NOTES
This chapter is a revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Honolulu, March 1996.
1. The Vietnamese term for commemoration, tuong niem, combines “imagining” (tuong) with “remembering” (niem). [BACK]
2. Da Ngan, “Nha Khong Co Dan Ong” [“The House with No Men”](1990), in Literature News: Nine Stories from the Vietnam Writers'Union
3. Margery Wolf, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972), 32–41. Her argument, which has already been questioned in the case of China, needs to be considered in the context of the Vietnamese tradition of village endogamy, which substantively modifies the effects of virilocal residence on women. [BACK]
4. Pham Quynh, “Dia Vi Nguoi Dan Ba trong Xa Hoi Nuoc Ta” [“The Position of Women in Our Society”], Nam Phong [Southern Wind] 82 (April 1924); quoted in Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 98. [BACK]
5. It would appear that the tale is based on a real event that took place in the fourteenth century. See Nguyen Nam, “Luoc Dich Quoc Ngu Cuoi The Ky XIX [“Translations into the Romanized Script in the Nineteenth Century”] in Tap Chi Han Nom [Han Nom Journal] 1, no.34 (1998): 20–31 n.13. [BACK]
6. George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). [BACK]
7. Ibid., 225. [BACK]
8. For a translation into English, see Huynh Sanh Thong, An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems from the Eleventh through the Twentieth Centuries (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 401–18. [BACK]
9. See Patricia Pelley, “The History of Resistance and the Resistance to History in Post-colonial Constructions of the Past,” in Essays into Vietnamese Pasts, ed.K.W. Taylor and John K. Whitmore (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1995). [BACK]
10. This figure was prevalent in the cultural debates of the 1920s. See Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, chap.3 (“Daughters of Annam”). [BACK]
11. Vietnamese discomfort with the equation of rape and invasion suggests a reason behind the discrepancy between Chinese accounts of the capture of the Trung Sisters in a.d.43 and Vietnamese oral tradition, according to which they met their death when they threw themselves into the Hat River to elude capture. [BACK]
12. Ho Chi Minh, Le Procès de la colonisation franc¸aise (Paris: Librairie du Travail, 1925).It has been suggested that Nguyen The Truyen actually wrote this book, since Ho, at the time, was either in China or on his way there from Moscow. [BACK]
13. Keith W. Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 91. [BACK]
14. Quoted in Phan Huy Le et al., Lich Su Viet Nam [History of Vietnam], vol.1 (Hanoi: NXB Dai Hoc va Giao Duc Chuyen Nghiep, 1991), 225. [BACK]
15. Nguyen Don Phuc, “Dan Ba Dong Phuong” [“Oriental Women”], Nam Phong 101 (December 1925); quoted in Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, 99. The Four Virtues are cong (good management), dung (decorous comportment), ngon (harmonious speech), and hanh (appropriate behavior). [BACK]
16. See Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley
17. Drew Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). [BACK]
18. Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). [BACK]
19. This is vividly captured in Karen Gottschang Turner with Phan Thanh Hao, Even the Women Must Fight: Memories of War From North Vietnam (New York: Wiley, 1998). [BACK]
20. The entire speech was printed in Saigon Giai Phong [Liberated Saigon], January 11, 1995. [BACK]
21. Trinh Cong Son, “Ngu Di Con” [“Sleep, My Child”], 1969, author's translation. [BACK]
22. David Ignatius, “Vietnamese Begin to Question If War Was Worth Sacrifices,” Washington Post, November 2, 1991. [BACK]
23. Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War; English version by Frank Palmos based on the translation from the Vietnamese by Vo Bang Thanh and Phan Thanh Hao with Katerina Pierce (New York: Pantheon, 1995); Duong Thu Huong, Novel without a Name, trans.by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson (New York: Morrow, 1995). Novel Wilhout a Name was originally written in 1989. [BACK]
24. This is based not on personal observation but on a private communication from a Hanoi intellectual. [BACK]
25. Trinh Cong Son, Gia Tai cua Me [Mother's Legacy], 1969. [BACK]
26. Mona Ouzouf, “Le Panthe ´on: L'Ecole Normale des morts,” in Lieux de me´moire, vol.1, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 157 [BACK]
27. Tran Van Thuy, How to Behave (Cau Chuyen Tu Te), 1988; distributed in the United States by First Films: Icarus. [BACK]
28. Nguyen Huy Thiep, “The General Retires,” in The General Retires and Other Stories, translated with an introduction by Greg Lockhart (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford in Asia, 1991). [BACK]
29. Nguyen Quang Than, “The Waltz of the Chamber Pot” [“Vu Dieu cai Bo”] (1991), in Literature News: Nine Stories from the Vietnam Writers'Union Newspaper, Bao Van Nghe, 6–37. [BACK]
30. This is a verbatim extract from the English-language portion of the wall poster. [BACK]
31. Communication with author, January 1996. [BACK]
32. Reported in Far Eastern Economic Review, May 11, 1992. [BACK]
33. Since the appearance of Maurice Halbwachs's pioneering work, Les Cadres sociaux de la me´moire, scholarly attention has focused on the social construction of memory. Less attention has been paid to social amnesia, although it is a theme that reverberates in societies that have undergone divisive episodes such as Indonesia in 1965 and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. In both cases, it is reported, it is memory, if publicly verbalized, that threatens community. [BACK]
34. Duong Thu Huong, Paradise of the Blind (1988), trans. Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson (New York: Morrow, 1991). [BACK]
35. On the link between failure and forgetting, see Michel Bozon and Anne Marie Thiesse, “The Collapse of Memory: The Case of the Farm Workers (French Vexin, Pays de France)” in Between History and Memory, ed. Marie Noelle Bourguet, Lucette Valensi, and Nathan Wachtel (Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1990). [BACK]
36. Duong Thu Huong, Paradise of the Blind, 258. [BACK]
37. See in particular the accounts in Karen Gottschang Turner with Phan Thanh Hao, Even the Women Must Fight. [BACK]
38. See, for example, ibid., 157–63. Also Ngo Ngoc Boi, “The Blanket of Scraps,” in Literature News: Nine Stories from the Vietnam Writers'Union Newspaper, Bao Van Nghe, 96–123. [BACK]