CHAPTER 12

CULTURAL CHANGE IN THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY

IN JANUARY 1968, the famous poet Nha Ca was in Hue to attend her father’s funeral when the Tet Offensive struck southern cities. For almost two months, she watched closely as war marched through her hometown. The experience transformed her and her art. She put aside her poetry and, a year later, published Mourning Headband for Hue, an emotionally packed account of the suffering the Battle of Hue had inflicted on the city and its people, including the communist massacre of hundreds of civilians. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam condemned her work. The Republic of Vietnam welcomed it. But, like their counterparts in the north, southern authorities soon discovered that controlling culture was no easy matter. In 1971, as the southern republic’s war went from bad to worse, Nha Ca began writing the script for the film Land of Sorrows, based in part on Mourning Headband for Hue. One of modern Vietnam’s greatest songwriters, Trinh Cong Son, starred in it. The government banned the film for its pacifism and the communists were no kinder when they took over Saigon in 1975. They sent Nha Ca to a re-education camp and placed a copy of Mourning Headband in the Museum of War Crimes.¹

That almost a half-century of war deeply affected twentieth-century Vietnamese culture, few would disagree. But other forces were at work, too. Nha Ca had after all first distinguished herself by exploring new literary forms in Saigon in the 1950s. In her poetry, novels, and essays, she explored issues such as love, marriage, family, and women’s rights. Trinh Cong Son’s guitar and songwriting took Vietnamese music in new ways as artistic innovation blossomed. Like Nha Ca’s poetry, Son’s music often dealt with the role of the individual in society. This was not new. Many artists and intellectuals had been grappling with such questions since the 1930s at least, when a cultural revolution first broke out in Hanoi. What connected these two periods was how the changes generated by colonialism, war, and globalization forced a debate over the freedom of individuals in the making of modern Vietnam. That debate is still going on today.

CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN COLONIAL VIETNAM

Between the Countryside and East Asia

Colonialism has always been a vector of cultural change in Vietnam. Long before the French arrived, a millennium of Chinese rule had deeply influenced Vietnamese civilization. If the Vietnamese rightly celebrate their independence and commemorate the heroes who rose up to oppose foreign invaders, they also know that Chinese imperial rule introduced new forms of dress, art, music, architecture, cuisine, and speech, as well as two character-based writing systems, Han (‘classical Chinese’) and another tailored to spoken Vietnamese called chu nom. Similarly, if many Cham, Khmer, and highland peoples celebrate their historic resistance to Vietnamese colonialism, they too know that their colonial encounters created fascinating mixtures of art, language, dress, and technologies. The Viet investiture of the Cham deity Po Nagar near Nha Trang is one famous example among many.²

Thanks to the adoption of the character-based writing systems, Vietnamese elite members developed a high level of literacy in areas where the court and its administration operated, as well as in ports, through which texts of all sorts (religious, philosophical, and literary ones) circulated long after the Chinese withdrew. Vietnam’s proximity to the Chinese empire guaranteed its higher classes membership in the wider East Asian civilization well into the twentieth century. Inside the country, the Confucian exams and the educational system nourishing them ensured a steady stream of literate elites. In the nineteenth century, around 4,000 men successfully passed the state board examinations. While another 50,000 never actually sat them, their training was nonetheless such that they could read official documents and correspond in classical characters and often in chu nom. Several helped channel the rich oral culture in the countryside into a written form, link it to East Asian literary models, and produce unique forms of Vietnamese poetry, folklore, satire, and literature. The Vietnamese national treasure, The Tale of Kieu, written by Nguyen Du in 1820, may have owed much to a Chinese literary model, but it tells a Vietnamese story in chu nom, one of a woman heroine, Kieu, whose devotion to her family, despite her fall from grace into prostitution, moves Vietnamese readers to this day.³

Chinese literature continued to find wide readership in Vietnam. One of the most popular novels in Vietnam was the fourteenth-century Chinese classic, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. While only a minority could actually read it in the original characters, the story, something like the equivalent of the Tales of Camelot, percolated into far-flung villages, thanks to gifted storytellers and local mandarins with extraordinary gifts of memory. This in turn fed into a vibrant oral tradition in the countryside that transformed the Three Kingdoms into a spoken version of an Asian bestseller. In the twentieth century, The Tale of Kieu and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms poured off modern printing presses in quoc ngu translations, making them among the most widely read stories in Vietnamese literary history. The Tale of Kieu has recently been adapted to the big screen, while Chinese adventure stories still appear regularly on Vietnamese television.⁴

Although Vietnam never produced large cities before the mid-twentieth century capable of sustaining commercialized cultural forms such as in Japan and China, court officials, nobles, and kings developed their own musical traditions, such as the hat tuong or hat boi (Vietnamese opera) and ca tru (chamber music). That is not to say that Vietnamese culture has come exclusively from the court or as a foreign import. The water-puppet culture of the northern countryside has its roots in the tenth-century Red River valley, telling the stories of day-to-day life, and the trials and tribulations of the rural population. By the early nineteenth century, ca tru songs were sung in Hanoi teahouses and wine shops and later spread into the countryside. Northern Vietnamese peasants still perform a kind of satirical musical theatre known as hat cheo, while an equally popular southern theatrical form, cai luong, arrived with ethnic Viet settlers spreading throughout the Mekong delta by the early twentieth century. The people conquered by the Viet—the Cham, Khmer, and highland peoples—possess their own cultural forms, many of which existed long before the Viet moved out of the Red River valley. As we saw in the first chapter, Cham music was a success in the Vietnamese court following their own independence from the Chinese in 939. Several of Vietnam’s most stunning architectural sites are to be found in Khmer temples and Cham stupas (holy mounds which are places of worship).

Global Cultural Change in French Vietnam

Although French colonial rule over Vietnam did not last a tenth of that of the Chinese, the French presided over a highly significant period of cultural transformation. They did so by promoting a Romanized written script, introducing a new education system, and stimulating moderate urbanization. They also did so through the introduction of the printing press, print media (newspapers, novels, pamphlets, textbooks), radios, telephones, telegrams, cinema, and new transportation systems. Did this globalization—this accelerated process of integrative, technological change—have to occur via the French colonial connection? No. As many Vietnamese realized at the time, Japan, Turkey, and even the country considered to be their equal, Thailand, had all adopted the changes above to various degrees without becoming formal colonies. The Nguyen royal family or someone else could have presided over such rapid change without the French, relying on foreign models, advisors, investment, finance, and the like.

But the French did colonize Vietnam and in so doing profoundly influenced its culture. Nowhere is this better seen than in the colonial promotion of the Romanized writing system for the Vietnamese national language, quoc ngu. Catholic missions had first developed it for spreading the word in the seventeenth century. Colonial authorities mobilized it two centuries later in order to administrate newly conquered Vietnamese territories more efficiently. They terminated the character-based exam system in Cochinchina in the 1860s and in Annam-Tonkin in 1919. What no one could have imagined at the time was the degree to which a new generation of Vietnamese would embrace quoc ngu. They saw in it the perfect writing system for capturing the spoken language. It was easier to learn for children and illiterate adults alike. And it was cheaper to print than Chinese characters. Combined, the Romanized language was capable of spreading all sorts of ideas to an unprecedented number of people in record time.

