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187DOI: 10.20495/seas.5.2_187Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2, August 2016, pp.
187–218
©Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University
History Reformatted:
Vietnam’s Great Famine (1944–45) in Archival Form
Ken MacLean*
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, recon-
figure selective aspects of different “pasts” for strategic use in the present. Govern-
ment-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 evi-
dence 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 eli-
sions 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 Tết 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.
* Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 950 Main Street, Clark University,
Worcester MA, 01610, USA
e-mail: kmaclean@clarku.edu
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People pour small portions of boiled sweet potato, cassava, roasted corn, hard rice pan-
cakes, 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 (Nạn đói Ất Dậu).
Official Vietnamese estimates, first put forward in a famous speech by Hồ Chí 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 (Nguyễn Khắc
Đạm 1988; Văn Tạo and Nguyễn Khắc Đạm 1988; Đảng Cộng sản Việt 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
(Dương Trung Quốc 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” (cồn ma) and “hunger tombs” (mả đói), 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 descen-
dants visit them during the festival to appease the hungry ghosts.
A three-meter-high concrete memorial, once part of a “charity cemetery” (nghĩa
trang hợp thiện) 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
1) Similar beliefs about hungry ghosts are widespread throughout Southeast and East Asia.
History Reformatted 189
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 long-
neglected 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.
The decision to renovate the memorial was not an isolated one. By the late 1990s,
the number and types of memory projects were increasing so rapidly that Hue-Tam Ho
Tai coined the phrase “commemorative fever” to capture the country’s mood (2001,
1–17). These projects, most of them local in focus, reconfigure selective aspects of
different “pasts” for strategic use in the present (MacLean 2013, 176–204). Government-
approved memory projects exhibit similar patterns. However, some of them openly
diverge from official narratives of patriotic resistance and heroic sacrifice in defense of
the “nation.” The project featured in this essay—a research effort led by the state-
sponsored Institute of History to document aspects of the Great Famine—is one such
example. I focus primarily on the unorthodox report that resulted from it, Nạn đói 1945
ở Việt Nam: Những chứng tích lịch sử (The Famine of 1945 in Vietnam: Some historical
evidence), edited by Văn Tạo and Motoo Furuta (1995).
Close attention to the decisions the researchers made with regard to the project’s
design, the methodology employed, and the representational strategies used provides
insights into how historical evidence regarding the Great Famine is fashioned rather than
found. This essay does not provide a comprehensive overview of the Great Famine or
the Vietnamese literature published prior to this study as a result. An extensive, though
still incomplete, list of sources can be found in the volume’s bibliography (ibid., 704–722)
and in Geoffrey Gunn’s recent Rice Wars in Colonial Vietnam: The Great Famine and the
Viet Minh Road to Power (2014). The focus here is instead on the ways the researchers
from the Institute of History and their Japanese counterparts from the University of
Tokyo reformatted micro-histories of the Great Famine into a larger archival form.
It should be noted at the outset that the Institute of History has since published two
expanded versions of the report, one in 2005 and another in 2011. I restrict my analysis
to the original 1995 version for several reasons. First, the publication of the 1995 edition
coincided with the 50th anniversary of the tragedy. In Vietnam, such anniversaries
provide opportunities for political and intellectual elites “to restructure and reshape col-
lective memory through rituals of commemoration” (Pelley 2002, 164). The 1995 version
thus marks the first of what would become several efforts to accomplish this goal. Second,
the 1995 publication was available when I began my fieldwork. I conducted ethnographic
and archival research on mass campaigns to eradicate hunger and to reduce poverty in
the northern Vietnamese countryside during 2000–02. The Great Famine was my tem-
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poral starting point. I draw upon this material to destabilize the standard assumption that
historical “evidence” emerges out of the closeness of fit between the records used and
the event described. Instead, I take the position that primary sources do not possess an
inherent “truth” value; rather, their evidentiary force—and thus credibility—arises out
of the “very processes that treat and use records as evidence” (Trouillot 1995; Meehan
2009, 160). Jennifer Meehan’s argument serves as the point of departure for my own,
hence my decision to focus on the first version, as it serves as the archival foundation for
the subsequent editions. Finally, the 2005 and 2011 editions do not differ significantly
in form or content from the one published in 1995. The continued accumulation of
empirical data and personal testimonies they contain does shed light on a paradox that I
revisit in the essay’s concluding section, however. Commemorative activities fix selected
aspects of “the past” and then re-present them, often in ritualized form, to specific audi-
ences. The Great Famine, as an “event,” remains an archive in formation, as the expanded
editions and periodic academic conferences regarding the tragedy attest. Yet, the efforts
to institutionalize the commemoration of the Great Famine nationally continue to gener-
ate disagreements that, to date, have prevented the outcome desired.
The essay is structured as follows. The first section provides background on the
conflicting narratives regarding the Great Famine, particularly the question of whether
the tragedy helped or hindered the August Revolution of 1945. I then present details
about the research project itself, which culminated in the publication of the 1995 edition.
Subsequent sections focus upon the report. Interspersed throughout are personal
accounts from “eyewitnesses” to the Great Famine I gathered during field research in
the Red River Delta, as well as selected historical documents, memoirs, and literary
works relevant to the inquiry—some well known, others not. When put into “conversa-
tion” with one another, four unexpected themes emerge regarding: (1) the partial alloca-
tion 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 how each of these partial silences shapes the terms of the others reveals
why what occurred during the Great Famine remains largely disconnected in historio-
graphic terms from what happened in its aftermath—the struggle for national inde-
pendence. The essay concludes with a brief overview of recent discussions about the
disaster and what needs to be done to reconfigure the place of the Great Famine within
the historical imagination.
History Reformatted 191
Conflicting Narratives
Symbolic reconfigurations often coincide with physical transformations. These are the
dynamics that prompted me to visit the neglected memorial to the famine victims in
Hanoi before the planned renovations transformed it. Finding the memorial proved much
harder than expected. It required nearly a half-dozen trips to Vĩnh Tuy, a poor working-
class area of the capital, before I was able to locate it. Much of my difficulty lay in the
fact that the charity cemetery no longer existed. Successive waves of postwar housing
construction had transformed the once-rural area on the southeastern edge of Hanoi into
a densely packed urban one connected by a chaotic network of narrow lanes, many of
them barely 1.5 meters wide. Indeed, the ongoing process of urban encroachment was
such that very few of the ward’s residents I encountered during my search believed the
memorial still existed. It did, as I discovered quite by accident on my fifth trip. But the
site was surrounded on all sides by multistoried row houses that towered above the
memorial. This situation clarified why Hoàng Văn Nghiên, then the chairman of the
Hanoi People’s Committee, suddenly declared in December of 2001 that the memorial
was a “vestige” (di tích) of historical and cultural significance. This bureaucratic upgrade
in status granted a measure of protection to the memorial, but it did not result in any
immediate changes. In fact, no major changes occurred until 2005, the 60th anniversary
of the Great Famine, when I again visited the site.
The slow pace was surprising given the unusual prominence of sites that are linked
to the struggle for independence. Indeed, many of the officials I met while conducting
research in Vietnam over the past 15 years expressed genuine disappointment that the
monument remained so difficult to locate. Nearly all of them regarded the tragic famine
as a catalyst for the August Revolution and Declaration of Independence on September
2, 1945. Three quotes, all of them from former commune-level cadres in three different
provinces in the Red River Delta who had survived the Great Famine, follow.
Vỹ, for example, pointed out there were three different but interlinked forms of
oppression during the conflict: “Japanese fascism, French colonialism, and the feudal
system of the Vietnamese themselves.” Taken together, he explained, “It was inevitable
that by twisting the worm,” by which he meant the suffering brought about by the Great
Famine, “you would cause [us] to rise up” (con giun xéo lắm phải quần).
Khoa, another cadre, explained: “We could not stand it anymore; we had nothing
left to lose, and the famine was simply the drop of water that caused a full glass to over-
flow” (giót nước cuối cùng làm trần cốc).
A third, Phong, was more succinct. “The famine was part of a long historical process;
we had no choice but to rebel.”
