A Vietnamese Family Chronicle

by Nguyen Trieu Dan

  After they came to power, the communists abolished the old village ad-ministration and replaced it with their own system of village committees. Grandfather lost his position as Head Dignitary. But he continued to enjoy the respect of villagers and for that reason was treated with consideration by the authorities. At village festivals, it was still he who received the best meat portion, and not the committee chairman. Our family’s sympathies lay with the Kuomingtang. I remember that when news came that the Kuoming-tang’s stronghold of Yen Bay had fallen to the communists, grandfather was saddened. “If my brother was still alive, he would have been in the ranks of the Kuomingtang,” he said. The last time he visited Hanoi was in September 1946, just three months before the war started. The situation was already very tense in the capital. His health had declined. The short trip by rickshaw from Ha Dong to Hanoi took much out of him. Yet, he insisted on coming to participate in an important ceremony at the Temple of Literature. The old scholars knew that the cult of Confucius was frowned upon by the communists, yet they defiantly went ahead with their celebrations.

  Soon after the hostilities started, the villa in Ha Dong was burned down by the communists, in application of their scorched earth policy. Grand-father was distressed by the news, for not only the house but all his books and papers were lost. Three months later, his only surviving brother died. The funeral was barely completed when French troops launched their first operation against our region, and my father and elder brother were taken prisoners by them. Kim Bai was spared in the course of that operation, but the French came back after a few weeks. This time, they entered the village and pillaged our ancestral home. Grandfather had to be evacuated, firstly to a small village in the Lichee Field, then as French pressure increased, to the village of Sao on the other side of the Hat River. He fell ill there. Although Kim Bai was exposed to enemy attacks, the family decided to bring him home so that he could die in the land of his ancestors. We were then in the eighth month, the month of the Moon Festival. The weather had been dry. The early moon which shone brightly in a cloudless sky carried the promise of a beautiful festival. But of course, with the war and grandfather’s condition, no one was thinking of celebrating it. All our family had assembled in the ancestral home. The white clothes of mourning had been made ready.

  Grandfather died in the morning of the twelfth day. With him, aca-demic success and high public offices returned to our family. His was a prosperous time, indeed the most prosperous that our family had known since the golden period of the doctors under the Le and Mac dynasties, some four hundred years ago. Under him, the family grew and developed into many branches. The old fear of an absence of male descendants had been left behind us. He built a new shrine to honor the Nguyen ancestors and devoted time to search into the family’s history. Thanks to him, we now know more about our roots. As a head dignitary of Kim Bai, he contributed greatly to its welfare and development. Looking back over his life, there must be much for him to be thankful for, but I know that there was also regret. He died without having by his side his eldest son and grandson, the heads of the next two generations. Since they were taken prisoners by the French, not much news from them had reached home. With a war raging in the country, when would the family be reunited? Then, a great misfortune was that he had to die before his old mother and thus, could not fulfill his filial duties towards her. He was, moreover, her only surviving son. His friend Hoang Huan Trung referred to this, in a commemorative piece he wrote upon receiving the news of grandfather’s death:

  He upheld his family’s tradition of academic success, became the highest mandarin that his village Kim Bai has produced. An abundance of descendants, a life close to seventy years, what more can a man expect? Yet, there must be sadness that he was survived by his old mother. Perfection is frowned upon by our Creator. Now as before, it has been always like that.

