A Vietnamese Family Chronicle Read online

  A page of the chronicle written in the scholarly-or Chinese-script by my grandfather, circa 1910. Written on absorbent rice paper, with a writing brush made of rabbit hair, the page measures 14.5cms by 29.5cms. The characters should be read from top down and right to left.

  A Vietnamese Family Chronicle

  Twelve Generations on the Banks of the Hat River

  NGUYEN TRIEU DAN

  McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

  Jefferson, North Carolina

  This book on our village

  and ancestry is dedicated to my parents.

  It is written for my children

  Huynh Chau, Trieu Minh, Trieu Quang and Hoang Anh,

  who have grown up far away from their homeland.

  My wife has been a constant source of strength.

  She and the whole family have been wonderfully supportive.

  This book owes much to them.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

  BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

  e-ISBN: 978-0-7864-8779-0

  © 1991 Nguyen Trieu Dan. All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Front cover design by David K. Landis (Shake It Loose Graphics)

  McFarland & Company, Inc., PublishersBox 611,

  Jefferson, North Carolina 28640

  www.mcfarlandpub.com

  Contents

  Prologue

  I. The Land of My Forebears

  1. Legends and History

  2. My Village

  3. Our Ancestral Home

  4. School Holidays in Kim Bai

  5. Our Family

  6. Family Gatherings

  7. The Village Community

  II. The Source in the Mountains

  8. The Family Chronicle

  9. The Ancestral Shrine

  10. The Cu Hau’s Papers

  11. The Nguyen Brothers

  12. Family Traits

  13. The Continuing Search

  III. The Nguyen of Kim Bai

  14. First Generation-The Count of Hung Giao

  15. The Academician-Envoy

  16. The Tragedy of the Third and Fourth Generations

  17. Recluse Scholars

  18. The Great Calamity

  19. The Businessman

  20. The Hermit of the Mountain of the Twins

  21. The Governor

  Epilogue: Leaving Kim Bai

  Chronological Table

  Bibliography

  List of Names and Terms

  Prologue

  “Stone wears out with time.

  But my heart will not forget.”

  The family chronicle, which we have managed to preserve through decades of war and the tragedy of exile, was compiled at the beginning of this century by my grandfather. It is being kept on the ancestors’ altar in our Melbourne home, in a red and black lacquer box. Written in Chinese script, the traditional way of writing for scholars at that time, it opens with the following sentences:

  A tree has countless branches and a dense canopy of leaves, because its roots grow deep into the soil.

  The water flows out in a multitude of streams and currents, for it has its source a long way back in the mountains.

  He who inherits the merit acquired by his ancestors for many generations, has children and grandchildren in abundance.

  The origins of a family are found not only in its lineage going back to the earliest ancestors in memory. They are also to be found in the land which has seen the generations succeed one another, has nourished them, and to whose fold all of us wish to return at the end of our lives. Attachment to our native land is as strong as to our kin. This is especially so for the Vietnamese who, for thousands of years, have lived in the delta of the Red River. The village and its rice fields, the river winding its way, the mountains on the horizon, have formed the setting of our lives since times immemorial. They have become part of our very soul.

  This attachment to the land has been tinged with sorrow and sadness because, now as before, it has been the lot of many Vietnamese to spend their lives far from the villages where they were born.

  They may have been soldiers sent to the borders, either to safeguard the country against aggression, or to take part in military campaigns to extend the national territory. They may have had to leave the overpopulated delta of the north and go south in search of new means of livelihood. It may have been, also, that the changing fortunes of war and the rise and fall of dynasties have forced those on the losing side into exile. Vietnam has had a tumultuous and violent history. During times of upheaval, which have been frequent, its people’s fate has been at the mercy of the tide of events, just as in the rainy season, the pieces of wood floating in the Red River are at the mercy of its angry current.

  In the old days, to leave one’s village at all meant in most instances never to return. Few soldiers who went to the borders ever came back. If not killed in battle, they rarely survived the deadly climate of those areas. Eleven generations ago, our forebears were uprooted from their village and became refugees after the dynasty they served was overthrown. They stayed away for ten years or more, before some of them were able to go back. Many of our kinsmen migrated to the south during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and all contact with them was lost. One of our ancestors visited the south as a trader, but there he died. Yet, separation from home only increased the age-old sense of belonging. The smaller the hope of return, the more desperate the yearning to do so. Homesickness has been one of the main themes of Vietnamese poetry, from folk poems communicated orally to the Story of Kieu, a long romance in verse considered as the brightest jewel of our literature. All children were taught the following folk poem in their first years of school. Impossible to translate faithfully, it nonetheless runs like this:

  Last night I stood by the side of the pond.

  The fish had gone deep under the water,

  And the stars in the sky were dim.

  Sadly I watched a spider spinning its web,

  Was it waiting for a soul to befriend?

  And was the Morning Star so pale,

  Because of the loved one it missed?

