Grandfather’s stay in Bac Ninh was short. The following year, he moved to Thai Binh, on his last appointment. He was fifty-eight. In the old system, a high mandarin was often given his choice of last appointment. That would not necessarily be the highest post he could aspire to, but one he would be happy to have before he retired. Thai Binh was large and populous, although not among the two or three most important provinces in the Delta. A mandarin of the traditional school, grandfather had always kept his distance from the representatives of the French protectorate who, for their part, had sometimes suspected him of sympathy for the nationalist cause. The very top governorships were not for him. With Thai Binh, he had had a long association. Early in his career, he had spent seven years there as an education officer. A whole generation of Thai Binh scholars had studied under him. His reputation was high. Former students of his went into the public service, education and the arts. Some were already prefects, others had become prominent authors. The scholars’ community in Thai Binh would like to have their old teacher back, this time as the head mandarin of the province. When he left Thai Binh, grandfather was a junior mandarin. Two decades later, he had reached the top of his profession and to return there would be a source of particular satisfaction for him, as well as a fitting end to his career. In 1937, the post of Thai Binh became vacant and his wish was granted. When he went there to assume his new functions, it was like a homecoming.
I followed my grandparents to Thai Binh. I was then seven and in my third year of primary school. We lived in a large compound which contained the governor’s office, his residence and outbuildings for the staff and servants. In one corner stood a rather lugubrious-looking blockhouse in concrete, with loopholes to shoot from, a reminder of the troubled period of1929-1930, when nationalist insurrections broke out in many parts of the country. The blockhouse was not manned anymore; instead, it had become a sleeping place for the soldiers who guarded the compound. The front garden with symmetrical flower beds, shrubs and low hedges, had no particular appeal to me. But the back of the office opened into a private garden shaded by big trees, which gave to the compound the character of a rural retreat. The garden led to a pond, where ducks were reared. I very much liked that garden, perhaps because its lawn, flowers, pebbled path, and especially its pond and trees, were all the things that I missed in our ancestral home in Kim Bai. Shrubs grew in profusion on the edge of the pond, as well as several clumps of bamboo. They attracted a great number of birds, small black or yellow-green ones which produced a delightful twitter, and bright-colored kingfishers with shiny green breasts. But the bird I was most interested in was a small water bird, with dark grey feathers. It usually made its appearance around noon, when the sun was very high and hot, and emitted a plaintive call. “Quoc, quoc,” it said. The call reverberated over the surface of the pond, and all other birds seemed to fall silent. The only sound one could hear was “quoc, quoc.” Quoc in Vietnamese means country. The story about that bird was that it was a re-incarnation of an ancient king who lost his throne and country, and had to spend the rest of his life in exile. The king longed for his old country. After he died, he became a water bird who kept calling “quoc, quoc.” Since then, in the turbulent history of Vietnam, many were those who had to go into exile like the ancient king. Fate had put them on the losing side of civil wars, and their souls continued to cry for their lost country through the bird’s sad call. As a young boy, however, I was interested in that bird not so much because of its sad story, but because I never saw it fly. It walked from the shrubs to the waterline, then walked back. I thought I must be able to catch it. My uncle and I would converge from opposite sides on the shrub, ready to pounce on it. Needless to say, it managed to elude us every time.
A pair of peacocks, symbols of wealth and power, roamed free in the garden. They were supposedly tame, but could give a fright to those who approached them too closely. Even the gardeners were sometimes attacked by them. The feathers in their wings were cut to prevent them from flying away, but there were times when they could be seen perched on a high tree branch, and it was quite a problem getting them down and back to their cage in the evening. Among the trees of the garden were two imposing bang trees, which were usually found at road intersections and a most welcome sight for travellers in hot summer days. With branches thrusting out horizontally, and leaves as big as a plate, a bang tree was an oasis of shade. The traveller would find a tea hut or two under its canopy, where he could sit down and quench his thirst with a hot bowl of strong green tea. Our two bang trees were as tall as wide, and we could play under them even in early afternoon, when the sun was at its fiercest. The cream-colored flesh of the bang fruit had a sweet smell, but was not edible. We had to break its hard stone open to eat the kernel, which tasted like an almond. There was also a flame tree, as tall and wide as the bang, but whose small leaves did not provide much shade. In Vietnamese folklore, the flame tree suggested an image of students going for their examinations as it bloomed in early summer, the examinations season. I remember well my first examination, which took place in Thai Binh. Our tree was then a mass of bright red blossoms.
