Street calligrapher in Hong Kong, on the eve of the Lunar New Year

Hong Kong.

On Portland Street, known for its disreputable saunas and karaoke bars, an old calligrapher inscribes characters on sheets of red paper. Today is probably his busiest day of the year, says A. He set up shop on the sidewalk, on a street corner a few paces from the smooth new towers of Langham Place. Customers stop by his rectangular wooden table. They ask him to write New Year’s greetings in his elegant calligraphy.

A lit cigarette pokes from the right corner of his mouth. His face is dark and creased, his soft hair very black. I imagine him as a young man. He stands at one of the short ends of the table. He mixes the black ink in a bit of water poured from a round ceramic bowl. He examines his raised brush carefully, flicks off an errant strand, then slowly sets his hand above the thick red paper and begins to write. I am watching him from a few feet away. The characters appear slowly and evenly in the wake of the brush. If I stood next to him or looked over his shoulder the characters would unfold stroke by stroke, as I myself learned to write them. I could follow and recognize the strokes, even name them, though I may not know every character. Here, I see the process in reverse, as if in a mirror. Seen upside down the brush strokes look eerie. I observe carefully and forget the noise, the traffic, the passersby in the street.

Customers come and pick up their orders. An older man in a felt cap, an open can of San Miguel beer in his hand, sets down his hundred Hong Kong dollars on the table. He checks the quality of the four sets of parallel sentences he had ordered. The calligrapher shows him the quality of the red paper, and points out the tiny golden specks that flicker on the surface. He rolls the red strips in a double sheet of newspaper, and hands the roll to his customer with a reserved smile. He opens his lips slightly, drops his cigarette on the sidewalk, and bends his head down almost imperceptibly to answer his customer’s good bye.

Next, a bespectacled woman in her thirties, a bit round in the middle in her bright yellow ski jacket, places a printed sheet on the table. The small printed characters are crowded together on a few horizontal lines. He knows his customers, says A.; he recognized her and remembered the characters she ordered. He begins to cut new strips of paper, by folding large sheets of the thick red paper. He quickly measures the folds and cut them with clean strokes of a flat blade. He has well-known companies as customers, says A. She points to the rectangular sheet of red paper inscribed in gold characters which is drying on the sidewalk under the worktable. It’s for the largest tailor in Hong Kong.

There are very few calligraphers like this man left in the streets of Hong Kong today. But for New Year auspiciousness, some people still prefer the quality of hand-written calligraphy. There is something that reassures in the smooth brush strokes of a master calligrapher. People do not trust their own handwriting. His strokes, on the other hand, signify something in addition to what the characters say. The calligraphy of this master is more than simply language. This is not the case for the utilitarian, often clumsily geometric characters one sees daily in the announcements and price lists posted on shop windows.

Here, it’s a matter of bringing in the New Year auspiciously. The strokes and calligraphy must reflect another, higher order. They must put the reader and receiver of these messages of good fortune in contact with a realm from which they usually are excluded, but upon which they rely for hope and propitious fate for the coming year. These hand-written characters link the beholder with a complex and largely unfathomable spectrum which connects the other world – the realm of spirits and deceased ancestors from which these characters derive some of their magical potency – to one’s everyday existence. Ritual and prayers are moments when common people come into contact with this spiritual realm, if momentarily.

The hand-drawn calligraphy means that by paying attention to the flowing strokes and the link they establish with long forgotten origins, the customers may gain something. They increase their chances of receiving good tidings for the coming year. Writing, when done by a master, has magical potency. Everyday tracing of black lines on paper does not.

We stand and watch the effortless movement of the old man’s brush. His black characters are neatly aligned vertically on the red paper. A small group of onlookers has stopped and we form a half-circle on the sidewalk around him. Everyone watches in silence. No one speaks. Then everyone slowly disperses. As they walk away, people begin conversing again in subdued tones, as if still under the quiet spell of the brush strokes on the red paper.

Note on Tiger Spirit shrines

I kept thinking about the Tiger Spirit shrine I wrote about yesterday.

Heonik Kwon, a Korean anthropologist, writes the following about shrines to the Tiger Spirit in his book After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai, published in 2006.

(Ha My and My Lai are two villages in Central Viet Nam, where South Korean and American troops slaughtered over 500 villagers in separate episodes less than a month apart in February and March 1968. These were not isolated "incidents.")

"In the countryside, the network of temples distinguished a village from others. In the town, the community temple dedicated to a specific genie or deity made the neighborhood a place with distinctive, memorable characters. And the particular traits of a community deity affected people's perception of the place. The Tiger Spirit, Ong Cop, and the Whale Spirit, Ca Ong, for instance, are known to have different personalities and orientations. Among many stated differences, the Tiger Spirit is considered to be impulsive and quick-tempered, easily provoked, but easily reconciled with, whereas the Whale Spirit is relatively more patient, but ferocious once a taboo is broken. Tiger temples tend to be interrelated in a form of descent -- between the parental site and the offshoot "child" temple. By contrast, each whale temple, even the smallest unit, is strongly autonomous but still forms a symbolic affinity with a temple that worships a different deity. A whale temple is typically situated in a seaside fishing hamlet, where there are abundant taboos related to maritime production activities and an exchange relationship with the agricultural neighbors is encouraged. A tiger temple, however, is often found in an area likely to expand, such as a busy crossroads." (pp. 108-109)

Into the Maze (3)

The small temple shrine (mieu) sits in a narrow lane. The lone tree I had observed from my balcony peers out from a hole in the shrine’s roof.

Inside the shrine, under the fluorescent lights, two elongated cement shapes that look like the corpses of turtles. They are covered in smooth white plaster. The large roots of the tree surround and weave around them. The straight trunk of the tree juts out from a hole in the roof.

On the wall, inscriptions in classical Vietnamese, parallel sentences written in a calligraphic trompe-l’oeil that mimics Chinese characters. Yellow letters on red background. The shrine attendant reads the parallel sentences for me. He translates them into modern Vietnamese and explains their meaning. The shrine is dedicated to a mandarin who in the 1830s killed a tiger that was threatening people in this low-lying marshy area between the settlements of Gia Dinh and Cho Lon. But more than to the official, the shrine is dedicated to the spirit of the tiger.

An apparition. Next to the shrine, I suddenly notice an elderly white man sitting quietly at a small, low table. He’s short and stocky, dressed in simple clothes. He speaks Vietnamese with his friends who are seated with him. Bottles of beer are scattered on the table.

A Frenchman, whose aging alcoholic eyes have retained the mocking gouaille of a Parisian youth from the 1940s. He’s a character which no longer exists in France: the proletarian type, the communist dock worker or car factory line worker. He says something to me. I don’t remember now what he said or what I replied. All I recall is that I froze up, and my mind went numb. I was shocked to see a 70 year-old French man there. I was not expecting this. I couldn’t figure who he was, why he was there, what his life story was. He didn’t fit.

Words failed me. He was sitting with his Vietnamese friends and family, drinking beer and smoking. I felt like an intruder. The juxtaposition of the shrine and his presence was jarring. I wondered who he was and what he was doing there: he clearly wasn’t a tourist.

The shrine is marked in my memory as the place where I encountered this diminutive elderly Frenchman. On the spot, I created imaginary scenarios to explain his presence there: Had he stayed in southern Viet Nam after the end of the First Indochina War in 1954? Or after the end of the American War and the Liberation (or Fall) of Saigon in 1975? Had he lived in Saigon when it was a French colonial metropolis, and had moved back to Viet Nam in the 1990s when the country opened up again? Had he stayed behind after the end of French colonial rule in 1954? Was he one of those French soldiers who deserted and crossed over to the side of the Viet Minh during the French Indochina War in the 1950s?

Who was he? I had tried to engage him in conversation. But I’d lost my nerve, and quickly fell silent. His aggressive cynicism precluded conversation. He said three sentences to me in an old-style Parisian faubourg accent. His tone and demeanor indicated that three sentences were plenty enough. He had better things to do than to talk to a tourist or an expat – which is no doubt what he took me for.

