Abstract
This essay examines the everyday life and death of residents in urban Hanoi during the fourth wave of the pandemic in the summer of 2021. The article considers how city dwellers developed manifold creative strategies to deal with government requirements and argue that part of the population developed tactics of survival to circumvent prescribed rules in coping with the pandemic. But it wasn't just the living who were affected by the virus. The dead are believed to live on in the afterlife, and hence the essay also illustrates popular religious practices performed to protect ancestors from infection. Since customary respect for the deceased involves burning paper votive replicas, new items in the form of face masks and vaccine kits began circulating online. This not only sheds light on people's efforts to ensure that ancestors feel safe in the hereafter but shows how ritual artifacts and practices reflect and refract political, economic, and health concerns to bridge life and death.
