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Foreword

Short, clear introductions to the cultures of Southeast Asian nations are difficult to find. For years, I cobbled together collections of short articles and selections of literature for my university-level introduction to Southeast Asia and presented the historical framework in lecture. My goal was to entice students to investigate the material on their own or in a more advanced class.

On a trip to Việt Nam, an area outside my own research field in the Bahasa world of Indonesia and Malaysia, I had a chance to meet Hữu Ngọc and was given a copy of Wandering through Vietnamese Culture, a collection of his essays, which is over 1,200 pages. It served as a wonderful guide, containing answers to so many of the questions that had presented themselves. When Ohio University Press was considering publication of an excerpted version of Wandering through Vietnamese Culture, I was asked in my role as editor for the O.U. Press’s Southeast Asia Series to accept the Press’s invitation to make the initial selection of essays.

Hữu Ngọc originally wrote his essays as newspaper columns for international readers who, living in Việt Nam, had some acquaintance with the country. Yet all of us working on this project, including and especially Hữu Ngọc, wanted also to think of those for whom Việt Nam is completely new. Starting from an early draft Table of Contents, with Hữu Ngọc as expert and author, we worked together to crystallize his oeuvre into a first-taste introduction to Vietnamese history and culture, emphasizing the structure, factors, and individuals he feels are particularly important.

Việt Nam: Tradition and Change shimmers with Hữu Ngọc’s thoughtful reflections and insight. The collection is designed for students in introductory classes and for other readers interested in Việt Nam. I hope they will also fall in love with the rich cultural heritage of the people and nation that is Việt Nam.

Hữu Ngọc’s central thesis—“All tradition is change through acculturation”—twines through each of the book’s ten sections and through many of these short essays. In the first section, “The Vietnamese Identity,” Hữu Ngọc portrays what it means to be Vietnamese. He describes the values that shape Vietnamese character, such as the untranslatable word “nghĩa,” and explores the meaning of the customs that embody Vietnamese ideals: ancestor veneration, worship of mother goddesses, the naming of a child, the arrangement of a traditional Vietnamese house, and the deep emotional attachment Vietnamese have to the communal houses of their home villages. In encounters with “others”—the Chinese, French, Japanese, and American overlords who have tried to rule Việt Nam—the Vietnamese absorbed new values, translating them into their own Vietnamese vernacular. Hữu Ngọc shows that the Vietnamese are martial, but not militaristic; they are willing to fight to defend their nation but never forget the anguish that war brings. We see how the Vietnamese have blended their ancient Austronesian cultural heritage and language together with Buddhist traditions brought from India and China, with the value that Confucian ethics from China place on order, harmony, and scholarly learning, and then with the Western influence of humanism and individual liberty. Nevertheless, for Hữu Ngọc, Buddhism remains the “heart” of the Vietnamese village, while Confucian ethics and learning and rites are still its “head.” The ancient, quintessentially Vietnamese rites of ancestor veneration that bind a family, clan, and village together and the awe at the legendary powers of the spirits of nature as well as the spirits of national and local heroes are the roots that anchor Việt Nam today.

The second section, “The Four Facets of Vietnamese Culture,” illuminates how the ancient Việt (Kinh) ethnic group had its roots in Southeast Asia and defines the Việts’ earliest cultural descriptors (e.g., a wet-rice-growing culture and bronze drums) that Việt Nam shares with other Southeast Asian countries. However, Hữu Ngọc specifies the cultural aspects (e.g., matriarchy, mother goddesses, myths, and legends) that are quintessentially Vietnamese. He clarifies the four major facets of Vietnamese culture—the original Southeast Asian roots and the subsequent Indian-Chinese, French, and regional-global branches—and shows how the Southeast Asian base of Vietnamese culture persists today within a dynamism created by tradition and change through acculturation. Central to the features specific to Việt Nam and important in the Việts’ preservation of their cultural essence during foreign occupations is the Vietnamese language. Vietnamese has been the mother tongue of the Việt for millennia and, today, is the mother tongue for 85 percent of the country’s population, which includes fifty-four ethnic groups. Many nations, particularly former colonies in Africa and Asia, do not have this unifying feature of a common language, which is both ancient and modern.

Hữu Ngọc takes us deeper into Vietnamese Confucianism and Buddhism in the sections, “Việt Nam’s Confucian Heritage” and “Buddhism in Việt Nam.” Hữu Ngọc helps us understand the ethics Confucianism espoused and the cultural overlay it brought. He contrasts the Machiavellian Realpolitik of twentieth century international relations with the Confucian ethical spirit that condemns corruption, but he also criticizes Confucianism for its conservatism, for its contempt of commerce (an attitude, which produced poverty) and for its misogyny (which altered the deep roots of Vietnamese matriarchy and institutionalized rigid and destructive gender inequality).

