A Vietnamese Family Chronicle

by Nguyen Trieu Dan

  11. The Nguyen Brothers

  Two names belong to our village’s legend. An old saying about them runs like this:

  Nguyen Huyen, Nguyen Tue,

  The two brothers.

  At the same session,

  They won the golden board.

  In the high examinations of old, the names of successful candidates were written on a board painted gold which was displayed in front of the Palace of High Learning in the capital. To win the golden board became a more refined way of saying that someone had passed an examination. From a village of scholars which had produced a large number of graduates, what did the Nguyen brothers do to be remembered in such a way? When did they live? The saying had been transmitted by generations of villagers; every child knew it, yet until the 1910s, no one could say who the brothers were. Being Nguyen did not mean that they must necessarily be our direct ancestors. Nguyen is a surname quite common in Vietnam. In Kim Bai itself, there were several Nguyen families which I believe may have started as branches of the same extended family, but had become separate.

  When my grandfather grew up-he was born in 1879-our lineage was known only as far as Ancestor Nguyen Uyen, who lived in the sixteenth century. The brothers were figures of legend, but he could not help associating them with a belief in our family that we descended from a long line of scholars and several ancestors of ours had obtained high diplomas and mandarinal positions. That strongly held belief did not quite fit in with the family’s history as we knew it then. From Nguyen Uyen, who was made a doctor in 1535, until this century, a span of nearly four hundred years, we could count only one more graduate, a licentiate at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Such a record was hardly impressive. Many scholarly families had done much better than us. To take just one instance, my mother’s family, the Hoang of the village Dong Ngac, can boast of five doctors under the Restored Le dynasty alone (1592-1788). So, how could our family belief be explained? Moreover, why did the people of Kim Bai also share that belief and consider us as being the leading scholarly family in the village? There were obviously some missing links. Our tradition of scholarship had probably been built up since early times, but the men responsible for it had gone out of our collective memory. Could Nguyen Huyen and Nguyen Tue have been amongst them?

  Cu Hau’s papers were found to contain less than what our people expected. They were a disappointment. Yet, like seeds planted in the soil which took time to germinate, half a century after they were found the papers would trigger another search for that “source in the mountains,” where lay the origins of our family. A careful study of the papers revealed to my grandfather that the generations immediately preceding that of Ancestor Nguyen Uyen left a large amount of land to the Ancestral Shrine and appeared to enjoy great wealth. The Shrine itself was probably built by them. No names of earlier ancestors were given, but the way these were referred to in the papers suggested that they had had careers even more distinguished than Nguyen Uyen’s. More and more, my grandfather came to believe that the golden period remembered by our people was that of Nguyen Huyen and Nguyen Tue. I believe that he spent time searching for the brothers’ identities after his father died in 1909. In accordance with Confucian tradition, he took a year’s leave of absence to mourn his father’s death. In that time of mourning and contemplation, his mind naturally turned to the past and to family history. From indications given in the Cu Hau’s papers, he set out to find whether there was any relationship between the brothers and our family. He talked to family and village elders but found on their part a strange reluctance. They all tried to discourage him. Some said that the brothers were ancient figures of legend, about whom information had since long been lost; it would be futile to go after such information. Others were against the very idea of trying to know who Nguyen Huyen and Nguyen Tue were. “Let a legend stay as a legend,” they said. My grandfather was taken aback by their reaction. It was only later, when he succeeded in his quest, that he understood the reason.

  Reasoning that the two brothers must have been successful at the highest civil service examination, that is, the doctorate, my grandfather started his search at the Temple of Literature in Hanoi. There, the names of those who graduated as doctors since ancient times were kept. Dedicated to the cult of Confucius, the Temple was the sanctum of our traditional culture. The History of Dai Viet, written in the second half of the fifteenth century and the earliest one preserved in Vietnam recorded that King Ly Thanh Ton “had the Temple built in 1070. Statues of Confucious and of his closest disciples were installed there. Ceremonies of worship were held in all four seasons. The Crown Prince went there for his studies.” The first civil service examination in the history of the country took place five years later, in 1075. King Le Thanh Ton, the great king of the Le dynasty, ordered in 1484 that all graduates of the doctorate-the elite of the nation-have their names carved in stone to be preserved for posterity. The stelae bearing their names were erected in the grounds of the Temple and can still be seen today.

  I have never been to the Temple of Literature. It was located just outside the city of Hanoi, to the south of the ancient citadel. On the way to Ha Dong and our village, I always passed by it. From the road, it appeared distant, almost untouchable to the common man. Tall trees with wide branches, which had been there for centuries, hid most of the Temple from sight. The place looked like a dark and deep wood. Nowadays, countries open their temples to the public and even use them to attract tourists. In my youth, our Temple of Literature stood in isolation, an object for reverence from afar. The thought never occurred to me to enter its grounds and look at the stelae, although I knew that my ancestors’ names were on them.