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Not everyone agrees with these assessments. Trần Văn Giàu, one of Vietnam’s
most eminent historians, placed less emphasis on the Great Famine as a key cause of the
August Revolution. He instead stressed the many problems the famine subsequently
posed. In his view, the Great Famine constituted a major obstacle to revolutionary
activities, as the immense death toll “drained its power” (1962, 621; see also Hoàng Văn
Đức 1946). Nguyễn Thế Anh, another highly respected historian, similarly argued it
would be a fundamental error to conclude the Great Famine was the primary cause of
the political instability that enabled the August Revolution to succeed. However, he
maintained that the impact of the catastrophe was undeniable and that widespread fears
that another large-scale famine might reoccur helped maintain the Party’s political stand-
ing (1985, 98).
These views of the Great Famine differ in detail; nevertheless, all of them recognize
the importance of this tragedy. Yet, the famine receives little attention today. For
example, an official university textbook, published after the 50th anniversary of the Great
Famine, devotes only a single paragraph to it (Lê Mậu Hãn et al. 2000, 11), while another
textbook solely emphasizes the famine’s statistical dimensions: the number of deaths
and the material assistance the Provisional Revolutionary Government provided (Hoàng
Phương 2015). Because the famine had such a tremendous impact on Vietnamese social
life, culture, and economic issues (Hoàng Văn Đức 1946, 16–17), it should have been
treated more comprehensively. The situation has not significantly changed, however.
The Communist Party’s annual yearbook devotes only four pages to the famine (Đảng
Cộng sản Việt Nam 2008, 921–925), nearly all of it concerning the precipitating causes.
What accounts for the marginal place of the famine in the historical imagination in
these representations of the past? While no single cause explains the famine’s diminutive
role in contemporary historiography, the Communist Party’s manipulation of statistical
evidence is surely implicated. Of course, such manipulation is not limited to the Great
Famine. Statistics have long formed a key component of the Communist Party’s efforts
to centralize all forms of representation through itself by claiming to be the primary, if
not exclusive, agent of unity as well as moral and economic progress (MacLean 2013).
The Party’s representational strategies have diversified somewhat in recent years. But
the focus here is on how bureaucratic categories and practices affect the form and content
of what can be remembered about the Great Famine. With this goal in mind, the remain-
der of the essay examines a highly unusual state-sponsored documentation project and
the archive that has resulted from it. The details provide a common point of departure
for ongoing debates regarding how the Great Famine and the hungry ghosts it created
should be properly memorialized and commemorated. These debates, although notable
in their own right, also reflect broader tensions concerning two closely related matters.
History Reformatted 193
First, which tragedies of the past still need to be afforded a place in the present given the
government’s heavy emphasis on the socioeconomic development targets it has set for
the future? (The current goal, according to the official slogan, is to build “a strong, inde-
pendent, prosperous and democratic country.”) And who should retain primary control
over how these commemorative spaces are used—government officials or ordinary
citizens?
Formatting an Archive
The Joint Vietnam-Japan Cooperation Committee for Researching the Famine of 1945
grew out of a larger study, begun in 1986, to jointly examine the effects of the Japanese
occupation of Indochina during World War II. The massive 728-page study, titled Nạn
đói 1945 ở Việt Nam: Những chứng tích lịch sử (The Famine of 1945 in Vietnam: Some
historical evidence), was one result of this collaborative project (hereafter the Joint
Committee). The study, compiled by researchers from the Vietnamese Institute of
History in Hanoi and their counterparts from the University of Tokyo in Japan, collected
oral histories from hundreds of famine survivors in three phases during the early 1990s.
Excerpts from 157 of these “eyewitnesses” (nhân chứng) are featured in the volume and
constitute its evidentiary core. A number of other semiotic technologies play an impor-
tant supporting role as well. The most notable of these technologies include several
hundred pages of “inquest reference tables” (bảng tra cứu). The tables provide annotated
statistical breakdowns of local mortality rates, hand-drawn maps that depict the location
of unmarked mass graves, and 42 photographs of famine victims. The result is an ethno-
graphically detailed, though fragmentary and geographically uneven, depiction of the
Great Famine as it unfolded in 23 different locations across what is now northern and
central Vietnam. It also constitutes one of the most unusual memory projects ever
undertaken by a Vietnamese state research institute.
The study, officially framed as an impartial and objective inquiry, thus invites a
number of questions: first and foremost, why? What gaps were thought to exist in the
historical record? How are the materials it contains—especially the first-person testi-
monies, which are normally excluded from official accounts of the past—supposed to fill
them? My overarching discussion centers on what is imperfectly remembered in this
multi-sited “history from below,” a genre that is itself quite rare in Vietnam, to explore
these questions. My intent here is not to read the survivors’ accounts “against the grain”
in order to fashion a critical counter-narrative that challenges the evidentiary claims the
subaltern memories are used to make in the study. Such an exercise is questionable in
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most instances (Stoler 2009). Nor will I argue that the Vietnamese historians involved
deliberately excluded material related to the Great Famine that diverged from dominant
narratives regarding the period, although this may have in fact been the case. (I requested
but did not receive permission to review the interview transcripts kept in the Institute
of History’s archive.) Instead, I wish to take seriously Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s claim that
relations of power introduce “silences” at different moments in the process of historical
production through the making of sources, the organization of archives, and the crafting
of narratives (1995, 26–30, 82–83). Trouillot argues that these silences permit some
accounts of the past—but not others—to appear plausible. Drawing on his insights, I
explore the extent to which the procedures of the Joint Committee both produced and
silenced certain kinds of evidence and thereby determined which aspects of the Great
Famine could be memorialized and commemorated.
I should point out that a long-running and complex dispute between the governments
of Japan and Vietnam over reparations and development aid prompted the formation of
the Joint Committee and its study of the famine. A brief summary of the dispute follows,
as the 1995 volume contains quite limited information on it (Văn Tạo and Furuta 1995,
28–42). Forty-eight nations signed the Treaty of Peace with Japan on September 18,
1951. Less than two weeks later, Bảo Đại, the State of Vietnam’s head of state, informed
the Japanese government of his intent to request US$2 billion in war reparations. But
no records indicate that he pursued the matter. Prime Minister Ngô Đình Diệm, who
declared himself president of the newly created Republic of Vietnam (RoV) following a
rigged election in 1955, renewed the issue of reparations. His foreign minister, Vũ Mạnh
Mâu, submitted an aide-memoire (memorandum) to Ambassador Akira Konagaya on
September 18, 1956, requesting US$1 billion in paiements de bouche (reparations) for the
people who died during 1945 due to Japan’s military food policies and rice seizures by its
troops (Gunn 2011, 7).2) President Ngô Đình Diệm further asserted that Japanese mili-
tary forces had caused US$2 billion in war damages but limited the official request to
US$250 million. The Japanese government declared the total costs Diệm put forward as
being “fantastically excessive and absolutely unjustified” (ibid., 6). Following 18 months
of negotiations, the RoV foreign minister reduced the claim to US$200 million, but the
Japanese ambassador refused to consider any figure higher than US$50 million (ibid.).
The disagreement proved to be a significant obstacle to normalizing trade negotia-
tions for several more years. Eventually, the focus of the negotiations shifted from the
issue of war reparations to development aid, which resulted in a bilateral agreement,
2) On the differences between “reparations” and “grant aid” from Japanese perspectives, see Asomura
(2013, 138–191, 228–328).
History Reformatted 195
signed on May 13, 1959 (ibid., 7–8).3) (Most of the aid requested was earmarked for the
construction of the Đa Nhim hydroelectric project, which would become the RoV’s first
such dam.) The need for further aid and the intensification of the Second Indochina War
during the mid-1960s meant that subsequent discussions concerning famine-related com-
pensation did not occur. Similar dynamics shaped post-treaty negotiations between the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and Japan. Discussions also revolved around
grant aid, and DRV representatives did not raise the issue of famine deaths during them.
The monetary award was also much the same. The DRV received US$39 million, approx-
imately the same amount of aid that Japan granted to the RoV (Shiraishi and Furuta 1992,
18; Minami Yoshizawa, cited in Văn Tạo and Furuta 1995, 18–19).
Katsuichi Honda, a reporter best known for his books on the atrocities Japanese
troops committed against civilians in China during World War II, especially the Nanjing
Massacre, raised the issue of accountability a decade later. In 1973 he published an
article in Japan’s leading daily, Asahi Shimbun, in which he asserted that nearly a quarter
of a million people starved to death in Thái Bình Province during the Great Famine, and
his estimates from nearby Nam Định Province were even higher (Cao Văn Biền 1990,
451). Honda’s controversial claims prompted the Institute of History in Hanoi to conduct
further field and archival research in both provinces during 1992. The initial findings
appeared to confirm Honda’s findings, which inspired a joint team of Vietnamese and
Japanese historians to carry out a more systematic study.