Like Confucianism, Buddhism is a theme spreading throughout this book. We meet the “Bearded Indian,” who played an early role in Vietnamese Zen Buddhism. We also learn about retired King Trần Nhân Tông, who established Việt Nam’s Bamboo Forest Zen branch at Yên Tử Mountain, which we as readers visit. The section on Buddhism features an essay devoted to the female Bodhisattva, Avalokitesvara (Quan Âm or Quan Thế Âm), the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, who appears quite often in other sections, helping us to feel her pervasive cultural presence. We can sense how Vietnamese Buddhism honors the fragile and impermanent beauty of nature and inspires aesthetic sensibilities. Taken together, these Buddhist traditions constitute a rich spiritual heritage without dogmatism or rigidity.

The essays in the section entitled “Exemplary Vietnamese” tell the stories of the national heroes (known and not well known) who embody Vietnamese values and love of country. These include the Trưng sisters, Việt Nam’s first historical personages, who defeated the Chinese in 40 CE, and Lady Triệu, who took up arms against the Chinese two centuries later, “her flag raised, breasts tossing, her elephant charging.” We have the great generals, Lý Thường Kiệt and Trần Hưng Đạo, who defended Việt Nam from Chinese and Mongol invasions in the 1000s and 1200s respectively, as well as Lê Lợi, who also defeated the Chinese and then became King Lê Thái Tổ in the 1400s, and we have the Tây Sơn rebel leader who defeated the Chinese and became King Quang Trung in the late 1700s. In his essay about Hoàng Diệu, whose warning to the emperor in 1882 about French intentions to attack Hà Nội went unheeded, Hữu Ngọc reminds readers that the cost of failure in a Confucian society was disgrace or an honorable suicide. He explores the dilemmas faced by Vietnamese searching for the best way to serve their nation under colonial rule. Particularly poignant are his essay on the Catholic Trương Vĩnh Ký (Pétrus Ký) and on Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh, who are seen by some as traitors to their country.

We hear stories of the teachers, writers, artists, and activists who fostered a love of Vietnamese literature and history and who kept alive the dream of an independent nation despite colonial repression. Hữu Ngọc’s essay on Hồ Chí Minh explores how the founder of modern Việt Nam himself embodied tensions that animate Vietnamese culture and history—tradition and revolution; idealism and realism; reason versus heart; and Eastern versus Western values. Hữu Ngọc shows us Hồ Chí Minh through the eyes of Western contemporaries, those who admired him and those who fought against him, describing how Hồ Chí Minh learned from the West while never losing the love of his country and its people that was at the center of all he did.

The essays in “Vietnamese Literature: An Expression of the Nation’s Spirit” are the heart of this book. Hữu Ngọc begins with The Tale of Kiều, which he describes as “the Vietnamese soul,” for “as long as Kiều lives on, our Vietnamese language shall live on. And as long as our language lives on, our nation will not die.” The love story at the heart of this narrative poem, the national epic written in Vietnamese ideographic script (Nôm), gives expression to the conflict between Confucian duty and the rebellious call of freedom. This tension appears over and over again in the writings of the Vietnamese poets we meet—the anti-Confucian feminist Hồ Xuân Hương, the bitter scholar-administrator poet Nguyễn Công Trứ, the rebel poet Cao Bá Quát (who was such an exception), and poets Nguyễn Đình Chiểu and Nguyễn Khuyến (who wrote about patriotism and not just about love).

In 1926, Phạm Tất Đắc, a high school student and author of the incendiary poem “Invocation for the Nation’s Soul,” set Việt Nam on fire with his call for revolution by joining Confucian piety to rising nationalism. Hữu Ngọc also describes the 1930s New Poetry Movement that gave voice to the young writers who sought to escape from traditional Vietnamese and Chinese literary conventions and who altered Vietnamese literature into a dynamism shifting between the romantic and the realistic. He quotes poet Xuân Diệu to help us understand the tectonic shift to the appearance of the personal pronoun “I” in common usage and in literature. The poems, short stories, and novels from the New Poetry Movement explored the individual’s struggle in a society that had stifled individualism with outmoded customs and conventions. We feel the “I” most profoundly in the excerpts of poems by the “leper poet,” Hàn Mặc Tử, a devout Catholic succumbing to Hansen’s Disease yet both proclaiming his faith in “Ave Marie” and portraying deep angst in Poems of Madness.

