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SEAS AND MULBERRY FIELDS
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Where do I begin?
"Where do I begin?"... That's the first sentence of the song from the movie "Love story" of the sixties. My son's answer to that question, when he was only five or six years old was "You begin as a baby". It's a cute response that I will always remember as long as I will live, it's something that you will remember even when you have got Aizheimer disease for years, remember it with a smile, something that would be nostalgia itself. So, I certainly began as-a baby half a century ago in Vietnam. The story that ensued, I am trying to recount it here at my son's request, to tell him what happened next in that far away place. It's the period between the time that Vietnamese little boy grew up in that agrarian, small country and the time when he got a son who would grow up as a young man in a post industrial society, speaking a totally different language, possibly having a quite different view of life and of the world. Indeed there are connections between the two worlds that, despite obvious differences, can be seen if we understand the metamorphoses in between. Hopefully then, the apparent mutations would be better accepted and alienation between generations attenuated. On the other hand, no accusation, no excuse, no apology is needed or intended; we are responsible of our own destiny even when the decisions were made by us in less than half of the times.
The origin of my family.
I do not have a clear understanding of my ancestors’ origin. My father talked to me a few times about my ancestors, their names and where they came from. I tried to take note to preserve that precious information for later reference. Unfortunately, my father discouraged me from doing that, insisting that those things should just be remembered, not written down. As I see it now, and even as I write these lengthy pages, I agree that there must be certain wisdom in that attitude, that often our interpretation of history must be allowed to live its own life and not left frozen in books nor carved in stone.
Our family’s last name HÒ (Sinitic-Vietnamese or “Han Viet” pronunciation of a character meaning Lake) is a combination of the ideograms for c° [old] on the left side and nguyŒt[moon] on the right side). In the Vietnamese order of names, it should be followed by the middle name Væn (meaning beauty, literature). We belong to a branch of a larger family of Ho.
We kept our Confucian tradition and observed the cult of ancestors and called ourselves “luong” which meant “good” or honest. We called the catholic minority ngÜ©i có Çåo which means “having a religion” but they preferred to call themselves ngÜ©i công giáo which literally meant “member of the official religion”.
. There was much hostility between the Catholics and the non-Catholics that probably had its origin as far as the early half of the nineteenth century when Kings Minh Mang, Thieu Tri and Tu Duc were banning Catholicism and persecuting clergy and their followers. Besides, Hue was the capital of Vietnam since 1802 and the siege of many traditional religious factions, including Buddhism..
My family, like most people in Hue, did not profess to any specific religion. We had an altar to our ancestors and observed the anniversaries of their death, based on lunar, Chinese calendar. We called our religious practice the “ cult of ancestors”. My father used to quote Confucius as saying that, in matter of “spirits and devils” (qu› thÀn), respect from a distance was recommended. (Kính nhi viÍn chi). At least, that is how I remember and understand the matter now. I think it is a healthy agnostic approach that, even half a century later, after much reflection and inquiry, I cannot find a better one for myself.
In fact, my father was a rather pragmatic person. He did not have the rigid, anachronistic pedantry of self-professed Confucians or the self-righteousness of many Catholics that I have known. He told me to be” juste et bon”(fair and good), which my brother Hi‹n said could be succinctly rendered with the French word “equitable”. It was probably a notion that my father had learned during his few years in colonial French school after his many years of traditional education in the old Vietnamese system. However, it resonates well in me with the Vietnamese ideal of being fair rather than just conforming to the rules of law without regard to human realities: h®p tình, h®p lš. It also reminds me the Chinese “Way of the Middle”. (ñåo trung dung).
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Our ancestors had probably settled in Phú Xuân, a historic village of the province of ThØa Thiên, early in the nineteenth century, at the beginning of reign of the second king of the Nguyen Dynasty, Minh Mång. My grand father was a successful farmer and had three children. My father was his only son. My grand mother had a pawnshop at their house at a place called Ch® CÓng. I remember well this particular detail about the pawnshop because I overheard people refer several times to a robbery incident. Thieves had used some kind of sleeping smoke (?) that enabled them to open the well-locked heavy trunk where my grand mother kept the belongings of her clients and on which she was sleeping at night. It also was an indirect confirmation that she had an excellent memory needed for matters of inventory, still noticeable to us even when she was approaching her one hundredth year.
They had a brick house with a terra cotta tile roof, which was a sign of prosperity in an era were most people lived in huts or wooden houses with a thatch roof. My mother’s side was probably as well off as my father’s side. My mother was born in the year of the Pig (like me, but 36 years earlier, in 1911). She was five years younger than my father was. Now that, in my pediatric practice, I have become familiar with many Vietnamese of Chinese descent, my mother’s family name sounds like an ethnic Chinese name to me. Besides, I found that on my mother’s side people were taller, more gregarious, better versed in business than my father’s side. Also I remember occasions when my mother took me to visit stores at the foot of the ñông Ba Bridge*. They were ethnic Chinese businesses selling traditional Chinese medicine and other special merchandises including mè xºng, a very sticky candy made of a mixture of caramel and peanuts sprinkled with roasted sesame, very particular to the region of Hue. In retrospect those clues make me think about the possibility of a Chinese heritage from my mother’s side. Once, I met her younger brother now in his eighties, here in America. I asked him about my suspicion but he thought that my theory was incorrect. However, even if my guess were correct there would be still some possible denial. Hue was a very close community with strong nationalistic sentiment, and nobody wanted to identify oneself as an outsider, even less a foreigner.