Quoc ngu was such a success that the colonizer’s own language, French, never really had a chance, unlike in Algeria and Senegal, where the elites made French theirs. One of France’s greatest cultural admirers, the indefatigable Nguyen Van Vinh, grasped this in the early twentieth century, when he quipped that ‘the condition of our nation in the future, good or bad, depends on quoc ngu’. The future father of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, also understood the power of quoc ngu for disseminating new ideas and forms of socio-political organization. Indeed, the growth of all sorts of ‘isms’ as well as postcolonial state-building depended heavily on the spread of quoc ngu, the literacy it generated, and the administrative legibility it allowed. For the first time, the elite and the wider population shared a common written language.⁵

However, the rapid switchover to quoc ngu starting at the turn of the twentieth century came at a high price. Unlike the Japanese and Koreans who maintained their character-based writing systems (kanji and hangul), the Vietnamese lost the ability to access directly (i.e., read themselves) their own rich heritage preserved in Han and chu nom, as well as in French. The Romanized system also distanced Vietnamese from the East Asian civilization in which they had moved for centuries. In the early 1900s, the great patriot Phan Boi Chau, might not have spoken Chinese or Japanese, but he could still interact with his East Asian counterparts through a shared ability to read and write classical characters. Few Vietnamese people visiting East Asia today could order from a menu in a Chinese, Korean, or Japanese restaurant without an English translation.⁶

Another factor explaining why the French triggered such important cultural change in Vietnam was the shift from the Sino-Vietnamese educational system to the Franco-Vietnamese one. Worried by the continued pull of East Asia over young minds, from 1905 onward Governor General Paul Beau, followed by Albert Sarraut and others, presided over the creation of a new educational system teaching in quoc ngu and, at higher levels, in French, too. By the early 1920s, the Franco-Indigenous educational system had largely replaced the preexisting Confucian one in major urban centers and was moving into rural towns to compete with the remarkably resilient Sino-Vietnamese private schools. In the new system, children of five or six years old could start elementary school, which covered grades one to three, before moving on to primary school (grades four to six) and then into upper primary school (grades seven to ten). Only a small number made it to high school, the lycée, which comprised grades nine to twelve. Colonial authorities opened the French lycées Albert Sarraut in Hanoi and Chasseloup-Laubat in Saigon to qualified Vietnamese, the ticket to advanced studies in France. While the Indochinese University, established in 1906, started off as something of a technical school, by the 1930s it had become much more than that, training the upper and middle-class young in medicine, law, veterinarian science, forestry, and the humanities. Of course when anticolonial trouble arose, as it always did, the French closed classrooms. The Indochinese University shut down after the 1908 revolts; but it reopened and went on to become the Vietnamese National University in 1945 and operates to this day in Hanoi.⁷

Whatever its republican pretensions, French education in colonial Vietnam was not always secular, assimilationist, egalitarian, and much less a nation-building enterprise. Scores of religious schools, Catholic, Protestant, and Buddhist ones, operated quite independently, in contrast to religious school establishments in France. There was no attempt to use education to create a homogeneous Vietnamese identity. By the 1930s, the French had opened classes to train highland bureaucrats and teachers in their own languages or French, but not in Vietnamese. The Ecole Sabatier produced highland nationalists, equipped with their own Romanized languages, who went on to oppose Vietnamese nation-builders. The large Chinese community built their own schools and taught classes in Chinese (and in several dialects).⁸

Moreover, the widespread idea that the Third Republic wanted to turn young Vietnamese schoolchildren into Frenchmen and women is an oversimplification. By the 1930s, Orientalist-minded administrators of the Third Republic sought to use the school to re-root the Vietnamese youth in their patriotic traditions so that they would not become déracinés (‘uprooted’). Vichy colonial educators followed suit. French schools across Indochina might have taught elite Vietnamese children that their ancestors were the Gauls, but the French were just as content to teach the majority of young Vietnamese in the majority Franco-Vietnamese schools that they were orderly minded Confucians with their roots in the village. And while Vietnamese and French students intermingled and developed friendships in elite lycées, school clubs, and sporting activities, racial lines were real and income disparities overwhelmingly favored the children of the colonizers. Marguerite Duras may have grown up dirt-poor in rural Indochina and transgressed colonial hierarchies in Saigon by dating a rich Vietnamese boy, but her experience was the exception, not the rule.⁹

Nor were Franco-Vietnamese schools democratic in their social reach among the Viet majority. In all, during the interwar period, only 10 percent of the school-aged Vietnamese population actually went to school. Attendance rates were much lower in rural Vietnam, where a lack of financial support forced the poor to make greater sacrifices or forego education for their children altogether, and with it any chance of upward social mobility. The children of the urban Vietnamese bourgeoisie, former mandarins, and new administrators always did better. Better-off and socially well-connected families sent their children to the best schools to take up new positions in the colonial state as lawyers, health officials, nurses, interpreters, telegraph and telephone operators, veterinarians, agricultural specialists, teachers, and journalists. Unsurprisingly, most of modern Vietnam’s nationalist elite came from the cities and these better-off classes. Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Dinh Diem were the fortunate sons of mandarins who studied at the National College in Hue, where Paul Beau had first introduced parts of the Franco-Indigenous curriculum.¹⁰

Despite all these limitations, the colonial educational system still stimulated great change. Although drop-out rates for poorer students were high, the new education system nonetheless spread quoc ngu into the countryside and working-class urban neighborhoods, democratizing the written language in ways which the earlier character-based systems had never achieved. General Nguyen Binh had dropped out of school in third grade, but not before learning how to read and write. He had devoured The Romance of the Three Kingdoms in his free time as a teenager and went on to wield a pen as effectively as the sword as an adult. Secondly, colonial education fostered the birth of a new urban intelligentsia numbering about 5,000 individuals in the mid-1920s and climbing to 10,000 by the eve of the Second World War. Its members were largely the products of the Franco-Vietnamese schools, at ease in French and quoc ngu. They, in turn, could rely on a mainly literate urban population of 550,000 people by 1937 who could buy their newspapers, novels, poems, and paintings. Thirdly, colonial education opened the doors to the other half of the Vietnamese population—women. Vietnamese girls of all ethnicities obtained the right to study, even in the same classrooms with boys, simply unthinkable under the former Sino-Vietnamese system. The daughters of wealthier families always went furthest. Henriette Bui Quang Chieu, the daughter of the Constitutionalist leader, went through this new educational system and on to France to become Vietnam’s first woman doctor in 1934. Lastly, through a combination of school teaching, quoc ngu, and modern means of communication, more and more Vietnamese discovered for themselves new scientific ideas, technological advances, literary models, poetic forms, and philosophical horizons.¹¹

The printing press and newspapers probably did as much as the new education system to clear the way for a cultural Risorgimento during the interwar years. The French had first brought printing presses to help run the colonial state in the quoc ngu script. Founded in 1865, the government’s official bulletin for Cochinchina (the Gia Dinh Bao) immediately began circulating decrees, with trusted Vietnamese interpreters and administrative allies at the helm like Truong Vinh Ky and Huynh Tinh Cua. First trained in Catholic missions in Penang, these men also used the government bulletin and the printing press to start publishing on a wide range of sociocultural matters. More presses spread as the colonial state expanded into Annam and Tonkin. Backed by the government, in 1892 François Henri Schneider opened what became the largest private printing and publishing house in Indochina and joined forces with none other than Nguyen Van Vinh to establish a string of newspapers, translations, and diverse publishing projects. Trained as an interpreter and an administrator, Vinh, like so many others, went on to open his own papers like the Trung Bac Tan Van(Northern Central News) and the Dong Duong Tap Chi (Indochina Review). While the French helped finance his papers and others in order to detach the Vietnamese from their East Asian cultural orbit and ally them with the French one, Vinh saw in quoc ngu print media the chance to unleash a cultural revolution on very Vietnamese terms. Keenly interested in technology, he began pushing ideas first promoted by the leaders of the Tonkin Free School (Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc). Like Phan Chu Trinh, he wanted to do away with Chinese characters, literary allusions, syntax, and what he saw as an embarrassingly outdated Vietnamese tradition and cultural practices. He championed the liberation of the individual from the suffocating hold of Confucianism. He translated scores of articles and books into quoc ngu, including the first translations of The Tale of Kieu and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, as well as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.¹²

Like the internet today, it is hard to underestimate the importance of the development of modern print media for spreading ideas to larger numbers of people at higher rates of speed. By the mid-1920s, several quoc ngu papers had daily print runs of 15,000 copies. The woman’s journal, Phu Nu Tan Van (Modern Women’s News), sold 8,500 copies daily between 1929 and 1931. And lest we forget, these papers passed from one reader to another. Actual readerships were always higher than the number of copies sold. Between 1923 and 1944, of the 10,000 published titles on official record, 20 percent dealt with religious topics (prayer books, rituals, bibles), 24 percent were novels and short stories, 19 percent covered traditional literature, folktales, poetry and satire, and 6 percent related to theatre, especially the southern form called cai luong. Little wonder that Vietnamese, like the Marxist lexicographer, Dao Duy Anh, no longer had to go abroad to China, Japan, or France to tap into the revolutionary ideas moving across the globe. Much of it was at his fingertips in quoc ngu, French, or in the Chinese papers he could read and buy in Hanoi and Saigon. And like the Vietnamese communist party’s security services battling the web today, the French colonial police censored written material heavily, and tightly controlled the licensing of papers and presses, but they could not stop the accelerating globalization of new ideas of which the French themselves were as much a part as their colonies were.¹³

Religious leaders also realized the power of what the French had done by pushing quoc ngu, widening education, and introducing the printing press and newspaper. They probably started promoting literacy ‘among the masses’ a decade before urban-based nationalists launched the Association for the Dissemination of Quoc Ngu (Hoi Truyen Ba Chu Quoc Ngu) in 1938. Unlike the Indian National Congress, however, Vietnamese bourgeois parties like the Constitutionalists never truly grasped the need to use quoc ngu print media to reach into the countryside (where 90 percent of the population still lived in 1945). Their newspaper, La Tribune indochinoise (Indochinese Tribune), never appeared in quoc ngu.