The efforts to resolve the disagreements concerning the actual number of deaths
were more complicated than anticipated, due not only to the amount of time that had
elapsed but to the uneven nature of the extant source material. The Joint Committee’s
report divided the sources into three separate categories—material evidence, written
documents, and oral accounts—as a way to manage these problems (Văn Tạo and Furuta
1995, 19–27, 704–722). Lists in Vietnam, however, implicitly rank various kinds of evi-
dence in a way that privileges physical remains over historical records and these, in turn,
over individual memories. Nevertheless, the three categories all belong to the same
analytical field, as the information derived from one source helps define the others. From
this perspective, the boundaries that delineate the three kinds of evidence are thus less
3) An internal study reportedly conducted as the negotiations were taking place rejected the commonly
cited figure of two million deaths as Vietnamese Communist Party propaganda. Instead, the authors
of the official report allegedly concluded that no more than 300,000 Vietnamese died during the
famine, a figure significantly lower than earlier French estimates of 600,000–700,000. Reviewer B
contacted the director of the 1st Southeast Asian Division in the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
to verify the existence of the internal study and its conclusion; however, the director’s office has
yet to respond. Interestingly, Văn Tạo maintains that 1.97 million died at a minimum, whereas
Motoo Furuta believes that the research done to date is not sufficient to “fix the total,” as reported
by Reviewer B.
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clear than one might assume.
This blurring of boundaries is most evident in the organization of the written docu-
ments. The researchers did not consistently distinguish primary sources from secondary
ones or works drawn from vastly different genres such as memoirs and statistical atlases.
Instead, other considerations shaped the “section” (phần) into which researchers placed
them. Section one, for example, contains more than half of the known sources relevant
to the Great Famine, collectively labeled “contemporaneous sources” (đương thời) docu-
ments. The period, although not explicitly defined, includes a diverse array of materials
from 1941 to 1945. The significance of this temporal frame is twofold. Most obviously,
the dates reflect the primary concern of the inquiry, which was to document the effects
of French and Japanese policies through the enumeration of the dead in different locales.
But the dates also illustrate how ideological assumptions influence the categorization of
sources—in this case, along a political continuum. The editors grouped the reports by
French colonial officials, Japanese military staff, and Vietnamese administrative person-
nel under the same heading, “lackeys” (chính quyền tay sai), despite important differences
in their form, content, and communicative purpose. Articles that appeared in popular
Vietnamese-language newspapers, such as Thanh Nghị (Public Opinion) and Bình Minh
(Dawn), were placed in a separate group, presumably because French and Japanese
officials censored them prior to publication. Documents prepared by the Indochinese
Communist Party (ICP) and the Việt Minh, however, as well as articles that appeared in
their clandestine publications, especially Cứu Quốc (Save the Nation) and Cờ Giải Phóng
(The Flag of Liberation), constituted the final group. By contrast, section three, which
forms the next largest collection of written documents, includes administrative records
that Communist Party cells and mass mobilization committees in 15 different provinces
produced both prior to and shortly after the 1945 August Revolution.
At first glance, these records appear misplaced; however, the report’s authors justi-
fied their separate categorization on the grounds that the documents were primarily
bureaucratic rather than political in nature. In most cases, these records languished in
back rooms for decades until it became fashionable for low-level officials to compile some
of the information they contained into amateur histories that highlighted district-level,
but more often provincial-level, contributions to the revolutionary struggle. This trend,
which began during the 1990s, helped precipitate the diverse range of official memory
projects that followed. The collection of oral testimonies, such as the ones featured in
the report on the Great Famine, is an important but understudied aspect of this trend.
The testimonies, due in part to the procedures used to recover them, evince considerable
similarities across the different locales studied; thus, they provide the basis of recasting
local experiences as “national” ones.
History Reformatted 197
Constructing Objectivity
Due to the continued dispute over the death toll, researchers were preoccupied with
gathering evidence they believed would finally document the “true” scale of the Great
Famine, hence the empirical nature of the questions that oriented the inquiry as a whole.
Where did the famine originate? Which places experienced the most deaths?4) Which
socioeconomic classes were most affected and why? Since the Great Famine left some
areas untouched and decimated others, the researchers limited their site selection to
locations that had experienced “average” death rates, which they defined as between 30
percent and 70 percent of the total local population (Văn Tạo and Furuta 1995, 684–685).
The researchers then collected oral histories from famine survivors in these locations
with the assistance of local officials. To help further ensure the findings would be as
representative as possible, the researchers also privileged what they regarded to be
“typical” accounts rather than “extraordinary” ones in the report.
Taken together, these oral histories form the evidentiary core of the report. Yet,
despite the crucial role these accounts play in it, no standard format was created to
present the information they contain in a uniform manner. All of the eyewitnesses are
named. However, some entries include other biographical details such as their age, place
of residence, and/or occupation, while others do not. Similar variation marks the use of
photographs, which accompanied approximately two-thirds of the eyewitnesses. Most
of the images mimic, in both size and style, those that appear on national identity cards—
a simple head-and-shoulder shot of the person who stares directly back at the camera
with no visible sign of emotion. But in other cases, the eyewitness is depicted in action,
pointing out a mass grave or discussing the Great Famine with the researchers. Each
entry also includes a “statement” (lời, literally a “speech” or “address”), which consists
of an excerpt taken from a longer first-person account that researchers elicited from
survivors. These too vary in terms of length, detail, and narrative style. But nearly all
of them exhibit a peculiar mix of anecdotes and statistics concerning family, hamlet,
and/or village mortality rates:
Trần Đình Khả, 76 years old (Hải Dương Province)
I was 26 years old in 1945, and I am able to “testify” (chứng kiến) that the famine was terrible. [It
is] something I will remember forever. My paternal uncle’s family was too hungry, so they had to
head off toward the bridge in order to beg for food. I don’t know if they died of starvation. Dạo’s
4) Thái Bình Province, in northern Vietnam, and Thanh Hóa Province, in central Vietnam, are thought
to have suffered the greatest number of deaths (Bùi Minh Dũng 1995, 574; Quang Thiện 2005).
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family had five people; all five of them died of hunger. Diền’s family had four people, and all four
died. Phương, five people died of hunger, the entire household. Mạc, Nhiêu Lãn, and Bồng died
of hunger. There were no reed mats to bundle them in. Their deaths were utterly tragic, their
corpses only bones enclosed in skin. [They] died at the head of the road at the corner of the mar-
ket. To look at them was truly horrible. (Văn Tạo and Furuta 1995, 393–394)
The excerpt, which is representative of the majority of those found throughout the report,
exemplifies how fact and affect intermingle uneasily with one another in the memories
of those who “witnessed” the Great Famine, at least as they appear here in written form.
I explore this tension in greater detail later, but I note them here to raise a broader ques-
tion: specifically, what effect does the “content of the form” have upon historical repre-
sentations of the Great Famine (White 1987, 26–28)? In other words, how does the
content of stories we wish to tell shape the form the narrative takes? This effect is most
apparent in the pairing of the photograph with the excerpts taken from the famine sur-
vivors. These visual and textual elements, when combined, create the appearance of
peasants and laborers speaking about their personal experiences as distinct individuals,
which is quite rare in histories officially approved for publication in Vietnam.
The process by which memories were “individually” recalled also remains some-
what unclear. Researchers sought out informants who had not only survived the Great
Famine but were also old enough to understand what they saw unfold around them, which
meant the vast majority were between 75 and 85 years of age when interviewed. Of
these survivors, researchers gave greater weight to those who held positions in local
Party cells or mass organizations or otherwise “served the people” (phục vụ nhân dân)
during the struggle to achieve national independence. The researchers did so on the
grounds that their official positions afforded them greater access to information, which
explains why more than one-quarter of all the survivors were members of this category.
The preference for these survivors also reflects the widely held belief among older
Vietnamese that individuals who participated in the struggle for independence did so for
entirely selfless reasons. “Purity” (sự trong sạch) and “honesty” (thật thà) are two com-
monly used adjectives to describe them—hence the assumption that such individuals can
provide accurate, factual accounts of what happened in specific locales as well.
