A Vietnamese Family Chronicle

by Nguyen Trieu Dan

  In times of war, when having to flee from the scene of hostilities, a Vietnamese would instinctively seek the protection of his village. I remember that, as the conflict with France threatened to break out in 1946, Hanoi was evacuated. My family knew where it would go and so too did most of my friends. We were not too worried about having to leave Hanoi and exchanged addresses, as if we were saying goodbye at the start of the summer vacation. “If you pass by my village, look me up,” we said to one another. One friend, however, had no forwarding address to give. “I do not know where we will go,” he said. “But where is your village?” we all asked, convinced in our minds that at such a time, one could only think of going to one’s village. He explained that his people had been living in Hanoi and had lost contact with the place of their origin. “We have spent all the Tet festivals in town,” he added, and his voice suddenly carried a note of sadness.

  Ceremonies and festivals played an important part in village life. They contributed much to bind people together. Kim Bai had no festivals known all over the country like that of the Heavenly Prince in my grandmother’s village, or a market day celebrated by the whole region like the New Year Festival in Chuong. Kim Bai’s festivals were only held for the benefit of the village community. There were many in a year, with the two main events taking place in spring and autumn. I knew little of them since they coincided with the school terms, when I was away. The first festival was for the village what Tet was for each family. At Tet, family members gathered to worship their ancestors’ spirits and celebrate the arrival of a new year. A month later, the villagers got together to worship Kim Bai’s deities and usher in a new cycle of seasons. The sacred tablets kept on the altars in the Communal Hall were taken out and carried in a solemn procession through all hamlets. After they were returned to the Hall and the religious ceremony had ended, a communal meal for the men followed. In the evening, music and dance were performed in the Hall’s courtyard for the enjoyment of the population. The second festival was held in the autumn to pray to the village’s deities for a bountiful crop. Between these two events, there were smaller festivals. Every month or so, villagers had an occasion to stop their work routine and participate in a day of celebration and entertainment.

  All citizens were entitled to contribute to the village feast and take part in it. From the age of twelve or thirteen, a boy could have his name registered in the village roll and, following an admission ceremony in the Hall where money and food offerings were made, was allowed to partake of the communal food. To begin with, he was only given his portion of meat and boiled glutinous rice. Then, having reached the age of eighteen, he would qualify to go and eat in the Communal Hall with the other citizens. In prosperous times, our village sacrificed an ox and several pigs at the principal festivals. As the economic situation worsened in the 1940s, the ox was spared and the number of pigs dwindled. Still, the excitement and sense of occasion remained undiminished and few people would ever want to miss a communal feast. Among those who left Kim Bai to work in town, many made the trip back to attend the main festivals. More specifically, they wanted to be present at the feast in the Communal Hall. “A morsel at the Hall is worth a platter of meat in one’s own kitchen,” people used to say. The criteria for determining village precedence were based on age and merit. The place of honor, in front of the altars, was reserved for holders of high diplomas and mandarinal ranks. In my grandfather’s time, he was the only person qualified to sit there, but abstained from attending, perhaps because he did not want to have to eat by himself. Two rows of wooden platforms covered with rush mats were arranged on the two sides of the altars. Heading the rows on the right side were the four oldest men in the village, all past the age of seventy and known as “the four pillars.” Current and former members of the village council headed the rows on the left. Behind them and the old men came the rest of the citizens.

  I was too young to take part in a meal at the Communal Hall, but had the opportunity to go to a formal meal at the place of my great-uncle the mayor. The Chu was one of Kim Bai’s prominent families. Their private function was attended by a large number of guests and village protocol was observed. My mother was quite excited. She treated the occasion almost like my first communal meal and carefully explained to me the rules of behavior, what to eat and when, although, being a woman, she had never attended a village meal.

