Introduction
The Second Indochina War, widely known as the notorious Vietnam War, is arguably the most prominent war memory in contemporary Việt Nam and the Vietnamese diaspora.Footnote 1 Following the end of the anti-French war, the First Indochina War, the 1954 Geneva Accords separated Việt Nam at the seventeenth parallel into North Việt Nam and South Việt Nam — the former under the leadership of communist revolutionaries, and the latter the purportedly democratic state backed by the US and allies.Footnote 2 The Second Indochina War (hereafter, the War) started almost immediately after 1954 and dragged on for 20 years until its official end on 30 April 1975, with the victory of North Việt Nam and the collapse of South Việt Nam. Việt Nam was reunified under the Communist Party, establishing the Socialist Republic of Việt Nam (SRV).
In the years after 1975, the Communist Party’s postwar nation-building unfolded on multiple fronts. On the memory front, state-sponsored war commemoration involved the construction of war memorials and museums,Footnote 3 the political economic leverage of war landscapes and historical tourism industries,Footnote 4 and public commemorative practices of the revolutionary war dead.Footnote 5 On the social and economic front, the Party sought to deliver its socialist ideals and imposed a stringent ration system where the state was the sole provider of all goods and services, instigating a period of rigorous socialism widely referred to as thời bao cấp, the subsidy period (1975–1986).Footnote 6 Postwar nation-building took place as the Third Indochina War raged on along the borders with China, neighbouring Cambodia and mainland Southeast Asian countries.Footnote 7
War-induced predicaments led to an unprecedented movement of over two million refugees from Việt Nam and Southeast Asia in the years after 1975, constituting the Vietnamese and Southeast Asian diasporas across many parts of the world, notably, the US, Australia, France and Canada.Footnote 8 Public political discourses around Vietnamese and Southeast Asian refugees in Western countries have circulated narratives of crisis, which victimise refugees as objects of war and suffering and, at the same time, frame the challenges that refugees face as technical problems to be solved by political mechanisms such as humanitarian aid, immigration policies, citizenship and social welfare.Footnote 9 Mimi T. Nguyen argues that these mechanisms constitute the bureaucratic regime that renders the portrayal of the grateful refugee who is forever indebted to the gift of freedom from Western liberal democracies.Footnote 10 Not only do these framings dismiss Vietnamese refugees as passive receivers of liberal democratic privileges, but they also reinforce ideologies of saviourism, which posit the West as vanguards of global libertarian values, and thus, obfuscate and justify Western imperialist violence in Việt Nam and Southeast Asia.Footnote 11
Based on my digital autoethnographic account, I present evocative stories about transnational and intergenerational memories of the War, which defy both state-centric discourses produced by the SRV memory regime and narratives of victimhood surrounding Vietnamese diasporic memories. This study of digital autoethnography takes place in the scholarly context that has predominantly focused on ‘official’ history and state-level memorialisation. Domestic and international scholarship of twentieth-century Việt Nam has largely centred an elite perspective of political and military officials and notable figures, as well as methodologies that rely on high-level primary sources and official historical documentations.Footnote 12 Official historiography of the War has therefore largely overlooked non-elite perspectives and historical accounts of Vietnamese civilians, soldiers, survivors and families, thus reproducing grand memory narratives and official histories on a public political level. Moreover, the War’s prodigious ramifications at a regional and global level have driven international scholarship towards Western/ US-centric inquiries.Footnote 13 At the same time, there has been persisting scholarly attention to the political, environmental, and cultural legacies of the War on Việt Nam and Southeast Asia, as well as the lived experiences and life stories of the people.Footnote 14
In Việt Nam and the Vietnamese diaspora, the proliferation of alternative memories and commemorative practices has continued to shape counter-hegemonic spaces where Vietnamese people retell and reconstruct memory narratives of the War. These alternative memoryscapes encompass people’s life narratives and lived experiences of war which often occur in intimate locales like family spaces, villages and local communities.Footnote 15 Since the start of the twenty-first century, the rise of digital media such as online news, blogs, Facebook and YouTube has expanded these alternative memoryscapes beyond traditional memory practices towards increasingly connective, accessible and transformative spaces of digital memories.Footnote 16 Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi argues that digital memory serves as a ‘subaltern digital archive’ of various Vietnamese war memories, particularly those that are marginalised or excluded from state-level official narratives.Footnote 17
Over the past few decades or so, there has been extensive research in Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Studies that challenges and disrupts official, state-centric discourses and Western-centric research modalities of the Indochina Wars. This body of research centres the significance of personal histories, art and literature in telling the life narratives of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian people.Footnote 18 Situating my digital autoethnographic work in this body of research, this paper aims to shift the focus to the life narratives of Vietnamese people, and in doing so, decentre from orthodox historical research methods of studying Vietnamese histories. Specifically, this paper uses digital autoethnography to bring to the fore evocative stories about the lived experiences of the War, and the creative ways in which Vietnamese individuals and families reckon with memories of this conflict in digital and non-digital spaces. In resonance with the themes of this special issue regarding alternative memories, this paper highlights how digital memories within personal and familial spaces decentralise and complicate dominant memory narratives about the War in both Việt Nam and the Vietnamese diaspora, and by extension, constitute digital vernacular memoryscapes of twentieth-century Western imperialist violence in Southeast Asia.
