Understanding Vietnam

Understanding Vietnam

A

Book

The Philip E. Lilienthal imprint

honors special books

in commemoration of a man whose work

at the University of California Press from 1954 to 1979

was marked by dedication to young authors

and to high standards in the field of Asian Studies.

Friends, family, authors, and foundations have together

endowed the Lilienthal Fund, which enables the Press

to publish under this imprint selected books

in a way that reflects the taste and judgment

of a great and beloved editor.

Understanding

Vietnam

NEIL L. JAMIESON

University of California Press

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

First Paperback Printing 1995

©1993 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jamieson, Neil L.

Understanding Vietnam / Neil L. Jamieson.

p. cm.

A Philip E. Lilienthal book.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-20157-6

1. Vietnam—History—1858-1945. 2. Vietnam—History—

20th century. I. Title.

DS556.8.J36 1993

959.7—dc20 92-20978

CIP

15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07

16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8

To my wife, Virginia Winstead Jamieson, and to the memory of my parents, Neil Livingston Jamieson, Jr., and Alice Williamson Jamieson

Contents

Contents

Preface

1 How the Vietnamese See the World

The Land of Vietnam: Ecology as History

The People of Vietnam

The Traditional Vietnamese View of the World

Vietnamese Society as a System of Yin and Yang

Traditional Vietnamese Values and Institutions

The Success and Failure of the Traditional System

2 Confrontation with the West, 1858-1930

The West Overwhelms Vietnam

The Fermentation of Vietnamese Culture, 1908-1932

3 The Yin of Early Modern Vietnamese Culture Challenges the Yang of Tradition, 1932-1939

The New Poetry

A New Paradigm: Individualism

The Battle of the Novels

The Paradigmatic Battle Continues

The Psychic Costs of Colonialism and Failed Individualism: A Desperate Generation

The Darkening of the 1930s

4 The End of Colonialism and the Emergence of Two Competing Models for Building a Modern Nation, 1940-1954

From Polemics to Politics, 1939-1945

Returning to the Roots: Literature and Society, 1940-1944

A Fateful Summer, 1945

The Democratic Republic of Vietnam, August-October 1945

Things Fall Apart in Saigon, 1945

Prom Politics to War,November 1945-December 1946

The Resistance and the Intellectuals, 1946-1947

The Anticommunist Factions, 1947-1950

The Supervillages of Vietnam

The Bao Dai Government and the French, 1948-1954

The New Yang of the Resistance

Dien Bien Phuf 1954

The Nationalist Dilemma

The Polarization into Two Vietnamese States, 1954

5 Yin and Yang in Modern Guise, 1955-1970

The Return of Ngo Dinh Diem

A Coalescence of Yin Forces

Anxious Souls in the Republic of Vietnam

The Supervillage of insurgency

Setting the Thermostat in the North, 1955-1958

The Ideological Foundations in the North, 1958-1968

The North and the South: Inverted Images, 1959-1968

The War, the Americans, and Vietnamese Society

Continuity and Change in Values in the South

Patterns in Chaos

6 Continuity and Change in Vietnamese Culture and Society, 1968-1975

A Frustrated Vision

The Develcfpment of Urban Yin Subsystems

Estrangement and Farewell

7 Another Cycle Unfolds

The Road to Victory

Resetting the Social Thermostat in the South

A New Yin Reaction

A Concluding Thought

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Preface

Over two and a half million Americans went to Vietnam, and over 55,000 of us died there. We spent many billions of dollars in a losing cause that divided us as a nation, battered our self-esteem, and eroded our confidence in both the morality and the effectiveness of our foreign policy. Yet our understanding of this tragic episode remains superficial and, I believe, in many respects simply wrong. We have failed to understand our experience because, then and now, we have ignored the perspectives of the people most deeply concerned with the war in which we became involved: The Vietnamese, both our friends and our foes, as well as those who wished to be neither.