I have a vague recollection of this man, encountered furtively and almost immediately gone. I never saw him again. I never figured out who he was. Indeed, I didn’t try very hard, content to leave him roam in my memory as an apparition, a strange spirit from the distant past who visited me at Tiger Spirit shrine, and then disappeared again.

Into the Maze (2)

The experience of walking into a narrow Vietnamese alley can be disorienting at first. I appreciate the sensation of calm that envelops me after entering an alley. A few steps away from the traffic of the street the noise level drops dramatically.

Voices of children playing, conversations, televisions and radios create a smaller universe, encapsulated by the narrow concrete paths. Sounds echo against the worn and moldy surfaces of the house walls that line the alleys.

Turning a corner you never quite know what you'll encounter. Late at night the alleys are almost silent. You hear muted conversations, snoring. Dogs bark. You walk faster, slightly embarrassed perhaps, and try not to make any noise. At night sounds carry more, and you detect the noise of engines, out in the distance, beyond the walls. The night sky is barely visible from inside these tiny lanes.

There is no graffiti on the walls, only stenciled phone numbers of cement contractors, in red or blue ink.

Into the Maze (1)

From the balcony on the fourth floor the view over central Saigon stretches far on clear days. The land is flat and packed. The flat roofs and rooftop terraces unfold, the narrow multi-storied houses tightly crammed together. From up here, the streets are not visible, they are only discernible by sound. The noise from motorbike engines, automobiles, trucks, the horns reach up here from below, the streets unseen, imagined only through their aural traces. The only visible street is the small one – Do Quang Dau Street, directly below in front of the tall building in which I lived for a few weeks while looking for a new place to live. Directly across, a few hundred meters slightly to the left, the massive vertical side wall of one of the Liberty Hotels. A blank surface. In the late 1990s, stretching for several floors, the faded outlines of a propaganda painting were still visible on this wall: the wall had been repainted white, but under the peeling paint, two children still reared up joyously next to an adult. An encomium to the great future ahead.

My eye was always drawn to the only tree visible in this forest of rooftops. The large crown of a dark tree emerged from the polygon of densely packed houses – the immediate outline of the ward visible to me because I had ridden and walked each and every small lane and alley that crisscrossed the neighborhood. The tree, improbably, emerged from the very center of the area. Farther out, on the periphery of my field of vision, large trees marked intersections by Tran Hung Dao Boulevards and lined the edge of the park to my immediate left. Yet this large, dark mass of leaves was the only tree in the entire ward, delimited by three large arteries and the smaller Do Quang Dau Street immediately below me.

I was intrigued by the incongruous beauty of this lone tree. In the summer the rainy season intensifies. That year the summer rains came regularly each afternoon, unlike more recently, when they were sparser.

Around noon, the sun begins to be overtaken by small fluffy clouds, which gradually turn into huge masses of dark grey as the afternoon wears on. The temperature drops, the wind picks up. Everyone shivers and worries. Will I be able to ride home? Will the streets flood? Will my street and my house be flooded? (Heavy flooding is a real problem. It is not unusual to be forced to turn back from certain streets which are drowned in a foot of murky yellowish mud and water.)

The lone tree fascinated me. As the clouds gathered and the skies darkened it became blacker. From where I stood on the balcony I could see its heavy branches and large leaves shake in the wind. The rains come. The rain is heavy, violent. All windows must be closed, otherwise the room will be drenched. The wind whips the rain into every open surface. I’d watch the tree fighting off the storm, its branches lashing out in the wind.

I eventually decided to go find this tree. Why was there a single tree rising over the dense network of narrow lanes in the ward? I asked neighbors. They said there was a small temple (mieu) at the base of the tree. Perhaps the word shrine is more applicable.

I entered one of the two narrow lanes that starts on the eastern side of Do Quang Dau Street. Immediately a strange sensation overcomes you. Things quiet down. The lane is so narrow that motorbikes can only be ridden slowly, in first gear. When another moped comes from the other direction, you must stop and maneuver slowly to clear a space and not fall. On foot, everything is visible, one is walking in the middle of people’s lives. Living rooms and kitchen doors are open to the lane. People sit and talk on the thresholds of their houses. Neighbors walk by.

The neighborhood underwent a lot of changes in the 1990s. People became wealthier. In these tight corners, construction workers build houses by hand, one concrete floor and one brick at a time. Small trucks unload bricks, sand, bags of concrete at the mouths of lanes on larger streets. Workers carry the construction materials into the lanes on small wheelbarrows. The houses are painted white or pale yellow, and in pastel shades of blue, green, and pink. Small patterns of decorative bricks pierce ventilation openings into the sides of houses. Things quiet down. Walking in these narrow lanes at night, soft concerts of television noises, karaoke, laughter, conversations, chess games, and children’s songs echo back from the depths of the labyrinth.

I walk by slowly. I take in people’s lives from the corner of my eye. These lives unfold for all to watch, and everyone watches, furtively. I am not from here. Several times, I hear people say “xi ke” with contempt, behind my back as I walk by, especially at night. It means “junkie.” I keep walking and reply nothing. I’m already several paces down the lane. No, I’m not a junkie. But some westerners do roam in these alleys at night, looking for drugs or whatever else. Not exactly in this area, further down closer to Bui Vien, closer to the police station and the ward’s People’s Committee office.

It took me a few attempts to find the tree. Not that I couldn’t find it. I meandered, I strolled, I never reached it for several days. I was simply fascinated by what I was seeing in the narrow lanes. I walked slowly, taking in the sounds, listening to the cacophony of language and, embarrassed, tried not to stare back at the amazed stares of the locals, surprised to see a white man here.

The already narrow lanes from which one enters into the maze narrow further after a few dozen yards. Houses draw closer to each other across the small cement trail of the lane. Quickly, as the main lane splits into smaller side alleys, the houses on both sides of a lane are not much more than a meter and a half apart. The second and third floors of the houses jut out slightly into the lane. From below, it feels like walking among the tightly pressed hulls of immobile ships at low tide. The pastel colors of the walls are oceanic as well. In these hidden alleys, scores of small shops, restaurants, cafés, karaoke joints, tiny and antiquated video game arcades, and small rooms with two or three desktop computers rented out for inexpensive Internet access. All of this in people’s small living rooms, cramped, built in the middle of people’s lives and houses – to try to make a living, and scrape by a bit of extra income.

None of this is visible from the streets. The life of the neighborhood unfolds, it seems, entirely out of sight. Other Vietnamese know the labyrinths are there, teeming with life, noise, hope, money, language, incense and prayers.

Foreigners don’t.

The Hold of Memory (1)

Think about Saigon today and you’ll eventually think about the hold memory has.

But think about this as well: you arrive at night, the plane slows down and hovers low above the rooftops before landing. You can see clearly the bright neon signs in the darkness below. You leave the airport. You’re thrown into a superheated and brightly lit darkness, traffic whizzing by on motorbikes, green and white taxicabs. Dirty exhaust fumes. Massive, ancient Soviet trucks honk and clear the way before them. Neon signs, advertising billboards, loud echoes of music from the cafés along the avenues. In twenty minutes you’re in the center of the city. Trees get very tall, colonial villas peer from inside gated gardens. Streets narrow. Central Saigon. The red brick cathedral is now dwarfed by tall buildings: banks and commercial centers.

Stop. You can’t go down this road. Don’t you recognize that voice, as you write this? The voice of the war, of the gonzo journalists, of Michael Herr and Hunter Thompson, and, before them, of genteel Graham Greene and his quiet, prescient novel on the end of French colonization, its replacement by American might.

Waiting.