Despite attacks from Phan Chu Trinh, Nguyen Van Vinh, and younger cultural militants, Confucianism experienced a revival via the print media. Major cultural figures of the time such as Tran Trong Kim, Pham Quynh, and Phan Khoi, as well as reform-minded mandarins about whom we know less, vigorously debated about Confucianism, its role in Vietnam in the past, how to retailor it to the needs of the country in the rapidly changing present or whether to discard it entirely. Pham Quynh saw in a renovated Confucianism the chance to remake the monarchy up above and hold the family together down below. Through both, he hoped to preserve the country’s social fabric in the face of communism, individualism, and rapid Westernization. Always fearful of Vietnamese nationalism, even among their closest collaborators, the French did little to help their bourgeois allies transform Confucianism into a unifying ideology as the President of China, Chiang Kai-shek, was doing with the ‘New Life Movement’. In 1934, when Pasquier ended the first Bao Dai solution (see chapters 4 and 5), he also closed Pham Quynh’s intellectual journal, Nam Phong(Southern Wind).

Others, like the inimitable Nguyen Van To or Tran Trong Kim, saw in reformed Confucianism an East Asian humanism capable of reconciling the community and the individual in a new national form. Man was perfectible and Confucianism was not necessarily a conservative ideology, incapable of change. Nguyen Van To may have dressed in Confucian garb and worked at the Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient on ancient history, but he was also deeply involved in his present, organizing quoc ngu campaigns in the 1930s, serving as a municipal advisor for Hanoi, and writing prolifically in intellectual journals in the early 1940s. He showed no interest in Vichy’s cultural politics during the Second World War and had no faith in the French resurrection of the very monarchy they had killed, repeatedly. He joined Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist government in 1945, helped to develop its educational service and literacy campaigns, and served in the first National Assembly. If young Westernized Vietnamese had lampooned his ‘traditionalism’ in the 1930s, this fiercely anticolonialist Confucian humanist (who was the first to condemn the French use of torture in 1946) commanded only respect from 1945. Sadly, he disappeared during the French attempt to wipe out Ho’s government in late 1947.

Despite modest urbanization across the whole of French Vietnam, it was Hanoi and Saigon that were the sites where Westernization, consumerism, and cultural change occurred most intensely. Bicycles and tramways, followed by automobiles and buses, transformed the way people moved about. Rubber-wheeled rickshaws first imported from Japan became a part of everyday urban life for Europeans and Asians alike. Streetlights went up while sewer systems went in. Cafés, theatres, concert halls, botanical gardens, and cinemas appeared, offering films in French, Vietnamese, Chinese, and even English as Hollywood eyed a global market. Charlie Chaplin visited the colony in the 1930s to the thrill of all. European trends in food, drink, and medicines seeped imperceptibly into local practices. The Vietnamese words for butter—‘bo’ and bread—‘banh’ derive from the French words, beure and pain. The delicious Vietnamese sandwich, banh mi, owes much to the French baguette. By the 1920s, taking walks, gardening, attending the theatre, and creating clubs seemed only natural for bourgeois Vietnamese and the fashionable youth who could afford it. Even the less fortunate could catch a glimpse of the big screen, though they had to watch from special, partitioned sections, known as les avancées.¹⁴

Vietnamese sartorial tastes Westernized during the colonial period, as wealthy men put on sports coats and buttoned shirts and women slipped into dresses and even wore shorts as sports took off and physical education became mandatory in schools. Tennis and football (soccer) became Vietnamese passions and remain so to this day. Nguyen Cat Tuong (or ‘Le Mur’) took fashion trends in Europe and combined them with earlier Vietnamese styles of dress like the ao ngu than (‘five-paneled body gown’) to come up with such original creations as the ao dai. This ‘long dress’ falls elegantly over the woman’s entire body, descending from a snugly buttoned collar at the top to a more loosely fitted lower robe flowing over the waist, down the legs, and to the ankles. While the ao dai first took off in Tonkin, southern women in Saigon were the ones to make it famous and those Vietnamese who were overseas after 1975 ensured that it remained a symbol of national elegance until it made a comeback in post-communist Vietnam. As Le Mur explained his approach: ‘In the old days people dressed basically to conceal their bodies, so they always presented a baggy appearance. But now one should dress so the body is present in a natural manner, or sometimes to modify it a bit so it appears more flowing and graceful’.¹⁵

None of these sartorial trends moved in straight lines, though. Well into the twentieth century, Vietnamese officials and even bourgeois men in ‘the more Westernized’ Cochinchina could slip into the traditional collarbuttoned tunics and hats when it suited them or the occasion. Nor did trends simply flow ‘out’ from the metropole to the colonies, but also the other way round, as Vietnamese influences in French fashion, cuisine, and art demonstrate to this day. Asian influences within Vietnam never disappeared. Indian-styled garments continued to find customers in Saigon and Hanoi, among both the Indian community and the Vietnamese. The writer, Vu Trong Phung, loved to sport his Indian-made shirt. The southern Vietnamese often relaxed in Cham or Khmer-inspired sarongs at home. While the Vietnamese bourgeoisie may have used Western cutlery as a social signifier when eating à la française, rich and poor alike continued to use chopsticks, eat white rice from a bowl, and enjoy a pho soup as they had for centuries. Chinese and Vietnamese cuisine remained as popular as ever and won over many in the French community. Smoking Western-brand cigarettes certainly took off, but many (mainly northern) Vietnamese men still inhale a potent type of nicotine tobacco through bamboo water-pipes, a practice collectively known as thuoc lao. My first Vietnamese language instructor brought his water-pipe all the way from Hanoi to Dekalb, Illinois, in the late 1980s. ‘I have never missed anyone the way I miss thuoc lao’ is how one folk song describes its power. My instructor would have agreed entirely. While urban women broke with the practice of chewing betel and areca nuts in favor of cultivating the pearly white teeth they saw in countless advertisements and beauty magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, these nuts still find their place in marriage celebrations, New Year festivities, and as offerings on altars dedicated to deceased family members.¹⁶

The Cultural Revolution of the 1930s: The Self-reliance Movement¹⁷

The renowned scholar of Vietnam and China, Alexander Woodside, is right to insist upon the importance for the twentieth-century Vietnamese of finding new ideologies and forms of social organizations which were capable of reconciling the individual with a society that French colonialism and globalizing forces had shaken so deeply. Some sought to find new forms of community along political lines, with modern nationalism never far from their minds. Communism and republicanism attracted others. Religion, millenarianism, and secret societies offered hope for just as many, while charities, sports, and professional associations worked for others. We have touched upon these questions elsewhere in this book. Here we need to add another ‘ism’, that of individualism, for it was at the heart of the cultural revolution that burst forth in Hanoi in the early 1930s, shifted to Saigon in the 1950s and 1960s, and continues today.