  As soon as the news of his death spread, villagers flocked back to Kim Bai from their places of refuge. In spite of the communist revolution, he remained their Head Dignitary. Old folks told me that when they saw black clouds suddenly gathering on a dry morning and bringing an unexpected shower, they knew what had happened. “When a distinguished man leaves this world, even the sky is saddened,” they said. Villagers joined in the preparations for the funeral, including the communist members of the village committee. A notable absence was that of my great-uncle, the former mayor. He was arrested and taken away by the communists at the outset of the war, “as a precautionary measure,” as they explained. Had he been in Kim Bai, Great-uncle Mayor would have assumed the responsibility for organizing the funeral. Now the communists were saying that everything should be done well, to show that the absence of the former mayor was of no consequence. Normally, the burial would take place only several days after a person had died. But in the special circumstances of war, grandfather was buried the following day. We were all worried that the French might attack when everyone was back in the village, or that their planes would spot the cortege. It would be a great misfortune if the funeral were to be disrupted. Fortunately, all went well. Nearly the whole village accompanied grandfather on his last journey from our ancestral home to the family tomb. In the next three days, our family could perform all the traditional rites for the newly departed. We felt relieved and immediately prepared to leave for our sanctuary on the other side of the Hat River. Early on the fourth day, the sound of approaching small arms fire woke us up. Quickly, we all fled ahead of the advancing French troops.

  Five months after grandfather’s death, my family went back to Hanoi where we were reunited with my father and brother. Grandmother and great-grandmother continued to stay in Kim Bai, in spite of the danger of French attacks. My father took steps to bring them to the capital once he succeeded in recovering possession of the house that my grandparents built there. But by then, the old lady was too weak to be moved. She died in 1949. The funeral over, grandmother was preparing to leave for Hanoi when the French attacked. This time, they occupied Kim Bai, making it one of their regional headquarters. Our ancestral home became a barrack. Grandmother had to flee deep into the highlands. Only in the following year could we get in touch with her and arrange for a guide to bring her to Hanoi. We knew that it would be an arduous and dangerous trip. No date of arrival could be given to us, for all depended on when the guide would think it safe to cross the fighting zone.

  One late Sunday morning in August, I had just finished escorting my mother back home from her learning sessions of Buddhist canons and was on the balcony, just idly looking out onto the street, when I noticed an old lady. In the very hot weather, she was dressed in a brown tunic and black trousers. Her head was covered by a thick brown scarf. On the burning bitumen, she was going barefooted. She looked so much like an old folk from the countryside and so much smaller and frailer that at first I did not recognize her. But she turned towards the gate of our house and I knew that she was grandmother. She had arrived and she was safe! We were all over-come with joy and gratefulness.

  The next four years were a leisurely and happy period in her life. As in the old tradition, she lived with her eldest son and was cared for in her old age by him. All her children and grandchildren in Hanoi were around her, in the same house. With the security situation worsening in the coun-tryside, several of my great-uncle’s children came to join her too. A bungalow had to be built in the garden to accommodate everybody. The atmosphere was like that of our ancestral home in years gone by. I still have a photograph of her taken at a Tet festival. She was sitting alone on a carved bed, ready to receive the New Year greetings of her family. Behind her were two silk hangings with large Chinese characters, in praise of two cardinal Confucian virtues: loyalty in a subject and filial piety in a son. The photograph evokes for me images of peaceful and orderly times, when it was good to live and people did not have to fear war, revolution or foreign domination. Grandmother liked to tell me stories of those long gone times, when I was a child. “Doors had no need for locks or bolts . . . no one picke
d up money found in the street . . . cattle stayed out in the fields at night . . .,” she said. As she told me the stories, her constant preoccupation with work seemed to have left her. Her expression became composed and relaxed and for a while, she was just sitting there, instead of rushing about doing things. That leisurely period in Hanoi was the last in grandmother’s life. In 1954, our country was partitioned and the north came under the communists. Our extended family was partitioned too. Of grandmother’s eight children, five went to live in the south, while three remained in the north. My father opted for the free regime of South Vietnam. Grandmother would have gone with him, for her place was with the eldest son. But she decided to stay in Hanoi. Her children had all had families of their own, except one, the youngest son who was of the same age as I. Her duty was to be with him, she told my father. He stayed as long as he could with her, and only left Hanoi on the last day, when the city was already being handed over to the communists.

