Our first two articles explore gendered forms of sociality and culture in Vietnam. ANN MARIE LESHKOWICH examines a marketplace fee controversy in Ho Chi Min City and finds gendered memory work at play. Southern Vietnam has been haunted for years by untold numbers of malevolent "wandering ghosts"-spirits of the war dead who, lacking descendants, linger in this world homeless and uncommemorated. Yet a new "wandering ghost" has appeared: the marketplace official who demands user fees from women

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... ders for rights to a market stall. Leshkowich shows that the fee controversy heightened tensions between cadres and traders. The metaphor of the wandering ghost, says Leshkowich, is a trader's commentary on officials who have been caught by the transition from high socialism to late socialism and who have been compelled to prey on traders. At the same time, the metaphor offers a way to talk about the consequences of war and the political and class divisions that accompanied postwar socioeconomic restructuring. Gendered memories of the war and its aftermath nonetheless enter into the picture, and Leshkowich is careful to describe how women's memories and metaphors achieve salience while others slip into the shadows of awareness. NHUNG TUYET TRAN presents a study of women's property rights in the Lê Dynasty and uses her findings to challenge broad claims that women in Southeast Asia enjoyed social prominence because of equal inheritance rights compared to men. Legal codes, legal practice, and local custom in the Lê era emphasized not bilateral descent but principles of patrilineal succession. Lê legal codes restricted women's claims to property, with the effect of leading some women to develop succession strategies for transferring property to institutions in order to ensure the maintenance of ancestral rites in perpetuity and to maintain a hold on property that might be returned to the patriline. In short, the arena of inheritance was marked by conflict and maneuvering rather than by smooth allocation of property to and through women.