In its simplest form, individualism emphasizes the independence, self-reliance, and liberty of a human being to determine his or her destiny. Freedom of choice and freedom of action serve as guiding principles. Individualism does not necessarily lead to anarchy, but it does require social, religious, and political systems to respect a human being’s freedom of choice as long as this person does not harm the liberty of others. Individualism is related to humanism, which stresses the individual worth of human beings as well as their ability to improve themselves and society through rational thought instead of blind trust in religious faith. However, humanism and individualism are not the unique products of the European renaissance. Confucianism in East Asia also stresses the perfectibility of man and does so in secular, rational ways respectful of the individual.¹⁸

Younger Vietnamese coming of age in the interwar period, however, latched on hardest to Western individualism. Most were largely uninterested in the humanist, reformist-minded take on Confucianism which Nguyen Van To and Tran Trong Kim advocated. By the 1930s, thanks to their mastery of French and quoc ngu, young Vietnamese had access to the canon on Western individualism that had spread to East Asia by the early twentieth century. They could read it in French or in quoc ngu translations. But there was also a Chinese connection: because many of these Western educated Vietnamese heralded from mandarin families, many could read Chinese characters and would have been able to follow the New Cultural Movement young Chinese had initiated after the First World War. One of the staunchest defenders of human liberty in Vietnam, Phan Khoi, closely read the works of China’s greatest humanist writer and cultural revolutionary, Lu Xun.¹⁹

Individualism provided young Vietnamese with a new foundation for creating a culture in which the tôi (the ‘I’, or the ‘me’) could find his or her rightful place in the family, society, and world. Confucianism, this generation claimed, had impeded the emergence of individual freedom and in so doing blocked the modernization of the country and its ability to exist on an equal footing with the West. Only the Vietnamese youth could lead this cultural revolution, for their parents, in their view, had failed miserably. This was certainly the conclusion Lu Xun’s generation had reached in the wake of China’s humiliation at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. In his condemnations of Franco-Vietnamese collaboration, Nguyen An Ninh drew a similar parallel for Vietnamese youth. In 1922, he told young Vietnamese that change could only come about with the liberation of the individual from the suffocating hold of the old order:

You must struggle against your milieu, against the family that paralyzes your efforts, against this vulgar society weighing you down, against the narrow, hampering prejudices that stop at every turn your actions, against ignoble, humiliating, terribly humiliating and lackluster ideals which lower our race with every passing day [. . .] The greatest idealists have always counseled those who want to follow them to leave ‘the house of their fathers’. And we, too, the youth today, must also leave the house of our fathers. We must leave our family, free ourselves from this society, separate from our country [. . .] That is to say that once we, the Annamese who have been given the chance to be conscious of our own worth, the highest possible form of worth being that of the individual and the law governing the world, then we will return to Annam.²⁰

Of course individualism was political. Nguyen An Ninh’s efforts to promote individual liberties went hand in hand with national liberation and landed him in jail on several occasions. The young leader of the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, Nguyen Thai Hoc, shared the republican dream. The French smashed the VNQDD’s uprising in Tonkin in 1930 and executed Hoc, suppressing a series of peasant revolts concentrated in Annam at the same time. The severity of this colonial repression was such that it shifted radical politics to Cochinchina for the rest of the decade. Given the more liberal press laws in the Cochinchinese colony, Ninh would militate in favor of political pluralism and workers’ rights in the pages of La Lutte in Saigon until his final arrest on the eve of the Second World War.

Realizing that politically minded papers in Annam-Tonkin didn’t last very long and in the wake of this repression, many young Vietnamese in the north focused their attention on promoting a cultural revolution. Leading the charge was Nguyen Tuong Tam. He joined forces with a core group of like-minded intellectuals, including his brothers, Nguyen Tuong Long (Hoang Dao) and Nguyen Tuong Lan (Thach Lam) and a close friend, Tran Khanh Giu, better known as Khai Hung. Tam adopted an appropriate nom de plume, Nhat Linh (‘Free Spirit’). The children of former mandarin families, they were all highly educated, perfectly at ease in French and quoc ngu (and could read Chinese). Khai Hung had graduated from the Lycée Albert Sarraut, Nhat Linh from the Lycée du Protectorat. The latter initially joined the colonial civil service, but his love of literature and the newspaper world proved too strong. He left for France in the late 1920s, where he pursued his literary interests, discovered the power of humor, and expanded his knowledge of the print media. Famous for its biting satire, defense of individual rights, and state-of-the-art cartoons, the French weekly, Le canard enchaîné (The Chained Duck), found an enthusiastic admirer in him, his entourage, and a wide variety of Vietnamese readers.

Starting in 1932, this core group established the Literary Self-strengthening Movement. It opened its doors to like-minded intellectuals, artists, writers, poets, and cartoonists. They established two equally notable quoc ngu newspapers to administer their assault on Confucian tradition and in defense of the individual—Phong Hoa (Culture) and Ngay Nay (These Days). From 1932 to 1940, the editors wrote and commissioned scores of articles on the need to remake Vietnamese culture, overturn Confucianism, promote Westernization in its place, break with antiquated cultural practices, and liberate the individual through poetry, literature, art, film, dress, sports, and the like. Khai Hung put it best when he affirmed that the ‘individual is in the process of achieving liberation, of breaking with the oppressive structures that had, by fooling him, led him down the wrong path [. . .] the individual must decide for himself’.²¹

Irreverence flew off the pages of the first issues of Phong Hoa and Ngay Nay as TLVD’s soldiers mobilized. Never had satire and humor been used with such devastating effect. Ly Toet, the woefully outdated Confucian, was an immensely popular figure for caricature, appearing in issue after issue. He served as the visual whipping boy for the group’s attack on all that was outmoded. The Tu Luc Van Doan ripped into those whom they judged ‘un-modern’, wounding egos as they did so and sparking some lively literary debates. As long as satirists steered clear of politics, colonial authorities, and the monarchy, French censors focused their attention elsewhere.²²

To defeat the Confucian tradition, Vietnamese writers focused their novels on individuals trapped by the oppressive hierarchical ‘system’—tyrannical mothers-in-law, arranged marriages, and power-hungry mandarins. Already, by 1925, Hoang Ngoc Phach had latched on to the theme of ‘true love’ in Vietnam’s first modern novel, To Tam, in order to bring to life vividly the destructive nature of arranged marriages on individual lives and suggest why cultural change was indispensable to Vietnam’s ability to enter the ‘modern world’. Phach has his beautiful heroine, To Tam, face the choice of staying with her true love and being happy or bowing to her parents’ wishes that she marry another and thereby strengthen the family’s future fortunes. But Phach, in a twist, offers To Tam a way out. Rather than accepting her Confucian fate and with it all chance of happiness, she escapes her dilemma through suicide, the ultimate expression of personal liberty. This was not The Tale of Kieu.²³

Other Literary Self-strengthening Movement writers followed suit. In his popular novel, The Midst of Spring, Khai Hung used true love to unite his young couple, Loc and Mai, in order to set up the opposition between individual choice and a traditional culture’s oppression. Loc’s family forbids his marriage to Mai. His love for this woman cannot not be allowed to trump the strategic need to unite him with a provincial mandarin’s daughter. Children were to obey their parents; they did not choose freely. Filial piety, or hieu, insured order and stability within the family unit. In terms that would have drawn approval from many of ‘the older generation’ in Europe as well as Asia, Loc’s mother told her defiant son: ‘You’re not satisfied, but I am satisfied. You must know that in marriage, it’s essential to look for a house of equal status. Do you intend to force me into a relationship with a bunch of country bumpkins? [. . .] You’re a boy without hieu, do you hear me!’²⁴

Nhat Linh launched a similar offensive in Breaking the Ties. Once again, a young, beautiful woman serves as the protagonist to frame the opposition between arranged marriage and the Confucian order on the one hand and free love and individualism on the other. Her name is Loan. She falls deeply in love with one man, but cannot pursue her heart, as her family requires her to marry another, a bad man, and all in the name of hieu. Loan accepts her fate, but in so doing descends into a nightmare as her mother-in-law and husband make her life a living hell. Rather than producing order and harmony, Loan’s adherence to hieu produces the opposite effect. While her husband cheats on her, her mother-in-law covers for him and exploits her at every turn. When Loan finally comes before a jury on murder charges trumped up by her mother-in-law, Nhat Linh can finally step in as the defense lawyer explaining to his readers that this case is part of a bigger problem: ‘Vietnamese society today is not the Vietnamese society of the nineteenth century. The Vietnamese family cannot be left intact to be exactly like the Vietnamese families of previous centuries. In all the countries of the Far East—Japan, China, Thailand and especially in China, the original ancestor of Asian civilization, the status of the family is not as it was before’. Nhat Linh sums up his defense of Loan: ‘These people who have absorbed the new culture have been imbued with ideas of humanity and individual freedom, so quite naturally, they seek to escape from that system. This desire is very legitimate [. . .]’. The jury declares her not guilty. She, and the generation she represents, could finally walk free.²⁵

Poets also broke with Confucian social constraints and Sino-Vietnamese literary forms that had governed poetry in the East Asian civilizational world for centuries. Several (but not all) started to use tôi, the ‘I’ personal pronoun, in order to free up the expression of the individual self from the oppression of family hierarchies and conventional social relations. True love again served as a popular model for setting up the opposition between ‘old’ and ‘new’, ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’. Phan Khoi drew the immediate praise of TLVD poets with the publication of his iconoclastic, free verse poem in 1932 called ‘Old Love’. In a few beautiful lines, he evokes the chance meeting of the two lovers long after their decision to part ways in order to accept their arranged marriages:

Twenty-four years later . . .

