A Life of Worry

Front matter

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Part One. Forms Of Anxiety

1. How to Worry 3 2. Moral Sentiments 35 3. Rich Sentiments 53

PART TWO. CLINICAL MANIFESTATIONS OF ANXIETY 4. The Medicalization of Worry 73 5. The Psychologization of Worry 86

Part Three. Anxious Formations

6. Love, Anxiety 105 7. How We Worry 125 Notes 137 References 143

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

. A popular way to unwind in the early 2000s, di choi (to go play) entails cruising through the city on motorbikes with friends 8

. New infrastructure projects like the Ong Lanh Bridge in District 4 ease congestion but also highlight inequality 43

. A sidewalk café in Binh Thanh District faces customers toward the street instead of each other 54

. The apartment complex at 14 Tôn That Dam Street in District 1 is

the site of trendy cafés, vintage clothing stores, and private residences 55 . Motorbikes and urban anonymity have made romantic intimacy possible in the public sphere, especially in Ho Chi Minh City’s downtown 106

. A motorist in District 5 protects herself from the sun and pollution 127

7. A fluorescent tube light bulb draws attention to a late-night air pump in District 3 127 vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I like to read a book’s acknowledgments first to get the story behind the stories. In my favorite stories about Vietnam that I heard as a child, the country was a place of an idyllic beauty that could easily slide into something dangerous. The beaches in Viing Tau, where my mother grew up, have a deceptively strong undertow. Guava branches in Son Tay made the best slingshots for my father and his friends to shoot at birds and each other with. The stakes in the stories from my parents’ last years in the country before they moved to the United States in 1975 became starker yet more ambiguous. Risk, desperation, and cruelty yielded to somehow even more gutting acts of compassion and honor. So I suppose my first thanks should go to my parents and my aunts and uncles for the stories that sparked my interest in Vietnam and the sacrifices they made that allowed that curiosity to become a vocation. Listening to these stories with me were my brother and our twenty-two cousins. Thank you for the nonstop mischief, inside jokes, drama, and commiseration, as well as the stories of your own.

My deepest gratitude, however, goes to the people in Ho Chi Minh City whose generosity and patience I will never be able to repay. My colleagues at the Southern Institute for Social Sciences patiently explained to me the contours of sentiment (tinh cém) and demonstrated it to me every time I saw them. Prof. Van Thi Ngoc Lan, Bui Linh Cuéng, Nguyên Dang Minh Thao, Ha Thuc Diing, and especially Lê Thé Viing and Nguyén Cuc Tram went above and beyond to support my research. The psychiatrists and psychotherapists I spoke with are laying the foundations for future generations of mental health care workers, yet they made time in their busy schedules to share their approach to treating anxiety, demonstrating their conviction and determination in the process. Their patients and clients were

X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS often even more giving of their time and energy under difficult circumstances. Most of all, I want to acknowledge the people I call Hoa, Hai, and especially Tram for trusting me with their stories. Their lives have unfolded over the past decade in ways I certainly did not see coming. In particular, the twists and turns in Hai’s life after the events described in chapter 6 warrant another book. But all three of them faced trials, successes, and the long, discouraging stretches of stagnation in between with their sense of humor intact, and they continue to seek out new ways of thinking about their world.

I first learned to think about the world like an anthropologist as an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles, where classes taught by Doug Hollan, Jason Throop, and Linda Garro sent me on my way. This project took shape under the guidance of Tom Csordas, my primary advisor, and Janis Jenkins, first at Case Western Reserve University and then at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Whenever I got lost in the weeds of social theory, Tom's ability to pinpoint where I took a wrong turn always left me shaking my head in disbelief—how did he do that?—when I left his office. In terms of my research topic, I have long followed the trail set by Janis’s detailed and empathic work on how mental health and illness are experienced at the level of the individual and the collective. At UCSD, Steve Parish became and still is my role model of the anthropologist as writer, and Suzanne Brenner, Eddy Malesky, and Yen Le Espiritu gave much-needed counsel on the politics and logistics of conducting research in Southeast Asia. Just as important as my committee to my progression through graduate school were my fellow students, including Nicole Barger, Jon Bialecki, Waqas Butt, Esin Duzel, Ted Gideonse, Candler Hallman, Eric Hoenes, Nofit Itzhak, Tim Karis, Corinna Most, Jess Novak, Tim Shea, and Brendan Thornton. Eli Elinoff, Whitney Duncan, and Heather Spector Hallman deserve highlighted recognition for their support and motivation, then and now.

