During his term of office, grandfather did much to make the province of Thai Binh better known to the rest of the north, or Tonkin, as it was then called by the French. He organized a highly successful Exposition of Thai Binh, to show the products of its agriculture and industries, as well as the various aspects of its culture and folklore. The Exposition was attended by the highest authorities in Tonkin. It lasted for quite a long time, perhaps several weeks, and attracted large crowds of visitors. The highlight of the closing day was a soccer match pitching the Racing Club of Hanoi, then the undisputed leader of the Tonkinese soccer championship, against a selection of the best players from the other clubs. The prize was the Exhibition Trophy. The French army band came from Hanoi to give more pomp and ceremony to the occasion. It performed before the start of the match, then stayed on the side lines to strike a tune each time a team scored a goal. The Racing Club of Hanoi had only Vietnamese players, although it was sponsored by the largest French department store in Tonkin. The selection opposing it was a mixed French-Vietnamese team, with the French in majority. The Racing was known for its slow start; it was often led in the first half, only to come back strongly in the second half. That afternoon, I was among the crowd, the biggest that the stadium in Thai Binh had ever seen. Naturally, we were all behind the Racing Club and its Vietnamese players. The two teams came onto the field, the Racing in its customary color of all black with only the shirt collar and sleeves lined in yellow. The selection was in white. The French players looked enormous next to their black Vietnamese opponents. As expected, the first half belonged to the selection, which got as many as three goals. Each time, the French army band launched into a vibrant victory tune. At the interval, our confidence in the Racing was rather shaken. It was famed for its staying power, but a three-goal deficit was difficult to make up. The match went into the second half and for a while, there was no sign of the Racing’s recovery. Our ap-prehension was turning into panic when the men in black scored their first goal. Suddenly, the tension was released. There were wild scenes. The band had just finished playing when a second goal came. The floodgates were opened. Goals came so fast that the band did not have time to play a piece in between. Finally, the Racing won the Exposition Trophy with a score of 5-3, and that soccer match has remained the most memorable in my life.
A governor’s term of office usually lasted for two years. Grandfather would have retired in 1939, but being a successful governor he was allowed to stay on for another year. He enjoyed working in Thai Binh and was proud to recall that, during his stay there, the “hundred families” under his care were able to go about their daily lives in conditions of peace and security. He would feel much happier had the natural elements been kinder to “his” province, but cyclones, floods, and at other times droughts, were unfortunately frequent occurrences in a low-lying region, many areas of which were newly claimed from the sea. When he left, in 1940, the constituent bodies of Thai Binh wanted to erect a statue or name a street after him. He wisely persuaded them not to. “I was just doing my duty as a public servant,” he told them. “A quiet retirement is my reward.” In the mandarinal tradition of our country, for a high official to retire in old age, peacefully and honorably, was indeed considered an achievement. Arbitrary rules, factional jealousies, and especially frequent political changes, made a smooth career out of reach for many. A mandarin may succeed in leaving a good name with the people he administered. He must, however, shun all forms of public fame or expression of gratitude, not only out of modesty but because these would be the very things to keep him away from a quiet retirement. “When gold and jade fill the hall, one cannot keep them safe . . .. When the work is done and one’s name is becoming distinguished, to withdraw into obscurity is the way of Heaven,” was the advice given by Lao Tseu, millenniums ago.
Grandfather retired in the summer of1940. Momentous changes were looming ahead for the world, and our own country. The year before, France and England had declared war on Germany. In the following months, nothing much happened on the battlefield in what became known as the “funny war.” But everyone knew that it would only be a matter of time before the Second World War started in earnest. Nearer to us, the Japanese army was poised on the Chinese border. An ally of Germany, Japan wanted the rice, rubber and coal of French Indochina. It was only waiting, so our people reckoned, for hostilities in Europe to flare up and France’s hands to be tied there, to invade. Then in May 1940, Germany launched its blitzkrieg. France collapsed. Within a month, that mighty world power and the largest colonial empire after England, had capitulated. The news came as a profound shock to the Vietnamese, who were convinced that the Japanese troops would now walk over Indochina. French domination would end and a new phase of Vietnam’s history would begin. Our people expected Prince Cuong De, a member of the royal family who had been living in exile in Japan, to return home and be given the reins of the country. But we were in for another shock. In September 1940, the Japanese forces crossed the border. Fighting broke out, followed however by an agreement which left in place the colonial regime, while allowing Japanese troops to enter Indochina. Other economic and trade agreements gave to Japan effective control over the resources of the Indochinese countries. Thus, the French managed to stay on as political master in Indochina, after having lost the war in their home country. Japan’s conduct was a bitter disappointment to the Vietnamese. Here was an Asian power, which had so often proclaimed that Asia should belong to the Asians, ready to make a deal with the French colonial regime over the heads of fellow Asian people. When the Japanese attacked the French at the border, they were joined by a force of Vietnamese revolutionaries who seized the opportunity to fight for the liberation of their country. Left to themselves after the agreement, the revolutionaries were wiped out by the French.
