Author: Mai Lan Gustafsson
Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2009
Price: £12.50 (paperback)
Isbn: 9780801475016

Mediæval Christians prayed for delivery from the sudden death that would prevent them from repenting their sins. Woodcuts showed angels and demons fighting over the souls of the dying. In Vietnam, equal import­ance is placed on dying well, and the penalty for failure is equally frightful.

The five million Vietnamese who were killed in the wars between the 1940s and 1970s died badly – they were mainly young and buried without due ceremony. When the war ended in 1975, the Commun­ists outlawed spirit mediums, and relatives had to deal with their loss without the comfort of spirit relig­ion and its protection against damned souls returning as angry ghosts. The war, writes Mai Lan Gustafsson, “created an overpopulated shadow world of darkness and pain” which haunts a cosmopolitan modern country. The 190 northern Vietnamese con ma subjects in War and Shadows range from infants (“I feel dead. Like Grandpa. I am Grandpa”) to octogenarians, and come from all walks of life; Gustafsson describes their spirit possession without academic or psychoanalytic tropes and in their own terminology. Appendix 1, The Table of Suffering, lists afflict­ions ranging from glossolalia, temporary paralysis, depression and hearing voices to aching heads and limbs – often the same body parts injured in their angry ghosts, a strange internalisation of the civil war that ripped the country apart. (Appendix 2 outlines events from the birth of Communist North Vietnam to the fall of Saigon.)

Chia buon – lessening sadness by sharing it – runs through this outstanding book and applies equally to the possessed and to the ghosts whose rage is dissipated by being acknowledged.