In Ha Nam and Bac Ninh, I went to the Vietnamese state school. I was quite happy and worked well. Thai Binh, a larger province with a strong minority Catholic population, boasted a French school run by nuns. My grandfather decided to put the two of us, my uncle and myself, there. He wanted us to study under the French system so that, later on, we could go to France. The thought of going to study in France was implanted in my mind ever since I was a small boy. It was my consolation when I missed my parents and wanted to go and live with them. The transfer to the nuns’ school was a logical step, but it made me very unhappy. I could not communicate with the nuns, or with the other children who were mostly French. For a long time, I dreaded going to school in the morning. Anyway, although we were no longer in a Vietnamese school, when the end of the academic year came we still sat for the Junior Primary examination, which was opened to anyone who had done three years of primary. That was the first of a series of examinations in the life of a Vietnamese student. After it came the End of Primary examination, then the Junior Secondary, then the End of Secondary or Baccalaureate. I was quite relaxed going to the test, in spite of the fact that for the last several months I had been in a French school and had made no preparation for it. I was eight and had already acquired the reputation of being a bright student. But I flunked all my papers. By the end of the day and without waiting for the results, I knew that I had failed. When the results were announced, and neither my uncle nor I got through, it was quite an event. The whole town talked about it. The son and grandson of the governor, who descended from a long line of scholars, failing at the most junior of all examinations! My grandfather was not too concerned about it. “At least that was a good experience for them,” he said. But my grandmother was furious. She fumed against the teachers of the state school who ran the examination. “They purposely set the papers on the topics that they (my uncle and I) did not study,” she claimed. She even said that this may have been a way for the teachers to show their displeasure that we had opted for a French school instead of the state school. Looking back over that matter, I felt a lot of admiration for the teachers. It was much easier for them to let us pass than to fail us, thereby causing a loss of face for the family of the new governor. They showed their courage and integrity by treating us just like any other candidates.
Fortunately, our examination system gave a second chance to those who failed at their first try. At the end of the summer vacation, a second session was held for them. Grandmother, after the first reaction of anger, set about to repair the damage. She invited the teachers in, to ask whether they would consent to take my uncle and me as their pupils during the vacation. The teachers happily obliged. Thus, instead of the seaside, we spent the time in Thai Binh. Everyday, we took our books to the empty state school, where the teachers coached us and made sure that, this time, we would not fail.
Parties and ba
nquets were frequent at the governor’s residence. The cooks prepared a combination of Vietnamese, Chinese and French food. Even from our study, located on the other side of the garden, we could smell the nice aroma. I often made a dash to the kitchen, careful not to be seen by grandmother. There, I watched the cooks arrange their beautiful displays of food. Carrots, turnips and other vegetables were cut into flowers and leaves of different shapes and colors. Their hands pressed thickened cream out of paper cones, and the drops of cream magically became fruits, flowers, letters and other decorations. The cooks offered me tasty morsels, such as the crunchy skin of a roasted suckling pig, or the heart pulled out from inside a sizzling roast duck. They explained to me why a proverb stated that the parson’s nose was the “number one” part of a chicken. Many of the dishes they made cannot be obtained nowadays, because people have no more time to prepare them. For instance, one can still order swallow nest soup in Chinese restaurants. But what one gets is a few shreds of bird nest lost among other ingredients. The original swallow nest soup was made only of swallow nest. To serve such a dish, people had to sit for hours sifting out feathers and other impurities from the very fine noodle-like nest. Swallow nest could come at the beginning of a meal as an appetizer, cooked in clear chicken broth with just a few cubes of chicken meat. Or it could come at the end as a dessert, cooked in a syrup of rock sugar. Often, it was served late in the night as a snack, while the guests played the game of to torn, or listened to music and singing performed by a group of songstresses. Another dish which has disappeared is the ice cream made out of a hand-operated mill. It took a long time to prepare. Two men had to take turns to turn the mill. But vanilla ice cream made that way had a freshness, consistency and flavor with which the industrial kind of today cannot be compared.