By the winter of 1940, the excitement was over. The change for our people had only been for the worse. The French regime was still there. In addition, the country was under a Japanese occupation force. After he retired, grandfather went to live in Hanoi. His only brother and most of his children were settled there. Hanoi was close to his hometown and, of course, it was the ancient capital and “the land where culture and learning had flourished since a thousand years.” He wanted to be there, to keep in touch with his friends and also with the changing political situation. At first, he rented a house in a well-established suburb on the western side of the city. The house was a few streets away from the Western Lake and the White Bamboo Lake, where Hanoi people liked to go for walks and boat trips on weekends and summer evenings. The narrow path separating the two lakes, bordered on both sides by weeping willows, was an idyllic meeting place for lovers. The sight of country girls paddling their small boats and gathering lotus flowers in the Western Lake had inspired many a painter and poet. When the situation had settled down with the agreement between the French and the Japanese, grandfather bought a plot in a newer part of the town, on the southern side. As his pseudonym indicated, he was very fond of lakes and ponds and he chose a piece of land close to a small lake. In the beginning of1941, work started on a large three-storeyed house. By the month of June, the house was ready. But grandfather never moved in there. The new building was requisitioned by the Japanese army, and so he had to stay on at his rented place.
He led a quite active life. Since 1917, he was a member of the Khai Tri Tien Duc, an association of scholars of the old school. The association aimed, as its name said, “to develop the mind and advance the scholarly virtues.” For many years, it had been working to stop the decline of classical studies and to encourage the young generations to preserve the scholarly language. In the middle 1930s, its Cultural Committee published a Vietnamese dictionary which was the first ever to cover both the scholarly and popular languages. Following retirement, grandfather joined in the activities of that committee. Its chairman was his close friend Hoang Huan Trung, my maternal grandfather. He took part in two projects that the committee was pursuing. The first one was to translate the Confucian
Four Books into the popular language and to annotate them for the use of young students whose vehicle of learning was that language. The second was a more ambitious and longer term project: the revision and upgrading of the Vietnamese dictionary published a decade before. Like the French academicians, whose work L’Encyclopédie they took as their model, our scholars went painstakingly through all the words of the vocabulary, hoping to produce a definitive work on our language. Meetings were held weekly. Grandfather attended them regularly. The draft of the new dictionary was believed to be near completion when the communists came to power in 1945 and the association was forced to close down. In the war which broke out in the following year, the product of so many years of patient work by the scholars was unfortunately lost.
Grandfather was also occupied with the Temple of Literature, the place dedicated to the cult of Confucius. Under the French regime, official rites had ceased to be celebrated at the Temple. But worshipping ceremonies continued to be held by an association of scholars, to which grandfather belonged. He dutifully attended all the ceremonies, even after his health had deteriorated. He often expressed concern over the condition of the Temple. The shrines, lecture rooms and library-for the Temple was also the seat of the university-were being run down for lack of maintenance. He observed that even the doctor’s names on the stelae, which were chiseled in stone, were becoming difficult to read, for the stelae had been left out in the open and at the mercy of the natural elements for many centuries. Village affairs took some of his time too. For many years, he had held the position of Tien Chi, or Head Dignitary of Kim Bai. The position was a purely formal one when he was a mandarin, but grandfather now presided over the important meetings of the village council. He often returned to Kim Bai, making the trip not anymore in his Peugeot car, which had been sold soon after he retired, but by rickshaw. It took him a whole day to get to Kim Bai, only thirty kilometers from Hanoi, for he always made a prolonged stop in Ha Dong where our family owned a small textile factory. There, he had lunch and his customary siesta, before starting on the second leg of the trip in the afternoon. Grandfather and the council sought to develop the Kim Bai market into a shopping center for the region. They had more shops built there and traders, particularly the Chinese, were encouraged to come and set up their businesses.
By the time grandfather retired, he had only a few close friends left. Their favorite pastime was to get together over a meal or a drink to talk about the war and political situation, or to challenge one another in poetry writing. If it was a meal, they would go to a Chinese restaurant. But mostly they would gather at the Jade Mountain Temple, on a small island in the Lake of the Returning Sword, in the very heart of the city. The lake’s name dated back to the fifteenth century. At the beginning of that century, Vietnam fell under Chinese domination for the second time in its history. The first time, the Chinese stayed for one thousand years. The second time, the loss of independence was mercifully very much shorter. The Ming rule started in 1414. It ended in 1427. Le Loi hoisted the flag of resistance in 1418. Within ten years, he had liberated the country. Legend had it that at the start of the struggle, he received a divine sword and, with that sword by his side, he went from one victory to another. He established the Le dynasty, with its seat in the Eastern Capital, now Hanoi. One day, the king took a boat trip on the lake. Suddenly, he saw a giant tortoise swimming towards his boat. He pointed his sword towards it, but instead of swimming away, the tortoise jumped forward and took the sword in its mouth. Before disappearing under the water, the tortoise told the startled king: “You were given the sword to rid the country of Chinese intruders. Now that your mission has been accomplished, it must return to its owner.”