In this paper, I make two related arguments about digital practices of personal and familial memory: 1) digital/non-digital co-production and 2) spatio-temporal complexities of this co-production in terms of transnational and intergenerational memories. First, instead of a sole focus on digital memory, this paper foregrounds the co-production of digital and non-digital memories within personal and familial spaces. In doing so, the paper argues that the proliferation of digital media does not diminish or replace the significance of non-digital media — such as stories, imagination and physical mementoes — but rather intertwine with traditional memory practices and co-produce distinct multi-media memoryscapes of personal and family histories. Thus, autoethnographic attention to the co-production of digital and non-digital memories enhances understandings of the changes made by the digitisation of memory on a personal and familial level.
Second, I argue that the digital/non-digital co-production facilitates a transnational and intergenerational dialogue where multiple memory narratives intersect, reflect and contradict each other. The digitisation of memory allows different generations from different parts of the world to commemorate the War through a diverse range of media and, in particular, affords a connective potential for the postmemory generation born after the War to engage with war memories and situate personal and familial memories in broader historical processes. The entanglement of multiple media thus enables a transboundary memoryscape — one that traverses generations, digital and non-digital spheres and national-territorial boundaries. As the section on digital diasporic postmemory production will show, the transboundary memoryscape encompasses complex nuances of space-time relations and place imaginaries, which complicate place-based memorialisation confined in national-territorial boundaries.
The interest in digital autoethnography stems from my personal memories of the War, as a fourth-generation family member who was not directly involved in but nonetheless internalised my family’s wartime past, and who is now living in Australia. Việt Nam is my home country, and I have grown up with family stories of the War. In 2014, I left Sài GònFootnote 19 at the age of 14 and migrated to Melbourne with my parents and older brother. In our first few years in Melbourne, I thought we would forget and ‘let the War go’ to begin our new life in the new country. But contrary to our expectations, war memories have remained conspicuous in our family life, choices of food, preferences of house decorations, family conversations and a large proportion of my digital practices. Two questions often puzzle me: Why do I, a fourth-generation family member who was born nearly three decades after 1975 and is now living abroad, still have memories of the War? How has individual and familial memory work — both digital and non-digital — shaped my war memories? These questions place my autoethnographic engagement in dialogue with current Vietnamese and Southeast Asian intergenerational and transnational war memories under the light of global socio-technological transformations.
Driven by these questions, I delve into how my Vietnamese Australian family and I negotiate and co-construct intergenerational and transnational memories of the War on multiple levels: locally as individuals and family members, and transnationally as diasporic Vietnamese. As a work of autoethnography, this paper does not seek to represent nor to arrive at any truth about intergenerational and transnational Vietnamese war memories. Rather, this autoethnographic praxis seeks a dual aim: 1) to tell evocative stories about my family’s intergenerational and transnational war memories; and 2) to serve as a reflexive memory work that looks within myself and my family so as to reflect ourselves and those like us against dominant narratives about twentieth-century Việt Nam and Southeast Asia. In doing so, this paper also intervenes in debates around the insider/outsider bifurcation and critical distance frequently raised in Critical Ethnic Studies.Footnote 20
The paper proceeds with a methodological overview of autoethnography, followed by an outline of relevant research on digital and non-digital co-production and digital diasporic postmemory. The empirical analysis then investigates my family’s and my own memories of the War through digital and non-digital media. The analysis consists of two sections. The first one focuses on my childhood postmemory in Việt Nam without the aid of digital technologies, followed by the second section which discusses how my family and I make use of Facebook and YouTube audiovisual materials (images, videos, and music) in Australia to reimagine our war memories, and in doing so, navigate our hybrid Vietnamese Australian identities.
Autoethnography: An auto-historical praxis
This paper draws on research undertaken in Việt Nam and Australia from December 2022 to June 2023 as part of my Master’s project on intergenerational memories of the Indochina Wars across space and time. My Master’s project combined autoethnography, photo-diaries and photo and music elicitation life history conversations. For the purposes of this paper, I only focus on autoethnographic details of digital and non-digital memory practices, including digital memory work in Facebook and YouTube, and the embodied engagement with war memories mediated by these digital activities in our family home space.
As mentioned in the introduction, the methodological orientation to autoethnography builds upon existing research on Southeast Asian and Vietnamese life narratives through creative media, centring a counter-hegemonic scholarship anchored in intimate histories and experiences. Autoethnographers, as insider-researchers, straddle the social worlds of the researcher and the researched, thus teetering, facilitating, reconciling and crossing the boundaries of insideness, outsideness, and in-betweenness. Juxtaposing his personal experiences as a Vietnamese refugee-scholar in Canada with broader diasporic Vietnamese experiences in academia and beyond, Vinh Nguyen foregrounds autoethnographic writing as an intellectual and political means to place the self into histories of war and displacement: ‘to situate lived experience, to link self and history, memory and sociality.’Footnote 21 Autoethnographic engagement thus allows forms of auto-historicisation of lived experiences, presenting a pathway for historical multiplicities alongside, beyond, distinct from and against official narratives. Several scholars of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Studies have argued that auto-historical modes of research enable a praxis in which individuals and communities develop and collectivise counter-narratives against white supremacist and racist structures.Footnote 22 In doing so, auto-historical projects — particularly those done by scholars of colour and cultural minorities — seek to challenge and disrupt canonical Western-centric paradigms by centring alternative narratives such as the lived stories of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian people.Footnote 23 Situated in this auto-historical research ethos, I engage with autoethnography to 1) ground myself and the stories I tell in the larger history of twentieth-century Vietnamese and Southeast Asian war experiences; and 2) place these stories in the intellectual and political activism against ongoing violences of racism and imperialism facing scholars and activists of colour and cultural minorities.Footnote 24
Autoethnographic research turns inward and tells stories from within, which intervenes in debates around critical distance and the insider/outsider bifurcation. These debates centre an area of relational ethics regarding which stories to tell or conceal, what entitles the autoethnographer the right to tell certain stories and not others, the relationships and responsibilities that the autoethnographer has for themselves and others, the myriad outcomes of telling (and exposing) personal lives, and the truthfulness of both the story and the process of telling.Footnote 25 These relational ethical challenges point to the question of research positionality regarding a critical distance — that between the researcher and researched, insider and outsider, storyteller and story(telling).
