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Nghĩa

Of all the beautiful verses in The Tale of Kiều (Truyện Kiều), the immortal work in 3,254 lines by our national poet, Nguyễn Du (1766–1820), this couplet in six-word, eight-word meter about Kiều, when she is beset by lost love, seems to me the most beautiful:

Sorrowful, the remnant of old love,

The thread of a lotus root still lingering.

Tiếc thay chút nghĩa cũ càng

Dẫu lìa ngó ý còn vương tơ lòng.

I believe only Vietnamese can really appreciate this couplet’s beauty and, in particular, can understand “nghĩa,” which in this context means “love.” But that’s not all. “Nghĩa,” a Sino-Vietnamese word, is a traditional Vietnamese ethical concept, which can be understood as moral obligation, justice, duty, debt of gratitude, and mutual attachment based on duty. Nghĩa has to do with both the heart and the mind, which are closely linked in important phrases, such as “nghĩ bụng” (think with the belly) and “nghĩ trong lòng” (think with the bowels). Traditionally, belly and bowels are the locus of feelings.

“Nghĩa” is the phonetic transcription of the Chinese character for “justice,” a key word in Confucianism. Actually, Confucius (551–479 BCE) placed greater stress on humanism (nhân) than on justice. Mencius (372–289 BCE), for his part, insisted on “nghĩa” as meaning “the right thing to do, even to the detriment of one’s own interest.” Moral obligation can take different forms depending on concrete social relationships (suzerain – vassal; parents – children; teacher – student; friends, etc.). The best definition for “nghĩa” may be found in the lines I just quoted. The definition has three components:

• duration: A proverb says, “Nghĩa can arise from one ferry trip” (Chuyến đò nên nghĩa). This means that one trip across a river is enough for passengers to feel bound together by nghĩa.

• mind: The mind is symbolized by the lotus stem. When snapped, the stem’s tenuous filaments keep the two halves linked.

• heart: The tenuous filaments represent the heart.

In brief, far from being a dictate of conscience, nghĩa mixes reason and feeling—the mutual, moral, and sentimental obligation born from human contacts, however brief. Nghĩa governs relationships with other people as well as within the family, village, and country.

Love in Việt Nam generally leads to marriage and family. Conjugal love based on affection and loyalty is expressed by “yêu thương,” a compound word, which is very difficult to translate. “Yêu” means “love;” “thương” means “to have compassion, understanding, or pity.” “Yêu” implies passion, desire, affection, and fondness. “Thương” implies care, even tolerance. However, conjugal love can be best translated by “tình nghĩa,” with “tình” expressing “love,” and “nghĩa” capturing “mutual, moral, and sentimental obligation born out of love.”

Nghĩa will keep a married couple together at a later life stage, when passion no longer reigns supreme and when affection has become a habit. But even then, because of nghĩa, a conjugal relationship will not be governed solely by reason. Husband and wife endure with each other because nghĩa binds them. Nghĩa explains why so many couples remain physically faithful despite long absences, especially during war.

The Vietnamese Character

A few years back, I spoke with Sociology Professor Göran Therbom about the Swedish mentality. We agreed that circumspection is indispensable in questions of national character, the psychology of peoples, cultural identity, and traditional values, lest one enter the trap of racism.

Since Việt Nam’s August 1945 Revolution, we have held dozens of seminars and have published an abundance of literature devoted to the character and cultural identity of the Vietnamese people. The research, which tended to stress positive aspects, established the following points about the traditional Vietnamese character:

• strong adherence to the community: formation of the nation (unifying the family, village, and state) at an early stage to fight foreign invasions and natural disasters (e.g., building dikes against floods); formation of the village as the basic social, political, and economic unit

• an essential element: love for one’s country

• an ancient culture: importance of the Việt language and love of learning

• ardor for work: intelligence, innovativeness, skillfulness, thrift, and the influence of wet-rice cultivation

• primordial role of the family: language use of personal pronouns according to the presumed age of the interlocutors and their position in the wider cultural family

• relationships: filial piety, respect for aged persons, and solidarity (family, village, and nation)

• adaptability: ability to survive, suppleness of comportment, sense of realism, preference for concreteness, eclecticism, and empiricism

• lifestyle: sobriety and simplicity, greater sensitivity to the simple, skillful, lovely, and graceful than to the imposing and monumental

• spectrum of feelings: tendency to be more sentimental than rational

• philosophical tendencies: little inclination toward philosophical speculations or metaphysical flights

• religious feelings: religiosity rather than fanaticism, with a large presence of autochthonous beliefs (animism)

• profound influences: Confucianism and Buddhism

• priority: preference for the good rather than the beautiful, hence the predominant role of morals and virtues

Our researchers analyzing Vietnamese character and cultural identity tend to highlight positive points. Very few discuss negative aspects. This attitude was justified during the long wars for national liberation, since we needed to emphasize positive national traditions to galvanize our Resistance. However, we need truly scientific research in today’s increasing competition on a world scale to reveal our people’s weaknesses and strengths in order to help shape capable and highly motivated citizens. According to our researchers, the main negative traits of traditional Vietnamese character and cultural identity may be listed as follows:

• social development and socio-economic structures: inability to evolve normally because of war and other interruptions

• in opposition to the strong sense of community: exaggerated concern for face-saving, difficulty for individuals to gain self-affirmation; localism and regionalism

• in opposition to fidelity toward traditions: conservatism and reluctance to embrace reforms and renovation of the economy, technology, and society

• patriarchal traditions inherited from traditional society: sectarianism, anarchism, and the cult of personality; too much emphasis on artisans and small-scale agriculture; lack of discipline, foresight, planning, and accounting; weak concern for profitability

• lack of logical and analytical sense: emphasis on empiricism and reliance on chance

Not all the traits enumerated can be taken as gospel truth. Nevertheless, they provide material for serious research and discussion.

The Vietnamese “I” and “We”

To understand the Vietnamese community, we should explore the strong socio-affective ties binding the “I” to the “we,” that is, binding the individual to the community, large or small. We can trace these ties back to the formation of the nation. Việt Nam, lying in the heart of Southeast Asia, developed its own life and culture as early as the Bronze Age (first millennium BCE) and before exposure to Indian and Chinese influences. The Vietnamese nation was formed through the sporadic multiplication of villages (làng, xã), which were political, social, and economic units with solidarity forged through successive struggles against natural elements and foreign aggression. The Vietnamese language, which symbolizes the Vietnamese community, has no general word for “I.” The first person singular cannot be expressed uniformly but must vary to suit different relationships the speaker has with others, including equals, parents, children, older or younger persons, and persons from different social conditions.

The pronoun “ta” may signify “I” or “we” depending on the context. The interrogative pronoun “ai” may mean “I,” “you” (singular or plural), “he” or “she,” “they,” as well as “him” and “her” and “them,” with a hint of tenderness, melancholy, or mild reproach. Consider this couplet in six-word, eight-word meter from an eleven-line oral folk poem (ca dao):

Ai đi muôn dặm non sông

Để ai chất chứa sầu đong vơi đầy

When translated literally, these lines are virtually meaningless:

Who crossed myriad mountains and rivers,

Leaving who fraught with melancholy, which defies measure.

With an understanding of the variations possible in “ai,” the lines become:

You are away, across many mountains,

Leaving me fraught with melancholy, which defies measure.

The Vietnamese: A Warlike People?

A favorite anti-Vietnamese press theme during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was: “The Vietnamese are the Prussians of Asia.” As ideological issues fade with time, perhaps future historians will agree among themselves that, at its base, all that fighting was for national liberation. If we consider the often bloody conflicts that tore apart Southeast Asian states in gestation during the second millennium, we can see that most wars fought by Việt Nam were in resistance to foreign aggression.

If it is true that literature mirrors a people’s psyche, then we might point out that the literature of Việt Nam’s majority ethnic group (the Kinh or Việt) does not have epics or other works exalting war for its own sake or singing the grandeur of massacres. On the contrary, the work second in popularity only to The Tale of Kiều (Truyện Kiều, the masterpiece by Nguyễn Du [1766–1820]) is a long anti-war poem, “Lament of a Wife Whose Husband Has Gone to War” (Chinh Phụ Ngâm). For two centuries, this lament enjoyed the love and esteem of both common people and learned scholars. This poem in 103 quatrains with eight-word meter exudes a poignant despair, which leads to instinctive hatred of war. As a woman subjected to Confucian education, the wife never directs the least reproach toward war’s initiators—the kings, lords, and other feudalists. Instead, she simply describes her loneliness and suffering. Her only solace is hope for her husband’s return. Memories of the separation from her beloved cast a constant shadow on her waking hours:

The brook rippling beneath the bridge is pure,

The roadside grass is still a tender green.

Seeing him off leaves her anguished,

Once he’s astride his horse, aboard his boat.

The rushing water can never cleanse her grief,

The fragrant grass can never ease her memories.

Let us note that the Vietnamese text of this lament is a translation by the poetess Đoàn Thị Điểm (1705–1748) from the original version, which male poet Đặng Trần Côn (1710–1745) wrote in classical Chinese characters (Hán). Ðoàn Thị Điểm condensed the original 477 lines into 412 lines in Vietnamese ideographic script (Nôm). During the Resistance War Against France, Hồ Chí Minh taught this long poem to his staff while on long jungle treks.

Are There Differences in the Mentality of Northern and Southern Vietnamese?

After first visiting southern Việt Nam and before traveling to the country’s northern region, a foreign friend asked me, “Have differences affected your national identity because of the regional interests and disparities in northern and southern mentalities that were deepened by twenty years of war and separation characterized by two different political and cultural systems?”

In answering such a question, it would first be useful to define “north” and “south” in Việt Nam, because these words have very different meanings depending on the time in our nation’s history.

