirect and hidden ways (Kerkvliet 2001; Tai

2001). Particularly, the “state functionalism”, as Malarney terms in his 2007 article, has exposed even more limits since the war’s end.

The crisis has become the impetus for the Vietnamese state to modify its policies, especially in the post-socialist transformation. In the new context, instead of “re- inscribing the local landscape within its own totalizing order” (Anagnost 1994: 230), the state has had to seek other means to deal with the task of constructing national past and modernizing simultaneously. Of those means, opening up space for non-state actors to participate in the construction of national memory and incorporating a diversity of forms and practices, have been significant initiatives of the state.

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Chapter 2

Living with the Dead: Filling Absence and Loss in Family Commemoration

“We mourn to let the dead live on in us, speak in us, because they no longer can exist outside of us, because they would otherwise be wholly silent.” (Nguyen-Vo Thu Huong 2005)

*****

In the early morning of a July day in 2014, joining Mrs. Xuân and her son, I took the bus from Tân Lộc commune to Trường Sơn National Cemetery where the remains of

Mrs. Xuân’s husband is housed. After a five-hour ride, we got to the destination. Once passed through the gate, I suddenly felt overwhelmed by the continuous rows of gravestones; all of them have the same height, width and shape. The gravestones are arranged in five geographical regions and subdivided according to the native provinces of the dead. With a closer look, I could see each grave is marked by an upright headstone installed on a small base with an incense burner situated at the foot of the stone. As we walked along a small path running through gravesite areas, Mrs. Xuân admitted that, when she came here for the first time, she almost lost her sense of direction and found it very difficult to locate her husband’s grave. There was no specific hint of it among such a sea of identical headstones.

Finding the place of a certain grave in such uniformity of physical construction, however, is an easier task than learning about personal stories of the real bodies, real

106 people who are resting beneath these tombstones. Beside the collective identity indicated in the inscription of large-sized letters “war martyr”, the brief information on the headstones says very little about the deceased, as well as about his/her life and death. If I had visited this cemetery myself, without Mrs. Xuân’s company, I would have only known that Mr. Hùng was a soldier who died at the age of twenty-five in Quảng Trị battlefield. The collective representation in the public landscape of this cemetery does not aim to inform about who he really was and how his life and many others’ have been changed by the war. Neither does it tell anything about him as a husband whose death turned Mrs. Xuân into a widow at the age of twenty-two, nor about him as a father who never had a chance to see his son in person.

The lack of individuality, touched upon in my first chapter, is a common denominator of the state commemorative programs dedicated to dead soldiers. In the present project which examines the commemoration of the fallen from the vantage point of the family, such a problem becomes a significant catalyst for further investigations.

Specifically, for families of soldiers, who form grassroots mnemonic communities, the way in which they make meaning of one’s death at the front is undoubtedly impacted by the national mode of commemoration. Many of them find the notion of heroic sacrifice for the nation a meaningful script for describing the death of their fathers, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters, since it helps them reconcile their personal losses with national political gain. However, such abstract depiction tending to distort the images of war deaths cannot offer satisfying comfort to the families. For those like Mrs. Xuân, despite the sanitized vision of death and killing intendedly delivered through the neatly order and setting of war cemeteries, once visiting the sites there might evoke in them the

107 haunting images of their relatives being involved in mass deaths in which their bodies were destroyed, dispersed, and unidentifiably fragmented. For many others who are still searching for the remains of their beloved ones, the loss and absence, which entails existential elements of specific individuals and their fate, is not only an issue of representation but a traumatic reality haunting their daily life.

Tellingly, death is interpreted and dealt with differently by different social groups.

The state employs the process of depersonalizing death as a mean to construct an ideological imagery of death linked to the doctrine of nationalism. Families, whose interpretation is framed by religious mandates and genealogical principles, see depersonalization as a threat to human essence of their members. These “frames of references” shape the process of memory construction within each group, and in the long term they also intersect and influence each other. In light of this observation, this chapter, which examines the role of the family in the construction of postwar social memory in

Vietnam, situates the questioned subject matter in a complex interplay between family memory and national memory. Such process, I argue, embraces domination, resistance as well as negotiation. Practices of families to commemorate the fallen can be seen as responses to the state’s proclaimed agendas. Many of them reveal difficulties faced by families as local agents in balancing their private needs and public pressure. Yet, many others indicate families’ contestation to the institutionalized memory.

If national memory, as I have pictured in the previous chapter, is crystalized in the countless sites of remembrance and characterized as a public articulation of the past, this chapter deals with another nuance of memory which presents a “more privatized sense of the past generating within a lived culture” (Popular Memory Group 1982: 211). In what

108 follows, I initially treat the domestic space as the primary site of memory for the family.

Yet, the essence of privatization entailed in the so-called family memory cannot be sufficiently acknowledged by limiting its expressions and practices within this spatial boundary. In fact, given the control of the state over the terrain of cultural and commemoration practices during the 1950s-1980s, the domestic space was incorporated to serve as a site for national self-presentation. Conversely, since the Đổi Mới era, family bereavement practices expressing loss and grief have become more visible in the public discourse. Family memory, therefore, should be comprehended by examining the human relations revolving around it. Because members of families are bonded together by strong emotional ties, memories recollected and shared among them are constituted by personal meaning and identification. They are “connected to individual or biographical memories of family members” (Bjerg and Lenz 2012: 42). The meaning of the past, for many people like Mrs. Xuân, who are relatives of war martyrs, is not just formed on the visual presentations “outside” of the society, but is a concrete part of their family history - they remember and interpret the past through the people whose lives and deaths are important to them. In this sense, family commemoration works toward a process of personalizing the dead, in which the deceased are always remembered as identified individuals whose identities are primarily defined by the positions they get through their social interactions with other members in the home and within their family/kin genealogy. These ties of blood or marriage which determine the membership of individuals in family and kinship, thus, also characterize the powerful emotional dimension of family memory.

This chapter results from fieldwork that I carried out in Tân Lộc commune, a rural commune in the central part of Vietnam. It is necessary to note that what I attain from

109 my research in Tân Lộc may not not representative of the experience of all other

Vietnamese communities. Cultural and memory practices vary between communities across regions, and the interactions between them and the state agenda are also different as well. What I seek to do is to understand the cultural experiences and dynamics of a local community in its own right.

When the presence of absence is felt

Today’s Tân Lộc commune is located at the center of Lộc Hà district, very close to the Route 1A, the trans-Vietnam highway, and is about twenty kilometers northeast of Hà

Tĩnh, the capital of the province by the same name. It is also thirty kilometers south of

Vinh, the capital of Nghệ An province. Historically, the significant role of the commune in regional and national history dates back to the early 1930s, when the Vietnamese

Communist Party was newly founded and started to organize its first anti-French movements. Most noticeably was the Nghệ Tĩnh uprising, with which Tân Lộc became one of the first strongholds of the communists. Then, during the Second Indochina War, with many other communes of Thanh Hoá, Nghệ An, Hà Tĩnh, Quảng Bình, Quảng Trị and Thừa Thiên Huế provinces, Tân Lộc was assigned to be an unit of the Military Zone

4. Located right in the middle of the strategic North-South transportation route, the

Military Zone 4 was directly under the Ministry of Defense, tasked to organize, build, manage and command armed forces defending the North Central part of Vietnam. Also, at that time when the Route 1A was not yet built up and the North-South connection relied only on the Hồ Chí Minh trail which was fifteen kilometers south of Tân Lộc, the commune thus provided a crucial route for the traffic of goods, personnel, and information between the liberated North and the occupied South.

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Since the widespread conscription of young men and the mobilization of civilians into militia forces throughout decades of wartime has turned Vietnam into one of the most highly mobilized societies in contemporary history (Beresford, 1988), Tân Lộc, unsurprisingly, also witnessed a large number of farewells between soldiers and their families. The separation that followed the farewell might last several years for those who were lucky enough to survive and return home, but for many others this separation was permanent. Consequently, over the course of the violent war, 165 Tân Lộc soldiers died and were recognized as war martyrs, 159 others returned home wounded and became war invalids. Imprints of such human loss and the brutal effects of the war continue to linger long after the war has ended. By the end of 2012, on average, one in every nine family units in Tân Lộc had war martyrs.

In this context, it is unsurprising to see in the contemporary landscape of Tân Lộc a war memorial being erected at the most visible place across from the commune’s

People’s Committee Hall. Beside a tall obelisk constructed in 1998, a stele house was installed into the complex of the memorial in 2005. Names of all Tân Lộc’s war martyrs are engraved in this stele. As a “proper place” (Maddrell and Sidaway 2010: 141) for commemorating the dead soldier, this public memorial signifies to the visitor that collective death is an important part of the commune’s reality and history. Such reality, moreover, extends beyond the public iconography, entailing the domestic space of numerous families.

Of course, one might be curious about the possible distinction between the public memorial and the private home when both of them come into the field of memory, encompassing the reality of the death. De Certeau (1984) gives us a very helpful hint by

111 underlining the significance of their own stories assigned to particular places. For De

Certeau, such assignment transforms “places” into “spaces” with defined purposes and meanings. The attachment of stories to a particular physical setting of places constitutively constructs them as distinctive memory bearers. Material aspects of places may affect the way stories are constructed, told, represented and respectively remembered, yet they do not necessarily determine the practices that take place on them.

This approach of De Certeau shares several similarities to Halbwachs’s influential notion of “spatial framework” as a significant criterion characterizing different types of collective memory. “Every collective memory”, says Halbwachs, “unfolds within a spatial framework” (Halbwachs 1980: 140). Yet, unlike De Certeau, Halbwachs further emphasizes the significance of physical setting within a certain place in which memory becomes rooted, “we can understand how to recapture the past only by understanding how it is, in effect, preserved by our physical surrounding” (Halbwachs 1980: 140). He also includes the element of conflict and contestation into the construction of meaning of space, which was left out by De Certeau. As well known by his treatment of memory as a product of social groups, Halbwachs points out the complex construction of memory space, encompassing not only objects and form but also people and habitual activities.

Since an individual attains membership from various social groups, there are a number of distinct frameworks as a function of the groups from which both groups and memories emerge. Contestation happens as a result of interest conflicts between groups whose intersection is vital and unavoidable.

Grounded in the above insights, the home, first and foremost, is opened for the observer as the material premise in which a special kind of collective memory is

112 constructed, transmitted and stored by the family who dwells in it. If public memory sites, such as museums, monuments or memorials alike, are normally sequestered from the daily life of ordinary people, the house is involved in every social action and relationship that happens under its roof. Moreover, public memorials have long served to commemorate the anonymous dead without connection to any real bodies. The dead in there are any one, yet no one at the same time. Within the home, nonetheless, the dead are defined, constructed and remembered with concrete personhood constituted by both their physical and social status.

While the “spatial frame” of the house, which is essential for the imagination and communication of memory processes, is constructed by positioning an object beside others, this setting is in constant exchange with people who dwell in it. During these processes and activities, there come constant interactions between the inhabitants’ physical bodies and material objects as well as the spatial structure of the house.

Simultaneously, the body internalizes the setting and project itself, or aspects of its schema, on the setting. The house, in this sense, would be considered as “an extension of our material self” to use William James’s words (James 1890: 292), partly constructing the individual’s identity and status. We identify and remember certain individual through his/her position and the space he/she occupies as well as imprints she/he leaves within the lived materiality of the house. There is the existence of spatial memories of people who are full spatial reality, “a conceptual linkage between personhood and the material world”

(Hallam and Hockey 2001: 36). We should also include inter-body interactions into the construction of material cultures of human existence and its relationship with the lived environment. Carrying the nature of the family’s affective life, intercorporeality as

113 termed by Merleau-Ponty (1960) (quoted in Koch et al. 2012: 14), is the primary manner through which occupants of the house contact and understand each other.

Hence, if body matters to the construction of one’s living personhood, it is definitely significant to evoke memory after his/her death. The emptiness or the space that once was filled and animated but now abandoned is nothing other than the material absence, the first and foremost effect that one’s death brings to the home and his/her family members. Here comes the crucial matter of death/memory/materiality nexus in which the absence of one caused by his/her death will evoke a sense of loss and power of remembrance, even influencing the living’s “experience of the material world” (Bille et al., 2010: 4). Thus, the absent body “attracts attention to or even provokes the production of another thing, mediating the absence as a stand-in, a surrogate or a proxy” (Bille et al.,

2010:10).

In this sense, as a large number of soldiers died in the war, in the absence suggested by their death, we have found potent cultural practices and strategies of remembrance.

From a Western perspective, the post-World War I era marked the inception of new mourning patterns, among them was the creation of reliquaries in which personal belongings and objects associated with the dead soldiers were kept in the home by their next of kin. Families also displayed these mementoes and letters of the dead on their front doors (Dalisson and Julien; Fussell 1975; Winter 1995, 1999). Impinged on survivors’ day to day lives, these attempts of bringing memories at work in material forms are termed by Hallam et al as “interconnected fields” whose focus is centered on the body that has physically ceased to exist due to the death. Those objects, whether they directly belong to or are further associated with the dead, can be seen as metaphors for the fallen

114 soldiers. They fill in the emptiness left by people who have gone. Here, despite their incapacity to bodily interact with the departed, the living still strongly experience a sense of being with them through the display of such objects. The dead then are both absent and present. This complex nature of death remembrance is termed as “an absent presence” by

Maddrell (2013).

In Vietnam, the continuity of decades-long wars coupled with the chaotic and violent aftermath made it difficult to keep, recollect and transmit the personal belongings of dead soldiers to their next of kin. Not only families but also homes were torn apart by war, leading to the ultimately physical absence of both natural bodies and essential frames that invoke memory about these people. This consequence is brutal but also a crucial nature of any memory processes. Memory works in spatiality as well as temporality. The ways in which memory works through time within a certain space involve either continuities or disruptions. The former case, if possible, however, is witnessed in the combination of multilayers of fragments rather than an intact preservation of the past. For instance, in the home of Mrs. Xuân, whom we met at the beginning of this paper, walls of the relatively fancy living room in the newly-built home are filled with collections of family photos kept under glass covers. Collage styles allowed the owner to place many pictures taken at different times together, showing all members of her family. Those collaged photographs were displayed alongside two recently taken wedding photos of her grandson, which were printed in large size.

Noticeably, among those contemporary photographs were two framed single portraits of

Mrs. Xuân’s late husband. Both of them were retouched from the black and white originals. Attempts of the technician resulted in quite sharp photographs but time-tinted

115 yellow was still visible at the corners of them. Mrs. Xuân is one of the very few people in

Tân Lộc, whose family albums contain pre-war biographical photographs of family members. Hence, a link chain of family memory has been created through these photographs. The deceased member is presented among the living ones within the present time.

More prevalent than the photographs is the existence of certificates of Tổ Quốc Ghi

Công in the living room of Tân Lộc residential homes. Except for a few cases where certificates have been lost or too worn, these state-issued certificates are found in every war martyr’s household in Tân Lộc. Moreover, it is not difficult to find families in Tân

Lôc that have more than one member, from the same or even different generations, registered as war martyrs. Thus, it is not uncommon to see three even four certificates within one household. Normally hung above the household ancestral altar at the central place of the living room, these certificates are visible for anyone at first sight when stepping across the threshold.

Image 12: Five Tổ Quốc Ghi Công certificates hung above an ancestor altar. (Photo by author, July 2014)

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During our first meeting in the summer 2014, Mr. Thanh, a high school teacher, showed me the certificate which was framed and hung on the wall of the living room in his current house. Mr. Thanh mentioned his father who died in 1968 during his military service, then he said: “It is the only thing that reminds me of my deceased father. Even though I cannot recall his face since he died when I was only 5 years old, and even though we still don’t know where he is now, having this certificate makes us feel he is closer to us”. Mr. Thanh’s story in which he experienced the loss of his father and the damage of his house where he was born and lived until his teenage years, is not unique in

Tân Lộc. The death of the father followed by the displacement of the original house, the only place where Mr. Thanh experienced actual but brief interactions with his father, led to the disruption of both family flow as well as the recollection of the dead person.

Moreover, since all of the father’s personal belongings were washed away by the flood during the early 1980s, along with the fact that he died away from home without the corpse being returned, meant that there is no grave to visit, further disrupting the physical connection between the dead man and his living relatives. In Mr Thanh’s case, it is understandable to see the prominent display the honorable death certificate in his new home’s living room. Though the certificate is not directly related to the body memory of the dead and the display in the new house is not “authentic”, it is the only material thing that Mr. Thanh and his family can rely on to fill in the gap left by his father’s death and to mend the disruption in the family history. For Mr. Thanh and many other relatives of war martyrs in Tân Lộc, these certificates become substitutes for the absent bodies of their departed loved ones.

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Drawing upon the above instances, we can see that, in a sense, many residential homes in Tân Lộc are spaces full of, or filled with, absences. Yet, these absences are neither simply absent nor present. Indeed, there is a complex correlation between these absences and their presences. While the absence is manifested and brought to presence, primarily thanks to the significant role of material objects, this presence is incomplete and depends on absence. Within the home, the meaning of objects whether in forms of visual photographs or textual certificates as presence of the dead, or rather those-that- once-lived, is only successfully constructed when connecting to the absence of real bodies. That is how boundaries of materiality and metaphor are crossed through the use of objects within certain space of memory. That is, moreover, through the complexity of absence – presence and the meaning-making process of objects involved, how the nature of memory as a social construction is emphasized. If memory of the absent dead is kept and made present materially, this process is nothing other than intentional human practices.

Here again, we return to the significant trajectory of human-object relations. Given that artefacts associated with war martyrs are often displayed in the public space of the owners’ living room, coupled with the prevalence of the one plan layout of the

Vietnamese rural household architecture,25 these objects afford a clear view to family,

25 The traditional way of organizing living space in Vietnamese rural households, in fact, has preferred communalism to individualism despite the fact that the house has been the metaphor for the boundary between the insiders and outsiders. Within the main house, boundaries between different chambers are marked by wooden or cement pillars rather than completed walls. This pattern of one-roomed, open plan layout primarily provides no personal areas inside a house. Instead gender, hierarchy, and status define the interior. This adaptability allows for the incorporation of different configurations of family members, as well as outsiders, at any given moment. Recently, modernization as part and parcel of the lengthy Western colonialization followed by the privatization of formerly state and public property within the Socialist era has resulted in changes in home interior in urban areas throughout the country. Nonetheless, this trend has not left much influence on rural household setting patterns. In Tân Lộc as well as in any other rural communities in Vietnam, except for the more popular usage of concrete and endurable material in 118 friends and sometimes strangers. Moreover, it is very normal in Vietnam for guests to start conversations by asking the hosts about wall-mounted objects they see in the sitting room. The objects such as photographs and certificates of war-death honor, then transcend their “thingliness” which presents a fixed point in the home’s interior, with their fixed images and inscriptions, into what Santino (2004) has described as an

‘performative commemorative’ process (as quoted in Maddrell 2013: 514), evoking, communicating memory and inspiring viewers. They, therefore, can be read as a

“reiteration of relationship as well as remembrance” (Maddrell 2013: 514) through which the absence of the dead is presented. Absence, in this view, is not a thing in itself but as something that exists through relations that give absence matter. Absence embraces the so-called relational ontology (Meyer 2012), being conveyed as something “performed, textured and materialized through relations and processes, and via objects” (Meyer

2012:103).

In the house, the absence is “seen”, “felt” and “heard”. During my fieldwork with the bereaved of war martyrs, I was struck by silent moments of elderly parents looking at or touching the certificates dedicated to the death of their children. Many others, on the contrary, were eager to show and comment on photographs of their dead relatives. Then, what was more significant for me was the discovery of the fact that absence was made present through “hidden” objects as much as through displayed ones. It happened to me only during my fourth week in Tân Lộc, and at my third visit to her house that Mrs.

Thảnh, a widow in her mid-60s, whose husband died in Quảng Ngãi in 1968, showed me

construction, not many remarkable changes have been seen in the open space setting of recently-built homes.