You recognize the voice. The great majority of male expatriates and apprentice travel writers in Vietnam slip into that voice, fall into the trap. The war. The elephant in the room. Invisible. Long gone. Nothing there anymore, really. A few tanks and helicopters in parks, a few museum exhibits. Westerners keep bringing this war with them, their own traveling exhibit.

The atrocity exhibition (J.G. Ballard).

Instead, you see the smiles, the noise – noise! – and the traffic fumes, bright, tight clothes that flash by on motorbikes – black clothes at night, white during the day. Women in hats, face masks, and the long gloves that protect the white skin of their forearms. What you feel is the heat. You wait like a child for dusk, for the night and the cool breeze that will come up from the river.

You realize there is no hold of memory, there is nothing to hold on to.

Nothing here but a rush forward. And rightly, happily so. Hopefully.

The question for people around you in this huge, overheated and taut city is not the hold of memory, the return of the past. That’s an afterthought, a side effect. Instead, they ask, how can we move forward as fast, as completely, as painlessly as possible?

“The hold of memory” presupposes (your presupposition) that memory functions through haunting and returns which paralyze, maim, silence.

Instead, you have tremendous NOISE. The vibrations of traffic, the screams of motors and klaxons, the roar of conversations and music in bars – a language of signs, a flow that blocks out and erases most everything else. The massive and close contact with strangers in traffic sketches a loose but insistent methodology for movement and forgetting.

You HAVE forgetting, this is what you see all around. Why would it be otherwise 25 or 30 years after the end of the war?

In conversations you’re polite and you listen. You’re especially careful not to drown out the voices of people with whom you converse. Maybe you’re too shy and not insistent enough, at first. You don’t ask many questions, until you get better acquainted. You want to let conversations unfold, understand the flow of ideas, how and why one thought leads to another.

Instead of assuming the paths by which memories resurface, you listen. You watch body language, and listen for tonality, texture, and range in voices. You listen for and detect transitions, silences. You interpret as you go. As JB advised, you don’t want to jump to conclusions and foreclose the development of an idea, the movement of thought back and forth in unexpected ways. Let the thoughts unfold, let yourself be surprised, stay open to possibilities, to the emergence of something new. The new, what you haven’t heard before. It’s rare in conversation.

If you begin by assuming – in the 1990s or after 2000 – that 20 or 30 years after the end of the war people are haunted, you’re making a categorical mistake. You misunderstand the passage of time, the way it erodes memories, sands them down and polishes them, one retelling at a time. After years, what you get is erosion and fatigue.

You get nothing. You get exhausted silences and dismissive movements of the hand. JS suggests that perhaps there is – after all – really nothing to tell anymore. In which case (I extrapolate) you would have to deal with the extraordinary claim that there is indeed a void where you’d want memories, fleshed out recollections, pain, evidence of suffering.

What you get is a smooth, worn, mirror-like surface that sends you back your own desire for evidence of something really BAD that has left traces.

You get absences, silences. This doesn’t mean that there is nothing there. The project becomes to start listening for what is kept to oneself, for what is not there on the surface: punctuated silences, distracted remarks, shifts in conversation. Evidence of forgetting. You listen for the echoes and the meanings of words other than those which are directly expressed. All the while, alert to tonalities in voices, you watch closely the eyes and the faces of those who converse with you.

One hypothesis: This “nothing” you listen for is the residue of exhaustion, the pragmatic recognition for many (southern?) Vietnamese in Saigon that precious little can be gained by speaking about wartime publicly – or sharing the past with me, a Westerner.

Haunted Terrain (2)

In Saigon I often have the uncanny feeling that the landscape is haunted. I say it’s an uncanny feeling, because I am not sure what this really means. Is it me who’s haunted, and not the landscape? What do I mean by haunted, anyway? Let’s say that I am particularly receptive to the presence of stories about the spectral presence of the dead, about spirits, about ghosts. About something that comes back, that returns.

The map of the city is in flux. Saigon’s urban landscapes change much faster than the maps, which can barely keep pace. An older map for what is today a park by Ben Thanh Market shows a railway station – an elongated spit of land, a peninsula of softly curving railroad tracks in the middle of the city. It dates from the French colonial period. My Vietnamese landlady told me that “the VC” became rich when people were expropriated and their houses demolished to make room for a new development in the area. The railway station was decommissioned and razed. In the late 1990s, part of this area was going to be turned into a skyscraper. The project failed, victim of the Asian financial crisis of 1997.

As always when people in Saigon used the term “VC” (pronounced “vee cee” as if this were GI-speak), I wondered exactly what my landlady was telling me. Why “the VC”? Who exactly was she talking about? Who made money? Who was corrupt? Who got expropriated? Was this an eminent domain type of operation, or was something more sinister involved? Etc. Well, she didn’t know. It was all very vague.

I was fed rumors daily. My landlady wasn’t there, but… She had friends who had heard that… People say that… She knew people who… Today, all traces of the demolished houses have vanished, but not the memories of them or their occupants. New houses and developments hardly cover over the history of injustice that gave rise to them. The lack of transparency in the process of expropriation, demolition, and rebuilding leads to rumors. Once rumors start circulating they reignite old feuds, they rekindle resentments, they reactualize the recent history of war and conflicts between Vietnamese. Don’t trust any-one. Assume the worst.

The maps of the city which people carry in their minds don’t resemble the official ones. People still talk about the old street names; the elderly sometimes mention a street and refer to its French name when recalling a story. Of course. Those were the names of the streets at the time, in 1950, in 1960, in 1970. All the names were changed after the end of the war in 1975. But this process had happened several times before, with each new regime. Saigon itself was renamed in honor of Ho Chi Minh by the new Communist provisional government in 1976. Young people only know today’s street names. They shrug, they don’t care. They smile and laugh when I ask questions about this.

For any given street there are hundreds of stories, collected and stored in people’s eyes and imagination. Small shops open and close. Someone died in a traffic accident. A street was widened; people’s living rooms were cut in half and they didn’t get compensated properly. Some families became rich and moved out of the neighborhood. New families bought houses. The neighborhood changed. People forget. There is so much rapid movement. The traffic increases in the street. Children are told to stay home and study English. A new school opened down the street. The small factories closed, and so did the old cinema house and its hand-painted film posters.

Multiples maps. Beneath the façades of the houses and shops, hidden and half-forgotten histories, stories from long ago or from yesterday sometimes resurface in conversation in a flash of new memories.

The large house on the corner is empty and gloomy looking. The exterior is crumbling and dirty. The paint on the outer walls is long gone, the façade a moldy grey with streaks of black and mossy leaks from the flat roof. The rain-soaked concrete is flaking off, and chunks have detached from the upper corners of the top floors. It stands alone in the evening rain at the entrance of a busy alley. Although it’s a prime commercial location, its windows are dark. It sits unoccupied, except for a small gallery of tourist art on the ground floor.

My friend Nam, the journalist, says there are stories about this house. People from the neighborhood say that there is a ghost there. He’s not sure what the story is about, exactly. Perhaps a woman who hanged herself, out of spite. Unrequited love. He laughs cynically, dismissively. He’s massively built and fearless. He’s a chain-smoker. He has no patience for ghost stories. Ghost stories, he says, are women’s stories. Superstition. You can’t take these things seriously. He’s educated. He writes about world events and international politics.

I’m curious. He dismisses superstitious and uneducated women, but he still passes on the information. As a journalist, he knows that someone may do something with this story. Who knows. So he passes the rumor on to me. It’s what people say, so it’s interesting. He’s a good journalist; he pays attention. Who said that about the house and the ghost of the woman who killed herself? Who knows. It’s not anyone in particular. Just a story that circulates, like many others.

This small street, all of a sudden, looks different. Nam, the journalist, had often told me that the neighborhood changed a lot since tourists started coming here in the early 1990s. It used to be a poor neighborhood, with all kinds of delinquents and traffickers, he says. There were some vacant houses, abandoned lots. Most of the original inhabitants sold their tiny, decrepit houses. Entrepreneurial families snapped up the cheap properties. They expanded the narrow houses vertically. They added three, four additional floors, sometimes more. They reopened the houses as mini-hotels and guest houses, and now charge backpackers 10 or 20 dollars a night for small, unadorned rooms. It was 5 dollars a night a few years back. The guest houses now provide Internet access in the first room off the street on the ground floor. In the old days, this would have been someone’s living room.

