A period of great confusion followed the treaty of 1883. Among Vietnamese commanders and mandarins some did not recognize it and kept up the fight. Others laid down their arms and went home. Still others stayed on to cooperate with the former enemy. Chinese forces and the Black Flags continued to engage the French. Patriots recruited their own troops, called nghia dung or “the faithful and the brave,” to defend the honor of the country. At the same time bad elements, outlaws and highwaymen took advantage of the situation to rob and plunder. Old scores were settled. Vietnamese were killing one another while their country came under the yoke of colonialism. At the court in Hue, the two mandarins usurpers made and unmade kings. As soon as a young sovereign showed some sign of independence, he was killed and another one put in his place. In less than a year, three kings followed one another on the throne. The region around our village of Kim Bai remained for a long time under the control of Vietnamese forces and the Black Flags, even though Hanoi had been under the French since April 1882. A number of Dinh Dat’s students joined the ranks of patriots who defended the citadel of Son Tay, some thirty kilometers to the northwest of Kim Bai. In December 1883, the French launched their attack against Son Tay and the battle which took place there was one of the fiercest of the war. The Vietnamese army, the patriots, the Black Flags and Chinese regular troops fought against some six thousand French troops for several days and inflicted on them heavy losses. But they were unable to sustain the intense shelling by French artillery and had to withdraw into the northern mountains. Few of Dinh Dat’s students came back. Many were killed in the battle. Others eventually retreated to China where they lived as exiles, hoping that one day they could return to their country and fight the French again.
The students were like members of his family and the news from the battle of Son Tay was a hard blow to Dinh Dat. Some months later, he fell ill. He was forty-nine. The family was greatly concerned because the forty-ninth year-and also the fifty-third-in a person’s life were believed to be years of ill omen. According to astrologers, the configuration of stars was especially harmful to health in those years. That was the reason why most middle-aged people were not be able to survive one or the other of those two years. Many families took the precaution of consulting astrologers and holding prayer ceremonies to invoke the protection of the spirits when a member turned forty-nine, even though no untoward signs had been detected and he or she was keeping in perfectly good health. In Dinh Dat’s case however, he had been depressed and his health had been failing since the previous year, when the fall of Hanoi and the treaty of 1883 did away with our independence. Then, in his forty-ninth year, he was struck by a grave illness. Medicines and prayer ceremonies did not lead to any improvement in his condition. The signs were ominous and the family thought that he was going to die. But he was saved by a Taoist priest, an acquaintance of his who led a lonely existence up in the purple mountains. That man was renowned for the medicine made from herbs he picked himself in the wild. On hearing that Dinh Dat was dying, he came down to visit him. He took his pulse and in true Chuang Tsu tradition, burst out laughing. “The white-haired teacher is not ready to change into a bird yet! He is still too heavy to fly!” he said, referring to the Taoist and Buddhist belief in reincarnation to another form of life. “I am giving you this bag of herbs which will help you get over the forty-ninth year and, moreover, will leave you with enough strength to overcome the barrier of the fifty-third. After that, you will gingerly get to the landmark of seventy.” Thus saying, the priest returned to his temple in the mountain.
True enough, Dinh Dat recovered and soon could resume his teaching. In 1885, his spirit rose. Imperial forces in Hue reopened the hostilities with an attack against the French garrison. The attack failed and Emperor Ham Nghi fled the capital. From a base in the countryside, the young emperor called on the population to rally to him in the fight to recover independence. Dinh Dat had been waiting for this act of defiance. It rekindled his faith in the monarchy. Since the shock of capitulation, many in the country had been waiting for it too. The response to the emperor’s call was a vast movement of resistance. Bands of “faithful and brave” patriots, most of them a few hundred strong but some reaching into the thousands, appeared nearly everywhere displaying the banner of Can Vuong, or Loyalty to the King. Under the command of scholars calling themselves “commanders,” “generals” and “marshalls,” they seized prefectures, at some places even provinces. In reality, it was not the young king, but the two regents who made the decision to attack the French. These regents soon showed their true colors. One promptly surrendered to the French when their move failed. The other fled to China with the professed purpose of seeking Chinese help. Emperor Ham Nghi was left in a perilous situation, but with the support of loyal mandarins he rose magnificently to the occasion. From jungle bases north of Hue next to the Laotian border, he gave inspiration and unity of purpose to the hundreds of resistance movements generated by his appeal. Our region was too close to Hanoi for resorting to armed insurrection, but young scholars went to join groups of patriots operating in the mountains, while older people like Dinh Dat kept up the morale of villagers and collected money and food for the fighters. However by 1885, the French had extended their hold over the country. Their repression took some time to come, but when it did the armies of patriots led by scholars with no battlefield experience proved no match for French troops. Also at many places, the insurrection turned into indiscriminate killing of people suspected of being pro-French and especially of Catholics, thus pushing them over to the side of the protectorate. The patriots were fighting a losing battle. Emperor Ham Nghi stayed to the bitter end, ignoring all the offers of reconciliation and appointment made by the new king who was put in his place by the French. In 1888, three years after he left Hue to start the resistance, he was betrayed, captured and delivered to the enemy. The young king-he was then eighteen-was an example of dignity in defeat. He suffered in silence, not uttering a single word to the Westerners who were now the masters of his country. He remained silent as he left Vietnam’s shores to spend the rest of his life in exile in Algeria.
