Epilogue
THE CREATORS OF SOUTH VIETNAM: AT HOME AND ABROAD
It is worth
noting, however, that in one area the regime’s effort to eradicate the culture
of the south utterly failed: the area of popular song. The regime certainly did
its best in its early years to eradicate the music of the south. I am
personally acquainted with a singer who was imprisoned for ten years as a consequence of
having been caught listening to a song with “petty-bourgeois” characteristics. The regime wanted music to be
revolutionary in spirit and to have a mass character. It was supposed to have
nothing to do with merely personal desires. A particular object of opprobrium
was “yellow music” (nhạc vàng), a type of formulaically morose music
designed to soothe the tired nerves of people in cafés and bars. It
was produced and performed in great profusion under the Republic. The
opposition of the government to this type of music was based in part on an
ancient Chinese superstition, very influential in East Asia, according to which
music of the wrong sort can bring a nation or dynasty to ruin, whereas music of
the right sort can cause a nation or dynasty to flourish. There was a Chinese
name for music of the wrong sort: wáng guó zhī yīn 亡國之音, or
“nation-destroying music.” But for several decades now, “nation-destroying
music,” a category mainly composed of songs created under the Southern Republic,
has completely triumphed in Vietnam. The regime has made efforts to promote
“red music” (nhạc đỏ)—jolly, martial, optimistic tunes sung
by happy comrades—but yellow music is what people overwhelmingly prefer to
listen to.
In order to provide a broader context for the figures discussed by
Doctor Vinh, I will add a few comments here about the historical nexus in which
the literature of the South arose.
• Language:
Vietnamese is in origin a member of the Mon-Khmer language family, an example
of which is Khmer, the language of Cambodia, but has such an extensive Chinese
overlay that it seems to the casual student to be more closely related to
Chinese than to any other language. In a typical piece of Vietnamese prose
about seventy percent of the words are Chinese, but are pronounced in a way
peculiar to Vietnamese. Six tones are distinguished in the writing system, and
the language is largely monosyllabic, in the sense that almost every syllable
in Vietnamese carries a meaning of some sort. There is considerable regional
variation in pronunciation, with three dialects, Northern, Central, and
Southern, being generally distinguished. Vietnamese is now written by
means of a phonetic system composed of Latin letters plus diacritics. The
earliest codifier of this system was the Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes (1593–1660), who in 1651
published a trilingual Latin, Portuguese, and Vietnamese dictionary in Rome.
His writing system, however, did not come into general use in Vietnam until the
first decades of the twentieth century. What was used instead was a system
known as “southern characters” (chữ nôm), an extensive adaptation of written Chinese. This system was
cumbersome and required years of study to master.
• Legends: Vietnamese literature began
with two lengthy manuscripts written in classical Chinese by Vietnamese court
officials in the fourteenth century, during the Trần dynasty. That they were written in Chinese is
not strange, because that was the language of the Vietnamese court, and at that time only partial efforts had as yet been made to use characters (whether preexisting or newly invented), to stand for words of
native origin. The first manuscript, Việt Điện U Linh Tập (“Anthology of the Unseen
Powers of the Land of Việt”) was devoted to the deeds of various deceased
military figures, the spirits of whom were presumed by the
authors to be providing supernatural support to Vietnamese royal
armies. The second manuscript, Lĩnh Nam Chích Quái (“Strange Tales Picked up
from South of the Mountains”) is filled with historical legends—about kings, princes,
spirits, damsels, adventurers, magicians, and so on—that seem to invite
comparison with Chinese historical legends. In comparison to their Chinese
analogues, the Vietnamese tales are outrageously supernatural, wildly
imaginative, and rife with wish-fulfillment.
• Rural
folk-verse: This category of literaure of is huge, and may be seen everywhere.
It has no analogue in China, either in form or spirit. Rural folk-verse in Vietnam exists in
the form of couplets, called lục-bát or “six-eight” couplets, because the
first line has six syllbles and the second eight. The last syllable of the
six-line couplet must rhyme with the sixth syllable of the eight-syllable line, so as to create an effect of snappy closure. They tend to be saucy, satirical, and non-ideological. Here are some examples:
Xưa kia nói nói thề
thề,
Bây giờ bẻ khóa
trao chìa cho ai.
[In times gone by you said “I’m true, I’ll stay”
But now the
lock is pulled apart—to whom will you vouchsafe the key?]
and:
Hoài tiền mua pháo
đốt chơi,
Pháo nổ ra xác, tiền
ôi là tiền.