  On the strength of my school diploma, I was allowed to attend the meal while still underaged; moreover, the mayor made me jump ranks and sit with adult graduates. Three elders shared a food tray with me. They were kind enough to make me feel at ease. The tray contained soup and a number of meat and vegetable dishes. The meat was neatly cut and arranged to show four clear portions. Any risk of confusion must be avoided, for to eat into someone else’s portion would be the worst of manners. Protocol set down precisely which part of the pig was served to whom. To the table of honor-or tray of honor, for everyone was sitting cross-legged around the trays of food-went the best parts of a pig, taken from its head and collar. For a citizen to be served the wrong piece of meat was a slight which could lead to bitter acrimony. Cutting and distributing meat at village functions was not a task for every butcher. Such task required a thorough knowledge of protocol and local customs. I read in history books that a king in ancient China chose a man to be his prime minister solely on his talent for cutting meat at public ceremonies. That man never made a mistake which caused recriminations. “He must have an inner sense of justice and of the rites,” the king said, and indeed the butcher proved himself to be a very good prime minister. Now I began to understand something of the king’s wisdom. We started the meal by drinking rice brandy while sampling appetizers. I accepted the first cup offered by my elders. The strong brandy took away my inhibitions and shyness. I remember that we had pork blood pudding, which was not as refined as duck blood pudding, but on that day it seemed to me particularly tasty. The thin slices of belly of pork, simply boiled and eaten with fish sauce and pickled cabbage, were also delicious. As the meal progressed, I joined in the spirit of togetherness. Wine and food made everyone merry and the mayor’s house resounded with talk and laughter. I found myself talking and laughing too, among those people who were all my elders but now had accepted me as one of theirs. I understood why the first communal meal was so important. To the young, it was something like their graduation to adulthood and to full citizenship in the community.

  When I think of my country, my mind often turns to the village of my youth. Walking through rice fields at harvest time among the golden paddy; swimming in the cool waters of the Hat as autumn mist covered the Lichee Field; greeting the new year behind the bamboo enclosure in the warmth and trust of the village community; it was there, in Kim Bai, that I began to feel the thousand ties which bind a person to his homeland. Since then, in every place where I have lived, the countryside has held for me a special appeal. Abroad during my career as a diplomat, I became attached to a country only after going out of the cities and spending time in a village, among open fields where I could sense the presence of the land all around me.

  The village to us Vietnamese is home. We never say that we are “going” to our village. Always, we are “returning” there, to the place of our roots. Generations of our family had lived in Kim Bai in an unbroken chain since at least the fifteenth century. Our ancestral home was built on a plot of land owned by our family from times immemorial. Our forefathers lived and worked there; when they died, they were laid to rest in rice fields which, since their times, had been the property of our family. The links with the past could be seen everywhere. They were never more apparent to me than when we went from one rice field to another to sweep the tombs in the yearly ceremony. In doing so, we crisscrossed the generations. From an ancient forebear who died three hundred years ago, we would come to a much more recent grave, then in another field, it would be back in time to an earlier ancestor. Sometimes, my uncle, the deputy mayor, could not tell to which generation belonged the grave that we
were sweeping, although he was sure that it was one of our ancestral graves. Or he would suddenly recall that a tomb was missed, and we had to retrace our steps. In this haphazard manner, we journeyed back and forth into family history, at each year’s ceremony.

  In Kim Bai, a large village with a population of about one thousand, the community was closely-knit, almost like a large family. Many villagers were in fact related, either by blood or by marriage. Even in my early teens and not living permanently there, I knew practically every villager. At any rate, I could say for certain who belonged to Kim Bai and who did not. Paths and lanes going into every corner of the village’s hamlets were familiar to me. The bamboo enclosure gave me an almost physical sense of belonging and security.

  All families in Kim Bai owned some land. The very poor ones would have about one-third or half an acre. An average farmer would have one or two acres. Landless people did not stay; instead they left to find work in town or venture farther away to the new lands of the south where they became plantation workers. Our village had no big landowners, over whose fields “the white egret could fully spread its wings,” to use a popular way of describing large properties. Land repartition in the Red River delta was completely different from that of the Mekong delta in the south, where big landowners may hold thousands, even tens of thousands of hectares, and a man could see his fields stretch out of sight in the horizon. In our region, the land was parceled everywhere in small plots, most of which were not larger than half of an acre. A family owning six or seven acres was already considered as fairly well-off.

