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Connecting places, constructing Tết: Home, city and the making of the lunar New Year in urban Vietnam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2012

Patrick McAllister
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Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the main features and nature of Tết, the Vietnamese lunar New Year festival, as it is currently experienced in Hồ Chí Minh City. It outlines a variety of social practices associated with Tết and suggests that it is through these that one can identify a ‘festive landscape’ in the city, within which a number of diverse places are made into and experienced as ‘meaningful space’ in the context of the Tết festival. The emphasis is on how the spatial practices associated with the festival constitute the lived experience of Tết by urban residents and on how this both transforms and connects various sites. Of particular importance here is the family home and how it is linked to the wider holistic experience of Tết, bringing together in a single place sacred and secular, public and private, and the production and consumption of place, in a social construction that is characterised as a heterotopia.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 111 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2012

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References

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5 Only the first and the last months in the lunar calendar are named. The others are simply known by their numbers, e.g. tháng hai (second month), tháng ba (third month), etc. Vietnamese also commonly use the Western month names.

6 The cây nêu is a bamboo pole decorated with various items deemed to bring good fortune and ward off evil.

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20 This applies only to a minority. The majority of homes in HCMC purchase their festive rice cakes at markets and supermarkets.

21 The aim of ‘star worship’ is primarily to offset the bad luck thought to befall people born under certain stars in the particular year being ushered in. It is also called cúng sao giải hạn — ‘worship stars to drive away bad luck’. Some informants point out that it is directed not at these stars themselves, but at the mystical beings associated with them.

22 The five fruits bowl often consists of custard apple or sour sop (mãng cầu), coconut (dừa), papaya (đu đủ), mango (xoài) and wild fig (cây sung) or another fruit such as dragon fruit (thanh long). These symbolise the desired quality of life in the New Year, since the names of these fruits when strung together form an expression in Vietnamese that translates as ‘pray to have enough money to spend’ or ‘pray for happiness and to have enough money to spend’, depending on which fruits are included.

23 Xuân Hiền Nguyễn, ‘Glutinous rice’.

24 Hilda Kuper, ‘The language of sites in the politics of space’, in The anthropology of space and place, pp. 247–63.

25 Tết diaries were kept for me by high school and university students, in which their Tết activities are detailed. In most cases these were followed up with interviews to enable the students to elaborate on what they had written. Young people, in particular, are likely to move about within and experience the urban landscape during Tết, but their diaries also detail the movements made by their elders and by whole families.

26 Political and civic authorities commonly take advantage of the festive period to honour war dead and pay homage to those who served in the armed forces in the past.

27 Ông Táo is three persons (or three deities) in one but is normally referred to in the singular.

28 Monks in Mahayana pagodas say that they do not hold such a service because praying for the dead is a normal part of everyday worship. Nevertheless, Tết is one of the festive periods during which prayer services for the dead are held in these pagodas most frequently, due to popular demand.

29 This is termed cúng tất niên (worship for finishing the old year); also rước ông bà (welcome the ancestors).

30 This practice is known in Sino Vietnamese as thập tự văn cảnh — literally ‘10 pagoda sights’, or hành hương thập tự — ‘10 pagoda pilgrimage’. The number varies; it might be 9, 10, or 13 different pagodas. These excursions or pilgrimages (hành hương) are also often organised by individual pagodas. They offer an opportunity for worship and instruction but also for enjoyment and sociability. A similar practice in the Hanoi area has been described by Soucy, Alex, ‘Pilgrims and pleasure seekers’, in Consuming urban culture in contemporary Vietnam, ed. Drummond, Lisa B.W. and Thomas, M. (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003), pp. 125–37Google Scholar. A general analysis of pilgrimage in southern Vietnam is provided by Taylor, Philip, Goddess on the rise: Pilgrimage and popular religion in Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

31 Religious practices in Vietnam cannot be categorised as simply urban or rural, and most of those who patronise famous and popular rural religious sites are from outside the local area; see Taylor, Goddess on the rise, pp. 114–15.

32 Taylor, Goddess on the rise, p. 50.

33 The translation is taken from Taylor, Goddess on the rise, p. 78. A simpler rendering might be ‘Sir's tomb’.

34 Xin xăm (meaning ‘choose a lot’ or ‘ask the oracle’) at Lăng Ông involves shaking a container full of numbered sticks until one of them eases itself out of the bunch and falls to the ground. The number and colour on the lot thus chosen corresponds with a particular prediction of the future which can then be obtained in printed form from a nearby counter. If more than one falls out and there is uncertainty about which one to count, or if there is an issue that the client wishes to confirm in a yes/no manner, xin keo (a pair of wooden blocks, yin [âm] and yang [dương], one white and one red) is consulted; here Lê Văn Duyệt, referred to as ‘God’ (Thần Linh), provides the answer by causing the blocks to appear in a particular way when they are thrown to the ground, a yin and yang combination being confirmation.

35 In the case of homes where the ancestors are not sent away, they are simply informed that there will be no more special meals for them.

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38 Some say that this altar is also for the ‘homeless ghosts’ who wander the streets, to keep them placated and ensure that they will not trouble the business.

39 Professor Trần Hồng Liên, personal communication.

40 Thần Tài and Ông Địa figures in the home/shop are purchased from specialist dealers and taken to the local pagoda (but not Theravada pagodas) where they are sanctified, before being placed in the home, but this happens at any time of the year.

41 Lovell, Nadia, ‘Introduction’, in Locality and belonging, ed. Lovell, Nadia (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 6Google Scholar.

42 The name of the festival refers to the festive rice cake associated with the South, called bánh tét, but this tét (literally meaning to cut or split) should not be confused with Tết, the lunar New Year, from which it is diacritically distinguished.

43 It is possible that this manipulation of space and the production of spectacle provide an image that helps to establish the legitimacy of the People's Committee, and, by extension, the Vietnamese Communist Party, as the provider of entertainment and pleasure for citizens. Handelman, Don, Models and mirrors: Towards an anthropology of public events (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 41–8Google Scholar.

44 According to Vietnamese legend, the original square version of the festive Tết rice cake, bánh chưng, which is associated with the North, was the creation of Prince Lăng Liễu, 18th son of King Hùng VII, an invention that was inspired by a dream in which a deity provided a recipe, and which earned him the right to be the next ruler.

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48 Ibid., p. 26.

49 Hetherington, Kevin, The badlands of modernity: Heterotopia and social ordering (Routledge: London, 1997), p. ix, cited in Saldanha, ‘Heterotopia and structuralism’, p. 2091CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Lovell, ‘Introduction’, pp. 6–8.

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52 De Certeau, The practice of everyday life, p. 117.

53 Ibid., pp. 93, 119, 196.