The Nguyễn and Trịnh lords, under the pretext of serving the Lê Dynasty (1533–1788), split the country into two by waging a war, which lasted two centuries (from 1570 to 1786, among many dates used). The demarcation line was the Gianh River in Quảng Bình Province, north of Huế. Foreigners—in particular Portuguese and Dutch traders—called the northern part of Việt Nam “Tonkin” and the southern part, “Cochin China.” Quang Trung (a.k.a. Nguyễn Huệ, life: 1753–1792; reign: 1788–1792) re-unified the country.

But then the French conquered Việt Nam in the mid-1800s. During colonial reign (1884–1945), France divided Việt Nam into three parts—the Northern Region, which the French called Tonkin (Bắc Kỳ); the Central Region, called Annam (Trung Kỳ); and the Southern Region, called Cochin China (Nam Kỳ). The French ruled Tonkin and Annam as protectorates and administered Cochin China as a colony. On September 2, 1945, Hồ Chí Minh proclaimed the independent Democratic Republic of Việt Nam (DRVN) and reunified the country. After nine years of war, the Geneva Conference ended the First Indochina War Against France and divided Việt Nam into North Việt Nam and South Việt Nam at the 17th parallel. This division lasted two more decades (1954–1975) during the Second Indochina War Against the United States.

Thus, the border between the North and the South changed three times, with the Center sometimes in play. In each case, the words “North” and “South” are capitalized, since they refer to distinct regimes. After 1975, there has been only one regime, one country, with formal re-unification on July 2, 1976. This is a little complicated, but lower case for “north,” “center,” and “south” and variations of those words should be used after April 30, 1975 and for periods before French colonialism except from 1570 to 1786 (the War of the Trịnh-Nguyễn Lords during the Lê Dynasty).

At present, when speaking of “the people of the south” in reunified Việt Nam, we think of the inhabitants of the Mekong Delta. Although their mentality is different from the mentality of Vietnamese in other areas, it is by no means secessionist. The French colonialists failed to realize this when they attempted to create the autonomous Republic of Cochin China in 1946. The US military made the same mistake during the American War when trying to sever the Hồ Chí Minh Trail, which connected North Việt Nam and South Việt Nam.

One cannot deny the different mentalities of our northern and southern people. In Europe, Nordics are generally less easy to approach and less talkative than Mediterranean peoples. The same might be said traditionally of northerners and southerners on the US East Coast. In a way, the same also applies to Việt Nam. But in Việt Nam, explanations should be sought by carefully considering history. The ethnic Việt were wet-rice farmers, who created an original cultural identity in the Red River Delta during the first millennium BCE. After freeing themselves in 938 CE from a thousand years of Chinese domination, the Việt began advancing southward, reaching the Mekong Delta during the 1600s.

The Mekong Delta’s first Việt settlers—famished peasants, peasant-soldiers, adventurers, and banished criminals—cleared virgin land. They did not experience the hard work and chronic deprivation of northern farmers plagued by scarce land and frequent natural calamities, such as typhoons and floods. The villages built by the Việt who moved southward were not, as in the north, isolated communities surrounded by bamboo hedges and burdened by age-old Confucian customs, rites, and taboos. New religions, such as Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo, which were unknown in northern Việt Nam, attracted millions of followers. No distinction was made between guest and host villagers.

The Việt lived in harmony with the region’s other ethnic groups, such as the Chăm, Khmer, Mạ, Xtiêng, and Chinese. There were enough resources for all. The Chinese, many of whom were political refugees, engaged in a thriving trade. Direct French colonial rule and, later, the capitalist economy under American sway reinforced the psychology of the “people of the former South,” some traits of which call to mind the American frontier spirit.

On Naming a Child

My first daughter-in-law, Lan, glows with happiness. She has just given birth to a baby girl; her nine-year-old is a boy. One boy, one girl—both “glutinous and ordinary rice,” as the saying goes—is the dream of Vietnamese couples after the family-planning limit of two children. My other two daughters-in-law have two daughters each. Having a male descendant is still the wish of all couples, although the custom decreeing that only a male descendant can perpetuate ancestral worship is waning.

While all our family was busy looking after Lan and the baby, it fell to me as paternal grandfather to choose a name for my new granddaughter. This rather pleasing spiritual exercise brought a challenge in poetic logic. Since my daughter-in-law’s name is Lan (Orchid), what system should I use to choose her daughter’s name? I could select an ideogram from a classical verse, a moral maxim, or an old adage containing the word “lan” to accompany my choice as an adjective. Or I could choose the name of a plant or flower, since “orchid” is both. Or I could opt for the name of one of the more than 10,000 orchid varieties!

In the end, a name—“Cúc Hoa” (Chrysanthemum Flower)—flashed through my mind from a treasury of childhood memories. Cúc Hoa is the heroine in a folk tale written in verse with ideographic Vietnamese ideograms (Nôm) during the 1700s. The story is set in China during the early first millennium. I remember being moved to tears when, at age eight or nine, I saw a chèo (popular opera), Phạm Công and Cúc Hoa (Phạm Công Cúc Hoa), based on this tale. In a particularly moving scene, two children find solace in the arms of their mother, Cúc Hoa, who returns from the Other World to protect them.