  Poor farmers supplemented their incomes by working as tenants. Landlords in our village did not necessarily own a lot of land. Many people let out their rice fields because they pursued occupations other than farming, such as teaching, trade, medicine, the civil service. Throughout the generations, our own ancestors were scholars and never worked in the fields. There were times when they became impoverished and led a life of privation like poor farmers, but the few pieces of land that they owned continued to be let out. Between landlords and tenants, rich and poor people, the difference in lifestyle was not great. For all, it was a life of work and frugality. Our family was the wealthiest in Kim Bai, yet my grandmother drove herself as hard as any sixty-year-old villager I knew. She did not eat meat everyday. Her diet consisted mostly of rice, fish and vegetable dipped in her thick bean sauce. Special fare was prepared for us town dwellers when we returned to Kim Bai. Grandmother made us work during our holidays--albeit not too hard-for there was no question of her letting us idle the time away. Life in Kim Bai was characterized neither by “exploitation” of poor peasants by rich landlords nor by “class struggle,” as latter-day Marxists would claim in their ideological model. Injustice and exploitation could occur where a few landlords owned most of the land and enriched themselves from the toil of their tenants; such a situation would be made worse if those owners were absentee landlords, with no other relationship with their tenants than the economic one. In the densely populated Red River delta, where land was scarce, there could not have been many such rich absentee landlords. Certainly, there were none in Kim Bai and neighboring villages. Very large landholdings could be found only north of the delta, in the highlands. There, during the French conquest at the end of last century, many battles took place and villagers fled from their villages. The French seized the abandoned land and granted it to their settlers and to French companies. When the situation had settled and the villagers came back, they could not claim their land and had to work as tenant farmers for the new owners.

  Rich and poor villagers of Kim Bai were part of the same community. The ties between them had been forged through generations of living together and sharing common responsibilities. There was much more to their relationship than just economic power and greed. In any case, village hierarchy rested on age and scholarship, not wealth. At public ceremonies, a rich landlord would be placed at a lower rank than a civil servant or a scholar. Should a conflict erupt between villagers, village elders would intervene to bring about a solution. Like a family, a village would seek to settle its own affairs as far as possible without recourse to an outside authority. Our traditional culture, based on the search for the Middle Way and for harmony, had always shunned extreme positions and conflicts. Emphasis had been on restraint and compromise. Moreover, many tenants were related to their own landlords, and family spirit would come into play to temper any excessive imbalance that may exist in their economic relationship.

  This is not to say that the traditional land system should have been kept unchanged. In a country of farmers, justice must ultimately mean that tenants become owners of the land they work on. Such was the objective of the land reform undertaken by the nationalist government of South Vietnam in the 1960s, which granted ownership of the land to tenants. At the same time, landlords were indemnified for their loss. That successful reform was carried out peacefully, unlike what happened in North Vietnam. After the communists extended their control in 1954, villagers were divided into “poor peasants” and “rich landlords.” Each village was fixed a quota of “rich landlords,” whether in fact they existed or not. A campaign of hate was launched against them. Then, they were brought before “people’s tribunals” to be tried for “crimes” that they had committed in the past. Villagers were forced to find or invent crimes with which to denounce their fellow villagers, their relatives, and, the cruelest of cruelties, their own parents. The 1956 campaign of so-called agrarian reform in North Vietnam accounted for the death of tens of thousands of innocent people, whose landholdings were confiscated by the state. Then, instead of giving land to the poor, communist policy forced them to give up what little land they had. Eventually, all peasants were dispossessed by the regime. All became proletarian workers in collective farms.