To no insignificant extent the war became defined in Washington, distorted in Washington, and finally lost in Washington through a process that was out of touch with any realistic understanding of what was in the much-touted hearts and minds of the people. The images of Vietnam about which controversy swirled in the United States arose from our own culture, not from Vietnamese realities or perceptions. Yet the ways in which the Vietnamese themselves perceived the war, including our role in it, were always at the heart of the matter. The war was, after all, in Vietnam; and it was fought mainly by Vietnamese against other Vietnamese—over the nature of Vietnamese society.

Even in retrospect, as a people we have learned very little about Vietnam or the Vietnamese. The films and books about the war in Vietnam that have appeared in the United States are almost entirely limited to the experience of being an American in Vietnam. The Vietnamese, when they appear at all in these works, are shadowy cardboard figures, merely one-dimensional stage props for the inner workings of the American psyche.

Lost in our own visions, we have never really grasped the passionate commitment with which Vietnamese clung to and fought over their own competing and incompatible visions of what Vietnam was and what it might and should become. But so long as we compulsively look inward, focused upon our reactions to the war as individual Americans, our experiences will never make sense as part of any larger whole. We simply cannot make sense of our experience in Vietnam by further brooding upon what we as Americans felt, or saw, or thought we were trying to do. In isolation, whatever our bias, this experience makes no sense.

To better understand ourselves, we must understand the Vietnam War. To understand the war, we must understand the Vietnamese. We must learn more about Vietnamese culture and Vietnamese paradigms in order to untangle the muddled debates about our own. Realizing that we must do this is the first and most important lesson of Vietnam. And it is one we Americans have been exasperatingly slow to learn. We remain far too ready to assume that other people are, or want to be, or should be, like us.

My fascination with Vietnamese culture and society began in 1959 with a small incident that revealed my ignorance of Southeast Asia and spurred a period of reading about French Indochina. With a fresh M.A. in folklore, I was attracted to Vietnam as a place to collect folklore in its social context, in a culture very different from the Indo-European tradition with which I was familiar.

I was neither for nor against American policies in Vietnam, and my knowledge of political issues in that part of the world was very superficial. When I attended language school after enlisting in the U.S. Army, I leaped at the chance to study Vietnamese.

After nearly a year of intensive study of Vietnamese, however, I was sent not to Vietnam but to the Philippines, where I traveled widely in rural areas during my free time and learned to appreciate the beauty, wit, and generosity—and the poverty—to be found in rural Asian villages. When my three years of military service ended, I looked around for some way to get to spend time in rural Vietnam as a civilian. The driving force was still primarily intellectual curiosity, along with a desire to improve my language ability in a non-Western language and some vague idea of doing folkloristic or literary studies in the future. But by now I was also very sym pathetic to the effort to stave off a Communist takeover of South Vietnam.

In January 1963 I went to work as a provincial representative of the U.S. Agency for International Development in its new Office of Rural Affairs in Vietnam. I spent two years in the field and another three months in Saigon as a staff officer. During my time in the field I met frequently with Vietnamese officials, both civilian and military, in provincial and district offices, discussing problems and opportunities for improvement in agriculture, animal husbandry, public health, and education. I also spent much time in rural villages, usually alone, walking about and chatting with whomever I encountered. People often invited me into their homes for a cup of tea, and we talked of many things.

I also traveled around the countryside inspecting projects paid for with American dollars. Among many other things, we paid for food and housing for defectors from the insurgency while they were processed back into civilian life, and I often stopped by to check the quality of the detainees’ meals and housing. More often than my official duties required, I lingered for talks with them about their lives as insurgents and the background of their recruitment into the movement.

