Tipped off by a new friend, I went to a market in central Ho Chi Minh in search of personal photos. The Dan Sinh Market, where I would find them, was full of hardware and a lot of Army/Navy Surplus-like merchandise. In addition, there was a large amount of "antiques," some conceivably dating from the Vietnam War or what Vietnam calls The American War or the War of American Aggression. Many things here are fake, which a number of the vendors had no problem admitting when I asked.
One of the most common sights were personally engraved Zippos, uncomfortably symbolic of American aggression. I was familiar with them because of Sherry Buchanan's, Vietnam Zippos: American Soldiers' Engravings and Stories (1965-1973), a memorable book detailing Bradford Edwards' collection of Zippos. From the introduction:
"...the Zippo was far more than an instrument of death and destruction. For the American soldiers who wielded them, they were a vital form of social protest as well. Vietnam Zippos showcases the engravings made by U.S. soldiers on their lighters during the height of the conflict, from 1965 to 1973."
The Zippos pictured cover a wide-range of the human experience, well under 140 characters. Below are a few examples.
As is the case with many objects that link us to the past, their authenticity is always a matter of provenance or belief. Yet, as the vendors pushed these on me ($5 for the fake ones and $25 for the real), I wasn't thinking of whether or not to purchase them - I wasn't interested. Alternatively, I was interested in a sustained question I've been asking myself for years - I will leave this question of authenticity (sincerity, genuineness) and how we "prove" it for another day.
I continued to walk through the market and eventually found a number of vendors that had piles of photos. After finding a friendly vendor, my friend and I sat down for the better part of an hour and superficially looked over hundreds of photos. The majority seemed to be of family and friends, ranging from the 50's to the 80's. The emotions that I had, from implication and imagination, were strong. Here is a small selection of the photos I brought with me:
When looking at personal histories from such a distance and without knowing their source or meaning, the photos take on a different role in my mind. As they blend with images in my memory and physically mix with other pictures from different settings, a more general view of the human condition comes into some kind of focus. Yes, it may be at the cost of their personal meanings, but those were lost long ago, when the pictures were abandoned, stolen, lost, thrown away or forgotten. However foreign and distant the "subjects" in historical photos, after looking through many of them, I always find aspects which bring me closer to the people around me now.