War and Shadows: The Haunting of Vietnam

By Mai Lan Gustafsson

War and Shadows is a fascinating book packed with vibrant stories and lucid exploration of their significance. Mai Lan Gustafsson's account of spirit possession in Vietnam is both nuanced and sympathetic. ― Ann Marie Leshkowich, College of the Holy Cross

Vietnamese culture and religious traditions place the utmost importance on dying well: in old age, body unblemished, with surviving children, and properly buried and mourned. More than five million people were killed in the Vietnam War, many of them young, many of them dying far from home. Another 300,000 are still missing. Having died badly, they are thought to have become angry ghosts, doomed to spend eternity in a kind of spirit hell. Decades after the war ended, many survivors believe that the spirits of those dead and missing have returned to haunt their loved ones. In War and Shadows, the anthropologist Mai Lan Gustafsson tells the story of the anger of these spirits and the torments of their kin.

Gustafsson's rich ethnographic research allows her to bring readers into the world of spirit possession, focusing on the source of the pain, the physical and mental anguish the spirits bring, and various attempts to ameliorate their anger through ritual offerings and the intervention of mediums. Through a series of personal life histories, she chronicles the variety of ailments brought about by the spirits' wrath, from headaches and aching limbs (often the same limb lost by a loved one in battle) to self-mutilation. In Gustafsson's view, the Communist suppression of spirit-based religion after the fall of Saigon has intensified anxieties about the well-being of the spirit world. While shrines and mourning are still allowed, spirit mediums were outlawed and driven underground, along with many of the other practices that might have provided some comfort. Despite these restrictions, she finds, victims of these hauntings do as much as possible to try to lay their ghosts to rest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9780801457456

Book preview

WAR AND SHADOWS

The Haunting of Vietnam

Mai Lan Gustafsson

Cornell University Press

ITHACA AND LONDON

For my juniors, with love:

Lonnie Philbrick, Samantha Hoang, Maria Gustavsson,

Natalie Clark, and Nina Clark

Contents

Preface

1. The Problem

2. Foundations

3. Revelations

4. The Living and the Dead

5. Afterlives

6. Problem Solving

7. Superstition in a Secular State

8. Revivals

9. Conclusion

Epilogue

Appendix 1. Table of Suffering

Appendix 2. Chronology of the War

Notes

References

Preface

This work is about how the Vietnam War has had an effect on both this world and the next. Long after the peace treaties were signed, the war rages on in both realms: the battlegrounds are living human bodies, its warriors, the enraged ghosts who invade and assault them. Many of the residents of the North, even after the North became Vietnam, were plagued by illness and misfortune—for years in many cases—that they attributed to ghosts. These ghosts are not mysterious phantoms lurking in dark corners: they are my informants’ friends and relatives, spouses, children, and neighbors. Casualties of the war, they have become angry spirits who prey on their descendants and survivors. The trouble they cause is very real and very painful for their victims, some of whom have been driven to despair and self-destruction by their tormentors. In anthropological terms, they suffered from spirit possession illness; in their words, they were bi benh ta, or made ill by ghosts.

In this book I describe the afflictions of my informants and the obstacles they and others faced as they attempted to release the ghosts of war from their rage and ease their own suffering by doing so. Throughout, their stories are told in the language they offered and not in the language of the academy. I leave the task of developing a theoretical understanding of their real-life pain and suffering to others. Those who seek to compare these stories to those related by psychologists and other social scientists will have to look elsewhere. My goal is not to advance a new theory of spirit possession, nor is it to analyze the woes of my informants solely through the perspective of trauma. Although I provide here the larger context of their suffering, I will give no explanation for what ailed the Vietnamese I worked with during my stay in their country beyond what they offered themselves. To do otherwise would denigrate their years of suffering, give lie to what I witnessed, and imply that they were not sound of mind.

I went to the country in 1996, just two years after the U.S.-led embargo had been lifted and a decade into the sweeping economic policy known as Renovation (Doi Moi). I fully intended to ignore the war—it was over, it seemed to me, over and done. Academics, journalists, and participants alike had already covered it ad nauseum, from lengthy histories detailing tactics and campaigns to revealing autobiographies of its major players and heartbreaking memoirs of both Vietnamese and American veterans. Not me, I vowed. I wanted to do something different.

