A Vietnamese Family Chronicle

by Nguyen Trieu Dan

  “You left only a boat!” he commented.

  “By doing good things and avoiding harming others,” said the fisherman in a whispering voice, as if to himself, “I strove to earn some virtue and merit.

  I do not know how well I have succeeded, but that was the real heritage I wanted to leave to my children.”

  Thus on his final journey, the king of Ngo learned that he was no more than any other man in his kingdom. “My companion the fisherman,” the king mused, “may be even richer than me, in the virtue and merit that he had acquired for the benefit of his descendants.”

  My grandmother ended her tale by repeating, in a singing voice, some of her favorite verses:

  The king of Ngo,

  Shaded by thirty-six gold parasols....

  On his last journey,

  He was on a par

  With the poorest fisherman in his kingdom.

  Family records show that the Nguyen have been blessed with longevity. An ancient proverb says that “from antiquity to our time, few people have reached seventy.” In our part of the world as in the West, three score and ten have been taken as a crowning landmark in a person’s life. Many of our ancestors lived to be over it. The head of our second generation was still actively involved in public service, even in his seventies. His son, who died a violent death away from his ancestral village, came close to seventy. The same trend had continued through the ages. In particular, our foremothers usually survived their husbands to live well past that proverbial age. Of the generations closer to us, my great-great-grandmother reached the age of seventy-eight. My great-grandfather died at seventy-four, his wife several decades later at ninety-six. My grandfather lived until sixty-eight, my grandmother until eighty.

  More than a sign of good heredity, longevity was in our beliefs a favor bestowed by Heaven. To generations of ours anxious for the arrival of a son, that belief had brought comfort and hope. A family deserving of such favor, they thought, must surely be able to overcome its problems and survive.

  I remember, since a child, having heard about another trait in our family. Elders never sat down to tell the children about it the way they did with other stories of the past. They only touched upon it in their conversations, with an air of mystery in which one could detect apprehension, but also pride. In almost every generation, it was said, “We have had people going to far away lands, wherefrom many failed to return.” The “going away” could be traced, like many of our family’s traits and traditions, back to the sixteenth century and to Ancestor Nguyen Uyen. A mandarin, Nguyen Uyen was sent to Thai Nguyen and Cao Bang in the mountainous region of the north. That remote region was looked upon with fear by Delta people, for few who went up there could escape from either the attentions of rebels and bandits or the effects of an unhealthy climate. However, Nguyen Uyen survived his stay in the mountains. Later in his life, our people recalled that he was called upon to undertake “a hazardous journey to a place far away,” but no details about the place or the journey were remembered. I found in ancient history books that Nguyen Uyen went in a tribute mission to China in 1580, when he must have been close to seventy. Not only was this an arduous journey for a man of his age, but also in the diplomatic circumstances of the time, our envoys did not know when, or even whether, the Chinese Court would let them go home. Nguyen Uyen came back. Calamity fell on the next two generations. With the change of dynasty, our family had to flee and stay away from Kim Bai. Of the head of the third generation, very little was known except that he had, at one point, been forced to live the life of a fugitive, “moving from place to place.” Even his name was forgotten. And yet, as I was to discover, he was a titled mandarin holding a high position at the Mac court. But, like his grandfather, he became the victim of political changes and such was the traumatic effect on our family that later generations forgot completely about him. His son also appeared to have been kept away for a very long time from his native place. However, he came back and died there. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, adverse economic conditions forced many of our kinsmen to leave their village and find means of subsistence elsewhere. The chronicle simply noted that “they went away and their trace was lost.”

  The tradition of “going away” has continued with the present generations. In the late 1920s, my father went to France to further his studies. On the same trip was a student friend, the son of a colleague of grandfather, from our own province of Ha Dong. After two years, the friend contracted tuberculosis and died in Paris. This unfortunate accident should have had nothing to do with my father’s stay abroad. But the news came as a profound shock to our family. It revived the centuries-old apprehension about people going away and failing to return, especially with my father being the eldest son. Grandfather, who had visited France, tried to make the family take an objective view of the matter, but great-grandmother would not listen. She refused to take any food until orders were given for my father to immediately stop his studies and take the next ship home. Those of our people who went away did so for a variety of reasons. But whatever the apparent reasons, I believe there must have been a strong desire to venture beyond the familiar setting of their lives. The call of distant lands seemed to have cast its spell on them. I myself came under it. Although attached to my ancestral land, I felt the intense need to move out of it and widen my horizons. After finishing high school in 1950, I asked my parents to send me to Paris for university studies. They wanted me to go, but finance was a problem. They had lost nearly everything in the war and were trying to rebuild the family’s assets. Already with seven children to provide for, it would not be easy for them to carry the additional expenses of supporting my stay abroad. Furthermore, as my father was the head of his branch, his duty was to help other family members. Just at that moment, my grandmother escaped from the communist zone and joined us in Hanoi. Without any hesitation, she said firmly that I should go. “Every generation of ours had people going afar,” she invoked family tradition. “Since he shows good promise of succeeding in his studies, it is right that we should send him to France.” As for the financial commitment, she expressed her confidence that everything would turn out right, but quoting this commonly used proverb:

  The Lord in Heaven created elephants,

  He also created enough grass to feed them.

