Our cover features Dinh Y. Nhi's Daughters of Mr. Nguyen II (2005), a painting included in the traveling show “Changing Identity: Recent Works by Women Artists from Vietnam,” organized by Nora Annesley Taylor. Image reproduced courtesy of Dinh Y. Nhi, with the assistance of International Arts and Artists, Washington, D.C.
Our first two articles explore gendered forms of sociality and culture in Vietnam. Ann Marie Leshkowich examines a marketplace fee controversy in Ho Chi Min City and finds gendered memory work at play. Southern Vietnam has been haunted for years by untold numbers of malevolent “wandering ghosts”—spirits of the war dead who, lacking descendants, linger in this world homeless and uncommemorated. Yet a new “wandering ghost” has appeared: the marketplace official who demands user fees from women traders for rights to a market stall. Leshkowich shows that the fee controversy heightened tensions between cadres and traders. The metaphor of the...