A chance encounter far away . . .

Both heads had turned to silver;

Had they not known each other well,

Might they not have passed unknown?

An old affair was recalled, no more.

It was just a glance in passing!

. . . There still are corners to the eyes.²⁶

Some of the TLVD’s best poets, Luu Trong Lu, The Lu, Huy Can, Che Van Lien, Xuan Dieu, Hoai Thanh, and others inside and outside the group joined in the battle against Sino-Vietnamese poetic forms in favor of free verse, Western models, and large doses of individualism. This flowering became widely known as the New Poetry Movement. Xuan Dieu was one of the movement’s stars. The son of a schoolteacher, he published over 400 poems and many essays and literary critiques. His artistic originality springs forth from the first lines of his poem, ‘Still Too Far Away’:

The other day you stayed too far away from me;

So I asked you to move over a bit closer.

You inched over closer, but I demurred.

To be a good girl you inched still closer.

As I was boiling over, in haste with a smile

You scooted closer, soothing, ‘Here I am!’

I brightened up, then scowled at once

For I thought, you were still too far away.²⁷

Xuan Dieu pushed the envelope like few others at the time. In ‘Boys’ Love’, he wrote approvingly of the homoerotic love between the French romantic poets, Rimbaud and Verlaine: ‘Drunk with exotic verse and with passion, / Defying worn paths and old ways’. His former classmate from Hanoi, Huy Can, joined him in taking Vietnamese poetry in new ways. Their homosexuality not only raised Confucian eyebrows, but the communists later forced Xuan Dieu to ‘correct’ his sexuality through intense ‘rectification’ that almost destroyed him.²⁸

The creation of the Academy of Fine Arts in Hanoi in 1925 introduced Western notions of art and their accompanying techniques, including oil painting to Vietnam. Victor Tardieu, the academy’s first director, was determined ‘to transform the indigenous craftsmen into professional artists’. Vietnamese graduates of the academy such as Nguyen Gia Tri, Bui Xuan Phai, To Ngoc Van, and others, borrowed Western techniques, oil painting in particular, and often imitated French models. But they also adapted them to explore very Vietnamese problems, such as individualism, love, gender differences, nationalism, politics, and the opposition between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. To Ngoc Van contributed regularly to the Literary Self-strengthening Movement’s newspapers. Like many poets and writers, several painters trained during the colonial period put their art in the service of national liberation after 1945. Some joined the communists and mobilized their art as part of a wider transformation of state and society. To Ngoc Van led many graduates of the Fine Arts Academy into the resistance. He died of the injuries he sustained during the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and is today considered one of the country’s greatest heroes for his sacrifice. However, Bui Xuan Phai’s call for artistic freedom in the wake of that historic victory landed him in trouble with the communists who were intent on defining and controlling art. He lost his teaching position in the School of Fine Arts and had to wait until the 1980s to display his work in public again.²⁹

Cultural Revolution: Widening and Humanizing Vietnamese Society

As important as the artists of the Literary Self-strengthening Movement were, they cannot serve to sum up all the cultural transformations occurring in Vietnam at this time. Many derided the literary movement for its unbridled romanticism and obsession with Western modernity when pressing social and political issues clamored for attention. What about the downtrodden, the working class, the domestics, the faceless people without whom the modernization of the cities would not have got very far? What about the peasants and agricultural laborers, who, collectively, constituted 90 percent of Vietnam’s population? The advent of the leftwing Popular Front government (1936–8) reinforced such social concerns in literary circles, as did loosening constraints on publishing in the north. Vo Nguyen Giap and Truong Chinh took advantage of this to publish their treatise called ‘The Peasant Question’ in 1938. Southern communists and Trotstkyists associated with La Lutte published investigations of working-class life. To be fair, the TLVD’s leaders had also ventured into politics and begun to move their urban cultural revolution in more social and rural directions. The Literary Self-strengthening Movement’s authors were by no means insensitive to the rural life and its problems. They investigated dire peasant poverty, rural indebtedness, and illiteracy.³⁰

Some of the best social realism, however, came from remarkable, independent journalists like Nguyen Hong, Nguyen Cong Hoan, and Tam Lang. During the 1930s, Tam Lang moved among the down-and-out of Hanoi. He described in memorable prose the poor, their lives, their hopes, their trials, and, sometimes, their tribulations. He disguised himself as a rickshaw driver for months in order to show to his urban, mainly middle-class readers the destinies of thousands of their compatriots trudging along everyday like animals. ‘Society is to blame’, Tam Lang concluded his classic piece of reportage, ‘I Pulled a Rickshaw’: ‘Yes, you and me, all of us are equally at fault [. . .]. To lower a powerless person from his status as a human being to that of a horse, to give him two wooden shafts and say “I will sit up here while you pull me” is the same as saying “You are not a human being”’. Tam Lang pointed out that the Human Rights League (Ligue des droits de l’homme) had tried to prevent the use of rickshaws during the Colonial Exhibition in France in 1931. Why could the Vietnamese not do this in their own society, he asked? At the heart of the question was once again the matter of individual rights.³¹

Some of the most sophisticated, penetrating, and original literature came from the burning pen of one eccentric, opium-addicted gadfly named Vu Trong Phung. His articles, investigative reports, and novels covered topics ranging from poverty, prostitution, and disease to sports, fashion, and love. He could move from biting social satire to outrageous humor in the space of a few lines. The originality of his social commentary comes through brilliantly in ‘Luc Xi’ (‘Dispensary’), his newspaper column about venereal disease and prostitution in colonial Hanoi, as it does in his satirical and often side-splitting take on modern bourgeois society in his story Dumb Luck. Like Tam Lang, Vu Trong Phung investigated the individual lives of those who had never received any attention. He also knew the poor because he moved among them. He despised armchair social scientists, especially those who intellectualized about these people and their societies without knowing them: ‘A rickshaw puller knows all the cruelty of human beings far better than a scholar. A room boy knows more about the debauchery of humanity than a surgeon. A servant understands more clearly the behavior of human beings than a realist writer’. He ends his social-realist reportage on ‘household servants’, by turning the tables on his bourgeois readers and asking them to ‘investigate’ themselves. The Vietnamese Communist Party later banned his books, writing him off as a depraved mind. He was probably twentieth-century Vietnam’s greatest literary artist and social critic. A brilliant mind, he died in 1939 at the age of twenty-seven.³²

One of the biggest changes in individual liberties to occur in colonial Vietnam was the expansion of women’s rights. While many have insisted that Vietnam differed culturally from China in its empowerment of women down through the centuries, recent research suggests a less optimistic picture. The Le law code did allow couples to separate, but divorce had to be mutually consented to. If the husband disagreed, there was no divorce. Legally, the husband, followed by the son, remained in control of land and no real estate could change hands without male consent. Inheritance was legally stacked in favor of men. The Gia Long law code of the early nineteenth century reversed many of the advantages women had enjoyed under the earlier one, while the Confucian-based examination system codified inequality by banning women from undertaking the examinations to become civil servants, and thus from entry into positions of power.³³

The ending of the examination system in Cochinchina in the 1860s and Annam-Tonkin in 1919 and the widening of the colonial education system to include Vietnamese girls stimulated important changes in gender relations and empowered women in notable ways. Following Meiji Japan’s example, the reform-minded creators of the Tonkin Free School allowed women to join them. By opening its doors to women, the Franco-Vietnamese schools had the biggest impact of all by increasing their literacy. This was revolutionary, for few Vietnamese women had ever had the chance to master classical characters or participate in the East Asian cultural world, an all-male club. Literacy in quoc ngu and, to a lesser degree, in French opened up new realms of knowledge, offered new career tracks, and allowed women to voice and promote their interests in unprecedented ways. Many put pen to paper as journalists, poets, writers, and newspaper editors. Southern journalists led the way in widely read women’s dailies like the Phu Nu Tan Van (Women’s Modern News) and the Phu Nu Thoi Dam (Women’s Modern Times). They attacked Confucian constraints on women’s rights in the family and wider society. Articles discussed whether widows should be allowed to re-marry, spouses to divorce, and polygamy to continue. Women’s associations, charities, and self-help groups multiplied during the interwar period. Groups for girl scouts appeared, joining the associations for boy scouts already in operation. As mandatory physical education spread in schools, young women joined their male counterparts in exercising their bodies. Madame Hoang Xuan Han pioneered the development of women’s tennis in Vietnam. Others entered into revolutionary politics and paid dearly for their activities. The French executed the female communist leader Nguyen Thi Minh Khai. One of the best historians of Vietnam today, Professor Hue-Tam Ho Tai, has provided us with a riveting account of the trials and tribulations of revolutionary women in the person of her aunt, Bao Luong.³⁴