Prior to doing fieldwork, the main impression I had of Vietnam had been gleaned from the frenetic media images I’d seen of the country. There stood Dan Rather in the middle of a boulevard teeming with young Vietnamese on motorbikes on the twentieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. On CNN, I’d seen shot after shot of VCRs and TVs, American beer and cigarettes being sold by tiny women wearing flip-flops and conical hats, the images accompanied by a grave voice-over lamenting that such a terrible war had been fought for nothing, as the American Way had won out in the end. Business journals raved about the money-making opportunities awaiting the enterprising cowboy in Vietnam. Such stories were always golden-hued, conveying the sense that all was well, that Vietnam had stalled for a while but was now making up for lost time with a vengeance.

Admittedly, I had succumbed to these visions, blithely choosing to believe what I saw on TV. Willfully blocking out the war, I wanted to write an ethnography of Vietnam that would showcase ghosts and spirits and their human attendants. I intended to use shadows as a lens through which something of the nature and quality of life in today’s Vietnam would be refracted. In 1996 there was little in the way of ethnography about Vietnam, due in part to the country’s closure to outside researchers during the war years, and afterward to the difficulty of conducting field-work in a socialist state. Why harp on the war, I thought, when so much had already been written about it and so little about life in postwar Vietnam?

Looking back now, I smile ruefully at my confidence that there was no need to address the war. Although I have always taken care to caution my students against the fallacy of thinking that culture is static and unchanging, somehow I believed that Vietnam’s spirit world was just that, protected from the damage wrought by the conflict. When I actually got there, the on-the-ground reality of today’s Vietnam packed a visceral punch. It does not take long to see beneath the shimmering and overly optimistic surface of things in Vietnam and finally get at this simple truth: in a very real sense, Vietnam is haunted by the war. To dismiss its impact—even in an ethnography likely to end up collecting dust in the back stacks of a library—is to denigrate the past and present experience of the Vietnamese people.

During my time in Vietnam, I did not meet a single person of any age whose family had not lost one or more members as a result of the war. During the war years, the population of Vietnam was 38 million.¹ With more than 5 million or 13 percent of the population killed,² and with family size at that time averaging six people,³ it was statistically probable that every family would lose someone. Countless families lost two, three, four, or more of their members. Without even asking anyone about it, you can see this loss all around you. Many couples lost their children to the fighting and had to restart their families after the end of the war—giving rise to frail seventy- and eighty-year-olds with children in their twenties. Other couples, separated by their war duties until after 1975, were delayed from having children until they were well into their forties. Vietnamese and hapless foreigner alike are never sure if what they are witnessing is the loving care of elderly grandparents by their devoted grandchildren or parents who were forced by the war to begin their families anew.

The loss can also be seen in virtually every home, where altars meant for the remembrance of ancestors are weighted down with pictures of young men and women killed in their prime. On dates important in the Buddhist calendar, pagodas and temples are crowded with people sending money and luxury items to their dead dear ones via the burning of hell money and votive paper offerings, and provisioning them with huge amounts of food. We have peace, but where are our people? asked Mr. Vinh, a trusted informant. Some are in heaven, most are in hell.

I came to understand that the positive media images I’d fallen for were made for Americans by Americans, perhaps to assuage our national guilt over the war—the simplistic they’re OK, we’re OK mentality. The smirking, triumphant tone of many media reports marking the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war in 1975 trumpeted the supposed victory of capitalism in Vietnam, a funhouse mirror reflection of the Marxist view that all roads inevitably lead to communism. Just as a culturally relativistic stance can disguise that what is being upheld as logical and reasonable has in fact already been altered beyond recognition by the stamp and stomp of colonialism, the exuberant reports of the media in the mid-1990s ignored that what was being touted as the debut of Vietnam as a junior player in the global economy was in large part the rapid expansion of the black market following the end of the embargo in 1994.⁴ Moreover, the benefits from postwar economic reforms tend to accrue to urban Vietnamese,⁵ and unevenly at that.

Vietnam is not simply playing catch-up, as if there is some inescapable and enviable progression from backward country to foreign colony to global player. What has happened and is happening there should not be reduced to mere reconstruction, even though so much that has been damaged or destroyed by the war remains to be restored. Yes, the war there did wreak havoc on Vietnam’s infrastructure, economy, and population.⁶ But as the Vietnamese managed to bring in the harvests, have children, celebrate the New Year, in short, live, during the war years, so too have they managed to adapt to the aftereffects of the conflict. For some, this has been more difficult than it has for others, as readers will come to understand from this book.