My grand father had wanted my father to become a physician practicing traditional Chinese herbal medicine (thÀy thuÓc B¡c). Somehow, things turned out differently because at the turn of the twentieth century, the French colonists were trying to expunge our country of thousand year old Chinese influences. My father quitted traditional, Sinitic ( Han hoc, Old Chinese) studies and went to colonial schools where teachers from France taught everything in French. He graduated as a primary school teacher assistant. Therefore he became “Ông Tr® Giáo” (the teacher assistant) or in short Ông Tr® (the assistant). That title stuck with him his whole life even after he switched career only a few years later and became a successful businessman in furniture manufacturing, logging and construction. Even in their old age, my uncle still addressed my mother with the title chÎ tr® (sister teacher assistant) referring to her husband’s former teaching position. In that era, anything that had to do with letters and teaching gave a certain aura of intellectuality, a vestige of the old social order that put intellectuals ahead of the other groups of society: farmers, artisans and merchants (sï, nông, công ,thÜÖng). Times were changing though. At my father’s home warmingparty
one of the friends of his teaching days gave him a pair of Sinitic (ch» Hán) antithetical couplets (câu ÇÓi) engraved on two parallel pieces of fine wood still hanging at our home in Hue. The first line described well the change in Asian society at the turn of the century as well as the fateful turn in my father’s life; the second line expressed the resigned pride of his friend still loyal to his own noble calling.
Á châu tân luÆt thÜÖng tiên sï
Pháp h†c tinh thông thiŒn giäng sÜ.
In the new order of Asia, business people rank before the literati,
I, with my thorough knowledge of French, will remain a good teacher.
*ñông Ba Bridge crossed the River ñông Ba which was the eastern part of an artificial, U shaped river (sông H Thành) that surrounded the Citadel on its western, northern and eastern sides. The excavation work was started in 1805 under King Gia Long and completed in 1924 under King Minh Mång.
The original bridge was made of wood. In 1892, it was replaced with steel spans.
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BAO VINH, PHU BINH, HUE, VIETNAM
Bao Vinh, Phu Binh, Hue.
When I recall my past, the most significant thing that comes to my mind is the house where I was born. It was located in Bao Vinh, the northern part of the city, in the space between an artificially created branch of the Song Huong River (Perfume River) and the massive walls of fortresses protecting the old imperial city that were built according to the principles set forth by French military architect Vauban.
We lived near the Cua Trai and Cua Mang Ca (The Gill Entrance), that gave access to one of the most important strategic parts to the imperial city. A few critical historic military events happened in that area during French colonial times. During my elementary school years, there was an improvised open market there. It got larger and larger, probably due in part to the increased presence of refugees from the north who fled the communist regime after the Geneva Peace Agreement of 1954. (Most of them were catholic and though they were from the same country, we actually considered them as foreigners who spoke a very different accent and practiced different customs. There was probably significant discrimination against them, at least in questions of marriage.)
It was at that open market at the entrance of Cua Mang Ca that my mother almost daily bought small household items, her food and groceries. Once in a while, when we had a surplus of crops like coconuts or bananas from our large grove, my mother also had her maid bring them there and sell them for some extra money.
The small branch of the Perfume River that ran on the east side of our house was a place where so many activities of the neighborhood took place. People bathed, washed their laundry there, and got their drinking water from the same place too. Motorized boats with their excessive load of passengers and their heavy cargo of rice or building material went up and down the stream, leaving behind their wakes high waves that almost drowned swimmers nearby. Fishing sampans added to the busy traffic on the water. Fishermen used large square nets operated with a weighed lever to catch schools of fish that were bounded to their trap by assistants who made a loud, rhythmic noise by banging on the sill of their smaller boats. Swimming there for hours using an inner tube as a float was also my favorite pastime during hot summer days when I came home from boarding school.
Almost every year, the river overflowed into a flood that ravaged fragile, often makeshift houses of the areas. In worst years, a lot of people from the neighborhood had to take refuge in our solid house. All our family moved to the third floor, leaving the second floor to our unfortunate guests while the ground floor was submerged in the rising waters.
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THE HOUSE THAT MY FATHER BUILT
The house that my father built.
By its architectural style, by its size our family's house is almost a landmark of the city. Built in the mid 1940's when Japan was occupying Vietnam, it was a prowess in circumventing the limitations of resources during a period where Vietnam was isolated from the rest of the world. Steel and cement were not available, so to erect such a tall and large structure, a three storied, 45 foot tall house, the builder (my father) had to improvise or to use old techniques creatively. They had to use a mixture of sand and ground limestone (or probably lime extracted from shells readily available because of the proximity to the South China Sea). They used large beams of solid wood (go kien kien), from the rain forest and very resistant to moth, to replace steel. Weight bearing walls had to be about three feet thick at the ground level to be able to support the structures above. They were built with bricks, enwrapped in a layer of about 10 by 7-inch blocks of granite. The house's architecture was a mixture of oriental design and French colonial living comfort. Its roofs were covered with thick, heavy, embossed rectangular red tiles; different from the thin, small, half-moon shaped tiles popular in smaller houses in the area. The slightly curved roofline and the red-painted jutting beams that sustained them reminded us of the silhouette of certain Vietnamese or even Japanese pagodas. (Recently, my brother Hau, who is still living in that house for the last 23 years, told me that Japanese tourists are very fascinated by the building and frequently take a picture of it.).
However, from the inside, space division and room arrangement were probably of French influence. Ceilings were four meter high (more than 12 feet). On the second floor, a large sitting room was connected by an arched entrance to a spacious living room. Large bays of windows gave a panoramic view of green tropical vegetation resplendent against the bright blue sky. Add to that the sound of cicadas chanting you to slumber into your mid-day siesta.
I still remember the heavy, French style furniture in those large rooms. Four massive armchairs were covered with blue green fabrics; there was a sofa besides them. I remember well that sofa. I used to lie on it during summer nights, listening to the music from my palm size transistor radio, using small headphones, actually ear-phones that I connected together to get a primitive "surround-sound" effect almost forty years ago. It's the same sofa where I still remember my father lying in 1978 when I said good-bye to him before returning to Saigon after a short visit to my parents. I came to say farewell to him and somehow he was not in the mood to get up and walk me to the gate. Only my mother did. Our relationship had been like that, I had been away from my parents' home most of my adult life. I had been released from the concentration camps the year before and I wanted to bring my children Hoa and Hieu to see my parents and to visit my native city of Hue before trying to get out of the country. (Hiep was too small then and probably could not have endured the very strenuous journey on a very crowded and primitive train). That was the last time I ever saw my father in his own house, the one that he built and also the place where I was born. Later, I met my father shortly once or twice in Saigon when he came to visit my brothers Phu and Quy and me, but I never had a chance to go back to Hue.