119 a small locked box in which all things of her late husband were kept. There were a yellowed diary, two letters, and a worn death announcement, all were neatly folded, wrapped in a white cloth and put into the box. Normally, as Mrs. Thảnh told me, the box was carefully locked and placed in the bedside drawer in her bedroom along with other most precious things of her family. Of course, the drawer was also locked. Mrs. Thảnh clarified: “I keep them all here in this locked drawer partly for the security reason because they are “paper work” needed for the registration of my husband as a war martyr.

But more importantly because I want to keep them for my son who never had a chance to meet his father in person. At least with these things, I hope he will be able to learn something about his father.” Here, the fact of being moved away from the public space of the living room to the private bed room, and being well hidden from the view and acknowledgement of outsiders, emphasized the ontological status of these objects as

“family heritage”, signifying the concrete evidence of intimate familial relationship as well as constructing the performance of absence as a bridge between past, present and towards future time. Here, as long as absence can be made present through objects and practices and have an important effect on the life of the family, “absence thus has agency” (Meyer, 2008, 2012).

What is more, I argue, whether through internal dialogues or inter-personal conversations, or even through objects being secretly kept in a locked drawer, absence and its agency signify “an intersubjective experience” between human and objects, that might “materially or sensually evoke and transmit emotive and corporeal traces of the dead” (Kidron 2012: 6), fulfilling what Walter (1996) terms as “biographical function”.

As the symbolic “body” that replaces the real vanished one, artefacts not only provide a

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“concrete evidence of their existence” (Riches and Dawson 1998: 129), but also they construct and maintain their “durable biography” (Walter 1996) unchanged or disrupted through time and space. While personal photographs depict the whole or part of the actual body of the dead, the certificate mentions his/her name and very brief identification information. More significantly, these physical traces work to ascertain the deceased identification, access and recall their names or even conjure them up as separate individuals who once existed here and there, who are distinguishable from others.

So far, we have discovered the nature of family memory through the lens of material culture in which the loss and absence of the dead become a significant potent evoking memorialization practice in forms of using and presenting physical objects. The materiality of the house and human-object interactions embraced by it, thus, have been emphasized as a specific frame characterizing and shaping the way objects are made meaningful and interpreted as mnemonic devices. To make it clear, in comparison with other institutionalized spaces, museums for instance, where the display of objects as well as the practices of the visitor are framed by shared understanding and instructed by specific rules and regulations (Meyer and Woodthorpe 2008), in the domestic space, people must rely on their own personal and independent perspectives to inscribe values onto objects. Moreover, always woven into daily practices of the home, these objects perpetually inscribe within the lived body, the sensual experience of habitants, depicting what Nora (1989) and Halbwachs (1992) term ‘lived memory”.

The household setting as space of memory also contains multiple layers and fragments of meanings accumulated over time. This complexity of the home as a space of memory is also reflected in the simultaneous existence of different kinds of memory

121 practices within the spatial setting of the home, for instance the dichotomies of vernacular

– national memory and private-public memory. In the specific case study of Tân Lộc, the integration of national memory with family remembrance has been widely witnessed, given the fact that the most prevalent object used to present the dead soldier in their home is the state-issued certificate. One can see Mr. Tuần, father of a war martyr, sitting in his living room, dusting the glass cover of the honor death certificate of his son every day. “I felt as if we were just sitting on the couch together. Touching it [the certificate] is like I touch my heroic son” said Mr. Tuần. Like Mr. Tuần, many other relatives of the war martyrs take pride when hanging the certificates in their private homes.

Thus, the domestic space, for the Vietnamese, as Kwon observes, is at once the arena for private life and a gallery for their public identity (Kwon 2008: 59). The intimate level of commemoration in the home through the preservation in households of possessions, photographs, and personal signatures of the dead also invites participation of visitors from the outside world. The practice of family commemoration associated with the space of domestic household, therefore, is not necessarily considered private. In addition, family memory is not constrained within the limitation of the home’s roof, but includes further forms and practices such as visiting personal graves in national cemeteries. It is noted that public and private places do not necessarily define private and public remembrance. Rather, as Cochran usefully points out, private and public matters are distinguished in terms of social inclusion and exclusion (Cochran 1990).

Furthermore, as Lebow specifies, the concept of private memory is designed to conceptualize how human beings put the official and public memory of their culture’s stories and interpretations of the past to their own use (Lebow 2006). Consequently, the

122 home can be understood as “heterotopic”, a term used by Foucault to described the ability of a space that transcends the “here and now” (Foucault, 1986).

Ancestor, ghost or hero? How should I remember him?

So far, in the previous section, I have presented a fundamental way through which families in Tân Lộc commemorate their deceased members, namely the preservation and display of material artifacts associated with the dead. Evidently, by way of contrast to the universal conceptualization of death in public memorials, the use of mnemonic objects in families embarks on a highly effective act of personalizing the dead. While the most common Tổ Quốc Ghi Công certificates may follow a stylized form, they are personal and distinct in the use of families who turn them into “shrines” of remembrance or surrogate bodies of their specific beloved.

From this initial observation, the following section takes a step further into the investigation of family commemoration of dead soldiers, situating the use of material objects in a broader context of making meaning of death, in which it is conjoint with other family practices. Specifically, I argue that the continuous use of objects as foci for presenting the dead is driven by particular logics and motives which are beyond the immediate responses to bereavement. The popular practice of subsuming Tổ Quốc Ghi

Công certificates to ancestral altar arrangement in households alongside attempts to preserve and hand down the deceased’s belongings as “family heirlooms” over generations depict family remembrance as long-lasting moral and social obligations.

Such remarkable memory-stricken forces lying in family and kinship principles whose emphasis on moral debt owed by descendants to their predecessors is elaborated by religious beliefs.

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Moreover, given the significance of religious and kinship traditions in determining and maintaining individuals’ identity, both in life and death, the intersection of such vernacular frameworks and that of the state within the realm of family provides an appropriate example to investigate the identity confrontation. Contestations, negotiations and sometimes dilemmas may have given rise in unexpected ways by these membership overlaps. Yet, on the other side, a common goal can be seen in all of these mnemonic attempts, which have been framed by religious beliefs, kinship principles and nationalist doctrines. And that goal is to present the dead as transcendental entity possessing the so- called social immortality made available through remembrance by the living.

The advantage of staying in Tân Lộc during my field trips enabled me to observe many of my informants’ daily routines which included several practices dedicated to the dead. The head of my host family, Mr. Sơn, fifty-eight years old, is a younger brother of a war martyr who died in 1972. During my stay in his house in Tân Lộc, I became a

“loyal” audience of Mr. Sơn’s morning rituals, which started with placing three burning incense sticks into an urn on the ancestral altar and ended with him bowing his joined hands and his head three times in front of the altar. Normally, Mr. Sơn does not prepare the offerings for the morning devotion by himself. His wife is the person in charge of it.

Unlike the full package of offerings, which includes seasonal fruits, flowers, wine, and votive money, that are required on the first and the fifteenth of every Lunar month, Mr.

Sơn’s wife only prepares three small cups of wine and a bowl of fresh water for each daily morning ritual. Even though ancestral altars are indispensable in every household in

Vietnam, not many people carry out the rituals daily as Mr. Sơn does.

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In his current house, living with Mr. Sơn and his wife, are their children, a mid- twenties son and his wife and another unmarried daughter. Being the second son of the family himself, Mr. Sơn inherited the house from his parents who lived with him until their death several years ago. By right, the house should have been handed down to his elder brother had the brother not died as a war martyr. Another younger brother of Mr.

Sơn lived in a separate house next door. This plot of land originally belonged to Mr.

Sơn’s parents and was allocated to the younger brother when he got married long ago.

Along with the house, Mr. Sơn acknowledges that he has inherited the most important family heritage, the ancestral altar and all responsibilities of remembering the dead members of his family and those of several previous generations.

The model of family structure and inheritance pattern witnessed in the case of Mr.

Sơn is not so unique in Tân Lộc or in other communities throughout Vietnam. In fact, my observations reinforce findings of previous studies that emphasize the dynamics of

Vietnamese household and kinship structure, setting it apart from that of ideal Chinese

Confucian mandate (Luong 1989, Hirschman and Vu 1996). Throughout the imperial period in China, the Confucian filial piety ideal was symbolized by the maintenance of large multigenerational households, encompassing several generations of patrilineal descendants and their families. Such foundational ideology was even legislated in the codes of all dynasties, affecting family and kinship formation in China. Introduced and developed in Vietnam since the early Chinese colonial rule in the first century, the ideology of filial piety has been adapted by the Vietnamese as a prescribed social code for their family life. However, this code has not significantly influenced the structural formation of Vietnamese households and kinship. Instead of living in extended families,

125 the majority of the Vietnamese historically and presently live in semi-nuclear families with grandparents and parents living with the family of the eldest son, other sons having independent houses. In rural areas, lineages are established by clusters of these semi- nuclear families living in the same village or neighborhood, who share direct or indirect origin with each other. This living arrangement allows families within a kin to maintain close and frequent contacts and engage in a wide variety of mutual activities while keeping them independent in their own daily lives.

The significance of Confucian heritage though has not left its strong imprints in

Vietnamese family and kinship organization, its salient role lies in the creation of a moral climate within them. This Confucian familial influence when compounded with other religious beliefs, both indigenous and imported to Vietnam at different points in time, has resulted in the most important socio-cultural practice, namely ancestor worship. On the one hand, the cosmological belief grounded in the constitutive blending of indigenous animism, Taoism and Buddhism, emphasizes the simultaneous afterlife existence of a wide range of spirits, human and non-human included, as well as their interdependent and constant influences on the life of the living. On the other hand, Confucian doctrine sets up societal norms in terms of the duties and obligations of family members toward each other, constructing and maintaining a long line of genealogy through several generations.

This intertwinement of different sets of societal norms and religious beliefs leads to the fact that remembering and even more importantly, worshiping the dead is one of the most significant moral duties and obligations the living have to conduct in order to maintain a good condition for their family and kin. Within the realm of family and kinship, as part of

126 the cult of spirits, ancestor worship hence possesses a twofold function, as religious belief/practice and as moral guidance for family life.

In this context, being born and raised in a typical rural Vietnamese village, Mr. Sơn obviously has witnessed constant interactions, inside and outside his family, between the living and the dead through a wide range of rituals and practices, from simple household devotions to extravagant funerals and annual death anniversaries. Mr. Sơn also learned that his deceased parents, brother and many other relatives would continue their noncorporeal afterlife in the Otherworld. They can nonverbally communicate with the living and travel back and forth between their world and the living one, all just through the smoke of incense sticks burned on the altar. More simply, they are also presented in the spirit whenever the living remember them. Family relationships do not end with the death of family members. Nonetheless, death has transferred them into the Otherworld where they gain a new membership which confers them with extraordinary power to influence the course of life of the living survivors. The wealth and security of the living depend on maintaining a relationship of mutual care and assistance with the dead family members.

Taught by Confucian prescriptions, Mr.Sơn also acknowledged that the most important virtue of a member of his family is his/her collective responsibility of maintaining a good fate, such as harmonious and healthy prosperity, for the family and the kin. To do so, he must, first and foremost, avoid any ill-treament to the dead, for this may cause purnishments or misfortune. Furthermore, he needs to dedicate appropriate post-mortem care to the dead, paralelling with attempts to fufill required moral duties to the living.

Here, Mr.Sơn and millions of Vietnamese people alike see themselves as engaged in “a social contract with the deceased”, which acts as the basis for structures of moral

127 authority and identity. That supernatural experiences are not considered out of ordinary in

Vietnam is indicative of a worldview shared across countries in East and Southeast Asia where, as Akira Nishimura insightfully explains it, the spirit of the dead should be regarded not as “substantial” but as “relational” (Nishimura 2011: 304). In other words, the existence of the spirit of is not an issue here. Rather, the concept of the spirit is considered as “an index of the relationship between the living and the dead.” (Nishimura

2011: 304)

It goes without saying that, for ages, the Vietnamese as well as millions of people all over the world have found in religious prescriptions, world and indigenous religions included, salient instruments and guidance for them to deal with the death of the loved ones. Recent war and postwar revolutionary politics in Vietnam have constituted the immediate and dramatic turbulence in both the world of the living and the one belonging to the dead, leading to the imperative of (re)defining, (re)situating and (re)constructing the pre-existing religious and moral identity of the dead within the realm of family and kinship.

Among those who survived the war, Mr.Sơn was not the only one witnessing unexpected disruption in the family flow which led to a slight shift in the inheritance queue. Yet as the main worshipper of the family, Mr.Sơn was more concerned about the fate of his brother who died as a war martyr than those of any other deceased ones. One day, Mr.Sơn explained to me the reason why he voluntarily devoted himself to the morning rirual everyday: “years have passed, we still do not know where my brother’s remains are; we also know nothing about how and why he died. Except for a letter from his comrade saying that he died in Huế in 1972, we don’t know about the specific date of

128 his death. Without a grave where he can live, his spirit has to wander like a ghost. And without knowing the day he died, we can not organize proper death anniversaries for him.

I just pray everyday for his spririt to rest in peace and hope that he will let us find the way to reach him someday.” Similar to the hardship experienced by the bereaved elsewhere in

Europe in the descriptions of Jay Winter (1995) and Bruce Scates (2001), the Vietnamese in the aftermath of war have had to face a prolonged brutal and traumatic crisis caused by the uncertainty of their beloved’s death and the absence of bodies to mourn. There was, hence, an air of panic in Mr. Sơn’s referring to his martyr brother as a ghost (con ma) whose lowest status and position within the hierarchy of the dead was given due to the missing of his corpse.

Grounded in the Vietnamese popular cosmology, the human body is believed to be the house in which the soul resides. When a person dies, the soul will leave its house, the dead body or the corpse (xác), but the soul remains in the vicinity of the death for forty- nine days. Therefore, dying at home or dying outside the home but having the intact body being moved into the house and placed in front of the family altar is the best circumstance constituting a good death. Being surrounded by the familiar setting of the home, and assisted by proper rites conducted by the family members, the soul will successfully free itself from the corpse and make its journey to the Otherworld. The corpse then will be buried and transferred to its new house, the tomb, located within the family graveyard along with other deceased family members. This condition of good death results in the soul’s attainment of ancestral membership whose memory is settled in the realm of family and kinship. On the contrary, dying far away from home without the corpse being sent home for proper rites and burial is a constitutive condition of a bad

129 death in which the soul when leaving the body will get confused by unfamiliar surroundings. Instead of gaining a position in the ancestral pantheon, the soul experiencing this bad death will become a ghost, a homeless spirit wandering around the earth. There are, of course, several other physical and social conditions determining the categorical distinction between good deaths and bad deaths, and respectively defining one’s posthumous identity as an ancestor or a ghost. Being advanced in years, having many surviving chidren, dying a quick, painless death all constitute a favorable end and a smooth transformation into a benevolent ancestor; whereas dying young and childless, dying in pain with wounded bodies are constitutive to a bad death (Malarney 2002: 179-

180). Hence, the ancestor and the ghost are opposite categories in the moral hierarchy of the dead, which significantly reflect the “house-centered philosophy” (Kwon 2006:13) widely believed and practised by the Vietnamese. Home, family and their related space of memory are essential determinants for the construction of identity for both the living and the dead. According to this theory, millions of people, including civilians and soldiers of both sides, died under violent circumstances war, casting as “the quintessential bad death” (Malarney 2002: 179) or specifically termed as “grievous death” (chết oan), have undeniably gained their status as ghosts. Unlike ancestors whose afterlives are normally described as benevolent caretakers because their memories are rooted in the domain of family and kinship, ghosts, especially ghosts of war, suffer from a very tragic afterlife.

Their memories are trapped within the terror and violent circumstance of their death.

Their physical pain compounded with the spiritual sorrow of being neglected and forgotten by the living make ghosts short-tempered and volatile. In this sense, ghosts are pitiful as well as harmful beings as the same time.

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Obviously, no one expects to see his/her loved family member as a ghost.

Unfortunately, the reality of war has been beyond any expectation, since the Second

Indochina war alone did overpopulate the Vietnamese Otherworld with an explosion of the unnatural and violent deaths of more than five million Vietnamese (Gustafsson 2008:

33-34). 26 Among such a huge army of ghosts wandering the country, there are more than

300,000 soldiers who are assumed to be dead but their remains are still missing

(Summerfield, 1998: 26). The tragic afterlife of war soldiers in Vietnam whose bodies had been blown apart by heavenly artillery, and whose souls have become ghosts is vividly described by the novelist Bảo Ninh in his novel entitled “The Sorrow of War”:

“They were still loose, wandering in every corner and bush in the jungle, drifting along the stream, refusing to depart for the otherworld…The sobbing whispers were heard deep in the jungle at night, the howls carried on the wind. Perhaps they really were the voices of wandering souls of dead soldiers” (Bảo Ninh 1996: 6). Because of such nightmarish conditions of their spiritual afterlife, a traumatic feeling is often provoked whenever the survivors think about their missing relatives as wandering ghosts. Like many people who share the same loss, Mr. Sơn has been haunted by this feeling for years, ever since he was notified about the death of his brother. More importantly, considering his role as the chief worshipper who takes responsibility for maintaining a well-being condition for the family and the kin, Mr. Sơn has suffered from a great deal of anxiety. Such anxiety is increased by facing possibilities of being punished or harmed by the ghost for not being able to offer him appropriate care and a “house” in which his soul can ultimately rest. Searching for and bringing the missing relatives home, offering spiritual care to pacify their pain

26 This figure includes 2 million Southern civilians, 2 million Northern civilians, and 1.1 million military killed. 131 and anger and last but not least resettling them into the domain of family remembrance, obviously, are the most urgent remedies many families might think of to deal with their families’ crisis. Yet, their wish and hope unfortunately encountered many obstacles due to the chaotic circumstance of war and postwar eras, the limitation of transportation and financial resources. The biggest hindrance, moreover, was erected by the state and its discriminative policy towards the dead, which lasted several decades.

While ghosts are one of the most significant moral and sacred categories in popular culture, they never have a cohenrent existence in Vietnamese official social and cultural landscapes. In other words, ghosts are marginalized and even officially eliminated by the

Vietnamese self-enligtenment and secularization projects whose purposes and agendas have been described in my first chapter. For the Vietnamese state, there are only two categories of the dead – ancestors and heroes – both are secular figures who gain their posthumous identies and are commemorated by the living because of the good deeds they have done when alive (Malarney 1996, 2002). These secular beliefs were strongly promoted by the state authority during the 1950s to the 1980s, assuring that there were no supernatural beings existing in the world of socialists and Communists. Thus, there were no places for ghosts as well as any practices related to them. Anyone who mentioned ghosts and conducted spiritual-related rituals, which were strictly labeled as superstitious, could be fined or even imprisioned. Therefore, during that period of time, families whose members died tragic deaths could not offer them special rituals to ease their pain. The door to the supernatural world had been shut down by the state. And the trauma of war survivors thinking of their beloved deceased as wandering ghosts was prolonged.

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The implication of the state’s revolutionary mandates in marginalizing civilian deaths and eliminating ghosts from the dominant postwar commemoration politics are examined in detail by Heonik Kwon in his seminal book entitled Ghosts of War in

Vietnam (2008). For Kwon, the absence of ghosts in the official discourse of remembrance defines “the difference between the state and popular ritual patterns, and war death in the statecraft and that in social practice” (Kwon 2008: 25). This difference is the result of the state’s hierarchical value system when it came to the dead. Vietnamese people’s ritual interactions with ghosts do not discriminate between innocent civilians and fighters, or between the heroic death and the tragic death, as long as they have died bad deaths, they become ghosts (Kwon 2006, 2008; Gustafsson 2008); whereas, the official media and the state’s commemorative projects clearly differentiate between death of combatants and those of civilians (Malarney 2002, 2007). War martyrs receive the extraordinary status of national hero to whom various public commemorative projects are dedicated. From the state’s perspective, this political position offered to dead soldiers and related discourse promoted widely in public can overturn the moral negativity constituting their bad death. War soldiers did not die but “sacrificed” their lives for the nation and its population. They have gained the merit of patriotic service to the country which set them apart from other war deaths. A sense of pride is apparently very common among next of kin of war martyrs whose death are considered meaningful. Still, seeing the issue from religious and family perspectives, such hero-centered commemorative sanctions which distance dead soldiers from their familial ancestral domain and popular cultural practices has caused more dilemma than comfort for the living relatives.