I am not the first, nor will I be the last, anthropologist or even traveler to arrive at a destination with expectations that turn out to be laughable and quickly discarded. It is no secret that ethnographic fieldwork suffers when its agenda is too rigid to allow for discoveries on the ground.⁷ In shifting my focus, I was able to infiltrate a natural community⁸ that merited study: living victims of war ghosts. Three simple words uttered to me a scant ten minutes after my arrival at Hanoi’s Noi Bai Airport provided the impetus for me to do away with my no-war policy: the customs agent scrutinizing my U.S. passport looked up at me and with the most beatific of smiles said, We forgive you. This declaration made crystal clear to me—even in the first chaotic weeks of my stay—that to write a truly comprehensive and relevant study of contemporary Vietnam, one has to acknowledge the war. Forgiven, yes. Forgotten? Not yet, and perhaps never. The war makes up a huge part of the consciousness of any Vietnamese person who lived through it and, by diffusion, even of those born after its conclusion.⁹

I ended up writing yet another book about the war because I had to: there was no other way to do justice to the pains of my informants.¹⁰ They are preyed on by the ghosts of the war, and their spirit attackers are angry and hateful because of the horrific ways in which they were killed during the conflict. Their ailments are not isolated events but rather part of a larger phenomenon acknowledged at the highest levels in Vietnam as both real and a problem. The war is to blame: by infusing millions of fresh souls into the spirit world, and relegating millions more to a hellish status as wandering ghosts, the war created an overpopulated shadow world of darkness and pain. In their unrelenting torment, this legion of angry ghosts seeks to make miserable those lucky enough to have survived. This is about them: the haunted living of Vietnam.

Portions of every chapter in this book were used in an article in the journal Anthropology of Consciousness 18, no. 2 (Fall 2007). I wish to acknowledge the American Anthropological Association and the University of California Press for permitting me to use that material.

A Note about Names

All names of informants in this book are pseudonyms. In the text I supply a full name for each principal informant; in the table in appendix 1, I list only given names.

Vietnamese names follow the Eastern order (also used in China, Japan, and Korea), that is, the family name comes before the given name. Vietnamese names are unique, however, in that unlike other places in Asia, where people are addressed by their family name, in Vietnam it is the given name that is usually the primary form of address. A person’s given name is often accompanied by a title or honorific such as Mr., Professor, Brother, or Aunt. For example, in this preface, Duong Huu Vinh is properly referred to as Mr. Vinh, even though Duong is his family name. The titles Mr. or Mrs. are used to address someone of a certain age. Young men are never called Mr. but rather by their given name alone or Brother or Son. For example, an older man would never be called Brother except by someone older than himself or by his actual siblings. When I use Mrs. it is a sign that the woman is older than myself, as well as being married. When I use Ms. it indicates that the woman is either Westernized in her style or of marriageable age but single. Women almost always keep their own family names even after marriage; however, children receive the father’s family name.

Although diacritical marks are important for distinguishing names with otherwise the same spelling, for simplicity I have not used diacriticals in this book.

1.

The Problem

It was the blood that gave Vi away. Had it not been there, she would have remained my friend but she would not have become an informant. But it was there, and it was startling to see it on her immaculate figure. I met Ly Thi Vi in 1996. She was a regular fixture in the foreigners’ guesthouse where I lived in Hanoi. Two or three times a week, I would see her sitting in the garden bar with a soft drink or having a meal in the canteen. Always, she was surrounded by foreigners, and the staff of the guesthouse rushed about making sure they were well-stocked with beverages, snacks, and cigarettes. Always, she was chic in her dark sunglasses and perfect makeup. Shoko, a Japanese resident of the guesthouse, referred to Vi as Rock Star. It was true: Vi was charming, beautiful, and intelligent, and all of us who lived there flocked to her.¹

Although the guesthouse was nine miles from the center of Hanoi, in a district sparse with foreigners, Vi’s presence there was good for business. The guesthouse’s director had picked Ms. Vi to formally open the garden bar four months earlier, knowing her to be foreigner-friendly and a sure draw for Western men. After the opening, Vi dropped by on a regular basis. She’d round up whatever guests she could and treat them to drinks and sometimes dinner, joking and talking for hours. Her efforts bore fruit: almost everyone who chatted with her in the garden bar ultimately scheduled a tour or a night on the town, or even made an outright move to a more upscale neighborhood.² Afterward, Vi would pay the director 30 percent of her fee for each excursion and thus ensure her continued welcome presence at the guesthouse.