However, the liberation bourgeois women experienced in urban areas was not necessarily replicated in the countryside, where male mandarins and rich landowners could run roughshod over women’s rights. Many abusive mandarins had several wives and subjected them to terrible existences. Rape went largely unpunished. The Literary Self-strengthening Movement’s Khai Hung wrote searing critiques of such matters. Colonial law could do little about these abuses of women given that the protectorate status of Annam and Tonkin kept the Gia Long code in operation there until the late 1930s. The termination of the Confucian exam system did little to change village politics and councils, which remained largely in the hands of men under the French.³⁵

Gender equality for French settler women was hardly better. A French woman could not run for office in the Cochinchinese Colonial Council. There was never one female French commissioner at any level of the Indochinese bureaucracy during the entire colonial period. The director of the Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient under Vichy, Georges Coedes, used Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws to get rid of the only female member of this organization, and a very illustrious one at that, Suzanne Karpelès. And French women, like their colonized sisters, only received the right to vote in France after the Second World War.³⁶

CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN POSTCOLONIAL VIETNAMS: WAR, THE STATE AND INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM

Decades of war deeply affected Vietnamese culture and individual liberties. Between 1940, when the Japanese began occupying Tonkin, and 1991, when the Paris peace accords finally ended the conflicts over Indochina, war mobilized, politicized, and militarized Vietnamese culture as a wide range of actors went to battle over the country’s soul. The French fought hard to maintain a colonial culture against those who sought to replace it with a nationalist one. The Japanese tried to force their own imperial propaganda upon Indochina during the Second World War, before the Cold War’s superpowers, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China next tried to export their own cultural diplomacies in Vietnam. It worked the other way too. Although Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Dinh Diem presided over the nationalization of their respective states within Vietnam, they also tried to adapt foreign ideologies to local needs. Ho’s entourage adapted a foreign Sino-Soviet communist ideology to the north while Diem’s family tried to tailor French Personalism to the social realities in the south. All of this built on earlier strata of intertwined cultural, religious, and ideological adaptations discussed earlier on in this book, reaching back for centuries in the form of all sorts of ‘isms’.³⁷

The Poverty of French Colonial Culture

From start to finish, colonial culture was very much an official enterprise, designed to legitimate French conquest and rule to both the vanquished Vietnamese and the French people in France, who cared very little about their empire. This lack of interest at home was such that the French government brought the colonies to the metropolis in a series of colonial exhibitions, culminating in the extraordinary reproduction of the French empire in miniature outside Paris in 1931. Colonial culture also evolved in reaction to external competition for Vietnamese hearts and minds. If Paul Beau established the Indochinese University in Hanoi in 1908, he did so because Vietnamese students were going abroad to study in Tokyo rather than Paris. Other sets of colonizers asserted their influence too. The Japanese, for example, tried to replace the Chinese at the center of a centuries-old East Asian civilization and were often in a more favorable position than the French in their ability to influence Asian opinions. The Japanese defeat of the Russian navy in 1905 only reinforced the sense of their might and thus their potential to influence the Vietnamese, as did their own colonial propaganda machine. In the lead-up to the First World War the Germans also expounded their propaganda throughout Asia (in Chinese and English). And the Americans were in there, too. French security services carefully monitored American Protestant missionaries in Vietnam during the 1920s, while censors tried to limit news of Washington’s creation of the Commonwealth of the Philippines in 1935 (as this was the Philippines’ first step toward full independence). All of these factors led the French to accelerate their own propaganda efforts. Indeed, the origins of the French francophonie project are not to be found only in the decolonization of the 1960s, as is so often claimed, but rather in this earlier inter-imperial cultural competition.³⁸

The outbreak of the Second World War in China in 1937 and the Japanese entry into Tonkin in September 1940 brought this competition directly to Indochina on unfavorable terms for the French. The humiliating defeat of the Third Republic in June 1940, followed by France’s official collaboration with Hitler and condominium with Germany’s Asian ally, Japan, cost the French authorities dearly in the eyes of the Vietnamese. Determined to maintain the fiction of Franco-Vietnamese collaboration, the new Governor General Jean Decoux reactivated the cultural front through the expansion of youth mobilization campaigns, sporting events, and by allying local patriotisms with Vichy’s Révolution nationale. Even the leader of Vichy France, Marshall Philippe Pétain, found himself dressed in full Vietnamese Confucian garb on the front page of one Vietnamese paper in 1943. Missing from this return to the past, however, was the colonial emperor Bao Dai and the very Vietnamese elites who had transformed culture and with it individual liberty in such profound ways during the interwar period.

Focused on more pressing matters during the Second World War, the Japanese were content to rule Indochina indirectly through the French and accorded the French governor general Jean Decoux a free hand on the cultural front in exchange for his continued political, economic, and administrative collaboration with them. However, this did not stop the Japanese from promoting their own imperial ideology and propaganda within Vietnam through the creation of cultural associations, newspapers, and limited study abroad. While Decoux monopolized the mobilization of urban youth, the Japanese launched their cultural offensive on the religious front in rural areas of Vietnam, mainly among the followers of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao Buddhist faiths in the south.³⁹

The thinness of Vichy’s colonial culture was laid bare for all to see on 9 March 1945, when the Japanese finally overthrew the French and with them, their colonial state. Many Vietnamese lost no time developing what had been in the making for decades—a Vietnamese national culture. Thanks to print media, the expansion of quoc ngu, and the access to globalizing ideas that had been developing for half a century, thousands of Vietnamese began decolonizing their culture with astonishing alacrity. Newspapers, radios, telegraphs, and photos spread the news of the end of eighty years of French rule. Colonial monuments came tumbling down. Street names changed from French colonial ones to those of Vietnamese national heroes, as composers scrambled to create a national anthem. Nguyen Thai Hoc, the leader of the Vietnamese nationalist party whom the French had guillotined in 1931 for demanding an independent republic, finally received a carefully ritualized resurrection and public homage in June 1945. The photographer Vo An Ninh captured these events on the covers of the Trung Bac Tan Van (Northern Central News).

Upon taking over a few months later, Ho Chi Minh continued in the same vein, saluting young scouts, solemnly visiting national shrines, and taking charge of a whole host of cultural associations, presses, newspapers, schools, and radios. He had competition from non-communist nationalists, however, especially when well-known individuals like Nhat Linh and Khai Hung returned to Hanoi determined to promote a nationalist culture as well as an anticommunist one. Since the start of the Pacific War, these men had joined Nguyen Thai Hoc’s party, the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, and now opened a new paper in Hanoi, Viet Nam. Heated exchanges broke out as Vietnamese nationalists argued over the nature of postcolonial Vietnam. Meanwhile, colonial war spread across the south as Charles de Gaulle’s troops began reconquering the Mekong delta in late 1945. From the start, all three sides—communists, nationalists, and colonialists—mobilized, politicized, and militarized culture like never before, via print culture, cinema, and the airwaves.⁴⁰

17. A Cao Dai temple.

18. Saigon Cathedral.

19. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu, 1954.

