Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City

Four. Summoning Spirits

83 Four Summoning Spirits R emittances denominated in US dollars in southern Vietnam created a social infrastructure for families that were stretched out across vast geographical distances. These gifts in the guise of US dollar bills were also valued as signs of membership in a globalizing economy. Are there parallels that can then be drawn between the economies of remittances and spirit money, paper replicas of money offered to the world of spirits? Although capitalist theories of value marginalized both practices and Vietnamese bankers and officials disapproved of them, they have been crucial domains in the production of Vietnamese personhood and in negotiating the complex meanings of sociality within a newly liberalized but not yet neoliberalized economy. Yet there is a danger with these economies as well. Money once stripped of its guise of sentimentality and relatedness can make even ghosts become real. Bùi Giáng’s Money Just off Highway 13, a dusty road lined on both sides by stands offering yellow mums, bundles of incense, and assorted paper offerings led to the entrance of a cemetery. People arrived in vans and on motorbikes to pay respect to deceased family members and friends. On this particular morning in 2002, I was with Mr. Thiệu, a man in his sixties, who had been invited to accompany a friend, Mrs. Nhung, whom he affectionately referred to as his “sister.” They had grown up together in central Vietnam, and, even decades later, she relied on his wide range of contacts, often to great profit. But she rarely compensated him for his efforts, or so he claimed. His complaint made visible a paradox of kinship, namely that as people express their relatedness to others through gifts of money, they expose those relations to the hazards of commoditization as affective labor becomes measured in terms of market 84 Chapter Four activity.1 The paradox of economic calculation, as we will see, extends as well to relations with the dead. On that day Mrs. Nhung intended to make offerings to her deceased parents . She had a reputation for lending money at high interest rates and for organizing rotating savings associations. Still, I was surprised to see how simple her offerings were. She laid a bouquet of flowers, a bundle of incense, a special rice dish, and a small set of spirit money on the gravesite. Behind her, other groups were preparing far more elaborate offerings: trays laden with cans of Heineken beer, boiled chickens, tins of fancy butter cookies, fresh fruit, and piles of spirit money. Mrs. Nhung was discreet; she was also thorough. After lighting a bundle of incense, she passed out a few sticks to everyone in the group, to offer at the neighboring gravesites. The adjacent spirits might be accidentally summoned by the offerings, and could be vengeful if they were not also acknowledged. Finally, Mrs. Nhung slipped one of the attendants a fifty-thousand-đồng note to motivate him to keep the area clean and well tended in her absence. Her attentiveness in acknowledging both the attendants and the neighboring gravesites made me skeptical of Mr. Thiệu’s claim of being overlooked by his “sister.” I soon realized that Mr. Thiệu had plans of his own. Mr. Thiệu’s interest in the trip was not in carrying out ancestral rituals for his sister’s parents. He had joined the entourage as an excuse to visit the gravesite of an old friend, a poet. While he never described the man as his brother, they had had an especially close relationship. The poet, Bùi Giáng, was still well known in Ho Chi Minh City, famous as much for the brilliance of his poetry and translations of modernist philosophy as for his descent into poverty and madness after 1975. Mr. Thiệu urged me to come with him to the gravesite. When we found the gravesite, I was startled by its elegant but serene design. Lines of Bùi Giáng’s poetry were carved in marble, and vines with blooming tendrils trailed down the wall. In front of the wall were a bronze bust of the poet and some benches for visitors to rest on. Someone had left a large bouquet of dried flowers next to the bust. Mr. Thiệu lovingly touched the bust with his hand, as he might his old friend. He then picked up the vase of flowers and tossed them aside, explaining, “Bùi Giáng hated flowers.” As we stood...