Hữu Ngọc celebrates “Culture and the Arts” with essays on contributions unique to Việt Nam, including the Đông Hồ folk woodcut prints, tuồng (Vietnamese classical opera), chèo (popular opera), ca trù performances in villages of the Red River Delta in northern Việt Nam, and the cải lương (renovated theater) of the Mekong Delta in southern Việt Nam. He brings alive the water puppets (unique to the Red River Delta of northern Việt Nam) by taking us to a local performance in one of the villages where the puppets originated some two thousand years ago. This essay gives us a taste of rural, farming life devoid of urban influences. We see this both through the visit to the village and in the characters and skits the farmer-puppeteers create. The essays on the romantic music of the 1930s and early 1940s and the paintings by Nam Sơn (co-founder of the Indochina Fine Arts College in 1925) and the “four pillars” of successive generations of Vietnamese painters embody the push-pull, repulsion-attraction of the Vietnamese response to French influences.

The section on “The Vietnamese Landscape and the Vietnamese Spirit” helps us understand the inextricably intertwining of these two determinants. Hữu Ngọc describes how the Vietnamese landscape has forged the character of Việt Nam’s people, how the harsher climate and floods in northern Việt Nam led to tight-knit communal villages, while a wilder frontier spirit prevailed in the southern part of the country. His essays introduce the reader to places beloved for their historical significance, beauty, and local customs as well as to the illustrious individuals and ordinary inhabitants associated with those sites. He takes us to Ancient Hà Nội and inside the Royal Palace in the 1700s, more than a century before French colonialism, through a long excerpt written by a Vietnamese doctor, Lê Hữu Trác, who arrives to treat the crown prince.

Hữu Ngọc also takes us to the Hà Nội of his childhood through his own reflections and a rich excerpt by Hoàng Đạo Thúy about traditional “Grand Tết” (Lunar New Year) in the early 1900s, “when the newly established colonial administration had only blurred the festival’s traditions.” This section ends with Côn Đảo Island and its infamous prisons off the coast of Sài Gòn and a tribute to Confucian scholar Phan Châu (Chu) Trinh, whose sense of honor did not bind him to tradition but, rather, made him one of Việt Nam’s most famous patriotic opponents to French rule. Phan Châu Trinh combined Confucian ethics with democratic ideals in an attempt to create a harmonious, independent country achieved through non-violence. Phan Châu Trinh’s poem, “Smashing Rocks at Côn Lôn,” which he wrote on the prison wall, weaves together landscape, Confucian ethics, patriotism, and Vietnamese endurance.

In the book’s final two sections, “Vietnamese Women and Change” and “Đổi Mới (Renovation or Renewal) and Globalization,” Hữu Ngọc turns his attention to more modern times. Once, teeth lacquering was thought to enhance one’s beauty. In the 1930s, the áo dài was created, with French influence; it is now considered traditional Vietnamese dress. In these essays, Hữu Ngọc’s subtle commentary suggests that customs and traditions must be thoughtfully assessed for the ways they shape people’s lives. Some should be preserved, some reformed, others discarded. Hữu Ngọc reflects on the difficulties confronted by women in the era of Đổi Mới, which began in late 1986. He exposes the ways in which Confucian traditions once limited women’s lives and the new challenges women face now. The essays on Đổi Mới consider the problems Việt Nam addresses as it builds an economy linked to global markets, a step that inevitably opens the society once again to outside influences.

Hữu Ngọc argues that national culture “must hold a central position and play the coordinating and regulating role” in economic development and that economic statistics are not an adequate measure of the quality of life of a people. The unfettered expansion of world markets poses a threat to the environment, and there is great danger that the wealth produced will be appropriated by a minority of elites, leaving the mass of people dependent and poor. To shape a different kind of identity, Việt Nam must restore a balance between national traditions fostering patriotism, a strong sense of community, and discipline on one hand and universal values (such as human rights) and the need for economic development on the other.

We find here essays on the impact of a market economy on marriage, divorce, attitudes toward tradition in the “cicada” generation born after 1990, class differences, the traditional village, the value placed on education, and corruption in government. Hữu Ngọc suggests that the traditional family, which is at the heart of national culture, should be modernized, divesting itself of disdain for women. His reflections are nuanced, returning always to the theme, “All tradition is change through acculturation,” yet encouraging readers to make their own evaluation of the balance between national values and the values of the market.

Having read these essays, a foreigner sees Việt Nam through new eyes. Written during Đổi Mới, the essays reflect modern times but reach into the rich past of Hữu Ngọc’s memory and scholarship. These essays are also a reminder to young Vietnamese and to all of us of the vibrant cultural heritage that distinguishes Việt Nam. The essays can be read in any order. They invite readers to dip in here or there, according to impulse and interest. Taken together and read from beginning to end, they transform one’s understanding of Việt Nam, its culture, and its people.

Elizabeth F. Collins

Professor

Ohio University

Athens, Ohio