Here, in a few lines, is the story:

Phạm Công was very young when he lost his impoverished woodcutter father and had to beg in the market to support his mother. A kind-hearted scholar looked after his education. A fellow student named Cúc Hoa fell in love with Phạm Công and, with her parents’ agreement, married him. However, the couple faced hard times. Cúc Hoa was expecting a baby, yet they owned nothing. Phạm Công presented himself for the royal examinations. He earned the first laureate degree and the offer of marriage to the Ngụy king’s daughter. When Phạm Công declined the marriage offer, the Ngụy king banished him to the Hán Kingdom.

There, Phạm Công was again honored with the first laureate title and a marriage offer to the Hán princess. When Phạm Công refused this marriage, the Hán king ordered the young scholar’s hands severed, his eyes gouged, and his teeth pulled. The Emperor of Heaven punished the tyrant king and restored the victimized scholar’s health. On his way home, Phạm Công passed through the Triệu Kingdom. This king also honored him with the first laureate title and a royal bride, but Phạm Công managed to escape and was reunited with Cúc Hoa. The couple had a daughter in addition to their elder child, a son.

Alas, Cúc Hoa fell ill and died as foreign troops invaded. Phạm Công, who was an army commander, set off to fight the enemy, carrying his wife’s coffin on his back. When the campaign ended in victory, Phạm Công took a second wife, Tào Thị, hoping she would tend to the two children. Three years later, Phạm Công became governor of Việt Nam’s Cao Bằng Province. In his absence, Tào Thị took a lover and turned Phạm Công’s two children out of the house. Cúc Hoa, by then in the Land of Shades, was broken-hearted. She returned to the World of Mortals to comfort her children. Before going back to the Land of Shades, she wrote letters deploring her children’s fate and sewed the letters into her children’s clothes. On his return, Phạm Công learned the truth and repudiated Tào Thị, who subsequently died from a lightning strike. He went to the Other World to search for Cúc Hoa. The couple’s sorrow so moved the King of Darkness that he allowed Phạm Công to take Cúc Hoa back to the World of Mortals. At last, the couple knew happiness.

My choosing “Cúc Hoa” also has another reason. A line in The Tale of Kiều (Truyện Kiều), the masterpiece by Nguyễn Du (1766–1820), matches “chrysanthemum” (“cúc”) with “orchid” (“lan”):

Spring’s orchid, autumn’s chrysanthemum, they are equally alluring.

Xuân lan thu cúc mặn mà cả hai.

The Traditional Village: For and Against

Over the centuries, the Việt (ethnic Vietnamese or Kinh) nation took shape through the spread of villages, which were the political-socio-economic groupings that united the Việt people in continuous struggle with nature and against foreign invaders. Another term for a Vietnamese “village” is “commune,” which is not a communist term but, instead, comes from the French word, “commune,” for the lowest-level governmental administrative unit.

The Vietnamese village with its staunch sense of community binds residents together within the three-step structure of family, village, and state. Villages allowed the Việt to survive on wet-rice cultivation by building and maintaining large communal irrigation and drainage systems. On a wider scale, Việt Nam’s thick network of villages supported the Việt resistance to invasions by powerful foes, such as the Mongol armies in the 1200s.

In many countries, military defense has relied on urban citadels. The fall of a fortress was a military disaster. However, in Việt Nam, each village was a bastion. The Ba Ðình Resistance Against France in 1886 is a perfect example. “Ba đình” (meaning “three communal houses”) refers to the three villages in Thanh Hóa Province that joined together, connecting themselves with deep, defensive trenches. They held at bay thirty-four hundred French colonial troops supported by four gunboats during the thirty-five-day siege conducted by Captain (later, Marshal) Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre (1852–1931).

Other factors in addition to self-defense and community irrigation systems strengthen the communal character of Vietnamese villages. Traditionally, villages were autonomous units within the state. The central authority, which was represented by district mandarins, assessed each commune for head taxes, land taxes, and unpaid labor. However, village councils of male elders assisted by elected agents met those obligations. A popular saying summarizes the village’s unusual stature: “Royal decrees yield to village customs.”

The village population had several groupings, including the hamlet, giáp, family clan, and guild. The giáp, a vestige of the primitive agricultural commune, was an egalitarian and democratic male association, which grouped the men into classes by age regardless of their titles, functions, or fortunes. A man’s passage from a lower to a higher class in the giáp gave him greater prestige. In certain cases, elders would bring sensitive matters before the giáp for a preliminary consensus to avoid a stormy discussion in the broader village.

The periodic distribution of communal village fields among registered male villagers every three, four, or six years was another democratic village institution and a vestige of the primitive agricultural community. Vietnamese practiced this recurring privatization of public land from the 1100s to the early 1800s and, in some areas, even into the 1900s. Communal fields still existed in some villages on the eve of the Land Reform Campaign conducted in the 1950s. The traditional communal lands brought the state more revenue than private lands because of higher tax rates; those taxes also supplied funds to pay village administrators and assist widows, the elderly, orphans, and others without adequate support.