  My grandfather found on the stelae that the two brothers became doctors at the 1511 session, twenty-four years before Nguyen Uyen graduated. The gap was that of a generation. Several pieces of the puzzle had now fallen into place. The brothers were from our village, they bore the same surname as us, they belonged to the generation of Nguyen Uyen’s parents. There remained, however, the need to establish the links of ancestry. The search for historical documents was long and difficult. Grandfather did not have access to government archives or to public libraries. He had to rely on books kept by other scholars in their private collections. Old editions published in a limited number of copies were rarely reprinted and scholars used to copy by hand the books they wanted to keep. It was several years before he could lay his hands on the right document, which was a register compiled by Nguyen Hoan and other authors, and published at the end of the eighteenth century. Entitled Register of High Graduates in the Dynasties of Dai Viet-Dai Viet or The Great Viet was then our country’s name-it listed the names of all people who passed the doctorate examinations from the beginning until the last session under the Le which was held in 1787. Each name was accompanied by a few biographical notes and these provided grandfather with the information he was looking for. He noted in the chronicle:

  The Register set down that in 1511, Nguyen Huyen and Nguyen Tue were both successful at the doctoral examinations. It added that Nguyen Tue was Nguyen Huyen’s elder brother and that his son Nguyen Uyen was made a doctor at the 1535 session.

  The relationship was thus established. An earlier ancestor had been found. That result vindicated grandfather’s belief and was a source of great pride to him. Triumphantly, he wrote: “This matter has been proved right! No further doubt can be entertained! I now put on record that Nguyen Tue was the ancestor of our first generation.”

  The Temple of Literature in Hanoi built in 1070. Stelae bearing the names of those who graduated as doctors are erected on the grounds.

  The two brothers became mandarins under the Le dynasty. They stayed on to serve the Mac who overthrew the Le in 1527. The Register mentioned that Nguyen Tue was a minister of the Mac Court and received the title of count. Nguyen Huyen rose to the position of governor of a region. After sixty-five years of Mac rule, the Le were restored to the throne. High mandarins who worked for the Mac and their families
were persecuted. Their villages also suffered. The victorious Le never forgave the Mac for having taken the throne from them and considered them not as defeated enemies but as traitors. Historians of the Restored Le, whenever they used the word Mac, always preceded it with the word nguy, which means usurper. That label stuck to the Mac.

  The reason for the negative attitude adopted by elders, on hearing that he sought to establish a link between the brothers and our family, was now clear to grandfather. Our family and village went through a traumatic period after the collapse of the Mac regime. Those who tried to dissuade him from launching into his search did not themselves remember who the two Nguyen of Kim Bai were. But they still had in memory the warning of danger, even after so many generations had passed.

  Doctors’ stelae sit on tortoise backs and are supposed to last for a thousand years or more-the life of a tortoise.

  Nguyen Tue’s son, Nguyen Uyen, was himself a high mandarin of the Mac; yet, later generations felt no apprehension in recalling him. The links with him were always maintained. Many aspects of his remarkable career were lost for a time, then rediscovered, but his name did not suffer from the same official ostracism as those of his father and uncle. I believe that was because Nguyen Uyen graduated, started his career, retired and died, all under the Mac. For him, there was no switch of allegiance. Nguyen Tue and Nguyen Huyen however, were mandarins of the Le who opted for the Mac at the change of dynasty. This counted against them, although they had died half a century before the Le came back. In those times, death did not put matters to rest. Their descendants and the villagers of Kim Bai sought to avoid the wrath of the Restored Le by hiding their ties with the two brothers. Soon, they themselves forgot and were it not for the popular saying, the identities of Nguyen Huyen and Nguyen Tue would have stayed forever in oblivion.

  Grandfather never seemed to be bothered by the fact that our ancestors made their names under a dynasty much stigmatized by later historians. He did not talk much about them, but whenever he did, it was with admiration and pride. “To shoulder the burden of office in that tumultuous period,” he said, “was a real test for a scholar-mandarin. Our ancestors did achieve much, for the first part of the Mac reign had been marked by unprecedented order and prosperity.” After a pause, he added: “It is not easy to do right for your country, your family and yourself, all at the same time.” In saying this, perhaps grandfather was also thinking of his own time and the difficult choices that he himself had had to make.

  12. Family Traits

  The chronicle left by my grandfather is a short document of ten pages or so. Written in the concise and condensed manner of a Confucian classical text, in which each Chinese character is carefully chosen and everything unnecessary has been cut out, it provides just the basic information on our family’s history. Each generation was outlined in a few sentences, most of which were taken up by the names of ancestors, anniversaries of their death and places where they were buried. Our second ancestor who lived to be over seventy and whose career was particularly long and varied, was given less than ten lines. Fortunately, many stories about past generations have been transmitted orally down to our times. Some of them I have learned from my grandmother and other family elders. Most were told to me by my parents, who also gave me eyewitness accounts of more recent events. My mother, in particular, is a treasure trove of family stories. Thanks to her excellent memory she is able to remember exact quotations of what was said some sixty years ago, from the time when she came into the Nguyen family as a young bride. “Being the wife of an eldest son, I expected plenty of responsibilities and a difficult period of adaptation,” she told us, “but it turned out differently.” Her in-laws let her have all the time she needed to settle in. Then, just a year after her marriage, she gave birth to a healthy boy. “My position in the family was firmly established,” she said with a smile. “My mother-in-law did not let me do anything else but take care of the baby.” She spent much time in the company of my father’s grandmother, who told her about family customs and traditions. Mostly, the old lady liked to tell stories of olden times and in that way, my mother said, she learned more about the family history than by reading the chronicle or other documents on our ancestry.