That was the final episode of the war. Although some movements deep in the mountains continued to defy the French well into the next decade, the Red River delta was pacified even before the king’s exile. Dinh Dat resigned himself to the fact that defeat was now irreversible. “My generation has failed,” he told his students. But his mind was at peace. He felt that Emperor Ham Nghi, by behaving in the way a king should, had saved the honor of the monarchy and the nation. “This game of chess has ended and we have lost. It is now your turn to prepare for the next game.” The students asked his advice about joining the new schools established by the French. He encouraged them to do so. “Our young people who fled abroad are trying to learn from the Chinese and from the Japanese, so that one day they may return and fight more effectively against the French,” he said. “We who stay back in the country should be prepared to learn from the former enemy, for that is the only way we could progress.”
Triennial examinations were held again as the new French regime went out of its way to gain the scholars’ support. Among Dinh Dat’s friends, some were serving the protectorate. They pressed him to sit for the examinations, assuring him that his talents would be properly recognized. He declined, saying that at over fifty he was already an old man. “At fifty a man should understand the decrees of Heaven,” he quoted the Analects of Confucius. “I know now that I am only good to be a village teacher and that diplomas and public offices are beyond me.” He continued until a ripe old age, teaching students and his own children. With his second wife he had three sons, the last one born when he was fifty-four. My grandfather said that he drove his students hard and his sons even harder. “Back in the sixteenth century, our ancestor Nguyen Uyen won the highest diploma, but since then and for many long generations our family has not been able to obtain much success at the examinations,” he told his sons. “You owe it to the books from which you
learn and the lamp by which you study to succeed,” he said quoting an old saying. One can imagine his joy when his eldest son graduated. My grandfather wrote in the chronicle: “When the good news arrived, he [Dinh Dat] was already in his old years but still strong and lucid. He expressed great satisfaction that a son taught by him had finally paid the family’s debt to lamp and books.”
A few years later, he joined the ranks of “the few since antiquity” who reached the age of seventy, an occasion for great rejoicing and celebration. But Dinh Dat’s unlucky star was still following him and even such an occasion was for him tinged with sadness. His youngest son, then sixteen, wanted to leave the country and flee to China “to work for the revolution,” in other terms, to fight for the overthrow of the French protectorate. The young man’s spirit made him proud and Dinh Dat gave him permission to go. But he knew that the life of a revolutionary was one of hardship and sacrifice. His son may never come back. At any rate, at his age, Dinh Dat would not live to see him again. Thus, the birthday celebration was also a farewell party, although this had to be kept hidden from the eyes of the secret police and for the other relatives and guests. The young man was just going to town to further his studies.
My father was born in 1907. Dinh Dat waited impatiently to see his first grandson, for the custom was for a daughter to leave her in-laws’ place and go back to her own parents’ to give birth to her first child. There she would stay for several months until the child was strong enough to travel. Many generations of our family had been obsessed with the fear of not having an heir. Both Dinh Dat’s father and grandfather only had one son, at a late stage of their lives. Dinh Dat himself had thought at one time, after his first wife and son had died, that he would not leave a male descendant. But his second wife gave him three sons and now a grandson had come. At last, the grandchild was brought to him and the old man could hold him in his arms. With three generations living together under the same roof, the Taoist recluse appeared happy and reconciled with the world.
Like his father, Dinh Dat spent time and effort researching the family history. In his time, the missing piece in the puzzle was thought to be the Cu Hau papers. To his credit, the papers were found and although they did not contain anything about the early generations, they did show the large amount of land owned by our family up to at least four generations following that of academician Nguyen Uyen, who is now known as our second ancestor. How could an academician, remembered by his descendants as having reached only the position of inspector-delegate to a province, own as large an amount of land as that of an ennobled high mandarin? Nguyen Uyen served under the Mac dynasty which lost its throne to the forces fighting for the restoration of the Le, after a long civil war. But the Cu Hau papers made it clear that our family was able to retain most of its land after the change of dynasty. How did it manage to do so? These were questions to which Dinh Dat found no answer, but they would lead his descendants on to new and fruitful avenues for research. What Dinh Dat was able to do immediately was to restore the ties between the different branches of the Nguyen Dinh, then on the brink of disappearing as an extended family. He called a plenary meeting of all its members in 1862, which resulted in a decision to resume the yearly ceremony of worship at the Ancestral Shrine and to write a new family chronicle. In all this, Dinh Dat’s role was one of leadership, although he belonged to the youngest branch of the Nguyen Dinh and was then only in his twenties.
