History Reformatted: Vietnam's Great Famine (1944-45) in Archival Form

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 Nguyen, 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, 16), who are neither fully dead nor alive, to dine upon. The festival's primary purpose, several Vietnamese explained to me, is to absolve the hungry ghosts of any harm they may have caused the living, such as misfortune or serious illness, over the past year. Several of them told me that the offerings also function as insurance against future problems because the offerings are meant to keep the hungry ghosts satiated for the next 12 months. The explanations are not mutually exclusive, and since the early 1990s growing numbers of people have used the festival to commemorate the victims of the Great Famine of 1944- 45 (N?n ðoi ?t D?u).Official Vietnamese estimates, first put forward in a famous speech by H? Chi Minh and then reiterated with little empirical support until recently, place the number of people who died within the space of six months at approximately two million (Nguyen Kh?c Ð?m 1988; Van T?o and Nguyen Kh?c Ð?m 1988; Ð?ng C?ng s?n Vi?t Nam 2008, 921; Gunn 2014, 259n1). Given the vast number of hungry ghosts this famine reportedly produced, the gradual inclusion of its victims, as part of this festival, is not surprising.1) The Great Famine affected 32 provinces across colonial Tonkin and Annam, reducing the population of what is now northern and central Vietnam by an estimated 15 percent (Duong Trung Quoc 2005). Yet, despite the size and scale of loss, no national monument exists to collectively memorialize the deaths. Instead, commemorative practices remain decidedly local in nature and revolve around the mass graves that can still be found across the countryside, usually in close proximity to villages where death rates were particularly high. "Ghost graves" (c?n ma) and "hunger tombs" (m? ðoi), as they are colloquially known, typically consist of a small mound of earth or a pile of carefully arranged bricks. These sites become visible to nonresidents only when famine survivors and their descendants visit them during the festival to appease the hungry ghosts.A three-meter-high concrete memorial, once part of a "charity cemetery" (nghia trang h?p thi?n) in Hanoi, is an exception to these informal practices. The remains of thousands of people who fled the countryside to seek refuge in the city but perished shortly after their arrival are interred beneath it. Residents of Hanoi raised funds to construct the memorial, which was completed in April 1951. Photographs, displayed in a small room adjacent to the memorial, indicate that people visited the site year-round for the next several years. But the memorial fell into disrepair by the time the Second Indochina War (1954-75) began. In September 2001, the People's Committee of Hanoi announced that it would rectify this situation by providing funds to renovate the longneglected memorial. The announcement, which appeared as a small sidebar in local newspapers, stated that the renovations would be completed by 2005, in time to mark the 60th anniversary of the Great Famine. …