  Once in full possession of the north, the communists ruthlessly im-posed their totalitarian regime. As part of their land reform program, they ordered all villages to stage public trials in which “rich landlords” were tried for their “bourgeois crimes.” Grandmother was a victim of such a staged trial. All the land owned by my grandparents were confiscated. The result of my grandfather’s lifetime work, they amounted to some thirty acres of rice fields in Kim Bai and the two neighboring villages of Kim Lam and Cat Dong. Our ancestral home was taken over by the communist authorities. Grandmother could not return to live in Kim Bai and look after her husband’s grave. In Hanoi, she was given the use of one single room in her own house. At over seventy years of age, she had to work to receive a ration card. In 1956, our family got to know an Indian official in the International Control Commission, the organization in charge of supervising the cease-fire in Vietnam. That man made frequent trips between Saigon and Hanoi. He agreed to go to her house in Hanoi to try and meet her. Posing as a tourist who happened to pass by, he went into the house and saw that she was looking after a group of children in a creche. He could not com-municate with her in English and, in any case, was concerned that his visit could cause her problems with the communist police. So, without speaking a word, he just took out his camera. She probably guessed who sent him and let him take a photo of her. Thus, he could bring back to us a rather fuzzy diapositive. Grandmother was sitting on a chair, dressed in a faded brown tunic. She looked weak and tired, with a sad smile on her face. That was the last memento we have of her.

  How different life would have been for her, had she accepted to ac-company my parents to the south. There, although they had to work hard to resettle, they would have been able to provide for her. She would not have had to toil in her old age. Most of all, she would not have had to suffer the pain and humiliation meted out by an inhuman Marxist regime, intent on sowing hatred among the people and forcing upon them their model of class struggle. I have often thought that grandmother may have had a premonition of what was going to happen to her, ever since those summers that we children spent with her in Kim Bai before the war and revolution. She made us do the work of other villagers, and the proverb that she taught us is still inscribed in my mind:

  It is not difficult,

  To learn the ways of high living.

  But how to live a poor and humble life,

  That is indeed difficult to learn.

  “Why should one learn how to live such a life?” I wanted to ask her, but did not. The last photograph of her brought me the answer to that ques-tion. I took some comfort in the proverb, for I knew that she was well prepared to meet with the challenge of adversity. She did not fear poverty and never shunned hard work. In the following years, news about her was scarce. We were only told that she was keeping in good health. Then, the war intensified and the news stopped. She died in the summer of 1965. Later on we learned that, because of the American bombings, she was evacuated from Hanoi. She went to stay with a son of her late sister in Nuon, a village close to her own village of Phu Dong in Bac Ninh. She died there. Her wish would have been, I am sure, to be buried next to her husband, in the fields of Kim Bai. But she was laid to rest in Nuon. Her grave, I am told, was built on high ground and the family in Hanoi could make frequent visits, since the place was not far from the capital. I have some recollections of Nuon, as grandmother sometimes took me there when I was a child. The small house in which her sister lived opened into a vast orchard full of orange trees. When these were in bloom, their sweet fragrance pervaded the air. Grandmother was fond of that place. “Nuon is like my own village,” she told me, adding that “Our Heavenly Prince of Phu Dong fought the An aggressors all over here and so all this region is part of his legend.” Thus, although she could not be returned to Kim Bai, I am glad that grandmother now rests in a place that she loved, near the sacred land of the Heavenly Prince of Phu Dong.

  Her life was all work and diligence. I can still see her short and stocky figure constantly on the move in our ancestral home. The wife of a mandarin, she led a simple and laborious existence, going to the market, busily working from dawn to dusk, doing every chore just like any other villager. Her relationship with the people of Kim Bai was especially close and easy going, so it must have been a bitter experience for her, as well as for those villagers who had to “denounce” her at the public trial, for “crimes” that she never committed. In the family, grandmother was a bridge between the generations. She served her mother-in-law in the manner of old-alone among her generation she was able to carry out all filial obligations towards great-grandmother-while staying close to the younger members and sharing their hopes and aspirations. In a traditional Confucian family like ours, each person had a clearly defined position. One must defer to one’s elders, but for his part, an elder also had the obligation to give due consideration to the opinion of those below his rank. If need be, he should be prepared to give way to them. The precept said: “Respect your elders, give way to your juniors.” As was their wont, our male elders often tended to forget, or to neglect, the second part of the equation. But grandmother was there to see to it that a certain balance was restored and that the wishes of the young were heard. Her kind and loving nature helped temper the rigidity of the Confucian system and maintain in the family an atmosphere of warmth and informality.