Critical refugee methodologies contextualise the idea of critical distance in the institutions of official historiography which often dismiss refugee stories as subjective and unreliable, pitted against ‘a detached, objective stance, which has long been held up to as the standard for rigorous critical investigation’.Footnote 26 Critical refugee methodologies, in turn, foreground the values of subjective and critical writing where the insider-researcher produces knowledge from within — that is, working inwardly through how personal experiences structure and position academic practices.Footnote 27 As Phu and Nguyen put it, research by and about the personal is ‘an attachment to or investment in the historical and contemporary fates of communities who have undergone state violence, who have migrated under different circumstances, who have had to seek or are seeking refuge.’Footnote 28 Critical refugee methodologies thus work through subjective and critical scholarship that is grounded and placed in, as opposed to distanced from, intimate experiences.Footnote 29 This echoes Jeong-eun Rhee’s framing of autobiographical research as an onto-epistemological endeavour — work/life project — in which academic and personal lives are inseparable. The work/life framing defies disciplinary fixities and rejects modern scientific ideals of objectivity, value, practicality and rigour.Footnote 30 Drawing on this methodological framework, in this auto-historical endeavour, I do not seek to distance myself from my subjective experience, nor my family from theirs. Instead, I historicise the very experiences and memories that have shaped my onto-epistemological understanding of what Việt Nam and the War mean and feel to me, my family and those like us. In doing so, the autoethnographic engagement of this paper expands ongoing conversations in the social sciences and humanities in terms of the potencies and challenges of insider research and autobiographical histories.
Multi-media memory work: Digital and non-digital co-production
In resonance with the themes of this special issue regarding the pluralisation of memory practices and mobility and connectivity, this paper draws on current perspectives on digital/non-digital co-production that encompasses a multi-media memoryscape intertwined at once in global digital spaces and intimate locales. In Southeast Asia and Việt Nam, the digital and non-digital memory co-production of past violence manifests in myriad ways. Birgit Bräuchler investigates how a documentary video on YouTube of two former child soldiers involved in the Moluccan conflict in Indonesia opens spaces of intimate experiences for diverse audiences to express empathy and hope for more peaceful future.Footnote 31 Simultaneously, the video generates transnational debates about the vexed memory politics and diverging discourses of the conflict. In Myanmar, Megan Ryan and Mai Van Tran look at the effects of digital activism in resisting the military’s attempt at authoritarian revival in 2021 and, to some extent, preventing democratic backsliding.Footnote 32 In this case, digital activism plays a significant role in the wider, long-standing pro-democracy movements towards political liberalisation in contemporary Myanmar.
For different generations of Vietnamese, the incorporation of multiple media has increasingly become a significant part of their memory work. Đạt Nguyễn and Tâm T. T. Ngô investigate a diverse range of digital and non-digital media that different generations of Vietnamese use to engage with war memories.Footnote 33 For example, in current Việt Nam, young Vietnamese graphic designers use digital restoration of North Vietnamese war martyr portraits as a form of historical revitalisation and commemoration of national liberational struggles, while South Vietnamese veterans organise informal volunteer-based grave care at the now abandoned South Vietnamese cemetery, and document this care work in online videos and social media. The multi-media engagement with war memories facilitates a space of historical multiplicities where reconstructed memories intersect and transcend generations and actors. Also examining the work of digital restoration of physical war portraits by young Vietnamese, Thy Phu investigates the potential of this memory work to renovate historical narratives, producing a connective memoryscape that places old and new memories in dialogue with each other.Footnote 34 In the diaspora, Vietnamese communities also engage with multi-media memory work in different ways. Quan Tue Tran’s study of a philanthropic organisation run by Vietnamese refugees in California that provides financial and medical support for South Vietnamese veterans in Việt Nam presents an example of a transnational support network which fundraises for compatriots back home through commemorative concerts and activities in the diaspora.Footnote 35 Alongside philanthropic purposes, this organisation employs a range of media — art performances and online and offline circulation of concerts and cultural activities — to commemorate and reassert the political legitimacy of the defunct South Vietnamese state. Taken together, these studies show how Vietnamese from different generations and parts of the world use multiple media to reconstruct war memories as well as realise other social and political possibilities beyond their memory work. Drawing on this body of literature, this paper focuses on the co-production of digital and non-digital war memories and the space that this co-production opens for personal and family history negotiation.
