A Vietnamese Family Chronicle

by Nguyen Trieu Dan

  A keeper was in charge of the Shrine. He organized worshipping services at seasonal festivals. “Once a year,” to quote our chronicle, “in the beginning of the second lunar month, all family members assembled at the Shrine to worship our common ancestors and to express attachment to our roots.” Proceedings on that occasion were rather similar to those at anniversaries celebrated within our home. Early in the morning, a pig was sacrificed. Food offerings were prepared as members from different branches started arriving, bringing with them incense, voting papers and flowers. The worshipping ceremony started with the keeper, who was the head of our eldest branch, first invoking in prayer the spirit of our original ancestor, then calling out the names and titles of all departed ancestors since the earliest generations. It was a long and arduous exercise because the old man was reading from a text written in scholarly script and many of our ancestors’ names, taken from ancient Confucian books, were extremely difficult to read. Moreover, their titles were long and many. I remember standing among family members, waiting for him to finish so that we could go in and perform the rite of kneeling and bowing in front of the altar. We did so by group of two or three people of the same rank. I came from the youngest generation of our branch, which was itself the youngest branch in the extended family, so my turn was very low down the line. Naturally, a meal followed the religious ceremony, and the atmosphere turned into one of fellowship and enjoyment. That annual function of the Nguyen of Kim Bai came after the Tet, which was celebrated within each family unit, and preceded the village Spring Festival. Only after these festivities over would our people finally set their minds back to work and another laborious year would begin.

  The Shrine was built in 1936, but the sacred tablet on the altar dated from almost two hundred years ago. It was made to specific requirements laid down by an age-old tradition for all ancestral shrine tablets. A flat and rectangular piece of wood, it was of a larger size than the tablets on the altar in our home. On each of these smaller tablets was written the name of an ancestor but, as has been noted, the large tablet in the Shrine had no individual name, only the family name. The small tablets were meant to last for four generations as within each branch, our ancestors’ cult was celebrated only up to the great-great-grandfather. When a man died and his son took over the cult from him, the tablets of ancestors of five generations before were taken off the altar and buried. From then on, these forebears would only be worshipped at the Ancestral Shrine, alongside those of other branches of the extended family. The sacred tablet in the Shrine, however, was meant to stay there forever. It was not to be replaced, or buried, at any time. It should for always stand there as the symbol of the permanence of the family. According to a popular belief, its wood was indestructible and “would not rot for one hundred generations,” because it was taken from a tree called tao which could live for one thousand years. Was that popular belief correct? No one could say, for the solidity of the tao wood had never been fully tested in our country. No sacred tablet had lasted for very long, not because rot had set in it, but because no ancestral shrine had been able to survive for very long. As a result of natural calamities, insecurity, war, political upheavals or the decline of families, most ancestral shrines disappeared after no longer than a century or two and when they did, the tablets they housed disappeared too.

  In the five hundred years of our family’s history, there had been three ancestral shrines. The first one probably dated from the early sixteenth century. At that time, our branch of the family had two brothers, both men of wealth and power. These two forefathers would, understandably, have wanted a fitting place for the cult of the Original Nguyen Ancestor and it was believed that the old Shrine was built by them. It was a spacious building, looking like a temple-as our family tradition recalled-and well-furnished with tables and platforms in precious wood, ornate commemorative boards and cult objects in brass. The heir to our eldest branch usually was named Keeper of the Shrine. Expenses related to the Shrine were met by donations and bequests from family members. Records showed that until the eighteenth century, our Shrine received from the various branches a great deal of land, called cult land, which was cultivated by its keeper. The Shrine also served as a repository for our family’s history. The Nguyen Register-our equivalent of the western family tree-was kept there, as were the chronicles of succeeding generations. The register was updated at regular intervals, while it was the duty of each generation to write a new chapter to the chronicles, not about itself, but about the generation that preceded it.