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One of my informants in Tân Lộc, Mr. Hùng, for instance, described the collective secular commemorative service organized for his martyr brother and three others in early

1970s as “a public meeting at the communal house, which was full of political speeches of local officials and cadres”. At the time, when his elder brother died in the battlefield,

Mr. Hùng was a high school student, already joining the commune’s self-defense unit in which he was taught about the honor duty of bravely fighting and sacrificing for the country. Yet, as Mr. Hùng recalled, when the news of his brother’s death was delivered to his family, the whole family including himself faced a great anxiety. The anxiety was intensified when they knew that there had been no corpse found as well as no traditional rituals would be allowed to be organized. To overcome that uneasy feeling and to calm down the family, Mr. Hùng’s mother decided to defy the state policy. She invited a spiritual specialist and conducted a Buddhist requiem at their home, which she believed was the only way to ensure the possibility for the loving care for the deceased’s soul. The requiem was secretly conducted in the dark of night and in a manner that was as modest as possible without votive papers being burned and without the music and other accoutrements that traditionally went along with it. Seven years after his death notification was sent to the family and the socialist funeral was organized, they found his remains somewhere in a civil cemetery in Huế. Even though the brother’s corpse was found, it was not sent to the family due to the state policy of gathering war martyrs’ remains in state-owned cemeteries. Instead, an exhumation was made and the man was reburied in Trường Sơn National cemetery with thousands of other war martyrs. It was not until 1980 that Mr. Hùng’s family was able to make their first trip to see his brother there.

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Thus, apart from those whose remains are still missing, many other dead soldiers are also kept away from their homes due to their special political status of national heroes. Specifically assigned for communes within the territory of Can Lộc district, Thiên

Lộc war cemetery was built in 1985 and started to receive the remains of war martyrs one year later. Located at the center of Can Lộc district and about ten kilometers north of Tân

Lộc commune, the Thiên Lộc war cemetery is the resting place of more than 400 soldiers who were born in any one of the communes in Can Lộc district. Since the early 1980s, many war martyrs of Tân Lộc, whose remains were found in temporary graves within civil cemeteries, former battlefields or even in residential garden plots in the neighborhood areas of Hà Tĩnh province were reburied in Thiên Lộc cemetery. Others who have died in far-away battlefields were repatriated and reburied at the nearest martyr cemeteries, most of them located in the Southern part of Vietnam. This pattern of mobilizing the dead under privileged burials might not lead to what was described by

Winter based on his observation of post World War I military burial pattern as “the cruelty of the erection of a new barrier between families and the bodies which belong to them” (Winter 1995: 24). Yet, it definitely has caused a wave of controversy, sadness and even discontent for many war martyrs’ families. Nam, a thirty-year-old man in Tân Lộc, told me about his martyr uncle whose grave is located in Road 9 National cemetery in

Quảng Trị province. He commented, “the location of the cemetery was a former battlefield. It’s an accursed place. We want to move him out of this place. His soul needs to be with other ancestors, so he can rest in peace instead of being kept in this terrible place.” Nam’s comment on the resting place of his relative resonated with concerns of other Tân Lộc inhabitants, some of them eventually voiced their appeal for change.

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Mrs. Hương, a farmer in her mid-50s recalled a difficult situation faced by her family in the late 1990s. More than twenty years after her death, Mrs. Hương’s sister, who joined the Group 559 of the Youth Shock Brigades when she was eighteen and served the war at the Southern front, constantly appeared in her mother’s dreams. She cried all the time. As Mrs. Hương recalled, at that time, her mother was suffering from serious sickness, and she was too weak to endure long journeys across the country to a cemetery in Tây Ninh province where the sister’s grave was housed. Mrs. Hương’s mother had only gone there twice since the family got the notice about the sister’s death in 1973. Other members also hardly visited her due to the unaffordable cost for the long trips. The mother’s dreams then were interpreted by the family as the deceased girl was missing her family and longing for their help to bring her home. As the mother’s health condition got worse and the possibility of not being able to see her daughter once before she died got closer, the family was prompted to take action. They made requests to the

Office of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs of Can Lộc District, asking for permission to bring the deceased girl’s remains back home. The consideration took nearly one year, and the approval was finally granted in 2002. The sister was returned to the commune’s cemetery after a long trip joined by Mrs. Hương and other two family members. To make the trip, beside a small amount of allowance granted by the Office of

Labor and Social Affairs,27 the family had to borrow money from other relatives. With

27 During the 1990s, state allowances were only given to those who were indicated as poor households by their residence units’ administrators. Such allowances also covered a very small amount of the total fare of the trips. Specifically, if granted, the family (three people at the most) would receive VND 120,000/day/person. Such amount of money was only for their food expense and limited within 4 days. Eligible families only received this kind of allowance once a year. Since 2008, allowances have been granted for all war martyr families, mostly next of kin, in their trips to military cemeteries. Once a year, a family (maximum three people) can get the financial aid for their trip. The amount of fund is calculated based on the distance from their home to the cemetery, which ranges from VND 150,000/person (less than CAD 10) to VND 1.7 million (about CAD 80). 136 her own house in her native homeland, Mrs. Hương’s sister now is surrounded by her loved ones including her grandparents, her parents and many other relatives. Her grave’s marker is inscribed with a red star and the privileged phrase “war martyr” above her name. Inside her late parents’ house which is currently taken care of by Mrs. Hương, her certificate of honor death is placed on the ancestral altar as a replacement of her mortuary photo. She joins other deceased members in the circle of family ancestors. “She has served enough for the country” said Mrs. Hương, “She is a war martyr. We are proud of her. But more than that, she is our sister. Home is the best place for the dead”.

Mrs. Hương’s family was not alone in requesting the homecoming of their departed relative. Many others in Tân Lộc and different communities throughout the country have taken the same steps. Since the mid-2000s onwards, numerous graves of war martyrs have moved from the state war cemeteries to local cemeteries in their natal communities.

Such movement of dead bodies, which indicates the state administration’s tolerance for civil activities, is of special significance given the fact that similar practices have been hardly seen in other postwar societies. In post World War I countries, for instance, constant requests of families calling on governments to let them bring their dead home were all refused. The only exception was seen in France where the “Return to families the remains of our heroes” campaign joined by hundred families and activists in 1919-1920 led to the promulgation of a government decree in 1920, establishing the right of families to claim the bodies of their loved ones, and to transfer them home at state expense. The operation of private exhumations in France, however, only took place for three years, and

For families who wish to have their relatives’ graves entered in or removed from war cemeteries, they will receive the funding amount of VND 2 million (about CAD 100) for exhumation and transportation fees.

137 it was concluded in 1923. Since then, no removal of soldiers’ remains was allowed in order to maintain the stability of the state cemeteries (Winter 1995: 22-8). Thus, with very few examples being recorded, bringing home the dead seemingly is an extraordinary issue in the commemorative culture associated with the 20th century’s wars. In Vietnam, unlike what happened earlier in France, even though the pattern of burial promoted by the state has facilitated certain problems for families of dead soldiers, it has never led to intensive protest by the public. The desire of families to bring their beloved home has mainly been accelerated since the mid-2000s, three decades after the war ended, and has been strongly associated with families’ private concerns caused by religious reasons.

Such accumulation of families’ inquiries has been a salient catalyst for the amendment of the state’s policy. Yet, in a broader sense, the transformation should be understood as a result of the decisive shifting in the attitude of those in authority toward the significance of religion and kinship in general.

That is to say, like the attempt to traditionalize war memorials by integrating elements of religious aesthetics into their secular architect and representations, the state’s tolerance for families’ claim on the dead is useful for the state itself as much as it is for families in their respective participation in the production of memory. The flexibility provided by the state after a long time of exercising strictly control over the politics of dead bodies has enabled both national hero worship and the family’s ancestor worship to prosper together. On the one hand, the idea of returning war martyrs to their places of origin, from the state’s perspective, means further assimilation of the national discourse

138 into domestic space and family life.28 On the other hand, from the family perspective, placing the dead, whose contribution to the country has been recognized by the state, in the family’s worshiping space with other ancestors helps transform the dead’s contribution to the nation into a blessing for his/herself as well as for the whole family.

Moreover, it is necessary to note that recent cases of transferring dead soldiers from state cemeteries to those of local villages or lineages have not affected the stability of state cemeteries in both physical and symbolic terms. In interviews and conversations, the majority of my informants in Tân Lộc supported the idea that war martyrs should remain in state cemeteries. In case of Nam whom I mentioned above, his idea of bringing his uncle home was not approved by other family members, especially those of older generations. The refusal was explained by pointing out the possibility of causing unnecessary turbulence for the dead who had suffered enough. One of Nam’s uncles who is the eldest brother of both Nam’s father and the martyr, told me that: “he [the brother] has been dead for more than forty years. I think it it’s disrespectful to dig up his grave after such a long time.” The old man who is a war veteran himself and a member of

Communist Party further explained: “We can visit him at the cemetery very easily nowadays thanks to the improvement in transportation facilities. Worshiping him is of importance, but it is not necessary to remove him from the historical site where his death already harbored. If he is buried in our lineage grave site, he will be closer to our family, but in the recent cemetery which is built in a former combat zone, his death will be more meaningful. The cemetery is a place where my brother is surrounded by his comrades. It

28 Whether reburying the dead in the existing war martyr cemetery in the local commune or in their lineage burial site, the family must register with the provincial office of Labor, War Invalids and Social Welfare. The tomb must be built accordingly to the military form of those in state cemeteries. 139 is also a place where present and future generations come to learn about the country’s history.”

As such, decades after the war ended, the right to choose a final resting place for the dead has shifted from the state authority to families. Even though there have not been so many soldiers transferred from a sea of identical gravestones in war cemeteries to a new order “follows the line of descent and the principle of seniority” (Kwon 2008: 61) in lineage burial sites, the significance of such phenomenon is far from being pivotal. It indicates how the present shift in Vietnamese socio-political and economic conditions can influence the way in which the relationship between the dead and the living is shaped and reshaped. Initiated under the banner of Đổi Mới program since the late 1980s, the implication of political liberalization and economic reform, as Luong (1993) and Heonik

Kwon (2006) points out to us, have energized a process of privatization through which the significant role of the family in both economic and cultural spheres has been revitalized. In this situation, just like the nation's economy of which labor forces have been shifting from the state monopoly to the private and communal sectors, commemoration domain has been undertaking a similar trajectory of privatization manifested through the movement of reburying the dead.

Changes in the socio-political fabric, therefore, have reconfigured the dynamic of power relations within the domain of commemoration, for which many alternative ways of remembrance promoted by the family have become publicly acceptable for those in authority. Beside the reburial movement, since the early 1990s, spiritual practices, especially those associated with the category of ghosts have remerged and become more and more popular in Vietnam. Ghosts appeared in literature, such as the novel of Bảo

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Ninh, and several others. First published in 1987, The Sorrow of War was banned from republishing for more than 10 years, since its trajectory went against the grand narrative of the state. It was the first public cultural product that described war soldiers as wandering ghosts. Gradually gaining its acceptance, this novel has marked a significant role in representing in the public domain a vernacular view based on religious perspectives about the fate of war martyrs in Vietnam. More empirically, immersed in recent increasing interests by domestic and foreign researchers and scholars in the resurgence of religious and ritual practices in Vietnam, ghosts have made their appearance in many of those notable works (Kwon 2006, 2007, Endres 2008, 2011,

Gustafsson 2011).

The appearance of war ghosts in the public domain in post-war Vietnam and the mention of their influence on the lives of living relatives have been examined as consequences of the long delay or ineffectiveness of attempts to search for and bring the missing dead home. Economic improvement, on the one hand, has enabled many families to organize pilgrimages to former battlefields or cemeteries long distances away to search for the remains of their relatives. On the other hand, results gained from the army’s body-finding missions formally organized by the state normally are not as productive as expected. Some even contested these missions as they “were far more rhetorical than they had been hoping for” (Kwon 2008: 48). The anxiety of survivors has been accelerated, since the longer the delay, the more painful their relatives’ lives. Thus, many have shifted their source of consultation from conventional and official to alternative vernacular searching channels which they believe are more accurate and trustworthy. During my stay in Tân Lộc, stories of families, some in Tân Lộc, some

141 somewhere else in the neighborhood communes, who have successfully found the remains of the dead relatives with the help of psychics (nhà ngoại cảm) repeatedly appeared in our interviews and discussions. Described by local people as someone who possesses the ability to communicate with the souls of the dead, these psychics and their supernatural methods have gained remarkable approval from families of war martyrs. As told by Tú whose grandfather’s grave was found by a psychic in Sơn La city more than

50 years after his death, “without the assistant of a psychic who had a gaze that could penetrate the entrails of the earth and a special skill to talk to the dead, my family could not find the exact location of my grandfather’s grave.”

Resonating well with Tú’s story, reports, video and audio recordings describing in minute detail how psychics work to locate the remains of dead soldiers were circulated widely in printed media as well as on the Internet during the late 1990s to early 2000s.

Of those testimonies, many were produced by high-profile public figures or people with high degrees and professional credentials (Schlecker and Endres 2011). Unlike the stories of secret rituals during 1950s-1980s, services of psychics, which embodies similar belief in the existence of supernatural beings, have been discussed and employed openly by the populace since the mid-1990s. From the dark rooms of residential houses, psychics and their spiritual practices have gradually stepped out to the public domain.

Against this context, different research groups began to investigate the various methods used by psychics. In 1997, one scientific project was set up by the Science and

Technology Union for Applied Informatics (UIA), another was established by the Center for Investigation into Human Capabilities (CIHC). With the funding from the Ministry of Science and Technology, as well as from the Vietnam Union of Science and

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Technology Associations, fifteen licensed psychics were recruited to work for the two projects (Schlecker and Endres 2011). Amidst the popularity of psychics’ services, rather than strictly banning them, in their public statements produced with a sympathetic tone, state officials just warn against the “abnormal use” of psychic mediums or they discourage families of war martyrs from seeking the services of unverified psychics who operate outside the supervision of UIA and CIHC.

Demands from people who long for the return of their long-missing beloved, however, are much higher than the capacity of the licensed research units. To avoid another long wait for their turn at the UIA and CIHC, many people, especially those in rural areas and those who live far from Hanoi, tend to seek help from self-proclaimed psychics recommended by their relatives, neighbors or friends. One of my informants in

Tân Lộc, Mrs. Vân heard about the excellent ability of Master Phương who had helped locate hundreds of soldiers’ remains throughout the country. In June 2010, Mrs. Vân visited Master Phương’s house in Vinh city, thirty kilometers north of Tân Lộc, for her first consultation with him. At Master Phương’s house, Mrs. Vân joined other twenty clients, sitting on straw mats in the courtyard and waiting for their turn. When she was called up to meet Master Phương, she showed him her late husband’s death certificate.

Master Phương immediately went into a trance and began speaking in verse, while his hands sketched out a map on a white paper. "I see your husband”. Master Phương told

Mrs. Vân as he put an X on the map. "You should go to Quảng Nam province and ask for village number three in Điện Thọ commune. Once you arrive there, call me and I will give you further details." At the end of their first meeting, Mrs. Vân paid one million VND for the fee. With the map and instruction given by Master Phương, she

143 began the search for her husband’s remains in July 2006. During her search, Master

Phương provided her instruction via mobile phone: “go another two hundred steps to the right of the village temple. You will see a big tree there. The grave mound is just next to it.” Mrs. Vân was impressed with the explicit details described by Master Phương. She dug down the earth as Master Phương told her to do. However, after hours of digging and constant conversations with Master Phương, Mrs. Vân did not find any sort of remains of her husband.

The failure of the search for her husband’s remains was a frustrating experience for Mrs. Vân. Yet, she did not blame Master Phương; she just considered herself unlucky. “There are some cases that are more difficult than others. Even Phan Thị Bích

Hằng29 cannot be 100 percent successful”, said Mrs. Vân.

Mrs. Vân’s story indicates a common view shared by many other living relatives of dead soldiers, who simultaneously have the desire of reuniting with long lost relatives and prominent faith in the capacity of spiritual practices in helping them fulfill this desire. Many referred to the existence of UIA and CICH as evidence for the reliability of psychic activity, and they ignored skeptical warnings which had swirled in the state media for years (Đao Nguyen Lan 2007; Tung Đệ 1997). Against this context, the news of seven psychics being arrested for defrauding families of war martyrs came out as a huge shock for the believers of psychic practices. In October 2015, a court in central

Vietnam sentenced Nguyễn Văn Thúy, 56, to life in prison; Thúy’s wife and four relatives received 5 to 25 years in prison. At the time, people knew that Thúy, who claimed to be a psychic, had no paranormal power. During 2010-2013, Thúy and his

29 Phan Thị Bích Hằng is a renowned psychic working for CICH. She claims to have helped find the remains of many historic figures and those of a vast number of war martyrs. 144 accomplices stole more than 70 sets of remains of soldiers in unnamed graves from several war cemeteries and set up fake graves buried with fake personal effects such as water containers and helmets and bore the names of the dead soldiers the families were seeking. After a military forensic team analyzed nine sets of supposed human remains that Thúy had helped to recover, they found out those remains were animal bones.

When the scandalous scam of Nguyễn Văn Thúy came to light, a state official commented that he felt hurt for the families and for the nation as a whole (Associated

Press, 2015). Sadly, the man’s statement echoed the essence of examples included in this section – the fate of dead soldiers is still a crucial dilemma in postwar Vietnam. The ideas of heroism and sacrifice promoted by the state cult of war martyrs enrich the way in which the family remembers their deceased members who died in the front during the war. However, religious beliefs, the most crucial frameworks according to which the meaning individuals’ death is interpreted and memorialized by their living relatives, evoke a darker side of the reality of the war through the concept of ghost and their tragic afterlife. Throughout the years, such “counter-memory” in Foucauldian sense has made its presence more visible in the public discourse.

“I am connected to you, but I’ve never met you…”

Three days after the aforementioned trip to Trường Sơn National cemetery with

Mrs. Xuân, I was invited to the death anniversary ceremony (Đám giỗ) of Mr. Lân who was Mrs. Xuân’s cousin in-law. It was on the 27th of July, the Invalid and War Martyr

Day. Mr. Lân was reported missing during his military service in Kon Tum province in

1973. He was assumed to be dead and was recognized as a martyr in 1979, yet his true fate is still mysterious to his family and friends. Without any specific date being recorded

145 on the announcement of his death, which was sent to the family, Mr. Lân’s family had to embark on an untraditional way to memorize his death, shifting the temporality of his death from a Lunar calendar circle to a Western-based one. They hold annual death anniversary rites for him on the 27th July, attaching the memory of his death to a national event.

Before giving a feast in their house in the evening of the celebratory day, Mr. Lân’s family visited the commune’s war monument and Mr. Lân’s lineage ancestral hall (Nhà thờ họ). Born into the lineage of Nguyễn Hữu, and having died as a war martyr, the name of the deceased man was inscribed on a commemorative stele along with 12 other war martyrs who also shared the same origin anchored in the lineage. The stele was erected in

2009 and the lineage of Nguyễn Hữu was the only one among more than ten major lineages in Tân Lộc having their own monument to commemorate their martyr members.