Thus, the lake acquired the name of Hoan Kiem, or Returning Sword. For centuries, it had been the most celebrated landmark in the capital, with the Tortoise Tower in the middle and the Jade Mountain Temple on another island linked with the shore by a wooden arch bridge. Residents of the capital flocked to the temple to pray during the three days of the Tet festival. In the middle of last century, two of the most renowned writers of that time, Nguyen Van Sieu and Cao Ba Quat, used to come with their friends to the temple to discuss poetry. They started a tradition. The temple became a favorite meeting place with scholars, writers and poets. In the calm and contemplative atmosphere of the temple, separated by the lake from the busy life of the city, they listened to one another’s writings and commented upon them. Over a cup of wine, they searched for inspiration and tried to emulate famous poets who had come there before them.
A gourmet who liked to eat out at restaurants, grandfather sometimes ate out, even without his friends. He would take my uncle and me with him. In Hanoi, I continued to stay with my grandparents, even though my parents were living in the same city, and their street was not far away. I only returned home for weekends. He always took us to the same restaurant, in a predominantly Chinese street called Sail Street. Those who knew Hanoi in the 1940s would remember the name Dong Hung Vien. Through him, I was introduced to the rich cuisine of southern China. I liked it, but after a few times there, I wanted a change. Once I made bold to suggest to him to go somewhere else, a Vietnamese restaurant for instance. “What do you want to eat there?” he asked. I replied that I had heard of places serving very good thang, a noodle soup with chicken, pork meat pie, omelette, peanut as well as other ingredients, and also cha ca, grilled fish fillets to eat with rice noodle and green vegetables. Thang and cha ca were two northern dishes which usually went together to make a complete meal. They were eaten not with the usual nuoc mam, or fish sauce seasoning, but with a shrimp paste which smelled even more strongly, to which was added a few drops of ca cuong, or beetle condiment. “The best thang and cha ca are cooked by your grandmother,” grandfather told me. “Cantonese cuisine is one of the richest in China. You do not know much of it yet.” He was keeping good health and enjoying his retirement, until he fell ill in the winter of 1942. It was not a sudden or acute illness. He started by losing some sleep, then some more. His condition worsened. Doctors and practitioners of oriental medicine could find no explanation for the illness. He did not respond to drugs. For months, he hardly had any sleep and the family was prepared for the worst. But as gradually as it came, the illness went away. Sleep came back to him, little by little. “It was as if I had gone through the full circle and the illness naturally came to an end,” he said. He recovered, but there was no more question of him continuing his work with the Cultural Committee. Doctors advised him to seek the healthier climate of the countryside. Meanwhile, Allied forces had started rolling back the Japanese in the Pacific. The war moved nearer to our country. Air raid sirens sounded more frequently in Hanoi. He left the capital to return to Kim Bai.
By then, a villa was being built in Ha Dong. When it was finished, he moved in there, sharing his time between Ha Dong and the village. His days were spent quietly “among his fields and gardens,” as scholars liked to describe their lives in retirement. He taught his children and grandchildren, saw some friends, or otherwise just watched events go their course. The Second World War was drawing to its climax. It was not long before it would end and our country would be plunged into a tumultuous phase of its history. At the Tet festival of 1945, he told the family gathered around him: “Thanks to the merits acquired by our forebears, I am now going on into my sixty-seventh year.” Recalling his illness, he went on: “Who knows, I might still be able to walk slowly to my seventieth.” That, in our culture, was the ultimate landmark in a person’s life. “Since antiquity,” a proverb said, “few have been those who reached seventy.” But grandfather would only come close to it.
In that fateful year of1945, events rushed upon our country. In March, the Japanese finally decided to do away with the French regime. In one night of fighting, everything was over. The eighty-year French rule had ended. There was general relief, but no rejoicing. Everyone knew that Japan was going to lose the war and that the new Vietnamese regime it had put into place would not last l
ong. Moreover, the Japanese occupation forces had proved to be no better than the French colonialists and Japan had lost whatever special consideration it had with the Vietnamese as a fellow Asian nation. A few months later Japan capitulated, creating a political and military vacuum. Taking advantage of it, the communists seized power. They took most people by surprise. It was thought that the ones to come back to take power would be revolutionaries in exile in China. In our family, hopes were rekindled that grandfather’s brother might be amongst them. A very confused period followed. Chinese troops came to disarm the Japanese. The nationalist party Kuomingtang took over several provinces. A French expeditionary corps was sent to reconquer Vietnam. The communists, who needed time to consolidate their position, accepted French terms. The French army returned to Hanoi. There was an uneasy period of coexistence with the French, while the communists sought to eliminate their Vietnamese opponents. Then in December 1946, war broke out.
A Vietnamese Family Chronicle Page 54