These observations are not intended to suggest that the effort to identify “objective”
sources was a disingenuous one designed to obscure the agendas of those who conducted
the inquiry. Rather, the point is to draw attention to some of the assumptions that made
the category of “objectivity” possible in this context. Doing so is important given the
highly “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1991) of the survivors and the methodology
researchers used to elicit information about the Great Famine. For example, a casual
glance at the report reveals that hearsay, rumor, and other kinds of factually suspect
History Reformatted 199
information permeate many of the eyewitness accounts. Other factors, such as the pas-
sage of time, the existence of cultural scripts for recounting hardship and suffering, and
the use of standardized questionnaires to elicit information from famine survivors affected
what could be remembered about the Great Famine. Admittedly, Vietnamese state
historians rarely explicitly discuss such concerns, in part because they raise difficult
questions concerning the authority of any narrative to provide a “found” rather than
constructed account of what happened (White 1987, 20–21). But these concerns are
further marginalized here as a consequence of the stated purpose of the inquiry: to elicit
memories that would help enumerate the dead.
Interestingly, efforts to extract targeted forms of recollection from the survivors
produced two dramatically different “statements” about the Great Famine. The first
consisted of vignettes that provided powerful “snapshots” of what conditions were like,
often in disturbing detail. Đỗ Mạnh Đích, who was a blacksmith at the time, provides a
representative example. In it, he recalls what happened when residents from a nearby
village traveled to his town to beg for food at the local market after Japanese troops had
uprooted all of their rice seedlings. Since rice stocks were nearly exhausted, none of the
traders wanted to give away any of the bran—a by-product of the milling process—they
had left to sell, which led to this desperate scene:
. . . People would pilfer the bran by thrusting their hand into it and eating it off their fingers. The
vendors took their shoulder-poles and lashed them as they ran by. As one person got lashed,
another person would run up and grab some bran to eat. The situation was the same along the
sewers. People sat down, and groped around in the water looking for some seeds or grain to
eat . . . (Văn Tạo and Furuta 1995, 542–543)
By contrast, the second kind of “statement” took the form of “memory-data,” i.e., highly
detailed statistical lists that provided figures on the number of fatalities a particular family,
hamlet, or village suffered. Nguyễn Khinh, who was the secretary in a commune-level
People’s Council during the Great Famine, provides just such a statement:
Compared with other patrilineages the Nguyễn experienced the fewest deaths. Approximately
half the Tô lineage died. The entire Lê lineage died, except for Khoa, who was 18 years old that
year. Half the Hoàng lineage also died. The Đặng lineage had three taxpayers [but] 15 household
members died, leaving only two. Compared with the Tây Bắc Hamlet, in which two-thirds died,
the Nam Thị Hamlet had more deaths. Adding up the entire village of Hiên, two-thirds died. Hoàng
Mạnh Tiếp’s family had eight members . . . and they all died . . . (ibid., 77)
Since the primary goal of the study was to document the scale of the Great Famine as
accurately as possible, the preoccupation with the facticity of the information extracted
from the survivors is not entirely unexpected. However, the relentless focus on what
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was remembered at the expense of how it was recalled signals an ethnographic refusal
(Ortner 1995), one that continually resists rather than incorporates the meaning of the
survivors’ experiences and their aftereffects. Consequently, the report sheds surpris-
ingly little light on how the Great Famine affected the survivors personally, the com-
munities in which they lived, and Vietnamese society as a whole.
Allocating Blame
A relatively small number of examples of popular verse describing the hardships of life
under French-Japanese rule during World War II have survived to make the transition
into published form. Not surprisingly, much of it centers on food (Vũ Ngọc Phan 2000,
596–598). Some poems lament wartime policies that forced people off land where their
ancestors were buried, whereas others assert that it was better to be reduced to eating
roasted manioc and boiled sweet potatoes—two crops commonly fed to swine—year-
round than to become “quislings” (Việt gian). During interviews with elderly Vietnamese
in the Red River Delta, I frequently asked whether they recalled any examples from their
youth. Three examples, because of their overlapping content and their broader relevance
to the allocation of blame and thus moral accountability, are included here:
Version 1
Nhật cười, Tây khóc, Tàu lo
Việt Nam Độc lập chết co đầy đường.
The Japanese laugh, the French weep, the Chinese worry
The Vietnamese, independent, curl up and die all on the streets.
Version 2
Tàu cười, Tây khóc, Nhật no
Việt Nam hết gạo chết co đầy đường.
The Chinese smile, Westerners weep, the Japanese are full
Vietnam is out of rice, [they] curl up and die in the streets.
Version 3
Mấy năm thiếu thóc các vì ai?
Làm dân ta chết hơn hai triệu người,
Ta thì khóc, no thì cười.
How many years [have we had] to pay extra paddy and on account of whom?
[They] made our people die, more than two million people,
We cry, while the full smile.
History Reformatted 201
The ditties are reminiscent of satirical folk narratives (vè) common to northern and cen-
tral Vietnam. Although vè are far longer and follow a four-syllable rhyme scheme rather
than the six-eight form used here, they serve a similar purpose—namely, to pass judg-
ment on people who transgressed the boundaries of morally acceptable conduct (unseemly
family quarrels, households that beat their servants, etc.) by singing their stories out
loud, but where no one could see them. But in other cases, the narratives commented
on historical incidents, such as the heroic, though typically unsuccessful, struggles by
ordinary peasants and scholar-mandarins to hold abusive and corrupt officials accountable
for their actions (Vũ Ngọc Phan 2000). Since the poetic forms themselves are quite
flexible, the content could be modified to suit the particular circumstances in which they
were sung, which meant multiple versions were often in circulation simultaneously, as
is the case here. In each instance, the emotional response of the different nationalities
to the Great Famine varies. However, no clear reason is offered as to why one will
“smile” while the others will alternately “weep,” “worry,” or “be full.” Additionally,
without any particles to indicate tense, it is impossible to tell whether these affective
states are real or imagined reactions to the Japanese occupation (the past), the Great
Famine itself (present), or what the prospective end of World War II will bring (the
future). Unfortunately, my efforts to obtain further details on the ditties from the survi-
vors I spoke with were met with a strikingly similar response: “That is what I heard.”
Nonetheless, several constants emerged. The first is the repetition of the verb cười,
which is rich in its varied meanings and occupies the ambiguous space between “to smile”
or “to laugh,” on the one hand, and “to laugh at” or “to mock,” on the other. Without
other lexical elements, it is not entirely clear which of the two was intended. However,
the verb “to cry/weep” (khóc) offers a further clue since it is closely paired with cười in
the adjacent clause in each of the three examples that I collected. What kind of smile,
but a false one, is elicited by the sound of someone weeping? The same theme reappears
in the last line of each of the three versions, which all share a common conclusion: inde-
pendence is empty when there is no rice in one’s belly.
By contrast, the eyewitnesses in the Joint Committee’s report commonly speak of
the joint French-Japanese regime. Sometimes the order is reversed, but the hyphen
always remains, which suggests the average famine survivor saw little to differentiate
them, even though underground Việt Minh publications during the period in question
carefully distinguished the evils of French colonialism from those of Japanese fascism.
When pressed, most of the people I interviewed identified the Japanese and their “policy
of stealing paddy” via French and Vietnamese intermediaries as the primary cause of the
Great Famine, which a combination of floods, pests, and the bitterly cold weather com-
pounded (Trần Văn Giàu 1962, 122–123; Bose 1990; Phạm Quang Trung, 1990). The
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Comité pour le Commerce et L’Exportation des paddys, riz et dérivés (CODIRIZ) was
the most visible symbol of this policy; it also serves as the primary point of departure for
debates regarding the proper allocation of blame. The following details focus on blame,
as a detailed discussion of French and Japanese food policies is available elsewhere (Gunn
2014, 135–164).
A joint Franco-Japanese agreement established CODIRIZ in May 1941 to subsidize
the cost of the occupation and, later, the war effort more generally. The managers of
CODIRIZ instituted a compulsory rice purchase program shortly afterward. The impact
upon rural households in Tonkin and Annam was immediate and dramatic, as a majority
of them already lacked sufficient land to meet their dietary needs. The program required
all rural households to sell a fixed percentage of the paddy harvested on each mẫu (3,600
square meters) of land they owned at well below market rates to its agents. Japanese
regulations also forbade people from accumulating or dealing in cereals (Nguyễn Quyết
1980, 9). Policymakers incorrectly assumed that each mẫu of land could produce between
four and five tons of paddy per year. Actual yields were much lower and further varied
from place to place; consequently, the purchase program consumed 50 percent to 80
percent of the actual annual rice harvest (Trần Văn Giàu 1962, 122–123; Văn Tạo and
Furuta 1995, 204; Hội Nông Dân Việt Nam 1998, 124). The quota system was thus
crucially dependent upon village elites. They collaborated with the much-hated and
feared rice unions (liên đoàn thóc gạo) that CODIRIZ outsourced to collect paddy. Yet,
there are almost no references to them in the report. Where references do occur—fewer
than five in the entire volume—eyewitnesses mention them in dispassionate terms.
