A Vietnamese Family Chronicle

by Nguyen Trieu Dan

  As we know so little about their background, it is difficult to assess the contribution made by our foremothers in terms of attitude, outlook, religious belief, or even money and property. It is believed that their influence had tended, over the generations, to temper our rather rigid adherence to Confucian norms. In some periods, it had helped bring out a development of the Buddhist faith. Wealthy families often gave their daughters to poor but promising scholars and in such marriages, the wife would bring to her husband a dowry to help meet the family’s expenses. That may have happened in some generations of our family. The chronicle mentioned that our ninth ancestor inherited all the land and property left by his in-laws. Part of the capital with which our tenth ancestor started his business was believed to have come from his wife. During the impoverished generations, women worked to provide a living so that the men could devote themselves to their studies. Their supportive role was acknowledged in the chronicle. They raised silkworms, wove cloth, made paddy into rice, sold textiles, rice and other products at markets. Like other women in Kim Bai, they worked hard and did well in their market activities. Often, they provided the main source of family income. Scholar-husbands, while they may enjoy a high status in the village, usually earned very little money. The women, true to the Vietnamese tradition, made sacrifices and endured hardship to give the men the opportunity to study and gain honors. As in the words of the young wife, in this popular ballad:

  Please, dear husband,

  Stay with your books and your studies,

  Let me do the tilling of the fields,

  And the transplanting of the rice seedlings.

  Let me work on the weaving loom....

  The main keepers of customs, traditions and oral history have been women. Most of the old stories I know have been told by my mother and my grandmother. As they were housewives, they had more time to spend with the children than the men who went out to work. My mother knows the members of the extended Nguyen family, their ranks, the branches to which they belong, better than does my father. Often she told stories about our ancestors to my wife instead of me; just as it was she, and not my father, who learned of them from my grandmother. The line of transmission has been mainly from mother-in-law to daughter-in-law. Often, if not always, our foremothers survived their husbands, some by a very long stretch. In my great-grandmother’s case, it was forty years; in my grandmother’s, eighteen years. They were the living bridges between the generations.

  From the first ancestor to my grandfather, in a space of some four hundred years, there had been eleven generations of our family, a rather small number compared to other families which may have counted up to fifteen or sixteen generations in the same period. In our case, a generation took up, on average, as many as thirty-six years. Sons generally came late to our ancestors. Several of them were over forty before they had a male descendant. Moreover, sons were very few. All through the first five generations, our lineage was maintained by a single male branch. The situation improved afterwards and several branches appeared, but while the others developed, the one son pattern frequently came back to our branch. Only in my grandparents’ time, did ours finally reach the traditional goal of familial happiness which was “an abundant flock of children and grandchildren.” But for a long period, the survival of our line had remained uncertain as it depended on an only son. This sole thread was a source of great anxiety and many generations were obsessed by the fear that the lineage might be lost. Down to my grandparents’ time, the fear had persisted. Grandmother kept reminding us that what our family needed and valued most was “children, more children.” She herself gave birth to twelve children, eight of whom survived. “From such insecure periods,” she told us, “we must feel particularly grateful that our family has finally been able to grow and prosper.”

  In the society of old, scarcity of male children was looked upon with great apprehension. People saw in it a warning by Fate that the worst possible eventuality-the end of the lineage-might befall the family. In the hopes of having more sons, our ancestors did what customs and superstition in those times prescribed them to do. They gave alms, offered prayers at temples, called in geomancers to modify the orientation of our altar house. Other people in their situation would also move family graves, but this our ancestors never did.

  The custom of moving graves was quite common in our region. A grave could be moved after three years had passed since the burial. The ceremony usually took place at night as the realm of the dead was associated with darkness; if it had to be done during the day great care was taken to shield the grave from the source of life, the sun. Its rays should not be allowed to reach the remains. The procedure consisted of digging up the grave and taking the bones out of the coffin, cleaning them with scented water and transferring them to a smaller coffin, then reinterring the remains at another location. Some families followed that custom as a matter of course. But in most cases, graves were moved only in the event of unfortunate occurences, such as a serious illness or disability in the family, the lack of an heir or persistent business losses. People believed that such bad fortune could be remedied by having ancestors’ graves relocated in a more auspicious geomantic position. It was recalled that at a difficult juncture of our family’s history, consideration was given to moving some of our ancestors’ graves. That happened in one of our first six generations, for the story indicates that our family was still wealthy enough to afford the services of a master geomancer. The man had arrived recently from China with a high repute. He was invited to our ancestral home and treated like an honored guest. While waiting for “the right time” to go and find auspicious geomantic locations, the guest toured the countryside, consulted our family chronicle and studied his books. Ten days soon went by. Our people asked no questions and continued to provide the geomancer with whatever he needed. Another ten days passed and our ancestor tactfully enquired whether the geomancer would want to see the family graves. “You may then tell me which ones need to be moved,” he added. “I am afraid the right time to act has not come yet, please bear with me a little bit longer,” the geomancer replied.