  Our chronicle shows a rigid adherence to the patriarchal system and to Confucian ethics. There is nothing about the maternal side of all our generations, besides the names of our foremothers. Essential information such as their social and family backgrounds, the villages where they came from, are absent. It is as if, once married into the Nguyen family, they were absorbed by it and their origins and distinctive characters ceased to matter. In the Vietnamese language, the word for maternal side is ngoai, meaning outside, while paternal side is noi, or inside. Our chronicle deals only with the latter, the side which is “in.” As mentioned earlier, two generations of our family were responsible for the cult of maternal ancestors, but even in such instances, the only indications given by the chronicle are the names of those ancestors and the anniversaries of their death.

  Daughters of our family also received scant attention. They only appeared in the chronicle from the eighth generation, in the eighteenth century. Of earlier generations, only sons were mentioned. “A daughter is born to you,” so goes a popular saying, “to another family, she will belong.” In our traditional society, marriage meant a radical break, almost a severance of ties between the bride and her family. She would only return to her parents’ home on rare occasions, once or twice a year perhaps. That explained why our old custom was for the bride to cry at her wedding and refuse to leave home. Relatives had to convince her to obey the wishes of her parents and it would be some moments before she would finally agree to go, still crying profusely. In many instances, this was not just an attitude dictated by social custom. The bride must have felt a genuine sadness and apprehension at parting with her own family and heading for a new life in an unknown family environment. While a son’s wedding meant an addition to the family, a daughter’s was a loss. In my grandparents’ time, the marriage of a daughter was an event both joyous and melancholic. I remember well my aunts’ weddings. The bridgegroom and his party came to ask for the bride; both families happily enjoyed the occasion until the moment the bride came out of her room crying. The assembly fell silent and I could see that my grandmother was crying too. Everyone left for the main ceremony at the bridegroom’s place, everyone except my grandparents. By tradition, they stayed back because their daughter now belonged to another family and they must not appear to be interfering. Some of us children, being too young, were also left behind. The house suddenly looked empty and sadness showed on my grandparents’ faces. Grandfather, normally so composed, now walked aimlessly in the courtyard, in and out of the altar house. The daughter he had raised and who had been at his side all those years was now gone. He would see her only from time to time, on brief visits. She had become a member of another family and had acquired a new loyalty. Times, of course, have changed. When the turn of my own generation came, marriage no longer meant such a radical separation. The bride was not required to cry and her parents were welcome to join in the celebrations at the bridegroom’s.

  Confucian ethics placed a woman, at all stages of her life, in a position of dependence. She must “defer to” her father when still unmarried, her husband after marriage and her son when in widowhood. This was reflected in the chronicle, which recognized to our foremothers a role secondary to that of their husbands and sons. Vietnamese women, however, have never quite fit the Confucian mold. As a matter of fact, relationship between the sexes in the early period of our history was on a remarkably equal footing. Men and women freely chose their partners in marriage. Warriors who fought under the Trung Sisters against the Chinese occupants in the beginning of the first century came from both sexes. After that period, Confucian influence spread from China and social norms became more and more male-dominated, although until the fifteenth century, our laws still recognized to women equal rights in such matters as inheritance and
marriage. To some degree, the ancient tradition of equality has continued to survive and reality has never totally reflected Confucian teachings. Vietnamese women have, hidden under their gentle demeanor, a strong personality. Their role as wife and mother and their contribution to the family have been far more important than envisaged in the Confucian model. While deferring to their husband’s position as family head, they have remained in charge of most of the day-to-day running of the family, administering its budget, looking after the children’s education, and so on. It is not for nothing that they have been called “generals of the interior.”

  Several women played vital roles at critical junctures of our family’s history. They were mentioned, albeit briefly, in the chronicle but remembered more fully through oral tradition. Our family survived the upheaval caused by the defeat of the Mac dynasty in the sixteenth century, thanks to Trinh Khiet, the wife of our third ancestor. The respect and gratitude that she commanded were only second to those that later generations showed towards Nguyen Uyen, long thought to be our first ancestor. As recently as the second half of last century, our family was still trying to find Trinh Khiet’s tomb, the location of which had been forgotten. Nearer to us, my great-great-grandmother was credited with saving the family from dropping out of the scholars’ class. She took over the helm after her husband died on a business expedition. All his money was lost, but she managed to raise three young children and, in particular, give to her son a proper scholar’s education.