The traditional village was also the repository of our nation’s spiritual and artistic traditions. Many mandarins and scholars retired to their home villages after public service; their literary creations were both learned and popular. Today, village temples remain the sites for spring and autumn ritual celebrations, which draw communities together through popular merriment. These temples display some of the best examples of ancient Việt architecture. They also house a majority of the remaining Việt sculptures because Vietnamese hid their national art (which was in fact popular art) in the countryside during the long periods of Chinese and French domination.

Despite its positive aspects, the traditional Vietnamese village is far from a Rousseau-esque model. During the early 1900s, “village” was synonymous with oppression and extortion, intellectual backwardness, and moral stagnation. The democracy apparent in the examples above became a delusion. Communal lands were reduced and no longer played a significant role. Elders imposed their tyranny. The communal hierarchy buttressed by Confucianism divided villagers into socio-economic classes: scholars, soldiers, artisans, traders, and peasants. The lowest class—the peasants—bore the burden of taxes and forced hard labor.

In fairness to the French, it should be said that the colonial administration attempted several reforms, but those were formalities. During French colonialism, the traditional village was still pre-capitalist, essentially agricultural, and self-sufficient. One result was a severely limited national economy with little foreign trade. Despite Việt Nam’s long coastline, the Việt were not seafarers like the Malays. The absence of Vietnamese foreign trade hampered the country’s economic advancement.

Before the August 1945 Revolution, young Western-trained Vietnamese intellectuals converted some patriotic Confucian scholars to the Western idea of progress. These patriots criticized the archaic character and structure of the traditional Việt village. During the Resistance War Against France (1945–1954), the vast majority of residents in French-occupied villages functioned undercover on the patriots’ side by secretly supplying food and intelligence. Many Vietnamese left French-occupied villages to help transport rice by shoulder poles and pack bicycles hundreds of kilometers to the Battle of Ðiện Biên Phủ. This Herculean effort made possible the Vietnamese defeat of the French army in 1954. Võ Nguyên Giáp, the victorious Vietnamese general, noted that when the French tallied the balance of armed forces before the battle, they neglected to appraise accurately the role of Vietnamese peasant porters.

Later, Ngô Đình Diệm, whom the Americans had brought in from the United States in 1954 to be premier of South Việt Nam, tried in vain to dismantle traditional Vietnamese villages. His troops drove southern Vietnamese peasants from their homes into policed, barbed-wire-encircled camps called strategic hamlets. During the American War, US aircraft tried without success to destroy the traditional Việt socio-economic-cultural village bonds by bombing two-thirds of the rural communities across the country, in both North Việt Nam and South Việt Nam.

The August 1945 Revolution, the Land Reform Campaign of the 1950s, the creation of agricultural co-operatives in the 1960s, and the two resistance wars for national liberation and re-unification (1945–1975) subjected traditional villages to profound upheavals. Now, it is up to us to keep the positive values within this heritage.

A Village Landscape

I shall never forget this reading lesson, which I learned by heart (but of course in Vietnamese!) at primary school, when I was eight:

My Village

My village is near the province. All around my village is a bamboo hedge so thick that those outside cannot see our houses. At the head and foot of my village is a brick gate. Most houses are thatch. Each household has a courtyard, a garden, and usually a pond. A bamboo hedge surrounds each house, while the garden has vegetables, sweet potatoes, and fruit trees. Only one main road runs through the village, but we have many meandering lanes. Recently, the small lanes were laid with bricks, making those paths much cleaner. Before, whenever it rained, the lanes were slushy with mud and unpleasant for walking.

The village bamboo hedge, in some cases reinforced by an earthen embankment and a moat, turned the traditional rural community into an islet in a sea of green rice fields. The hedge not only protected villagers against bandits and typhoons but also supplied materials to repair or build temples, bridges, markets, and other public works. A village usually had four gates (north, south, east, and west) but sometimes fewer. Guards closed these gates at nightfall. Banyan or ceiba (kapok) trees in front of the main gate cast refreshing shade for farmers returning from the fields or travelers drinking a cup of tea at a stall nestled among the trees. A few villages in Việt Nam’s northern delta, the cradle of our nation, kept these traditional traits when facing Western influence and urbanization.

Topography determines four villages types in northern Việt Nam:

• villages behind a river dike, which also serves as a road, since the dike is higher than the flooded rice fields

• villages built on raised ground in swampy lowlands, where fields are often under water

• villages scattered on upland slopes, where the population is sparse and the land is not fertile

• coastal villages among sand dunes, which residents have turned into arable fields

Villages in the Mekong Delta of southern Việt Nam seem like descendants of northern villages in the Red River Delta but with their own character. The ethnic Vietnamese who settled southern Việt Nam were famished peasants, demobilized soldiers transferred to agricultural colonies, adventurers, and political refugees from China. They settled on alluvial land, building new villages along the delta’s myriad rivulets.