Digital diasporic postmemories
Marianne Hirsch puts forth the concept of postmemory to inquire into the process by which children of survivors of traumatic conflicts inherit and internalise memories of which they do not have direct experience.Footnote 36 Recent scholarship on the postmemory of the War has focused on diasporic postmemory work by children of Vietnamese refugees. Analysing the work by postwar diasporic poet Phan Nhiên Hạo, Hai-Dang Phan emphasises an intergenerational responsibility to ‘transmit a linguistic and cultural heritage’ through collective memory work.Footnote 37 Through an examination of second-generation Vietnamese American memory work in art and literature, Linh Thủy Nguyễn re-contextualises intergenerational family trauma in the cultural politics of US imperialism, which sustain and transform the ongoing violence of the War into quotidian, slower forms of violence within intimate family relations and experiences. In doing so, Nguyễn reframes the figure of the Vietnamese refugee family beyond the immediate violence of war, tracing the long-lasting and penetrating impacts of Western imperialist violence on intergenerational intimacies.Footnote 38 Looking at the performances by postmemory-generation Vietnamese American rappers and a graphic novelist, Long T. Bui argues that performative postmemory allows for the formation of a political consciousness and refugee subjectivity rooted in intergenerational experiences of war, which challenge the objectification of refugees as mere victims of war.Footnote 39 Together, these studies bring to the fore how the postmemory generation in the diaspora crafts their imagination of the War and experiences of intergenerational war trauma through cultural and artistic performances. Through their postmemory work, they mediate their relationship with family histories and distant memories.Footnote 40
Since the mid-2000s, the proliferation of digital media has introduced new forms of postmemory and transnational memory networks. Looking at the emergence of Internet memorial sites of the former South Vietnamese state, Yến Lê Espiritu argues that this online archive allows many in the Vietnamese diaspora to relive history and reformulate South Vietnamese political legitimacy. These Internet memorial sites function as counter-memorials to the ‘forced disappearance’ of South Vietnamese memories both in the SRV memory regime and in the diaspora.Footnote 41 In a similar vein, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi observes the role of digital media as a ‘subaltern digital archive’ of alternative memories, which facilitates transnational and intergenerational conversations about the War between Vietnamese from different generations and parts of the world.Footnote 42
More recent studies have theorised a globalised Vietnamese digital diaspora which moves beyond the function of an online alternative memorial and situates digital diasporic practices in the dynamics and processes of global connectivity.Footnote 43 This thriving field of research has highlighted the ways in which diasporic Vietnamese of different generations engage with a collective formation of shared historical identities grounded in experiences of war and displacement, constituting a global digital community of transboundary memory work and identity construction. Framing digital memory as a form of shared historicisation within personal and familial spaces, the autoethnographic insights of this paper show how the global digital diaspora manifests in the intimate experiences of personal and familial digital memory work.
Childhood postmemories of wartime Sài Gòn
During childhood, the postmemory generation is yet to critically understand familial memories, and so they imbibe on these memories to construct a sense of family history and belonging. Childhood postmemories are abounded with complex emotions that are yet to be comprehended but nevertheless undergird the early memory construction of the postmemory generation. As Hirsch puts it, childhood postmemories act as ‘the motor of the fictional imagination [that] is fuelled in great part by the desire to know the world as it looked and felt before our birth.’Footnote 44
Flicking through piles of dusted family photo albums, I came across several photos of my first and only birthday celebrated at the house that four generations of my maternal family had lived in. The house is located on 24 B Lý Thái Tổ Street, District 3, Sài Gòn. Just a few blocks from the house, also on Lý Thái Tổ Street, is the famous phở restaurant called Tàu Bay that has been a well-known phở restaurant among the people of Sài Gòn since 1954; my family, too, have been regular customers of the restaurant. A few metres from the house lies the Lý Thái Tổ roundabout surrounded by constant traffic flows and bustling economic activities. The house was sold in 2001. I have been told that our family sold the house because our motorcycle service business started to diminish after foreign investors dominated the market during postwar economic reforms.Footnote 45 The selling of the house contains rich details and important insights which I will delve into in the subsequent sections.
I was one year old when the house was sold and thus do not have a conscious memory of it. However, I have grown up with stories of the house. It is a much-adored house; family members of different generations talk about it very frequently; almost without exception, every time any family member rides past it, we would always turn to look at it. The emotional baggage of that look has always been complicated, and I can never make out any specific emotion — is it sadness, regret or despair? Upon seeing the photos of my first birthday, I immediately recollected episodes of the house that I grew up hearing and knowing by heart (see Figure 1).
Author’s first birthday celebration at Lý Thái Tổ house in 2001 (Author’s family photo album 2001)
Figure 1 Long description
Five people are seated on a sofa. In front of them, there is a table with a birthday cake and a vase of flowers. The group includes two adults and three children. The adults are positioned at either end, with the children seated between them. The cake is decorated with fruit and surrounded by other items on the table.
Adopted narratives
Back in Việt Nam, my childhood was filled with stories about family life in the Lý Thái Tổ house during wartime and the postwar years. I remember my mother and uncles telling stories about their experience of thiếu ăn (lack of food) that was characteristic of life during the subsidy period. My mother and uncles would walk to Phở Tàu Bay to buy two portions of takeaway phở, then the whole family of three generations would share the two portions and combine with plain rice because there was no other food in the house, and they could only afford two portions of phở. Until this day, both my maternal and paternal family members, especially those of the war and postwar generations, are still accustomed to this habit of eating phở or any noodle soups with plain rice or baguette. The earlier generations call this habit ăn độn (ăn means to eat; độn, to stuff or fill), and sometimes call the subsidy period the ăn độn period.