Indeed, they focus on isolated incidents where an unnamed landlord or wealthy peasant
refused to help neighbors in need rather than the systemic nature of the exploitation.
The relative silence is striking since the violence and corruption associated with
these organizations, which operated with the full consent of French and Japanese officials,
was well known and widely documented in the press at the time. According to Việt Nông,
a journalist who wrote for the Sunday edition of Trung Bắc, rice unions took advantage
of their positions in every province to extort “small gifts” (vi thiềng), i.e., bribes, and to
illegally confiscate paddy stockpiled as a safeguard against famine, which they consumed
and/or sold at a huge profit on the black market (Bùi Minh Dũng 1995, 615; Văn Tạo and
Furuta 1995, 619–620). Nguyễn Phúc Lộc, a journalist with Trí Tân, reached the same
conclusion, and he noted that the program had “created a gang of thieves that was reduc-
ing the people of the North to starvation” (Văn Tạo and Furuta 1995, 611–612). In
response, peasants with sufficient land to produce a surplus employed a number of tactics
to limit how much paddy they were forced to sell to the rice unions. Some reduced
production levels to meet their subsistence needs in addition to the required quota, which
History Reformatted 203
rapidly led demand to outstrip available supply. Others abandoned nearby fields to
secretly cultivate distant ones. Still others illegally transferred arable land to economi-
cally less fortunate households, who were often kin, to work for them in exchange for a
portion of their harvests (Marr 1995, 97n103).
These everyday forms of resistance, in conjunction with inclement weather, con-
tributed to a 15 percent decline in the amount of paddy produced between 1941 and 1944,
even though the total area under cultivation remained approximately the same (Shiraishi
and Furuta 1992; Văn Tạo and Furuta 1995, 583–600; Nguyễn Sinh Cúc and Nguyễn Văn
Tiêm 1996, 13, Table 2). The decline prompted French officials, who were likely pres-
sured by Japanese ones, to take more decisive action; however, their decision to further
raise quotas, raid private granaries, and sharply restrict the import of paddy from Cochin-
china to compel compliance only served to exacerbate existing food shortages. These
shortages rapidly gave way to widespread famine during the summer of 1944.
Food shortages were not limited to the countryside. In Hanoi, monthly food rations
declined dramatically between late 1943 and early 1945 from 15 to 7 kilograms of paddy
per person. Much of that paddy was either stale or moldy and heavily cut with rice husks
and bran, according to the survivors I spoke with in Hanoi. The steady decline in size
and quality of the rations fed fears that existing stockpiles were approaching exhaustion.
The fear led the black market price for paddy to rise dramatically from 57 to 700–800
VNĐ/kilogram over this period. The price eventually peaked at 2,400 VNĐ in July of
1945 (Đặng Phong 2002, 71). Vietnamese-language newspapers, although subject to
censorship prior to publication, also carried regular reports and, later, photographs of the
worsening famine as well. Several poets hauntingly conveyed in verse what it was like
to helplessly watch thousands of men, women, and children collapse and die of starvation
in the streets of the city on a daily basis (e.g., Vũ Khiêu 1945; Bàng Bá Lân [1957] 1985;
Tố Hữu [1945] 2003). Yet, high-ranking French and Japanese officials remained largely
silent, at least publicly, on the mounting crisis (Marr 1995, 96–107).
In recent decades, a limited number of memoirs written by former high-ranking
French officials have appeared, but these accounts either minimize or overlook the sig-
nificance of the Great Famine entirely. By contrast, Japanese memoirs, although equally
small in number, offer a somewhat more accurate description, perhaps because low-
ranking soldiers authored them. These autobiographical accounts notwithstanding, no
persuasive new evidence has emerged to counter Vietnamese claims that neither French
nor Japanese officials took any decisive action to curtail the famine; instead, representa-
tives of both sides attributed the disaster to the policies and incompetent personnel of
the other (Huỳnh Kim Khánh 1986, 301; Bùi Minh Dũng 1995; Marr 1995, 105n140).
But to this day, many elderly Vietnamese I spoke with continue to assert that although
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the Japanese were primarily responsible for the conditions that gave rise to the Great
Famine, it was the French who sought to exploit the tragedy as a means to delay Vietnam’s
independence. However, the authors of the Joint Committee’s report, as well as the
famine survivors featured in it, are mute on the question of blame and how it should be
properly apportioned. The excerpts included in the report contain minimal descriptions
of Japanese soldiers and their conduct, and almost none that pertain to French ones.
Ethnic Chinese, who figured in two of the three ditties described earlier, are completely
absent, even though they played a crucial role in the rural economy as moneylenders and
rice mill owners. So, too, did Vietnamese who actively collaborated with the French-
Japanese regime, such as members of the rice unions. This silence reflects the lack of
sentiment expressed in the report more generally.
Suppressing Sentiment
At first glance, the heavy emphasis on personal testimonies of the eyewitnesses would
appear to undercut the broader goal of collecting and presenting “objective” data on the
Great Famine. But the members of the Joint Committee repeatedly justified the inclusion
of the oral accounts by claiming that their recollections made the report more “penetrat-
ing” (sâu sắc), “truthful” (chân thực), and “appalling” (rùng rợn). The intended effect
was to convey the “terrible” (khủng khiếp) nature of the event. Yet, the reader is con-
fronted with a persistent flatness in the oral testimonies that leaves one strangely
unmoved. The flatness is particularly striking when juxtaposed against the highly emo-
tional accounts, excerpted at the end of the same report, from Vietnamese writers and
journalists who survived the Great Famine, the report’s editors among them (Văn Tạo
and Furuta 1995, 610–679).
To a certain extent, the form conditions the content. Many of the testimonies, for
example, reproduce a style of oral expression that I have repeatedly heard when ordinary
people are requested by government officials to express their views on a particular topic.
Typically, such orations begin with the stock phrase: “I request permission to express . . .”
(xin phép phát biểu . . .). Then, after specifying which issue(s) are to be addressed, the
speaker locates himself or herself in bureaucratic space and time, as is the case below:
I am Hoàng Hái Nam, 68 years old, residing in Pác Gà Village, Nhượng Bạn Commune [now in Bế
Triêu Commune], Hoà An District, Cao Bằng [Province]. My family during the period 1944–45
had five people; we had 10 pùng [5,000 square meters] of land and were considered to be a middle
peasant household. When the French colonialists built the farm and stables in Bê-na, they stole
one-third of the land . . . (ibid., 279)
History Reformatted 205
Visually reinforcing the flatness of such accounts are the “inquest reference tables” (bảng
tra cứu), which consume more than one-third of the 728-page study. The tables always
precede the oral accounts of the eyewitnesses and offer a quite different sense of the
Great Famine. Unlike the accounts, the information included on these charts, which
mimics the form used today for detailing local land tenure patterns, varied considerably.
Typically, the charts were organized in hierarchically descending order by village,
hamlet, lineage, and then household. Some of them merely recorded the names, number
of people within the household, and the household’s economic situation (i.e., amount of
land, draft animals, and type of house—either wood or bamboo) at the time of the Great
Famine. Others included the number of deaths within the household and their kinship
status (son, mother, etc.). Still others, more elaborate in design, stated the primary
occupation of the household members, age at the time of death, current location of sur-
viving members if known, and detailed statistical breakdowns of death rates by hamlet.
Again, no explanation is provided for this idiosyncratic presentation, which may
simply reflect the disparate interests of individual members on the research team and/or
the level of detail available in different locales. But regardless of the answer, the same
question remains: what evidentiary weight should be given to these decontextualized
fragments of people’s lives that fill the tables, especially as the report contains few
methodo logical details on the circumstances of their collection? Were the statistics
derived from the memories of the survivors and their descendants? Or were local docu-
ments and the revolutionary histories they later informed crucial to this effort as well?
Alternatively, were the tables used as memory aids to prompt the recollections of the
eyewitnesses, as I often witnessed during my fieldwork? If so, does this help explain
why detailed mortality statistics are so firmly embedded within their oral accounts?