Recollecting about the furniture in my father's house also reminds me of my father 's admonitions about cleanness. He used to ask me not to forget to dust the veneer surface of those tables and chairs; something that not surprisingly I usually did with a lack of enthusiasm characteristic of a teen-ager. I still remember myself rationalizing why we had to put so much attention to all those rooms where any outside guests rarely set their eyes on. Only a few privileged ones like my older brother's in-laws were received there, casual visits from relatives or children's friends mostly stayed in less formal quarters on the lower floor.
So, I had the place for myself most of the time. Either I was daydreaming, reading old books half eaten by moth that thrived in tropical, humid climate or listening to music from a stereo set that my brother Phu brought home from his trip to America and other exotic places like Mexico and Jamaica. I was also keeping a diary for a while. And also exercising (although this may surprise Huy). I was in a world by myself, separated from the Vietnam of war and misery that history talks about. I did not know how fortunate I was until I almost lost everything.
HVH M.D
My mother’s kitchen and Hue’s cuisine.
It may fit the much-maligned stereotype now, but thinking about the small, secondary kitchen on the ground level leads me straight to my memories about my mother. There is a Chinese story about a man who cried whenever he was served a soup of a certain herb called "hË" because it reminded him of his mother who used to cook that special soup for him. It is a kind of emotions a la Marcel Proust, in "A la recherche du temps perdu" which predated Proust for more than two thousand years.
In that small kitchen on the ground floor, we had breakfast, lunch, dinner, all cooked from scratch by my mother. The kitchen itself was in an annex building connected to the main residence by a by a covered, tiled corridor about 20 meter long. My mother did not have any electric or gas range. She had only a raised floor of concrete where two open fires were made, pots and pans were put over a three legged support made of iron or a set of three bricks. Her maid had to keep the flames alive by blowing air on them intermittently through a hollowed segment of bamboo tree or fanning them with a fan made of sheaths of areca palm fronds (mo cau).
Rice was our staple. There were many kinds of rice, its taste, consistency and even its aroma depended on its provenance. Gåo Nàng HÜÖng, Gåo Nàng ThÖm were very sought-after domestic products, brought from the plains of the Mekong River in the Southern part of the country. Gåo MÏ, imported American rice, although cheaper, was less well liked because its blandness. We occasionally ate yams (khoai lang) and different tubercles like cû s¡n (cassava) or khoai tía that we grew in our own field in the back of our house. We just boiled them and ate them without any added sugar but somehow, in their natural and fresh savor, they were so sweet and so appetizing.
For breakfast, we usually had bland rice soup eaten with nܧc m¡m or cá nøc kho. My father liked to eat it when it was still steaming hot, with a lot of red pepper, to the surprise of his five year old grand son who was able to notice it when he came to visit his grand father in 1978. Later, my son liked to recall this particular trait of my father eating habit, which was common in our area, probably common among Chinese people.
We raised our poultry (chicken and duck) in our yard. Turkey was unknown to us. We had one or two pigs in a pen, which my mother and her maid fed with chopped banana tree trunks, left over food like spoiled rice and bran bought from the rice mills. Pork usually was a special treat reserved for special occasions like New Year (T‰t) or the celebration of the death anniversary of one of our ancestors. Fish was sold by merchants who went from house to house, carrying their fare on baskets hanging on both extremities of a bamboo pole balancing on their shoulder rhythmically. I only remember a few dishes of fish that my mother made.
Canh cá was a kind of soup of fish boiled with few condiments like hành ngò (onion and parsley), and eaten mixed with rice; most of the times it was cá gi‰c, a fresh water fish the size of a child’s hand. I was an art to eat those small carps because they had tiny bones and we had to dissect their meat carefully lest we would choke on one of those bones.
When this type of accident did happen, a popular treatment was to have the victim swallow whole without chewing a bolus of rice or of rau muÓng (a kind of water morning glory very popular in Vietnam) in the hope that it would carry away the impacted bone down your stomach. Running the fingernails of a child born in the year of the tiger along the throat of the victim would help also, because the child was believed to have the spirit of the tiger, which like cats is an antidote to fish bones.
Another dish was cá kho, fish stewed in nܧc m¡m and brown sugar; it might be cá kho khô (stewed until dried) or kho nܧc (still left with its delicious sauce) which I preferred. Most ca kho was made of cá nøc, a kind of salt-water fish that lacked the delicate taste and texture of ca giec, but was cheaper and easier to eat. Those dishes that my mother cooked were much simpler than restaurant food that much later in life I had the chance to taste in Saigon and later in America. Its simplicity and its lack of high calorie-components were characteristics of Hue ‘s cuisine.
Another dish that my mother prepared on special occasions was Hue’s noodle soup, bún bò Hu‰. During my wife’s short visit in 1973, my mother managed to teach her how to cook that special treat of Vietnamese cuisine. My wife is from the South and I am delighted that she inherited something from my mother’s culinary heritage. Bún bò Hu‰ later became a favorite among my children too. My youngest son, though born in America, is very fond of bun bo and eats it my father’s way, very hot.
About my mother, I also remember the days preceding Vietnamese New Year Festival, Tet, when I helped her make bánh tét, a special Vietnamese rice cake wrapped in banana leaves and containing green beans, pork and bacon at their core. They were tied tightly in thin ribbons of bamboo wood (låt) and we had to boil them a whole day in large tin cans that formerly were containers of petrol intended as fuel for cooking stoves. We also made b¡nh in, cookies of sweetened, compressed glutinous rice powder, wrapped in colorful transparent wrapping paper that would be dedicated to our ancestors on their altar or served to our guests during the first three days of the New Year.
