Elizabeth F. Collins
Professor
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio
Introduction
If I were to choose one person to accompany visitors on their first trip to Việt Nam, my choice would be Hữu Ngọc. If I were to choose one book for those about to visit Việt Nam or those unable to visit, my choice would be Hữu Ngọc’s Việt Nam: Tradition and Change.
At age ninety-eight by Western counting (ninety-nine according to Vietnamese), Hữu Ngọc is among Việt Nam’s most famous general scholars. Born with limited eyesight, he reads by holding a text three inches from his near-sighted eye. Yet with his unusual linguistic ability, prodigious memory, and his longevity, he is among Việt Nam’s keenest observers of traditional Vietnamese culture and recent history. For twenty years, Hữu Ngọc wrote a Sunday column in French for Le Courrier du Vietnam (The Việt Nam Mail). An English version appeared as “Traditional Miscellany” in Việt Nam News, Hà Nội’s English-language newspaper. He collected 1,255 pages from these essays into Wandering through Vietnamese Culture, the only English-language book to win Việt Nam’s Gold Book Prize.
Việt Nam: Tradition and Change is a selection from the many treasures in Wandering through Vietnamese Culture.
Hữu Ngọc was born on Hàng Gai (Hemp Market) Street in Hà Nội’s Old Quarter in 1918, when Việt Nam did not yet have its own name on world maps. At that time, the French name for Việt Nam was Annam, which was also the French name for one of Việt Nam’s three regions—Tonkin (Bắc Kỳ, the Northern Region); Annam (Trung Kỳ, the Central Region); and Cochin China (Nam Kỳ, the Southern Region). The Vietnamese people in all three regions endured colonialism’s rigid and often lethal grasp. The literacy rate among Vietnamese was from 5 to 10 percent. The schools recognized by the French provided education in Quốc Ngữ (Vietnamese Romanized script) and French to train a small group of Vietnamese students to be administrators at French offices. The curriculum in the country’s few high schools centered on French literature, French history, mathematics, and the sciences, with Vietnamese taught as a foreign language.
During Hữu Ngọc’s student years, Hà Nội had only two state-run high schools—Bưởi School for Vietnamese and Lycée Albert Sarraut for French children as well as for Vietnamese children from the privileged class. Hữu Ngọc was one of two students from Bưởi along with several from Sarraut to place highest in the special examinations. The prize was a ride in the first airplane to circle above Hà Nội.
“This was 1936,” Hữu Ngọc says. “Airplanes were rare in Việt Nam. How extraordinary, how amazing to be up in the sky! Such a wide-open view!”
Việt Nam was still under French rule when Hữu Ngọc completed a year of law school in Hà Nội and taught French in Vinh and Huế, two cities in the Central Region. Việt Nam’s Declaration of Independence placed the Democratic Republic of Việt Nam (DRVN) on the world map on September 2, 1945. Hữu Ngọc joined the Revolution that same year.
However, nationwide independence was short-lived. The French re-invaded Việt Nam’s Southern Region on September 23, 1945, three weeks after the Declaration of Independence, arriving on British ships carrying American materiel. Then, in late 1946, the French re-invaded Việt Nam’s Northern Region and its Central Region, again with American materiel. By this time, Việt Nam was divided into two shifting zones—French-occupied and liberated.
Hữu Ngọc was in the liberated zone. There, he took an examination with forty candidates to choose four who would become English teachers. He placed first. He laughs about this now: “The examiner for the verbal section asked about Wordsworth’s ‘The Daffodils,’ my favorite poem. I could be unusually fluent, and so I placed first. Wordsworth changed my life!”
He taught English in Yên Mô District, Ninh Bình Province and in the liberated zone of Nam Định Province, where he also served as chair of the Cultural Committee for the Nam Định Province Resistance. While in Nam Định, he created, wrote, and edited a French agitprop (agitation and propaganda) newspaper intended for troops in the French Far-East Expeditionary Corps. Only one known copy of the newspaper remains. Its red banner proclaims L’Etincelle (The Spark). That issue has an article about General Võ Nguyên Giáp, complete with a photograph.
Hữu Ngọc would tie his contraband newspapers to his bicycle’s luggage rack. He remembers passing through a Catholic village. He was biking down a narrow alley when he spotted several French-affiliated African troops, who had arrived for a mopping-up operation. They were on foot and heading toward him.
“Halt!” the soldiers shouted.
“I had to remain calm,” Hữu Ngọc says. “I ducked down an alley. I heard the click of gun triggers engaging. I was sure the soldiers would shoot me in the back. But I was lucky. I had just enough time to turn into another lane and disappear.”
In 1950, the DRVN government called up adult men in the liberated areas to join the army. By then, the French had re-occupied the liberated areas in the Red River Delta. Hữu Ngọc walked hundreds of kilometers out to the Việt Bắc Northern Liberated Zone in the mountains. As an army officer, he supervised the Section for Re-Education of European and African Prisoners of War (POWs). At that time, the DRVN kept the POWs at houses of local Tày and Nùng ethnic-minority people in “prisons without bars.” Hữu Ngọc remembers sitting with three POWs around a hearth in a house-on-stilts. “One POW was French,” he says, “one was an English former officer who’d served in the Royal Air Force, and one was German. We were chatting about anything and everything. I was speaking three foreign languages in the same conversation! I learned a great deal about foreign cultures from the POWs.”
Several thousand Germans had joined the French Foreign Legion, a French mercenary force, after World War II for assignments to Việt Nam. Some deserted to the Việt Minh side. “I worked closely with Chiến Sĩ (Militant, a.k.a. Erwin Borchers), an anti-Nazi German intellectual,” Hữu Ngọc says. “Chiến Sĩ had joined the French Foreign Legion and then deserted to the Việt Minh before our 1945 Revolution. He handled our agitprop among German POWs. We were close friends. That’s how I learned German.”
The Foreign Legion and the French Far-East Expeditionary Corps in Việt Nam had nearly twenty different nationalities. Many POWs had come from the French colonies in Northern and Central Africa. Hữu Ngọc and his colleagues organized lectures and printed training materials on nationalism to persuade POWs (particularly those from other French colonies) that they had been assisting the French in an unjust war.
Then the Vietnamese periodically released their “best students” back to the French side to organize within French ranks. The French soon caught onto the scheme and sent the newly released POWs back home. Once they were back home, many of these liberated African POWs began to organize for their own national revolutions. Perhaps it is no accident that some Algerians identify the beginning of their revolution as May 8, 1954, the day after the Vietnamese victory over the French at the famous Battle of Điện Biên Phủ.
Hữu Ngọc received a People’s Army Feat-of-Arms Award for his agitprop work. His assignments during the French War had taken him between POW camps-without-bars to staff headquarters and to other sites in liberated Việt Bắc. Like many other army officers, he hiked along mountain paths. One day, at an intersection between two trails,