A Vietnamese Family Chronicle Read online

  The transversal house, too, was female territory. And so, of course, was the kitchen. How many times had I been expelled from there by my grandmother! She was very firm that only girls should be in there. “Heroes of the kitchen corner!” she would chastise us boys before telling us to go back to our study room. Still, I was drawn there by the smell of my favorite dishes being cooked, like bean curd casserole, caramel pork and a lot of others. Moreover, I was quite good at tasting the food to see whether it had been cooked to the right texture or whether it had got enough salt, sugar, or the right combination of spices. Often, I was called by the ladies to the kitchen to give my expert opinion on the dishes they were cooking.

  In front of the altar house and parallel to it was a two-story building called the new house. Built in the 1930s, it was the only storeyed house in the village and probably, in the whole canton. As mentioned earlier, its shape recalled the Mountain of the Twins in the geomancer’s prophecy. The three rooms downstairs were used as lounge, guest room and my grandfather’s study. The guest room became the boys’ study or games room during the summer vacation. Grandfather worked and slept in his study. His platform of blackwood had a smooth and shiny surface which kept wonderfully cool in summer. I have fond memories of the new house, where we boys had our quarters, for we slept in the two rooms upstairs. It was also there that grandfather taught me the Chinese script, which we called chu nho, or scholarly script. A knowledge of that script is essential to a thorough understanding of the Vietnamese language, but schools had stopped teaching it. In the summer of 1943, my grandfather decided that it was time to fill that gap in our education. He started teaching us four boys. After a couple of weeks, however, the other three left for Hanoi to have private tutoring in preparation for the coming academic year. I was the only one who did not need tutoring and, therefore, stayed back in Kim Bai. At first I felt left out but soon became absorbed in my new studies. Each day after the morning meal, I went to grandfather’s study and prepared the black ink by dipping an ink stick in water, then rubbing it hard against a stone slab until an ink of required thickness was obtained. I learned to use all the muscles of my right arm in this rubbing operation, so as to warm them up for the writing session. Then, I put out on the desk his writing panoply of brushes of different sizes, most of them having bamboo handles but some with handles in shining silver. When everything was ready, grandfather came to the study and the lesson started. A big rectangular panka fan was suspended from the ceiling. I listened to grandfather while pulling the fan.

  Grandfather began his career as a teacher and stayed in that profession for ten years before he was appointed to head a prefecture. He was a good teacher who adapted his teaching to the needs of his pupil. Instead of making me learn by rote a number of Chinese characters in the traditional way, which was dry in the extreme, he taught me the characters in the context of Vietnamese and Chinese classical literature. Each day, he took a passage of the Story of Kieu, a 3254-verse poem acknowledged as the masterpiece of our literature. As I read the verses aloud, he wrote down all the words which came from Chinese script, at the same time explaining and commenting on each verse. Where other poetry may directly describe, Vietnamese poetry commonly alludes and suggests. Just as a few dots of ink in a painting can suggest so much, a few words of poetry can create a whole mood. Often the poet makes reference to some story taken from classical Chinese literature, and he gives to his poem, by that brief reference alone, a new dimension. For instance, in the early part of the Story of Kieu, the heroine said in response to the advances made by her lover:

  Even with deep red leaves and vermilion threads,

  We still must depend on our parents’ consent.

  “Deep red leaves” and “vermilion threads” both allude to ancient Chinese stories. To a knowledgeable reader, their inclusion gives to the above verse the poetic meaning and depth of feelings associated with those stories. This is the story of the vermilion threads. Vi Co was a young student, still very much after the pleasures of life. Returning home one evening after a merry session with friends, he saw an old man reading a book in the moonlight. The man had beside him a bag full of vermilion threads. Something out of the ordinary about the old man led Vi Co to approach and ask him what it was that he was reading. The old man said: “In this book are the names of men and women destined to be joined in matrimony and these threads are to tie them together.” Vi Co was in high spirits so, repressing a chuckle, he said to the old man: “My name is Vi Co, can you tell me who it is who will be my wife?” The old man replied: “Indeed, I should not divulge Heaven’s secret prematurely, but for you I am prepared to make an exception. Come and meet me tomorrow morning at the market place.” Next day Vi Co went to the market and saw the old man already there. “So,” asked Vi Co, “where is my future wife?” The old man said, “There she is!” and pointed to a half-naked three-year-old girl playing nearby. At once, Vi Co saw himself as the butt of a joke and was furious. Losing all control, he hit the small girl on the head with his stick and in the commotion that ensued, he slipped away. Years later, as a mandarin, he duly married the adopted daughter of his superior. They were in love with each other and lived happily ever after. One day his wife was washing her long black tresses when Vi Co happened to pass by her room. At that moment, he noticed a big scar on her head, and her story came out. Coming from a poor family, she had been orphaned and came to, be adopted by a high mandarin. Vi Co realized that indeed it was she who had been the small girl in the marketplace so long ago. When Vietnamese texts mention “vermilion threads” or “the old man in the moonlight,” they refer to a predestined union that transcends the love between a man and a woman. The phrase “deep red leaves” alludes to another story of love promises exchanged.