And there’s this house on the street corner. It’s marked and slightly menacing. It stays dark at night. It’s quiet and therefore spooky. Vietnamese don’t like quiet and empty places. Strange thoughts come to mind in places like these. Loneliness. Decay. Death. This is when anxiety hits. This is when thoughts turn to the possible presence of ghosts. Strange noises startle in the silence of a quiet, deserted house.

There are many maps of the city. Any given house exists in the minds and memories of people. As you pass by quickly you glide on the surfaces of city streets. The houses may look similar. But in Saigon these houses often have histories that involves a dark past in wartime, now one or two generations removed.

When houses change hands the new owners (renters, too) hold a ceremony to bless and dedicate the house. It’s in part a naming ceremony. You announce yourself to the previous inhabitants of the place – with the understanding that you are communicating with the departed, the previous occupants who may have died in this space and who are forever linked to this space. If you are very religious you may invite Buddhist monks and nuns to bless your new abode and properly dedicate the altars to the Buddha and Quan Am, the Goddess of Mercy. From a rooftop terrace I once witnessed the dedication ceremony of a house on an adjacent rooftop. A few days before, the construction crew had finished laying the concrete structure of the house and filled in the front and back walls with red bricks. The main construction work was over. Now it was time to bless the house before putting in the finishing touches and moving in. The owner’s family dedicated and blessed the house. They lit incense bundles and prayed to the four corners of the house; they announced themselves and asked for a propitious future and good fortune for the house and its occupants.

People try to gain supernatural help and assurance that they will be protected. What would happen if they didn’t hold these ceremonies? The thought is simply impossible. No one would dare not have a ceremony. The risk would be too great. When kept at a minimum, the ceremonies are basic and require very little time and expense. You would be foolish not to do this. Even if you are not religious, you must have a small ceremony to bless a new house. This is not worship per se. This is appropriation of a new space for the living. It’s an attempt to make sure that the house, the structure that’s just been built or purchased, will not have any nefarious influences. It’s an attempt to make sure that this space of human activity will not reject its new occupants.

In this way of thinking about time and place a house is a repository. It concentrates energies, and the past leaves deposits in it, sediments of past events. The past has sedimented itself in a given place, even before a structure was built at that location. (Hence, the location of a house or an intersection can be haunted by the presence of a spirit that inhabited the area when it was still a grove or a swamp. A place can be haunted by the spirit of an animal, too. These spirits need to be tamed and domesticated. Humans must acknowledge and pay respect to them by burning incense and praying.)

Things remain. They don’t dissipate with the passage of time. The past is not past. It retains texture, thickness, and depth, which adhere to a given place. For Vietnamese, we inhabit the realm of the living for a short time only. Our transient existence locates us within longer soul-spans, most of which are invisible and barely knowable to us. We can get a glimpse of these invisible realms by examining the altar to the deceased parents found in Vietnamese houses. The spirits of the deceased are not gone, they live among us. Once a year, on the death anniversary of their deceased parents, families gather and offer prayers and thanks to their ancestors before sitting down to a family feast.

Our existence is transient. We inhabit a realm of appearances which derives its sustenance over time from the invisible realm of the dead. The dead, deceased ancestors or benevolent strangers, can help us in our endeavors, provided that we care for them properly. Retribution from the invisible world – the basis for Buddhist doctrines of karma – is an implicit threat. You cannot ignore it.

You can choose not to think about this, the way you can choose not to think about the weather or about your past. But it’s there. In moments of personal crisis, during illness, family strife, or unfortunate events, these thoughts about the spirit world creep back up to the surface. Even the skeptical ones get pulled back into this and may start having doubts. You never know. Old ladies, grandmothers, superstitious neighbors: conversations, stories, rumors, commentaries will run on and spread.

Multiples maps of the city emerge from these crisscrossing histories and stories. Underneath them, giving them meaning and sense, the invisible strata and eerie realities of the spirit world help explain misfortune and strange events.

The Poor in the Streets: Remnants from the Bad Old Days

In the bad old days after the end of the war many city people in Saigon, desperate to make some money, tried to set up small sidewalk stalls. They sold soup, beer, coffee, cigarettes. When things got really bad in 1977 and 1978, some families who wanted to leave Viet Nam sold their belongings in the street or in private. Everyone was in on their game and bought furniture sets, silverware, or stereos for cheap. An entire history of abjection and resentment is built into these memories, especially when people recall these stories today.

Some people got rich, others lost everything, many tried to get by and humiliated themselves further by selling cigarettes on the street, or a few goods that no one was interested in buying. Anything to try to make it and not starve. The results were often inconclusive.

Today the streets of Saigon are being cleaned up. Since the late 1990s the city government – the People’s Committee of Ho Chi Minh City – has been trumpeting and implementing its urban beautification projects: replace sewage mains, widen streets, build new ring roads and bridges, clear squatter communities from the waterfront and dredge the canals, raze old and insalubrious housing (often in historical districts), design grand gated communities, beautify city parks, remove the homeless and the junkies, etc.

This is the fantasy of “building a beautiful, civilized city, proud to bear the name of Ho Chi Minh.” Ruthless deals and real estate speculation thrive under the aegis of the People’s Committee and its shady friends in the business community – in the name of building socialism.

After the 1996 Communist Party Congress, the official slogan for economic development was “Rich People, Strong Country, Building a Civilized and Egalitarian Society.”

The people who hawk goods on the sidewalks, those out of the loop of laissez-faire prosperity, were reclassified as parasitic, problematic, unclean. Along with the other members of the “informal economies” – junkies, dealers, prostitutes – they’ve become new symptoms in an imaginary epidemic of delinquency, criminality, and disease. The new bourgeoisie started fearing anew the great masses of the unwashed. Though they alternatively preyed on them and fattened themselves at their expense, the new rich became allergic to the dirt and the rough sounds and smells of the poor and the uneducated.

Their presence on the sidewalks in narrow and dank alleys, their begging hands, threaten the insouciant march to the future of the new moneyed classes. Their blank gaze, their silence as they try to pawn off a few goods in run-down neighborhoods are a bad deal. Too many memories. They remind today’s rich that 25 years ago, in the really low days of economic crisis and hunger in southern Viet Nam, some made it and some didn’t. Some got help from a relative with connections in the Communist Party. Others got help from relatives who had fled to refugee camps in Thailand and Indonesia as “boat people” – and then on to Australia, Canada, and the US, from where they send remittances every months.

Others, simply stayed put in Saigon. They didn’t have anything else to sell to pay the smugglers and the bribes so that the police would look the other way. They stayed behind. Among those who stayed in Saigon, some eventually found ways to make it. They were lucky enough to have a child who did well at school, got a good job and lifted the family out of poverty. Good marriages and family connections helped. Anything to try to find a way out of the morass of despair and abjection. In Viet Nam, when you’re poor, your memories are that much more painful.

But some never made it. You find them on the streets of the city today: the moto-taxis give rides to people on the back of their beat-up mopeds. On the sidewalks resigned women in polyester blouses sell a few packs of cigarettes, bottled water, and lottery tickets. Rough young guys hang out in sidewalk cafés; it’s unclear what they do for a living.

They are the leftovers of a past that everyone tries their best to forget. Yet this past returns, unannounced. From the surface it’s invisible, just like street people in the eyes of the rich. They can be – and will be – bulldozed away, cleared up, washed away in the great big push for disinfection and progress. They simply stand in the way. They are a bad reminder of the poverty that Viet Nam is slowly leaving behind. They are an embarrassment. Their humiliation, as they try to sell a few trinkets on the sidewalk so they don’t entirely starve, is an unspoken reproach. The luckier ones who made it – through hard work, no doubt, but most everyone works hard here, that’s the point – the fortunate ones, don’t want to be reminded of the existence of the have-nots. It’s depressing, it spoils the fun.

