1995/07/01 by Bùi Minh Dũng · 5 citations
Social Sciences · Psychology · Medicine · #Vietnamese History and Culture Studies #Famine #Vietnamese #Starvation #Poverty #Newspaper #History #Clothing #Visitor pattern #Art #Gender studies #Ancient history #Demography #Psychology #Media studies #Sociology #Political science #Medicine #Law #Archaeology #Philosophy
paper · doi:10.1017/s0026749x00014001
openalex publication_date 1995/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
A contemporary Hanoi newspaper, Viêt-Nam Tân Báo , reported on 28 April 1945: ‘Old men of 80 to 90 years of age that we talked with all told us that they had never before seen a famine as terrible as this one’. The Vietnamese starvation was described in a letter written in April 1945 by a foreign visitor named Vespy: They roam in long, endless groups, comprising the whole family, the elderly, the children, men, women, all of whom are disfigured by poverty, skinny, shaky and almost naked, including young girls of adolescent age who should have been very shy. From time to time they stop to close the eyes of one of them who has collapsed and who would never be able to rise again or to take the piece of rag (I do not know what to call it exactly), that has covered the fallen victim. Looking at those human shadows who are uglier than the ugliest animals, seeing the shrunk corpses, with only a few straws covering them for both clothes and funeral cloth, at the side of the roads, one could feel that human life was so shameful.