Had they also possessed their own ancestral halls like the Nguyễn Hữu’s, others would have done the same thing to memorialize their dead soldiers. Unfortunately, the land reform and the subsequent secularization campaign and cultural revolution during the

1950s -1970s either destroyed or transformed many ancestral halls in Tân Lộc into communal warehouses or hamlet’s cattle cages. Amidst these waves of changes, the original ancestral hall of Nguyễn Hữu kin was also completely destroyed, yet the lineage was fortunate enough to get generous donations from the current incumbent head who had dedicated a part of his land to the establishment of the hall. Other members, some of them were well-to-do urban dwelling residents and overseas Vietnamese contributed a large amount of money to the project. Since the construction of the ancestral hall was completed in early 2000, it has become a pivotal destination for all members whenever

146 there are life-circle ceremonies to be held in their families. Paying a visit to the kin hall and lighting incense sticks on the ancestral altar placed inside the hall is the indispensable obligation prior to the main ceremonies that take place in the members’ own households.

Inside the sacred space of the Nguyễn Hữu lineage, there was an impressively- looking pedigree of the lineage which was printed out in large scale covering the whole left wall of the hall. The genealogical chart traced the history of the lineage back to five generations through the male line, of which the most current generation was one of Mr.

Lân’s son’s contemporaries. In addition to an extravagant wooden altar at the center of the hall, the stone martyr stela was located on its right side. Three generations of Mr.

Lân’s family headed by his wife, Mrs. Ngọc, then spent about an hour at the lineage’s worshipping house. The youngest member, Nguyên, Mr. Lân’s 12 year-old grandson, conscientiously took part in all ritual procedures. After finishing the rite in front of the altar, the young boy showed me the name of his grandfather which was engraved on the stone stela. On the one hand, by including only martyrs who were descendants of the

Nguyễn Hữu lineage, this stele was thus breaking away from the state category of war martyrs based on their contribution to the war. On the other hand, the increasing popularity of this practice of erecting lineage martyr stelae along with the resurgence of kinship rituals and practices throughout Vietnam has emphasized the conjoining of the two potentially memorial domains: the Party - State’s cult of war martyrdom and the vernacular domain of ancestral worship.

The main ceremony to mark the 40th death anniversary of Mr. Lân was organized in the most popular pattern of a family reunion with a big feast provided by the host family.

Apart from his immediate family, the next of kin of Mr. Lân including families of his two

147 younger sisters, both have expanded to the third generation, three war veterans from

Quảng Bình province, who were in the same unit with Mr. Lân before he disappeared, the head of the Nguyễn Hữu lineage, heads of offshoot branches in the kin, several representatives from families of Mr. Lân’s cousins, and some neighbors from next door households were invited to the ceremony. During the meal, people reminisced about the deceased man. As he was born when his father was already in the army, neither did Nhân, the only son of Mrs. Ngọc and Mr. Lân met his father personally nor had he any direct memories about him. Thus, he listened intently to what other people described and reminisced about his father. There was a process that was described by Walter as the

“jointed construction of biography” in which “the exploration of the deceased’s biography both inside and outside of the family’s knowledge enables the living to integrate the memory into their ongoing lives” (Walter 1996: 17). Moreover, as the feast was held in the living room of Mrs. Ngọc’s home, during the time when people were having their meal, they could simultaneously watch the live broadcast on the provincial network of an official ceremony dedicated to the War Invalid and Martyr Day happening at Đồng Lộc T-junction historical site. Some nephews and nieces of Mr. Lân had left the death anniversary early to go to the location where the official celebration took place.

They were eager to join the crowd there, paying tribute to fallen soldiers through a rite of candle lighting and finally watching an art performance.

Precisely, what I observed during the event in Mr. Lân’s family was not out of the ordinary, yet it posed further questions for my current research about the nature of family memory and its dynamics within the broader politics of memory in contemporary

Vietnam. High-casualty wars and ancestor worship have been the most crucial

148 components characterizing memoryspace of millions of families throughout Vietnam.

The intimate relations between family members and others within the kin are elaborated through the moral indebtedness towards shared familial and lineage ancestors. Family ties are constructed and developed among people who believe that they have the same fate and future which depend on the ways they make meaning of their mutual past through appropriate remembrance of their ancestors. Because of this moral principle, when it comes to the special circumstances of war which produce violent and mass death, potentially precluding the deceased from attaining ancestral spirit status, surviving kin are concerned about the possibility of being unable to fulfill their moral, ritual obligations, and this makes the dead hard to forget. More importantly, as Kwon points out in his study, decades of war in Vietnam have populated the Otherworld with “a special category of dead whose identity is far more ambiguous, shifting from too young ancestors without their own descendants to ghost and national hero” (Kwon 2006: 74). Here, in one way, the cruelty of war has given rise to unexpected glue that tightens up familial linkages through sympathetic rituals dedicated to the dead. Yet, in a contradictory way, the war has partly transformed Vietnamese family and household structure with female headship becoming more popular. Despite being demonstrated that family and kinship structure in

Vietnam has been quite different from the ideal patrilineal model rooted in orthodox

Confucian, and Vietnamese women have played active roles in their household’s economic, social and political activities (Luong 1989, Hirschman and Vu 1996), the fact that a vast number of young widows become the heads of families due to their husbands’ unexpected death has deepened the scar of war witnessed in its aftermath. More brutally, not only have family memoryscapes been changed by the war, but many families have

149 even suffered from the end of their flows. Mrs. Tiu, a woman in her mid-60s, and is a younger sister of two war martyrs, told me during our interview: “My parents have only three children. Both of my brothers died without marriage and children. If I got married, I could not take the incense burner30 of my home to my husband’s. It would never be allowed by my in-laws. And if I did that, my house and this land would be transferred to other people in my kin. Of course, I still could visit home and worship my parents and my brothers on main ritual occasions. But I could not abandon everything like that. So, I decided to stay single. Without being married, I can stay in my home until I die and worship my parents and my brothers.”

Definitely, the dynamic of memory as claimed by Pierre Nora lies in its “permanent evolution” (Nora 1989: 8), meaning that memory is open to changes and derived interpretations. The establishment of the ancestral hall and its significance in memory practices of the lineage of Nguyễn Hữu in Tân Lộc are understandable when situating them in the broader context of a revival of traditional cultural values as well as the reaffirmation of the socio-political and cultural positions of the institution of family and kin in Đổi Mới era in Vietnam. The themes have been mentioned over and over again both inside and outside my research. Moreover, seeing the phenomenon in the light of

“permanent evolution” as suggested by Pierre Nora, there come interesting points for further investigations. While reviving the core elements of memory practices that contemporary generations of the Nguyễn Hữu have learned from their precedent ones, they undoubtedly reinvent them in their own ways. The indispensable urbanization and the increasing mobility for different reasons of education, occupation, marriage, etc.,

30 The Vietnamese believe that the incense burner is where the souls of the dead dwell. 150 additionally, have resulted in the expansion of the family’s spatiality beyond their original locus in Tân Lộc. Instead of going home for a family reunion and to organize his father’s death anniversary, Mr. Vinh who lived in Hồ Chí Minh city now threw a celebratory party by himself simultaneous with the ceremony organized by his mother for family members in Tân Lộc. Remembering the dead is a family heritage that Mr. Vinh cannot neglect, yet he needs to modify the pattern to adapt to a new living condition. In this sense, the family has become a more abstract concept, shifting its structure from a spatially-bound model to a spatially-unbound one.

Family and kin not only develop their scope through the boundary of space, they, more remarkably, yield their fruits through time, resulting in the long line of generations claiming their membership under the umbrella of the family. The fact is that decades have passed since the last war ended in Vietnam, thus, bearers of the war memories have shifted from the generation that had experienced the war themselves to the “postmemory generation”: a generation born after the event. As Kwon analytically shows us, even they have died young and childless, the lapse between their death and the present is pivotal, since within it a new generation has been produced by their surviving kin, to whom most of the dead soldiers have been granted the position equal to their “grandfather” or

“grandmother” according to the pattern of their family tree (Kwon 2006: 75). In this context of post-war Vietnam, when coming to terms with family memory, I believe that the concept of “postmemory” coined by Marianne Hirsch is especially helpful to shed light on the examination. Extended from her initial studies on autobiographical works by writers and visual artists who are descendants of Holocaust survivors, postmemory is referred by Hirsch to a structure of memory in which the generation who was born after

151 the given event construct their own memory through an evocation of what other members in their families have actually experienced and remembered. Postmemory, for Hirsch, is memories of things you never experienced which now become internalized (Hirsch 2008,

106-107). In this sense, memory within the realm of family is first and foremost the intergenerational memory in which many people of the second and even the third generations after the war like Nhân, the son of Mr. Lân, who have never met their deceased relatives are still able to “remember” them indirectly through the memories of others. Since the effective force of the event, here the death of the family member, is so strong that it constantly provokes his/her presence through stories, images, and other reminders and remainders of their family’s experiences, it is through instruments that descendants who were born after their death can internalize and construct their own postmemory about them.

Hirsch’s analysis of memory as familial inheritance seems to echo what Halbwachs emphasizes in his classic theory of social frameworks of collective memory. Yet derived from Halbwachs’ framework in which he sees "each memory is a viewpoint on the collective memory" (Halbwachs, 1980:48), Hirsch rather stresses the powerful role of individuals in the internalization of memories that preceded their birth. For Hirsch, postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because “its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation” (Hirsch 1996: 659). As secondary memory, postmemory is characterized by its fragmented nature rather than a concrete totality. Yet, this essence perfectly fits the form of knowledge transmission prevalent within the domain of family which happens in casual situations of everyday life rather than in standardized and formalized ones (Welzer

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2010, Bjerg & Lenz 2012; Muxel 2012). Apart from several occasions specifically dedicated to commemorate the dead, such as their death anniversary, in which family members gather and tend to tell stories about the dead as “one they have known”, during their daily life, instead, the dead and their memory can suddenly be evoked among other topics of familial conversations. Then, of course, they can be interrupted by other stories as suddenly as when they appear. Thus, memory of the dead seems to “slip into the present in glimpses of a short references to episodes” (Bjerg & Lenz 2012: 42). This fragmentary form keeps the “family memory” open to the imagination and creation of individuals. At the same time, while relying on the dominant living memory of people who themselves experienced the event or who had direct memory about the dead, people of the postmemory generation often make their own interpretation thanks to the openness and gap in this form of narrative and transformation. Family memory, in this sense, “does not serve as storage for memories, but rather serves as a catalyst for many different elements of the past to be specifically combined by the involved persons – in such a way that it makes sense to them” (Welzer 2010: 6). Nonetheless, as conjured up in Bjerg and

Lenz’s essay, there always exists a certain boundary for individual imaginations and interpretations when they come to terms with the narration of family stories. While opening space for different versions of the past, for Bjerg and Lenz, “an adjustment” between family members is remarkably necessary in order to ensure that “the story told or referred to is adjusted to the expectations and situational necessities within the family constellation” (Bjerg and Lenz 2012: 42). This adjustment, thus, is an untold but mutually accepted norm which is salient to maintain the sense of unity within family.

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These dynamics of family memory that provides necessary space for both individual imagination as well as the unity of family as a social institution, thus, has been characterized as a joint process of (re)constructing episodes from the past. This is appropriate to what Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka described in their article Collective

Memory and Cultural Identity (1995) as “communicative” memory. Described as “an everyday form of collective memory” which is gained through “the practice of oral history”, communicative memory is “biographical” and “factual” and is located within a generation of contemporaries who witness an event as adults and who can pass on their bodily and affective connection to that event to their descendants. With a normal generational succession, especially that happens in family context, this form of memory can be transmitted across three to four generations, equally to eighty to one hundred years. This concept of communicative memory then is elaborated by Aleida Assmann

(2006) as the primary method used by the family which is a privileged site of memorial transmission (Assmann (2006) as quoted in Hirsch 2008: 111). Along the way, intergenerational transmission and especially the powerful “imaginative investment” of individuals involved, who belong to different social spectra coded by a generational gap, moreover, distort and turn what is remembered to such an extent that the result is closer to fiction than to a past reality (Erll 2011: 307). As a complexity existence of “a mass experience and “resonance of ancestors’ experiences in one’s own life” (Ziino 2010:

126), family memory is accumulated through the endless process of sharing stories which members either experience themselves or those they have heard from their elders.

However, as Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka also point out, the limitation of communicative memory lies in its limited temporal horizon. With the constant passage of

154 time, and as the generation who bore eye-witness to and had experienced the war is aging and dying, their memories also are dying with them. That this fact of losing living memory is unavoidable leads to the shift of postgenerations from relying on family memory to outside sources made available through mass media and cultural productions as well as through official projects promoted by the state. “Cultural memory” is the phrase used by Jan Assmann to describe this source of collective remembrance. “Once we remove ourselves from the area of everyday communication and enter into the area of objectivized culture, almost everything changes”, says Jan Assmann (1995: 123)

It is clear that the transition between communicative memory to cultural memory has been witnessed in Vietnam. Tiến, a student at his early 20s, once was eager to show me two best-selling novels adapted from written-at-the-trench diaries of war martyrs

Đặng Thùy Trâm and Nguyễn Văn Thạc. He said: “I know my grandfather is a war martyr but in my family, there is nothing of him left. My mom also does not know much about him since he died when she was only a child. I read the books and think that what these two martyrs experienced in the war would be similar to my grandfather’s.” Indeed, for Tiến, without concrete material objects and sustained memories of other people in the family from which he could form his own ground, the image of the grandfather which was a result of Tiến’s imagination and interpretation was a myth rather than a reality.

There were of course various other family myths of deceased ancestors from distant generations whose memories had faded with time. In order to get to know more about his grandfather as a war martyr, Tiến found that the two books he introduced to me were extremely helpful. Indeed, as soon as the books were published in 2005, they

155 immediately became media sensation and cultural phenomena in Vietnam.31 Moving from the realm of their families in which these books initially served as the private family heritage of the deceased martyrs, they attended the public domain of cultural memory.

The books, one contained letters sent by Nguyễn Văn Thạc to his family during his days in Quảng Trị battlefield, the other was a collection of daily journals written by a female doctor when she was serving in the military, were welcomed by young readers and were considered essential readings for younger generations who want to know about the experience of former generations during the war. Unlike the tragic novel of Bảo Ninh, the diaries of Đặng Thùy Trâm and Nguyễn Văn Thạc have gained much support from official channels. Through state-owned distribution systems and promotion, these book have reached the hands of millions of readers in Vietnam. And they have deeply influenced the way people of the postgeneration era like Tiến connect and construct an image of their dead relatives.

This modest instance echoes what Dan Todman in his study on the Great War memory has argued. Todman states that there is a reductive process occurring, in which

“popular representations of the war will eventually overtake the private and familial myths that also surround it” (Todman 2005: 173). This transition has been common and surely in the nature of collective memory of any kind, without any exception for family memory. Communicative memory is linked to cultural memory and cannot be separated from it. Yet, the problem as Todman further suggests is that the current generation of

31 Short notes about the books: - Dang Thuy Tram’s diary: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/apr/09/johnaglionby.theobserver - Nguyen Van Thac’s diary: http://vietnamnews.vn/talk-around-town/146027/talk-around-town.html

156 family members are appropriating rather than remembering the experiences of their ancestors. They are inspired less by family connections to the past than by the cultural products of the war (Todman 2005: 223-24).

Conclusion

This chapter is devoted to descriptions of commemorative activities performed by the family. The findings are tentative since they are gained through a case study conducted in a specific rural community. However, they suggest a set of questions that may be useful for the comprehension of commemoration culture in Vietnam in general.

To understand and appropriately conceptualize the family as an active agent of memory, this research has so far employed the paradigm developed by scholars in the field of memory studies, which examines this significant concept in three different aspects (Halbwachs 1992, Erll 2011, Bjerg and Lenz 2012, Muxel 2012):

1) Family as a site of memory in both literal and metaphorical senses. On the one hand, the material setting of the house and its intertwinement with bodily interactions embraced under its roof characterize family as a space of memory on its own terms. On the other hand, family provides individuals the first and foremost environment of socializing in which they learn about social and moral obligations as well as other principles through objects, rituals and story-telling.

2) Family memory as a type of collective memory: the family is a specific mnemonic community characterized by intimate relationships among members as well as casual situations of recollecting. Thus, family memory contains specific constructive practices among them the most outstanding is interpersonal communication. Moreover, going along with inter-generational transmission framed by kinship patterns, family

157 memory is widely known for its emphasis on individualizing and identifying aspects within related social as well as material practices.

3) The family as an important link between the individual memory and larger communities of collective memory.

In the specific issue of commemorating dead soldiers in the Vietnamese postwar context, this research supports that the postwar cult of memory cannot be fully understood if considered simply as a political manifestation or a restoration of national identity. It should also be seen as a means for the expression of personal grieving and private ways of remembering. Within the realm of the family, the death of each member is concretely linked to his/her individuality and the meaning of his/her existence within the family history. Therefore, death and its consequence entailing a sense of loss are referred to a reality rather than an abstract representation. The absence of bodies to mourn is also a reality that underlies various forms of the family commemoration dedicated to dead soldiers.

In families, moreover, the relationship between the living and the dead are framed and elaborated by a system of religious beliefs and kinship mandates. Such bonds conceptualize family as a specific realm of collective memory in which the past, the present and the future are in an ideal relentless flow. Family culture as part of Vietnamese popular culture emphasizes the significance of remembering the dead, yet its emphasis is on the dead person's living presence rather than the memory of this person (Nguyen Van

Huyen 1995: 61, quoted in Kwon 2006: 64).

The significance of domestic commemorative practices as a site of memory which processes “something that the archival and monumental memories do not do” (Kwon

158

2006: 64) has been highlighted in this research. More importantly, as my ethnographic examples show, the family is a multivocal arena in which socialist-nationalist trajectories of commemoration intersect and interact with the domains of popular religious beliefs and kinship culture. Family memory which is specifically dedicated to the dead soldiers in contemporary Vietnam, thus, is one of the most suitable cases for the investigation of symbolic confrontation between the state and grassroots agents. For the Vietnamese, whether they lived through the war or not, war is as much a personal event as it is a matter for public consumption and commemoration. From the above analyses, it is obvious to see that the nexus between family remembering and the public discourse remains mutually constitutive. While trying to regenerate family memory, people do not work in isolation or without contexts imbibed from preceding generations, nor are they unaffected by public representations of the war. Family stories and national grand narratives are in a constant state of making and remaking, negotiating and renegotiating, in which the war in general and the war dead in particular are both rendered as multi- faced symbols.

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Chapter 3

Digitizing Death: Remembering in the Virtual Space

“The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.”

(Czeslaw Milosz 1955)

*****

On the front page of Nhân Dân (People) newspaper published on July 18, 2011, there was a small headline that read “Visiting the Trường Sơn cemetery without having to travel a long way”. Under the headline, the article then detailed the launching of the

Trường Sơn Cemetery’s official website at nghiatrangtruongson.quangtri.gov.vn.

Resulting from one year of design work and consultation, the website is the first project to use the Geography Information System technology in Vietnam. Its homepage thus features a 3D map of the entire cemetery, which guides visitors on a virtual tour and helps them locate particular tombs they want to visit. Another component of the website is the database of all war martyrs buried in the cemetery, from which individuals’ information can be easily retrieved by using the search function. With these archival and interactive features, the website of the Trường Sơn cemetery is believed to “give people a new way to visit and pay homage to war martyrs at their resting place”. More significantly, as the webmaster pointed out in his interview, the establishment of the website, which enables visitors to visualize and capture images of the deceased’s burial

160 sites whenever they want, “helps ease the worry of thousands of families who are physically apart from their beloved” (Dương Lê 2011).

Curious about the new website, after reading through the news article, I logged onto the Internet, following the given address and entered the cemetery. Using the GIS map, I got to see the landscape of the whole cemetery. I zoomed in to get a closer look at certain memorials and gravesites. The tour around the site took me about ten minutes. I exited the website with the image of the cemetery still lingering in my mind.