  At the end of the sixteenth century, our third ancestor found himself on the wrong side of a dynastic war. When the Mac were defeated by the Le, he and his family had to flee to escape persecution, leaving behind all properties in Kim Bai. What happened to the Ancestral Shrine during their absence, which lasted for over a decade, was not clear. It may have been looked after by other branches of the Nguyen, whose members were not high mandarins under the Mac and therefore did not have to flee their village. At any rate, the Shrine was neither destroyed by the new authorities, nor seized by other people, as would often happen to properties belonging to losers in a war. It survived. When our branch returned to Kim Bai, the Shrine again was the recipient of donations of land. The chronicle mentioned that successive generations continued to give land all through the seventeenth century.

  In the following century, all branches in our family suffered a decline in their fortunes and the Shrine became less well-endowed. However, it was still an imposing place, which explained why it was among the first places that bandits, who overran Kim Bai in the middle of the eighteenth century, directed their attention to. The Shrine was sacked. Cult objects, ceremonial swords and flags, gongs and drums, heavy platforms, tables and commemorative boards, all were taken away. Then, the bandits set fire to the building, which burned down completely. The family’s archives, kept in the Shrine, were destroyed.

  Security only returned to our region several decades later. Our extended family, by then impoverished, managed to build a second Ancestral Shrine on a very modest scale. It was just a small cottage with bamboo walls and a thatched roof. Most of the cult land had disappeared. The keeper continued to celebrate the cult at the Shrine, but with dwindling donations, ceremonies became fewer and fewer. Sometime after the turn of the nineteenth century, the annual function attended by all family members ceased to be held. A low point had been reached in the history of the Nguyen family, whose branches seemed to have lost touch with one another.

  Then, the pendulum swung again. The tenth ancestor of our branch, who lived in the first half of the nineteenth century, was a successful businessman. He took great interest in the family’s history. The Shrine which, after a few decades, was already in need of repair was a matter of concern for him. He never saw the first Shrine, but had heard it described by his grandmother, “looking like a temple” and rich in furniture and cult objects. “I want to build a fitting shrine,” he often said, “to those forefathers who had built such a grand memorial to our ancestry as the old Shrine.” His intention was to pull down the existing Shrine, build another place of worship and equip it with new furniture and decorations. Proceeding by stages-like the good businessman he was-he started by having commemorative boards made, which would decorate the future Shrine. These included a large horizontal board to be suspended above the Shrine entrance, bearing in Chinese characters the words “Ancestral Shrine of the Nguyen Family,” two other horizontal boards each bearing a poem and a pair of vertical boards bearing parallel sentences, to be hung inside the Shrine. Our ancestor was a scholar turned businessman. He himself wrote the poems and parallel sentences to honor the memory of his forebears. Well-known calligraphers were invited in to write the large characters on the boards; then, wood-carvers were hired to work on them and painters came to put on the gold leaves and red lacquer. The boards were installed in the existing Shrine, while waiting for the new place to be built. A few years later, our ancestor bought expensive timber from the northern high
lands and had it sent down the Hat River to Kim Bai. He planned to start work on a new shrine in 1836, after having completed a business trip to the south of the country. He died on that trip. With his death, our family found itself in difficult times again and there was no more question of building a shrine.

  The problem of the Shrine did not come up again until 1862, when a special meeting of the extended family took place there. The meeting was convened following the recovery of the Cu Hau’s papers, an event of special importance in our family’s history. Family members decided to restore the annual ceremony of worship, which had been abandoned for over fifty years. They discussed the Shrine and agreed on the need to have a new and larger place of worship. However, financial resources were not available and the assembly could only conclude that: “As for following on our forefather’s footsteps and extending the Ancestral Shrine, that will have to be left to the coming generations.”

  By the twentieth century, the Shrine had fallen into dilapidation. In 1936, my grandfather came into possession of a piece of land in the Middle Hamlet, just behind the Communal Hall. This well-situated rectangular plot measured 372 square meters. After consulting the heads of all branches, he built a third Shrine, then donated both land and building to the extended family. In the village’s Land Register, these were recorded as “the common property of the Nguyen family.”

