Fire in the Lake (72 page)

On my first postwar visit to Vietnam in 1993, I went with a group from an American foundation to see a new handicraft project in a village some twenty miles from Hanoi. Surrounded by a thick hedge of bamboo and thorny plants, the village was invisible from the road. Within the hedge was a labyrinth of narrow dirt lanes flanked by hedges and brick walls. Walking along the lanes and looking through the gates in the walls, we could see houses with tiled roofs and open fronts giving onto brick courtyards and tiny gardens. The village was a honeycomb in which each household maintained its privacy. Near the center of the village was a big rectangular primary school, built in the 1960s, with sports fields around it. But on the hillside above it was the village
dinh,
built in the old style with heavy wooden pillars supporting a red-tiled roof. Shaded by a huge old banyan tree, the
dinh
faced south, overlooking a pond.

The school aside, the village looked to me much like the traditional northern villages described by French scholars such as Paul Mus and Pierre Gourou. I had never expected to see one this physically intact. In the 1960s the DRV had collectivized the family farms, merged the villages into larger administrative units, and organized the farmers into specialized production brigades. The government had also modernized the irrigation systems and rationalized the division of the rice lands, creating straight lines where none had existed before. In 1986, after the collectivization program failed, creating a near-famine in parts of the north, the government dismantled the communes and reinstituted private enterprise and family farming. In the meantime, however, the population of the country had grown almost exponentially, spilling millions of people into cities, towns, and roadside settlements.

By 2000, the major roads out of Hanoi had become corridors so built up with houses, shops, and small businesses that it was difficult to catch a glimpse of the landscape beyond. But farther out in the countryside we could see from the heights of a dike the old-style settlements commanding their rice fields like fortresses. Physically and politically, these villages are hardly as they were in precolonial times. Still, some institutions of village life have not changed, and a surprising number of others have been revived since 1986.

From medieval times on, most villages had their own particular handicraft industry — and they do today. Driving in the countryside, we could see the raw materials stacked up by the roads: plywood near villages that made toothpicks or matches, bundles of reeds and straw by those that wove baskets or mats. Some villages continue to produce the same handicrafts they did centuries ago. Bat Trang, for example, just outside of Hanoi, has long been famous for its blue-and-white pottery, Chuong in Ha Tay province for the
nom
leaf covering for conical hats. In the village I visited in 1993, a young woman, a mother of three small children, had contracted with a Japanese company to make baskets of a traditional design, giving employment to dozens of households. Elsewhere, villagers had used their entrepreneurial skills to take advantage of the new demands of the Vietnamese market. In Duong Ho in Hai Duong province, a village known for its traditional woodblock prints, most families, we discovered, had turned their talents to making paper offerings for the ancestors. Officially the government still frowned on the practice of burning paper imitations of luxury goods people wanted their ancestors to have in the afterlife, but after the economic reforms of 1986, it had given up trying to stop the practice. In tune with the times, the villagers of Duong Ho were turning out not just paper shoes, umbrellas, and dress shirts, as in the old days, but paper motorcycles and cell phones as well.

In Dong Ky in Bac Ninh province, a village that has used its ancient woodworking skills to produce inlaid furniture for the international market, I talked with the manager of one family business, a young man with an executive air, about how he had coped with the Asian economic crisis of 1997 and what he was doing to fill the needs of an expanding Taiwanese market. Later he took us back to the family compound, where a tent was still up from a big family wedding held there the day before. His father, a Mr. Vu, gave us tea in the main house in front of the ancestral altar and discoursed on various subjects, including his service in the Viet Minh and the continuing relevance of Confucian values. A man in his seventies, Mr. Vu, we gathered, was the patriarch of a subclan, or extended family. He told us that the clan, which had seven branches in the village, kept genealogical records going back for centuries, and that everyone in the village knew his or her place in the patrilineage. Apparently neither revolution nor war nor business success had altered the family structure of Dong Ky.

