Viet Nam. Hữu Ngọc
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melodies and harmonies of language. At ninety-eight, Hữu Ngọc is still writing weekly essays and assembling books. He is busy moving forward. For that reason, he asked me to assume responsibility for shifting his selected newspaper columns into the essays that appear in this volume.
That task provided me an opportunity for many random discussions of this text in Hữu Ngọc’s office. In consultation with the author, I have updated paragraphs, made corrections, and inserted some sentences and phrases for clarity and context. I have left in repetitive details because readers may approach the essays out of order. I have also added a note on the Vietnamese language, a historical timeline, and an index.
Additions made to Hữu Ngọc’s text include the titles of the works he quoted, with the Vietnamese titles in parentheses and the English translation in italics or quotation marks in the body of the text. This intentional reversal of usual practice is for easier reading; it does not indicate that the quoted excerpt is from a work that has been translated into English. Indeed, very few of these works have been translated in full.
Vietnamese Literature, the English version of the French anthology, was the source for many of the excerpts from poetry and prose that Hữu Ngọc quoted in his newspaper columns. The Vietnamese works in Vietnamese Literature had been translated sometimes from Chinese (Hán) or Vietnamese (Nôm) ideographic script into Romanized Vietnamese script (Quốc Ngữ), then into French, and, only then, into English. As a result, understandably, many English translations in Vietnamese Literature and in Hữu Ngọc’s original newspaper columns were rather distant from the original texts.
For this reason, I have re-translated all the quotations from Vietnamese works, returning to the original Romanized Vietnamese versions and, when relevant, to the transliterated Hán and Nôm versions of the ancient poems and prose. By adding the Romanized Vietnamese titles, I hope to encourage interested readers to explore the original texts, many of which are available on the Web at <www.thivien.net> in Quốc Ngữ and, for the ancient works, also in Hán or Nôm at that same website. Some of our translations in this volume appear in our other books and articles and will appear in the new edition of Vietnamese Literature.
Hữu Ngọc chose not to read the final manuscript for this book because he wants to conserve his time to work on new projects. His son, Hữu Tiến, read the manuscript and alerted me to several errors. Phạm Trần Long, deputy director of World Publishers and the book’s editor in Việt Nam, is always a careful, helpful reader. Trần Đoàn Lâm, the director of World Publishers, is well versed in Chinese Hán script and Vietnamese Nôm ideographic script. In addition, he is fluent in Russian and English and can read French. Mr. Lâm has checked our translations with the original texts (Hán, Nôm, Quốc Ngữ, and French). As director of World Publishers, he is also the book’s final Vietnamese reader. Trần Đoàn Lâm brings to any text an extraordinary ability to think broadly yet concentrate on the smallest detail.
This book does not attempt to be a systematic study of Vietnamese culture or of Việt Nam’s traditions and changes. Rather, it is a compilation of some of the essays from Wandering through Vietnamese Culture that reflect that theme. As a result, there may be important events, people, and issues not covered in this collection.
Now, with many of us working together and with assistance from many other colleagues in Việt Nam at World Publishers and in the United States at Ohio University Press, we have Việt Nam: Tradition and Change, an accessible and absorbing tour of Việt Nam’s history and culture with scholar-writer Hữu Ngọc as our guide.
Lady Borton
Hà Nội, Việt Nam
The Vietnamese Identity
Nghĩa
Of all the beautiful verses in The Tale of Kiều (Truyện Kiều), the immortal work in 3,254 lines by our national poet, Nguyễn Du (1766–1820), this couplet in six-word, eight-word meter about Kiều, when she is beset by lost love, seems to me the most beautiful:
Sorrowful, the remnant of old love,
The thread of a lotus root still lingering.
Tiếc thay chút nghĩa cũ càng
Dẫu lìa ngó ý còn vương tơ lòng.
I believe only Vietnamese can really appreciate this couplet’s beauty and, in particular, can understand “nghĩa,” which in this context means “love.” But that’s not all. “Nghĩa,” a Sino-Vietnamese word, is a traditional Vietnamese ethical concept, which can be understood as moral obligation, justice, duty, debt of gratitude, and mutual attachment based on duty. Nghĩa has to do with both the heart and the mind, which are closely linked in important phrases, such as “nghĩ bụng” (think with the belly) and “nghĩ trong lòng” (think with the bowels). Traditionally, belly and bowels are the locus of feelings.
“Nghĩa” is the phonetic transcription of the Chinese character for “justice,” a key word in Confucianism. Actually, Confucius (551–479 BCE) placed greater stress on humanism (nhân) than on justice. Mencius (372–289 BCE), for his part, insisted on “nghĩa” as meaning “the right thing to do, even to the detriment of one’s own interest.” Moral obligation can take different forms depending on concrete social relationships (suzerain – vassal; parents – children; teacher – student; friends, etc.). The best definition for “nghĩa” may be found in the lines I just quoted. The definition has three components:
• duration: A proverb says, “Nghĩa can arise from one ferry trip” (Chuyến đò nên nghĩa). This means that one trip across a river is enough for passengers to feel bound together by nghĩa.
• mind: The mind is symbolized by the lotus stem. When snapped, the stem’s tenuous filaments keep the two halves linked.
• heart: The tenuous filaments represent the heart.
In brief, far from being a dictate of conscience, nghĩa mixes reason and feeling—the mutual, moral, and sentimental obligation born from human contacts, however brief. Nghĩa governs relationships with other people as well as within the family, village, and country.
Love in Việt Nam generally leads to marriage and family. Conjugal love based on affection and loyalty is expressed by “yêu thương,” a compound word, which is very difficult to translate. “Yêu” means “love;” “thương” means “to have compassion, understanding, or pity.” “Yêu” implies passion, desire, affection, and fondness. “Thương” implies care, even tolerance. However, conjugal love can be best translated by “tình nghĩa,” with “tình” expressing “love,” and “nghĩa” capturing “mutual, moral, and sentimental obligation born out of love.”
Nghĩa will keep a married couple together at a later life stage, when passion no longer reigns supreme and when affection has become a habit. But even then, because of nghĩa, a conjugal relationship will not be governed solely by reason. Husband and wife endure with each other because nghĩa binds them. Nghĩa explains why so many couples remain physically faithful despite long absences, especially during war.
The Vietnamese Character
A few years back, I spoke with Sociology Professor Göran Therbom about the Swedish mentality. We agreed that circumspection is indispensable in questions of national character, the psychology of peoples, cultural identity, and traditional values, lest one enter the trap of racism.
Since Việt Nam’s August 1945 Revolution, we have held dozens of seminars and have published an abundance of literature devoted to the character and cultural identity of the Vietnamese people. The research, which