  Night after night, I dreamed of the Milky Way,

  And the Polar Star of my own firmament.

  Three full years have gone by.

  Stone wears out with time, but my heart will not forget.

  The Tao River still flows, and will ever be there.

  When I learned the poem I did not quite understand the last verse, although like many other children I could recite it by heart, because the rhyme is so melodious and easy to remember. As a young man, I went abroad for my university studies. On summer nights in France when the air was warm and filled with the sounds of insects just as it was at home, I often watched the sky to look for the familiar sights of my childhood: the cloudy Milky Way which in Vietnam we call Ngan Ha or Silvery River, the stars which form the image of Emperor Than Nong, the God of Agriculture, who at harvest time would change his posture and bend over to cut the rice plants, and the bright full moon on which one could clearly see the banyan tree of the legend with Master Cuoi sleeping in its shade instead of minding his water buffaloes. But the sky in Europe was different. Stars were not at their appointed places and the moon had no banyan tree. It was only then that I understood the anonymous poet. He had to dream of his familiar sky because, where he was living at the time, it could not be seen. He was an exile crying out his love and yearning for the land o
f his birth.

  Today, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese are in exile. Their country is under a regime which tramples on human rights and keeps itself in power using a ruthless apparatus of oppression. In a foreign land, they struggle and toil to make a living. But the source which had nourished their spirits and their hopes is missing and the night skies of Australia, Europe and America, beautiful though they may be, are not the companions of their dreams. The English poet Coleridge wrote:

  Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,

  And hope without an object cannot live.

  Was he thinking of exiles like us, I wonder. For which Vietnamese has not, when evening falls on his place of refuge, felt the years slipping by him like spring water through his fingers and the waste and uselessness of his life? Yet, it is not true to say that our country-the object of our hope-has been lost. We have been separated from it, but like the Tao River in the folk poem, Vietnam is still there and it will ever be. We do not know when history will begin another chapter, but we must have faith. As in the words of the poem, let our hearts not forget. Let them not waver.

  I. The Land of My Forebears

  1. Legends and History

  The home of my family is in north Vietnam. My forebears came from a village in the northwestern corner of the Red River delta, not far from the hilly region covering the provinces of Phu Tho, Vinh Yen and Son Tay. That region is thought to be the cradle of the Viet race. The Viet people in all probability came down from there to settle in the plains next to the foothills, millenniums ago. They cultivated the land, set up villages. Gradually, they spread out on both sides of the Red River towards the Eastern Sea, the name by which we call the South China Sea. The country’s first dynasty, the Hong Bang (2879 to 258 B.C.), established their capital at Phong Chau, a few dozen kilometers northwest of our village.

  Among Vietnamese legends, some are believed to relate to events occuring under the first dynasty. The oldest is the legend of the Heavenly Prince of Phu Dong. In the reign of Hung Vuong VI, the country was attacked by the An people from China. The army was unable to contain the aggressors. The worried king sent messengers to all the provinces to look for warriors capable of saving the situation. In the village of Phu Dong, north of Hanoi, lived a four-year-old boy who was healthier and stronger than other boys of his age and whose handsome features bore the sign of precocious intelligence. But since birth, he had never uttered a sound, nor proffered a smile. Upon the arrival of the royal messenger, he suddenly burst into speech and asked his parents to take him to the visitor. The boy talked to the messenger like a grown man. He said that should the king give him an iron horse and a gold sword, he would pacify the An. The messenger brought the boy to the capital and duly made his report. King Hung Vuong, intrigued, called for the boy to be brought before him. He was impressed by his appearance and ordered the horse and sword to be cast. When these were ready and brought before him, the boy got up and, stretching his body, at once grew into a ten-foot-tall warrior of imposing presence. The warrior leapt onto the back of the iron horse, which thereupon was transformed into a splendid white steed. Brandishing his gleaming sword, the warrior hero fought the aggressors at the head of the army. Wherever he went the enemy ranks crumbled and before long peace and security returned to the country. But the warrior did not. His mission accomplished, he flew away on his steed into the sky and disappeared. The grateful king bestowed on the warrior the title of Heavenly Prince of Phu Dong and ordered that a temple be built in the village where he was born to honor his memory. Every year since that time, a festival is held at Phu Dong on the ninth day of the fourth lunar month to commemorate Anniversary Day, the day when the miracle-working warrior returned to the heavens.