My colleagues in the department of sociology and anthropology at Bucknell University have given me more mentoring, and more of a sense of community, than I ever expected. I am grateful for Deb Abowitz, Karen Altendorf, Danny Alvord, Matt Baltz, Dannah Dennis, Elizabeth Durden, Sarah Egan, Lauren Fordyce, Natalie Kuhns, Stevie Rea, and Clare Sammells. Conversations with Deb Baney, Michelle Johnson, and Ned Searles carried me across the finish line more often than they know. Outside of my department, drinks, dinner clubs, and pub trivia with JiaJia Dong, Scott England, Qing Jiang, Leo Landrey, Alicia Hayashi Lazzarini, Heather Mechler, Christine Ngô, John Penniman, David Rojas, Sezi Seskir, Dan Temkin, and Bryan Vandevender have also been essential. Anna Baker and I cotaught an interdisciplinary class on anxiety, and her clinical expertise moved chapter 5 away from simple critique. My anxious Gen Z students’ honesty about their own experiences and curiosity about others’ always gave me more to think through. Chapter 7 was written with them in mind. Jonathan Bean, Erica

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi

Delsandro, Annetta Grant, and Aaron and Marissa Mitchel made a small college town in Pennsylvania feel more like a home. Any place with my dog Roger seems like home, so thank you to Hadar Sayfan for opening hers in New York City to us.

Portions of this book have been presented at conferences for the American Anthropological Association, Association for Asian Studies, and Society for Psychological Anthropology and benefited from the engagement of panel organizers and discussants, including Amy Borovoy, Paul Brodwin, Tom Csordas, Byron Good, Hsuan-Ying Huang, Janis Jenkins, Ann Marie Leshkowich, Rebecca Lester, Andrea Muehlebach, Eugene Raikhel, Christina Schwenkel, Jason Throop, Ben Tran, Anita von Poser, Julia Vorhdlter, Jie Yang, and Jarrett Zigon, among many others. Side conversations with Nick Bartlett, Elizabeth Carpenter-Song, Vivian Choi, Michael D’Arcy, Jenna Grant, Chris Kortright, Martha Lincoln, Abby Mack, Raphaélle Rabanes, Sarah Rubin, and Michelle Stewart have become the highlight of these events. Merav Shohet has carefully read and reread almost everything I have written, an expression of her own excellent work on care and sacrifice. I look forward to all of us gathering together again, hopefully soon. My gratitude also goes to the audiences and participants at UCSD’s Seminar in Psychological and Medical Anthropology and Science Studies Program; UCLA’ Mind, Medicine, and Culture Seminar; Bucknell’s Medical Humanities Working Group and Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender; the Framing (Dis)Orders Workshop at Washington University in St. Louis; and the Affective Arrangements in Therapeutic Settings Symposium at Freie Universitat Berlin.

Ho Chi Minh City draws a brilliant and supportive network of scholars whose work grounds my own and always generates new ideas and connections to explore. Ethnographic research is exciting and fulfilling but can be so draining! Being able to vent or puzzle over something with fellow researchers is a gift, especially when done over a bowl of noodles and a crisp lager with ice or a bougie cocktail. Dzô to Erik Harms, Ann Marie Leshkowich, Hy Van Luong, and Christina Schwenkel for the insights into Vietnam studies; Ivan Small and Jamie Gillen for the laughs; Mitch Aso and Caroline Herbelin for the stickers and gifs; Alex Cannon, Hyunok Lee, Khai Thu Nguyén, and Maria Stalford for the deep conversations and support; Claire Edington and Haydon Cherry for the gossip; and Sarah Grant for all of the above. Numerous research trips to Ho Chi Minh City were made possible by the National Science Foundation; UCSD’s International, Comparative, and Area Studies Research Fund; and Bucknell’s Scholarly Development Grant, International Research Travel Grant, and Tom Greaves Fund for Research or Curricular Development.