  I had known by heart many verses of the Story of Kieu and enjoyed their melodious rhymes and surface meaning, but grandfather’s commentaries opened my mind to the real depth and richness of that work. I was thrilled. The solitary summer months without any companion of my age passed quickly. I also occupied myself with learning Chinese calligraphy. Grandmother looked upon it with much pride. As I was then very thin, she constantly urged me to have more to eat. “Only those who eat enough can learn,” she said, quoting a well-known proverb. As a matter of fact, I found out myself that it was very difficult to use my brush well on an empty stomach. Good brushwork required total control of your right arm which was inclined to be shaky if you felt hungry or tired. We Vietnamese liked to eat what we called “the end parts” of fish or fowl; for instance, the head and tail of a fish are more appreciated than its body and chicken feet are much sought after. One popular belief, however, was that if a scholar were to eat chicken feet, his arm would shake and his calligraphy would suffer. It was a belief that I had never subscribed to, but whenever grandmother was present, chicken feet were something I was not allowed to touch.

  The following summer, I was back in the village and grandfather resumed his teaching. I had by then made enough progress to learn the Confucian Four Books, not in their totality of course, but the first two-the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean-and extracts from the Analects and from Mencius. At the same time, grandfather introduced me to Tang poetry. It was pure joy. He had a complete collection of Tang poems, printed with wooden plates in Vietnam or China, probably at the beginning of this century. The characters were bold and beautifully composed. How I wish now that that collection had been kept! In the manner of scholars of his days, he made a small circle in red ink next to the words he most enjoyed reading, so, when I opened a book, I would read first the poems that had the most red circles. Many Tang poems were so beautiful that some of the pages were almost covered in red circles. It was like discovering an endless treasure. In many poems, I could not read all the words nor could I completely comprehend the meaning, but even two or three verses would often suffice to reveal a magic beauty that led me passionately to search for new discoveries.

  At about the same period, I began reading The Stor
y of the Three Kingdoms in Chinese. Grandfather was away from the village for a few weeks. I took out the first volume of The Three Kingdoms from his bookcase more out of curiosity than anything else. I did not think I could read it, having studied Chinese for an aggregate of three or four months only. To my surprise, I went easily through the first pages and continued on. Lying on a hammock in the guest room and using my foot to swing it to find relief from the stuffy heat, I read avidly and with trepidation the stratagems of heroes and villains, the tales of loyalty and treachery, the fortunes of war and the fate of men in those stormy times. The Three Kingdoms along with other Chinese classics such as The Warring States, The Water Margin and The Journey to the West were parts of our own cultural legacy. Their heroes and heroines were familiar already from folk stories. Now I found them all over again and learnt more about them and their exploits from the richest literary veins themselves. When grandfather came back, the whole household was talking about my ability to read The Three Kingdoms in its original text. It was grandmother who broke the news to him. Grandfather was pleased indeed, but characteristically kept a sense of proportion. “ The Three Kingdoms,” he said, “is the easiest of Chinese historical novels. All students started their reading with that novel.”

  Grandmother also kept all the sheets of paper that I used for practicing my calligraphy. It was a special, absorbent paper, as Chinese is written in vertical lines from top to bottom and from right to left. Our people considered Chinese characters as the “script of saints and sages” and extended their respect to the paper they were written on. It was not to be thrown away together with rubbish, or put to any lowly uses. Thus, grandmother took special care in collecting my papers and storing them away in a safe place. She showed them to her husband proudly. Grandfather, however, was content to respond with a smile. I knew that he considered my calligraphy still very immature.

  The new house was parallel to the altar house, at a distance of about a dozen meters. Linking the two was a roofed hall, open to the garden and trees on both sides. The family took their meals during the summer in that well-ventilated area. In front of the new house lay a large courtyard, paved in square red bricks. The newly harvested paddy was dried there before being stored in our granary.

  There was another building in the compound called the western house, but we seldom went there. It was built in 1929, in a style brought into the country by the French and therefore called western or modern. It had a ceiling and large windows, and was partitioned by internal walls into separate rooms. The name western also indicated its position, the western side of the compound. My grandfather gave the house to his younger brother, who had a business in Hanoi but owned no land in the village. My great-aunt died there in 1940 of tuberculosis. Since then, the house had been left vacant most of the time. Only at important ceremonies was it opened, to entertain village notables. When we children returned to Kim Bai for the summer holidays, we tended to keep away from it. Although my great-aunt had died several years earlier, we were still fearful of catching tuberculosis, an incurable disease in those days.

  All the houses, except for the transversal house, were decorated with innumerable boards carrying Chinese inscriptions carved in the wood. There were vertical boards, hung in pairs on walls and pillars and called “parallel sentences.” A sentence could be composed of up to seven or eight characters. There were horizontal boards, hung high on walls or across lintels. Some boards had only three or four very big characters. Others contained whole poems in smaller characters. The boards were painted and lacquered in various combinations of black, red, gold and silver; for instance, gold characters on a red background or silver characters on a black background. Some characters, made of mother-of-pearl inlaid in the wood, shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow. Apart from the boards, the houses had no other decorations, pictures or paintings. But the boards were everywhere. Their shining colors gave a rich and festive look to the rooms.