  The new Shrine was a brick construction, the size of an average cottage. It had three “rooms” without any partition walls. The altar to our Original Ancestor stood in the middle. On both sides were wooden platforms, tables and chairs for use of family members during ceremonies, and cabinets to hold the family’s records. Around the block ran a perforated brick wall with decorations in plaster of flowers and of the Chinese character tho, meaning longevity. The building opened into an attractive garden planted with small trees and shrubs of the kinds usually seen near temples and pagodas. The shrubs were chosen for their big and variegated leaves of red, blue, green and yellow hues. The trees of different sizes from the taller orange trees to the shorter mandarin and cumquat trees exhibited their round and golden fruits. The jasmine and ngau blossomed in spring and their flowers added perfume to the tea served as an offering on the altar. There were dahlias and camelias. A narrow pebble path wound its way from the gate to the Shrine, bordered by a dark green grass with very fine and long leaves called toc tien, or fairy’s hair. On the front verandah, blue porcelain pots were lined, holding trees such as pine reduced in size-although not as small as the Japanese bonsai-and bent into shapes of dragon and phoenix. Right next to the gate stood a miniature bamboo grove no more than two meters tall. The black-stemmed bamboo with yellow stripes belonged to a rare species highly prized by our people. My grandfather especially wanted it to adorn the Shrine of his ancestors, for in our culture, bamboo was a symbol of the gentleman-scholar, whose “character was as straight as a bamboo stem” and for whom wealth and power meant little, for his heart, “hollow like the bamboo trunk,” was devoid of wordly ambitions. The garden retained a rich and dense vegetation all year round. The trees, shrubs and flowers of different shapes, sizes and colors made it look much larger than it was. During the summer holidays, I often went to the Shrine to enjoy its garden, for our ancestral home was all courtyard and apart from some big trees, had no garden. More particularly, I was looking for bird nests. Small black sparrows with a lively chirp liked to build their nests in orange trees and always a few nests could be found there, quite low and within easy reach.

  The seat of our cult was transferred to the new site. My grandfather bought new cult objects, but the altar came from the old Shrine and naturally, the sacred tablet installed in the latter part of the eighteenth century was preserved. Having pride of place in the new Shrine were the commemorative boards presented by our tenth ancestor in the 1830s. A century later, his wish of having a more fitting place of worship was finally fulfilled by his grandson. The boards were the oldest heirlooms kept by our family. They dated long before those which decorated our ancestral home. At the end of the 1940s when I last saw them, they were over a hundred years old, yet still retained their original colors and shining lacquer. Unfortunately, I do not remember the poems and parallel sentences that they carried. When war submerged our village, all furniture and decorations in the Shrine were lost. What use could these boards, sacred and treasured relics of ours, be to other people besides their weight in firewood, one must wonder. Thus, only a decade after it was built, our new Ancestral Shrine had ceased to exist. The shell of the building still stood, but the Shrine had gone. With our country subjected, since then, to more wars and to a communist regime whose aim has been to undermine family ties, who could say when the Nguyen of Kim Bai would be able to get together again and have another Ancestral Shrine.

  Of the documents kept at the Shrine, the oldest and most precious to our family were papers belonging to an ancestor known as Cu Hau. These were the only written evidence of our lineage to have escaped the destruction wrought by the bandits in the eighteenth century. For a very long time, they went missing. Our family regained possession of them in 1861.

  10. The Cu Hau’s Papers

  Searching for ancient documents to establish a family’s ancestry is an extremely difficult task in Vietnam, often an impossible one. Change has been the rule, stability an exception. Vietnamese families have moved up and down the social ladder in rapid succession. Wealth has never lasted for very long. It has always been dispersed. In all extended families, rich and poor branches could be found; within each branch, there have been rich and poor family units. A deeply-held belief of our people was expressed in this proverb:

  Who can be wealthy,

  In all three of his families?

  Who has to endure

  Poverty for three generations!