At UC Press, Kate Marshall and Chad Attenborough ushered this book through the publication process with more patience than I deserved. Thank you to Tanya Luhrmann for making the introduction to Kate. The generous and astute comments of three reviewers, one of whom was later revealed to be Nick Bartlett, xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS sharpened my arguments and expanded their scope. Portions of chapters 3, 4, and 6 were previously published in American Anthropologist, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly.

My father, Luu Tran, passed away as I was considering whether to pursue a career in anthropology. Shortly before he died, he told me that he wasn’t worried about me. My mother, Julie Tran, worries about me more than anyone ever has or ever will. This book falls somewhere between their ways of worrying and would not have been possible without either. My brother, Brian Tran, is the storyteller of the family, and his book will be much better than mine. I am still trying to worry about/for him just enough. Cúa bé me, em.

Part One

Bac Lan’s kitchen did not have any windows. It was tucked in the back of the ground floor of her narrow four-story house in downtown Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, so the only light came from fluorescent tubes overhead and a television's blue-tinted glare that bounced off the room’s cool, sterile surfaces: all tile, metal, glass, and plastic. Still, the room felt oddly comforting to me. Most Vietnamese kitchens are spotlessly utilitarian, with little decoration or personal ornamentation, but this one featured a breakfast nook framed underneath recessed walls and built-in shelves. On the shelves were figurines of Phuc Léc Tho (the trio of East Asian deities associated with prosperity, status, and longevity) and various Disney characters as well as framed photographs of Bac Lan, her husband Vi, and their daughter “Mimi” (a family nickname). The biggest picture was of Bac Lan, smiling in front of a Cartier boutique in Paris during a trip to visit her sister. Of course, much of why I was drawn to this kitchen was due to Bac Lan herself, a cheerful fifty-nine-year-old who was always ready to receive unannounced visitors with mangos, lychees, dragonfruit, or whatever was in season. Because she was one of the few people in Ho Chi Minh City I knew who was actually born and raised there, I occasionally stopped by her home to ask her how the house, neighborhood, and city had changed.

Born into a wealthy family in what was then French colonial Saigon, Bac Lan grew up in the house with the windowless kitchen, but its layout was much different then. Commissioned by her grandfather, the house was built on a spacious plot on a wide, bustling boulevard. Even against the backdrop of the Second Indochina War—more commonly known outside of Vietnam as the “Vietnam War” but what most Vietnamese call the “American War”—Bac Lan had, by her account, a happy childhood spent playing with numerous cousins and schoolmates. Indeed, many native Saigonese recall the war as a time when the American presence brought an influx of capital into the city and describe it as a happy (sung suéng)' one. This characterization of the war era is no doubt a reaction to the one that followed, which many people, including Bac Lan, said was the most difficult period of their life. After the war ended in 1975, the state sought to improve all aspects of life in a newly reunified Vietnam through socialist transformation. However, Ho Chi Minh City residents’ recollection of the following ten years emphasize the suffering (dau kh6) endured as a result of an oftentimes punitive regime change, government mismanagement, domestic economic stagnation, and chronic shortages of essential goods. Poverty, hunger, and malnutrition—already rampant from thirty years of war—worsened somehow. Bac Lan’s father had walls built to divide the house into three separate units and sold the flanking residences to sustain the family through the transition of a newly reunified Vietnam.

“Nghich ly, Va chimed in. A paradox! Himself a rumored supporter of the new regime, he went on to say that everything that the Saigonese had known until then was suddenly turned upside down. Streets once bustling with social and commercial activity became eerily calm. The poor were rewarded for their status as the proletariat, while Saigon’s elite were punished as bourgeoisie sympathizers. The youthful Communist vanguard became more powerful than their elders, now vilified as feudal and superstitious. Parents were afraid of their children, not the other way around. Profound economic scarcity led to suspicion and distrust where there had once been generosity and fellowship. Many of the people I spoke with during my research insisted to me that because of the war and its aftermath the Vietnamese had known more suffering than anyone else on the planet. Furthermore, Bac Lan and Vd insisted that the Saigonese—or at least those who profited from an inflated wartime economy—suffered the most during that time because they had the steepest decline in quality of life. Everyone else in the country was used to hardship. For Bac Lan, the worst part was simply not knowing what would happen each day. Such uncertainty makes adequate planning for the future an impossibility, yet her every waking moment was still spent figuring out how to survive.

