After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (review)

The melancholic theme of Heonik Kwon's After the Massacre is the fate of the restless dead in Vietnamese culture, those wandering souls whose bodies were not properly buried and whose lives were not rightly commemorated. The massacres that claimed them, and to which Kwon refers, are those of Vietnamese villagers carried out by French, American, and South Korean soldiers during the Indochina wars. These dead villagers lead a tormented existence, caught somewhere between death and life, suspended between survivors prevented from mourning them and a state whose hand reaches even into the grave. Kwon's nuanced scholarship is a way of mourning these Vietnamese dead, for outside of Viet Nam their fate is generally forgotten. If they are remembered, it is only poorly, for if French and Americans understand each other's death customs, they know little of Vietnamese rituals, and of how the massacres made these rituals impossible among the living. As Kwon's fine book demonstrates, our ritual practices of burying the dead are as much about ensuring their safe passage into an afterlife as they are about guaranteeing the living's harmonious relationship with the departed. But when the circumstances of death prevent us from burying the dead in the ways to which we're accustomed, then the living may find it difficult to continue the rhythm of their normal existence. Thus, the unburied dead, or the badly buried dead, not having left this world properly, remain to haunt us.

Such was the case after the two massacres that Kwon is most concerned with, occurring at My Lai and Ha My, two villages in Viet Nam's center, where some of the war's heaviest fighting occurred. The name of My Lai, where over five hundred women, children, and elderly were murdered by American troops in 1968, is, of course, branded into the psyche of an entire generation. But Ha My? There, South Korean troops, allied with the United States, killed one hundred thirty-five villagers during the same season as the massacre at My Lai. As Kwon enumerates, these were only the two bloodiest of many large and small massacres carried out by American and South Korean troops from 1966 to 1969. The atrocities of American troops are well known, but those of South Koreans less so, despite the fact that during the war over 300,000 South Korean troops served, of whom over 4,000 were killed. South Korea was the most important military ally of the United States, whose payments to the South Korean government for the use of its troops helped to launch South Korea into an economic rise that has not yet tapered off. This history is obscure not only to Americans, but even to the Vietnamese and South Koreans themselves, who have only begun to learn of the economic benefits, and moral costs, of their nation's involvement in Viet Nam in the 1990s.

Both South Koreans and the Vietnamese, Kwon argues, were caught in a Cold War not of their own making, a "bipolar" world that forced them to take sides and make choices with tragic consequences. This political bipolarity affected even the culture of death, which for the Vietnamese was already dual in nature, with good deaths occurring in the "house" and bad ones in the "street." If someone died in the domestic space of the home, then the dead person's descendants could worship her spirit at the ancestral shrine. A bad death outside the home, however, meant that only strangers could mourn one's spirit at the numerous shrines for wandering souls. The victims of the massacres confused this traditional concentric ordering of death, for while they died in the inner circle, at home, they did so badly. Not only did their killers inflict violence upon the victims, but they prevented the dead from being buried properly. Survivors at My Lai were forced to bury the dead en masse in shallow...