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Dynamics of Memory and Religious Nationalism in a Sino-Vietnamese Border Town

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2019

TAM T. T. NGO
TAM T. T. NGO*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity; Department of Comparative Religious Studies, Faculty of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies, Radboud University Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article analyses the dynamics of official and unofficial religious nationalism in the Vietnamese border town of Lào Cai. In 1979 it was one of many Vietnamese towns that were reduced to rubble during the short but bloody war between Vietnam and China. The normalization of Sino-Vietnamese relations in 1991 allowed a booming border trade that let Lào Cai prosper, while the painful memory of this war continued to haunt the town and the daily experiences of its residents, both humans and gods. Since the Vietnamese state forbids any official remembrance of the war, Lào Cai residents have found a religious way to deal with their war memories that skilfully evades state control. By analysing narratives about the fate of the gods and goddesses that reign in the Father God Temple and the Mother Goddess Temple—two religious institutions located right next to the border—this article shows that it is in the symbolism of the supernatural that one can find memories of the war and of the changing social landscape of Lào Cai and reconstruct its history.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , May 2020 , pp. 795 - 829
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Ken MacLean, Peter van der Veer, Laurel Kendall, Wu Da, and Hue Tam Ho-Tai for their constructive comments, and Kenneth Dean for his insightful comments and translation of the imperial edicts.

References

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69 Madam Sường served as the first incense mistress of the Temple after it was rebuilt in the 1991 until her death in 1996. She was my former neighbour in Pho Lu, a town 40km south of Lao Cai where most Lao Cai residents resettled in the decade after the war. In 1968, both of her sons died while fighting as North Vietnam soldiers in the south. After this tragedy, she sought comfort in the Mother Goddess to sooth her personal pain, despite other political and social trouble this worship brought her. She was one of the devotees who hid and protected the status and icons of the Mother Goddess Temple when anti-superstition campaign offices sought to destroy them. Several of the statuses were later displayed in a secret shrine in her house in Pho Lu where secret spirit possessions, with her as the main medium, took place. Madam Sường was instrumental to my early knowledge of Mother Goddess religion, just as she was to the survival of the community of the temple devotees.

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