Memory, comparison, and reciprocal commensuration: searching for the socialist ‘bad life’ in aspirational Vietnam

Abstract

ABSTRACT How does one remember the past that is radically incompatible with the present? This article addresses this question by demonstrating the work of memory as reciprocal commensuration – the intensive social labor required to make the past and the present comparable, and the condition of bittersweetness that is inherent to this process. Drawing from twenty-eight life stories of Hanoi’s residents who usually claim that ‘life today is better than before’, this article traces the ways Hanoi people turn the ‘badness’ of the socialist life into a ground of comparison against which ‘life today’ was graded as ‘better’. This paper then unpacks how the materialistic quality of the ‘better life’ was historically formed along the greater intensities of ‘Western’ comfort, convenience, and abundance, which were experienced and still embraced by an extensive network of Vietnamese workers who traveled to Eastern Europe in the 1980s. But despite the dominant narrative of the current ‘better life’ as an escape from socialist miseries, memories of Hanoi residents about life quality under socialism reveal an ambivalent state of bittersweetness, in which laments about past sufferings become folded in with stories of half-forgotten progress, and stories of progress are entangled with lamentations of ongoing dissatisfaction. Thinking about memory in terms of commensuration makes visible the ways Vietnamese people orient themselves out of socialism, demonstrating the navigational power of memory in contexts of radical historical ruptures.