These stories, as I now reflect, imply a nostalgia for a ý nghĩa life — a meaningful life worth remembering — that was resuming amid chaos and disruption. Anthropologist Munira Khayyat develops a concept of ‘ecologies of resistance’ in which people living in landscapes of perennial warfare construct pragmatic and creative lifeways to live with unabating conflicts and obliterated resources: life must go on with war.Footnote 46 My family’s ý nghĩa life in times of crisis resembles the resistant ecologies that necessitate the will to sustain life amidst war and violence. My childhood memories were deeply seated in family narratives of a tenacious life during the war and postwar years. Lê Espiritu contemplates underlying emotions that children of the Vietnamese war generation face as they navigate their relationship with the War and family histories of which they have no direct experience — that the War ‘is a shifting specter that hovers over personal heartaches, family tensions and dissolution and/or economic insecurities’.Footnote 47 My early perception of familial pasts was situated in the wartime rather than contemporaneous with the peacetime I was born and raised in. I carried the mnemonic and emotional baggage of these pasts as my childhood memories imbibed on family narratives about the house and war experiences therein.
At a young age, I simply wanted to know what it would have been like to live in this house with all my relatives from four generations. I adopted my family’s narratives of a war-torn Sài Gòn bristled with brisk and resourceful lifestyles that enabled the continuity of life despite the dread of war. I remember having inexplicable feelings of nostalgia and longing towards the family house every time a family member mentioned the War and the house in our family conversations. When I encountered the photos of my first birthday in the house, similar feelings of nostalgia emerged as I began recollecting family conversations about the War. My emotional attachment to family narratives offered a kind of bridge between my family’s firsthand experiences of war and my imagination of those experiences — however delicate and transient that bridge might be.Footnote 48 As Phu argues, the vernacular memories embedded in family photos domesticate the long-lasting impacts of war, ‘nudging us even further away from familiar spectacles of violence to consider instead daily struggles to survive.’Footnote 49
My postmemory of war was mediated not only by acts of recollecting and the materiality of the family photos, but also by the ‘imaginative investment, projection and creation’ generated by them.Footnote 50 My imaginative memories of wartime Sài Gòn were imprinted in repeated family stories about family bonding, joy and resilience amidst tumults. At a young age, I did not comprehend these stories, but nonetheless internalised and imagined a past where I could have lived the ý nghĩa wartime life in the Lý Thái Tổ house as a family. I felt a postmemorial desire to ‘re-member’: that I truly belong to family histories, a true family member through vicariously and imaginatively living this family wartime life. Although writing specifically about children of Holocaust survivors, and without conflating the historical specificities of the Holocaust and Indochina Wars, Hirsch’s account nonetheless lends much relevance to my reflection regarding ‘the need not just to feel and to know, but also to re-member, to re-build, to re-incarnate, to replace and to repair.’Footnote 51
Alongside the desire to relive and re-member distant pasts, postmemory work also drives the envisioning of presents and futures. Drawing on Bui, the postmemory of war violence that children of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian refugees hold imbues a kind of ‘cultural sovereignty’ — an inheritance of ‘beauty, art, and hope within the destruction of war’ — with which the postmemory generation reimagines violent pasts and prefigure presents and futures.Footnote 52 Relating to the focus of this special issue on postmemory activism and futurity, the kind of mnemonic imagination I had as a young child resonates ‘a fundamental curiosity about my familial past’ — an urge to know where my family and I came from, to know the past from which we came to the present and future.Footnote 53 Thus, a postmemorial imagination is simultaneously a subconscious internalisation and an active reworking of inherited memories. I did not simply adopt but also contemplated and reimagined family memory narratives at a very young age.
Perplexing narratives
Family narratives are not always fully accepted. In their imagining of familial memories, the postmemory generation faces an unsettling question: to what extent do members of the postmemory generation have a personal connection to familial memories that are inherently unknown to them and of which they do not have direct experience?Footnote 54
Although unrealised at the time of my childhood, I, too, faced this question. I remember feeling puzzled as I found my imaginative memories of a war-ruined Sài Gòn contradicting public political memory narratives. In the early 2000s, Việt Nam began presenting narratives of reconciliation, recovery and moving on from war. This was done through state-sponsored initiatives to neutralise historic sites (such as the Independence Palace and the Củ Chi Tunnels), to recreate spaces of wartime activities for tourist purposes, and to project images of a friendly, forgiving, and angerless Việt Nam who now welcomes former enemies and other foreigners. The history of the War has now been remade into a ‘past without pain’ — that is, Việt Nam has apparently moved beyond the once-uncrossable lines of war and enmity.Footnote 55 I was born and raised in this public political circulation of a painless and forgettable war while my postmemory was deep-rooted in my imagining of wartime life.