Communities in southern Việt Nam developed along intertwining waterways, which replaced the village lanes common in the north. These villages did not have hedges and were not separated from each other. Compared with northern villages, they were young communities with a more heterogeneous population, including Chinese, Chăm, and Khmer minorities. The age-old Confucian strictures common in northern Việt Nam did not bind people in these newly formed communities. Fertile land and a mild climate spared these new southerners from the toil and suffering that had been their lot in the Red River Delta.

The Traditional Vietnamese House

The Vietnamese word “nhà” (house) has an emotional, sociological, and ideological resonance, which is greater and more profound than “house” in Western languages. Whereas individualism is imbedded in Western cultures, Vietnamese culture relies primarily on community spirit and particularly on family spirit. For generations, more than 90 percent of the Việt lived in rural areas, where they practiced wet-rice farming and rarely stepped outside the bamboo hedges encircling their villages. Their rice paddies held their ancestors’ graves and the joys and sorrows of their own lives. Houses had a sacred, mystical character, since they sheltered the altar for the family’s ancestors and secondary altars for the mother goddesses and the Genie of the Home and the Genie of the Sun. Thus, the building of any house entailed rites and sacrifices, since people and supernatural beings—the living and the dead—would share the same abode.

The traditional Vietnamese house evolved in northern Việt Nam’s Red River Delta, the nation’s cradle, beginning with the Bronze Age in the first century before Christ. In early times, the rural Việt built their mud, wattle-and-daub houses (nhà tranh vách đất) with walls made from a mixture of clay, rice husks, and straw. They made their roofs from thatch. The Việt modified the basic model as they extended their territory southward after a thousand years of Chinese domination. The variations reflect Việt acculturation with other ethnic groups, including the Chăm in the country’s center and the Khmer and overseas Chinese in the south.

The typical Việt house has three rooms (ba gian) and two attached lean-tos (hai chái), with the foundation (nền) higher than the courtyard, which is used for drying rice and corn. The gian are not closed-off rooms but, instead, are compartments separated by bamboo or hardwood columns. The central room (gian giữa, the largest) contains the ancestral altar. The head of the family hosts visitors on a bed in front of the altar, and he also sometimes sleeps there. The two adjacent gian have beds for the male and female members of the family. There are two attached lean-tos (one to the left and one to the right). One is the sleeping area for the head of the family and his wife, and the other is a storage area for rice, clothes, and tools. In order to deter thieves, traditional houses have no doors on the side or back. In the old days, the floors of even rich houses were made from packed earth to symbolize the harmony between Heaven and Earth and the universal principles of yin (female) and yang (male). In later wooden houses, the roof was supported by large columns, heavy beams, and joists with mortise-and-tenon joints to hold the weighty roof tiles. Lattice walls, which were independent of the roof, obscured the interior and blocked the tropical sun. The effect was solid yet graceful.

Rural houses are usually one story and face south within an enclosed compound (khuôn viên) formed by a hedge of spiked bamboo, cactus, or some other trimmed shrub. The front gate usually faces the middle room of the house. The family may have flower beds alongside the courtyard and may also plant trees and vegetables behind the house, where they may have a well, pig sty, cow or buffalo shed, and latrine. Most rural house compounds also have dug ponds stocked with fish. Behind the house, families will often build a small temple dedicated to the Genie of the Earth, or they will have a pedestal in front of the house with an urn for burning incense to the genie. The kitchen is in a separate building.

Construction of a residence for both the living (nhà ở) and the deceased (mồ mả) becomes a semi-mystical task. The owner must prepare for the happy or unhappy future of his family members. The deceased ancestors must do the same for their descendants by fostering riches, honor, longevity, and many offspring. Although the building materials for a house are simple, construction requires complicated rites. Decisions about a favorable site (with configuration of terrain and orientation), the dimensions for the house, and the proper time (the specific day and hour) to begin construction require the magical competence of a geomancer (thầy địa lý), who performs certain rites. For example, when it’s time to raise the ridgepole (thượng lưỡng), the geomancer attaches to the pole some red fabric (representing the Genie of Fire) and a cycad leaf (thiên tuế, a fernlike tropical evergreen representing ten thousand years and, therefore, permanence). During the 1800s and 1900s, the traditional lattice walls began to disappear in favor of brick. A geomancer tending to a brick house will define two walls to establish the spread of the beams.

The homeowner offers a feast for all these ceremonial occasions.

Vietnamese usually orient their houses toward the south, since the south is the principle (yang, male) direction and provides access to fresh ocean breezes. A popular saying recommends:

When marrying, you take a woman;

When building a house, you face it to the south.

Using his compass, the geomancer determines the house site and orientation. However, it is the astrologer (thầy phù thủy) who protects a new house from possible adversity. He creates a paper model of the future house, on which he places five reeds representing five destructive devils (ngũ quỷ). He burns the model and mannequin reeds during the ceremonial rites.