In 1986, a series of neoliberal reforms known as déi mdi (renovation) began to be gradually rolled out; by the early 1990s, signs of the country’s economic revitalization were obvious. This process entailed the “normalization” (binh thudng hod) of Vietnam’s relations with its former adversary the United States, but Bac Lan usually used the word binh thudng Iai, or “renormalize,’ to describe the era and the city’s return to form. By now the owner of the house, Bac Lan rented out her front room to a photocopier repair shop, earning enough income for her and Via to retire comfortably and send Mimi to university. (It was around this time that she remodeled her kitchen.) With more and more storefronts and restaurants opening across the city, the street outside her house became busy “just like before,” except that all the bicycles were replaced with motorbikes. Surely this was evidence, not only that life had become normal again, but that significant progress was happening.

Some nights, though, in the last moments before Bac Lan drifted to sleep, she would be dropped wide awake in a familiar feeling. It is some time between 1981 and 1985, and she is thinking about what to do next.

I discovered late into my initial fieldwork that Bac Lan’s kitchen was designed by an American-trained architect. No wonder I felt at home there. Yet this unconscious reminder of home when I was far from it was unnerving. A few years later, the kitchen was torn down along with the walls that divided the ground floors of the three residences, reunited as a gleaming white car dealership.

Bac Lan is hardly alone in her worries. Insecurity of all stripes makes headlines around the world. For example, economic volatility in a globalized marketplace now has worldwide effects. As precarity becomes the rule rather than the exception, once stable political orders buckle under austerity measures and the rise of antiestablishment political movements, giving lie to the idea that they were even stable to begin with. We have yet to see the worst of global climate change, but we know it is coming and perhaps has already begun. The fact that most of us cannot fathom what “it” will look like makes the associated uncertainty that much more disquieting. Of course, these persistent problems have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the effects of which on our physical and mental health are persistent yet still unclear. Anxiety and stress disorders are the most common types of mental illness in the world and are the sixth leading cause of disability (Baxter et al. 2014b). At any given moment, one in fourteen people on the planet suffer from an anxiety disorder (Baxter et al. 2013). In the United States, that figure is one in four (WHO World Mental Health Survey Consortium 2004), representing a twentyfold increase since the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition (DSM-III) standardized the diagnosis of anxiety disorders almost fifty years ago.’ It should be little surprise that anxiety is trending on and off social media platforms. The number of people who Googled anxiety has doubled in less than a decade, and the hashtag #ThisIsWhatAnxietyFeelsLike has millions of posts on Twitter (Williams 2017). Social media campaigns by various mental health collectives, such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness, advocate that “its OK to not be OK” in an attempt to destigmatize discussion of one’s mental health problems. Being OK with not being OK has become not just a mantra of the times but a structure of feeling as well (Williams 1977).

Anxiety is the general apprehension of threats to what we hold as essential to our being and its flourishing. As an anthropologist, I focus on its relational dimensions. Indeed, anxiety can itself be considered a kind of relationship between the self and a world of uncertainty. An unfortunate turn of events may provoke a wide range of emotional reactions, but what distinguishes anxiety from those other feelings is that it revolves around what might happen, not just an existing danger. It is a register of lived experience that invokes questions of meaning and deadlines, headaches and being-in-the-world; these questions are usually “what if?” questions. Anxiety ranges and cycles from the catastrophic to moments of indecision and a “sense of dull disquiet” (O’Gorman 2015, 25). Circumstances that have not yet come to pass and exist because we imagine them as a possibility may be more pressing—even more real—than what is already over and done with. Worse yet, at times we do not know what we are afraid of, and this suggests that what is so troubling about anxiety is rooted not in a particular object of fear but in something about ourselves and our ability to respond to the unknown. Anxieties are a part of us yet lie beyond our ability to know, let alone control, them. “What is there so fearful as the expectation of evil tidings delayed?” the nineteenth-century writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote. “For then the heart no longer sickens with disappointed hope.” The answer to her question may be found in her most famous work, Frankenstein (1818), with its themes of alienation, ambition, and the unanticipated consequences of scientific progress.