While remaining connected to the Internet, I opened the Google search page, and typed the keyword “liệt sĩ” (war martyrs) into the search bar. 368,000 results showed up within 0.48 seconds. I clicked on link after link. Surprisingly, beside the website of the

Trường Sơn cemetery which was listed at the fifth place among the first ten results, I found fifteen other websites claiming to be specifically dedicated to the commemoration of war martyrs. These websites are named differently, from online memorial, online cemetery to war martyr database. Unlike the Trường Sơn cemetery website wherein visitors cannot upload any additional information into the default web map, interactive features of the fifteen so-called commemorative websites enable more active engagement from visitors. They can create whole new sections of content or upload photographs, links and textual messages to the existing ones. More significantly, none of these websites was opened or run by state organizations. They are products of individuals or groups of ordinary Internet users.

Such initial observation provided me with significant impetus for further investigations which delve into acts of remembrance entailing these websites and their implications in the politics of postwar memory in Vietnam. The eagerness to conduct my

161 research became even stronger after I found out that the issue of online commemoration has not received much academic attention.32 Compelled by this context and with the objectives set above, this chapter aims to provide a glimpse at the nature of such newly- emergent phenomenon in the domain of memory in Vietnam. Here, I start my study with an argument that the emergence and existence of websites in memory of fallen soldiers in

Vietnam manifest two parallel tendencies that have taken place in the past two decades.

First, the pluralization of memory, which has been seen in the increasing presence of families and grassroots actors’ ways of remembrance in public, alongside those of the state and large organizations. Second, the increasing enthusiasm of the Vietnamese for using Internet technology to communicate and coordinate activities. As such, to understand the nature of websites of commemoration and activities revolving around them, it is crucial to take the intertwinement of these two processes into careful consideration.

As shown in my initial survey, all existing websites dedicated to dead soldiers in

Vietnam are run by voluntary groups and by individuals. This observation resonates well with the common tendency seen in many other countries around the world. Here, except for very few official government websites, the majority of online memorials, virtual

32 To the best of my knowledge, Anthony Heathcote is the first scholar to deal with the topic of online commemoration in Vietnam in a relatively comprehensive way. His PhD dissertation entitled Remembering Forever: Relationship with the Living and the Dead in a Vietnamese Online Memorial Site is an anthropological study focusing on activity of Nhomai.vn. Before successfully defending his thesis at the University of Adelaide in December 2015, Heathcote had already published an article entitled “A grief that cannot be shared: Continuing relationships with aborted fetuses in contemporary Vietnam”, Thanatos, vol.3 1/2014. Another scholar who is interested in studying Vietnamese online commemoration is Yen Le Espiritu. In her 2014 book Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees, Espiritu includes a chapter entitled Refugee Remembering – and Remembrance, which examines the online commemoration dedicated to soldiers who died for the South Vietnam state during the American War.

162 monuments and remembrance walls that exist on the Internet are credited to the voluntary and collaborative work of families of soldiers, war veterans and other dedicated individuals.33 Each website may be initiated by individuals or a small group, but subsequently often draw large numbers of active participants who contribute to the formation and growth of the commemorative structure. Because of this nature of co-

33 Examples of official government websites include: http://www.izkor.gov.il in Israel or Rolls of Honor created by the British Ministry of Defense (https://www.gov.uk/government/fields-of-operation/afghanistan and https://www.gov.uk/government/fields-of-operation/iraq), and the Canadian Virtual War Memorial created by Veterans Affairs Canada (http://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/memorials/canadian- virtual-war-memorial). A large number of websites dedicated to fallen soldiers are created by voluntary groups and individuals. In Britain, for instance, in 2008 the BBC launched a campaign to create an online Remembrance Wall (http://www.bbc.co.uk/remembrance/wall/) to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the end of the World War I. Families of the fallen were invited to share their own memories of the dead and contribute to the establishment of the website. Consequently, after six months, from November 2008 to April 2009, 5,800 profiles of soldiers with 3000 portraits were posted on the Remembrance Wall. Similar to the BBC’s website, in the U.S, several virtual walls have been created to commemorate soldiers who died in the war in Vietnam. Among them, the most visited three websites are the Wall of Faces (http://www.vvmf.org/Wall- of-Faces/), The Wall-USA (http://www.thewall-usa.com), and The Virtual Wall (http://www.virtualwall.org). All of the three websites share a commonality; they serve as digital extension of the physical Vietnam Veterans Memorial - The Wall - in Washington, DC. Each website hence features a page for every one whose name is on the actual memorial. Like the practice seen at the site of The Wall in Washington, DC, people who visit the virtual walls can post textual messages or photographs on individual tribute pages of the dead. The first website, the Wall of Faces was launched in 2008 and is managed by the organization of Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund who directly built The Wall memorial. The Wall-USA was created in 1996 by the veteran Alan Oskvarek and now it is run by the group of volunteers of the 4th Battalion 9th Infantry Regiment Manchu (Vietnam) Association. The last website, the Virtual Wall, was opened in 1997 and has been managed since then by a group of veterans and relatives of deceased soldiers. Beside websites which are dedicated to the commemoration of soldiers who died in long-ago wars, since the early 2000s, there has also been the proliferation of digital memorialization associated with soldiers who lost their lives in recent or ongoing wars and conflicts. In the U.S, soldiers who died in the Iraq war have been commemorated at the Iraq Veterans Memorial (www.iraqmemorial.org) since March 2007. The memorial, which is run by filmmaker Robert Greenwald and Brave New Foundation, uses the medium of online video to memorialize the fallen. Like the method used by the BBC’s Remembrance Wall, the Iraq Veterans Memorial invites friends, families and colleagues of the soldiers to contribute to the collective memorial by submitting their short testimonial style videos about the dead. Alongside with iraqmemorial.org, similar use of video memorials is also seen in Denmark. In their article published in 2012, Knudsen and Stage, for example, listed 28 You Tube videos which memorializes Danish soldiers who were killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Such videos include those that commemorate soldiers in general and those memorialize specific individuals. Another way of commemorating the dead online, as Avilés-Santiago points out in his study on Puerto Rican soldiers in the Iraq war, is the tendency of turning social networking sites (SNS), such as Facebook, Twitter or Myspace into memorial pages. Specifically, after the death of soldiers, friends and families keep the dead’s SNS pages active and keep posting tribute messages, photos and videos on their homepages (Avilés-Santiago 2014: 156-157). By doing so, they turn such personal SNS sites into memorials to the dead.

163 production, it is safe to say that, associated with each website, there is an online community34 of commemoration including members with different social backgrounds, perspectives and societal status. Consequently, we expect to see a diversity of stories, and images of dead soldiers being articulated by these hybrid online communities.

Needless to say, pluralization of memory, as seen in the previous chapters, had taken place prior to the introduction of the Internet to the country.35 Yet, the potential of the Internet, especially its integral representative and communicative tools, has brought up new opportunities to accelerate such pluralization. The Internet does not only make possible an easily accessible space of commemoration, which has potential for a diversity of personalized representation of the dead, but it also facilitates an effective way for social mobilization, widening functions of online sites of memory beyond those of conventional ones. Specifically, with the capacity to engage a large number of users, websites of commemoration are also potent information resources as well as spaces for discussions. In this sense, I argue that pluralization of memory is not necessarily limited within the realm of representation; it can be seen in the process in which regular citizens take part in activities that are neglected by the official agenda of commemoration, such as supporting families of war martyrs in searching for their remains or giving them instructions on state policies.

34 I use online community in Howard Rheingold’s sense as “social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace” (Rheingold 1993: 57).

35 In Vietnam, permanent access to the international Internet community was commercially made available for the whole population in December 1997. Over the past 17 years, the number of Internet users has increased from 7,000 people by the end of 1997 to more than 40 million by the end of 2014, accounting for 40% of the population. 164

Shedding light on these premises and situated within the dialogues of my previous chapters, this present research emphasizes the role of “online communities” revolving around surveyed websites as active agents in the construction and negotiation of collective memory. Despite the fact that online communities are formed by “weak ties”

(Granovetter 1973) and virtual interactions shared among their members, their existence reflects the emergence of a new concept of civil society which is of significance in a country run by a monopolistic political party like Vietnam.

To accomplish the objectives set above, I decided to carry out my detailed research focusing on a small sample of websites. As mentioned above, I found fifteen websites which existed by July 2011. I keep visiting them from time to time since then.

However, there were several changes occurring in the period between July 2011 and July

2013. Two websites stopped updating; another was even completely closed and could not be found. Of the remaining twelve websites, I finally chose four for detailed case studies.

They include a martyr cemetery on a community forum, an online memorial and a commemorative website run by an individual:

 www.nhantimdongdoi.org (searching for former comrades), and www.lietsivietnam.org (Vietnamese war martyrs) Created in 2004 by Nguyễn Hữu Tuấn, a student majoring in computer science, the first commemorative website, www.nhantimdongdoi.org (hereafter NTĐĐ), was aimed at providing a space for families of missing soldiers to network and share information needed for their search for the remains of their loved ones. In 2009, Ngô Thị

Thúy Hằng, a 30 year-old journalist joined Tuấn and his group after she learnt about the website during her search for the remains of her uncle. However, no sooner had Hằng joined than each member of the website graduated from university and left to look for

165 work. To prevent the website from being taken down, Hằng quit her job as a journalist and focused on operating the website.

With constant efforts invested by Hằng and many volunteers, more functions and patterns were added to the website www.nhantimdongdoi.org later on, allowing more interactive and engaging actions from users and visitors. Most importantly, the website tended to establish an online database as a foundation for commemorating dead soldiers at the individual level.

In 2010, with the slogan “Remembering war martyrs by their own names”, Hằng began a new project – an online memorial for the dead soldiers. The new virtual memorial was created in a separate site at www.lietsivietnam.org (LSVN), and was connected to the original site www.nhantimdongdoi.org through an external link placed on its homepage’s main navigation menu. On the memorial, a list of war martyrs is displayed, each with his/her own individual tribute page which contains a profile photograph (if available), and a brief personal and military biography. By the time of this research, 457 war martyr profiles had been established on LSVN.

 War Martyr Cemetery at www.nhomai.vn

Sharing similar evolution with that of nhantimdongdoi.org, the website called nhomai.vn

(NM) (literally means “remember forever”) develops its sphere from a personal site to a community forum with a large range of users. Opened by Nguyễn Anh Tú in February

2008, as a cluster of cemeteries in which each is dedicated to a specific category of death,

NM is the largest website to commemorate the dead in Vietnam to date. By early 2015, the total number of officially enrolled users of NM had reached 70,000 persons. The

166 recent cemetery of war martyrs, which is placed among other cemeteries of celebrities, children, and politicians, to name just a few, has included 378 tombstones.36

 Mr. Nguyễn Sỹ Hồ’s website www.nguoiduado.vn (the ferryman)37

Mr. Nguyễn Sỹ Hồ used to be a math teacher at Tân Bình High School in the southern province of Bình Dương. During the war, Mr. Hồ’s mother died in a bombing by the U.S in Hương Khê District in the north-central province of Hà Tĩnh in 1972. His brother took part in the Mậu Thân Uprising in 1968 and died as a war martyr. The whereabouts of Mr. Hổ’s brother was unknown to the family for many years.

As soon as Mr. Hồ had retired from his work in 2004, he dedicated himself to searching for the remains of his brother. Fortunately, after a two-year search, Mr. Hồ successfully found the brother’s grave in a war cemetery near the Vietnam-Cambodia border. His journey, however, did not end there. Hồ has continued to gather information about war martyrs with a goal of helping other families to find their missing relatives. He has visited more than 300 war cemeteries throughout the country. During his trips, Mr.

Hồ carefully takes photographs of every single tombstone in each cemetery, and writes down details about the war martyrs buried there. The information collected by Hồ fills a pile of 15 notebooks.

When connecting to the internet in 2008, Mr. Hồ synthesized all the information on war martyrs, his journals and testimonials on his personal blog at http://teacherho.vnweblogs.com. However, after four years of operating, the default platform of a blog and its limited storage capacity caused some troubles for Mr. Nguyễn

36 Thereafter, I use nhomai.vn to refer to the specific section of war martyr cemetery, not the whole website. 37 A ferryman is a literary metaphor widely used in Vietnam to portray a teacher who diligently takes various generations of students across the river of knowledge. 167

Sỹ Hồ in updating his information. In 2012, with the sponsorship from a website designing company, Mr. Hồ created a new website www.nguoiduado.vn (NĐĐ) and successfully synthesized all existing data from the current blog to the new website. Now, thousands of people access Mr. Hồ’s website every day.

Selected websites, therefore, present different aspects of web-based commemoration in terms of their producers, platforms and activities. It is more important to note that attempts to delve into web-based memory works should be situated in their comprehensively contextualized condition of production which determines the way they are presented and become meaningful. Therefore, online commemorative practices should be considered in broader terms, expanding the scope beyond the circle of networked computers. Being online does not mean that remembrance practices and their implications are necessarily confined within the virtual materiality generated by the digital network technology and are conducted only through individual computers.

Nevertheless, in seeking to catch on to attributes, significance and influences of online commemoration, we should go beyond the conventional binary pairing which presents online culture as a separate space, being opposite to the offline one. Online commemoration as a constitutive part of a broader online culture, as David Silver suggests, “is best comprehended as a series of negotiations which take place both online and off” (Silver 2000:12).

This research resulted from my fieldwork during summer 2014 in Vietnam, in which I employed both online and offline participation/observation and textual analysis of selected websites as well as individual interviews. I spent most of the time immersed in the websites, observing interactions among users, and reading their textual entries and

168 messages. Some individual interviews were conducted with key informants in Hanoi through one-on-one conversations at informants’ houses or at café lounges where they were most comfortable. Required follow-up interviews or those with informants who lived outside Hanoi were carried out through telephone and email.

The writing is structured into three parts. The first one deals with the foundational aspects of the websites as collaborative work shared between initiators and users. Specifically, it seeks to provide a glimpse at the dynamic of online communities who are involved in the emergence and development of the websites. Also, this section describes physical forms and architecture of websites as sites of memory. The second section focuses on the living – the dead relationship through detailed examination of discursive content of digital artifacts on the websites. The last section of the writing is dedicated to the scrutiny of the significant role of online commemoration in social mobilizing and facilitating civic activities associated with the specific task of searching for remains of war martyrs.

Once physical, now virtual

The first website I visited among those brought up by the Google search in July

2011 was the online cemetery at NM. Simply consisting of a computer-generated picture of three grave rows embedded in a black background, the opening page of NM successfully evokes its initial cemetery imagery. Placed underneath the gravestones, a textual footer translated as “click here to enter the forum” provides visitors an official instruction and a main entrance to enter the virtual cemetery.

169

Image 13: Front page of Cemetery Online at www.nhomai.vn (accessed on 01 May 2015)

The official name of the site known as Nghia Trang Online (Cemetery Online) is indicated at the top right side of the primarily navigation menu containing hyperlinks to all constitutive sections of the cemetery. Chronologically arranged in a reverse order, from the latest to the oldest, each section is designated as a cemetery for a certain category of death. When aggregated together on the site, they hence constitute nhomai.vn as a web hub of various cemeteries. Once going inside a cemetery, visitors are welcomed by a directory page where they can find links to all registered individual tombs, which are marked by names of the deceased. A pop-up window will appear and navigate the visitor to the individual tomb of the martyr just after a click on his/her name. Created freely by registered members of the forum, each tomb, which is in fact structured as a “thread” or an individual tribute site, includes a permanent header in the form of a gravestone with name, home town and death date of the dead inscribed on it. The photo is either one actually taken at the physical cemetery or merely computer-generated. Over time, the scope of each thread or tomb can be expanded from one to multiple pages.

170

This foundational architecture of nhomai.vn, which employs a multi-layer structure and hyperlink navigation method, has been witnessed unchanged during my constant visits for the past four years, even though the scope of the site has constantly been expanded with many cemeteries and tombs having been added. Obviously, there is nothing surprising in this observation since multi-layered architectural technology is the most popular and optimum method used in designing and organizing currently existing digital networked sites to date. Not only does it allow web producers to neatly organize their massive content, but it also enables users to move quickly from section to section, and freely select a certain place to visit without having to surf through the whole large repository.

Similar use of hyperlink navigation, therefore, can be seen on the memorial lietsivietnam.org. The homepage encompasses at its central place a simple graphic drawing depicting a memorial in the form of a red flame with a golden star on top of it.

The memorial then is surrounded by names of commemorated war martyrs, each attached to a photo, the actual one of the dead or a default one in the form of the memorial miniature. These photos, in fact, are embedded links that lead to the individual profiles of registered martyrs, where visitors can light an incense stick or lay a wreath just by simply clicking on the respective icons. An opened guestbook is placed underneath the memorial. All messages which are successfully sent will be firstly displayed on this guestbook. The length of messages is varied, ranging from 15 to more than 500 words.

Ones that are devoted to the same person then will be clustered into his/her personal page with the copies of them still remaining on the guestbook. On the left hand side of the memorial there are indexes that mark different categories of information on war martyrs

171 based on their combat units and actual resting places. The last part of the homepage includes a section called “letters from the battlefield” containing several retyped copies of letters sent by war martyrs to their families during the war.

Apart from the producer’s statement “Remembering war martyrs by their own names” written in an introductory article on the website www.nhantimdongdoi.org, the recent aesthetic presentation of the memorial strongly manifests the conventional memorialization of war martyrs. From the image of a flame with a star on top of it to a banner with the sentence “Eternally Remember Our Debt to the Heroic Martyrs Who

Have Sacrificed for a Brighter Future for the Country” permanently placed on the top of the homepage, it appears that the website producer is framing the memorial within the familiar discourse of heroism.

Image 14: Front page of www.lietsivietnam.org （accessed on September 21, 2015）

172

On the website of Mr. Nguyễn Sỹ Hồ, moreover, apart from hyperlinks that navigate to their internal sections, links to external sources are also included, aiming to widen its scope of networking and experiencing. On the homepage, the existing database is organized into two main indexes named as “martyr records” and “martyr gravestones” whose links are placed in a horizontal menu on top of the page. Contents are also categorized into different sections such as “Nguyễn Sỹ Hồ’s diary”, “Notifications for war martyrs’ families”, and “Things I have seen”. Navigation links to these categories are placed on a vertical menu on the right hand side of the page. Mr. Nguyễn Sỹ Hồ also includes some external links to websites of governmental organizations in charge of war invalid and martyr affairs and those leading to his own Facebook and former blog.

Image 15: Front page of www.nguoiduado.vn （accessed September 21, 2015）

Whether it is complex or simple, multi-layered architecture constructs every single website as a cluster of “addresses”, which furthermore are linked to countless other sites and addresses, constituting a special topography of the Internet. As long as collective memory as Todman once stated “is about networks” (Todman, 2010:77) the crossing of these two domains significantly yields fruitful implications. When all

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Internet-based sites of memory are connected together, either directly through their navigation structures, or conceptually in terms of their specific subject-matter commonalities within the sphere of the Internet, there emerges a sub-landscape particularly assigned to collective memory (Veale, 2004). The mechanism of the digital networking allows this space to be visited only through using subscribed electronic devices, yet be accessible from anywhere and at any time once connected.

Along with the new concept of spatiality, when immersing in the online memoryscape people are enabled to experience a new manner of social interaction. Here, visits to martyr cemeteries and monuments, which are formed of pixels and ones and zeros, are started and fulfilled with some clicks from the computer’s mouse instead of several-hour long trips. Less exhausting and costly and more convenient, online pilgrimages, for many living relatives of the dead, have become part of their daily life activities. As the number on the top of the martyr cemetery’s directory page at nhomai.vn, which indicates the number of people who are currently visiting the site, is normally double digits, we know that any single visitor is accompanied by others during their trips. While one is busy placing offerings and lighting candles on the tomb of his beloved relative, other fellow visitors are writing their memorials or just simply roaming around the cemetery. Thus, various activities can be carried out at the same time in one place without imposing on others, and without interruption to themselves. This manner of participation enables a person to immerse him/herself individually in practices of remembering, yet still characterizing virtual sites as collective space.