  1945 was the last year our family celebrated a traditional Tet. A few months after Tet, a chain of events was started which changed the course of our history. In March 1945, as defeat in the war was imminent, the Japanese finally decided to get rid of the French. On the evening of the eighth-I was then going to school in Ha Dong and staying with my grand-parents-we had just finished dinner when a heavy rumble was heard over the small town. There was no air raid alert, so it could not have been American planes. We went to the verandah, which looked on to the road linking Ha Dong to Hanoi, and saw Japanese army lorries rushing past. There were hundreds of them all packed with troops in full battle gear, some trailing artillery pieces. That day, I had homework to do for a coming test at school, but I knew that something far more important than a school test was going to happen. Leaving my books aside, I went up to the first floor balcony to watch the lorries passing by in the evening darkness with hardly any lights on. A few hours later, cannon fire rolled in the direction of the capital, signaling the end of the colonial regime. It took only one night of fighting to make Vietnam “independent.” A new government was installed by the Japanese, but it had not time to consolidate. Japan soon lost the war and, taking advantage of the power vacuum which ensued, the communists launched their revolution. Events happened in quick succession. French troops were sent to reoccupy Vietnam. The communists agreed to let them come into the country. A period of uneasy coexistence ensued. Then, war broke out in December 1946.

  My father, who at the time owned a small bakery in Hanoi, stayed there as long as possible to keep the business going. My elder brother and I kept him company while the rest of the family went back to the haven of Kim Bai. French troops were stationed in many sectors of the city and exchanges of gunfire between them and Vietnamese guerrillas occurred nearly every night. One morning, after having finished the night’s work of looking after the baking and delivery of bread, we were told to leave Hanoi immediately. Hostilities would start that very evening. Without any sleep, we packed our things on top of the rear wheel of our bicycles and set out in streets which were almost empty, most people in our area having fled already. We dared not go past the old citadel, now occupied by trigger-happy
French troops and avoided the main streets where one could run into French soldiers patrolling in their jeeps, their submachine guns at the ready. By a roundabout route, we got out of the city. The town of Ha Dong had also been evacuated, although there was no French presence there. My grandparents’ bungalow was deserted but for a servant who had remained behind to guard the property. In our ancestral home in Kim Bai, the whole family had congregated. All houses in the compound were occupied. Even the transversal house, which was opened on one side and was normally used as a working area, had been equipped with platforms for people to sleep. That night, we had just gone to bed when a muffled sound like that of distant thunder was heard. The thunder did not stop. It went on and on. War had begun.

  The haven of Kim Bai could not shelter us for long. Early in 1947, it became exposed to enemy attacks. On their first foray into our village, the French captured my father and elder brother and took them away as prisoners. The rest of the family fled to a small village in the Lichee Field. We stayed with acquaintances in that village, but many people from Kim Bai had to camp in the lichee groves. Each lichee tree served as a prop to a small tent and each grove became a little hamlet. During the day, people crowded there. At night, when French troops had returned to their camps in Ha Dong, everyone slipped back into Kim Bai, to leave again early the next morning. However, the Lichee Field was uncomfortably close to the dike, which was only a few hundred meters away. We could hear the noise of tanks and trucks passing on the dike, sometimes even the voices of French soldiers. The latter did not venture into the Field, but after a few weeks, our family thought it safer to have the Hat River between them and us. We crossed the river and sought refuge in the village of Sao, on the other bank. Many people from Sao had previously served in our household. My own wet nurse came from there. My family stayed with the Phat’s, whose head was a former corporal in my grandfather’s personal staff and whom I called Mr. Corporal. His wife was nurse to both my younger sister Giang and my younger brother Dong. Our group was composed of my great-grandmother, my mother with six of her children, and my youngest brother’s nurse. My grandfather stayed with the former mayor of Sao. My uncles and aunts moved to other places in Sao with their families. But my grandmother chose to remain in Kim Bai to look after our ancestral home. She fled to the Lichee Field whenever the French came, and returned home after they left. As she could not take care of great-grandmother, that responsibility fell to my mother, her eldest daughter-in-law, and therefore great-grandmother was staying with us.