In Vietnamese, “nhà” (house) takes on many meanings, including religious identification (nhà chung = a Catholic priest; nhà chùa = a Buddhist monk or nun); a political era (nhà Lý = the Lý Dynasty); professions (nhà báo = a journalist); and political definitions (nhà nước = government). “Nhà” also designates esteemed professions, including writers (nhà văn), poets (nhà thơ), and mandarins (nhà quan). “Nhà” can imply a level of intimacy not found in the Western word “house.” For example, “nhà” can be the pronoun “you” when speaking to one’s spouse or with someone for whom the intimate French pronoun “tu” might be used. Further, “cả nhà” (literally, “the entire house” and therefore “the entire household”) can mean “family.”

Poet Nguyễn Du (1766–1820) used “nhà” more than a hundred times in Việt Nam’s national epic, The Tale of Kiều (Truyện Kiều), which he wrote in 3,254 lines of six-word, eight-word meter. A profusion of Vietnamese sayings and proverbs relies on “nhà” to crystalize Vietnamese culture in a few words. Among the most famous sayings are:

• “Life’s two main tasks: build a home for the living and a home for the dead.”

• “Men build the houses, women guard the doorways.”

• “Children without a father are like a house without a roof.”

• “Householders near the market leave debts to their children.”

• “While guests eat for three, household members splurge and feast for seven.”

• “For advice about a trip, ask the elders; for the truth within the home, ask the children.”

• “Once you leave home, you are lost.”

• “For a wanderer at night, any place is his home, and any place he lies down is his bed.”

• “A master leaves his home, his chickens freely roam.”

• “Only when a house burns, do the rats appear” warns that only amidst trying circumstances does a person’s real personality show.

• “Corrupt households are corrupt from the roof down” uses “nhà” to refer to a family, society, a business, or a government.

• “When the house lights go out, rich and poor are alike” warns of the equalizing effect of life’s challenges.

The Communal House

Lines from an oral folk poem describe a traditional Vietnamese village’s communal house. Here, “nón” is the emblematic Vietnamese conical hat.

Crossing the bridge, tilting her nón,

The bridge, many spans: How she misses him.

Passing the communal house, tilting her nón,

Its roof, many tiles: How she loves him.

Nearly half a century ago, Chu Hồng Quý, a ten-year-old boy hunkering in a bomb shelter, composed the following lines in six-word, eight-word meter to begin his poem, “The Ceiba Trees at Our Communal House” (Cây Gạo Đình Chung). The ceiba (kapok), sometimes called a “cotton tree,” has a straight trunk and red flowers.

My village has a communal house,

Its well water dances with the moon’s glow;

Nearby, ceiba trees watch the sky,

A winding, sandy road runs past the gate.

Ceiba flowers cover everything in March,

Half the flowers for fish, half for birds;

The communal house seems sleepy-eyed,

Its roof curving upward, looking at the sky.

A noted painter, Phạm Tăng (1924–), also writes poems. He speaks wistfully with six-word, eight-word lines in “Song for My Ancestral Home” (Bài Ca Quê Hương), which is the opening poem in his collection Phạm Tăng: Poems (Phạm Tăng: Thơ, 1994):

Gone: the village banyan’s roots, the river’s flow.

Is our well’s water still clear?

Do lotus blooms cover the communal-house pond?

These quotations show the vivid presence of the đình (communal house) for ordinary Vietnamese as a temple, a town hall, a house of culture, and the focus of village life. The đình dominates a traditional community’s spiritual life, together with the Buddhist pagoda (chùa), Confucian shrine (văn chỉ), and the many small shrines (đền) dedicated to spirits in Vietnamese animistic worship, which has been tinged with Taoism. English speakers sometimes use “temple” when referring to a Buddhist place of worship. However, in Việt Nam, to avoid confusion with the temples for the worship of ancestors and tutelary spirits, we use “pagoda” when referring to a building for the worship of Buddha.

Villagers meet at their communal house to worship their village tutelary god, thần thành hoàng, literally, “god” (thần) of the “rampart” (thành) and the “moat” (hoàng) surrounding the citadel. This god could be a historical personage (such as a national or local hero), the benefactor who taught the villagers a trade or helped them claim virgin land, a mythical figure (such as a celestial being like the God of Mount Tản Viên), a deified animal, or an unidentified person (in some instances even a thief or a beggar, who died a cruel death at a sacred hour).

Residents conduct their major rituals honoring the tutelary spirit in spring (at Tết, the Lunar New Year), autumn, and on the anniversaries of the god’s birth and death. These solemn ceremonies and joyous festivities may last several days. Village leaders organize games and entertainment on the đình grounds, including tuồng and chèo operas, traditional wrestling matches, buffalo and cock fights, and human chess games with young men and women, who are moved about as the players’ chess pieces.