That said, digital network technology is of fundamental significance for making possible a new space of commemoration. Yet, as an inherent part of society, technology

174 is inseparable from social actors who create and use it. Some glimpses above show that both the creation of the websites and the use of specific digital objects within them are outcomes of deliberate decisions made by people who are involved. In this sense, in order to comprehend the dynamic of web-based commemoration as a socio-cultural practice, the standpoint of social actors and frameworks that influence their acts of making - creating, appropriating, linking to and/or displaying digital objects - within the online space should be seen as central.

In the Vietnamese context, just like elsewhere in the world, the use of the Internet, despite its nature as a global phenomenon, is increasingly conforming to the national structure of power. Specifically, the government policy on Internet activity is an important influence on the way in which the Internet is actually used. While users, individuals and organizations alike, can easily create their own websites, set up Facebook pages, and open blogs, they must be very cautious in posting and sharing information on such sites. Numerous laws and regulations have been promulgated since 1998, emphasizing the strict prohibition of material that “opposes the Vietnam government”,

“distorting historical truths”, “negating revolutionary gains”, “hurting the nation, great public figures or national heroes”, “disseminating reactionary ideologies, depraved way of life and superstition”, “harming the fine traditions and customs”, and “disclosing secrets of the party and state” (The National Assembly Vietnam 1989, 1999, Vietnam

Government 2013). In fact, these off-limit topics are ambiguously defined in documented laws, meaning that material created, transmitted and stored online, is interpreted

175 differently by authorities who are in charge of monitoring Internet activity.38 And anything that is deemed to violate the law can land netizens in serious trouble. Since

2009, numerous Vietnamese netizens, mostly bloggers, have been forced to shut down their personal blogs; many others have been arrested and sentenced to prison for such acts as “propagating”, or “circulating documents or cultural products” against the government

(An ninh the gioi 2010; C.Mai, 2012; Vietnamnet 2014).39

Within such an environment sanctioned by a simultaneously strict and arbitrary policy, it is understandable that self-censorship has become commonplace among

Vietnamese Internet users (Hayton 2010; Vennevold 2011). Typically, as seen on NM, a set of rules and regulations is publicized on the homepage, setting the boundaries of users’ activities and warning them that they shall be legally responsible for any information they post on the website. The website does not allow users to post material that contains “false information of the dead”, “expressions against the government, the

Communist Party, and state laws”, “information of sensitive political affairs”,

“expressions against freedom of religion”, “promotion of reactionary ideologies, superstitions, gambling, and immoral behaviors”, “expressions of insults or attacks on others”, “information that infridges upon other people’s privacy” and “commercial advertisement”. Penalties applied to those who violate the rules vary from removing the offending posts and issuing a warning message, to banning users’ ID temporarily and to

38 The task of monitoring Internet material is simultaneously assigned to the Ministry of Information and Communication focusing on sexually explicit, superstitious, or violent content, and the Ministry of Public Security monitors politically sensitive content. 39 According to Civil Right Defenders, in 2014 alone, there were 77 Vietnamese bloggers arrested and jailed for engaging in online discussions and transmission of material that was deemed to express dissent to the Vietnamese government. Civil Right Defenders, 2015, We Will Not Be Silenced. https://www.civilrightsdefenders.org/thematic-reports/we-will-not-be-silenced-bloggers-and-the-human- rights-movement-in-vietnam/

176 the most extreme penalty of permanently banning their ID and prohibiting their access to the website.

Apart from general rules applied for all users, each board – or cemetery - has its own regulation and further instructions. The war martyr cemetery’s regulation note is permanently attached at the top of the directory page, indicating that to create a tomb, you need to enroll in the website. The enrollment is free of charge and very easy to process. Further guidelines include the description of grave marker template, the minimum length of tribute messages, the proper use of Vietnamese language, and the size of images. The set of regulations in the war martyr cemetery, hence, emphasizes the technical aspects only.

The monitoring mechanism applied in the online cemetery of nhomai.vn reveals a seemingly hierarchical order among its administrators and users. To maintain their membership, users must obey the rules set by administrators; and their activities are monitored as well. As noticed, many of the website’s rules and regulations, which influence users’ online practices, are designed in tandem with the state’s policy. That fact, indeed, shows how the state has been successful in controlling the large picture of

Internet usage in Vietnam. Netizens in Vietnam, using the Internet for different purposes, are aware of the state’s surveillance and the risk they may face if crossing the line. The moderator of the online war cemetery on NM, for instance, said to me that: “Since the cemetery was opened in 2008, we have never had to remove and ban any member. It is a cemetery where the dead are buried; it is their resting place, not a place for discussing political issues. All members know that very well. Still, we need to set up the rules and regulations and warn people about what they should and should not post here.”

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However, as many scholars have observed in Vietnam and China whose legal environment for Internet activity shares many similarities with Vietnam’s, for internet users, employing self-censorship does not necessarily mean that they agree with or totally support government policy. Instead, self-censorship is a survival strategy for many netizens (Pang 2008; Vennevold 2011). On websites using the bulletin board platform like NM, users, normally in large numbers, are asked to follow the rules in order to avoid legal troubles which in turn may affect the existence of websites. Moreover, administrators in fact are ordinary users, elected by other users for doing the task of monitoring the site without any payment. For both parties, self-censorship, hence, is not something imposed by the administrator, but a task shared by all members.

Without any official regulations published for visitors, the website of Mr. Hồ, in contrast, presents a different pattern of self-censorship. In the short textual instruction sent out to his visitors, Mr. Hồ clearly states that he himself reads all messages posted by visitors on the website, and those that are inappropriately written will be removed. By

“inappropriately written”, Mr. Hồ only refers to messages written in the Vietnamese language without diacritic marks; he does not mean anything about monitoring the content of visitors’ posts in his website. Yet, in one of my interviews with him, Mr. Hồ said he would remove any messages which contain “unacceptable and illegal information”.

Similar to Mr. Hồ’s website, the virtual memorial at LSVN does not establish official rules for visitors. Instead, there are only some technical guidelines on how to set up memorial pages for war martyrs and how to send messages to the guestbook.

Specifically, to get the name of the dead displayed on the memorial, one has to send a

178 request to the administrator along with the copies of his/her death announcement or honor of death certificate and a tribute photo, if available. This registration requirement implies that only families are eligible to request the creation of individual profiles of the dead.

Once the request is completely processed, the martyr will be commemorated on the site with his/her name displayed on the homepage and an individual profile created. Only registered users can leave messages on the open guestbook, or on individual pages, light incense sticks or lay a wreath for the dead. There is no registration fee for creating an account, and posting messages in the open guestbook is also free of charge. However, anytime one wants to send a message to individual tribute pages of the dead, he/she has to purchase a day pass, that costs 5000VND (less than CAD $0.29), allowing the user to send an unlimited number of messages and conduct other activities on the website within

24 hours. Ngô Thị Thúy Hằng, the founder of the virtual memorial, noted that she is mainly concerned about the appropriateness of war martyrs’ information. Therefore, she requires people to send her photocopies of their death notifications or Tổ Quốc Ghi Công certificates. Unlike a public forum with a diversity of activities, the virtual memorial does not require strict monitoring. Yet, for Hằng, it is necessary to scan over all messages left on the site and make sure nothing goes wrong.

It is clear that the state’s censorhip regime has an impact on the activities of users and administrators on these four websites under discussion. Specifically, the state law sets a limitation for the use of material and expression. Yet, despite this limitation, the presence of the state does not greatly change the dynamic between the two involved parties. A shared responsibility among creators and users, as mentioned above, is of significance to the existence and development of all websites regardless of their scale or

179 platforms. Once the curatorial role of the website’s creator (or creators) - determining the website’s primary functionality, its static structure and setting up regulations – is mutually accepted, users and even irregular visitors, who mainly don’t know each other personally, will play the main role in contributing and developing the dynamic structure and scope of the site. In her 2003 research, Anna Reading describes such construction and development of online memorialization websites as complex co-production processes, in which the significance of collective framework and individual role is simultaneously emphasized. For Reading, how these co-productions work and how they result in the establishment and the development of virtual projects are in articulation with a variety of factors. Among them are the influence of institutionalized discourse, individuals’ perception of death commemoration, and even users’ technological skills.

In the case of Mr. Hồ’s website, for instance, the materiality of the site reflects the remarkable personal imprint of the creator. Even though the website primarily serves as a database of war martyr information, its official name does not directly represent this function. Instead, the name – Người Đưa Đò – which metaphorically means “teacher”, emphasizes Mr. Hồ’s pride in his own former profession. This personal nature of the website’s name is somewhat misleading for the audience, especially for those who do not know anything about the website and its functions beforehand. With only little biographical information gleaned from their grave markers, the dead are commemorated on the website of Mr. Hồ as “generalized others” rather than as individuals whom Mr. Hồ knows personally. Lists after lists, the database on the website is being piled up and accessible for any visitor. Mr. Hồ supplements the lists of war martyrs in each cemetery

180 with one or two personal journals tracing his experiences and activities when visiting there.

Mr. Hồ’s articulates his motto “Let’s contribute a grain of salt to the saltiness of life” on a banner placed at the top of the homepage. As stated above, Mr. Hồ also invites visitors to make comments on his entries, to contribute information and to send him their requests. Without being enrolled as official users, any visitor can easily leave comments at the end of entries or participate in group discussion in a separate section entitled

“Visitors’ comments”. The interactions between Mr. Hồ and visitors of the website and between visitors themselves are mostly conducted through textual messages, which go along with the main database and entries composed by Mr. Hồ, thus characterising the whole website as a heavily text-based construction.

Unlike Mr. Hồ’s website, as a community forum, the platform of NM embraces an ambition to create an open space for individuals to practise their memorialization of various kinds of death. The development of the most important material components within each cemetery on NM, hence is contributed saliently by users who invest their own time and efforts to commemorate the dead as specific individuals. In this sense, the website is an exemplar of participatory culture, in which users themselves actively create the structure and content of the web.

The predefined architecture of the community platform, moreover, allows people to integrate many kinds of visual presentations rather than textual messages alone.

Photographs, both still and animated, and embedded music videos are widely used by users of nhomai.vn. Altogether, they made up a collective repository of mnemonic artifacts. Moreover, unlike the depersonalized representation seen in physical war

181 cemeteries where all graves share a uniformed appearance, tombstones, which have been established in the online cemetery, are different from one another. On the one hand, the uniqueness of each grave presents the idea of memorializing the dead as a particular person with specific qualities and merits, not simply as a member of the social group of war martyrs. On the other hand, since virtual graves of the dead are the result of the creation of the living, the way in which such graves are materialized depends largely on the creators’ aesthetic perspectives and technological skills. The majority of users of NM individually create virtual tombs for their relatives, meaning that each user himself/herself decides all processes of registration, collecting objects, and uploading them to the website. In this sense, as central actors of online commemoration practices, both the dead and their living caretakers are involved in the process of individualization.

However, there are some exceptions observed during my research, showing an intertwinement between onscreen individualized presentation and off-screen collective production. While virtual tombs, messages, testimonials, and photos presented on the web are individually credited to specific users whose registered usernames are indicated, many of them are initially created as the result of a mutual decision made by many family members of the dead. These co-productive processes happening offline include occasional family gatherings, especially those that take place to mark important anniversaries of the departed, in which living survivors sit in front of the computer, visiting the tomb and deciding on what would be told or sent to the dead together. There are also communal activities giving rise during processes of technical skill-sharing in which people who process prominent skills assist the computer illiterate. Not very often but happening from time to time, tech-savvy school students are reported to help out their

182 parents or grandparents with gathering materials, composing and posting messages on a virtual cemetery.

The fundamental fabric of commemorative websites, as shown in the analyses above, presents both similarities to and distinctions from those of more traditional sites of memory. On the one hand, just like in public sites of monuments or cemeteries, the control of the state, especially the limitation on what can be said, has remarkably influenced the dynamics of Vietnamese commemorative websites. On the other hand, despite that fact, thanks to their peculiar virtuality and accessibility, websites still provide significant opportunities for the facilitation of “the joint production of web-accessible materials by disparate actors” (Foot & Schneider, 2002). Such co-production which entails the active role of Internet users in constantly contributing various forms of memorial artifacts into the virtual storages and exhibitions of websites characterizes these sites of memory as evolving and hybridized projects rather than static ones. Much of the central focus of this co-coproduction of memory, moreover, is placed on the attempt to establish a more personalized way of remembering the dead. In the following section, specific outcomes and significance of this personalized way of commemorating the dead will be further discussed.

“Hello, father. It’s me again.”

I begin this section with a closer look at how participants of LSVN and NM use the online space to “interact” and commemorate the dead. Specifically, when examining the relation between users’ intention for individualizing the remembrance of fallen soldiers and their incorporation of commemorative spaces to serve this purpose, I find a slight paradox arising within the site of LSVN. While each war martyr, as noted

183 previously, is assigned a separate memorial profile, most of the commemorative activities dedicated to them do not take place within such individual space but in the communal space of the open guestbook instead. During the time between July 2010 and April 2015, for instance, there were only 102 textual entries being posted within 457 individual profiles; whereas the open guest book received 1054 entries. The detachment of commemorative activities dedicated to the dead from their personal profiles is arguably a problematic issue of representation. While most of the online profiles talk very little about the dead except for some basic personal details, significant memories about them, which are supposed to enrich the construction and representation of their individuality, are distantly scattered somewhere on the guestbook. Perhaps, the small expense people have to pay for when they post messages on individual pages of the dead makes them less interested in these individual spaces. Users prefer the guestbook, which is open and free of charge, as the primary memorial space wherein they can commemorate specific war martyrs by indicating their names in the textual entries. Moreover, anecdotal evidence shows that the open guestbook enables people to commemorate the deceased whose individual profiles have not been created on the website. In many ways, the prioritization of the open guestbook over individual profiles of the dead does not change the main focus of users’ commemorative acts; that is individual war martyrs. Most of the entries held by the open guestbook are dedicated to individual war martyrs (78%) rather than to a generalized receiver.

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Image 16: A memorial profile on lietsivietnam.org (Translation)

Whether it be on individual profile pages or on the open guestbook, all textual entries40 are written as direct messages to the dead, with evidential identification of the relationships between their authors and those commemorated. Messages left in war martyr’s individual pages were largely written by their relatives (92 messages). The rest of them - 10 messages - having the same content, were written by one particular visitor and were sent to 10 war martyrs who have no direct relationship to him. On the open guestbook, through the use of kinship terminologies, textual entries indicate various family relationships between the dead and the living, such as parent-child, sibling, grandfather-grandchild to name a few. Such messages that are written by relatives of war martyrs cover the most significant percentage (75%) of all textual entries. Other groups who engage in the memorial include war veterans (2.7%), people who have no

40 The data reflect the number of entries, and not the number of users. Several entries posted by the same person were counted as separate entries. This way of grouping the data is exercised in other studies of web memorials (Foot et al., 2005; Danilova, 2015).

185 experience with wars and no connection to war martyrs (4.2%), webmasters of the website (2.6%), and authors who do not provide any indication about their personal relationship to the dead (15.5%). Contributors belonging to these categories tend to provide a brief self-introduction at the beginning of their messages, which explains their agency in the collective commemorative act. These users also dedicate their textual entries to “war martyrs” in general rather than to specific individuals.

On the cemetery of NM, because there exist only individual spaces for the dead - their online tombs - the individualization of remembrance is strongly emphasized. There is no confusion such as that of lietsivietnam.org emerging within nhomai.vn. Apart from this minor difference, NM shares significant similarities with lietsivietnam.org in terms of its user composition. Between March 2008 and April 2015, 378 online tombs had been registered on the cemetery, of them 294 (78%) were created by relatives of war martyrs.

The rest of the online tombs include those having no information about their creators

(12%), and those of well-known war martyrs,41 which were created by the website’s administrators (10%). Interestingly, on one particular tomb, the creator noted that she/he did not know the dead personally. She/he just read about the war martyr in a newspaper article and decided to create a tomb to commemorate him because she/he was moved by the martyr’s story.

Surveyed websites, as such, are produced with the central focus being placed on the family commemoration of war martyrs. Such a characteristic is significantly reflected in the ethos and discursive schema of the websites. Commonly, users frame their entries

41 These war martyrs include Võ Thị Sáu, Nguyễn Thái Bình, Nguyễn Văn Trỗi, Hoàng Ngân, etc. They are known as “national martyrs” whose lives and deaths are widely described in school textbooks and mass publications.

186 around the intertwinement of institutional and non-institutional references. Besides adapting the institutional discourse of heroism, the death of individuals is conceptualized with intensive references to ancestor worship and kinship doctrines. More expressions, especially sadness, grieving and a sense of loss, can be seen in the family discourse of fallen soldiers rather than conventional notions of sacrifice, heroism and glory. The quotation below illustrates this tendency:

“To the holy soul of my uncle, martyr Le Hai Ha. When you left our family to join the army, I was not here in this world. When I was born and grew up, I never met you personally. The war has ended and peace has come to our country for more than 30 years. Many soldiers have reunited with their families, but you have not come home yet. We are still waiting for you. Dear uncle, our Fatherland recognizes your ultimate sacrifice, and our family misses you so much. Our family members, aunt Di, uncle Thật, uncle Sang and many other cousins of mine have always been searching for your current resting place so that we can bring you home. If you were here, close to us, we could visit you more often and share our happiness as well as sorrow with you. We are still attempting every single day to find you. Uncle, please forgive us for not being able to find you earlier. Also, you, my wise and holy uncle, please show us the way to where you are lying now. Before we can reach your place, we would like to invite you to rest in this virtual memorial where we can light an incense stick and lay a flower wreath to console your soul. Uncle, please give your best blessings and protect our family and kin members”. (Lê Ngọc Hiển, LSVN, August 13, 2014)

In a more complex form, using photographs to accompany textual entries is popular in the cemetery of nhomai.vn. Photos of the national flag are occasionally posted on war martyrs’ tombs to mark the celebration of special events, such as the anniversary of the War Invalid and Martyr Day and their personal death anniversary. More frequently, however, photographs are used as ritual offerings which emphasize the

187 significance of ancestor worship and the need to care for the afterlife of the dead.

Typically, as shown in the pictures below, photographic objects, be they actually taken or computer-produced, depict a vast array of things – flowers, fruits, food, clothes, and money. In the practice of ancestor worship in the real world, the living send offerings, which, except for food and flowers, are made from paper, to the dead by burning them. In the online world, offerings are “sent” to the dead by uploading picture of them to the dead’s virtual tombs. Beside these still photos, animated GIFs emulating flickering candles or smoking incense sticks, and other kinds of ornaments widely seen in ancestral altars in people’s homes are also used to accompany textual messages sent to the dead.

Other kinds of images seen in the online cemetery are portraits of war martyrs and objects representing their soldier’s identity, such as green boonie hats. Those military- related objects are placed alongside other offerings, depicting the dead as soldier- ancestors.

Image 17: Offerings at a war martyr’s tomb on www.nhomai.vn （accessed May 01, 2015）

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Image 18: Photo of offerings at the real tomb of a war martyr being displayed on the online counterpart at www.nhomai.vn （accessed May 01, 2015）

As a bottom-up practice, the discursive structure prevailing in online commemoration, thus, effectively personalize and domesticate the remembrance of war martyrs. Overall, memories of the fallen are recalled in a factual manner by people who share close relationships to them. However, it is necessary to point out that, because of the lengthy lapse between the death of war martyrs and the emergence of online commemorative practices in Vietnam, those who participate in the websites mostly belong to the second or even the third generation of the postwar era. They have never met the dead in person; and they therefore commemorate them through the lens of postmemory (Marinna Hirsch 1996, 2008). Consequently, even though shared by living relatives of the dead, such memories do not sufficiently present the dead as people and individuals with specific personal qualities. They also do not reveal much about the lives of soldiers before their death. Instead, narratives of website users mainly emphasize the

189 post-mortem statuses of the death and what their death means to their living survivors.