  Epilogue: Leaving Kim Bai

  The war broke out in December 1946. For the first few months, things were not too bad in Kim Bai. We only heard the distant sound of artillery fire. French planes sometimes swooped down to strafe on villages not far away, but ours remained untouched. Refugees from Hanoi and Ha Dong came in great numbers. In our own compound, all the houses were full of people. Even the transversal house was used as a sleeping place, although it had walls only on three sides and we were in the middle of winter. Young people of my age group slept there. We had rather trying nights when the icy northern wind blew. For refugees as well as villagers, the hostilities still seemed somewhat unreal. No one thought that they would last long. Negotiations, it was rumored, were being pursued with the French on a cease-fire. Meanwhile at the market of Kim Bai, tents and huts sprouted on both sides of the highway. Almost overnight, the place became a bazaar where one could buy almost anything: clothes, textiles, Western medicine, even books. I found some novels and collections of poems of the 1930s that, before the evacuation, I could not obtain in any of Hanoi’s bookshops. There were several bicycle repair shops, the bicycle being the most convenient and effective means of transport during the war. Eating places were numerous. Some well-known noodle shops in Hanoi had reappeared there. In spite of the hostilities, they still served an excellent pho, our national dish of beef noodle soup. People made the trip to Kim Bai for the sole objective of having a bowl of their favorite pho.

  Activity during the day was subdued because of the risk of strafing by enemy planes. But once darkness fell, an extraordinary animation took over the market. I bumped into several school friends. When we said good-bye in Hanoi, we never thought that soon
we would meet again over a bowl of pho in Kim Bai, exchanging the latest rumors about the war. “You are lucky to take refuge in this bustling place,” they told me, “and not in some forsaken little village.” My grandfather and the former village council sought to develop Kim Bai into a marketing center. Events proved them right. Kim Bai had that capacity and it quickly became a bustling bazaar in response to the influx of refugees into our region.

  The Tet festival in the beginning of 1947 was still celebrated, more or less normally. People still gambled. We youngsters served as guards at the village gates and spent the nights there playing cards. The noodle shops were full, although one wondered about their delicious broth; how did they manage to get ox bones to cook it? Rumor had it that it was not ox bones but field rats which, by the way, were huge and provided an excellent meat. But that Tet was a watershed. As soon as it was over, the war descended on us. Having completed their occupation of Hanoi, the French attacked and took over the town of Ha Dong. In addition to artillery fire, we could hear from Kim Bai the distinct sound of small arms fire. In the quiet of the night, it sounded as if it were coming from the next village. Refugees who came to our village were on their way again, fleeing further away towards the south or the western foothills. One by one, the shops at the market folded up. In the village, people buried their brass urns, candle holders and incense burners, as well as their china and copper cooking pots, everything that could be buried. One day, orders were issued by the communists that dogs had to be disposed of, for their barking would reveal the presence of guerrillas operating at night to the enemy. In a space of two weeks, all dogs were killed. It would be a long time before villagers would have as much meat to eat as during those two weeks. For our family too, the new year brought with it bad tidings. These began with grandfather’s villa in Ha Dong being burned down. Then, my father came under threat of arrest. On the surface, relations between him and the communist authorities were correct. They asked him to preside over this and that committee, but that was a way for them to keep an eye on him. His movements were under strict surveillance. He was not allowed to go to other villages, even on official business of his committee, without being accompanied by two or three communist cadres. Soon, he heard that orders for his arrest had been sent out. Luckily, the communist hold on the administrative apparatus was still loose at the time. Friendly officials succeeded in sending the orders to the wrong village. A few months after the Tet, my great-uncle died. French troops launched an operation against our region and my father was captured by them.