Viet Nam. Hữu Ngọc
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and their friends’ congratulations. They shared three days off in the special honeymoon hut Hữu Ngọc’s colleagues had built. Then he and his wife returned to their assignments, seeing each other whenever possible. Their first child was born in the mountains.
After Hà Nội was liberated in October 1954, Hữu Ngọc and his family moved back to the capital. These days, he and his wife live with one of their sons and his family. Without fail, their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren gather each Sunday for lunch, rotating from one household to another. Over the years, foreigners from many countries have joined Hữu Ngọc’s family for Sunday lunch, formerly sitting in a circle on a reed floor mat but now sitting around a large, polished table, yet always conversing in many languages.
During the American War (the term Vietnamese use for what Americans call “the Vietnam War”), Hữu Ngọc was deputy director of Việt Nam’s Foreign Languages Publishing House. He and Nguyễn Khắc Viện, the publishing house director, edited and translated Vietnamese poetry and prose for their thousand-page Literature Vietnamienne (Vietnamese Literature, 1979). Publication of this work was a major cultural event. Le Monde (The World), the leading newspaper in France, noted: “Every day, a hundred American B-52s pummeled North Việt Nam. Nevertheless, the Vietnamese did the work to publish this major anthology of their literature in French.”
The Foreign Languages Publishing House (also known as Red River Press) printed books in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and other languages, including Esperanto (a constructed international language).
“The Esperanto period was so interesting!” Hữu Ngọc says. “Not many people knew Esperanto, but those who did were fanatical. They would translate from Esperanto into their own languages. Esperanto multiplied our efforts at the publishing house because Esperanto translators worked in both the communist and the capitalist blocs.”
Hữu Ngọc was director of the publishing house from 1980 until his retirement in 1989. When Việt Nam began to open, he changed the name to Thế Giới (World) Publishers because all countries in the communist/socialist bloc had a Foreign Languages Press. Hữu Ngọc wanted to signal that Việt Nam was not only unique but also open to the whole world, including the West.
During the American War, the publishing house had paid particular attention to English. Those books and Vietnamese Studies—a quarterly founded by Nguyễn Khắc Viện in 1964 and still published today—reached American activists and scholars.
Between the end of the American War in April 1975 and September 1989, Việt Nam faced war on two fronts: 1) the Khmer Rouge incursions into southern Việt Nam with the subsequent war in Cambodia and 2) the Chinese invasion into six Vietnamese border provinces. The then US government politically backed the genocidal Khmer Rouge and the Chinese invasion. Thus, although many say the American War ended in 1975, in truth, re-unified Việt Nam first enjoyed peace only in 1990.
The United States responded to the war in Cambodia by enforcing an even stricter embargo, which entangled all Western countries except Sweden. The embargo kept out not only Western goods and spare parts for any machine produced or patented in the West but also books, including medical journals. Việt Nam’s leadership had already instituted a rigorous, intensely collectivized socio-economic system, which stymied individual incentives in agriculture, trade, business, education, and scholarship. Although Việt Nam received military aid from the former Soviet Union, with the exception of Sweden, the country essentially had no outside assistance for food, medicines, and post-war reconstruction. Everything was rationed. Everyone was gaunt. Typhoons, floods, and droughts compounded the stress. Nevertheless, by the mid-late 1980s, Hữu Ngọc was already looking ahead to normalized relations between Việt Nam and the United States. He had published works about French, Japanese, Lao, and Swedish culture. Now, he wanted to write about American culture.
Hữu Ngọc often cites this caution: “You can go to Paris for three weeks and write a book, but if you live there thirty years, you dare not write a word.”
With his own caveat in mind and long before the Internet, Hữu Ngọc read everything he could about American culture. He asked any Americans he met to send books with the next visitor and to write articles. He went on to create a thousand-page volume in Vietnamese with essays from friends, summaries from his own research, and a very extensive bibliography. Hồ Sơ Văn Hóa Mỹ (A File on American Culture) remains in print today after twenty years. Hữu Ngọc’s oeuvre also includes many books about Vietnamese culture. Perhaps most important among them is his Dictionary of Traditional Vietnamese Culture, which has been available in Vietnamese since 1994 but was published in English only in 2012. This must-have book holds gems on every page.
When Hữu Ngọc was still in his late eighties, he walked to work, carrying his bag of books and covering the five kilometers in a little more than an hour. He used his far-sighted eye to negotiate Hà Nội’s famously horrendous traffic while reciting poetry in Chinese, English, French, German, and Vietnamese, with William Wordsworth still among his favorite poets. And so, it is no accident that Hữu Ngọc’s Wandering through Vietnamese Culture opens with his favorite lines from Wordsworth’s “The Daffodils.”
Several years ago, Hữu Ngọc’s family moved too far from World Publishers for him to walk to work. Now, for exercise, he walks forty-five minutes every day, covering three kilometers inside his house, often reciting the ten Buddhist precepts. He begins with the first precept, then recites the first and second precepts, then the first and second and third. When he finishes all ten precepts, he starts over again. Then Hữu Ngọc continues his day, writing his essays in heavy black ink, a felt-tip marker as his pen.
Hữu Ngọc has a rather wry approach to his prolific writing. “Do you know why I write?” he will say, pointing to the shelves of books he has written and edited. “When I need to check something, I know where to look!”
Three days a week, Hữu Ngọc rides on the back of his son’s motorbike to his office at World Publishers. He is a mentor to many. His door is open. Whoever pops in is welcomed, introduced, and linked to anyone already in the room. His open door emphasizes the great role of “the random” in life. Hữu Ngọc says his own life has been a continuous series of random events. As a youth in Hà Nội, he dreamed of marrying a girl from the mountains and nesting in a house by a stream. However, the random from an interview question and lines from his favorite Wordsworth poem led him to teaching. In 1945, he joined the Việt Minh because of random events of history. His limited eyesight and assignment to work with POWs and the random in life led him to a career as a researcher in culture. Yet, despite his belief in “the random,” Hữu Ngọc recognizes opportunity without being an opportunist. Those who take advantage of his open door know that he has an unusual ability to discern and develop a new idea or a novel approach.
After retiring as chairman of the Vietnam-Sweden Cultural Fund and of the Vietnam-Denmark Cultural Fund, in 2012 Hữu Ngọc established the Cultural Charity Fund to provide children in remote areas with world literature. The translated books range from works by American John Steinbeck to Russian Boris Pasternak to the newest Harry Potter books. He has also given rural children the chance to study English first hand by organizing courses taught by English-speaking volunteers.
Hữu Ngọc continues to give his ever-changing lecture, “Three Thousand Years of Vietnamese History in One Hour.” He will hand Wandering through Vietnamese Culture to a listener in the first row. “Take a look,” he says. “Pass it around.” One by one, members of his audience marvel at the book’s weight and peruse its 1,255 pages, pausing here and there to measure the book’s depth.
For this volume, Professor Elizabeth Collins from Ohio University has worked with Hữu Ngọc to select essays from Wandering through Vietnamese Culture. This was a huge task, one I had seen as important for years but had found overwhelming. Hữu Ngọc worked over successive drafts of the Contents, restructuring some sections, making minor changes in other sections, and adding a few pieces, which do not appear in Wandering through Vietnamese Culture.
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