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The number and types of memory projects in Vietnam have proliferated rapidly since the mid-1990s. These projects, most of them intensely local in focus, reconfigure selective aspects of different "pasts" for strategic use in the present. Government-approved memory projects exhibit similar patterns. However, some of them openly diverge from official narratives of patriotic resistance. The project featured in this essay-the creation of an archive to document the Great Famine (1944-45) by a joint Vietnamese-Japanese research commission-is such an example. Close attention to the methodological procedures used to assemble this archive, which is highly unorthodox in form and content, provides insights into how historical evidence is fashioned rather than found in the Vietnamese context. The details reveal partial silences in four thematic areas: (1) the allocation of blame, (2) the suppression of sentiment in oral form, (3) the depersonalization of suffering in visual form, and (4) the comparative absence of organized resistance. Close attention to these elisions explains why the Great Famine and the hungry ghosts it produced continue to resist incorporation into state-approved histories of the "exceptional dead," who sacrificed their lives to defend the "nation" from foreign aggressors.
Keywords: history, memory, commemoration, archive, famine, Vietnam
We primarily see the archive as storehouse of memory and fact, as the place from whence history issues forth. However, the archive is much more than this; it is . . . a place of trauma and pain. It is a place of sorrow and loss for many, where unpacified ghosts with unfinished business await, yielding stories and letters different from expectation, a site where loss is localized and realized. (Murphy 2011, 481)
Many Vietnamese present ritual offerings to wandering spirits during T?t Trung Nguyên, a popular festival that occurs on the 15th day of the seventh lunar month. Participants recite prayers and then light seven sticks of incense to appease these spirits, who cannot become benevolent ancestors due to the unjust and often violent nature of their deaths. People pour small portions of boiled sweet potato, cassava, roasted corn, hard rice pancakes, and porridge-foods commonly eaten during periods of scarcity-into cones made of leaves from banyan trees. They then place the offerings outside in bushes, small shrines, and other hidden spaces for these "ontological refugees" (Kwon 2008,...