20. Vietminh medical soldiers at Dien Bien Phu.

21. French troops at Dien Bien Phu, 23 March 1954.

22. Vietnamese child commandos.

23. Independence celebrations in Hanoi, September 1954.

24. Ngo Dinh Diem at a denunciation of communism ceremony, 28 November 1955.

25. A Buddhist monk burns himself to death in protest of government discrimination, Saigon, 11 June 1963.

26. A helicopter picks up a wounded South Vietnamese soldier, Hiep Duc, South Vietnam, November 1965.

27. US marines in the jungle, 4 November 1968.

28. Vietcong soldiers on an abandoned US tank during the Tet Offensive.

29. Captured South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, Saigon, 30 April 1975.

30. Chinese troops entering Vietnam, 1979.

31. Vietnamese boat people awaiting rescue in the South China Sea, May 1984.

32. The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, Hanoi.

Cultural Revolution, War and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1945–75)

The outbreak of full-scale hostilities in Hanoi in late 1946 between the French and the Vietnamese saw the French embark upon a bloody war of colonial conquest. French artillery and bombers reduced much of the old quarter in Hanoi to rubble, sending the population fleeing into the countryside. Unlike in the nineteenth century, however, foreign correspondents and diplomats monitored this second conquest closely. And despite their efforts to shape public opinion by emphasizing the three pillars of the ‘colonial gesture’ (the creation of hospitals, schools, and roads), and the ‘horrors’ committed by the other side, the French press and propaganda services could never stop their critics, not even those coming from inside the colonial office, from challenging the premises of colonial ideology and war. In 1949, the head of the Colonial Academy in Paris, Paul Mus, dropped a bombshell when he published a series of articles condemning the army’s use of torture and calling for French negotiations with Ho Chi Minh. He lost his job and ended up in Yale, where he helped get Southeast Asian studies off the ground and influenced the antiwar movement in the United States. One Frances FitzGerald met him there. Her Pulitzer Prize–winning attack on the American war in Vietnam, Fire in the Lake, is dedicated to Mus. Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig, nominated for an Oscar for ‘best documentary feature’ in 1969, owes much to Mus, one of the few French intellectuals to have spoken out against the First Indochina War. In this film, one can hear de Antonio’s French Orientalist ‘expert’ defend Ho Chi Minh passionately, insisting that he was the rightful heir to a timeless Confucian tradition and resistance culture.⁴¹

Culture remained a battlefield too, because French colonial conquest was never complete during the entire First Indochina War. Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam continued to exist as a state, controlling ten million people spread across wide tracts of territory by the end of that war. From its capital in the northern hills to its control over much of central Vietnam, Ho’s lieutenants contested every colonial attempt to influence Vietnamese, Asian, and foreign opinion. The government’s diplomatic delegations in Bangkok, Rangoon, New Delhi, Prague, and Paris organized interviews with foreign correspondents, countered French propaganda, and promoted their own. The Ministry of Education and Culture, in collaboration with the Vietnamese Workers Party, presided over the continued nationalization of culture in schools, the bureaucracy, the army, the arts, and literature. Hundreds of prewar cultural luminaries joined the ‘resistance’, including Xuan Dieu, Huy Can, Phan Khoi, and a young singer-songwriter named Pham Duy. They put their individual freedoms on hold for the greater good of achieving Vietnam’s national independence. Many found the resistance personally liberating and often exhilarating. It gave their lives new meaning in an extraordinary time of change. They helped organize mass literacy campaigns in the countryside and put their novels, poetry, paintings, and compositions in the service of the war for national liberation.

Ironically, even in war nationalists continued to rely on French Vietnam’s print media. Months before full-scale war broke out in December 1946, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam authorities transferred scores of colonial printing presses, typewriters, radios, and paper to the countryside. A phenomenal range of party, government, technical, and educational papers, directives, and messages poured off DRV presses of colonial origin. Bao Nhan Dan (The People’s Daily) had a print run of 20,000 copies; the communists’ weekly, Su That (The Truth), was printed to the tune of 10,000 copies every week. In all, almost nine million books appeared in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam between 1945 and 1954, the majority of which served administrative, educative and military purposes as well as firing a fiercely patriotic resistance culture. The survival of the war state also depended on administrators, educators, and soldiers being able to read and write in the Romanized script. During its first year of operation, free of French interference above the sixteenth parallel, the DRV taught the basics of quoc ngu to 2.2 million people. By the end of the war, the government claimed to have taught those fundamentals to all of the ten million people under its control. Hundreds of rudimentary resistance schools (at both primary and secondary levels) operated in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. During almost a decade of war a new bureaucratic elite emerged from administrative, agricultural, medical, and technical schools (many of them originally having come from a rural and poor milieu) which offered unprecedented social mobility to the rural Vietnamese.They may not have possessed state-of-the-art training in medicine and science, but they were empowered by the DRV and wartime.⁴²

The Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s communist leadership went further by seeking to introduce a new communist culture to the country. The party’s acting General Secretary, Truong Chinh, worked on this during the Second World War, when he penned a series of influential essays outlining the future of communist culture in Vietnam. Based on the Marxist-Leninist creed, Chinh explained, culture would one day have to serve class interests, above all those of the worker and peasant classes. But for the time being, the party focused on creating a large united front via both of its biggest mass organizations, the Viet Minh and the Lien Viet. Heroic, anticolonialist themes dominated in schools, cultural associations, and the army. This changed radically after the Chinese communist victory of October 1949, however. With Sino-Soviet diplomatic recognition in early 1950, Vietnamese communists willingly aligned their country with the communist bloc, much as the Le dynasty had connected Vietnam to the Confucian East Asian world, its culture, canon, and philosophies, in the fifteenth century. To Marx and Lenin, Vietnamese communists now added Mao and Maoism as the newly renamed Vietnamese Workers’ Party embarked on transforming culture through ideological rectification sessions, new hero campaigns, and massive amounts of propaganda. To create a new intellectual and bureaucratic class under its firm direction, the party required artists, poets, writers, and teachers to undergo intensive re-education before returning to their teaching positions. Communist propaganda campaigns in Vietnam proposed more and more worker and peasant heroes to emulate, as they did in China, North Korea, Cuba, and the Soviet Union.⁴³

No matter how anticolonialist, intellectuals who resisted this ideological homogenization did so at their own risk. Some escaped to the Republic of Vietnam, like the singer and songwriter Pham Duy. Others convinced themselves that things would improve once national liberation was achieved. Many embraced the party’s cause and defended its crackdown during the late 1950s on intellectuals who called for the protection of human rights. This had happened with the Nhan Van (Humanism) and Giai Pham (Fine Arts) affair (see chapter 10). Some stood up to the party’s assault on individual liberties. The soul of the New Poetry Movement, and an admirer of China’s Lu Xun, Phan Khoi, angered the Vietnamese communist leadership by daring to write, in the wake of the disastrous land-reform campaign of 1956, that ‘the people have a right to demonstrate’. He died in 1960, shortly before the party was to put him on trial for ‘deviationism’.⁴⁴

Not all individual liberties were suspended in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, however. Women acquired greater rights. In 1945–6, the government legally established the equality of the sexes, including the right to vote for women. In 1950, another law recognized divorce. The 1959 Law on Marriage and the Family further emancipated women by prohibiting forced and premature marriage. Children could choose their partners, not their parents. Laws outlawed violence against women and the exploitation of daughters and daughters-in-law. As they were operating only from remote areas of Vietnam until 1954, DRV gender laws affected areas long left alone by the increased and mainly urban feminism of the interwar period.

But war, not law or ideology, may well have served as the most effective gender equalizer until 1975. Firstly, the mobilization of millions of men for wartime service required more women to assume positions of power in the family, village councils, and the field. Secondly, while the People’s Army of Vietnam was all-male, women were massively involved in rural militias, urban commando units, and the human logistics of transportation. They were essential to operating the highly dangerous Ho Chi Minh Trail and did so at a serious cost to themselves. Thirdly, the evacuation of Vietnamese cities in the face of French attack in 1945–7 sent tens of thousands of urban women into the countryside and, with them, all sorts of new ideas about gender and culture. Similar things occurred when American bombs rained down on Hanoi. The feminization of local politics and work during the Vietnam War is particularly noteworthy. In 1962, DRV women only held 0.5 percent of presidencies in the village administrative councils. By 1967, that number had risen to over 15 percent. Between 1965 and 1969, female membership in village people’s councils jumped from 19 percent to 44 percent, while the number of women in the labor force reached an astonishing 80 percent or more by the early 1970s. The percentage of women in militias protecting northern villages, and even among the National Liberation Front fighting alongside the all-male People’s Army of Vietnam in the south, ran as high as 50 percent.⁴⁵

We know precious little about how gender relations operated with the end of the war and the return of so many men to their villages to find work. It is doubtful women were able to maintain their wartime gains. And male stereotyping of women, communist or not, did not die easily. As the party’s Secretary General, Le Duan, disingenuously put it in the early 1970s: ‘Women are very good [at] and highly suited to teaching. Good teaching needs good feelings and deep love for children [. . .] there should be many women in this field, because education for children is above all education by emotion’.⁴⁶

Cultural Revolution, War, and the Republic of Vietnam (1945–75)

If Vietnamese communists later regretted their enthusiastic embrace of Maoism and downplayed their dependence on Sino-Soviet support during three decades of war, anticommunist nationalists also found themselves in a similarly uncomfortable position: that of having to rely on the French and the Americans. The situation was complicated from the outset. Unable to defeat Vietnamese communists on their own, non-communist nationalists, including Nhat Linh/Nguyen Tuong Tam, bet that they could play off the French and the Americans against the communists. Instead, the French played them. The result was that the French not only prolonged their colonial rule (with American support), but in so doing they also undermined non-communist attempts to create a separate national culture at the same time. The French thus ensured that Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam remained the unique, viable defender of independence, despite Ho’s efforts to communize Vietnamese culture along Sino—Soviet lines.

