Living history
We had a task at the university I used to work at in Vietnam that was aimed at practicing comparatives. Called "Your city - then and now", it asked students to find out from a living person what things about Hanoi had changed since 1960.
Despite the clear instructions, students tended to head straight for the internet, bringing back the same tired old pictures that were often clearly just 'old', faded sepia with titles like Tonkin - Kiosques au Petit Lac de Hoan Kiem.
So we went back to the lesson and tweaked the design, and once we'd got past the fact that no, you didn't have to use English when you were interviewing your grandparents, we were away.
The students turned up some interesting information and anecdotes, to be sure. But by far the most interesting thing for me was just how many said they'd never really spoken to their grandparents before. Certainly not about things like the war and the ensuing privations. Not about that W-A-R thing that is the first association many Westerners have with Vietnam.
Thinking about it a little further, it's not so very strange. Not strange that old folk wouldn't want to bring it up after centuries of war - before the Americans the French, before the French the Chinese - turned into hard won independence, and, after a few years of turmoil and random blood letting, settled into stringently anti-capitalist no-fun ration-book communism, before finally morphing into today's pedal to the metal iGreed good times - no wonder there's not a lot of reminiscing going on.
Not so strange that eighteen-year-olds with their eyes on the iPhone5 weren't much interested in hearing about how hard it was in the mists of the past nearly two lifetimes before you were born. Just like the Japanese kids I saw haring around the Atomic Bomb Museum in Hiroshima completely unaffected by the horrors that so-called human beings are capable of. And I'm just as guilty: I remember satirising elders' war reminiscences with the phrase "in my day, in the war, then the Nazis nicked me teeth".
I've grown up a little now, or at least enough to know the value of this kind of living history. Sadly, my grandparents all died before I was really in a position to engage with them as adults, but I'm lucky in that my father sat his mother down and asked her to tell him the high points of his life. Twelve cassettes later, they had built a bridge that allows me to reach back into the life of a woman, and to some degree an era, that would otherwise be closed to me.
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