The office and residence were built in the traditional style, with wide verandahs to keep the heat away from the rooms. The verandahs were lined with potted plants and dwarf trees, many of them camelias and miniature palm trees. My grandfather had a few prized quynh, a cactus-like plant with flowers of white petal and yellow stamen. The flowers came rarely and only opened at night to wilt in the morning. Each quynh plant coming into bloom was a special occasion. Grandfather invited his friends to come over, some from Hanoi and other provinces. After dinner, there were music, songs and poetry writing while host and guests waited. When the moment arrived, everything stopped and everyone crowded around to admire the delicate flowers which had only a few hours to live. A poet has written these lines about the quynh:
The young moon has risen above the roof. It is past midnight.
The garden holds a thousand fragrances within its fragile petals.
The leaves are sleeping and the wind is lost in its dreams.
As a trail of mist wanders by silently,
A bashful quynh flower reveals her virginal beauty.
Around New Year’s time, the white, red and pink camelias started to bloom, and the verandahs received a great many cumquat trees. A pair of cumquat, heavy with fruits, was a traditional present for the Tet festival. The golden fruits were symbols of prosperity. They added color to the verandahs and stayed on the trees all through the season of festivities which followed the Tet. Many of grandfather’s scholar friends came to see him during that season. For days, they played card games, challenged one another to poetry writing, and reminisced about old times. One year, grandfather invited all those friends who graduated with him in 1903, more than thirty years before, to a reunion. It was a very special reunion. The twenty or so remaining scholars knew that it was their last, for grandfather was the only one among them who had not retired and, because of his position, had the means to organize such a meeting. Grandfather ordered the cooks to prepare the dishes that he knew his friends liked. He brought over a troop of songstresses from the neighboring town of Nam Dinh, a traditional cultural center in the country. Many of the scholars had studied in Nam Dinh, grandfather included. He went to great lengths to make the reunion a success. Since the guests were all Vietnamese and some were close friends of our family-my maternal grandfather was at the party too-I was allowed to go to the reception room and mix with them.
In the reception room were displayed two cumquat trees of a beautiful round shape and with so many fruits that they appeared more golden than green. The trees were placed in antique porcelain pots. The pebbles at their base were so shiny that they looked unreal. In fact, they were pebbles covered with candy. It was the fashion then for candy to be prepared that way, for people to suck, then spit out the small pebble. Normally, these candies were offered to the guests in a tray. But for the special reunion, someone had gotten the idea of placing them around the base of the cumquat trees. I wanted to eat the candies and posted myself near the trees, waiting for the scholars to start. Then, I would follow suit. They came, by groups of two or three, to look firstly at the white porcelain pots and their landscapes painted in blue. Some recited aloud the poems written on them. Then, they admired the shape of the trees and praised the extraordinarily high number of fruits. But no one seemed to notice the candies. Could it be that they thought these were just pebbles, I wondered to myself. Groups came and went. I was getting discouraged, when one came by himself. Like the others, he watched the pots, trees and fruits. Then before moving away, he nonchalantly picked up two candies, put one in his mouth and, with a smile, handed the other one to me.
