Lingering phantoms : haunted literature and counter memories from the Vietnam/American War

Abstract

Ghosts feature prominently in the imaginary of the Vietnam/American war for all sides. These spectres form counter memories that are maintained by ancestor worship or Buddhist conceptions of the hungry ghost, and they run against the rhetoric of the Vietnamese and American nation states. This exegesis will explore the presence of ghosts in published works in English after the Vietnam/American war. Maxine Hong Kingston's renditions of American war veterans' stories have emerged from workshops which she has run for veterans. These workshops have been informed by engaged Buddhism, as practised by Thich Nhat Hanh The Sorrow of War sees Kien, a Vietnamese war veteran turned writer, become like a ghost himself after his experiences. In Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge, Mai is haunted by her mother's grief and eventual suicide in America. Nam Le writes a short story about his father, who resembles a hungry ghost unable to receive his son's love. Vu uses the gothic retelling of the Buddhist myth of Anguli Ma to reveal the hungry ghost that dwells inside Dao, his landlady. Vu's story, A Psychic Guide to Vietnam obscures more than explains Vietnam to the reader with a text using silences and omissions. These works are 'counter memories' to the dominant Hollywood depictions of the war. The novel that accompanies the exegesis, titled The Lady of the Realm, retells the parable of Quan Am and is a historical fiction featuring Lien and her decades of stories, and Kim, a young psychic employed by the present-day Vietnamese government to reunite the war dead with their descendants. Ghosts literally feature in the text, and the work is polyphoniclike the nature of truths. These works together present a diverse range of voices and heterogeneous representations of the war, and it is hoped that in telling their stories, some ghosts will be put to rest.

Date of Award	2016
Original language	English