At the time when I was a primary school student, I was baffled by images of buzzing tourist activities and well-maintained architecture and facilities on a school excursion to the Independence Palace. These images of modernity, wealth, and an ahistorical Việt Nam stood in stark contrast to my imaginings of ravaging war, urban decay and poverty. The state narratives of ‘moving on from wars’ fissured my own and my family’s narratives of ‘life must go on with war’. I felt somewhat irrelevant in my hometown because my postmemorial imagination did not seem to have a place in contemporary Việt Nam. Do I, too, not have a place in my hometown? Grace Pundyk asks a similar question about the ambiguity of intergenerational memory ‘that is temporally, culturally, geographically, and linguistically unfamiliar’.Footnote 56
Even within my own family life, that question remained pronounced. The Lý Thái Tổ house, an emblem of family history, was not where I grew up in and thus remained ever-imaginative for me — a family story that never materialised. The house now looks nothing like how it used to; it is now the building of a tutoring centre called Mathnasium Tutoring. I remember many occasions of feeling out-of-place because my childhood imagination did not manifest in any palpable manner, both inside and outside of my family life. My childhood postmemories felt aloof as I could only grab hold of them in my imaginative registers. Although incomprehensible to me at the time, I experienced feelings of disconnectedness from my hometown and all that went with it — the resistant ecologies, the ý nghĩa life during wartime, and a sense of what it meant to be a part of family histories and heritage. I have argued elsewhere that Việt Nam is neither a peaceful country nor a war-torn country, but fragments of both and that when family members encounter mundane memories, past and present spatio-temporalities intersect and co-produce new meanings, feelings and ambiguities.Footnote 57 The family home, and the imagination of which, can be a fraught space where different generations of war-affected families negotiate with ongoing violence of war. Intergenerational memories of war re-emerge in private and familial spaces and sometimes lay bare the festering wounds of war, placing generations in an uneasy engagement with violent pasts that weigh on their imagination of presents and futures both anchored in and beyond these pasts.
Postmemories in the diaspora
The process of becoming a diasporic postmemory individual involves complex emotions of belonging and fulfilment as well as ambivalence and secrecy. Growing up with imaginative and fragmentary postmemories of war, I have had an urge to emplace and materialise my childhood imaginings. I carried this urge to Australia as my family migrated here in 2014.
Facebook and the faraway past
As a teenager, I began dwelling on my inherited memories of wartime Sài Gòn and the Lý Thái Tổ house through my memory work in Facebook and YouTube. There is a wide range of material-sharing and discussion platforms on Facebook and YouTube that are designed to commemorate the War and Vietnamese histories from various historical perspectives. I engaged with Facebook pages such as Nhóm Thời Xưa — Nơi lưu giữ những hoài niệm xưa (Vintage Group — An archive of memories)Footnote 58 and a diverse selection of YouTube channels that primarily commemorate pre-1975, wartime life in Sài Gòn and southern Việt Nam.
As part of my digital postmemory work, I collated videos, songs, photos and stories about Sài Gòn during the war and postwar years, particularly those specific to District 3 and the Lý Thái Tổ area. During the process, I was able to find images of the Lý Thái Tổ roundabout and Phở Tàu Bay before 1975. Combining online materials and family narratives, I have been curating my own archive of what the Lý Thái Tổ house and its surroundings might have looked and felt like during the war and postwar years.
The digital materialisation of war memories moved those memories from my childhood imagination, from the thereness of wartime Sài Gòn to the nowness of present-day Melbourne.Footnote 59 Through digital memory practice, the diasporic space in Melbourne became a space where my postmemorial imagination took shape and reconnected me to some parts of wartime Sài Gòn. While family photos provided me with some resonances with the distant past of war, materially and imaginatively, digital media like Facebook enabled an audiovisual assemblage of my postmemorial imagination. The act of curating my postmemories into an online archive of wartime Sài Gòn exemplifies a process of auto-historicisation in which children of the Vietnamese war generation reconfigure inherited memories into broader histories of war and twentieth-century Việt Nam.Footnote 60
Digital postmemory practice transcends the materiality of digitally mediated memories and evokes complex embodied experiences. The audiovisual repertoire of Sài Gòn during the war and postwar years rendered a multi-sensory stimulus for the aroma and taste of phở, the feel of tropical humidity, the sentiment of vibrant family life that I knew and imagined as a child. This multi-sensory engagement with digitally mediated memories turned cyberspace into an embodied experience that traverses multiple geographies as intimate as the screen of my devices, as local as Phở Tàu Bay and the Lý Thái Tổ area, and as transnational as Việt Nam and Australia.Footnote 61 Imprints of the past — tangible and intangible, digital and non-digital — accumulate and reconfigure spatio-temporal relations, creating a palimpsestic memoryscape of interlacing memories and place imaginaries.Footnote 62 Through this embodied cyberspace, I experienced the imaginative, emotional and sensuous qualities of being a diasporic postmemory individual as I oscillated between multiple worlds — wartime Sài Gòn and present-day Melbourne, and somewhere in between — temporally, spatially, emotionally, sensuously, all at the same time.
Online news and family secrets
Postmemory as a process of reconstructing distant pasts can sometimes reveal concealed family secrets. My family narratives of the Lý Thái Tổ house have been saturated with endearing memories of love, joy and perseverance. But the house is also associated with ambivalent episodes that have often been avoided and silenced by family members. One of these episodes is an extraordinary accident that happened after the house was sold in 2001. Family stories about this accident have been brief, ambiguous and unfinished. I have been told that a family of seven bought our house, and a few months later, they were killed in a fire accident that happened in the house. Back then as a child, I did not realise or understand why my family avoided speaking about the accident. I was nonetheless always curious.
Then in Australia, I encountered several online news articles about the accident as I was looking for records of the house on the Internet. The spontaneous search caught me by surprise when I found that our family’s house was circulated online with a sobriquet ‘Ngôi nhà của ngọn lửa oan nghiệt’ — the house of the disastrous fire.Footnote 63 It was also from the news articles that I found photos of what the house looked like from the outside as a whole. My family does not own any such photo, and so finding photos of the house on the Internet was a remarkable moment. It was even more so because what I discovered was not simply a visual record of the house, but a tragedy and the shadow it casts on my family’s memories (see Figure 2).