As we were leaving the village, we stopped to watch a wrestling match in an open-air stadium. High school athletes were competing with wrestlers from a neighboring village, and the crowd was cheering and groaning with the fortunes of the local boys. It was a completely modern scene, but the tournament, we learned, was a part of the spring festival celebrating the patron genie of the village.

I happened upon several such festivals that March. The first was in Quang Ba, beyond the West Lake of Hanoi, a village that used to grow flowers but that has been built over and transformed into a residential neighborhood where many foreigners live. The
dinh,
a fine example of traditional architecture, just recently restored, had a lacquered and gilded altar decorated with flowers and miniature orange trees. One of the chief organizers, Mr. Vu Hoa My, welcomed me in rusty French and told me that the guardian spirit was Phuong Hung, an eighth-century king who had led an uprising against the Chinese. Mr. My was, it turned out, a retired government and Communist Party official who, he told me, had made money in real estate. He had given generously to the restoration of the
dinh.
I arrived just as the procession returned with the throne of the genie, pennants flying, musicians making a great noise, and a beautiful cloth dragon billowing out overhead. The procession, Mr. My said, had gone to the village pagoda to collect pure water — the dew of the morning. A couple of hundred people, the women in
ao dais,
the men in Western dress, had gathered to greet its return. After the throne had been ceremonially replaced in the
dinh,
a group of elderly men in blue Chinese-style robes said prayers before the altar. Families came forward out of the crowd with trays piled high with rice, vegetables, fruits, and cooked chickens. Leaving symbolic morsels on the altar, they asked the patron spirit to bless their meals and went outside to have their holiday photograph taken.

Afterward, amid a genial hubbub, the entertainment began. The village chess masters set up a human chess game in the courtyard with high school students dressed in robes representing kings, queens, knights, and pawns; the students sat on chairs and moved from square to square as directed. The play was fast, but one of the queens, who was hardly moved at all, got bored and read a movie magazine through most of it. Meanwhile, a flock of ducks was let loose in the pond and little boys competed to capture the ducks with long-handled nets — or simply by diving in and grabbing them. In a field behind the
dinh,
men huddled around rings in which spurless fighting cocks struggled more or less energetically to force their opponents out of the ring.

At a simple luncheon Quang Ba held for visitors from neighboring villages and a few other guests, Mr. My told me that for many years the
dinh
festival had not been celebrated in this way. But now, he said, the government favors the ceremonial and traditional games because they remind people of their history and help to create strong communities. Listening to him, I began to think that the festivals were some kind of government effort to resurrect “tradition” for state purposes. Later I discovered that it was the villages who had insisted on reviving their festivals — along with their other religious practices.

Northern Vietnam never had a cultural revolution, but in the period of “building socialism” from 1954 to 1986, the government curbed the old rites and banned the expensive feasts that often accompanied them. The elaborate family ceremonies, the cult of the village genie, and other spirit cults were variously denounced as wasteful, superstitious, and “feudalistic.” By the mid-seventies even ancestor worship seemed to be on the wane. But then came the failure of collectivization and the economic reforms. Villagers immediately began to put more time and resources into their family rituals, and when they had some money, they refurbished their
dinhs
and began to celebrate the festivals. According to anthropologists, the villagers were readjusting to the return of family farming and the need for voluntary cooperation among households. The family and village ceremonies helped this process along.

In the early 1990s, the government gave the historic
dinhs
landmark status and helped to restore them. It also gave its blessing to the festivals. “When we collectivized, we said the festival was feudalistic. Now we bring the festival back and call it traditional,” one villager told an American development expert with some irony. Apparently, in the wake of the economic disaster caused by its own “scientific” methods, the government had decided to relegitimate itself on traditional grounds.

Central Vietnam was the region hardest hit by the American war. Driving from Danang to Hue on my first trip back, I somehow expected to see the rusting bodies of tanks, the tin shacks of the refugee encampments, and scars from the bombing and shelling on the hillsides. But the wounds of war had disappeared from the countryside, and in Hue the citadel and the palaces and tombs of the Nguyen emperors had been so completely rebuilt and restored that it was hard to imagine that the sanguinary battle for the city in 1968 had ever occurred. Along Route 1, the landscape looked much the same as when I first saw it in early 1966 — except for one thing. Here and there by the roadside were cemeteries with enormous new family tombs freshly plastered and painted in pastel colors.