Based on ethnographic research conducted during the periods 2007-09, 2015-16, and 2019-20, with several summers of fieldwork in between, A Life of Worry is a cultural biography of the anxieties that take on a life of their own in Ho Chi Minh City.’ Biographies of noted individuals suggest formative narratives of identity. As a genre, they typically frame their subject as an autonomous protagonist to speak truth to power. However, as I loosely conceive it, the cultural biography is neither a hero’s journey nor a cautionary tale. Applying a biographical lens to anxiety, stress, and worry focuses less on the individuals who experience them—though certainly those individuals populate the study that follows. It places anxiety just outside of the context of an individual’s psyche to examine its own agentive force and how it is sustained by social relationships and institutions. Following Fassin and Rechtman’s (2009) analysis of trauma’s hold on the medical, legal, and public imagination, this book traces the epistemologies and discourses of new scientific paradigms and a shifting moral economy. But I also explore how worries can take on a life of their own as they travel in and out of the clinic as well as between individuals. People often know that they worry needlessly and return to those worries compulsively, unable to either avoid future suffering or stop themselves from the torment of anxiety. These feelings do more than embellish moments in people's lives. They have far-reaching social repercussions that move across social relationships and institutions. Anxiety can define the subject but can also exceed it.

This book offers a conceptual approach to anxiety that is different from how we are often trained to think about it. The dominant perspectives from philosophy, psychology, and, increasingly, neuroscience frame anxiety as an emotional state, a pathological symptom, a biochemical process, or an existential condition. By individualizing and universalizing the experience of anxiety, these conceptualizations obscure the critical role of anxiety’s social context. Thus, I conceptualize anxiety as a practice—something we do and perform in addition to feel and experience— that creates and sustains social relationships. And as with all social practices, anxiety is not entirely innate. The process of worry entails caring about an object and imagining a future that threatens that object, actions that are profoundly shaped by social and political forces. Put simply, we learn how to worry. Thus, I examine the cultural and personal patterning of mundane and extraordinary, as well as normative and pathological, forms of anxiety and how local systems of knowledge, relationships, and practices inform and are informed by anxiety. If we pay attention to how people in Vietnam confide their own specific anxieties to their families, friends, colleagues, doctors, counselors, and the occasional anthropologist, we can also glean their attempts to articulate new ways of living in a rapidly changing society. Going beyond what people say about their worries to the social and institutional construction of anxiety requires attending to multiple levels of analysis and the resonances between them. As a phenomenological study of anxiety and global capitalism in Ho Chi Minh City, this book analyzes that feeling akin to when you trip and “the ground is rushing up at you before you land” (Solomon 2001) and situates it in the broader context of the ground that shifted beneath your feet in the first place. If emotions are interpretations of problems, then examining the state construction of affect reveals how the historical, ideological, and embodied registers of those problems connect each other (Jenkins 1991; Ngai 2007).

Despite their global prevalence, anxiety and anxiety disorders have received sporadic anthropological attention.‘ This is all the more striking given the extensive literature within medical anthropology on other forms of mental health concerns stemming from the dangers of social experience (Kleinman et al. 1997). These studies examine the continuum between normal and pathological forms of emotional experience and the medical and political process of setting a boundary between them. While people with depression (Kitanaka 2011), trauma (Daniel 1996; Jenkins and Cofresi 1998; Lester 2013), and substance abuse (Garcia 2010; Bartlett 2020) often focus on coming to terms with the past, anxiety is primarily oriented toward the future. The unknowability of what lies ahead is not anxiety’s only source of ambiguity. In today’s transnational capitalism, the nature of the sociopolitical itself cultivates more ambient feelings that are perhaps less forceful than the political passions of fear and anger but no less effective (Virno 2004; Ngai 2007). Anxiety draws our attention to the precarity of everyday experiences and how it is linked to relations of gendered care, classed aspirations, and moral selfhood.

A Life of Worry opens in Bac Lan’s kitchen because anxiety does not need the darkest recesses of the soul to take root, though a dimly lit room does not hurt. After all, Bac Lan is not a particularly nervous person. Yet the potential for anxiety surrounds her. The states of her mind, house, and hometown intersect to blur the boundaries between past and present, as well as between self and other.

FIGURE 1. A popular way to unwind in the early 2000s, di chai (to go play) entails cruising through the city on motorbikes with friends.