Memories from the bad old times are not too far from the surface. Those who can afford to do so actively repress these memories, though these flashbacks have a nasty tendency to resurface at inopportune times. The sight of the poor and the parasites on the street certainly will do that – it can ruin your day, especially when it reminds you that a few years ago you were right there with them, too. It can be chilling.

Vietnamese Markets (1)

In Ha Noi’s Old Quarter streets bear the name of a product: Silk Street, Bamboo Street, Silver Street, etc. This remnant of the old guild system has a strange effect today. The street names no longer correspond to what you find there when you stroll by. The principle – similar goods or services in adjacent shops – remains, though in attenuated fashion. It might disappear in the long run, with economic development and the increasing “rationalization” of trade in the city.

For now, you still find streets with rows of stores that offer the same products or services: shoes, toiletries, electrical equipment, books, religious items, tombstones and stone carvers. Sometimes one side of a narrow street is dedicated to the sale of a set of goods, and the other side of the street to another trade. It adds to the local color of Old Ha Noi for the foreign visitors. To locals it means that they can quickly go purchase what they need. They ride over on a motorbike and they can find a wide array of similarly priced goods in a small area. Buyers think this gives them the upper hand in the bargaining process. It actually gives the merchants additional bargaining power because the set-up is akin to price fixing. No one is likely to give you an amazing deal on a given product since everyone sells similar goods. It’s in no one’s interest, among sellers, to give a deep discount – unless they want to make a sale that will be remembered and get a customer to come back.

The Old Quarter of Ha Noi is one of the most ancient trading neighborhoods in the city. The streets are narrow. In the summer the trees provide shade and cool the sidewalk a bit. People sit and wait for customers. At night, the soft glow of light bulbs hanging from the store fronts or tree branches gives a festive appearance to these small streets. People sit on small stools on the sidewalks in front of their houses and enjoy the cool evenings. To the foreign tourists these streets are magical. French tourists in particular marvel at the fact that time seems to have stood still: they think nothing has changed since the colonies. Colonial nostalgia, a longing for what you have destroyed, is rampant among the contingents of French tourists.

For locals who live in these crowded, sometimes insalubrious houses, the picture is quite different. These small family traders have a hard time competing with the larger shops, supermarkets, and department stores that have opened all over Ha Noi since the early 1990s. Some of the big shops were purchased early on by small-time trading families. They seized an opportunity at the right moment and never looked back.

Even the large covered markets are reorganizing and improving their bottom line. Everywhere you see the familiar process of increased rationalization, better organization along one basic principle: maximize profits.

This process is faster, began earlier, and is much more ruthless in Saigon. You can still find very small-scale trading in Saigon, but, as in Ha Noi, it is increasingly confined to the poorer areas of the city. What to foreign tourists is picturesque is increasingly a marker of poverty: those small sidewalk markets and open stalls are remnants of former times and their attendant trading practices.

The looks and sounds of these small street stalls, of the conversations between traders and customers, seem increasingly out of place today. Even for Vietnamese, these are becoming quaint encounters – most of the nouveaux riches stay away from the face-to-face interactions where you have to haggle for a good price. Money being no object, they’d rather shop in the new supermarkets: the shiny surfaces, air conditioning and high prices keep away the undesirables. They don’t even dare and try to come in. They would not make it past the guards in their shiny polyester uniforms.

The new feel of buying and selling is sanitized. The new civilized people don’t buy and sell in the street or in rough, loud, crowded covered markets. The new shops and supermarkets strip down the process to an encounter between you and what you want to buy. Pure desire, cooled off by the reflective surfaces, the neat rows of bottles and boxes on shelves, each with a fixed price. Nothing disturbs the flow of information. No parasites and no interferences. The poor are kept out of sight.

Brick Lane, East End, London

Jet-lagged in London, I had a strange experience a few days ago.

Anita and I were walking together in the rain, away from the Spitalfields Market and the S & M Café on Brushfield Street. (S&M, as in sausage and mash.) We’re huddled together under the umbrella, trying to keep dry. The street lights cast eerie pale halos through the drizzle. It’s 6 in the evening and dark. On Middlesex Street, we walk for a long while past an outdoor street market. Stallholders are taking it down, disassembling the thin metal poles and canvas tops. Numbered stall outlines are painted on the pavement. Small vans idle in the street. City workers hose down the grime off the sidewalks. Garbage bags and refuse litter the street. All the windows on the low brick houses seemed dark, but it’s probably my memory playing tricks with me.

We’re walking on, wondering when we’re going to reach Whitechapel High Street. And then on to Brick Lane. When we start up Brick Lane the young men standing under the doorways of the Bangladeshi restaurants call out to us, politely advertising their menus and drinks specials. It’s a familiar sensation. It brings to mind the ex-bohemian streets around Boulevard St Michel in Paris. There, the touristy Greek restaurants send men out to aggressively advertise their fares and channel tourists through the front door.

We enter the covered market that occupies the large building of a former brewery. Here too, things are shutting down for the day. Dub music pounds softly from one of the stalls near the entrance. Sellers are dismantling their stalls briskly and efficiently. They talk and joke. We take a quick walk around the market, and see artwork and designer clothes similar to the ones sold in fancier Spitalfields Market. We’re edgy. The light is very bright and music filters from many sound systems throughout the market. Sellers of vinyl records. I am tired and wet. As we round back toward the entrance we pass small groups of people, couples sitting on small plastic stools. They eat Nepalese, Ethiopian, Chinese food from the small stalls. A lot of unsold food is going to go to waste.

We come out in the street again. The upper part of Brick Lane, past the curry restaurants gets darker and narrower. There are large construction sites on both sides of the lane around the Shoreditch underground station. The station is closed, we learned later. We looked for it and never found it.

Right at this spot, after two days of visiting various markets in London, something strange came to my mind, through the haze of the jet lag. We were walking north in the rain, past the high fences of the construction site. On our left side a large graffiti-style mural, representing an aboriginal mask, runs for a few dozen meters. Then, in this run-down part of the street, another market. A sidewalk market. At the time, I wondered who these men were. Many of them looked like homeless peddlers selling things they had collected in the streets, and in attics and abandoned basements. Saucers, pans, drinking glasses, old 45 records, books are spread out in the rain on wet plastic sheets and blankets. The displays glisten in the fuzzy light. Our soles grind up the slime of the greasy sidewalks.

At the time I couldn’t quite tell what that sensation was. The jet lag placed me behind a screen. I was removed from the scene, both in it and outside of it at the same time. The complete foreignness of this small, barely lit lane, the strangeness of the scene – I didn’t know what to say. Anita said later she felt she was talking to a wall. I’d mutter a vague yes and no to accompany her sentences. I could not figure out what was happening.

Now I remember.

Now, back in New York, with two more days of reverse jet lag to reflect on this, I realize I was thinking about Viet Nam. Well, no. Instead, Viet Nam came to mind. It did so unannounced. The rain, the poorly lit darkness, the shiny and dirty sidewalks, the misery of the people trying to hawk a few random goods in the wet night – it brought back memories and images of small sidewalk markets in the less traveled streets of Vietnamese cities. I’ve seen these markets in small towns in Vietnamese rural areas too. Then, there are sometimes no sidewalks, just dirt lanes. These are the images that came to me unannounced.

It started a whirlwind because, simultaneously, I was thinking about fancy central London and the tenements of the East End, about the poverty, the textile manufactures in the old days, Huguenot and Jewish immigration. These jumbled thoughts even took me to Jack the Ripper. This place looked creepy.

