| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Hue-Tam Ho Tai, editor. The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam. Foreword by John Bodnar. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2001. Pp. xiii, 271. Cloth $50.00, paper $19.95.

This book of essays is a rarity: a fully integrated discussion of a sustained theme by eight authors who address aspects of the construction of narratives of war and postwar life in Vietnam since 1975. In both introduction and conclusion, editor Hue-Tam Ho Tai elegantly weaves the thread that binds together this moving tapestry. She describes in powerful ways the multiplicity of strategies and strategists of memories in Vietnam, people who move beyond state-sponsored and enforced messages to construct other pathways to the past, many located in family life and civil society. Particularly striking are Shaun Kingsley Malarney's discussion, laced with intimate detail, about the parallel workings of family and communal rituals of mourning and the editor's exploration of how women act as carriers of memory and of grief. 1

Both of these contributions bring me to the critical question: how does remembrance as a practice actually happen in time and space? We know what the choreographers want, perched in their ministries, but what actually takes place when they are not looking? And on this point, this book is a major addition to the literature. It is evident that what happened in Vietnam has happened in many other parts of the world. To be sure, the timing of economic reforms in Vietnam has a bearing on these practices, but here is a general story told in a national setting. The memory boom is everywhere. It is over determined, but one of its sources is the acknowledgment, the acceptance of the need to account for those who die in war. This is at the heart of any account as to why "memory" is ubiquitous in Vietnam: there are at least three million reasons, three million people who died in the war of 1959–1975, who tell us why this is so. . . .

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