These convergences, which register alternately as dissociation or signs of economic progress, may appear to be unrelated, but anxiety can arise from seemingly innocuous and chance circumstances. It is not the sole product of individual-level factors because it does not reside within individuals. Rather, much like selfhood, anxiety exists somewhere between individuals and the world, demonstrating that the self does not exist independently of its relation to the world. In anxiety, people find themselves “thrown” from the familiar, suddenly not at home in the world (Heidegger 1962). Though Bac Lan is thrown back to the 1980s for only a second, the effect lingers. The paradox of the postwar lean years that Va describes and the post-reform return to “normal” question what all that suffering was for. This question starkly contrasts with the official narrative of personal sacrifices made for the benefit of a Communist victory (Shohet 2013). Furthermore, the return of something—whether it is the postwar lean years (if just for a moment), the ground floor of a house, or a capitalist economy—is uncanny because it brings the familiar to an unfamiliar context (Freud 1919). Although Bac Lan and her contemporaries are still trying to determine the meaning of Vietnam's traumatic history, it is important for us to avoid explaining away the confusion of anxiety. Liberal discourses of the emotions privilege them as the site of intimate self-knowledge, but anxiety alienates us from the world to reveal the self faced with its own indeterminacy.

Saigon and Ho Chi Minh City

A woman on the cusp of a promising career comes under increasing pressure from her parents to abandon it in order to marry and have children. A market vendor struggles to find the money to pay her child’s tuition. A student crams for finals; his classmate is concerned that he has not felt the urge to study all semester. A patient at the Ho Chi Minh City Psychiatric Hospital who has just been diagnosed with depression wonders how she will pay for her medication, how she will manage her work and family obligations with an illness, and whether or not she will one day “go crazy” (bi dién). That the set of concerns that preoccupy Ho Chi Minh City residents—financial woes, work pressures, and family tensions—may seem so familiar or exceedingly ordinary to many of us is, in and of itself, remarkable given the tumult of Vietnam’s recent history. For most people outside of the country, “Vietnam” has become synonymous with the “Vietnam War,” oversimplifying both the country’s past and its present. Although this book does not focus on that war, understanding its themes requires proper contextualization of the war and its legacy. Here, I briefly set the historical context of Ho Chi Minh City before I delve into the effects of specific policies in the following sections.

Then an outpost of the Khmer empire called Prey Nokor, Saigon came under jurisdiction of Vietnam in 1698 as part of its Southward March (Nam Tién) from Hanoi during the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. Near the fertile Mekong Delta, it quickly expanded under Vietnamese rule and developed a national reputation as a place of relative wealth, ease, and leisure that it maintains to this day. When the French colony of Indochina (encompassing present-day Vietnam, Cambodia, and eventually Laos) was established in 1887, Saigon was named its first capital and has since borne the strongest Western influence in the region. On September 2, 1945, the Communist revolutionary Hô Chi Minh read the Proclamation of Independence to a crowd of thousands at Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi to announce the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and Vietnam’s independence from France. The ensuing First Indochina War was fought between the Viet Minh (Viêt Nam Déc Lap Déng Minh, League for the Independence of Vietnam), led by Hô Chi Minh, and French and pro-French Vietnamese forces. The Geneva Conventions of 1954 ended the war with the partitioning of Vietnam into the DRV in the North and the State of Vietnam, renamed the Republic of Vietnam (ROV) a year later, in the South. Over the next year, nearly one million political refugees, known as the ’54 Northerners (Bac 54), relocated from the North to the South.

The Second Indochina War set the DRV, the southern-based National Liberation Front with their military wing the Viet Cong (Viêt Nam Cong San, Vietnamese Communists), and Communist supporters, including the Soviet Union and China, against the ROV and the United States with additional support from South Korea, Australia, and other anticommunist allies. During the twenty years of this undeclared war, over three million Vietnamese combatants and civilians were killed, and tens of thousands more died after the war due to unexploded ordnance or the chemical defoliant known as Agent Orange. Moreover, millions in Cambodia and Laos were killed during and after the war. Vietnam was “reunified” when North Vietnam took Saigon, the southern capital, on April 30, 1975, and thereby ended one of the twentieth century’s most controversial and devastating wars. However, as Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016, 4) writes, “all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” A year later, Saigon was officially renamed Ho Chi Minh City, but most people in the country still refer to it informally as Saigon.