In contrast to the Buddhist pagoda, which is a closed building in a secluded place for funeral rites and for events affecting future life, the communal house is an open structure conveniently situated for social activities and meetings. There, adult male villagers meet to address administrative matters (distribution of taxes and communal lands, recruitment of soldiers, allotment of labor) and to settle minor judicial proceedings (conflicts between neighbors and punishment for transgressors of village customs). In former times, the communal house guarded the Confucian order, which determined village social structure during the Lê Dynasty (1428–1788). The đình probably first appeared in the 1500s and peaked in the 1600s and 1700s but declined during the 1800s because of feudal disintegration and French intervention.

The traditional communal house began in northern Việt Nam and spread southward with Vietnamese territorial expansion. However, some scholars suggest ethnic-minority longhouses in the Central Highlands may have been the model for Vietnamese communal houses, while other scholars cite boat-like images engraved on the Đông Sơn bronze drums from the first millennium BCE. In any case, Vietnamese communal houses constitute a priceless cultural patrimony with traditional architecture and collections of ancient wooden sculptures. The most famous examples of communal houses are: Tây Đằng (late 1400s, early 1500s, Hà Tây Province, now part of Hà Nội); Lỗ Hạnh (1576, Bắc Giang Province); Thổ Hà (1500s to 1600s, Bắc Giang Province); and Ðình Bảng (1736, Bắc Ninh Province).

The Head and the Heart of the Traditional Village

To understand the soul of the traditional village, you must visit the countryside. There, lies the village, the social cell and the administrative, economic, and spiritual unit that is the repository of Việt Nam’s oldest cultural values. Each village has a communal house (đình) dedicated to its tutelary god; temples (đền, miếu, phủ) for the worship of spirits or saints (deified heroes and tutelary gods); one or two pagodas (chùa) to worship Buddha; and sometimes a temple (văn miếu) or a shrine (văn chỉ) for the worship of Confucius.

Despite a very strong religious syncretism, one can classify these buildings into two groups according to the endogenous (internally caused) or exogenous (externally caused) origin of the worshiped divinities. The first group—the đền, miếu, and phủ—are used to worship spirits and ghosts of autochthonous (indigenous) origin, that is, the veritable Vietnamese religion according to French researcher Léopold Cadière (1869–1955). Some popular animist beliefs of the Việt from the Red River Delta date to the beginning of recorded history. These include worship of natural forces (thunder, lightning, rain, rocks, plants, and animals), ancestors, the mother goddesses (mẫu), and heroes. The second group of religious buildings serves beliefs imported from India and China. Buddhism and Confucianism were grafted onto autochthonous stock (the worship of spirits), which was already firmly rooted and which remains alive today.

In the traditional village, the four elements—the autochthonous animist stock, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism—harmonize and amalgamate. In particular, Buddhism and Confucianism complement each other in meeting two needs. Confucianism responds to the social element and reason, while Buddhism addresses the individual and sentiments. In brief, Confucianism and Buddhism represent the head and the heart.

Confucianism as the “head” reflects Chinese influence. Strictly speaking, Confucianism is not a religion but, rather, a philosophy of social ethics. Confucianism summarizes the precepts for all social relations to achieve universal harmony (hòa) by virtue of humanity (nhân) governed through rites. In a strongly hierarchical and patriarchal Confucian society, everyone—from kings and mandarins to scholars, peasants, artisans, and workers, to men and women, husbands and wives, parents and children—must accept his or her specific role in society and accomplish his or her duty.

How does Confucianism manifest itself at the village level and on the cultural plane?

The Confucian rites at local temples (văn từ, văn chỉ) recall the pre-eminence of the Doctrine of the Master (Confucius, 551–479 BCE) and his followers. The đình (which serves as the office for the temple, mayoralty, and local tribunal) represents the rational Confucian order in all its strictness, including ritual ceremonies to the tutelary god accredited by royal decrees, a rigid order of precedence, distribution of land taxes and labor duties, and the enforcement of customary laws, which are sometimes very severe, for instance, against unmarried mothers.

In the village, Buddhism as the “heart” addresses feelings and provides solace amidst Confucianism’s rigorous norms. The pagoda is a peaceful haven, which calms suffering and assuages sorrow and social injustices. Villagers often evoke Buddha Amitabha (A Di Đà), who is ready to help all who are suffering, and they also call upon Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (Quan Âm), who, as Amitabha’s auxiliary, can implement the most disinherited person’s terrestrial wishes. The word “Bụt” for Buddha is synonymous with “pity” or “compassion.” However, the Buddhist concepts of existence and non-existence remain the domain of educated Buddhist scholars, particularly in the Zen (Thiền) school. For ordinary villagers, karma and metempsychosis (transmigration at death) are reduced to simple beliefs: One must do good deeds to be reborn in human form in the Afterlife and to attain Nirvana, which is conceived as a paradise endowed with terrestrial pleasures. Wicked people are led to Hell by devils, who submit them to atrocious torture.

Buddhism and Confucianism—heart and head—have influenced the Vietnamese psyche for centuries, creating a necessary equilibrium.