Most commonly, the dead are presented as long-time absent members of the families.

Their absence is constantly mourned and integrated into the daily life of their living relatives. Lam, a user of NM, for instance, signed up and established his mother’s tomb on the site in June 2008. Since then, his entries have constantly been posted on the page.

Some read as following:

07 January 2010: This New Year holiday, I was sick and hospitalized for the whole week. I have just been discharged today, so now I’m visiting your tomb and lighting an incense stick for you. Your death anniversary is approaching. I still don’t know what I should prepare for you. This time, I might cook some Southern dishes only. Some previous years, I invited many people but no one wanted to come. So, this year I will not invite them. If one remembers you, one will come.

02 February, 2010: Today is your death anniversary. I prepared some dishes that you liked. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture to show you.

08 February, 2010: Tết [Vietnamese New Year] is coming. I used to visit our ancestors’ tombs every year, but this year, I was so tired, I just stayed home and skipped the visiting.

16 June, 2010: Today is Double – Five Festival,42 I went out to a café for my breakfast. I met a 100 years-old geriatric there. Life is ephemeral. Humans are born, suffer from all kinds of hardship, then all die. Hundreds of years later, who still remembers us!!!

18 June, 2010: Today is the second anniversary of your tomb creation. I’ll go to Cambodia this month with some friends of yours to search for your remains. If I cannot find you, I will take a handful of soil from there back to our home. I will accept that you have turned into dust for good. If I find you, I will bring you back to the city’s war martyr cemetery. You will have a better place there compared to our kin’s one which I think will be deconstructed soon.

42 The Lễ Đoan Ngọ, or Double Five Festival occurs on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month in recognition of the summer solstice. 190

Far from formal and stylized language used in commemorative speeches at national cemeteries during public ceremonies, entries written by Lam to his mother embrace a sense of casualness and spontaneity. Mostly talking to his mother, who volunteered for the war at the age of twenty and died when Lam was only one-year old, about what happened to him recently, these one-sided conversations turn Lam’s

“mundane life experiences” into “memory-like narratives” (Christensen and Sandvik

2015: 64-65). Although Lam’s recollections of his mother are only based on “inventing memories”, they still manifest the close relationship between a son and his deceased mother and the long-lasting grief over the loss of the beloved one. Amidst his daily life full of activities, the shadow of his long-absent mother is always presented as a significant component.

Moreover, even though they are mundane and personal, Lam’s conversations with his mother, attracted attention from other users of NM. Some left Lam messages that read: “Sending my consolation to you”, “I feel sympathy for you”, “Honoring the soul of your mother”. Some others did not post textual messages but lighted digital vigil candles on the tomb of the deceased woman as a way to express their empathy with Lam. And, in his turn, Lam also visited many other war martyr’ tombs. He lighted incense sticks for the dead and sent messages to the creators of their online graves. In dialogues with these messages, the dead who may or may not be directly mentioned are always present as a mediation agent or an emotional glue that links the living together.

As the analyses has shown thus far, the newly-emergent websites in memory of

Vietnamese fallen soldiers do not present a qualitatively different discourse of

191 commemoration. Moreover, within the websites, while existing in vast numbers, the content of entries produced by disparate users significantly presents a communal consensus. So far, there has been only an entry written by Lam to his mother on the cemetery of NM, which can be interpreted as a critical comment on the meaning of the war. “I keep wondering whether the path you took was right or not! However, it was.

You already chose it, and already walked it” wrote Lam. While this entry suggests that participants of the websites can potentially question the dominant discourse of war and dead soldier commemoration, its existence as a rare exception does not affect the consensus prevailing on the websites. In general, users constantly grieve over the loss of their relatives’ lives, but they do not question the reason for their engagement in wars, as well as the framework that makes violence and wars possible.

In a sense, online commemorative practice in Vietnam has not met the expectation of some scholars believing that virtual memorials can escape the pressure of social conformity and “establish a more democratic situation characterized by public commemorative disagreement” (Knudsen and Stage 2012: 432). Such limitation, however, does not necessarily downplay the significance of online memorialization. In fact, the emergence of online commemoration as a grassroots practice associated with ordinary citizens and its capacity to introduce a patchwork of various statements by different people to the public are themselves positive implications. Ngô Thị Thúy Hằng, the founder of LSVN insightfully summarized the values of the online memorial sites in one of my interviews with her. Hằng said: “More than impersonal statistical figures, the singularity of the soldier who died is to remind us of the war and the human cost we had

192 to pay for our peace today. In each entry left on the virtual memorial, there is not just a name, but a human being whose passing has a profound effect on those who loved him.”

For Hằng and those who engage in the websites, the politics behind the form of online memorialization is an individualistic one, in which the commemoration of individual soldiers serves as protest against the urge to forget or the depersonalization commonly seen in official mode of memorialization. Moreover, online commemoration is not only to honor soldiers but also to make visible the experiences of many people who live with the shadows of their absent fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters. Such implications of the burgeoning practice of online commemoration resonate with a broader transformation recently happening in the memory politics of Vietnam, which I have mentioned many times in my previous chapters. Since the early 1990s, only after a half century of grieving in silence, relatives of soldiers who died in the fronts been able to retrieve the right to be sad and more importantly a hope to publicly express it. From conversations in the intimate sphere of family homes to practices of religious rituals and fictitious presentations in literature, more and more accounts told by people who have survived the war and experienced the loss of their beloved have been brought to light. In this context, the Internet comes into play as an additional space where more effective tools are provided for people to accelerate their recurrence of postponed memories.

Moving beyond the private space of the family and fictitious presentations in the literary field, there are actual stories and emotions being shared by users of web memorials.

Beyond the screen

My family has been waiting for my brother for more than thirty years. I never forget what my parents have experienced since my brother died. Here, thanks to

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the assistance of the website administrators, I have been enabled to establish a tomb for my brother as a place where I can reunite with him. Through the website, I am also looking for assistance to locate my brother’s grave. If you know any information as to the location of the aforementioned battlefield and the combat unit please contact me. Information is gratefully received My contact information: - Nguyễn Thanh Mai - Address: xxxxxx - Phone number: xxxxx The entry above was written by Mrs. Nguyễn Thanh Mai, a user of nhomai.vn, and was left on the grave marker of her brother. Through the message, Mrs. Mai makes explicit her reason for joining the practice of online memorialization as well as her perception of the functionality of the website. For Mrs. Mai, the website is not only a place of remembering but also a place for connecting and finding succor. Also, it is revealing that Mrs. Mai seeks to gain attention and, subsequently, support from not only participants of the website but also the general public as well.

Mrs. Mai’s entry helps outline the main ideas of this section which seeks to examine the significance of online sites of memory as source of support and a tool for social mobilization. Here, it is necessary to note that within the space of commemorative websites, memorial and supportive functions are closely intertwined. As argued in the previous section, while the theme of LSVN and NM is the memorial function and thereby the fallen, their main focus is on the grief and the people left behind. This focus itself characterizes the websites as sources of support for those who engage in them. Through their commemorative acts within the websites, users can maintain their relationship with the dead as well as expressing their emotion and concerns. For people like Mrs. Mai whose relatives’ remains have not been found, the significance of these practices is even

194 greater. The Internet grave, as Mrs. Mai states, serves as the substitute for the missing physical grave of her brother. And Mrs. Mai believes that by having his own symbolically individualized grave as such, the brother may find some comfort, and so does Mrs. Mai’s family.

Unfortunately, while the discourse of substitution offered by the online memorial site may minimize the trauma caused by the absence of her brother’s physical body, it does not fulfil the commemorative desire of Mrs. Mai and her family. As Mrs. Mai’s message reminds us, the ultimate goal of her memory work is no other than to retrieve her brother’s remains. Unless knowing the brother’s whereabouts and providing him a proper burial, Mrs. Mai’s commemoration is still an unfinished business.

The story of Mrs. Mai reflects a particular situation of commemoration which involves the difficult task of searching for the remains of the dead. As Mrs. Mai expresses, support which is directly associated with the search, especially through sharing information about the dead, is of the most desirable form.

Moving on from the example of Mrs. Mai, in paragraphs that follow I will examine the implications of online sites of memory as sources of support associated with the task of searching for the remains of dead soldiers. In doing so, I place the focus of this section mainly on the website of Mr. Nguyễn Sỹ Hồ and that of NTĐĐ. The two websites, which I have briefly introduced at the beginning of this research, provide several forms of support for the families of war martyrs, such as information concerning various cemeteries throughout the country or instructions on state policies related to the issue of war martyrs. The main function of these commemorative websites makes them quite distinctive from the previously analyzed online cemetery and memorial; yet in a

195 broader sense, they contribute to the politics of memory in postwar Vietnam in a very similar way. First, they emphasize the individuality of the dead by directly dealing with the most important issue of such individuality - the body. Second, they contribute to the pluralization of memory by providing services that are mostly neglected by the official agenda of commemoration promoted by the state. Together with the analyses I have presented thus far, existing websites and activities associated with them confirm the role of “online communities” as active agents in the construction and negotiation of collective memory. More importantly, their existence, I argue, reflects the emergence of a new concept of civil society which is of significance in a country run by a monopolistic political party like Vietnam.

Before I continue to delve into discussions outlined above, it will be helpful here to recall the high number of soldiers with unknown burial sites in Vietnam, which I have already mentioned in previous chapters. Specifically, as reported by July 2015, of more than 1.1 million Vietnamese soldiers who lost their lives during the past wars, the bodies of 300,000 are still unaccounted for. Alongside with them, as many as 200,000 soldiers who are buried in war cemeteries throughout the country remain unidentified. Overall, for decades since the last war ended in Vietnam, an uncertainty is still revolving around the death of around half a million soldiers.

To address such uncertainty, there have been certain attempts conducted by

Vietnamese military authorities. Since early 1990s, under the supervision of the Ministry of National Defence, numerous body-finding units have combed the areas over which soldiers have fought during the past wars in an attempt to locate the remains of those missing. Much of the search conducted by these teams is involved in difficult tasks, such

196 as multiple excavations in jungles or in mountaintop areas. In December 2013, in order to accelerate the search for remains of war martyrs, a national campaign was launched by the Vietnamese government, resulting in the establishment of the Steering Committee on the Search and Repatriation of Remains of Fallen Soldiers. After one year of setting up of its organization nationwide, the committee started up its first action plan in 2014, which was reported to be successful in recovering 1,108 sets of soldiers’ remains (Ha Thanh

2015).

By all means, such responses from state authorities to the issue of missing soldiers are of significance. However, between the number of soldiers who have not been accounted for and the goal set by the Search Committee - that is, finding 2000 sets of remains each year - it is noticeable that there is a substantial gap. The uncertainty about the fate of a large number of soldiers, therefore, still exists as a painful reality. And more than anyone else, families of those whose burial sites are unknown continue to suffer from the burden of not being able to commemorate their deceased loved ones properly.

Consequently, many of the families have decided to take action on their own, starting their search for the remains of the dead before it is too late.

The search that many families have embarked on, of course, “requires great amount of effort”, Mrs. Mai, whom I mentioned previously, told me in one of my interviews with her. Mrs. Mai was born and raised in Hải Dương, a small town located 50 km from Hanoi. At the age of sixteen, Mrs. Mai became the only child in her family after her elder brother, who enlisted as a soldier when he was 20, was killed in the battlefield in 1971. Following the wish of her parents before they died, Mrs. Mai has started her quest for the grave of her brother since 1995. The brother’s death notice, the only clue

197 she has, does not provide specific information as to the location of his grave. The available details are too ambiguous and incomprehensible. The dead soldier’s combat unit is indicated by some letters, D5-KT; whereas the circumstance of his death and his burial place are only described in a few words - “killed and buried at the Southern battlefield”.

Attempting to solve the puzzle, Mrs. Mai first sent letters to military committees and social affair bureaus in Hải Dương where her brother originally enlisted before being sent to the battlefield and many others in Southern provinces with a hope that she could find some more detailed information on the brother’s whereabouts, or at least could get some assistance to attain proper understanding of the death notification’s details.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Mai hardly got any responses to her queries. The few letters that she did receive after a long wait, however, were unhelpful. The few words they wrote - “no information concerning him available” - gave the woman more anxiety than hope.

As years of searching for information through conventional methods had resulted in failure, Mrs. Mai, who was a school teacher, decided to spend five consecutive summer breaks from 2000 to 2005 to visit various war cemeteries, military headquarters and local social affairs offices in Central and Southern provinces. Every trip was started with a complicated administrative procedure of making appointments with local officials and applying for government funding, which in fact helped cover only a small part of the trip and was granted only once a year. Overriding all these tasks, obviously, the most difficult one for Mrs. Mai was retrieving information on her brother. The current bureaucratic apparatus responsible for information on war martyrs is operated by local offices of both the Ministry of National Defense (MOND) and the Ministry of Labor,

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Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA). Because of this managing mechanism and especially the lack of compatibility between involved agencies, information on war martyrs is scattered and unsystematically stored. Thus, during her search, Mrs. Mai’s queries were often sent back and forth between the two agencies. Despite a large amount of time, money and effort being invested, while still unable to find any information regarding her brother’s military personnel file or his posthumous whereabouts, Mai’s inquiry about how to decode her brother’s death notification was not answered either.

The officials with whom Mrs. Mai met told her that they were unable to give her any help, since they themselves knew nothing about those codes which were used by the

Army a long time ago and applied only in war time.

As such, despite her “great amount of effort”, her brother’s whereabouts remained mysterious to Mrs. Mai. Without accurate information and guidance in hand, multiple searches by Mrs. Mai in different war cemeteries in Southern provinces consequently ended up at a dead end. She got lost in a sea of headstones while visiting each cemetery and was painfully disappointed when she was unable to find her brother’s name there.

Eventually, running out of money after her trips in 2000-2005, Mrs. Mai had to leave off her search in faraway cemeteries since then.

The failure in obtaining information about the fate of her brother, as Mrs. Mai told me, gave more anguish for her family who had waited for more than forty years.

Unfortunately, within the endless search for soldier remains in contemporary Vietnam,

Mrs. Mai is not alone in experiencing such fruitless attempts and protracted painfulness.

Ngô Thị Thúy Hằng recalled similar experience and difficulties she had faced when searching for her uncle’s remains:

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“I had spent years tracking down details provided in my uncle’ death notification in many military offices without any success. The most frustrating thing for me is the unsystematic management of information on war martyrs. I understand the circumstance of war wherein the process of recording and storing information must be done as quickly and simply as possible. Yet, until now, decades after the war’s end, further information about the circumstances and locations of war martyrs’ death have not been provided to their families. It is also disappointing that families of war martyrs always have to contact the officials first, instead of them approaching us.

Finally, I had to give up tracing information from government agencies. Instead, I tried to learn from veterans’ accounts about the war. After ten years, I can present a scenario that will explain the circumstances surrounding my uncle’s death. Yet, I am still plagued with the question “What ever happened to him?”

Mr. Nguyễn Sỹ Hồ is somewhat more fortunate than Hằng and Mrs. Mai, since he eventually found the remains of his late brother in 2008. However, Mr. Hồ’s experience still echoes those of Mrs. Mai and Hằng in many senses; his search was by no mean easy.

In one of my interviews with him, Mr. Hồ told me:

“Had it not been for the help of my brother’s comrades, I would have never known about the site where my brother fell. His death notification paper only shows that he died in the Southern battlefield, and without any clue about the exact location of his death. Two former comrades of my brother contacted me in 2004 and we started our search immediately since then. We first visited the site of the former battlefield where my brother was killed. It is now a small town in Long An province, 200 km from where I live. Of course, when we visited the town in 2004, nothing of the war remained there, including my brother’s bones. One local official told us that the remains of my brother and six other soldiers had been removed from the site and reburied in one of the war cemeteries nearby, but he did not know exactly which cemetery it was. From this original burial site, I continued my search in many war cemeteries in Long An province, until one day in 2006, I found seven unidentified tombs in Mỹ Thạnh Tây commune cemetery. As soon as I had consulted with local officials and learnt that those tombs entered the cemetery in 1982, I believed one of them was my brother’s. 200

However, the line on seven headstones that read “Unknown martyrs” made me really sad. How can I identify my brother’s identity? How about families of his comrades? Just like me, they must be waiting and searching for them desperately?

In 2008, thanks to the money funded by my brother’s former comrades and my relatives, I was able to afford a DNA test to identify my brother’s remains. Finally, 37 years after his death, I could get my brother’s name inscribed on his grave marker.

Personally, I feel blessed that I have found my brother and laid him to rest; however, what I have witnessed and experienced during my long search has always been lingering in my mind. There are many families searching for the remains of their sons, daughters, brothers, etc. without any clue of their resting place. Just like the case of my brother, many war martyrs have been removed from their temporary burial sites, which are recorded in the death notifications, yet their families have never been informed about the changes. It is sad that thousands of families have not been able to reunite even after the war due to such an inaccurate way of communication and dissemination of information.”

With those words of my informants, many weaknesses of the government archival system and administrative processes are highlighted. They thus partly explain the imperative of coming up with alternative ways to trace information of those gone and to fully account for their death. Many families have attempted to seek information about the dead from witness accounts of war veterans or local residents. In 1992, the very first requests of the sort were published in a section called “Information on the Search for War

Martyr Remains” in the weekend special publication of “War Veterans of Vietnam” (Cựu

Chiến Binh Việt Nam). Typically containing details extracted from his/her death notification, a photograph of the dead (if available), and a message that read “If anyone knows the current location of this grave, please contact…”, each inquiry, if approved, will be placed on the column for two consecutive weeks. And each week, there are 20

201 enquiries being published by Cựu Chiến Binh Việt Nam. Following Cựu Chiến Binh Việt

Nam, in 1995, two national media outlets – the Voice of Vietnam (VOV-Radio station) and Vietnam Television (VTV) – also started their 15-minute weekly newscast “Nhắn

Tìm Đồng Đội” (Missing Comrades) serving as an avenue for people to place their messages seeking help to find the whereabouts of long-missing soldiers. Since their start, all of the three special advertising sections on Cựu Chiến Binh Việt Nam, VOV and VTV have been inundated with missives and requests sent from families of war martyrs.

During the time between 1995 and 2015, for example, the VTV’s “Comrades Missing” program alone received more than 15.000 requests.

A small number of those requests indeed got some kind of response. In 2008, Cựu

Chiến Binh Việt Nam reported that more than 1000 families, whose requests had been published in the “Information on the Search for War Martyr Remains” column, had successfully located the remains of their loved ones. The figure is quite humble compared to that of unresolved cases. However, beyond such specific number of findings, the significance of these media-generated search lies in the great public attention they have attracted. For decades of constant exposure, family inquiries seeking for their lost members have not only stirred memories of those who survived the war, they but also have galvanized an impulse to act and to share responsibilities among a broader portion of the population. Nguyễn Hữu Tuấn, one of the initiators of NTĐĐ, for instance, noted that his idea of establishing the website was chiefly inspired by the existing “Nhắn Tìm

Đồng Đội” newscast and column. Tuấn further explained:

“While all the Vietnamese owe a great gratitude to war martyrs who have sacrificed their lives for our today’s independence and peace, I think helping those still missing reunite with their families is the best way to express such gratitude. It is

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always very touching to hear about stories of families finding their lost relatives through “Nhắn Tìm Đồng Đội” programs. Yet, there are still a lot of families who have not been able to find their deceased members. Their urgent pleas for information keep coming up year after year. Those inquiries demand action from all of us - the Vietnamese - not only from those who know the dead personally.”

In October 2004, Tuấn and seven other fellow friends, who then were all second- year students majoring in computer science, created the website of nhantimdongdoi.org.