It was these street sellers by the closed underground station and the desolate construction site. They sold things that no one would buy. Perhaps you could take a look, perhaps you’d find an unlikely treasure. But everything was wet. What would they do with these soaked books and records? Try to sell them again, once they’d dried them out? The desperation unhinged me. Why did I think about Viet Nam, then? Did I really think about Viet Nam then, or am I making it up now? It doesn’t matter. The connection is made now, after the fact.

I could not read these types who were hanging about their sidewalk sale. On Woodseer, a gentrified side street, right around the corner from this desolation scene, a sign on a lamp post warns against illegal street selling. I could not figure who these men were, what they were selling, how and why. Who were they?

A bit more familiarity with the area and its history, and these questions could be answered easily. At the time, I was puzzled. I can’t render the shock of this scene, the way it brought other scenes to mind and transported me to Viet Nam. I attribute this to jet lag. Wrongly, perhaps. There was a connection here: the almost absurd sale of these soaked items. On the surface it makes no sense to bohemian bourgeois like us. Yet we visit these street markets. But of course this desperation makes a lot of sense, and so does the attempt to try to get ahead a bit by selling on the street. Even if what you’re selling is soaked, even if it’s dark and there’s no one around, and you’ve stood there in the rain for a long time.

But these rationalizations don’t work. I couldn’t figure who these sellers were. Maybe, just maybe, they loved doing this. Maybe they would have told me to fuck off, me and my fake well-intentioned emotions, if I talked to them. I just couldn’t tell. I know that three of them were talking and laughing as we crossed the street.

Perhaps what was most striking and why I mention Viet Nam in connection with this scene, is the fact that I simply couldn’t decide. The jet lag is a nice excuse. It absolves me from having to figure it out. We were just passing by. It was over in a flash. I barely remember the street names. When we go back in a few months, there’ll be a behemoth of a tall building there, new security cameras, and a refurbished Shoreditch tube station.

But right then, in the drizzle, hungry and jet-lagged, I simply couldn’t understand what was happening. Best to keep walking perhaps, though even that was strange. We couldn’t find the station. It seemed to have vanished. No signs, or we missed them.

I could not make sense of what I was seeing. It reminded me of many moments in Viet Nam – always when encountering poverty and its abjection. In retrospect, I know that in these moments you look away, you pretend it’s not there, you shiver, you “feel bad” as they say. You try to do something and say something, then you remain quiet, then you just don’t know. I think that was it. The jet lag was masking a much deeper sense of confusion about what I was seeing, right there, right in the middle of fancy London. Poverty, despair, gentrification. Big words. None of the reactions I could envision at that moment were quite working. I could not even determine the exact nature of what I was seeing. So we just walked on. I mean, of course. We were tourists, strolling.

Then we get on a double-decker bus. I almost get killed, falling backward in the open stairwell, as the driver jams the bus back into traffic.

Jet lag, indeed.

Photographic Memories

There is a large, vaguely ominous building in central Saigon, a French colonial palace. The grey exterior is reminiscent of the color of warships. On the left side of the building, under large banyan trees, a US helicopter is displayed as a war relic. On the right, American fighter jets and Vietnamese anti-aircraft guns complete the décor. Since the late 1990s, this has been a popular place for soon to be married couples to have their pictures taken, often next to an antique French car from the 1930s. The car, the famous Citroen “Traction,” is always painted black. This building used to house the Museum of the Revolution. The museum has now been renamed the Ho Chi Minh City Museum. A few years ago, large wooden billboards adorned its colonial gates at various times during the year, reminding passers-by, at regular intervals, of various important dates of the revolutionary and Communist calendar. Today these billboards have disappeared.

I used to sit in an outdoor café located in a small park across from this museum. In the center of this park the enormous banyan trees with multiple trunks shaded the plastic tables and chairs of the café. A small stage with a fiberglass slanted roof occupied a corner of the park, facing outward toward the intersection and the museum. On weekend evenings, especially Sundays, the small park was crowded with people who enjoyed the comic skits and music at this outdoor stage. No longer. I asked Kim why not. She replied that people’s tastes have changed. This is no longer a fashionable place. This place did not age well, did not adapt to the new influx of money and classier entertainment in the city. The desultory small stage, now rusty, looks abandoned. The park has been improved. City employees – gardeners – groom it carefully; they mow the lawns, they transplant new flowers when the old ones have wilted. The park is almost directly in the center of the city, a few hundred meters from the Theater, Reunification Palace, and the People’s Committee. It must look nice. But not much takes place here anymore.

Several years ago I used to come to this park with my notebook. I would write in the relative coolness of the morning, sipping my ice coffee, smoking a cigarette or two. I would buy the morning newspapers from an old lady who walked the neighborhood with an armful of newspapers, smiling to me as she recognized me. I was a good customer. I bought two or three newspapers from her, almost every day.

When I returned to Saigon this summer, I wanted to go back to this small café, which was important to me during my dissertation research, as I just explained.

The place had changed a lot. The café was now called the Diva Café. It now consisted of a few low tables and folding beach chairs under the awning of the small building next to the stage. In the push to make the center of the city presentable – clean, civilized – the tables had been removed from the shade of the banyan trees. Customers were now confined to the stifling heat of the awning, which the few furtive fans could not quite dispel. Now one could look at the banyan trees and the museum, as a spectator, removed from the possibility of actually enjoying the shade of the trees and the morning breeze.

So I returned there a few times. I was there the morning after my return to Saigon, with my ice coffee, without the cigarettes. After a few days, Kim started calling it, jokingly, “ca-phe ong gia” – “the old men’s café,” for, indeed, the customers were mostly older men. They were clearly government workers from neighboring administrative offices, but something in their manner of dress, their dark blue pants, their short sleeved, light-colored shirts, suggested that they had not quite prospered under the new economic boom of the post- “open-door” period. Or perhaps they had prospered, but being old, they still enjoyed the old-fashioned feel of a small, left-behind, outdoor café. I enjoyed the sight and presence of the trees. But I realized that I was missing something by being so far removed from the actual pedestrian traffic of the street – no one was actually walking through the park. After a few days, I rarely returned to this café anymore. I began patronizing another sidewalk café in a bustling street nearby, on the way to the market.

Kim and I had a lot to talk about after my long absence. We had kept in contact regularly on email. I was back in her city. I asked her many questions. I was freer with my questions, less inhibited perhaps – the crushing weight of graduate school and the dissertation had somehow been lifted. I asked so many questions about her family’s past that one morning she brought a thick leather photo album to the “old men’s café.”

The black and white pictures, yellowed with age and frayed or torn, were mostly photographs of her father and of her mother. The album, in rough chronological order, showed her parents’ wedding in rural Long An province, about 30 km from today’s city limits west of Cho Lon. The houses of the grand-parents. The ceremony, the shy bride and groom. And then the sequence of photographs unfolds, representing a young couple’s life in southern Viet Nam, in the Republic of Viet Nam, in the 1960s. Her mother was a school teacher, her father taught as well. They appear in black and white pictures – she in her Vietnamese ao dai tunic, her hair impeccably done, her face often melancholy, he in equally impeccable dress, in sharp shiny suits and narrow ties, shined leather shoes. They are photographed among their students: Kim’s mother protectively holding some of her young female pupils by the shoulder in a maternal gesture, her father proudly standing in the front of a lecture hall, surrounded by his students at an officer training school in Da Lat. The photographs are eerie because nowhere does the war appear in them, though it is clearly “present” in the background – though this background itself never appears, is never pictured. But for instance, when I ask Kim if her paternal grandfather’s house still belongs to the family, she replies matter-of-factly, “It was destroyed by a bomb.” It gets complicated when we try to figure out when it was bombed and by whom. Kim does not know exactly. And here, in a flash, I am back in the same situation that I faced so often during the research for my dissertation. Events happened, of course, but they took place so long ago that memories of them are now often extremely fuzzy.