  He did not speak Vietnamese. Our ancestor communicated with him by writing, using classical Chinese. Early one morning, he awoke our ancestor to let him know that “the right time” had come. T1- two set out for the fields around our village. The geomancer visited all our family graves and spent a great deal of time examining their positions. When he had finished, our ancestor thought that he would next choose the new locations, but the geomancer headed straight back to our house. There, he sat down to engage in a long communication, by writing, with our ancestor. According to him, those geomancers who had placed our graves where they were had done a very good job. The location of each grave was well-chosen; moreover, all graves were linked together in an auspicious pattern. “If you move one grave away, the whole pattern will suffer irreparable damage. Your family would gain if, for now and for the future, all graves were left in their places,” he wrote, adding “Only in unavoidable circumstances, such as when ordered to do so by the authorities or when a road is built running over them, must you move the graves.”

  At the end of the exchange, the geomancer offered this reflection: “Families who are given talent and a capacity to reach the heights have to contend with difficult problems. That is the way of Fate. The way to the top of the mountains is never easy.”

  The next morning he left, refusing to take any fees. He said that he did not have to choose any new locations and, in any case, had taken advantage of our hospitality far too long. Since then, it had become a tradition in our family not to move any graves. In our region, original graves were usually built in rectangular tumuli. When newly established, they were about two meters long and one meter wide. Over the years they would get smaller and smaller but would keep their rectangular shape. The smaller graves of a round shape which looked like small drums in the fields were those that had been moved. On the day of sweeping the tombs, our party would sometimes find three o
r four graves close to one another in a plot of rice field, and it was by their shape that we could recognize which ones were ours.

  Our ancestors were scholars of the conservative school who kept rigidly to the path of examinations and public service, or failing that, teaching. They would not try other fields of activity, except for one brief interval in the tenth generation. They even shunned occupations such as medicine, astrology or geomancy, which were often taken up by untitled scholars, but regarded by the traditional school as less orthodox. In addition to the conservative streak, several of our ancestors seemed to share the trait of being late bloomers. Success did not come to us either early or easily. Our second ancestor reached the high mark of his career-a diplomatic mission to China-at the age of seventy. My great-grandfather gained the reputation of being a fine scholar, but he never won “the golden board.” He turned to teaching his sons and the success which eluded him only came to the next generation. His eldest son, my grandfather, started slowly by first obtaining the bachelor degree, then at the next session, which was three years later, the licentiate degree. Bright students-and he was one-could have jumped the grades and become licentiates at their first try. Once in the mandarinate he was bogged down and stayed in the same starting position for years before receiving any promotion. His career ultimately brought him to the top of the mandarinate, but not without other stagnant periods and with him having to go through each and every rung of the administrative ladder. Results achieved by our family had been through persistent efforts and step by step progress. As with climbing to the peaks of the Mountains of the Twins, we learned that in life there were no easy shortcuts, but one had to patiently follow a winding path.

  “Who has to endure poverty for three generations?” asked the proverb. Our family had, and it had also enjoyed wealth for more than three generations. Perhaps as a consequence of our character, the cycle of rise and decline in our case had stretched over a much longer period than that indicated in the proverb. We managed to remain wealthy in the first six generations. In the next two centuries, except for a brief interval, poverty became our lot. More seriously for a family of scholars, eight generations of ours could claim just one academic diploma. By failing to make it through the competitive civil service examinations, our people were kept in the lower social class of “untitled scholars.”

  The recovery had started in my grandparents’ time. When I grew up, we enjoyed a comfortable life, but many of the stories told by elders were still about hardships suffered by ancestors of not so long ago. When we sat down to a good meal, one with a dish of meat or two, my grandfather often reminded us that our ancestors were poor and would seldom have had such a meal. The nadir, he told us, was reached in the eighteenth century with our eighth and ninth generations. The family could afford to buy meat only on special occasions such as Tet. For the rest of the year, meat was served only when our ancestor received his portion at village festivals. That portion would be shared among the whole family. Grandfather told us how our ancestor would save his small share until the end of the meal so that he would get the impression that the whole meal had been eaten with meat. There were also times when our family did not have enough rice and had to cook it mixed with sweet potato and manioc. Care was taken not to let other people know of our plight, for as teachers, our ancestors held a high position in the village community. The rice pot would be quickly hidden away if a visitor should appear at mealtime. Here, my grandfather would pause to smile before adding: “But all the neighbours knew because they could smell potato and manioc being cooked.” Grandfather himself, as a student, often had just boiled vegetable to eat with rice, and salt to dip the vegetable in, instead of the more expensive fish sauce.