Close attention to the respective content of both forms of evidence suggests that
each helped fashion the contours of the other. Access to arable land, for example, clearly
emerged as an important site for knowledge production. Stage I of the research project
narrowly focused on the impact of the Great Famine on one commune, Tây Lương, in
Thái Bình Province. While overall mortality rates were severe throughout the area (over
66 percent of the inhabitants perished), households that had access to some private land
in addition to the communal fields not surprisingly reported lower death rates (Văn Tạo
and Furuta 1995, 120). Questions regarding landholdings became progressively more
detailed during Stages II and III of the project. Interestingly, the data collected on this
topic resulted in dozens of inquest tables that noted in precise detail what portion of a
sào (360 square meters) a household cultivated, but not the “class status” that was com-
monly associated with its inhabitants (ibid., 444–447). The omission is interesting for
several reasons. Bureaucrats employed such “Marx-ish” categories from the 1950s
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onward to label people in ideological terms (Pelley 2002, 9). The designation given had
a determining effect on one’s life chances, as well as those of one’s children (MacLean
2013, 31–53). These designations are rarely employed in everyday speech today. But
scholars and local officials routinely project them back in time to describe colonial-era
class relations and to justify the postcolonial campaigns in the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam to abolish the material basis of “feudal” and “capitalist” forms of exploitation in
the countryside (ibid., 54–110). Consequently, one would expect that class terminology
would permeate the testimonies of the eyewitnesses, especially as more than half of them
were low-level cadres who “served the people” during the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, this is
not the case.
A few scattered references to a landlord or a collaborator (almost always anonymous)
can be found in the report, but almost none of the witnesses openly or directly blamed
other Vietnamese. Two tragic examples from Tây Lương Commune in Thái Bình Province
follow. Nguyễn Văn Tư sold all his rice to buy his neighbors’ precious heirlooms, and
then died of starvation when his food supplies ran out and no one was willing to buy back
these goods. Nguyễn Văn Lý made the same wager and similarly lost. Of the 16 people
in the Lý household, 15 died (Văn Tạo and Furuta 1995, 689).
However, vast areas of productive land were abandoned or sold for a song as the
owners, both French and Vietnamese, fled or died of starvation and the cholera that
quickly followed. Conditions were reputedly so severe in nine provinces in Tonkin that
approximately 50 percent of the arable land was temporarily abandoned during the winter
of 1945 (HNDVN 1998, 154). Landlords, at least those with better luck than either Tư
or Lý, reportedly bought much of this abandoned land at prices a mere fraction of their
market value, which became a major point of contention when land reforms began in the
mid-1950s (Trần Phương 1968, 56–84). But again, no one mentions these practices in
the study.
Nowhere is this silencing of affect and, by extension, blame more apparent than in
the accounts of what people ate during the famine. Individual recollections typically take
the form of lists that convey both the passage of time and the steady decline of viable
food sources, but not the terror this experience must have evoked when family members
began to die in great numbers. Cổ Kim Thành offers a typical example: “During that
time in my house, we first ate gruel, after that rice bran with pennywort [and] sweet
potato vines. After that was gone, we ate roasted rice bran, with a little bit of salt, which
caused bad heartburn and extreme constipation” (Văn Tạo and Furuta 1995, 488). By
contrast, famine survivors I spoke with in Hưng Yên and Hải Dương, as well as other
written accounts I gathered over the years, vividly describe the taste, textures, and smells
of what they were able to eat as the sources available to them became increasingly scarce.
History Reformatted 207
The first to disappear were sources of protein, they explained. Meat, never common,
disappeared quickly as people consumed all their chickens and ducks and then the frogs,
snakes, salted fish, and field rats; after that, they ate their own dogs, cats, and songbirds.
Bad weather and poor storage facilities meant that stale, musty rice, though widely
despised, remained the staple food, at least during the early months of the Great Famine.
When cooked, it produced a sour smell that caused most people to lose their appetite.
To help fool themselves, survivors told me, they mixed stale rice with water to produce
a weak gruel to which small bits of whatever was still on hand could be added. Water
spinach and sweet potato vines were common, as were other fast-growing vegetables,
such as bitter melons and mustard greens. Aubergines and salt, according to one sur-
vivor, made the gruel more palatable because “they went together perfectly, like the
moon loves the color white.” But even these vegetables, which form the cornerstone of
the everyday diet of the rural poor, began to disappear as peasants became too weak to
grow them. This left pennywort leaves, since their sharp, acrid smell helped counter-
balance the gruel’s insipidity, as well as banana and potato peels, soybean dregs, rice
bran, and corn stalks. But these scraps, which Vietnamese normally fed to their pigs,
quickly became scarce as neighbors “began to steal from one another to eat,” one sur vivor
confessed. When this swill was exhausted, those who sought to stay alive turned to
edible grasses and plants, such as dayflower and duckweed, which traditionally served
as meals of last resort whenever crops failed.
But perhaps the most tragic aspect of the famine concerned those people who died
from “being full” (chết no). Famine victims require the careful reintroduction of foods in
small quantities, due to the deterioration of the digestive system and to correct for mul-
tiple nutritional deficiencies brought about by chronic malnutrition or the complete
absence of food. Many people were either unaware of this need or, more likely, simply
could not control themselves when they finally got access to some food, especially during
the spring harvest of 1945. By this point, the Great Famine had already lasted six months
in most places. According to Nguyễn Thị Chúng, people in her hamlet went out to the
drought-stricken fields in March, just prior to the harvest, where they ate the immature
rice grains raw. Many of them, she noted, promptly died from intestinal blockages (ibid.,
326). In other places, people were able to wait until April, when the rice was ready for
harvest. But again, their patience proved insufficient. Trần Văn Sử lost four of his rela-
tives, including his maternal grandmother, when the smell of partially steamed rice
overcame them. According to Sử, they ate the contents of the pot before the rice had
completely cooked and died a short time afterward (ibid., 454–455). Nguyễn Duy Nhi
also watched his paternal uncle eat four small bowls of rice and then die (ibid., 259).
Similar examples are scattered throughout the text. Yet, the circumstances are
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again described in strikingly unemotional terms and frequently appear almost incidental
due to the prominence eyewitnesses gave in their “testimonies” to enumerating the
dead. One startling exception to this pattern appears in the report. Nguyễn Thị Chúng,
quoted above, was 10 years old when the Great Famine began. When asked by the
research team what she remembered, Chúng responded in “double-seven six eight”
(song thật lục bát) verse. Chúng noted that the rhyme scheme, which is typically used in
Vietnam to chant lengthy elegies and ballads, helped preserve the events in her mind.
An excerpt from her 75-line poem follows:
People appear like underworld ghosts,
Wearing torn ill-matched clothing,
Peering at you for a long while without showing their eyes.
Eating pennywort leaves, clusters of figs and amaranth
Banana tubers boiled with a side plate of salt
Eat hoping to ward off our hungry stomachs.
Dry cakes pretending that they are rice dumplings filled with green bean paste.
People slit open sweet potatoes and smeared them with ancient bran dregs
To keep from wilting like swine.
Ponder how depressing and miserably wretched this is and then
Judge those watching outside the store
What reason is there for their misery? (ibid., 325–326)
What I find most distinctive in this poem is the open recognition of misery and depres-
sion, especially when one compares it to the emotional flatness of the other eyewitness
reports. But it is the issue of non-judgment, upon which the excerpt ends, that fore-
grounds these differences most clearly. In Chúng’s view, the starving were already little
more than hungry ghosts. For this reason, they should be forgiven—if not entirely
absolved—for the shameful acts they frequently committed in the effort to remain alive.
Depersonalizing Suffering
Võ An Ninh captured on film what Chúng conveyed through verse. Ninh was a young
photographer when the Great Famine began, and he traveled throughout Tonkin on
assignment to document the tragedy as it happened. His photographs were first pub-
lished in the Việt Minh’s Cứu Quốc (Save the Nation) magazine (No. 133, January 3, 1946)
and then quickly reprinted elsewhere. Forty-two plates of his black-and-white photo-
graphs are reproduced at the end of the Joint Committee’s report, and their content forms
a stark contrast with the rest of the report. The report’s authors state that they included
them because Ninh’s photographs “note the truthfulness [of what happened], and call on
History Reformatted 209
us to remember, with deep grief and resentment, what can never be forgotten” (Văn Tạo
and Furuta 1995, 673). In a later interview, Ninh said his photo-“reportage” (phóng sự)
constituted a visual denunciation of the French and Japanese crimes but added that what
struck him the most was the inescapable smell of the dead and of those about to die (ibid.,
679). These sentiments, which stand in marked contrast to the subdued tone of the Joint
Committee’s report as a whole, are embedded in the images themselves, but in a manner
that depersonalizes the victims, hence the additional attention they receive here.
