Viet Nam. Hữu Ngọc

      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,