My oldest brother.
Strangely enough, talking about food reminds me of my oldest my brother. One day I was adding sugar to my large bowl of coconut milk that we used to drink (there were a lot of coconut trees in our garden). I still remember him telling me, “Tu mouras a trente ans” (You will die at age thirty). I don’t know why, I still remember that verbatim in French, after so many years. Now that his is gone (he died in 1978, in communist prison) his words characterize the way he cared for his 18 years younger brother.
When I was old enough to remember things, he had left Hue already for Dalat, in the Vietnamese highlands. Dalat was a tourist resort very popular among the French colonists. Its mild, cool climate reminded the French of the temperate climate of their native country. My brother went to a very selective French high school there, le Lycee Yersin, very famous for its picturesque bell tower appearing in many post cards. After a year majoring in philosophy in Dalat he moved to Saigon where he studied Law at the National University and at the same time attended the newly established National School of Administration. So, he was a little more than a generation older than I, I had very few moments shared with him
One of those moments was when he came back to the Hue area and became the chief of the district. of Phu Vang, one of the most affluent districts (quÆn) of the province of Thua Thien that surrounded Hue. I sometimes came to see him at his Chief of District residence (dinh quÆn trܪng) and once he gave me money to buy a movie ticket when I went back home. I still remember the movie that I went then, it was “The Bridge on the River Kwai”, with its famous song. Now, that song that began like” Hello, le soleil brille, brille…”(every movie we saw was dubbed in French and subtitled in Vietnamese then) always reminds me of my oldest brother. The ticket was not the only reason. Somehow in my mind he was associated generosity, pride and self-respect, the essence of an uncorrupted gentleman portrayed in the film.
He was born in the year of the horse, Canh Ngo and he believed it brought him bad luck. His life had its high points however. He was tall, handsome. He loved glamour and enjoyed nice cars, stylish clothes and luxurious things like stereo and hard wood furniture. I still remember the issues of Marie Claire and Paris Match (French magazines) that he regularly brought home and that I read regularly. Many of the French and American songs like La Vie en Rose by Louis Amstrong, April Love by Pat Boone that still linger in my memory were 1950’s , 1960’s hits that played on his Telefunken record changer that my brother Phu had bought for him. His Peugeot 403 sedan had the honor of occupying our number one garage at the ground level of our house. Because of his knowledge in matters of law, he was very helpful to our father when he had to deal with different authorities and even with our poorer neighbors who sometimes tried to encroach on our ground limits. As the eldest son of the family, he was very involved in many facets of our life. He and my older brothers painted its hundred windows and doors with paint that he personally brought back from Saigon, fixed the gutters that hang dangerously 10 meters above the ground. He was involved in my home studies during the summer when he was home. Later, when I went to Saigon to take exams to professional schools, I stayed for one month at his house in Bien Hoa (30 km from Saigon). I had the opportunity to know him better; and we were closer than we had ever been given our age difference, even the generation gap between us.
He married the third daughter of the governor of Thua Thien and they had seven children, five boys and two twin daughters. In the last years of his life, he was hounded by the new regime and tried to escape Vietnam with his family. He ran out of luck when his escape boat was stopped in the Saigon River by the same militia. He was put in prison and died in there.
Brothers and sisters.
My parents would not have thought, in their wildest dreams, of sending most of their children to America. It turned out, however, that the greater half of their descendants are now living abroad. Among my siblings, half are still in Vietnam.
My second older brother now lives in Saigon. He was born in the year of the Rooster (1933). My brothers grew up in a very turbulent period of Vietnamese history and probably witnessed many disturbing times. There were for example the massive famine during the Japanese occupation period that killed millions of Vietnamese and the communist take over of the government in August
1945, the so called “ August Revolution” (Cách Mång Tháng Tám) . They lived through the different regimes that transformed Vietnamese political and societal landscape in many different directions over a very short period of time. They also grew up during an earlier phase when, I supposed, my parents were still a younger couple and had still have to deal with the many problems of building a stable foundation to their family. My third brother and I came to life at a much later and different period, when my father was already in middle age and when our family was well-positioned in society. By then, Vietnam was starting to enter a short period of relative calm that would end later with the assassination of President Ngô ñình DiŒm on November 1st, 1963.
My brothers went to Institut de la Providence, a catholic high school run by French Redemptionist priest (Dòng Chúa CÙu th‰). Despite their self-professed anticlerical attitude, my impression is that they inherited from the catholic fathers’ teaching a very high level of moral integrity, seldom bordering on compulsive rectitude or intolerance. This often clashed with the pragmatic, less rigid Vietnamese traditional morality, more based on the compromise of three different religious or moral systems: Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. All this probably was the main factor in creating a certain attitude of rebellion from the younger generation vis a vis its elders. Also, my older brothers were strongly influenced by liberal ideas and the kind of cultural revolution promoted by modern Vietnamese writers like the members of T¿ L¿c Væn ñòan groups in the thirties. Some of the latter were urging strongly for a total elimination of traditional mores like the subservience of daughters in law to their husbands’ family, arranged marriage, the institution of indenture servants and social stratification. Its is also remarkable that, despite the fact that all of us attended schools with French curriculum, there was always, in the family, an emphasis on using proper and correct Vietnamese and a wealth of Vietnamese books and dictionaries giving every one of us an opportunity to write and to read extensively in our language, even when there was a dearth of facilities like public libraries and cultural centers and before the local Hue University was created under President Ngô Çình DiŒm in the late 50’s. Our supplies of stationary and books came from a handful of small, family run book stores like Ðng Hå and Tinh Hoa .Despite their modest size, were important institutions in the cultural life of our city, where the intelligentsia met and where every student spent hours browsing the classic Vietnamese prewar (tiŠn chi‰n) novels by Khái HÜng or NhÃt Linh, the latest literary magazine from Saigon or the most recent popular livre de poche from France.