I tell myself that each subsequent retelling could be viewed as the unearthing of an artifact which, once brought to the surface and into contact with air and humidity – with life – will actually decay and be reduced to dust, often extremely quickly. Then I tell myself that I am being melodramatic, that I am succumbing to the attraction of the old and tiresome cliché about memory – one that I often use, nevertheless – the archeological metaphor. I try to be a bit more careful, a bit more theoretical perhaps, as we say. How about narrative? How about theories of narrative? Granted, Kim, like others who showed me their family photographs, was often stumped by my questions, my requests for chronological markers. To me, of course, it would make a big difference if her grandfather’s house was destroyed in 1968 by the “VC” as Kim would herself say or in 1969 by an American or South Vietnamese warplane. She was not sure. Yet, over time, something else happened during that entire summer of my asking questions. This was most evident with Kim. What happened is that she went back to her mother and asked questions. Her mother, in turn, sometimes surprised, often annoyed, would ask her “Why do you ask me all these questions?” (In Vietnamese the question sounds different. Literally: “why does child want to know?”) It started somewhat of a dialogue, an often painful and halting discussion between Kim and her mother about the past, their pasts, which for so long had remained dormant.

I am not certain that it was either good or bad for me to stir up these past events, to lead Kim and her mother to create or retell stories to make sense of their pasts. I am actually not certain that this is the proper way to pose the question – and this is something to which I want to come back.

I am still reflecting today about these photographs. Several things struck me. The pictures are focused on the 1960s. They are mostly a record of the marriage and early life of a young couple. The birth of their children is recorded, that of the first son, and then, of Kim in 1964. Kim points out that she looks exactly like her father, and, judging from the photographs, indeed she does. She notes that, just like her father, she is very tall. The photographs provide springboards for her own narratives, for her own “memory work,” giving her, perhaps, a chance to “work through” (durcharbeiten, in German) her and her family’s past. The photographs unfold, not necessarily in a purely chronological order, and Kim and I meander through her family’s past. She weaves her own narratives of that imaged past. The photographic record ends, abruptly in my view, with the end of the war. Kim does not say this directly, nor do I notice this at first. Then there are no more photographs. No photographs of the children as adolescents, of the parents moving into middle age. The young couple is preserved in their youth, in their well-tailored clothes. There are no hints of the war itself, no direct images of it in this album, as I indicated – except for one photograph, of the young officers in training standing at attention at the Da Lat school, under a banner that welcomes the visit of the president of the Republic of Viet Nam. Again, no date.

The strangest aspect of this photo album is that four color photographs are pasted in at the end. They represent the next generation, Kim’s nephew and niece, when they were quite small. These pictures date from the 1990s and form a jarring contrast with the black and white photographs that precede them. There seems to be no direct link, no pictorial narrative or visible chronology that explains the relationship between these color photographs and the black and white ones from the 1960s.

There are several pages left at the end of the photo album. They are blank and have never been filled.

Haunted Terrain (1)

My old German friend, P., asks me about violence in Viet Nam.

I think he wants to know largely because during his year of ethnographic research in northwestern India he witnessed horrendous violence: large-scale anti-Muslim pogroms, in which thousands of people were slaughtered, their houses burned, their neighborhoods destroyed and looted.

First, I ask myself what exactly it is that he is asking me. I keep thinking that we are not talking about the same problem, which he of course knows.

Memories of violence -- war's aftermath -- have sedimented for over 30 years in Sai Gon and over the whole of Viet Nam (with the understanding that in various locales in southern or northern Viet Nam one deals with very different set of issues, and hence, definitions of what constitutes violence). What P. witnessed a few years ago has not yet deposited in such deep layers in people's minds and over the landscape. Yet, when I ask him, he tells me that when he returned to Gujarat two years after the massacres local people usually pretended that everything was fine; in his view they were trying to convince themselves that it was best to let the past alone, hoping perhaps that it would simply fade from memory. It was also a way for some perpetrators to try to absolve themselves from their own participation in the killings, hence, possibly, their own guilt. For those who had survived the killings, it may have been an attempt to cope with the fact that no legal retribution or compensation would be possible, that the work of remembering and narrating would end up in a political and personal dead end of unrelenting sorrow and mourning.

In Viet Nam today one witnesses the results of 30 odd years of a (perhaps) similar desire to forget. Over time, clearly, the past does recede from memory: the edges of violent events blur, the intimate wounds, physical or psychological, heal. Pain, scars, phantom limbs are all too real, but in strange, attenuated fashion; people seem habituated to the intimate presence of their suffering, and yet seem distant from it. One could perhaps say "resigned," though that would be too strong. It seems that the everyday, the eternal return of the same, has dulled the sharp edges of the pain. Violence, then, is only visible and perceptible in its after-effects, in its aftermath, after the fact. This structure of deferral, the continuing presence of something whose origin is perhaps now not much more than a blurry, inexact recollection, is what needs to be examined and conceptualized in order to understand violence and its legacy in Viet Nam.

Hence the notion of haunted terrain.

It is not a coincidence that ghosts inhabit so many novels and shorts stories in Vietnamese literature of the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the time, Vietnamese writers were beginning to experiment with ways to write differently about wartime. They were attempting to move away from the official dictates that literature about the war be a heroic one. The recurrent figures of ghosts -- found for instance in some of the best known texts of that period, such as Bao Ninh's novel The Sorrow of War or his short story "Savage Winds," or Duong Thu Huong's Novel without a Name -- haunt Vietnamese landscapes and Vietnamese people.

As we saw previously in discussions of Vietnamese ghosts, what returns when something ghostly appears is something ominous, a force that springs forth as a result of a violent death.

Bad death.

Death away from one's home, from one's family and kin group. Violent death that dismembers the body and tears away at its corporeal integrity. Death before one has been able to marry and procreate, and thus contribute to the ongoing existence of one's lineage. Violent death, that is, a death in which the person, deprived of the presence and reassurance of loved ones, dies terrified.

There is a relationship to guilt and to mourning in these Vietnamese (and East and Southeast Asian) ways of imagining "bad death." In all cases, the soul is blocked, it cannot be properly released and accompanied ritually to the world of spirits. Wounded, incomplete, terrified, sad, it hovers in a no-man's land of mournful echoes in an attempt to alert the living to its forlorn plight.

What one does see a lot in Viet Nam today is a very distinct effort at forgetting. "Why do you constantly want to know about the past?" people often asked me in conversations when I inquired about the war years. Why do YOU want to know, what exactly do you want to know anyway?

The past, the violent past of war is long gone in Viet Nam. It is a divisive past. In many ways, true, if one focuses on it too much today, this past will haunt. It will hover somewhere remote in consciousness, like a small voice demanding that it be recognized, like a distant echo that hums in memory. The violent past will somehow return, past the comfortable distractions of today's shopping malls and entertainment parks.

Haunted terrain.

Working across three languages -- French, English, Vietnamese -- I think of the French medical term terrain. It refers to the body as a "terrain," a surface which can give rise to certain pathologies or on which certain pathologies take hold and develop. The body as field, as medium. Translating, transcribing, while keeping this metaphor in mind, I think of Viet Nam as a haunted terrain. Working back from memory (and working through, period), I also note that terrain in French sociological and anthropological terminology means "the field," the place where "fieldwork" (travail de terrain, in French) gets carried out.

It is safe to say that I am haunted by my research in the field, my own experience of terrain in Viet Nam.

My own psychological terrain (to go back mischievously to the medical term now) perhaps predisposes me to be receptive to ghost stories, or at least not to discard uncanny occurrences as irrelevant on account of their apparent unclassifiability.

Precisely, I have tried to argue that ghostly apparitions are classifiable; they certainly are for Vietnamese.

