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CHAPTER 6 Telling Life: Ton Duc Thang’s Official Biography in the Posthumous Moment ON 30 MARCH 1980, Ton Duc Thang died in Ha Noi at the age of ninety-one after a period of steady physical decline.1 He was buried at Mai Dich state cemetery outside Ha Noi with its hierarchically ordered layout, where—absent Ho Chi Minh’s remains, which are exhibited in a mausoleum—he received the most prominent burial site. Since then, how has Viet Nam remembered its second president? As chapters 4 and 5 have argued, already during Ton’s lifetime, certain episodes of his biography became contested and utilized in veiled disagreements between broadly regionally defined factions of the party. Similar tensions manifested themselves after Ton’s death in commemorative projects around the country, of which the two most significant ones will be the subjects of chapters 6 and 7. In the new historical contexts and dramatically changing political-cultural environments of the 1980s, differences in biographical accentuations and various interpretations of the meaning of Ton’s life were reflective of, and contributed to, much larger intraparty debates. In a sense, the celebration of the life of an accomplished, unassailable revolutionary became a safe ersatz arena for contests about nothing less than the ancestries, the spirit, and the future direction of the Vietnamese Revolution. WITHIN THE SUBSTANTIAL BODY of biographical writing on Ton Duc Thang, clustered either in the years immediately following his death in 1980 or around Ton’s centennial anniversary in 1988, one text stands out: Comrade Ton Duc Thang, an Exemplary Staunch Communist Fighter, published in 1982 by the Central Commission for the Research of Party History of the Vietnamese Communist Party.2 Because of its production so close to the central VNCP leadership, this booklet undoubtedly was meant as Ton’s official, party-sanctioned biography. It represents most clearly the commemorative concerns emanating from the northern core of communist state power, and this chapter will 149 closely examine some of the text’s features: its discursive and, in a broad sense, aesthetic makeup, its built-in agenda of Telling Life, and its historical-political functions. That an official biography is highly didactic and prone to hagiography can be assumed to be a foregone conclusion. But how, more precisely, does this particular pamphlet work? For Ton Duc Thang’s biographers, what made his life telling? Beyond the specific text, an examination of its generic form will show that official biographies inherently contain complex mixtures of seemingly contradictory textual movements of appropriation and exclusion, containment and expansion. These phenomena are inseparable from the underlying paradigm of Marxian historical materialism after which such biographical writings are patterned. The notion of a highly deterministic historical process that moves in steady progression according to scientific laws is therefore predictable, and the claims of a revolutionary vanguard party as its most progressive human force might provide a certain kind of comfort, or self-flattery, for those who see themselves belonging to the leading camp. Yet, more important, a control of the present is to some degree dependent on the control of, or at least dominance over, the exegesis of history. Therefore, people who define themselves as the historical vanguard are trapped in a never-ending legitimizing , indeed de- and re-legitimizing, process, a historiographical Sisyphean labor, of fitting the past, including their own and their ancestry ’s, to this very paradigm. In other words, the custodians of a teleological historical model of predictability are engaged in a constant battle against the unpredictability of history, against the unsettling impermanence of historical truth. Ton’s official party biography is a product of this perpetual self-legitimizing task and part of a more expansive genre of prescriptive texts—like, for example, communist prison memoirs and Ho Chi Minh stories—that aim to “correctly” decode the past of Vietnamese communism. WHEN TON DUC THANG’S official biography was published in 1982, the Revolution’s momentum from the military triumph of 1975 and rapid unification had almost completely evaporated. The rush toward socialist transformation in the south had resulted in the near-collapse of the southern economy, and hundreds of thousands of southern refugees left the country. Instead of the long yearned-for peace, Viet Nam found itself engaged in a low-level border conflict with an aggres150 Telling Life: Ton Duc Thang's Official Biography sively xenophobic Kampuchea under the genocidal Pol Pot regime...

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