  The tradition of going afar revealed an adventurous and daring side of our character, which was perhaps the counterpart to our cautiousness and conservatism. Time and again in recent generations, our family has shown a willingness to pioneer new ways and take up formidable challenges. Early in the nineteenth century, my great-great-grandfather Nguyen Quang So was the first Nguyen of Kim Bai to engage in wholesale trade and he chose to break new grounds by cooperating with Chinese merchants and by pursuing his activities abroad as well as in the south of the country. Vietnamese had traded with Chinese for a long time, although rarely as partners. Our ancestor joined hands with them in what would now be called joint ventures. The south was a comparatively new field for trade, but he saw the vast opportunities it offered. On both grounds, he achieved considerable success. As we know, he lost his life in the south. In 1904, my great-uncle Nguyen Tam Tiep left home and country as a young man of sixteen to fight against French domination. France was then a great world power. He certainly knew that the fight against colonial rule was an uphill battle and that what lay ahead for him were long years of hardship in exile. He left, not to return. Thirty-one years ago in 1960, my eldest brother Nguyen Trieu Hong led a military coup against the Ngo Dinh Diem regime. South Vietnam was fighting against communist aggression from the north, the threat to its survival was becoming more and more acute; yet the regime could not command popular support. My brother, a colonel in the army, tried to bring about a change. But Fate took a hand. He was killed in the first hour of the uprising while inspecting his troops on the battle-field.

  "Men scheme their endeavours, Heaven decides of their success,” says a traditional precept. These elders of ours did what they thought
they must, however difficult the challenge and even at the risk of their lives.

  13. The Continuing Search

  To praise the efforts made by his father and grandfather to delve further into our ancestry, my grandfather used the term quang tien, which means throwing light on the past. According to Confucian ethics, a pious son should uphold the virtues and merits of his ancestors; to do so he must strive to learn about them. The philosopher Tsang, an eminent disciple of Confucius, called that duty truy vien, a term which can be translated as both to remember one’s distant ancestry and also to search into it. My grandfather had left us the chronicle. My father, after he returned to Hanoi in 1947 during the war, searched patiently through the largely destroyed government archives to piece together his father’s career. Their examples were before my eyes; yet, it would be a long time before the “source in the far mountains” which my grandfather alluded to in the chronicle, would beckon to me.

  At first, the chronicle was a precious book given me for safekeeping. After my grandfather died, it became a treasured relic. Each time I looked at it, the image of him sitting in his study in the ancestral home teaching me how to write Chinese characters came back to mind. I knew the content of the chronicle; more correctly, I had read it a few times. Then, I went abroad for my studies and stayed there to pursue my career, coming back to the country only for short stays. For years, I did not see the chronicle. When once again it was given to me for safekeeping, this time by my father, I was already in my late thirties. I took it with me abroad. Reading it again after a gap of some twenty years, I was surprised to find it so concise and brief. I told myself that I should put down in writing all that I knew about our history. I should get in touch with elders to learn more from them and to transmit their knowledge to younger generations. The presence of the chronicle seemed to urge me on. Our family had lost its ancient documents, but I could search in history books for information about those of our forefathers who had achieved high positions and honors. Grandfather’s chronicle started with two particularly successful generations. In the old days, a graduate of the doctorate brought fame to his family and to his entire village. Two brothers graduating at the same time was the material of which legends were made. But that was not all. In the next generation, another doctor followed in the footsteps of Nguyen Huyen and Nguyen Tue. Could such results have come to our family, all of a sudden? Just as a tree needed time to take roots and come to fruition, I believed that our tradition of scholarship must have been cultivated long before. Earlier ancestors of ours, now forgotten, must have been scholars with academic titles.

  If the cycle of rise and decline held true, our family should have known an earlier period of prosperity, some two or three centuries before the brothers. I would place that period either under the Ly (1010-1225) or the Tran (1225-1400), two of Vietnam’s most powerful and glorious dynasties. The Ly were strong enough to even attack China, their troops going into Guangdong and Guangxi provinces in 1075. Under the Tran, our people became the only ones in mainland Asia to defeat the Mongol invaders. In a space of four years (1284-1288), Kublai Khan’s army was decisively beaten by the Vietnamese, not once but twice. During the Ly and Tran dynasties, our national territory extended to the south at the expense of the Kingdom of Champa. Several military expeditions were sent there and against Laos in the west. That period was also one of the most creative in the arts. Classical prose and poetry blossomed in what could be considered a Vietnamese equivalent of the great Tang era in China. Learning and scholarship prospered. The first literary works written in the everyday language of the people appeared. Those were times of great opportunity for men of talent and ambition. Perhaps my own forefathers were among the many who had distinguished themselves and gained a mention in the nation’s history books. Perhaps, their names were there, in those books, waiting for a descendant to discover them.