  When spending our school holidays in Kim Bai, we often had boiled sweet potato or manioc as a midday snack and were quite fond of it. We could not understand the stories of poor people having to mix it with their rice. Why! Potato and manioc would make the rice taste better, we thought. We talked about it so much that grandmother agreed to cook for us the rough red rice that country people used to have, mixed with slices of potato and manioc. “You will have it for a week,” she told us. “Let us see how long you will like it. Do not forget that poor people have to have it the whole year.” The first meal went wonderfully well. The sweet potato and manioc gave sweetness and flavor to the rice. It was like some kind of cake. I found it so good that I ate it just by itself and hardly touched any vegetable or meat. At the next meal, it became less appetizing and, after a few days, that very sweetness and flavor put off my appetite. I missed rice, the unmixed rice thought to be tasteless but which, I now realized, had a taste so delicate that one never grew tired of it. In a popular saying, rice was likened to “gold” and the water which helped it grow, to “silver.” The meaning of that saying was brought home to me, as well as that of grandmother’s oft repeated admonition: “To waste a single grain of rice is to commit a sin.”

  In North Vietnam, winter temperature could drop to ten degrees Celsius but the cold was made worse by humidity and a biting wind coming from the landmass of China. However, “impoverished scholars,” in our language han nho, a term which can be translated literally as “scholars suffering from the cold,” continued to wear clothes made of thin material more appropriate to the heat of summer. As teachers, our ancestors earned little. In the old Confucian tradition, teaching was a vocation and a duty more than a career. An unwritten rule laid down that students from poor families should receive their tuition free. Teachers were presented with gifts in kind such as fruit, chicken or a plate of glutinous rice on occasion of season festivals; rarely were they paid their fees in money. To make ends meet, they might have offered their services as calligraphers, while their wives engaged in petty trade. I remember the spectacle of impoverished scholars who had set up calligraphers’ stalls at the local market as the year drew to a close. Using big fat brushes, they wrote large Chinese characters on red paper for people to stick on the doors and walls of their homes; the characters were expressions of good luck and good wishes to greet the coming of Tet. Most were old men, their grey hair hidden under black turbans, some with long beards of silvery whiteness. Dressed in a double tunic of white cloth on the inside and thin black gauze on the outside, they all looked thin and frail. “My ancestors must have been like them,” I told myself. The wrists and hands which came out of the black sleeves of their tunics were all skin, bone and sinew. A group of deferential customers and onlookers formed around them; we were all shivering in the cold and I imagined that I could never write good calligraphy in such conditions, for my hands would shake terribly. Yet, when those old and wrinkled hands held a brush and dipped it in the black ink in preparation for writing, they gave out a surprising impression of strength and suppleness. I can still see them moving the brush in firm and purposeful strokes and making elegant characters appear on the red paper, shining in their wet black ink.

  At the best of times, village teachers did not have a prosperous life. Our impoverished ancestors in the eighteenth century were much worse off. At that time, the country was racked by civil wars. Our own region suffered from wave after wave of rebellion and banditry. Villages were pillaged, people ruined. Few families were left which could afford to send their children to school. Scholarship itself became devalued. Our ancestors, however, continued with their teaching. True to the Confucian tradition, they “accepted their poverty and sought to find joy by following the ways of Saints and Sages,” said my grandfather quoting an ancient precept. At that point of the story, my grandmother usually intervened to tell us another of her favorite tales, this time about the king of Ngo, a country in ancient China. The king owned fabulous treasures, never in history had there been a man as rich as he. Whenever he came out of his palace, thirty-six parasols made of gold shaded him. Following his death, he found himself walking alone on his last journey. No mandarins or servants waited upon him and he was not able to take any of his treasures with him. He met another man.

 
; “Who are you?” the king asked.

  “I was a fisherman in the kingdom of Ngo,” the man replied.

  “Do you know who I am?” said the king.

  “No, who are you?”

  “I am the king of Ngo,” said the king who was rather annoyed by the question. “He should have recognized me by the robe I wear,” he thought.

  But then, he looked at himself and did not see his golden brocade robe. He was dressed in simple cloth like the fisherman.

  The two got on talking. The king was mostly interested in whether the man was rich or poor in his life and what he left to his children on his death. The man replied that he was poor; the only material thing he could give his children was a small boat. He said:

  “With a boat, they can fish and spread their nets in rivers and out in the sea, they will not have to depend on anyone else for a living.” After a pause he continued: “With a boat, they can go anywhere they want, from the River Ngo to the Sea of So, any port can be their haven. With a boat, they are free men.”

  The king listened to the man, but still found it hard to understand that a man could be happy to leave his children just a small boat.