Unfortunately, we know very little about the cultural changes that occurred within this ‘second’ Vietnam that emerged on the international scene between 1949 and 1954. One of the most important transformations may well have been the Vietnamization of the education system and the organization of literacy campaigns in the countryside during the battle for the hearts and minds of the people. Understaffed and at war with a competing DRV state, the French supported the spread of quoc ngu as the State of Vietnam began taking over their colonial administration and creating a Vietnamese army. Schools operated in remote areas of the country which provided opportunities and upward social mobility as in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Dozens of Vietnamese newspapers, presses, and publishing houses reopened in the cities. Novelists, poets, artists, and intellectuals remained active. Although French censors closed papers judged too critical of the war or French colonialism, there was no stopping the nationalization of culture along Vietnamese lines. New histories of Vietnam appeared, written by irreproachable authors like Hoang Xuan Han. Educators may not have achieved political independence, but they forced the French to grant them greater control over the education system and its curriculum.

The French also tried to limit the amount of American cultural influence entering post-1945 Vietnam, especially the flood of Hollywood films, consumer culture, and music, but not always successfully. French reliance on American aid during the second half of the conflict also made it impossible to deny an increasing number of Vietnamese students the right to study abroad in the United States, like the brilliant English-language translator of The Tale of Kieu, Huynh Sanh Thong. All of this occurred as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam sent its first students to China and the Soviet Union. Decolonization, the Cold War, and competing state-building realigned modern Vietnam’s cultural alliances in new ways.

While the French did their best to hang on culturally in Vietnam after 1954, their withdrawal finally allowed non-communist nationalists to get rid of a century of colonial culture, as the communists had already done in the DRV. Leading the charge was, of course, Ngo Dinh Diem. Working through the ministries of the Interior and Education, Diem promoted an official nationalism based on three ‘antis’: anticolonialism, antifeudalism, and anticommunism. He lost no time nationalizing colonial museums, research centers, hospitals, schools, universities, presses, and newspapers. Street names changed yet again as a new set of monuments appeared. As in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, feudalism meant Diem had no love for the monarchy which the French had systematically used for a century. The sham vote Ngo Dinh Diem organized to get rid of Bao Dai in 1955 was designed as much to consolidate his power as it was to bury the monarchy’s prestige for good. His disdain for French colonialism and Vietnamese feudalism was exceeded only by his hatred of communism. Indeed, anticommunism became a vital ingredient in the national culture for the fledgling Republic of Vietnam, transmitted by teachers, cadres and textbooks throughout the national education service, the army, and bureaucracy.⁴⁷

This state-sponsored nationalism ran into problems, however. Diem’s methods paralleled the harsh methods used by his communist counterparts to forge a new culture. The ‘Denounce the Communist’ campaign, like communist rectification, sought to inculcate a homogenous anticommunist ideological mindset. Civil-action cadres were dispersed across the country to train teachers, bureaucrats, highlanders, and army officers. Security services organized denunciation campaigns in villages, convinced as the communists and Confucian militants were before them, that they could impose ideology from the top down. Many accepted their fate, but those who resisted did so at great risk. Thousands of southern communists perished at the hands of the Ngo government. But non-communists who resisted would often meet a similar fate.

Indeed, in his nationalist offensive, Ngo Dinh Diem alienated important non-communist groups. Upon coming to power, he attacked the French-backed ‘feudal sects’, the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai religions. By failing to reincorporate them into the national body, however, Diem missed an opportunity to develop a wider nationalist coalition and cultural identity capable of resisting communist efforts to build up a national front against the fledgling republic. Diem further reduced his base by refusing to work with other anticommunist parties like the Dai Viet and the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, each of which had moved southward after the Geneva armistice. All of these groups and others increasingly contested Diem’s nationalist legitimacy and monopoly on national culture. Like the communist crackdown on intellectual freedom in the north, Diem’s authoritarianism also impinged on individual liberties and re-ignited a democratically republican-minded resistance in Vietnam (which had its roots in the early twentieth century). Perhaps the parallel of Phan Khoi’s unrepentant defiance of the communists in 1960 and Nhat Linh’s decision to kill himself in 1963 rather than appear before Ngo Dinh Diem’s court captured the disillusion of this generation of intellectuals with postcolonial authoritarianism. The history of individual liberty in Vietnam is a tragic one.

That said, the Republic of Vietnam, at least following Diem’s assassination in late 1963, never matched the communist party’s ability to control, rectify, and destroy those who defied its leadership in their cultural production and quest for individual liberties. Twenty-seven Vietnamese language papers came off Saigon presses in 1967, most of which were not government-run. This would have been unthinkable under the communist single-party state. Others appeared in French and English. Glossy magazines appeared, filled with gossip and film stars, as well as journals relating the latest political, philosophical, and literary trends in Europe and North America. Trinh Cong Son read Jean-Paul Sartre while in Hanoi Sartre’s Vietnamese colleague, the philosopher Tran Duc Thao, suffered rectification that drove him to the brink of madness. Free verse, creative writing, independent social reportage, and individualism were as popular in Saigon in the 1950s as they had been in Hanoi in the 1930s. Nha Ca and Trinh Cong Son’s poetry and songs reflected the importance of individualism to the creation of a new society. Nguyen Sa’s free-form writing of the 1960s could have appeared in Hanoi in the 1930s: ‘Let me speak at once. If not, I will have to go seek myself like a maddened horse galloping down the road at twilight, chasing the sun as it disappears beyond the mountains [. . .] Let me speak at once’.⁴⁸

War, however, consumed southern Vietnamese culture during the 1960s, as a civil conflict was submerged by massive and intensely violent American intervention. In the north, the Vietnamese Workers Party closely controlled how writers, poets, and artists represented the war in their work. War had to remain sacred. It had to be glorified. It had to be heroic. When Phu Thang, the First Indochina War veteran we met in chapter 9, suggested otherwise in the early 1960s, the party shut him down. In the south, republican authorities certainly censored artists, and, as we saw above, banned the film Land of Sorrows for its pacifism. But until the end of what has become known as the Vietnam War, southern artists, poets, and writers could express remarkably candid accounts of the destructive, ugly face of war as it marched through Vietnam, ripping people, societies, and countries apart. Years before the famous Vietnam War veteran Bao Ninh published his international bestselling novel, The Sorrow of War, a host of artists in the south had already taken up the theme because, whatever its faults, the southern republic was more open.

These authors found little to glorify in what the war was doing to Vietnam. As the fighting intensified from 1965 onward and bombs rained down over the country, artists wrote with extraordinary power, originality, and lucidity. Singer and songwriter Trinh Cong Son captured a deep desire for peace and a latent fear that all of the Vietnamese were on a road toward self-destruction in his songs. Everyone knew his songs ‘Legacy of the Motherland’, ‘Love Song of a Madman’, and ‘Lullaby of Cannons for Night’. The poet Tran Da Thu (Nha Ca’s husband) found his own way to capture the grotesque nature of war in the opening lines of his poem, ‘Some Gifts to Express My Love’:

I give you a roll of barbed wire.

Some kind of creeping vine of this new age,

Which has stealthily crept around my soul today.

That is my love, accept it without question.

I give you a truck with plastique.

It explodes in the midst of a crowded street,

Explodes and hurls about chunks of flesh.

That is my life, do you understand it?

[. . .]

I would like to give you many more things.

But that’s enough. I’ll just give you a tear-gas grenade,

To force out tears neither happy nor sad,

Like those streaming down my waiting face.⁴⁹

The singer-songwriter Pham Duy, who first became famous in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam for his blood-chilling song which had condemned the French massacre at Gio Linh in 1948, used his powerful songwriting to communicate the fratricidal nature of the Vietnamese civil war. In his ‘Tale of Two Soldiers’, he sings of two soldiers who ‘both loved the fatherland—Vietnam’ [. . .] ‘From the same village, but divided’. Both were heroes, but both were forced to be fighting machines designed to kill the other. Duy ends his haunting song with them both lying dead on the battlefield, clasping their rifles in their hands. The last line reads: ‘There were two soldiers who one rosy dawn killed each other for Vietnam, killed each other for Vietnam’.⁵⁰