Grandfather was a mandarin who kept on the move, visiting villages to acquaint himself with the life of the population. His dark blue Peugeot car was a familiar sight on the roads of the province and the prefects knew that it could appear in their areas without warning. My uncle and I often accompanied him. He brought us along on festive occasions such as regional fairs, market openings and sporting events. When he went to areas stricken by drought or floods, we were with him too. Obviously, he wanted us to see for ourselves the harsh conditions that country folk had to face, for we often attended those somber occasions, instead of going to school. The two of us used to walk behind him, at the head of the official party. We saw villages destroyed by cyclones, rice fields transformed into parched land by drought. People who had lost everything were sitting there with a resigned look, waiting for the authorities to provide them with some help. We could hear survivors describe how giant tidal waves come in from the sea to uproot houses and trees, and take away men and beasts. We were, however, only observing the destruction and suffering from our side of the barrier, until an incident occurred to me which drove home the lesson that my grandfather had probably intended me to have. The occasion was a dis-tribution of food and clothing to victims of a drought. It was a particularly hot day and the waiting crowd was particularly large. At one point, it surged forward and submerged the official party. Soldiers let fly with their long whips to push people back. Somehow, I got separated from my uncle and the rest of the party. Several times, I just avoided being lashed by the soldiers. As the crowd retreated, I was drawn farther and farther into its midst. Everyone around me was in tatters. There was a strong smell of dust and poverty. I was terrified. I had never been out on my own before. So many times, I had been told stories of children being kidnapped and sold to the Chinese. But the people around me were friendly and my courage gradually came back. Some talked to me, asking where I came from. When I said that I was the governor’s grandson, they did not seem to believe me. After a while, I started looking for my way back to the official party. The food distribution had begun. Everyone was trying to get there. I pushed those in front of me, others behind pushed me. My fear was gone. The misery, smell and dust ceased to affect me. I realized that I was not among strangers, but countrymen who were no different from the folks of my own village. I felt that I was part of the crowd and that feeling gave me strength and self-confidence. It was in a quite different frame of mind that, after a great deal of pushing and jostling, I managed to rejoin the party.
My most cherished memory of Thai Binh was summer at the seaside. We Vietnamese traditionally referred to th
e sea as be dong, or the eastern sea. All our coastline, except only for a small section in the south, duly faced eastwards. To me seashores abroad from which one could not watch the sun and the moon rise, seemed to be lacking in something essential. Our eastern sea brought hope in the morning, as sun rays emerging from it pierced the darkness of the sky. In the evening, the moon rising from under the waves was the bearer of dreams. Dong Chau, Thai Binh’s seaside resort, did not have the scenic beauty of so many other beaches in Vietnam where the green mountains descended right next to the blue sea. It was situated near the mouth of the Thai Binh River, a major tributary of the Red River, on absolutely flat land. But it nestled in a forest of pines and the sand beach ran along the coast for miles. The long needles of the pines sang to the lightest breeze. They could also howl like an army of ghosts in the night when a strong wind blew. The resort had only a few bungalows serving as holiday homes for the town mandarins. The fishing village of Dong Chau was some distance away. The governor’s bungalow, a wooden construction with a thatched roof, stood right on the beach. It had at the front a covered verandah in the shape of a half moon. In the afternoon, I used to sit there listening to the song of pines and the sound of waves, while the water lapped close to the steps of the bungalow. Some mornings, I woke up to find that all was absolutely silent. The pine trees were immobile. The sea had disappeared. From the verandah, all that I could see was a vast expanse of wet sand. Our group of vacationers had to walk for hundreds of meters, sometimes even more, for our early morning swim. When we finally reached the water and turned back to look, the pine forest and village of Dong Chau were reduced to some blurred lines. The Red River and its tributaries carried a great amount of alluvion to the sea. As a result of their action, land steadily extended out. Large areas of Thai Binh were gained from the sea in the course of the last centuries. From time to time the sea would come back, and newly established villages on the flat land would disappear. Then, the sea would withdraw, and the land would resume its slow expansion. When the monsoon season started, Dong Chau often came in the path of tropical cyclones. We could stay there only in the dry summer months. Some years after we had left Thai Binh, I learned that the area was struck by a violent cyclone. The fishing village was destroyed. Many lives were lost. The bungalows on the beach must have been taken away on that occasion too.
A Vietnamese Family Chronicle Page 53