For many who met her, Ms. Vi seemed to be the face of postwar renovated Vietnam.³ She was young and wealthy, an entrepreneur par excellence. Ever glamorous, she zipped along the streets of Hanoi on her new Honda motorbike wearing a face mask and silk scarf, setting up appointments on her mobile phone and popping into expensive cafés and hotels to meet clients. After graduating from college with a degree in business, Vi worked as a secretary for an import business specializing in Chinese goods. When the embargo was lifted in 1994 and a flood of foreigners arrived in Vietnam to set up business or tour the country, Vi quickly put her English skills and forceful charisma to work. She bribed her way into a job at Hanoi’s most luxurious hotel and from there launched her empire.

She started by setting up informal tours for the foreigners she met: day trips to Ha Long Bay, tours of the countryside, nights of pub-crawling and karaoke. Within a year, she had moved on to arranging housing, transportation, electronics, and various sorts of adult entertainment for a largely male and foreign clientele. By 1996 Vi had established herself as one of Hanoi’s top service providers to Western visitors and business people. She had a large office in downtown Hanoi and a staff of three, as well as a beautiful apartment near Hoan Kiem Lake in the city center. Her parents had moved from a tiny house in the provinces to a marble three-story mansion Vi paid for, and her younger siblings were assured of going to college. She epitomized the spirit of capitalism, while also maintaining her worth as a Vietnamese in the dutiful upkeep and upgrading of her family. In short, she was all that a modern Vietnamese in peacetime was supposed to be.

But back to the blood. After we became friends through our various dealings at the guesthouse, Vi and I would often meet downtown on Friday afternoons to go shopping and eat dinner. These were precious outings for me. Friday afternoons spent in bookshops and restaurants with Vi did much to restore my spirits, and I was able to return to my research with renewed vigor. I waited for her at a lakeside café in early May 1997. Our plan was to shop in the old quarter for a birdcage, as Vi wanted to install a singing bird in her office to keep her staff alert, and then dine wherever Vi could order fettuccine Alfredo. She arrived at the appointed time, roaring up on her gleaming motorbike. Hi, Chi!⁴ she called. I waved and put my field notes away. With her hair upswept under a silk scarf and her expensive all-white ensemble, Vi garnered appraising glances from the assembled restaurant patrons—Vietnamese and Westerners alike.

As she took the chair next to mine, I noticed three long lines of red on the front of her blouse. What’s that? I asked, pointing to the stains. Glancing down, she grimaced. Blood, she whispered, taking the scarf from her hair and attempting to conceal the red marks. Taking my hand, she whispered, Brother is very upset. He knows I am sending Little Sister to France for study.

Trouble with Spirits

The blood, and her chilling words, marked Vi as another member of an unenviable segment of Vietnam’s population: victims of angry ghosts.⁵ She was one of almost two hundred northern Vietnamese I met and interviewed who had various ailments, all of which they attributed to the predations of spirits. Ideally, spirits are to be revered as the oldest and wisest of the family’s elders. They are not always treated as such, however. When this occurs, ancestor spirits are quick to let their displeasure be known, in quite visceral ways.⁶ These ancestor spirits were not the ones afflicting my informants, however. The Vietnamese I knew were preyed on by a kind of ghost that is permanently enraged. Unfortunate souls who died horribly or who died without relatives to remember them or whose remains were lost and so the necessary funeral rites were not performed—these souls are angry ghosts. Such spirits have a penchant for violence or aggressive mischief, as one man tormented by his lost uncle, phrased it.

In Vietnam, supernatural causes for illness are likely to be blamed when the following situations apply: the sudden onset of strange behavior, frequent and/or recurring illness, and chronic illness that is unresponsive to treatment.⁷ This was the case with my informants, who had attempted to explain and treat their maladies in conventional ways prior to blaming ghosts. The wide range of problems they suffered present as classic symptoms of spirit possession,⁸ a psychophysiological event during which an individual’s body and consciousness are temporarily dominated by a noncorporeal entity.⁹

Anthropologists have found that spirit possession¹⁰—as a theory of illness used to explain sickness and other misfortune—occurs in a majority of cultures worldwide.¹¹ Indeed, many of my informants explicitly referred to their problems as spirit possession,¹² though others spoke not of being forced to share their minds and bodies with ghosts but rather of physical and emotional disorders caused by spirits. Wherever possession beliefs and practices are found, the symptoms or signs of