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