  The first documents I directed my attention to were the registers of high graduates. Historical records are sadly lacking in our country, but fortunately those on the holders of the doctorate are not. All the names of doctors since the first examination in 1075 have been preserved. I knew of at least two complete registers, both published in the latter part of the eighteenth century, one by Nguyen Hoan called the Dai Viet Register of High Graduates-in which my grandfather found the link with our first ancestor Nguyen Tue-and the other by Phan Huy On entitled the Southern Sky Register of High Graduates. Besides the names, the registers contain short biographies of the graduates and therein lies their interest because Vietnamese names, by themselves, do not give any precise indication on family relationship. All the Nguyen, or the Tran, or the Le are not related. The village where a graduate came from and some details about his career are needed to ascertain his origin. However, the problem with both registers was that they were not readily accessible, as only a small number of copies existed in the country. Also, they were written in the old scholarly language, which I could only read with great difficulty. We were then in the 1960s.

  In that decade, ancient books started to be translated into the modern language. I learned that a translation of Nguyen Hoan’s compilation was available in Saigon. But then, the war intensified in Vietnam while prolonged peace talks, in which I was involved, took place in Paris. I had no time to devote to family genealogies. I only returned to my quest more than ten years after the war had ended and my family had taken refuge in Australia. On a visit to Paris and following a laborious search in libraries there, I finally had the two translated volumes of the Dai Viet Register in my hands, one morning in 1986. With some trepidation, I looked for the doctorate session of 1511, the year of the two brothers’ success. As their names appeared in front of me, I could imagine how my grandfather felt three quarters of a century ago. The information he was looking for was there before him, and it could not have been clearer or more precise. “Nguyen Tue,” it was written, “was Nguyen Uyen’s father and Nguyen Huyen’s elder brother. Father and son, elder and younger brothers, all graduated.” It was as if the author had written it specifically for the benefit of our family, knowing that one day, we would search for it in his book. “No further doubt can be entertained!” exclaimed my grandfather. People were skeptical, some even critical, of his endeavor to establish the identity of the brothers. But he was proved right and, of course, by his time the old antagonism toward the Mac dynasty belonged to history. I could feel his excitement and joy. Now, I was following in his footsteps and trying to find in the same book some clues to our earlier ancestry. Starting from the 1511 examination, I went further back in time and carefully read through lists of doctors. Names from the prefecture of Thanh Oai appeared frequently, underlining the prominent position held by our region in the field of letters. I recognized villages close to ours and which I knew well. Where were the descendants of doctors who became high mandarins, I wondered, for in several of those villages, there were no large ancestral homes, no imposing gates, no vestiges which recalled the prosperous times of old. Slowly, I came to the first doctorate session ever to be held in Vietnam, in 1075 under the Ly dynasty. Disappointedly, I found that there were no Nguyen of Kim Bai among the lists of doctors.

  Going back to 1511, I then moved down to more recent years and was not looking for any particular information, when came an unexpected windfall. Nguyen Tue, his brother Nguyen Huyen and his son Nguyen Uyen were thought to be our only high graduates. To my surprise, another Nguyen of Kim Bai appeared in the register, whom I think must be Nguyen Uyen’s son and the forgotten head of our third generation. “Nguyen Hoang,” as the register made clear “hailed from the village of Kim Bai in the prefecture of Thanh Oai. He graduated (in 1571) at the age of thirty-eight.”

  The following year-1987-on another visit to Paris, I obtained a microfilm of the Southern Sky Register in the old scholarly language. I found in it valuable information which helped me reconstruct the careers of our first three ancestors, but this book confirmed what I had learned from the other register, that there was no Nguyen of K
im Bai on the golden board of the doctorate before 1511. The brothers were, indeed, the first doctors ever to come from our family, or our village. Could our earlier people be holders of the lower diplomas of baccalaureate or licentiate? I have no way to know, having not come across any register for such diplomas.

  Next, I turned to history books. After the Ly and Tran dynastic periods, however, very few records were left. The Tran dynasty was followed by years of instability which led to Vietnam falling under Chinese domination in 1414. That domination lasted only thirteen years, but proved disastrous for our historical records and literary treasures, nearly all of which were either destroyed or taken to China by the occupants. All the history books that we have today were written after that fateful period. Of the two major works on Vietnam’s history, History of Dai Viet was written in 1479 and Mirror of Vietnam’s History much later, in 1884. Both works are, as far as those early dynasties are concerned, fairly general and basic. I was not able to find anything about earlier generations of our family in the first work. As for the second, I have only succeeded in consulting a few chapters. So far, my quest has proved fruitless. But it will continue. There are still many documents which I know exist, but have not been able to lay my hands on. Others I do not know about must be held in archives and libraries. It is said that of the lost records of the Ly and Tran dynasties, some are still kept in China, while others have found their way to Japan. I am confident that, in the coming years, we would stand a better chance of retracing an earlier phase of our family history.

  Three legends held the keys of our village’s past: the Two Nguyen Brothers, the Mountain of the Twins and the name Kim Bai. The first legend helped my grandfather trace the roots of our family back to the fifteenth century. The Twins in the second legend predicted the brothers’ concurrent success at the examinations and following grandfather’s discovery, the Mountain of the Twins also became associated with our family. Our own history seemed to merge into our villages. The third legend remains unexplained. When and how was the name Kim Bai taken? Would the same link be found there with our family?