Vietnamese reportage first appeared in 1932. The genre was modeled after inves-
tigative French reportage, which itself was derived from the literary tradition of social
realism. But the Vietnamese word for reportage carried an additional connotation. Phóng
sự means “to blow up” or “to magnify events” and conveyed the popular understanding
that it was acceptable, if not required, for the writer to enlarge the facts to achieve a
desired aesthetic and/or political effect (Lockhart 1996, 27). By using this term, Ninh is
signaling that the “truth” of the Great Famine requires something more than “facts” to
fully represent the tragedy to people who did not personally endure it. Ninh achieves
his desired effect in several ways. Most of his photos are hand-signed on the front
(though without the requisite diacritics) rather than the back, as if to evoke Western-style
paintings and other artworks. The lengthy captions, with their liberal use of exclama-
tion points, also move beyond simply factual descriptions to create short, almost cine-
matic stills that dictate what we are to conclude from the presented image. Photograph
No.
18, for instance, is a close-up shot (head and shoulders) of a male corpse lying on
the ground, with disheveled hair, and severely sunken eyes staring blankly upward. The
caption reads, “Dead and unable to shut [his] eyes! The rancor and bitterness are spent
here!”
The emotional power of the photographs arises not simply from their content, which
is often disturbing in its own right, but through their juxtaposition with the “testimonies”
in the report, as previously mentioned. Photos of the nearly dead in Thái Bình and Nam
Định Provinces show small groups of emaciated women and children standing, squatting,
or lying down on the ground. The subjects are either dressed in filthy rags or completely
naked. Their gaze is aimed in every direction, often directly at the camera lens, but only
rarely at each other. The recently dead, by contrast, appear in great numbers and take
the form of corpses piled on wagon carts and the back of flatbed trucks or in great stacks
at impromptu graveyards. Still others are shown wrapped in mats made of sedge—
normally used in rural areas as a dining surface—and then placed in shallow graves in
rice fields. The differences in formal composition aside, all of the individuals portrayed
in Ninh’s photographs are depicted as nameless victims whose anonymity is further
reinforced by the captions that accompany them (see also Campbell 2012). These cap-
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tions offer little to contextualize the scenes Ninh captured on film. Instead, the captions
instruct viewers on how to respond emotionally to their visual content, compassion for
those “near the earth and far from heaven” (gần đất xa trời), and outrage on behalf of the
already dead.
The instructions provide a useful reminder of a broader dilemma people faced at the
time: namely, what should be done with the corpses, especially given the dangers they
presented to the people who handled them? Ironically, professional gravediggers were
often the first to die because they had no arable land of their own and thus no reliable
sources of income and food. As the speed with which people died accelerated, others
had to find ways to dispose of their kith and kin to avoid cholera outbreaks. In rural areas,
the most common solution was the creation of “ghost graves” and “hunger tombs,” such
as the ones described at the outset of the essay, which were normally placed apart from
those used for one’s ancestors. This problem was further compounded in urban areas
due to the sheer number of people who arrived in cities each day in desperate search of
food but perished shortly afterward. Since there were no known relatives to take respon-
sibility for their unidentified remains, tens of thousands of corpses were placed in hastily
constructed mass graves, typically in close proximity to the bus stations and markets
where they collapsed.
In 1950 residents of Hanoi raised funds to exhume, wash, and then rebury some of
the remains in the city’s charity cemetery, according to the caretaker of the famine
memorial whom I met. The reburial effort was unusual for several reasons, the least of
which was that it occurred during the middle of the First Indochina War (1946–54).
Funerary practices in north and central Vietnam commonly require two burials, the first
in special containers located at geomantically auspicious locations in one’s own rice fields
or near bodies of water. The remains are generally exhumed after two years, when they
are carefully cleaned with alcohol, counted, and then re-interred by a ritual specialist, as
an incomplete skeleton can result in serious problems for the living as well as the dead.
However, the mass burials made this impossible, which perhaps explains the decision
made in 1951 to further violate normal mortuary practices and collectively entomb the
remains inside the memorial that was erected on the grounds of the charity cemetery.
Ninh’s photos of the reburial, although not published until five years after the process
was completed, showed the culturally unthinkable: piles of skulls three meters deep,
rows of femurs stacked like kindling, and jumbled masses of ribs. An elderly woman,
Nhung, who lived next to the memorial and regularly encountered the spirits of the
famine victims, told me the collective reburial was nonetheless a marked improvement.
Before 1951, she explained, it was not unusual to see bits of exposed bone lying on the
ground among the weeds; however, the decision to place all of the disarticulated remains
History Reformatted 211
in a large ossuary under the memorial ensured, in her opinion, that the “thirsty and
hungry victims of injustice” (oan hồn đói khát) would never be fully at peace.
Missing Resistance
Rural Vietnamese employed a range of strategies with mixed success to survive the
famine. Theft was an obvious choice, as was buying and selling rice on the black market
while supplies lasted. However, most turned to begging, but the scale of the famine was
so terrible that it was impossible. “The markets,” the former assistant chairman for Thái
Bình Province, Bùi Thọ Tỵ, recalled, were too crowded with people “who were nothing
but skin and bones” (Văn Tạo and Furuta 1995, 85). Nguyễn Văn Đảng similarly remem-
bers how Vũ Thị Ang (sic), who was 12 years old at the time, went to the local market
to beg after her grandmother, Bà Măn, collapsed. “She was too hungry to ask for food,
so she lay down at the corner of the market and died . . .” (ibid., 387). The comparatively
better off sold their property and clothing, piece by piece until there was nothing, and
then they sold their homes. Once the money from that was gone, they sold whatever
family heirlooms remained. But even that, according to Nguyễn Thanh Vân, the former
president of Thái Bình Province’s historical research council, was often not enough.
“When everything was gone [sold],” he explained, “you would still die, impoverished, of
starvation” (ibid., 87–88). The only other option, according to Chu Bá Hoan, was to leave
for the mountains in the far north, where rumor had it food could be had if one joined the
Việt Minh (ibid., 232).
There were, of course, more active forms of everyday resistance prior to the Great
Famine. Rural households, as I noted earlier, sought to hide the true extent of their
landholdings and to harvest crops in secret to limit what the rice unions and others could
seize from them. Fields officially designated by Japanese officials for the production of
cash crops (e.g., peanuts, cotton, and jute) needed to supply the war effort commonly
went under-planted and thus reduced the amount of materials available to them. In
several isolated instances, mobs “borrowed” (i.e., seized) paddy from landlords and
Japanese-managed granaries as well (ibid., 86). But these isolated actions were not
coordinated (ibid., 626–629); moreover, they appear to have largely ceased by August
1943, months before the Great Famine began (ibid., 124–131, 626–629). The apparent
lack of organized action is significant, again by contrast. Peasant uprisings hold a con-
spicuous place in the new histories of the national past written after the creation of the
DRV in 1954. Details regarding them are routinely cited as proof of two things: (1) the
revolutionary potential of Vietnamese peasants, and (2) the concomitant need for the
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Communist Party to guide their actions in an effective manner (Vũ Huy Phúc 1979, 387;
Pelley 1995).
The lack of large-scale, organized resistance on the eve of the Great Famine helps
explain the peculiar position of the tragedy within historical accounts of the period. Slump
famines are generally associated with a sudden and unexpected drop in the economy or
one of its sub-sectors, which produces catastrophic mortality rates—even though suffi-
cient food exists to prevent it. The sudden onset of the crisis instead leads to loss of a
household’s substantive ability to establish ownership over an adequate amount of food
to preserve life, either by growing it or by purchasing it. But in this particular instance,
there was no sudden economic downturn, only an inexorable decline that began in 1930
(Nguyễn Thế Anh 1987; Bùi Minh Dũng 1995, 580; Gunn 2014, 75–105). By the eve of
the famine’s beginnings, there was no fat left on the land—or, for that matter, on Viet-
namese bodies. So, within a very short period of time, people were too weak to do
anything.