When I returned seven years later, Route 1 outside of Hue had become a bustling commercial highway lined with stores, repair shops, and houses. New houses had sprung up in the villages as well, some with highly decorated spirit screens in front of them. But the
dinhs,
even those the Ministry of Culture had designated as historical monuments, lay in various states of disrepair. “It's hard to raise money for the
dinhs,”
an elderly guardian of one of them told me. “People take care of their clan houses, but the
dinhs
are lost in these large communities.”

In central Vietnam — at least south of the seventeenth parallel — the villages do not have the cohesiveness they do in the north. Whether this is a recent or a historical development, they are today little more than administrative units. But all the people we talked with knew exactly how many clans and subclans there were in their villages, and, as the
dinh
guardian suggested, the most impressive buildings were the houses that people had built or repaired in honor of their ancestors. Walking around one village — as it happened the home village of Le Due Anh, the president of Vietnam in the early nineties — we found a splendid new house, completely unoccupied, that the members of a clan had built for the ancestral altar and for family gatherings on the death anniversaries of their forebears.

On a road just north of Hue, we came across a lineage hall: a shrine built in the 1990s by a branch of the imperial Nguyen family containing the family's ancestral tablets and a genealogical chart tracing the family back fifteen generations. Lineage halls were, I knew, a feature of traditional society, but I had never seen one in the sixties and seventies. Just opposite the Nguyen hall was another one, also of recent construction, this one honoring a branch of the Do family. The caretaker of this shrine, Mr. Do Van Le, showed us a book, privately printed in 1998, that traced the family back twelve generations to the ancestor who had come here from Thanh Hoa province in the north five hundred years ago. In 1977, by his account, a member of the family had found a record of the first seven generations compiled by a Confucian scholar in 1875. He had the text translated from Chinese characters and added information about the succeeding generations. Subsequently the family had appointed a board of editors to do the remaining work.

According to Mr. Le, most of the Do family had lived in this district until the American war, when there had been a partial diaspora. Some members now lived in Hue, some in Ho Chi Minh City, some in the United States. Mr. Le told us that his elder brother had joined the NLF and had been killed in the U Minh forest, but he spoke of the war as if it were ancient history. What pleased him, he said, was that as many as two hundred fifty members of the family came back for reunions, including a number from California.

Listening to Mr. Le, I remembered a family feast a colleague and I had stumbled upon in 1973 in a hamlet not far from Danang. The village had been razed in the sixties, but the rice was growing again, and people had put up thatched huts on the old brick foundations and terraces. On one of the terraces some forty people — old men, women, and children — were gathered around a long wooden table laden with dishes of fish, chicken, vegetables, and fruit. The elders at the gathering gave us to know that the village supported the revolution through the French and the American wars. They were telling us obliquely of their own exploits in the resistance when an ARVN major in dress uniform pulled up on a motorbike. The patriarch acknowledged his arrival and motioned him to a place at the table. The old men went right on talking about what they had done to help the NLF. The major was, after all, a member of the family.

That family feast had seemed to me a natural resumption of tradition — a simple exhalation of breath after all those years of war. But the appearance of clan houses and lineage halls in the 1990s seemed to require some explanation. Families such as the Do and the Nguyen had not simply renewed their local ties after a decade of collectivization. Rather, they had gone to considerable scholarly effort — one they had not made since the French arrived in the nineteenth century — to discover their roots in the distant past. In doing so, they had created clans that encompassed large numbers of people, some of them living as far away as California. But perhaps that was just it. Central Vietnamese families had been torn apart by two wars and geographically dispersed. The effort to put them back together was so great as to seem artificial, but it was proportionate to the trauma of the deaths and the separations.