VIET NAM: Tradition and Change | By Hữu Ngọc; edited by Lady Borton and Elizabeth F. Collins
Research in International Studies. Southeast Asia Series, no. 128. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press; Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press [distributor], 2016. xxviii, 358 pp. (Illustrations.) US$26.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-89680-302-2.
Through his leadership in Hanoi’s Foreign Languages Publishing House (later Thế Giới Publishers), Hữu Ngọc crafted a long career of explaining Vietnam to foreign audiences. In Hanoi, he is an institution in his own right. Now nearly one hundred years old, he became famous in expatriate circles for his short columns in French and English newspapers on various aspects of Vietnamese culture.
These were originally compiled into a 2004 book, Wandering Through Vietnamese Culture. Though this book is an accessible introduction to Vietnamese culture, it spans a cumbersome 1259 pages. Việt Nam: Tradition and Change edits and reorganizes the material in Wandering Through Vietnamese Culture into a shorter and more digestible form, with a new preface and introduction and several other new materials in an appendix.
This book is a series of short vignettes on the culture, society, literature, art, and history of Vietnam. It focuses heavily on the Red River Delta, and much of its content is specific to Hanoi and its immediate environs. Naturally, such a collection of short works does not lend itself to an overarching thesis.
However, two almost contradictory themes rise to the surface more often than others. The first is the notion that the Vietnamese identity has been forged through a tradition of resistance to foreign aggression. This theme leads Hữu Ngọc to conclude that modern Vietnamese can be defined as “members of the Việt ethnic community who did not want to become Chinese” (29). The second is the idea that Vietnamese culture formed through the localization of foreign cultural influences from such places as China and France. “Cultural identity evolves with time and space,” he reminds us, and “a new tradition may be refashioned in the national mold from a foreign source” (46).
The editors have helpfully organized his explanation of these two themes into ten sections, which cover the nature of Vietnamese identity, aspects of cultural influence on Vietnam, Confucianism, Buddhism, biographies of important historical figures, Vietnamese literature, theatre and art, geography, Vietnamese women, and the cultural, social, and economic challenges posed by the 1986 adoption of the renovation (đổi mới) policy.
This book serves best as a guide for those travelling to Vietnam. It is particularly helpful as a broad-based introduction to a potpourri of subjects on Vietnamese culture for those with only a basic knowledge of the subject. Because Hữu Ngọc gives very specific geographical details for the sketches he provides, it would be possible to organize a quite exciting and comprehensive tour of northern Vietnam from the places he mentions. This book might also spark younger readers’ interest in Vietnam, and is well suited for the high school or lower-division undergraduate classroom. Hữu Ngọc is an engaging and brilliant writer, and the brevity of his vignettes are just enough to spark an interest in a topic for a reader unfamiliar with the material. Even scholars of Vietnam will find something to learn in this volume. Though the material covered is relatively basic, the author is clearly a renaissance man. His works span such a remarkable variety of topics that there is something for everyone to learn from this volume.
That being said, this work clearly represents the point of view of a Hanoi intellectual of a certain age. While the south is sometimes mentioned, there is a tendency in many of these vignettes to portray the culture of the Red River Delta as if it were Vietnamese culture in general. Hữu Ngọc sometimes romanticizes the culture of the rural northern Vietnamese village in a way that could only come from the pen of an urban intellectual. His assertions of the ancient origins of Vietnamese identity and of the centrality of “resistance to foreign aggression,” while typical of an intellectual of his era and political background, are largely contradicted by the recent scholarship of Katherine Churchman (The People Between the Rivers: The Rise and Fall of Bronze Drum Culture, 200-750 CE, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) and Erica Brindley (Ancient China and the Yue, Cambridge, 2015). These works show that to the extent that we can know anything for certain about the people living in the Red River Delta in ancient times, the notion that they possessed a Vietnamese identity comparable to modern-day Vietnamese is not sustainable. In fact, this point should lead us back to the contradiction between the two themes that seems to form the basis of Hữu Ngọc’s writing: if Vietnamese culture is only made coherent through a continual process of change resulting from the localization of layers of foreign influence, then it cannot simultaneously be possible that there is also an essence of Vietnamese culture that can be located through the study of exemplars from the Vietnamese past.
Despite these flaws, readers will enjoy this book. As an easily digestible introduction to a wide variety of aspects of Red River Delta culture for those travelling to Vietnam, or for those who are new to Vietnamese studies, the book is as good or better than any other material currently in print. From the morose words of Vietnam’s leper poet Hàn Mặc Tử to the bawdy lines of Vietnam’s great woman poet Hồ Xuân Hương to the images of water puppets in a rural village to the descriptions of divorce and single parenting in contemporary Hanoi, there is something in this collection for everyone. Its true value lies in the rich diversity of what it offers and the beauty of Hữu Ngọc’s simple descriptions of cultural practices he clearly loves.
Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox
Western Connecticut State University, Danbury, USA
pp. 855-856
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