For many of those who witnessed the Great Famine, their survival cannot be sepa-
rated from intense personal feelings of shame. Their shame has several causes, many
of which fall under the generic heading of selfish acts committed in the name of self-
preservation, such as the abandonment of families, sale of children, theft of food and
clothes from others who were weaker, and cannibalism (Tô Hoài 1994, 58–70; Marr 1995,
106n144; Văn Tạo and Furuta 1995, 638, 649). “A hungry belly renders the ears deaf,”
(bụng đói thì tai điếc) one survivor in Hanoi told me, by which he meant being momen-
tarily indifferent to the needs of others. But the crime that appears to haunt survivors
the most was a ritual one. As conditions worsened, it became impossible to present daily
offerings to one’s ancestors, much less to bury family members properly when everything
of value was sold to purchase food:
An offence against Heaven has been committed
The antiques are brought out
Everything belonging to the Grandparents is sold
The [lesser] lines of descent are also sold
Now, on this day, even the ancestors are sold.
This lullaby and the shame it describes alludes to another obstacle to state-sponsored
commemorations of the Great Famine. The Communist Party justifies its monopoly on
political power by placing itself at the head of a long line of “ancestors” that defended the
“nation” against “foreign aggressors” (Pelley 1995). The Great Famine did not con-
tribute to any well-known acts of heroic sacrifice, however. Consequently, the accounts
of individual suffering and passive nature of their deaths have little historical significance,
History Reformatted 213
except in statistical form as a means to validate Vietnamese claims regarding the scale
of the tragedy. When viewed from this perspective, the Great Famine constitutes an
example of suffering without “sacrifice,” a point Ninh’s photographs continually reem-
phasize.
The absence of any mention of “sacrifice” in the oral testimonies is a further
reminder that not all deaths are equal. Since the victims of the Great Famine did not die
in defense of the “nation,” they cannot be interred in the “martyrs’ cemeteries” (nghĩa
trạng liệt sĩ) the government has constructed throughout the country to honor individu-
als who sacrificed their lives to achieve its political goals. While the millions of hungry
ghosts produced from the First, Second, and Third Indochina Wars can be converted into
martyrs once their physical remains are located (typically with the assistance of spirit
mediums) and properly buried, victims of the Great Famine cannot be similarly trans-
formed. The ontological status of these hungry ghosts remains ambiguous, as no officially
approved ritualized procedures have emerged to change them into either benevolent
ancestors or the “exceptional dead” (Malarney 2007, 521), whose sacrifices are worthy
of emulation by others.
Partial Reincorporation
Despite the Joint Committee’s findings, the Great Famine remains a non-event, at least
within official histories of the revolutionary struggle. The tragedy produced no heroes,
a point that Văn Tạo, senior historian and co-editor of the volume, stated in the report’s
concluding section. He painfully noted that the indignities Vietnamese suffered and the
shame they carried from what they had to do to survive made people “lose their human-
ness” (Văn Tạo and Furuta 1995, 693). As time passes, therefore, the Great Famine
becomes increasingly marginal in depictions of the national past.
That said, restoration work on the 1951 memorial to the famine victims, which began
in 2001 under the direction of faculty at Hanoi Architectural University, updated its exist-
ing features using historical sources, and added some new ones. The result was a mod-
estly sized “zone of recollection” (khu tưởng niệm) on what remained of the former
charity cemetery. Sturdy cement walls and a padlocked gate now protect the zone,
poetically named “the sleeping place of a thousand years” (nơi an giấc ngàn thu), from
further encroachment by the private homes that surround it on all sides. Once inside the
zone, a curved pathway bordered by decorative trees and potted flowers leads visitors
around the monument, which was fully restored and repainted in the same colors as the
national flag. Two further elements were added in 2003. The first was a large polished
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black granite slab that features the full text of the 114-line poem by Vũ Khiêu, a famine
survivor and former vice-director of the Institute of History. (He composed the poem in
March 1945 to honor its victims.) The second was a small two-story structure built a few
meters to the left of the memorial. The top floor contains reproductions of the photo-
graphs Võ An Ninh took of the Great Famine on its walls, while the bottom one houses
a large altar for visitors. Thắng, the part-time caretaker of the zone, informed me that
visitors are largely limited to government officials and Japanese dignitaries, who peri-
odically come to “recall” (tưởng niệm) the dead with a ritual prayer, incense, and small
offerings, especially during the festival to appease the wandering souls of the dead.
The zone was not simply about honoring the famine victims, however. The funds
the People’s Committee allocated for it were drawn from a much larger item in the city’s
budget. Funds were earmarked for the restoration of other sites of historical and cultural
significance, then scheduled for completion prior to September of 2010, when nationwide
celebrations would mark the 1,000th anniversary of the founding of Hanoi. The restora-
tion thus prompted renewed discussions among the historians who participated in the
research project. The topic was whether the memorial, in its new form, should serve as
the national “site of memory” (Nora 1989) for all victims of the Great Famine. These
informal discussions gained strength prior to the 60th anniversary of the tragedy—a date
that carried additional cosmological significance. The year 2005 marked the completion
of the sexagenary calendar, which in Vietnam is used not only to predict the future, but
to account for the moral character of the past as well.
The historians organized a number of public events that year to mark this anni-
versary, which included the release of a revised and expanded version of the Joint
Committee’s 1995 report. But the most notable of these events was the symposium held
in May 2005. The event brought together scholars from the Institute of History, many
of whom had participated in the inquiry in 1995, assorted government officials, reporters,
and several eyewitnesses. Dr. Vũ Khiêu opened the event by tearfully reciting his well-
known poem regarding the event. The discussion then turned to the question of how to
prevent further ritual marginalization of the victims.
Professor Văn Tạo, the co-author of the 1995 report and a famine survivor as well,
argued that this outcome could best be forestalled through the establishment of “one
death anniversary and one shrine” (một ngày giỗ và một bàn thờ) to commemorate the
victims. Not everyone agreed with his proposal, however. Some participants noted that
it would require the adoption of a national standard, which would reduce and possibly
eradicate the diverse array of commemorative practices that now exist. For example,
one person pointed out that at least four different dates were currently used to present
offerings to the Great Famine’s victims: (1) September 3, when Hồ Chí Minh announced
History Reformatted 215
that a mass movement would be organized “to raise production to resist famine”; (2)
October 11, when he provided concrete details on how to implement the campaign; (3)
the full moon in March, when death rates reached their peak in 1945; and (4) the full
moon of the seventh lunar month, when all hungry ghosts annually emerge (Quang Thiện
2005).
The tensions over whether the death anniversary should coincide with the political
or religious calendar also resurfaced around the question of whether a national monument
was needed. Most felt that the restored memorial, which also included the remains of
individuals killed during the 1946 bombing of Hanoi that marked the start of the First
Indochina War, was too small and difficult to find to serve this purpose. But there was
sharp disagreement over where a new one should be erected, especially since a substan-
tial number of the dead were also buried at the Phúc Thiện Cemetery, near the zoo. Some
proposed other sites in Hanoi where large numbers of people perished, such as the Hàng
Da Market in the Old Quarter or the Giáp Bát Bus Station on the southern outskirts of
the capital. Others argued that a national monument should be placed in Thái Bình
Province, where more than a quarter of a million people died. Advocates of this site
wanted to place it next to the road marker three kilometers north of the provincial seat
on Highway One in honor of the famous photograph Võ An Ninh took there of two young
male victims. Participants from Thanh Hóa, a province farther south, claimed it experi-
enced a higher death toll and should host the monument. Still other participants expressed
concern that a national monument would encourage the mass graves scattered across
the countryside to gradually “fall into oblivion” (ibid.).
These debates over how the hungry ghosts should be recalled and ritually “cared
for” (chăm sóc), as one participant in the symposium put it, remain unresolved despite
ongoing efforts to establish a larger place for the Great Famine in the historical imagina-
tion, including public exhibitions of the photographs in the Museum of Vietnamese
History and university textbooks (Hoàng Phương 2015; Thanh Nien News 2015). They
remain unresolved because the archive that resulted from the Joint Committee’s inquiry
documents features the unmaking of an entire population rather than its productive
management toward officially desired ends: the struggle for revolutionary independence
prior to and immediately after the August Revolution. And it is primarily for this reason
that the Great Famine and the hungry ghosts it produced continue to resist incorporation
into official narratives about the “exceptional dead,” who sacrificed their lives to defend
the “nation” from foreign aggressors.
Accepted: August 31, 2015
K. M
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank both reviewers for their constructive criticism, assistance with technical issues
related to Japanese-Vietnamese relations, and editorial suggestions. All errors remain mine.
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