the village was like an islet encircled by a bamboo hedge and seeming to float amidst rice paddies. Indeed, the village was an autonomous administrative, economic, and cultural unit. An old saying held, “Royal decrees yield to village customs.” Each village has its own tutelary spirit, communal rules, and customs. However, this isolation was tempered by a quite widespread practice, giao hiếu or giao hảo, an agreement between two or more neighboring villages and sometimes between several distant villages. These allied villages never brought legal proceedings against each other; rather, they provided mutual aid during floods, typhoons, fires, and epidemics, and they fought in coordination against pirates. The people of one village often sent a delegation and gifts to the festivals of an allied village. Every five or ten years, they would organize a joint festival.
Văn Xá and Văn Lâm Villages are twenty kilometers apart in two different districts of former Hà Nam Ninh Province in the Red River Delta. Despite this distance, spiritual links unite the two, for their tutelary spirits are said to be husband and wife. Legend has it that during the Lý Dynasty (1009–1225), a fisherman named Cao Văn Phúc lived in Văn Xá Village. A woman, Từ Thị Lang, lived in Văn Lâm Village, where she caught field crabs and snails. Fate led them to meet at the market and become a happy couple. Poor as they were, their hearts were benevolent.
One day, while hoeing their field, the couple found two eggs, which could not be broken or boiled. The eggs hatched into two snakes, one marked “elder” on the belly and the other marked “younger.” Since husband and wife had no children, they surrounded the snakes with love. Cao Văn Phúc’s medicinal recipes stopped a horrible epidemic in Văn Xá. After his death, grateful villagers honored him with a temple. Before long, the two snakes went to live near the temple. Văn Lâm villagers built a temple to Từ Thị Lang. That same year, a flood breached the dike protecting the two villages. The snakes slithered out to the dike, inflated their bodies, and formed a giant dam, which checked the rising waters.
The worship of the divine spouses led to the alliance between Văn Xá and Văn Lâm, with customs handed down for generations. Villagers commemorate the two spirits’ death anniversaries together. Although twenty kilometers separate the two villages, they now share the same name, Văn Xá. To show mutual respect, the residents greet one another, calling out “Uncle!” or “Aunt!” whenever they meet.
These two villages engage in mutual aid, including reinforcement of local dikes, relief during flooding, assistance in fish rearing and river fishing, and participation in festivals. They hold their large joint festival every ten years; both villages make voluntary donations, with residents contributing as they can. Funds from selling fish raised in ponds at the two communal houses help cover the joint festival and other common expenses. The village honoring the female spouse has a deep well with, according to legend, its water connecting to the Red River. Từ Thị Lang is said to send a message to the village of her husband’s spirit in the pomelos that villagers drop into the well. (Pomelos are rather like large, sweet grapefruits with thick, green rinds.)
Vietnamese Cultural Identity
Obviously, eighty years of French colonization influenced Việt Nam’s cultural identity. During colonization, some people from the upper social strata prided themselves on speaking French fluently and despised their mother tongue, which they considered fit only for peasants. A Molière-type Vietnamese comedy, The Annamite French Man (Ông Tây An Nam, by Nam Xương, 1931), aimed its cutting comments at the key character—a Vietnamese national returning from France. This lead character acts as if he has forgotten how to speak Vietnamese and must hire an interpreter! In fact, at that time, pro-French snobbishness gnawed into traditional Vietnamese culture. After the 1945 Revolution returned independence to Việt Nam, we stressed our cultural identity to enhance the confidence of our people, who once again faced foreign aggression. During colonialism, French was the language of instruction in tertiary education. After the Revolution, we used the Vietnamese language in all educational levels, including higher education, because language is crucial to cultural identity.
For several decades, globalization has forced Việt Nam to redefine its cultural identity after defending it for thirty years (1945–1975) during two wars of national liberation. Now, Việt Nam must preserve and enrich its national culture while opening to world culture. Cultural identity is not permanent, for “All tradition is change.” I like this title of a Swedish treatise on Sweden’s traditional arts and crafts. A closed culture will wither and die. Cultural identity evolves with time and space. A new tradition may be refashioned in the national mold from a foreign source. The same tradition may take different forms according to time periods.
Let me cite some examples.
Most foreigners agree that modem Vietnamese lacquer painting has a markedly Vietnamese stamp setting it apart from Chinese and Japanese lacquer. Indeed, modern Vietnamese lacquer is a marriage between our traditional handicraft and Western pictorial technique. Another example from art is paintings by Phạm Tăng (1924–), a Vietnamese famous in Europe, especially in Italy. He breathed the Vietnamese soul into an abstract Western style. A further example is the famous Vietnamese long tunic (áo dài), which emphasizes the fine silhouette of Vietnamese women. This garment appeared in the 1930s through Westernization of the traditional Vietnamese four-piece, multi-colored women’s tunic. More than one Western dictionary mentions “nem” (spring rolls) and “phở” (soup made with flat rice noodles) as typically Vietnamese dishes. These foods appeared in Việt Nam during the early 1900s. However, they are only indigenous adaptations of foreign dishes of little renown.
A Hyphen between Two Worlds: Indian and Chinese Influences
Việt Nam’s location in the center of Southeast Asia makes our country like a hyphen between two worlds, India and China. Southeast Asia has a common heritage marked by these features: matriarchal traditions, predominance of agriculture, and cultivation of rice, betel, areca, and mulberries. Villages were characterized by houses-on-stilts, spinning, bronze drums, bronze gongs, tattoos, loincloths, and kite flying. Spiritual life revolved around special funeral rites and the worship of spirits and fecundity.
Within this common background, Southeast Asians modeled their cultures according to their own geo-political conditions. Since ancient times, Vietnamese have faced two huge challenges: first, the struggle against natural calamities, particularly the Red River’s floods; and second, the unbalanced struggle against foreign aggressors. These ordeals gave the Vietnamese certain characteristics: strong communities fighting for survival, a hard-working nature, sobriety, care for real issues rather than metaphysical abstractions, dexterity, facility with imitations, resistance to physical and moral suffering, and a great ability to adapt. Animism as a pantheist framework characterized the country’s spiritual life. The worship of spirits and genies flourishes today, although sometimes diluted by imported religions. Such is the substratum of Vietnamese culture—a Southeast Asian substratum on which Indian and Chinese cultures were grafted during the Christian era.
The first contact with India came early in the Christian era through the Indian traders who ventured into Southeast Asia, seeking gold and spices. While waiting for the northeast monsoon, these traders propagated their culture, in particular their Hindu and Buddhist faiths. The Hindu states of Funan, Chenla, and Chăm Pa emerged. Later, the Khmer and Chăm peoples integrated with the Vietnamese as ethnic minorities.
Vinitaruci (Tỳ Ni Đa Lưu Chi, ?–594 CE), an Indian monk, came to Việt Nam from China and established Việt Nam’s first school of Zen (Thiền) Buddhism around 580 CE at Luy Lâu in Hà Bắc Province. This cradle of Vietnamese Buddhism is located at Dâu Pagoda in Thuận Thành District, Bắc Ninh Province, which is about twenty kilometers east of Hà Nội. Later, political upheavals interrupted direct Indo-Vietnamese acculturation. Chinese monks traveling overland replaced Indian preachers and traders. Contact with India resumed only in the 1900s, during our two countries’ shared struggle against colonization.
Indian
