CPA Media

SEE RELATED IMAGES @ PICTURES FROM HISTORY1

By Andrew Forbes

There are a number of books on traditional life in the 36 Streets in Vietnamese, but relatively little exists in English. One exception is Dr Nguyen Dinh-Hoa's From the City Inside the Red River: A Cultural Memoir of Mid-Century Vietnam. This fine study was penned by the scion of a traditional mandarin family, born in 1924 in a tube house at 65, Hang Bac, the son of a middle-ranking civil servant of an upright, conservative and Confucian character. Nguyen Dinh-Hoa spent his childhood in the 36 Streets, receiving an excellent education and becoming fluent in Chinese, French and English before leaving to study at Union College, Schenectady, New York State, in 1948. He would go on enjoy a very distinguished academic and diplomatic career in South Vietnam, Europe and the United States, before retiring in California. Although he lived his formative years (1924-48) in the very heart of Hanoi Old City, he did not return to the place of his birth until 1994. He went on to publish his memoir on the Old City in just before his death 1999, and it represents a priceless and unique record of life in the 36 Streets in the early part of the last century. I brought a copy with me to read in situ during the relaxed Hanoi evenings, and benefited greatly thereby.

When Nguyen Dinh-Hoa was born on Hang Bac in 1924, the street was solely devoted to the jewellery trade. He writes: ‘The street, which was muddy on rainy days, and once or twice even flooded when the Red River overflowed its dikes, was divided into five sections. The patron saint was worshipped in two dinh or halls… that tutelary deity watched over the twofold economic activities: chuyen bac, smelting silver and duc bac, casting silver bars'. He describes the traditional guild shops with their auspicious signs in Chinese characters and Vietnamese transcriptions hanging out front, names like Tien Bao, or ‘Progress in Preciousness', Tien My, or ‘Progress in Beauty', Phu Xuong, or ‘Wealth and Prosperity', Duc Bao or ‘Virtuous Jewel', and the like. ‘The living quarters were in the back. Passers by saw only the stores in front with a display case full of glittering merchandise. Farther back one could see the equipment of the trade… the hand operated bellows, the small furnace consisting of a cavity dug in the floor with two bricks and some burning charcoal, a few anvils, and the paraphernalia of silversmithing, tiny wooden and metallic hammers, chisels, picks, files, tweezers and scales'.

Everyday life at 65, Hang Bac, where he grew up, is described in loving detail. Of the house itself, he notes:

“The whole building was shaped like a shoe box, with no windows; permanent semi-darkness reigned over the people and the furniture. In the courtyard in the wider back of the property, there was a small garden, with a masonry cistern for storing rain water and a tiny “bathhouse” on the right, and a kitchen located on the left and leading to the latrine. Just beyond a couple of other tenant households, a narrow side door led to Sam Cong Alley, perpendicular to Silver Street. Rain water was caught from the fronds of two areca palms nearby. A guava tree and a rose-apple tree spread their foliage near bushes of aglae and jasmine, and clumps of cacti climbed the wall.”

When he was five years old, Hoa's formal education began at Tri-Tri School on nearby Pho Hang Dan, or ‘Stringed Instrument Street'. The name of the school derives from a Confucian precept advocating ‘the achievement of True Knowledge'. The headmaster, Mr Nguyen Van To, wore the traditional male ao dai and tied his hair up in a chignon within the black folds of his turban. A noted Sinologist and scholar of Chinese history, he was also associated with the prestigious École Française d'Extrême-Orient (French School of the Far East, or EFEO), spoke fluent French and was a Viet patriot. Here, and at home under the tutelage of his somewhat austere father, the young Hoa was schooled in Chinese culture and Vietnamese nationalism. He would study Chinese classics, such as The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin, and Journey to the West, in Chinese. Then his father ‘would recount in his own words the exploits of Vietnamese national heroes in their struggle against Chinese invaders – those stories of the Trung Sisters, Lady Trieu, Ly Thuong Kiet, Tran Hung Dao, Emperor Quang Trung, that he knew by heart'. His first headmaster, Nguyen Van To, was instrumental in founding, in 1936, the Hoi truyen ba quoc ngu or ‘Society for the Diffusion of the National Language' (Vietnamese written in an adapted Roman script). Yet at the same time the young Hoa was brought up in a household where: ‘the medium of Chinese characters was so sacred that a piece of rice paper containing Chinese written symbols should never be used as trash or otherwise desecrated, but should be burned instead'.

In a very real way, Nguyen Dinh-Hoa's upbringing epitomises the strange paradigm that lies at the heart of the traditional Vietnamese worldview and, especially of Viet perceptions of China and Chinese culture. At the Tri-Tri School he was ‘terrorised' by ‘that old scholar' into memorising the rhythmic phrases of the San Tzu Ching or ‘Three Character Classic', a Chinese primer dating from the Song Dynasty seven centuries before. ‘This book consists of 356 alternately rhyming lines of three ideographic symbols each. Until the early decades of the 20th century every child in China – and in Vietnam – began his education by memorising the verses'. From this, he progressed to the Nhat Thien Tu, or ‘Book of 1000 Characters', a Vietnamese-authored glossary using 68 verses as a mnemonic device for memorising 1,015 Chinese characters. Steeped in the morals of Confucianism, and raised with an almost mystical respect for classical Chinese, yet deeply committed to Vietnamese freedom and independence, Dr Hoa would later write that he was: "astounded to read in the 1970s that the communist authorities in mainland China had denounced the Chinese One Thousand Character Book, The Three Character Classic and The Classic of Filial Piety as ‘poisonous weeds'!"

We are fortunate indeed to have Nguyen Dinh-Hoa's cultural memoir of Hanoi three quarters of a century ago, as things are indeed very different today. Many tube houses in the old city have survived and are gradually being restored, but very few Vietnamese today can read Chinese characters, and the semi-indigenous chu nom script, based on Chinese characters and developed in the 13th century, has all but died out, completely replaced by the Romanised quoc ngu script so ardently advocated by Dr Hoa's venerable headmaster. According to the Vietnamese Nom Preservation Foundation – which is based in North Carolina – ‘today less than 100 scholars worldwide can read chu nom, and much of Vietnam's vast written history is, in effect, inaccessible to the 80 million speakers of the language'. After two thousand years, a sea change has taken place in Vietnam, and education in Chinese has given way completely to a desire, almost a national compulsion, to learn English.

SEE MORE 36 STREETS IMAGES @ PICTURES FROM HISTORY

Text by Andrew Forbes; Photos by Pictures From History - © CPA Media