Dinh Dat did not know that the brothers Nguyen Huyen and Nguyen Tue of the village legend, who graduated at the same doctorate session, were his own ancestors. Nor did he realize the link between the prophecy about the Mountain of the Twins and his family. Yet, he must have sensed something in his subconscious mind to take the mountain’s name as his pseudonym and call himself Song Son Dat Dan, or The Hermit of the Mountain of the Twins. In doing so, he appropriated the village prophecy and it was a measure of the respect he enjoyed among the scholars of Kim Bai that they did not criticize his choice as being misplaced or pretentious. Indeed, he was known mostly by that name, either as a teacher or as a writer, in preference to his pen name of Hy Tu.
Dinh Dat died in 1909 when seventy-four, according to the traditional way of calculating his age. In actual fact he was born in 1836 and was thus only seventy-three. But our old custom gave an extra year to everyone. When I was young, I also heard elders saying that Dinh Dat died at the age of seventy-five, in deference to another custom which said that when a person was born, he received a year from Heaven and when he died, Mother Earth gave him another extra year. The number of years that a person accumulated was a good indication of the virtues and good fortune that his family was blessed with. Dinh Dat’s father was a wealthy man; under his son, the family would again enjoy a prosperous living; but he remained throughout his life a poor scholar. My grandfather often regretted that he was not able to provide more fully for his father in his old years. As he wrote in the chronicle:
His eldest son Ba Tiep won a bachelor degree, then a licentiate degree three years later, when Dinh Dat was already in his late sixties. After three more years of study at the School of Administration, his son was appointed as Educational Officer to a prefecture. Although a mandarinal position, it was a junior one. Salary and allowances were very small. In 1909, Dinh Dat joined our ancestors. After taking leave for a year to perform his duty towards his departed father, his son returned to his career. Gradually moving up the scale, he attained the higher ranks of the mandarinate. Dinh Dat was posthumously awarded the lower fifth mandarinal rank, elevated to the lower fourth, then to the third, finally to the second rank. Four times, he was a recipient of favours bestowed by the Imperial Court. In the abode of the Spirits, he may have derived some glory and pride, but his son’s wish to serve and care for him for one single more day will never be fulfilled.
The one-year leave on the death of one’s parents was common administrative practice in those days. It was considered so essential in our Confucian culture that it took precedence over even the most important affairs of state. Even the highest mandarins laid down their seals of office during the period of mourning. Scholars in mourning were not allowed to sit for the examinations.
Dinh Dat was buried in a field owned by our family in an area called Lung Dinh, or Raised Platform. The land in that area was higher than the fields around it, only a few meters but enough to make it safe from floods. Geomancers could see there plenty of auspicious features where an ancestor’s grave would be of benefit to his family. Here was a dragon, there a phoenix, they would point out. They could even see a rhinoceros watching the moon at one place and a group of immortals having a drink together at another, all special features to look for when choosing a place for burial. Later on, my grandfather converted the plot containing Dinh Dat’s grave into a family tomb, intending it for use for his parents’ and his own generation. The tomb was quite close to the Si Gate, just on the other side of the highway. It had a low brick wall painted in cream color and decorated in all its length with green pieces of ceramic carrying representations of flowers and auspicious Chinese characters such as Longevity and Good Fortune. Unlike other tombs, it had no garden. Dinh Dat’s grave sat in the middle of a square patch of lawn. It was not in brick or stone, but only a mound of earth several times the size of an average grave and covered with a mat of green grass. There was no headstone over the grave, no altar or shrine next to it. Grandfather had wanted the family tomb to be very simply laid out. In fact, except for the patch of grass around the grave, the land inside the tomb continued to be cultivated with rice and other cereals, depending on the season. The only special feature in the tomb was pine trees, planted in rows along the four walls.
When we stayed in Kim Bai during the summer, our group of boys and girls in their early teens used to go out of the village and its barrier of bamboo to catch the evening breeze in the open countryside. We had the choice of either going up the dike on one side of the village and enjoying the sight of the Lichee Field over a backdrop of purple moun
tains, or going to the tomb on the other side. There, the scenery was one of flat land typical of the Red River delta. Rice fields extended as far as the eyes could see interrupted only here and there by great clumps of bamboo which were villages. There were very few trees besides the pine trees of the tomb. Only one or two solitary banyans could be found, which gave some shade to farmers working in the fields during the day. No houses could be seen, except for some tea huts strung along the highway. On days when a light wind was blowing, we liked to go to the tomb to listen to the song of pine trees. These belonged to a species called phi lao, with long and soft needles which swayed and sang at the faintest breeze. In our cultural tradition, a pine tree is the image of freedom from the shackles of time and of human worries. Popular folklore has this poem, which has inspired many a poet:
In the next life may it please Heaven,
Not to make me a human,
A Vietnamese Family Chronicle Page 47