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"Le livre de la vie est le livre supreme, Qu'on ne peut fermer ou ouvrir a son choix" (Lamartine)
Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,
Ou comme cestuy-la qui conquit la toison,
Et puis est retourne, plein d'usage et raison,
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son age!
Quand reverrai-je, helas! de mon petit village
Fumer la cheminee, et en quelle saison
Reverrai-je le clos de ma pauvre maison,
Qui m 'estune province et beaucoup d'avantage
Plus me plait le sejour qu'ont bati mes aieux,
Que les palais Romains le front audacieux:
Plus que le marbre dur me plai l'ardoise fine,
Plus mon Loire Gaulois que le Tibre Latin.
Plus mon petit Lire que le mont Palatin.
Et plus que l'air marinla douceur Angevine.
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Joachim du Bellay (Les regrets)
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I WENT TO SCHOOL
I went to school.
Education in the Newly Independent Vietnam
The Vietnamese education system was based on the French model since the beginning of the 20th century. After elementary school, which lasted 5 years and a final exam, students were awarded the primary studies diploma. In the French system, high school was either a college which had 6th to 11th grades, or lyc‰e, which went as far as grade 12th, called also “ classe terminale”.
Before 1945 there was a colonial instructional system devised specifically for the purpose of the production of a basically literate or moderately educated mid-level class of government workers to serve the colonial government. It was supposed to replace the thousand year-old, traditional, Confucian system of education that used as written language Old Chinese (sinitic) characters (Ch» Hán) as its official language and that relied mostly on endless, selective examinations at multiple levels to recruit the best candidates for public office. Besides, there was also the system identical to the one used in the “metropole”of French colonial empire, that is, in France itself. It went from the classe de douzieme (“12th class”, first grade in the American system) up to the classe terminale (12th grade) and was available only in few metropolitan areas. The only University was in Hanoi until 1947 when a second Medical School (Faculty of Medicine) was created in Saigon. A lot of well to do students went abroad to study in French universities.
After 1954 when Vietnam was divided into two states, one communist in the North and the other in the South, anticommunist, a large part of the faculty of the Hanoi University fled the new communist regime and joined the University of Saigon.
Until the late fifties, instruction at university level was done in French in Saigon. For another decade, the University of Paris still sent its professors to the Saigon Medical School as part of France’s educational assistance program to Vietnam. That program was terminated under the government of Premier Nguyen Cao Ky. In Hanoi, after 1954 it was the communist regime’s policy to switch overnight instruction at every level to Vietnamese, despite the lack of Vietnamese scientific terminology and faculty proficient in expressing scientific thought totally in Vietnamese.
My Elementary School
In that context, I grew up in Hue, in the most northern part of South Vietnam (officially known as the Republic of Vietnam). My elementary school was about a mile from home. I walked to school in the morning, came back home around noon, had lunch then walked to school again. It took about two hours of walking a day, quite a lot of regular exercise, six days a week. Thursdays and Saturdays, I had the afternoon off.
My cousins and why we called our father “Uncle”
I had a cousin that I called O Cháu who was about ten years older than I ( O., meaning Auntie, was a polite term used for female cousins who were “ lower” than oneself in the blood line hierarchy but who were too much older than oneself to be addressed as a kid sister, em) Her mother was my father’s sister and had died probably even before I was born. She and all her siblings, one older sister HÜ©ng (“Rose”) and a younger brother Thai (a word from the I Ching meaning a period of prosperity following a period of dire depression) had come to live with my father since their mother’s death. O Huong (Aunt Huong) called my father Uncle (CÆu in Vietnamese), and because of that, my oldest brother who was several years younger took up the habit and called his own daddy Cau. That explains the peculiar situation in our family: in Hue, usually we did not address our father as CÆu (an usual appellation in North Vietnam). The traditional appellation for one’s father was Cha, B† or Ba..
My cousin and the cyclist
Enough digression about my cousin’s family. Now, that cousin O Cháu had a boyfriend who was a non-commissioned officer in the Army and who rode a bicycle to work every morning on the same road. During my first grade, he used to give me a lift on the back seat of his bicycle on his way to work. One day, one of my friends whose family had a car promised me a ride the next day. So that day I declined the cyclist’s offer to take me to school and I waited for my special ride in the car. It never came. I had to walk and was late for school that day. It is one of the few early memories that somehow remain vivid in my mind after more than forty years. I don’t know why, maybe because it gave me a kind of moral lesson. Something like” Don’t drop too quickly your old friend just because something that looks better is coming along”.
A little follow-up here about the cyclist. He later married O Cháu and moved to Qui Nhon, Central Vietnam, had two or three daughters after their first born died of some severe diarrheal disease. After the Americans came to Vietnam, they were successful in doing business with the GI.
People from forty years ago
After the fall of South Vietnam in April 1975 they lost most of their fortune and moved back to Dong Ha, North of Hue. After almost forty years, through my cousin in Canada, I learned that they were still in Center Vietnam, rather destitute in their old age and wanted to contact me about an old family matter. I sent them . I was a significant amount for them in Vietnam. She was able to have some badly needed cataract surgery and was very happy with the result. I received a letter of appreciation from the couple. I really wanted to write them back, but her sister somehow talked me out of it. I still feel ambiguous about the matter, somehow in my memory I still feel gratitude toward her for helping my mother take care of me when I was a small child, and toward him for giving me all those bicycle rides to school.
Thanh Long Elementary
Now, I must give a short description of my elementary school Thanh Long. Formerly it was named De la Caillette (?), after a French military colonist, and it was located next to the city slaughterhouse, not an ideal location for a school. The new name Thanh Long meant Blue Dragon and was taken from the name of a small historic bridge nearby that I had to cross everyday on my way to school.
