How does one remember a past that is fundamentally contradictory to the present? This article addresses the question by demonstrating the work of memory as reciprocal commensuration—the intensive social labour required to make the past and the present comparable, as well as the condition of bittersweetness that is inherent to this process. Drawing from twenty-eight life stories of Hanoi’s residents who 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 experienced and remembered by the extensive network of Vietnamese who travelled to Eastern Europe in the 1980s. Despite the confirmation of the “better life” as an escape from socialism, memory of Hanoi residents about life quality evinces a state of bittersweetness, in which bitter complaint about past miseries still fail to make the present less miserable, and sweet memories keep lingering. Thinking in terms of commensuration makes visible the ways Vietnamese people (dis)orient themselves out of socialism, thus demonstrates the navigational dimension of memory thanks to its inherent comparative nature.
Giang is research fellow at the Digital Cultures and Societies Hub (DCS), University of Queensland. She obtained her doctorate at the University of Queensland in 2016. From 2018-2020, she worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center of Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Her book Television in Post-Reform Vietnam: Nation, Media, Market (Routledge, 2019) is the first monograph in English about contemporary Vietnamese media. She has published articles in Cultural Studies, The Journal of Asian Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and Media International Australia. Her current project explores the lived experience of digital time. She is also interested in cultural memory, especially the reconstruction of the socialist past in now highly globalized and marketized Vietnam.