Lý Thái Tổ house (on the left with piles of tyres at the front) renovated after the fire accidentFootnote 64
Figure 2 Long description
A two-story building with a balcony and railings on the upper floor. In front of the building, there is a large pile of tires stacked against the wall. Several people are present; one person is riding a motorcycle with a passenger, while others are walking nearby. A streetlight and electrical wires are visible and a small canopy is partially seen on the right side.
Upon seeing the photo, I confronted a bricolage of emotions. On one hand, there were feelings of success as I finally saw the house, a puzzle piece with which my postmemory work became more complete. In significant ways, the photo conjoined family narratives and my imagination, cohering my postmemory into a vivid image of the whole house taken from the street. The photo was an unexpected proof of the existence of my four-generation family histories, an affective prop that filled some of the voids and absences in my childhood imagination.Footnote 65 As Nguyen Austen argues, globalised digital diasporas allow a dynamic process of individual and familial historicisation that transcend spaces and times.Footnote 66 Through the use of digital media, the diasporic space in Melbourne became a distinct site of relational postmemorial production, shaping my perception of Việt Nam and Australia as intricately entangled places of transnational personal and family histories. As this vignette shows, digital diaspora as a site of intergenerational and transnational memories moves beyond place-based memorialisation towards transboundary memoryscapes and practices, which constitute intertwining place imaginaries beyond physical space-time boundaries.
The initial feelings of success were quick to succumb to indescribable feelings of compassion, disappointment and confusion. Such emotional intensities were associated with the fire accident and the fact that my family does not own this photo. Tragically, the existence of this photo is (only) because of the accident and the online circulation of it. Had the accident not happened, there would not have been any record of the house, except for scattered snippets of the inside of it in my family’s photo albums. This foregrounds one of the characteristics of postmemory as being ‘one’s memory of another’s memories’, foregrounding the question of family heritage in terms of the ambiguous ownership of distant family histories which the later generations are to negotiate.Footnote 67 In that moment, memories of the Lý Thái Tổ house felt like they were never truly mine and that I never truly remembered it. I simply imagined.
There was also a sense of immense loss. In a way, my family lost our house twice — the first time when we sold the house in 2001 and the second time in the fire accident. In both times, what was being lost was not only the house, but also family narratives of the ý nghĩa life. In a lowered, almost whispering voice, with an equivocal, undirected look on her still face, my mother would recount how my grandfather deliberately avoided going along Lý Thái Tổ street after the house was sold because he never accepted the loss of it. My mother has never told her friends and colleagues about our family’s former ownership of the house because of its association with the fire tragedy. Although our extended family has never talked about the news articles (some members do not even know such articles exist), the fact that the house is identified with such a tragic event is a hurtful remark. I, too, have never mentioned the news articles to my family members. There was a collective grief among family members marked by deliberate silence and non-acceptance. Discovering details about the fire accident on the Internet, on one level, pulled me closer to familial pasts, yet on another, further repressed this story into oblivion, secrecy and avoidance.
YouTube and the sound of war
In my diasporic life in Australia, the co-production of digital and non-digital war memories sometimes manifests explicitly through the presence of wartime music played via YouTube. Through YouTube, my parents access Vietnamese songs about the War and wartime life — most of which were composed and widely listened to in southern Việt Nam before 1975. Together with my digital diasporic postmemory production on Facebook, my family’s curated YouTube playlist of wartime music renders our home space in Melbourne a particular transnational memoryscape of war memories.
At one family dinner, the YouTube playlist was on repeat on our home TV as my parents and I were setting up the table. There was no conversation until the song, Chuyện Tình Mộng Thường (The Love Story of Mộng Thường), written by a much-loved singer-songwriter in South Việt Nam during the 1960s and 1970s, Trần Thiện Thanh, came on. The song tells a true story of Mộng Thường, fiancé of Lieutenant Phạm Thái who was reported to have died in the Battle of An Lộc in 1972. Believing Lieutenant Thái had died, Thường travelled from Sài Gòn to An Lộc to find his body. On her journey, the minibus that carried Thường hit a landmine, and the accident killed her. Tragically, the original report turned out to be wrong, Lieutenant Thái had not died and found his way back to the base a few days later.Footnote 68 Thanh conveyed the tragedy through the melancholic melody and mournful lyrics:
My father reacted almost immediately as the first few seconds of the song were played: ‘Ah! This song…Very tragic!’. His reaction ruptured the stillness and nonchalant movements of the room and captured all the attention there was. I began heeding more closely to the song despite having known it previously. I turned to the TV and observantly watched images of the War flicking through in the video as the song was played. My parents continued their conversation while aimlessly glancing over the images:
Father: This song reminds me of my mum’s journey to Quảng Trị in 1971 to retrieve the remains of my soldier uncle who died in the battlefield. There must have been landmines everywhere on Mum’s way, too. Luckily, nothing happened to her … Life was really about life or death. Poor Mum and the people at that time. Life was tough for us, but the earlier generations were in much worse conditions.
Mother: Yeah, I think of that story straight away whenever I hear this song. My dad also told me that he had to go to the battlefield to retrieve the remains of my youngest uncle. Deaths were everywhere.