It probably had about 300 students. It had a main building consisting of about 5-6 classrooms. A smaller building parallel to the first one could better be described as a hangar, having a wall on only three of its four sides. It was used as a classroom for us on alternatively in the morning or in the afternoon because we lacked space in the main building. I do not remember if this interfered with our studying during rain or thunderstorms. Between the two structures, there was a small courtyard with a flagpole in the middle. In the back of the buildings, there was a large yard where children played during recesses. Most of the time, I did not participate actively with the other children. A few things are still vivid in my memory. There was a recessed window of the building part of the slaughterhouse next door that opened on the yard, we liked to climb there and sit on the sill. Once someone from the other side poured a pail of dirty hot water through the slated window panel and it was all over me. I don’t think I got burned but it was quite an experience to remember. I also remember the outhouses, which were terribly dirty.
Political climate: Ngo Dinh Diem, the new strong man
The state of South Vietnam was being created by then, so the government made a lot of effort to inculcate in us a sense of patriotism, of allegiance to the new state and to the new anti–communist leader Ngô ñình DiŒm. At the beginning of the school day, we had to stay in formations, dressed in our Boy Scout like uniform of marine blue slacks and white shirt, with a yellow and blue scarf tied around our neck. We then sang in unison our national anthem followed by our eulogy of the Prime Minister (later President) Ngo Dinh Diem.
The anthem started with the sentences “Này thanh niên Öi, ÇÙng lên Çáp l©i sông núi,ñÒng lòng cùng Çi, hi sinh ti‰c gì thân sÓng,
Vì tÜÖng lai quÓc dân, cùng xông pha khói tên, làm sao cho nܧc Nam tØ nay luôn v»ng bŠn..
Young people, let’s stand up and respond to the call of the land, let’s go and sacrifice our life without hesitation.
For the future of our people, let’s together defy arrows and gunpowder, so that our southern country stays even more solid from now on”…
It ended like this:
Thanh niên Öi, mau hi‰n thân dܧi c©, mau làm cho cÕi b© thoát cÖn tàn phá, vÈ vang, ngàn næm xÙng danh r¢ng ta la giÓng låc HÒng!
Young people, let’s immolate ourselves under the flag, let ‘s bring glory to our borders so that for a thousand years we deserve our reputation as the descendants of the Fairy and the Dragon”. (Vietnamese mythology says that we descended from the marriage of Låc Long Quân and Âu CÖ. Lac Long Quan was the son of Long N», the Dragon Lady. Au Co was from fairy ancestors. They had 100 children that later they divided among themselves. 50 followed their father to inhabit the mountains and 50 followed their mother the sea probably meaning the lowlands). Isn’t it tragic that our first family made in Heaven also ended up in divorce?
Then there was the hymn to our leader Ngô ñình DiŒm : Ai bao næm tØng lê gót nÖi quê ngÜ©i, Cùu ÇÃt nܧc thŠ tranh Çãu cho t¿ do, NgÜ©i cÜÖng quy‰t chÓng Cng bài phong ki‰n bóc lt, DiŒt th¿c dân Çang r¡t gieo tàn phá..Ngô T°ng ThÓng, ngÜ©i vŠ Çây, Çem dân tc lên VINH QUANG CHIN THNG! {Who had for years wandered in foreign lands, searching for a means to save our country and dedicating himself to the cause of freedom? He is committed to fight communism, to ban feudalism, to struggle against colonialism…President Ngo, you come to bring our people to glory and victory…)
We had to sing those songs every day while saluting our colors. The flag had three horizontal red stripes representing the three parts of our unified country, on a yellow background, the color of ripe rice field, of our past royalties, of our national flower hoa mai or bông mai (apricot flower) that bloomed around Tet. Older generations who had lived through different regimes and political ideologies from Confucian monarchy to French and Japanese colonialism probably saw in all this just another ridiculous wave of political propaganda based on the cult of a strong man. We ourselves also might now see all this as mere hollow political indoctrination, particularly in the context of American style political life where administrations and individual leaders come and go as frequently as fashion fads. However, in retrospect I see a possible positive side in all this. It was a different context where a political state was born with so much uncertainty in its future and where so many lives where at stake. Pride in our heritage and confidence in our leader were not mere talk for feeling good purpose, it had an impact on our fight for survival in front of the communist threat and the multiple forces left over by colonialism that tried to destroy our existence as a new nation.
The curriculum
We had Vietnamese, arithmetic, history, geography and khoa h†c thÜ©ng thÙc (the basic sciences). Vietnamese stressed on calligraphy (tÆp vi‰t) and orthography (chính tä). We spoke the Hue dialect with its characteristics like pronouncing the sound “nh” as ‘gi”. For example we pronounced “nhà” (house) and “già” (old) the same way [ya]. We did not make the difference between the ending consonants t and c, so for example we pronounce “rát”(burning pain) and “rác”(trash) the same way. We had five tones for each sound instead of six as in Northern Vietnamese. For us, “nºa” (half) and “n»a” (again) sounded the same. That’s why we had more difficulty with spelling than the northerners; standard spelling being mostly based on the northern dialect. We also had recitation where we had to memorizes short poems or paragraphs “by heart” (h†c thuc lòng). I still remember large parts of those poems, most of them popular folkloric songs (ca dao). During the summers, my older brothers and sisters gave me similar assignments. Familiar topics for essays were “Description of a rainy afternoon”, or at a higher level: “Explain the following saying: “As it flows, water erodes stones” (Nܧc chäy Çá mòn). What does it mean to you, give examples illustrating the idea contained in the saying.” Writing letters to my brothers in Saigon was another activity that helped improving my Vietnamese.
