The Country of Memory "ss1.03"

GEOGRAPHIES OF MEMORY

Nearly a century after the end of the American Civil War, William Faulkner wrote: “The past is never dead, it's not even past.”^[8] In Vietnam as in the American South, the past remains a live presence, impossible to ignore, difficult to assimilate. With its share of winners and losers in what, increasingly, is recognized to have been a civil conflict as much as a war against foreign intervention, postwar Vietnam, at first glance, offers striking parallels with postbellum America; yet the issues involved in grappling with the past are quite different in the two countries.

Some Vietnamese families begin their collective narratives of living with and through conflict in the nineteenth century, when the French conquered Vietnam. For many, that narrative did not end until 1990, when Vietnamese forces finally pulled out of Cambodia. While some rejoice in their improved situations, others mourn accumulated losses. Answers to queries about a person's current circumstances are often prefaced with “After 1975” or “Before Doi Moi.” Temporal references such as these function not merely as markers of time gone by but also as indices of economic and political gains and losses and of personal experiences of war and revolution. Gains and losses, triumph and tragedy, however, do not align neatly and predictably on either side of the national divide that was the seventeenth parallel. The postwar era has also become the postrevolutionary era, in which it is unclear who won and who lost, as it was in the American Civil War. This complicated geography of triumph and setbacks has a profound impact on how the past is reimagined.

The complex intertwining of geography and time in Vietnamese memory is illustrated in one of the earliest novels of the Doi Moi period, Duong Thu Huong's Paradise of the Blind. This book was published in 1988, when the Doi Moi reforms were just being launched, and is widely seen as a revisionist account of over forty years of Communist rule in North Vietnam by a veteran of the War Against the Americans.^[9] At the end of the novel, the heroine decides not to accept the house bequeathed to her by her aunt because she is unwilling to take on the burden of bitter memories that goes with it. The house in question had been confiscated during the Land Reform campaign of the 1950s, and the once prosperous lineage to whom it had belonged had been destroyed. Later, thanks to the Doi Moi reforms and her own unceasing efforts, the aunt was able to rebuild the family fortune and recover the house. It is thus full of ghosts and painful memories, a reminder of the toll of revolution

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on a single lineage as well as the eventual triumph of a lone individual. It is also concrete testimony to that individual's insistence on passing on her memories of bitter loss and vengeful triumph to the new generation. The narrator thus speaks for many when she decides to refuse “to stay here beneath the roof of the ancestors,” as enjoined by her aunt: “I can't squander my life tending these faded flowers, these shadows, the legacy of past crimes.”^[10] The rejected house functions as an ambiguous symbol of the past. For the heroine, it contains the bitter ghosts of the revolution, but for her aunt who had schemed for decades to recover it, it had represented as well the glory days of her family before Land Reform.^[11]

While it is conceivable that alternative interpretations of the past would not have surfaced into public life had it not been for the reforms, it would be misleading to infer that the “orthodox” narratives all belong to the pre–Doi Moi period. As some of the chapters in this volume suggest, the perpetuation of the state narrative—though sometimes modified—is made possible by enduring collective and personal concerns that have not been rendered moot by reforms even as other actors with different interests have come forth with their own revisions of the past. Everywhere, the prerevolutionary tradition is being revived (and, in many cases, invented wholesale), but its function is highly ambiguous. It is revived by some as an alternative to the cultural legacy of the communist era, and by others as a means of entrenching that legacy even more firmly in the national consciousness. As the heroine of Paradise of the Blind realizes, the struggle over the past is an aspect of the struggle to control the future.

A complicating factor is the emergence of an art market and thegrowth of the tourist industry. These are allowing international actors as well as domestic ones to play a role in this work of revision. The battle sites visited by French tourists are not the same as those that bring back American veterans, to cite two groups of foreign visitors with their own time specific memories of “Vietnam,” while others without personalties to the country are drawn to the “timeless” beauty of its landscape and recreational facilities. More important, there is a definite tension between the uses of the past as a legitimating device and as a means of constructing community and its repackaging as a marketable commodity.