  The boards were presented to our family on occasions such as the reception of some honor from the court, or when my grandfather was promoted to a higher rank, or again, when my great-grandmother reached the age of seventy. The inauguration of a new house was also such an occasion. Big celebrations were held and guests brought these boards as presents. Their value resided, of course, not only in the quality of the wood, carving, paint and lacquer, but even more in the thoughts they expressed and in the artistry of their calligraphy. Not every scholar could write the large characters to be carved on the boards. These were the work of master calligraphers. Calligraphy in our home region tended to favor an angular or “nervy” quality of stroke, designed to show “all the thews and sinews” in each character. Most boards in our ancestral home came from that school and gave an impression of strength, but also of formal rigidity. A few had characters with softer and rounder lines, which were more pleasing to the eye. They were written by scholars belonging to a different school of calligraphy. The characters on some boards were written in a clear and “regular style” and I could read them, or at least I could look them up in the dictionary. Many calligraphers, however, prided themselves with writing fast; they often used a “running style,” or even a faster “grass style,” which reduced the characters to a maze of indecipherable loops. “Like wriggling worms!” people would mock their style. But the highest compliment that one could pay a calligrapher was to say that “flying dragons and dancing phoenixes” came out from his brush. As a teenager, I was not able to read the grass style, but did sometimes see those mythological creatures appear. I used to take my midday nap lying in a hammock in the new house’s guest room. In that room was a horizontal board with a long poem written in grass style. The characters of the poem were painted black over a background of golden clouds and the board itself was framed on all four sides with elaborate carvings of dragons painted in red. Dozing off in the oppressive heat of early afternoon, I would wake up suddenly and see the characters on the board springing up to life. For a brief moment, red and black dragons were dancing together before my eyes in a confused manner.

  The words on the boards were mostly consecrated formulas expressing compliments and good wishes. A large horizontal board in the front room of our altar house had the four characters Dai Gia Bi Phuc, which expressed the noble reminder that “A great family is destined to be happy and fortunate.” Most parallel sentences and poems were in the same vein. But some boards were particularly prized by my grandfather, either because they were written by renowned poets of his time-his friend Licentiate Duong, who wrote our family chronicle, was one such poet-or because they referred to salient events in our family’s history. All the boards, however, were lost in the turmoil of the 1940s and the 1950s. Many of these works of art, I was told, were chopped up by the troops billeted in our compound to make firewood. Our family had kept a complete record of all presents received on the occasion of celebrations, including the texts of all decorative boards. Alas, that document too had been lost. Our ancestral home was occupied by French troops from 1950 until 1954. When the French left, the communists moved in. We were never allowed to go back there.

  My grandfather built the altar house and its adjoining transversal house in the 1920s to provide better accommodation for his old mother, who stayed back in the village and did not follow him on his mandarinal postings. Besides a courtyard, the rest of the land was left to trees and gardens. In particular, our compound had a number of old and tall trees giving it coolness and shade and making it look like a secluded rural retreat. Grandfather was the son of a Taoist scholar. He would have liked the compound to stay that way, for the day when he would retire. But his career decided otherwise. He became a high official in his hometown Ha Dong. As Kim Bai was so near, he used to go back there to celebrate important family functions such as the anniversary of the death of his father. Friends, colleagues, surbordinates joined him on such occasions. As he rose high in rank the number of his guests increased. In the late 1920s, he built the western house to entertain them. Soon, th
is proved to be insufficient and the new house was built. Then, a larger courtyard was needed to park the guests’ rickshaws and even cars which had made their appearance in the country. Our ancestral home became a group of brick buildings, very comfortable to live in, but a far cry from the traditional village cottage that I had learned to love in poems and folk songs. The arbor of thien ly was not there, and neither was the thatched roof on which dewdrops shone like gold in the morning sun.

  Grandfather managed, however, to preserve a few old trees. In the front yard was a row of tall and thin areca nut trees, whose fruit was an essential ingredient to betel chewing. A long nao or camphor tree stood between the altar house and the new house. It was the tallest tree in the compound, taller even than the roof of the two-storeyed new house. The sap of the long nao had medicinal qualities and the whole tree produced a nice fragrance which kept away flies and mosquitoes. Its wood was good to make furniture. Three pomelo trees bore each year hundreds of fruits as big as a melon, full of juice and very sweet. The front yard had two tropical flower plants called ngau and moc. These were usually planted near places of worship and, therefore, treated with special care. Our ngau and moc were enclosed in raised brick planter boxes. The moc flower is a miniature jasmine, with white porcelain-like petals. The ngau must be quite old, as it was twice or three times the size of a normal ngau and its branches reached up to our first-floor windows. Its small and numerous yellow flowers bloomed in spring at about the same time as the moc and their fragrance filled the whole courtyard. Behind the altar house was a large tree called sau which bore small and acid fruits and when marinated in a mixture of fish sauce, vinegar, sugar and chili, produced a favorite tidbit. Ask any Vietnamese from the north about the marinated sau and his mouth will water at the mere mention of it.