Those few years of basic Vietnamese gave me a foundation on which I built up later my knowledge and my love of the language. Recently, I have regularly published articles in different Vietnamese newspapers and magazines. Most readers were surprised to learn that I had spent most my school years learning French. Actually, my years studying French helped me improving my ability to express myself in my mother tongue. Likewise, most Vietnamese writers in the era preceding the war against the French (1945-1954) had their background in the French system. Modern Vietnamese had to liberate itself form the constraints of formal and antiquated Sinitic -Vietnamese (væn chÜÖng Hán ViŒt) and had to learn a lot from French in its attempt to express new western concepts in a manner accessible to a larger part of the population.
Lessons in mathematics and sciences consisted mostly of drills and rote learning. We had very primitive textbooks written in Vietnamese by local teachers. We did not have a laboratory and audio-visual materials of course were non-existent. Around 1960, our old principal retired and the new principal was much younger and more active. He organized a campaign where each of the students would bring to schÖl a few bricks, a little cement with which a new aisle was built. Then he tried to create our own h†c cø khÓ (bank of teaching instruments). Each of us tried to create something to contribute to that makeshift museum: a map, a statue, a clay reproduction of a fruit or an animal, a simple device to illustrating a physics principle. Geography was concentrated on the study of our local province and data on Vietnam that we had to memorize. In retrospect, I think that most of my teachers were poorly informed or motivated and much of the information was outdated. However, I still remember the fun of making a map of Vietnam with grains of rice dyed in different colors and glued on a piece of cardboard. I also remember one of the rare field trips that we had: our class accompanied other older schoolmates to visit people living in different neighborhoods near our school. We walked all day long. We taught people elementary principles of hygiene. With a small supply of first aid medical material, we helped people take care of minor health problems like scabies, infected cuts of the skin, washing their wound, applying the ubiquitous, red antiseptic tincture mercurochrome (thuÓc ÇÕ) Those classes gave in me a sense of belonging to my city and my country as well as the feeling that we were their owners responsible of their fate.
End of primary school.
Summer 1957, I graduated from Thanh Long Elementary. I was almost ten years old, a year younger than the average student. When I was in my third grade, my always dressed up and laid back teacher who had the reputation of liming her nails while sitting at her elevated teacher desk, Cô Viên, wrote in my report card that I was “a very hard working but slow student”. Two years later, under a much more understanding and attentive teacher, Cô HÜÖng, I was doing much better and was described in my report card as a “very intelligent, very god student” Perhaps, the change was due to Cô HÜÖng, a dedicated, diminutive, typically “Hue” woman, who helped me overcome my shyness and believe in my ability to do well.
At the graduation ceremony, I had an encouragement award consisting of a dozen notebooks and a Vietnamese adaptation from the Italian classic novel “Great Hearts”*. I was proud to get something to show to my parents. I also received the Diploma of Primary Studies (B¢ng ti‹u h†c). My brothers teasingly gave me the title of “Anh Khóa”. “Khóa” was the form of address reserved for those who had that diploma decades before, at the beginning of colonial rule, when even basic literacy in French or modern Vietnamese conferred some academic prestige. However, it was just a joke. Of course, I had to go further. That, unfortunately, also meant that I had to leave my family very early in my life, and with each step I made in my education, the distance from home became greater and greater.
Note * It was a kind of diary by a second grade school boy who related the memorable events of his school year, things he learned from his teachers, his parents and his friends. There were letters that his parents wrote to him to make a certain points about his behavior, when a written message was felt to have more impact than an oral one. For example, the father noticed that his child went to school reluctantly that morning. His letter then explained to his son the importance of education, reminded him that he was “ a little soldier among the vast army of soldiers” around the world who are fighting ignorance, etc…He then exhort him to more courage and hard work to his study. My father probably picked up from the book the habit of writing reminding letters to my brothers instead of talking to them face to face. “Great Hearts” was initially translated into French and became very popular in French schools under the title “Grands Coeurs”. In Vietnamese it was “ Tâm HÒn Cao ThÜ®ng” by Hà Mai Anh. The version that I received , “Dܧi Mái H†c ñÜ©ng” (Under the School Roof) was a rather clumsy “ Vietnamized” adaptation of “Tam Hon Cao Thuong.”
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My years in Danang, Vietnam.
In 1957 I finished my fifth year of elementary school. My school was called Thanh Long, “Blue Dragon”, and the whole curriculum was conducted in Vietnamese. Classes were crowded, about seventy students when we were in the first grade. My last year there, there were about 20-30 students in my 5th grade and I fared much better academically than when I entered first grade. However, there was little help or tutoring at home and my performance was not on par with other children who went to better schools. When I had to take an entrance exam ( a concours as it was called in French), I only made the waiting list to one of the main public high-schools in Hue. All my brothers and sisters had been going to Catholic school where instruction was conducted in French and with a much more rigorous curriculum than in the Vietnamese public schools. L’ecole de la Providence and Pellerin were major catholic institutions responsible for the education for the local and to some extent national elite for many decades. There had been also an secular French school in Hue, but that school had moved to Danang(also called Tourane by the French
By 1957, President Ngo Dinh Diem had been in power in South Vietnam for 3-4 years and was trying to establish a national education system based only on Vietnamese language. The use of Vietnamese was until then limited to high school level, much of the university level education was done in French. Therefore, students who underwent a high school curriculum were at a big handicap when they had to compete for a slot in very competitive professional schools like medicine or architecture. Once admitted, they also had a very hard time keeping pace in a foreign language that they did not know thoroughly.
Therefore, there was several reasons for me to leave home, go to Danang and apply to the College Francais de Tourane. I passed the entrance exam. My father probably hesitated a little in letting me go at so early age of ten. He asked me what I thought about it, it seemed that I gave him the right answer, that I would miss home but I had to do what I had to do. Besides my age, there was also some suspicion regarding the nature of the education that I was going to get from a secular French institution. The Catholic Sisters at Jeane d’Arc High School where my sister went to predicted that I would leave as angel and come back as the devil. That dramatic prognostication might be partially true. My eight years in boarding school separated from my family and without direct moral and spiritual guidance from my parents reshaped my mind and my way of thinking forever, for better or for worse.