  My grandmother liked to tell me the legend of the Heavenly Prince. To the above version given in most of our history books, she usually added a number of details which belonged to the story as told by the people of Phu Dong. For Phu Dong was her village. Thus, she said that the Prince was of supernatural origins. His mother became pregnant after meeting with a spirit one night. Before he rode out on his steed to fight the aggressors, villagers of Phu Dong offered him food but, in view of his enormous size, did not know what would be a sufficient amount of rice to cook. “What is the largest pot you have?” asked the warrior. “We have a pot which can contain enough rice to feed thirty grown men,” the villagers answered. “Then, cook enough rice for thirty people!” ordered the warrior. After the rice was cooked, the warrior seized the huge pot and swallowed in one gulp its contents of steaming rice. My grandmother did not always recall all the details, so that each time she told me the story, there was something new. “When the horse jumped high in the sky,” she said,“it began to spit out fire. Many of the An bandits were turned into ashes.” The warrior fought so hard that his gold sword broke. He directed his steed to a nearby village and uprooted a clump of tall bamboo to use as a weapon. Unfortunately for that village, his steed continued to spit out fire and the village was burnt out. Later on, it was rebuilt and given the name of Lang Chay, or Burned Village. The Heavenly Prince did not forget the harm done by his steed. Soon a new type of bamboo grew in the village. It had a black and yellow variegated trunk making it look as if it had been scorched. The bamboo was particularly straight and strong. Villagers of Lang Chay used it to make household utensils which became much sought after and gave them a good income.

  Next to the great mass of China, Vietnam is a small country. It has survived because, like the Prince of the legend, its people have been able to rise above themselves in times of need to defeat the aggressors. The Prince has been a guardian spirit shielding them from despair and urging them to continue with the struggle, even when the odds were stacked against them and all seemed lost. When the country was still at peace, my grandmother used to take me and my uncle-her youngest son who is of the same age as I-to the celebrations of Anniversary Day. Phu Dong is about fifty kilometers from our village, on the other side of the Red River. As a boy, I never went there without a certain feeling of awe, for the sacred land of our Heavenly Prince was also rooted deep in Buddhist tradition. In the ninth century, the Chinese Zen master Vo Ngon Thong came to Phu Dong and asked to be admitted to one of its temples, called the Kien So. There, he spent the next six years practicing the “face to the wall meditation.” Before he died, he passed the “seal-of-mind” to the Vietnamese head priest of the temple. That was the beginning of a famous Zen school which bore his name. In the eleventh century, Princess Dieu Nhan of the Ly dynasty became a nun in the village’s Huong Hai Convent. She was the only bhik-suni-or nun-ever to receive the “seal-of-mind” in the Zen patriarchal tradition. She belonged to the seventeenth generation of the Ty-Ni-Da-Luu-Chi School, founded in the sixth century by the Indian priest Vini-taruci and the oldest Zen school in Vietnam.

  We used to spend the eve of the festival in Phu Dong, in the ancestral home of the Dang Tran, my grandmother’s family. I could never recognize all my uncles, aunts and cousins there. At festival time, the ancestral home overflowed with people and we hardly slept amidst all the noise and movement. My grandmother greatly enjoyed her visits to Phu Dong. She rarely missed a festival, not only because that was the only time during the year that she could meet with her family but also, as she told me one day, because it was on the festival grounds that she first saw my grandfather, many years ago. But I do not recall him accompanying us, except in the year when he was the governor of the province of Bac Ninh, where the village of Phu Dong was. The next morning, we would rise early and go to the temple dedicated to the Heavenly Prince, before the crowd of festival-goers arrived from Hanoi and the neighboring towns. The large temple was built in the eleventh century by King Ly Thai To, the founder of the Ly dynasty. Before he became king, Ly Thai To was a mandarin under the Le. He stayed for some time in the Kien So Pagoda and often came to the old temple to pray to the Heavenly Prince for guidance, for the country was in a desperate situation with an evil and bloodthirsty Le king, who led such a diss
olute life that he could not even rise from his bed for Court audiences and was therefore nicknamed “The Reclining King.” It was said that the Heavenly Prince appeared to Ly Thai To in his dream and revealed to him his royal destiny. After ascending the throne, Ly Thai To ordered that, in place of the old temple, a new and larger one be built.

  The festivities started later in the day. They took place on a grassy hill outside the village. In the fourth lunar month, the heat was already upon us and the pretty faces of the village girls were hidden under wide conical hats. In the afternoon, a battle reenacted the crushing of the An bandits. The Vietnamese forces were played by well-built young men, dressed only in black loincloths, under the command of officers wearing ancient style military uniforms and shaded by parasols. The commander of the forces held an orange banner, said to be the color chosen by the Heavenly Prince for his campaign against the aggressors. Much of the attention of the crowd was directed to the “enemy,” who were dressed much more elaborately in rich combinations of colors. They were young girls, looking like actresses on stage with their heavy makeup. That they were chosen to play the enemy was not intended as a slight to the fair sex, only to show that in a battle, they were no match for the young men, just as the An aggressors were no match for the Heavenly Prince. After a session of ancient music, songs and dances to strengthen the fighting spirit of the men, the battle was joined. The Vietnamese attacked, the enemy withdrew, then counterattacked, but they were beaten and captured. There was no show of fighting, just a series of slow moves back and forth. At the end, the girls remained as fresh and beautiful as when they started, and still attracted the better part of the crowd.