"Ta muốn cưỡi cơn gió mạnh, đạp làn sóng dữ, chém cá tràng-kình ở Biển Đông, quét sạch bờ-cõi để cứu dân ra khỏi nơi đắm-đuối chứ không thèm bắt chước người đời cúi đầu, cong lưng làm tỳ-thiếp cho người ta"

** Triệu Thị Trinh **

                     Hue in 50s  -1

.Fig 1: Young women in traditional ao dai in old Hue.

Old streets, ancient paths

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. We kept our Confucian tradition, observed the cult of ancestors and called ourselves “lương” which means “good” or honest. My family, like most people in Hue, did not profess to any organized 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” (quỷ thần), respect from a distance was recommended. (Kính nhi viễn 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 that I have known. He told me to be “juste et bon” (French words for “fair and good”), which my oldest brother said could be succinctly rendered with the French word “équitable”. It was probably a notion that my father had learned during his few years in colonial French school after his years of traditional education based on Chinese characters 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: “hợp tình, hợp lý”. It also reminds me the Chinese Way of the Middle. (Đạo trung dung).
Our ancestors had probably settled in Phú Xuân, a historic village of the province of Thừa Thiên, early in the nineteenth century, at the beginning of reign of the second King of the Nguyen Dynasty, Minh Mạng. 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 Chợ Cống. 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. I remember occasions when my mother took me to see a Chinese traditional medicine doctor or visit her relatives at the storefronts at the foot of the Đông Ba Bridge. They were ethnic Chinese businesses selling traditional Chinese medicine and other specialty merchandises including mè xững, 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, which was never confirmed.

hue in 50s --- 2

Fig. 2: Mè xững, a very sticky peanut candy

My grand father had wanted my father to become a physician practicing traditional Chinese herbal medicine (thầy thuốc Bắc). 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 ( Hán học, 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 trợ giáo (the teacher assistant) or in short ông trợ (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 chị trợ (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 (sĩ, nông, công, thương). Times were changing though. At my father’s home warming party one of the friends of his teaching days gave him a pair of Sinitic antithetical couplets (câu đối) 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 luật thương tiên sĩ
Pháp học tinh thông thiện giảng sư.

In the new order of Asia, business people rank before the literati,
I, with my thorough knowledge of French, will remain a good teacher.

hue in 50s --- 3

Fig 3: Antithetical couplets carved in wood in Princess Ngoc Son temple in Hue
(Hoành phi và câu đối bài trí ở gian giữa Ngọc Sơn công chúa từ đường)
http://phanquoctuanqa1.violet.vn/entry/show/entry_id/9413912

hue in 50s ---4

Fig 4: Bao Vinh (Photo by Thai Phien)

Bao Vinh

When I recall my earliest years, 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 Sông Hương 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.

hue in 50s --- 5

Fig 5: Old map of the Hue Citadel (From Đại Nam Nhất Thống Chí). The thick walls, flanked by a large ditch, and the bastions (angular structure projecting outward from the curtain wall) are recent European developments in fortification from the mid 16th to the 19th century in response to attacks by gun powder artillery. Vauban (1633-1707), under Louis XIV, was the most notable fortification architect in the 17th century.

We lived near the Cửa Trài and Cửa Mang Cá (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, they created 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. It was from that open market at the entrance of Cửa Mang Cá 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.hue in 50s --- 6 

Fig 6: North-East Entrance to the citadel (Cửa Trài)

( Đông Bắc Môn có tên gọi dân gian là cửa Kẻ Trài, nằm ở góc Đông Bắc của Kinh Thành, bên bờ Tây của sông Đông Ba. Phần vòm cửa được xây dựng vào năm 1809, dưới thời Gia Long, vọng lầu được xây dựng vào năm 1824, dưới thời vua Minh Mạng. Ngày xưa, Kẻ Trài là tên một xóm ở phía trước cửa thành, nơi đây có chợ Mới, có Hàng Bè, có phố Đông Hội, thương nhân Bắc kỳ đưa hàng hoá vào buôn bán, họ làm lều quán lúp súp, thành những dãy nhà trài hai bên bờ sông, dân bản địa thường gọi là Kẻ Trài, từ đó cửa Đông Bắc cũng có tên là Kẻ Trài.  

( http://dulichhue.com.vn/new/vi/a6927/kinh-thanh-hue-co-bao-nhieu-cua.html)

  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.

hue in 50s --- 7

Fig 7: Đông Ba Bridge crossed the River bearing the same name that was the eastern part of an artificial, U shaped river 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 Mạng.
The original bridge was made of wood. In 1892, it was replaced with steel spans.

In 2012, the steel bridge was to be replaced with a new concrete bridge.

[Cầu Đông Ba sắt hiện nay (bắc qua sông Đông Ba, một chi lưu của sông Hương, nối đường Nguyễn Chí Thanh với đường Đào Duy Từ) sẽ được tháo dỡ để xây dựng mới vĩnh cửu bằng bê tông cốt thép. (dulichhue.com.vn)]

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 elder 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 Mạng 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 Đình Diệm on November 2, 1963.

hue in 50s --- 8

Fig 8: Institut de la Providence ( Trường Thiên Hựu). Many erudite catholic priests such as Georges Lefas, Petitjean, who taught at the institute would join the faculty at the University of Hue, founded in 1957. The first and founding president, Reverend Cao Văn Luận (1908 Hà Tĩnh, Vietnam-1986 USA, author of his memoirs “Bên giòng lịch sử’ [1940-1965]), was formerly a philosophy teacher at Quốc học High School.

My brothers went to Institut de la Providence, a Catholic high school run by French Redemptionist priests (Dòng Chúa Cứu Thế). Despite their self-professed anticlerical attitude, my impression is that they inherited from the catholic fathers’s 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 Tự Lực Văn Đoàn group 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 husband’s 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 Đình Diệm in 1957. Our supplies of stationary and books came from a handful of small, family run bookstores like Ưng Hạ and Tinh Hoa. Despite their modest size, they 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 (tiền chiến) novels by Khái Hưng or Nhất Linh, the latest literary magazine from Saigon or the most recent popular livre de poche from France.

hue in 50s --- 9

Fig 9: Old Hue: Tran Hung Dao Street

Hien V. Ho, MD

11-09-13

(Adapted from “The Mayflowers of 1975”, a collection of autobiographical essays by a few dozens of Vietnamese doctors, edited by Chat van Dang, Hien Van Ho, Nghia Vo, An Than and A. Capdeville).

http://www.amazon.com/Vietnamese-Mayflowers-1975-Chat-Dang/dp/1439230366/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384016531&sr=1-2)