Ling U

Subsistence crises have recurred throughout Vietnamese modern history, notably in the contexts of French colonialism, Japanese occupation, and postcolonial and postwar communist economic centralization and agricultural collectivization. The Great Famine of 1944-1945 - whose causes have been attributed to the convergence of natural disaster, French and Japanese mismanagement, and American bombing – has been significantly commemorated within Vietnamese revolutionary history. Other, more recent, episodes of hunger have been creatively remembered through a range of official and unofficial forms, such as film, literature, and museum exhibitions, even if such episodes occupy a more uneasy place within the sphere of state culpability and thus national historiography. Nonetheless, there is clearly a rich body of artistic expression and remembrance of the crisis of hunger in Vietnamese history.