The name of the website makes explicit its function and mission – serving as an Internet- based version of the “Nhắn Tìm Đồng Đội” column and newscast. Yet, beyond the limitations seen in the conventional media, such as long wait times for requests to be published or broadcast, the website allows families to post their requests immediately when they need and present them to the public as long as possible. Moreover, as described by Tuấn, the website is not merely a tool for families to disseminate their appeals for information; it is aimed to connect people together. “It is a place where the past and the present are interwoven, where hope and compassion co-exist, and where the attempt to ease the war-induced suffering is realized”, said Tuấn. Much of the content of the website, therefore, is constituted by entries of families updating and sharing their experience during their journeys to locate the remains and identify the fate of their missing members. In addition to them, a section entitled “war memoirs” is dedicated specifically to war martyrs to share their accounts of the history of various military units, and descriptions of former battlefields and events. Another important component of the website is an archive of government regulations on the issue of war martyrs.

Soon after the establishment of the website, especially with the official announcement being broadcast by the VOV radio in early 2005, public attention paid to

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NTĐĐ increased remarkably. In any single day within the first week of February 2005, as many as 500 requests were posted on the website by families of war martyrs. Alongside them, several maps, notes and lists of soldiers who died in certain battles were also uploaded by veterans from different parts of the country. In August 2005, three months after posting his appeal on NTĐĐ, Lê Văn Quang, father of war martyr Lê Văn Lưu, got an email from Trần Đình Kiên, a former comrade of Lưu during his military days in the

Regiment 372. Kiên informed the family that Lưu had been buried in a war cemetery in

Biên Hòa city, Đồng Nai province. Reading the email which was accompanied by a photograph of Lưu’s grave marker, as Lê Văn Quang recalled in one of his entries posted on NTĐĐ, brought him “an indescribable feeling”. The reunion between Quang and his son eventually took place in September 2005, 30 years after the death of Lưu. Such an event, the first story of success, significantly energized Tuấn and other administrators of

NTĐĐ as well as motivating many other people to further engage in the activities of the website. Both Quang and Kiên, in particular, have become active members of NTĐĐ since then; they have maintained a close relationship with the webmasters and dedicated themselves to help other families in searching for their missing relatives.

Another landmark event in the development of nhantimdongdoi.org was the joining of Ngô Thị Thúy Hằng in the administrator group in 2009. Hằng knew about the website during her search for the remains of her uncle, and as a journalist, she wanted to write an article about the activities associated with it. At that time, when Hằng met Tuấn and his friends, the number of requests posted on the website had grown to exceed

36,000, and dozens of graves of war martyrs had been successfully located with the help from information exchanged through the website. Yet, as Tuấn and his friends now had

204 graduated from university and had their own full-time jobs in different organizations and businesses, their time for the website became more limited. As Tuấn expressed this difficulty in his interview with Hằng, the young journalist decided to help take care of the website which she believed “too meaningful to be neglected”. Soon after the meeting with Tuấn, Hằng quit her job as a journalist and has worked solely as the chief webmaster of nhantimdongdoi.org since then.

Upon Hằng’s participation in the website, her personal experience in the year- long search for the grave of her uncle, especially her encounter with the so-called

“unsystematic management of information on war martyrs”, strongly compelled her to a new idea of using the website. “An online database of war martyrs’ graves”, as Hằng suggested, should be established and incorporated into the website. All other webmasters, of course, supported this idea of Hằng; and in October 2009, a notice about the planned database was posted on the homepage of nhantimdongdoi.org. In such a written statement, by underlining not only the significance of the database as “a comprehensive source of information” but also its novelty of being “available and accessible for anyone”, Hằng and her group appealed to the website’s users and visitors to participate in the project, sharing their efforts to make such meaningful work possible.

Taking up the call for contribution to the cause of “honoring war martyrs and supporting their families”, within a week, more than 30 volunteers had registered with the webmasters of NTĐĐ. While most of those volunteers were veterans or relatives of war martyrs, who had engaged in the website since its early days in 2005, a few of them were new visitors entering the site for the first time. One of my informants, Ngọc, for example, happened to bump into the website while surfing the Internet looking for material for her

205 school assignment. After spending hours clicking through countless pages of the website,

Ngọc, a high school student back then, was extraordinarily impressed by stories of war martyr families, which were rarely seen in her school textbooks. She thus immediately decided to sign up as a volunteer of NTĐĐ, hoping that she would get to learn more from the fieldwork experience.

In November 2009, two weeks after her first email exchange with Hằng and other volunteers, Ngọc started working as a data collector for NTĐĐ. As instructed by Hằng,

Ngọc visited the war cemetery in her local town in Đà Nẵng. She initially tried to obtain information about soldiers buried at the site through consulting the cemetery registration book. However, the local official refused to give her the list because, as he explained, he was not allowed to lend such important documents to a group of individuals, who is not directly associated with or authorized by any registered organizations. Facing such refusal, Ngọc then had to employ another method of collecting information; she took photographs of all the grave markers there. When done photographing more than 100 gravestones and writing a careful note of description, Ngọc sent the data to Hằng and other volunteers who worked as data processors. After accomplishing her work in her own town’s cemetery, Ngọc continued collecting data in several cemeteries in the nearby area during three months afterwards.

Using the same method as Ngọc’s, other volunteers of NTĐĐ collected thousands of photos of war martyr graves within the first few months of the project. While Ngọc could only focus on small-sized cemeteries in her local area, many volunteers, when done with the graves in their hometown, have traveled great distances to collect data in medium and

206 big-sized cemeteries in other provinces. They do so, of course, at great personal cost to themselves.

Thanks to the work of volunteers, which come in different shapes and sizes, the online database of war martyr graves is made possible. By April 2014, the NTĐĐ database contained 400,000 records of war martyrs in more than 2000 cemeteries nationwide. While it is still an ongoing project, the database now is certainly one of the most significant tools for people to obtain information about war martyrs in an easy, fast and uncomplicated way.

Along with these attempts of Hằng and numerous members of NTĐĐ, another website, on a smaller scale yet no less significant, has also emerged since 2008 with the role of Mr. Nguyễn Sỹ Hồ. Functioning similarly to the database of NTĐĐ, Mr. Nguyễn

Sỹ Hồ’s website - Nguoiduado.vn - contains a repository of photos of war martyr graves located in different cemeteries. Most of those photos have been taken and compiled by

Mr. Hồ himself, yet the assistance of other volunteers is still worth mentioning. From time to time, Mr. Hồ may receive a large folder of photos of war martyr graves at a certain cemetery, which is sent to him through email or his Facebook page. Sometimes, he asks for help from those living near particular cemeteries to double check or take a new photo to replace a low quality one.

By the end of 2014, the website of Mr. Nguyễn Sĩ Hồ reached the 11 million views, marking its incredible popularity. To help dozens of those scattered requests sent to his website to reach a more public view, Mr. Nguyễn Sĩ Hồ even upgraded its original structure by creating a special section called “Sending a Request” where people can send their inquiries by simply filling in an online form and clicking on the submit button. Once

207 successfully sent, the inquiry, which includes basic contact information of the sender

(name, contact address, phone number and email address) and biographical and military details of the dead (year of birth, date of death, combat unit, combat rank), will be placed in the designated section on the right hand side of the web, being visible to everyone.

Consequently, six months after its creation in October 2014, there had been 1500 requests placed in this section.

Recently, as Mr. Hồ revealed, he has established a stable network of consultants and volunteers who, depending on their expertise, have assisted him in various aspects of developing the website’s content and functions. While young people are helpful in doing technological-related work, other volunteers, namely war veterans, take part in giving instructions and information about administrative procedures, history of combat units and former battlefields. Rarely meeting each other personally, these volunteers and Mr. Hồ work together, exchanging documents through an email list service. Yet, sometimes, when needed, Hồ and several volunteers would accompany families of war martyrs in their onsite search.

With his constant efforts and the help of many volunteers, the website of Mr. Hồ has become a repository containing 145,614 tombs located in 252 cemeteries. Moreover, with clear information and instruction given through Mr. Hồ and his network, several dozen families have found the graves of their long time missing relatives.

So far, I have pictured mainly the activities of websites which are created with the intention of searching for the remains of fallen soldiers in Vietnam. At this point, we should turn to the issue concerning the position of such particular online activities within the broader politics of postwar memory in Vietnam. Clearly, as the organized efforts of

208 ordinary citizens, which aim to resolve the fate of soldiers who died serving the country, both NTĐĐ and NĐĐ have gained considerable praise from those in authority. In recent reports of MOLISA, for instance, the two websites have been occasionally mentioned as epitomes of citizenry’s support for the state’s efforts in solving the issue of missing soldiers (Nguyễn Dân 2012; Hoàng Phương 2015). The state’s recognition of these websites gives credit to the contribution of NTĐĐ and NĐĐ; yet, it mainly views these groups as being subordinate to state agencies. This discourse, then, intentionally ignores a very important fact that these websites have emerged primarily as a response to the insufficient official measures of the state. Moreover, while rhetorically encouraging individuals to get engaged in activities of NTĐĐ and NĐĐ as well as other voluntary war-martyrs search groups, state officials do not often provide them with further support or actively collaborate with them.

Looking through these responses of state authorities, it is arguable that the possibility for the two websites to directly impact the macro level of the socio-political landscape, namely the Vietnamese government’s policy decisions, hardly exists. Yet, the involvement of such commemorative websites in the public sphere and their practical activities can be conceptualized as an important advocacy endeavour. Both NTĐĐ and

NĐĐ have greatly contributed to raising public awareness of the issues relating to war martyr commemoration, especially the critical problem of lack of information about the circumstances of the deaths and, in some cases, the lack the bodies of the soldiers. Their practical actions counteract the military and political establishment’s prevalent tendency to conceal information. Moreover, through promoting the collective acts of sharing experiences and providing mutual support for those in need, NTĐĐ and NĐĐ aim to

209 achieve a positive end - healing the wounds of war. Such objectives and mission coupled with the value of voluntarism embraced by their members have characterized the websites as a space of informal politics constitutive for the so-called civil society.

Beyond the conventional ways of organizing civic actions, such as through formal and registered associations, moreover, the stories of NTĐĐ and NĐĐ present a new way of mobilizing citizens and the general public and a new manner of associational formation. While each of the websites can only generate around them a loosely-organized network of individuals, it still effectively works the system to build support for its goal.

Such mobilization and associational formation of virtual networks, as Wells-Dang has convincingly argued, are the true building blocks of civil society (Wells-Dang 2011).

Conclusion

The increasing number of participants and their intensive engagement in activities of newly-emergent commemorative websites are indicative of an endless demand of the

Vietnamese for seeking different spaces and methods to come to terms with the death of those who were killed in the past wars. Here, existing parallel with the realm of private home and public sites of national commemoration, online sites provide those who engage in them with more opportunities to express their memories and connect with each other.

Resulting from such activities, there indeed have emerged in Vietnam certain online communities specifically dedicated to the commemoration of fallen soldiers.

While the vast majority in the membership of such online communities are relatives of war martyrs, contribution from people having different relationships to the commemorate soldiers is considerably significant. Together, as shown in my research, these members, most of them may have never met each other personally, have

210 participated in the construction of a patchwork of memories by embarking on a process of virtual co-production. Each of them, whether regular user or creator of the websites, can play a relatively equal role in such process of memory construction. They share their own personal experience, recollection and interpretation. Such a trait of the internal power relations between website creators and users characterizes online sites of memory as more democratic spaces of practice in comparison to those created by official institutions.

In addition to, and perhaps because of this transformation in their participatory mode, from passive consuming to active co-producing, participants of websites have also further shifted the focus of their commemorative expressions. Much of the discursive content, thus, manifest emotional responses of website participants to the death of their relatives rather than constructing individualized representations of the dead themselves.

Interactions among members of online communities as well as their ties become more strengthened when it comes to the activity of mutual supporting. The absence of the dead bodies of many soldiers and the task of searching for them are crucial catalysts driving the engagement of many people in the online communities. Many members define their actions by referring to abstract notions, such as voluntarism and social responsibility; whereas, others get involved because of their personal loss and experience of searching for their long-lost ones. Regardless of such slight differences in their intentions, the collective actions of these individuals been facilitated not only alternative sources of public support for those in need but also a new form of associational life for all people who are involved.

By all means, the emergence and development of online communities in memory of fallen soldiers have importantly contributed to the constant transformation in the

211 politics of memory in Vietnam. They have accelerated the pluralization of memory by opening up more memorial spaces, giving rise to new styles of commemoration, and making possible public sources of support. All of these activities, however, have not facilitated a process of democratizing remembrance; people tend to express their memories in a consensual way rather than publicly voicing their disagreement with discourses that are deemed to be mainstream. The reason for this limitation may partly have its roots in the censorship of the state which is immensely exercised in the realm of the Internet. Yet, in general, such limitation does not necessarily downplay the significance of online commemoration in the contemporary Vietnam; both state authorities and the general public have acknowledged the existence of websites in memory of fallen soldiers as salient components of the country’s memoryscape.

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Conclusion

The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Vietnam

‘Commemoration is a way of claiming that the past has some thing to offer the present, be it a warning or a model’ (Olick 1999)

*****

My purpose in undertaking this study was to address the commemorative cult of fallen soldiers as a specific manifestation of the politics of memory in Vietnam.

Particularly, I was interested in how the power relations within and between different social groups structure their processes of making meaning of and commemorating the death of soldiers who died in the 20th century’s wars. Each chapter in this dissertation, thus, mainly focuses on a specific social group, delving into its own dynamics that shape the commemorative acts of its members. And then, when bringing together three chapters, there forms a composite picture that depicts the contestation of meaning occurring between these forms and practices. This contestation, in its turn, presents the struggle among actors who attempt to install their versions of the past into the center of public memoryscape.

Throughout decades, there have been remarkable transformations in the power relation and hierarchy order among those who are involved in the social production of collective memory in Vietnam. During the period between the 1950s to 1975 in North

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Vietnam, and from 1975 to the mid-1980s throughout the country, the power of the

Vietnamese socialist state dominated the realm of memory and commemoration. On the one hand, the state claimed its ownership of almost all existing public sites of memory.

On the other hand, it exerted a firm control over commemorative practices conducted by other social groups. Since the launching of the Đổi Mới program in 1986, however, the state has significantly retreated from their previous dominant position. They have loosened their control over the socio-cultural life of the population, and started realizing active dialogues with other social actors in society. In such a new context, instead of acting as passive participants in the state-led events and practices, grassroots agencies, especially the family, have been given opportunities to integrate their own interpretation and representations of the past into the public memoryscape of the country.

That said, the transformations of power relations involved in the production of collective memory in Vietnam have taken place as responses to constant shifts in the country’s historical context - from wartime to peace time, and from socialist construction to post-socialist reform. As a result of aforementioned change and reconfiguration, a positive dynamic has been present within the power structure defining the politics of memory in Vietnam. This dynamic is a movement toward the diversity and plurality of mnemonic practices, which confirms the role of various social groups as significant actors in memory production beside the state. However, as this research has shown, while the Vietnamese state nowadays does not embrace a highly exclusive position as they used to do several decades ago, the activities undertaken at the nation-state level still have important implications for all other agencies involved in the construction of collective memory. Through dialogue and negotiation with other actors, the state continues with its

214 selective construction of the past, in which they allow only what can benefit the grand narrative to be publicly articulated. Those memories which present discontent and disagreement have not been freely voiced. In conclusion, therefore, my research reinforces what Hue-Tam Ho Tai has pointed out, that is, memory politics in present-day

Vietnam is characterized by “neither full blown totalitarianism nor total democracy” (Tai

2001:10).

Within this specific power structure, the negotiations and contestation between different social actors revolve around a critical issue as to how memories of past events and participants serve the interests and needs of those living in the present-day society.

For those who are in authority in Vietnam, memory and commemoration work as a vital political instrument with which they legitimate their war efforts and bind their citizens into a collective national identity. For this purpose, during decades, at the heart of the

Vietnamese national memory, dead soldiers have been commemorated through a shared identity transcending all their social differences. They embody the positive essence of larger-than-life heroes who have been willing to sacrifice not only their lives, but also their death and bodies for the country. In the context of wartime, these discourses helped the state strengthen military and civilian morale, thereby serving its doctrine of the people’s war. In the postwar peace, and even in today’s context of international integration and modernization, Vietnamese political leaders retain a stake in promoting such national discourse of heroic sacrifice and patriotism as a means of mobilizing the population. One prominent example of this continuity of the nationalist perspective of commemoration can be seen in the speech given by a Vietnamese military leader on the recent event of the 69th anniversary of the War Invalids and Martyrs Day. On 24th July,

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2016, in front of more than four hundred high school and university students who gathered together at the grand studio of the Đồng Nai television station for a special live telecast titled “Gratitude”, Lt. Gen. Phạm Văn Dĩ remarked:

“War has receded, and suffering no longer exists, yet the flame of patriotism remains burning every minute and hour in the hearts of the Vietnamese. This flame (of patriotism) was the critical source of strength for youths of previous generations when fighting on the battle fields, and now it is the necessity and weapon for today’s youths in their journey of building up an industrialized and modernized Vietnam.”

While Vietnamese authorities, as such, have continuously emphasized the political aspect of memory and commemoration, ordinary people, especially those who have experienced the loss of their beloved one for the cause of war tend to seek the significance of these phenomena primarily from their existential function. For these people, commemorating and remembering are associated with expressions of mourning, being the human response to the death and suffering that war engenders. They commemorate the death of specific individuals as a way to come to terms with a sense of loss which refers to a reality rather than an abstract representation.

The two tendencies of conceptualizing the primary function of memory and commemoration, of course, have never existed separately from each other. The politics of war memory and commemoration itself has to engage with mourning because it attempts to mask out the psychological and physical damage of war. In fact, as pointed out in my research, many relatives of war martyrs found the notion of heroic sacrifice for the nation a meaningful script for describing the death of family members, since it helped them reconcile their personal losses with national political gain. However, such concept of

“positive mourning” and its abstract depiction tending to distort the images of war deaths

216 could not offer satisfying comfort to the families. More importantly, for decades during

1950s-1980s, rather than helping relatives of the fallen come to terms with their loss, the political project of commemoration promoted by the state made mourning more difficult for those survivors, since it eliminated many existential aspects of death and dying, which were strongly appreciated by family discourse of commemoration.

Such confrontation between the political project of the nation-state and the mourning practice of ordinary citizens has become less intense since the late 1980s with the aforementioned retreat of the state from its previous dominant position. While continuing to emphasize the political doctrine of heroism and patriotism, the state has sought to embrace more cultural and religious aspects of commemoration, which directly address the traumatic side of war and the large scale of death it has produced. Within the socialist-nationalist trajectories of commemoration, therefore, the intersection and interaction with popular religious beliefs and kinship culture have become more and more visible.

So far, my analyses have demonstrated the argument pointed out at the beginning of my research, that is, collective memory is a salient lens through which to understand prominent transformations in the socio-cultural and political conditions in contemporary

Vietnam. Doing research on this topic, while being interesting, has also been a challenging task. Early on in this research, I became overwhelmed when encountering a vast array of commemorative forms and practices dedicated to the remembrance of war martyrs. As much as I wanted to fully explore this sheer range of available materials, I understood that it was important for my research to be selective and to embrace certain limitations. Throughout my ethnographical research, therefore, I have mainly focused on

217 examining the practices and arenas of commemoration that I felt somewhat confident to write about. Many other important loci of memory contestation and negotiation, such as the areas of media representation and artistic practices in the form of film, music and literature, have not been sufficiently covered in my present research. In my future plans, in order to fully comprehend the dynamic and complication of the politics of memory in

Vietnam, endeavouring to explore these special fields of memory practice is of my interest.

Furthermore, in the years to come, with the continuous transformations in the sociopolitical fabric of Vietnam, the dynamics within and between social actors who are involved in the production of collective memory will have to be amended and re- evaluated. Consequently, it remains to be seen how the image of fallen soldiers who died in the 20th century wars will evolve. Given this fact, this study is not meant to say all there is to say about how Vietnamese soldiers have been commemorated. It rather serves as a significant starting point for anyone interested in the compelling yet challenging matter of the politics of memory in Vietnam.

218

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