It did not occur to my parents to engage me in their conversation. They seemed entirely absorbed in the song and their recollection of the War. Their recollection — compounded by the melancholia of the song and nostalgic images of the War — nonetheless got to me.Footnote 69 The initial liveliness of the dinner was clouded by sensations of sorrow and bereavement, at least for the four minutes of the song as well as through my parents’ recollection of the deaths of relatives in the War and my grandparents’ journeys to the battlefields. Such ambient dynamics drove me from lackadaisically setting up the table to heedfully listening, despite having already known both the song and the story of my grandmother’s journey to Quảng Trị. Shivering in the cold of Melbourne winter, I pulled together mental images of my soldier granduncle’s portrait on our home altar in Việt Nam, of the ‘fire and smoke of war’ condensed in the humidity of Việt Nam, and of lives during wartime hanging on the edge of life or death.
Through the YouTube playlist, our home in Australia emerged as a digital diasporic soundscape of war memories. Vietnamese wartime music serves as an auditory medium through which the diaspora transforms into a space-time of war memories, of wartime Việt Nam.Footnote 70 The digital diasporic soundscape of wartime music was intertwined with that of my parents’ conversation, the mundane sounds of cooking, chopsticks and spoons clacking and tapping, and the ambivalent silences in between. The overlapping of different digital and physical soundscapes constituted a distinct spatio-temporality — one that is both confined in our home space and traversing the national-territorial boundaries of Việt Nam and Australia, and of personal, familial and national memories.Footnote 71 The transboundary soundscape of war memories sheds light on the continual violence of the War which manifests in individual and familial memory practices, transcending boundaries of the immediate violence of armed conflicts, of Việt Nam and Australia, and wartime and peacetime.Footnote 72
Concluding remarks
‘Không có mấy cái online này kia chắc con không biết tới thời chiến đâu Thư’ (Without these online platforms and materials you might not have known about the War, Thư).
Much of my digital autoethnographic endeavour gained momentum from this fleeting yet repeated remark that my mother would make while glancing at some vintage-looking, low-resolution image of wartime Việt Nam on my laptop screen.
In the era of global digitality, memories seem to be evermore hyper-connective, interpenetrating and conspicuous. Contemporary digital memory practices give rise to new ways of remembering and reconstructing past conflicts that can both reinforce and contest hegemonic memory narratives on multiple levels — from individual and familial to transnational. Digital memory practices go hand in hand with their non-digital counterparts, constituting a co-production of memory that traverses symbolic and physical places and memories. Transnational and intergenerational memories of the Indochina Wars and Western imperialist violence in Southeast Asia manifest this dynamic memory production as war-affected Southeast Asian individuals, families and communities from different generations and parts of the world reckon with the ongoing violence of war beyond space-time boundaries. Their lived histories constitute a particular set of vernacular historiographies, presenting alternative memory narratives to official history.
Through the autoethnographic lens of my Vietnamese Australian family, this paper tells evocative stories about how Vietnamese individuals and families have lived through intergenerational and transnational memories of the Second Indochina War in digital and non-digital spaces. Framing my autoethnographic endeavour as an auto-historical effort, in this paper, I turn inward to self-historicise my personal and family memories in the overlapping realms of the Vietnamese digital diaspora and quotidian spaces of the family home and private life. Insights of this paper illustrate the pluralising memory practices in both digital and non-digital spaces on an everyday level, centring mundane memory practices and alternative narratives distinct from larger-scale, official memory projects. My autoethnographic account of diasporic postmemory production serves as a window into the transboundary qualities of war memories as war-affected Vietnamese individuals and families reconstruct violent pasts and imagine postwar presents and futures in specific ways and contexts. The transboundary memory reconstruction engenders interlacing spatio-temporalities of past and present, war and peace, revealing the enduring impacts of the War that transcend place-based memorialisation as well as the national-territorial boundaries of Việt Nam and Southeast Asia. These insights advance epistemological understandings of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian post-conflict experiences as both rooted in and exceeding the immediate violence of armed conflicts, pointing towards the long-lasting legacies of twentieth-century Western imperialist wars.
Together with the other contributions of the special issue, this paper calls for continual inquiry into the agency of the postmemory generation whose memory work constitutes a form of activism and coming to terms with violent pasts, which seeks accountability and justice and prefigures more peaceful presents and futures. As shown in this paper, the postmemory generation makes use of a parameter of practices and platforms to continually rework and own memories of which they do not have direct experience. This paper raises important questions about place imaginaries in studies of memory and the digital. With almost everything available at our fingertips, traditional perspectives of territorial, national, and cultural fixities are constantly challenged by transcultural/transnational ways of being. Digital ethnography offers a potent methodological framework to tease out and debunk nuances of transboundary memories in the digital age. Another methodological consideration that this paper puts forth centres the affordances of autoethnographic, auto-historical methodologies which are grounded in personal and family histories. Official historiography of the Indochina Wars largely neglects the life narratives of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian people and their lived histories of Western imperialist violence. Auto-historical research intervenes in this traditional historical research modality with a centring of lived stories and alternative historiographies alongside and against dominant narratives. As this paper has shown, an autoethnographic engagement with personal and family histories enabled the project of auto-historicisation, allowing stories to be told by those who have experienced what it meant to live through the violence of war. Therefore, this paper continues the conversation around intimate and critical scholarship that is geared towards reclaiming life narratives of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian people as part of the continuing struggle against dominant modes of knowledge production.
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