  The three families of a man are his own, his mother’s and his wife’s. Our traditional society had no rigid classes and nothing like the entrenched nobility in feudal Europe, India or Japan. Its distinctive character was a constant movement form one class to another. Everyone could aim for the top, through studies and by presenting himself to the civil service examinations. Change could occur after a span of no more than a few generations, as indicated in the above proverb, because things usually moved in a certain way in our society. Unsuccessful scholars or people belonging to lower social categories were strongly motivated to move up. They sent their children to school and made them spend much of their time with “their lamps and books.” Maybe success would not come in the first generation, or the next, but with perseverance, it would finally be attained. At the other end of the social scale, a mandarin brought wealth to his family, but his descendants may soon become spendthrift and lazy. They would neglect their studies and fail at the examinations. As a result, the family would go into decline. In prosperous times, a family would build an ancestral shrine in memory of its forebears, put land aside to provide for the cult, keep records for future generations. During periods of decline, however, cult land may have to be sold, the shrine may fall into disrepair, family members themselves may have to leave their village in search of a living; in such circumstances, chronicles would not be written and documents handed down by earlier generations might even be lost.

  Apart from these changes in family fortunes, there were also other factors. Many dynasties had followed one another on the throne of Vietnam. Each time a new ruling house came to power, it tried to eradicate all vestiges of its predecessor. Palaces were razed, records of the fallen regime destroyed. Not only the former dynasty, but also its mandarins would go down in defeat and have their possessions taken. Many family archives were lost in that way. War and insecurity also took their toll. Ever since the sixteenth century, our country has hardly known a prolonged period of peace. If it was not war against foreigners, it was war amongst contending Vietnamese dynasties. Insecurity often plagued the countryside, caused by rebel movements or simply bands of brigands. One of the worst periods in our history, in terms of loss of ancient
documents, was the Chinese domination in the fifteenth century (1414-1427). The Ming aimed to stamp out our literary heritage and make Vietnam a mere cultural appendage of China. All books they could lay their hands on, whether prose, poetry, history or law, were either burned or taken away to China. Of the many authors under the Ly (1010-1225) and the Tran (1225-1400) dynasties-that golden period of Vietnamese classical literature-we know only the titles of books they wrote and some extracts which have survived in anthologies. The bulk of their works was lost. From the forest of our ancient literature, only a few trees remained. Last but not least, another great destroyer of our historical records has been the tropical climate. Books and other paper documents are quickly damaged by dampness or eaten away by white ants. Inscriptions on wooden material cannot last longer than two centuries or so. Our people have never been good at the art of preserving ancient relics. For all the above reasons, there are not many Vietnamese families who can trace their roots back to more than ten generations.

  Our family has, since the sixteenth century, undergone several critical periods in which it was almost cut off from its roots. The first period came with the fall of the Mac dynasty, at the end of the sixteenth century. Our ancestors had to flee, abandoning home and village. Chronicles and records may have been lost in the upheaval. Families caught in such a situation, if they escaped with their lives, still faced a real danger of being dispersed. Hiding their real identity under assumed names, always apprehensive of being discovered by the new authorities, their members may soon lose touch with one another. After a number of years, links between branches may be severed. Thus, two branches of our family were believed to have fled Kim Bai to escape persecution. Our branch was able, eventually, to return to the village; but of the other branch, nothing more was known. Although our people were back in their haven of Kim Bai, the trauma they suffered was such that, of the three generations of ancestors who were mandarins under the Mac, two would soon disappear from our collective memory. Clearly, a persisting fear had inhibited the family from recalling the times and lives of those ancestors; consequently, younger generations quickly forgot about them. Only in this century could we find out again who they were. None of their graves had been preserved. Our first two ancestors died while the Mac were in power; being high mandarins, their burial places would have to be built into large tombs. Sitting amidst open and flat rice fields, such tombs used to be considered as landmarks by travellers and it would have been difficult to lose trace of them. That ours were lost suggested that they had been destroyed, either by the advancing Le army as it passed through our region on its way to the Mac capital, or by some zealous officials in the violent period immediately following the change over. Certainly the people of Kim Bai were not involved, for our Ancestral Shrine, located within the village bamboo enclosure, had been left untouched.