[I miss the funds I spent on fireworks,
The shells went bang and turned to ash; the money—oh my money!]
and:
Khen ai khéo tạc bình phong,
Ngoài long, lân, phượng, trong lòng gạch vôi.
[How splendid are the screens that people make—
Outside all dragons, tigers, phoenixes; inside—bricks and lime].
• Verse
Narratives: These are narratives made up of a thousand or more strung-together
“six-eight” couplets. This, again, is a branch of literature that has no
analogue in China. Well over a dozen examples of this form are extant, but one in particular
enjoys particular fame. This is the Tale of Kiều” (Truyện Kiều.).
It was written in “southern
characters” (see above) in circa 1818 by Nguyễn Du (1766–1820), a
court official under the first ruler of the Nguyễn dynasty who, on the basis of this work, is
regarded as Vietnam’s greatest poet. The characters and plot of the work are
closely based on a Chinese prose romance that had appeared in the
mid-seventeenth century. The story follows the fortunes of the heroine Kiều, who is forced
by circumstance to endure a series of harrowing adventures, including many
extremes of triumph and degradation. Quotations from Nguyễn Du’s Kiều, and references to its characters and
events, abound in the works of other Vietnamese authors. Among English
translations of this work, I recommend that of Vladislav Zhukov entitled Kim
Vân Kiều (Cornell University Press), and another
by Huỳnh Sanh Thông (Yale University Press). An additional Vietnamese verse
narrative that has had a substantial influence is Lục Vân Tiên (composed 1851, first printing 1864) by Nguyễn Đình Chiều (1822–1866), a poem that celebrates Confucian
virtue combined with manly hardihood, with many evocations of nature spirits.
• Song Lyrics:
As I have mentioned above, the period of the Southern Republic was particularly
rich in the production of songs. The musicians who created the melodies of those
songs often wrote the lyrics as well, so they were poets as well as melodists.
Many phrases from their lyrics have become part of the Vietnamese language and some sets of song
lyrics are expressive enough to work as stand-alone poems. Here, for example,
is a translation of the lyrics to Trịnh Công Sơn’s “Give a Little Favor to Life” (“Cho Đời
Chút Ơn”):
One day I saw you walking home across the street,
And I was suddenly delighted, as if life were
strange.
I saw my gazing at each footstep from afar;
My soul was floating here and there above the
road.
I felt that I was like a ray of sunlight come
To help the red hue of your lips become more
red.
Oh paradise, oh chirping khuyên
bird,
Oh fragrant curled hair and silent shoulders—
I felt that life was endlessly immense
In people’s slow successive steps.
Keep stepping on,
that dawn may rise into our hearts;
Give to life the
little favor of a certain flapping dress.
You’re the pollen
giving fragrance to the forest;
You’re the words
we sing upon the road.
Oh, having seen
you on that city street,
I lay and dreamt
of you throughout the night in paradise.
• Other aspects
of the culture: In the above I have omitted many items worth exploring. I
will here make a few random additions. There is the autobiography of the
filmmaker Trần Văn Thủy (Chuyện Nghề Của Thủy, 2014, English title: In Whose Eyes,
University of Massachusetts Press). Thủy, born in 1941, began his filmmaking career as a combat
journalist for the North Vietnamese army and then evolved into professional maker of documentaries notable
for their truthfulness. His book could be regarded a sort of
“cousin” of Solomon Volkov’s Testimony (the oral memoirs of Shostakovich) in that it portrays the inherent difficulty
of behaving in a kind and principled manner in a sociopolitical system that
punishes people for the possession of such qualities. There is Số Đỏ (English title: Dumb Luck, University of Michigan Press) by Vũ Trọng Phụng (1912–1939), first published in the late colonial
era in 1936. It is a satirical novel in which the protagonist’s complete lack
of intellect and principle allows him to rise to highest levels of society.
Then there is Chuyện Ngõ Nghèo (“Life in a Wretched Little Lane”),
written by Nguyễn Xuân Khánh (1933–2021) in 1982, but not published until 2016. It evokes an era when the
author and his compatriots had to raise pigs at home in order to keep body and
soul together. Pig-raising has the same degree prominence in this work that
whaling does in Moby Dick, and evolves into a metaphor for many other
situations. This work has not yet been translated.
In conclusion, I
wish to observe that the Vietnamese are an intensely literary and artistic
people. I am fond of making the joke that whenever several previously
unacquainted Vietnamese meet together in a café, a new literary periodical is
born.
ERIC HENRY
Emeritus
Professor, University
of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill
May 2025