One of the questions is to try to understand better how violence manifests itself long after its actual cessation, through recurrent after-effects. After the fact, we are faced with its various aftermaths, with the fact that the myriads of forms violence may have taken at the time -- killing, maiming, dismembering, raping, bombing or burning down someone's house, hence turning that person into a displaced person, depriving someone of food or of a means of livelihood (by defoliating a field, for instance), etc. -- will render it that much more present, while more diffuse. It seems to both pervade the social field and be invisible, ungraspable, since one is no longer sure what exactly constitutes violence, thirty years after the end of the war in Viet Nam (which officially ended on April 30, 1975). Where does one look for it? What does one look for?

I tried to argue previously that one place to look -- obviously -- is in people's narratives, in the stories they tell about their lives and about their experiences of violence and of its aftermaths.

Hence, the provisional notion of haunted terrain. We shall have to return to it.

Vietnamese Ghosts (3): "Superstition" and belief in ghosts

The woman – I call her Kim – who tells me these ghost stories says that her mother criticizes superstitious people for their gullibility. Educated people, on the other hand, know better. They learned foreign languages and literature, science, history. They use reason to dismiss irrational and illogical thinking. “Lo-gich” (logic) is a word that recurs in her mother’s speech when she discusses the foolishness and irrationality of superstitious people. This is not necessarily a class argument. Her mother was from a very poor rural family from Long An province. She studied hard and her family sacrificed so she could go study in Saigon in the late 1950s. She used to study in a city park at night with a friend: under a streetlight, they were able to study until very late. A basic point underlies her criticism of superstitious people: they are ignorant because they are lazy and self-complacent, prone to supernatural fantasies about the darkness, about things that a basic knowledge of physics, for instance, can explain. It is a harsh indictment; her own life of suffering during and after the war against the Americans is further proof, in her eyes, of the validity of her diagnostic.

Her mother has a sharp tongue. She routinely uses it to chastise her adult daughter. My friend is often perplexed by her mother’s aggressiveness. Alternatively, she’s amused when this aggression is directed at other people.

Neither she nor her mother “believe” in ghosts, they say (khong tin). And yet ghosts appear to both of them.

Something happens, and they say it was a ghost. “Ghost” is a register of surprise, to the point that it can happen even when one does not believe in the phenomenon, in the thing called ghost. It breaks through. The logical impossibility of the apparition of ghosts to someone who does not “believe” in them is beside the point. The apparent logical flaw does not register as such. The charge of the ghostly apparitions breaks through the defenses set up by the intellect. There is no other possibility but to instantaneously recognize that what one is experiencing is the apparition of a ghost. In other words, one recognizes what one knows is impossible and cannot exist. When a ghost appears they find themselves thrown into the impossible position of instantaneously turning into a superstitious person. The crucial difference is that they are actually NOT superstitious, or at least they still maintain that they are not.

The result is anxiety. This anxiety sometimes leads to illness. My friend recalls that her mother saw a ghost in the spring of 2006. It was a rainy day, and her mother, as she always does, was riding her bicycle to run an errand. The family has plenty of money so she could ride a motorbike, but, when alone, she prefers to go by bicycle – as in the old days, one is tempted to say. She likes the slow pace of a bicycle, as well as the physical exercise. The sight of people on bicycles is disappearing in Sai Gon. Her decision is surprising – the family has money – but also makes sense given her view that society is changing too fast, and not for the better.

So, on that day, her mother rides her bicycle to the market shortly before one o’clock in the afternoon. People take a short nap after lunch at that time of the day. The traffic in the streets eases up a bit then. On her way back from the market it begins to rain hard. She seeks shelter under the protruding roof of a shuttered house. An old man says a few words to her about the heavy rain. She replies absent-mindedly, the way you make small talk with a stranger while waiting for the end of a downpour, huddled under an awning in front of a house you don’t know. The rain eases up a bit, the roar of the water on the roof begins to subside. It gets quiet. There are very few vehicles in this small side street. Everyone waits for the rain to fully stop before getting back on their motorbikes and riding on. She turns around and there is no one there. She is actually not standing under the roof of a shuttered house, but in front of a decrepit and abandoned building.

“Con ma roi,” says my friend. “[It was] a ghost already.” Her mother hurries back home, speeding in the slick, empty streets on her bicycle. She arrives home and immediately feels nauseous and cold. She develops a fever and remains ill for several days. To simply say that she got a cold because of the rain and the sudden change in temperature is beside the point. Vietnamese are not dumb or illogical, they recognize the cause and effect relationship between rain, cold, and a fever in this context. But the fact remains that her mother – who does not “believe” in ghosts and is not superstitious – saw a ghost, and that the shock of that uncanny encounter made her sick; it predisposed her, we could say, to falling ill. Her body’s defenses were lowered because of the fear and the anxiety of that encounter.

This ghost story is a classic example of the unexpected character of the apparitions of ghosts. Surprise results in shock because it strips the surroundings of their familiarity. Her mother thought that she had stopped to shelter herself from the rain in front of a house, but she was actually standing in front of an abandoned building of unknown origin. It begs the question of the everyday: had she really never seen this building before? It was not far from her house. She was after all riding her bicycle back from the nearby market, presumably in an area which she knew intimately well. Yet the fact remains, there she was, in front of an abandoned building, and a ghost appeared. It appeared in this specific place according to the logic of spectral apparitions. The building was abandoned, possibly because of the initial presence of a ghost or ghosts which made it unlivable, threatening, scary, or simply a place in which people could not make a decent living or live without misfortune or illness. The point is that the building is abandoned, but its abandonment, its decrepitude takes new salience in light of the apparition of the ghost.

The logic is tight, if circular. Just as tight is the logic of illness that follows from being drawn into conversation with, and by, a ghost. It is impossible speech. The ghost, an old man, says something and she replies. The ghost does not answer back. Her shock comes in part from having been drawn into a complete logical impossibility, since she knows herself as someone rational who does not believe in the supernatural: she is a schoolteacher, she educates children and adults. She has done so for decades. Her identity is intimately bound with the notion that she dispels fantasy, ignorance, and myth, and replaces them with scientific and historical knowledge. She always portrays herself as someone who is experienced, who literally has seen (and heard) it all. Not this time. And yet she recognizes that she encountered a ghost. It’s worse than simply saying, “Oh, I heard a sound, I thought someone said something to me.” She has a visual hallucination and an auditory one. Her defenses – what enables her to distinguish herself from the masses of ignorant, uneducated, and superstitious people – fall part.

These ghosts stories are striking because people retell them as non sequiturs. The stories don’t add up to specific causal narratives. Or rather, they might do so, but within given, isolated contexts, for example, when discussing why no one can earn a good living in this or that specific location, or why one’s mother fell sick after seeing a ghost. The stories themselves replicate the terrorizing surprise, the anxiety of the apparition of ghosts. This leads to the desire to move on quickly to other, less anguish-ridden topics.

On the other hand, even people who “don’t believe” in ghosts can retell these stories with a pleasure mixed with the frisson of having experienced something scary or eerie, something that in retrospect makes for a good story, a narrative that can give rise to laughter. The question of death, of the bad, often violent death that underlies the return of a ghost – an errant soul in search of human contact, warmth and caring in order to be properly ritually propitiated – is usually not touched upon in these ghost stories. Yet those (usually women) who do believe in ghosts – and who may be embarrassed when they sheepishly define themselves as "superstitious" (me tin) – do not narrate these stories lightly. They often say that after discussing ghost stories with me, they can’t sleep. The evocation of ghosts gives rise to anxiety. The same anxiety which, in the case of several devoutly Buddhist young women I knew in Sai Gon, made them rush down the stairs of the house at night when they had to go pee, trying simultaneously to look in front of them and behind them in the darkness to see if a ghost was following them. They and their siblings or friends laugh uncomfortably when they retell or hear these anecdotes of night-time domestic panics. And then it’s time to go on to other topics, because those who do believe in ghosts don’t take specters lightly. This makes for a fragmented retelling of ghost stories. This fragmentation preserves the uncanny charge inherent to the apparition of something that, though nameable and classifiable (“I saw a ghost”), retains the capacity to terrify or render ill.