I still remember the day I went to Danang to take my entrance examination. It was the first time I had ever been out of Hue, my native city. Danang was more exposed to the outside word, more modern by Hue ‘s standard, with more restaurants and shops.
Soon after the exam, I had to leave home and start my septieme speciale, a transitional fifth grade year that would help me streamline into a French curriculum, a 2-year process.
I still remember the day my father brought home my first suitcase. I never could have predicted the endless travels that would ensue later in my life. It was a small suitcase that my father tied on the rear seat of his bicycle when he came home that night from his office. It was made of light pinewood, covered on the outside with painted tin. On the inside there was a lining of fabric glued over wood. That kind of luggage was very popular in Hue at the times. My mother packed my belongings, mostly things from a required list sent out earlier by the school. There was a wool blanket that my mother bought from a neighbor who had won it as a prize at a fair lottery. There was a whitish cotton military mosquito net given by my brother in law. Pajamas were required too, I guess. Other little things that my mother packed for me, probably with tears brimming in her eyes. Later, when my wife came home for the first time to visit, my mother told her that she had suffered so much when I went away, but that she had let me go because I wanted to go. My parents went with me to Danang on my first trip. We went to the school for registration then spent the night at the hotel nearby. The next day, I slept in my new home.
The French High School.
The French name of my high school meant the French High School of Tourane. In French, the word” college” usually does not mean a university level institution. Around 1963, it was renamed Lycee Blaise Pascal. At the end of high school we took an exam to get the diploma of Baccalaureat, which again was not a university degree like the BS or BA in the American system.
My school had about 500 students, ranging from 12th grade to first grade. Each class had about 15 to 25 students. Most teachers came from France and lived in a compound nearby on Quang Trung Street, a few had apartments inside the school. The Directeur or Principal had a separate villa next to the school, at the intersection of ñc LÆp (Independence) Street and Quang Trung Street. The names of the principals that I still remember are Mr. Mougenel, Mr. Duplessy and Mr. Decroix. Most students were commuters: the younger ones were brought to school by their parents on motorbikes or less frequently by car. Most high schoolers rode a bicycle or walked to school. About thirty of us were internes, living in the school itself, away from home.
It was a big site occupying a whole large block of the city of Danang. We were told that formerly it was a military fortress before the arrival of the French at the end of the nineteenth century NguyÍn Tri PhÜÖng, a famous Vietnamese general and patriot had his quarters here when he was responsible of guarding the harbor area of Danang. Later it was transformed into a French military hospital. After the French lost Vietnam as a colony in 1954, it became the French college.
We could still see a large moat that divided the campus into two parts: the front part with the classrooms, the science laboratory, the yards where children played during recesses and the administrative buildings. The part in the back of the campus, on its West side was much older, with two large main buildings built in French colonial architecture. They were joined together in the middle with a hallway. White stucco columns bordered the corridors that surrounded high-ceiling rooms. Those rooms were used as dormitories for the internes.
On the ground floor, there was a dining room in the building on the left. In the building on the right there were a room for judo training with a large mat and locker rooms. The bathrooms were in a separated small addition in the back, We had to cross a small yard whenever we wanted to use a bathtub or take a shower. At the time, those facilities were much better than what most of us had at home, however I still remember the chills I felt on winter days when we just came from a bath and ran back to our dormitory.
At night it might be a little scary to for the younger internes. The toilets were about 60 feet away, also connected to the main building by a T shape corridor. I mention the distance because it was quite a long stretch of running for anyone who had diarrhea in the middle of the night. Add to that the stories about ghosts that haunted the place from its military hospital past, the sounds of giant geckos and the occasional snake dangling from the ceiling of the hallway. The toilets were very old and water leaking made a constant background noise. It was the siege a la turque that you had to squat on. (Last time I saw similar toilet seat was in 1998 in Singapore, a much more high tech version, with infrared beam automatic flushing.). The sewage pipes had been broken a long time ago, so that when you flush the water on one side, the person next-door was going to receive the whole exhaust from the septic tank air.
Isolation from the world.
All these minute, insignificant details that come to my mind now, I recount them as small pieces of a mosaic of a time past. When we think of all the amenities available to a high school student in America, it is hard to imagine how simple our high school was. We were not allowed to read newspapers in studying rooms or in the dormitories. There was no music, no telephone, no pharmacy, no nurse, no television (of course), no library, no counselors. After classes, except for 30-45 minute breaks, there was always studying time, until bedtime. The internes were not allowed to cross the bridge that connected us to the other part of the campus. For years we were not allowed to have a peek of the street scene in front of our school or buy anything from the peddlers who went around selling their fares of Vietnamese noodle or rice cake.
On weekends only, we were allowed to take a trip supposedly to our “correspondant” in town. A correspondent was some relative or family friend who would assume the responsibility of accepting us to their home for half a day or so and who would sign our “Permission de sortie” slip (Permit to get out slip), issued and signed by our stocky, debonnaire, scarfaced surveillant general Mr. Menguy, when we are due back. I often went to my brother-in-law’s home. He was a career military man who stationed in Danang for years. For a while, my sister and their children lived on a military housing compound on Quang Trung Street, just across the street from our place. Most of the time however, I only took the opportunity to go to a movie, something made by Hollywood and dubbed in French with Vietnamese subtitle. Or I just got a snack of some Chinese food sold from a cart by a peddler, thÎt bò khô ( dried beef mixed with finely chopped green papaya in nܧc m¡m (fish sauce), or chè sanh b° lÜ©ng, a sweet concoction of different algae, longan pulp and beans stuffed in scraped ice ( nܧc Çá bào). I relished those treats because they were rare in Hue where I came from, probably due to a relative absence of Chinese commerce in that city. If, for any minor infringement of discipline, like making noise during sleeping time or coming back late, our right to the outside world was suspended for that weekend. We then had to stay inside, studying.
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