In all of my activities, both professional and social, because I spoke Vietnamese I had often found myself explaining the Americans to the Vietnamese and the Vietnamese to the Americans. The number and scope of misunderstandings were incredible. Having taken one anthropology course in college and read perhaps five or six books, I was being pushed by events into practicing anthropology on a regular basis. Also, my efforts to read Vietnamese literature were often foundering on my ignorance of Vietnamese literary conventions and classical language and allusions. At the same time, my desire to learn more about Vietnam’s literary heritage was increasing as people I met in my travels kept telling me about this poem or that novel that I must read to really understand the answer to some question I had posed. To a degree that would be astonishing in the United States, Vietnamese in all walks of life could recite long passages from poems, recount folktales and legends, and discuss novels thirty years old as if the characters lived next door. I wanted to read much more of this literature that lived so vividly in people’s minds. After twenty-seven months in Vietnam (from early 1963 until mid-1965), I resigned to go back to graduate school. Although I was increasingly unhappy about the way we Americans were going about things in Vietnam, I quit not in protest but to seek the intellectual skills and tools I needed to understand a whole new set of questions.

In fall 1965 I went to the University of Washington, where Nguyen Dinh Hoa (a noted specialist of Vietnamese language, literature, and culture) was then a visiting professor. I studied Chinese, Sino-Vietnamese, Vietnamese literature, and anthropology. The academic work was a pleasure, but the debates over American involvement in Vietnam troubled me. I did not recognize the Vietnam that either the hawks or the doves were talking about. Nor did I recognize the America they talked about. America now seemed to me as exotic a culture as Vietnam. In the four years I had spent in Southeast Asia, I had changed, and so had the people back home. And I could not communicate effectively about these differences in perception. I talked to a wide range of people, everyone from the John Birch Society to radical leftists. But we all talked right past each other.

Over the next ten years I spent two more years in Vietnam during six trips. I left for what I thought would be the last time on April 29, 1975, the evening of the final day. In between these trips, which were mostly research trips (the last one was purely personal), I pursued graduate studies at the University of Washington and then at the University of Hawaii. I took classes on Southeast Asia, China, and Japan, and I read everything I could get my hands on about Vietnam. Eventually these studies culminated in a Ph.D. in anthropology.

During my travels I collected a small library of Vietnamese- language books. In conversations with Vietnamese I often asked people questions about books they had read, stories they remembered being told as children. I asked students what-they_were assigned to read in school. And when in Saigon, I sometimes stood in bookstores and watched what books people bought. I read hundreds of poems, short stories, folktales, essays, and novels. I had no rigid sampling plan, but I tried to read the books that many people had mentioned in conversation, books commonly used in high school classes or introductory college classes in Vietnamese literature.

Originally, I intended to publish a book on Vietnamese literature. Between 1970 and 1972, with the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, I began translating some of this literature. But under the impetus of the strident positions taken on the war by Americans, and my growing feelings that both hawks and doves were somehow missing the point, what was originally a straightforward idea became more complicated. I wanted to convey to Americans some deeper understanding of Vietnamese culture and society.

Although I have conducted a lot of research in Vietnam and about Vietnam, this book is not really a report on that research. It is an attempt to convey to readers what I learned over the past thirty years in all of my reading and experience, and what it led me to believe about the Vietnamese and the nature of social change. Much of what I learned was serendipitous, caught out of the corner of my eye while waiting for something quite different to happen, shaped by happenstance, by personal values, and by the materials to which I had (or did not have) access. And more than anything else, my experience of Vietnam has been shaped and colored by people.

The several thousand villagers with whom I have chatted, a dozen or so very close friends, several dozen other friends, teachers, colleagues, several hundred other acquaintances, coworkers, counterparts, research assistants, neighbors, maids, and drivers—many Vietnamese taught me about their culture. So did many people who served as informants in structured research. But formal interviews gave me only facts and opinions, mere information. Almost everything truly important was gained from spontaneous experience recollected in tranquility, to borrow Wordsworth’s dictum on poetry. I learned from being around, and being open to, people going about their daily lives.

Being open to people was not always easy in the 1960s and early 1970s. The Vietnam War involved misunderstandings and conflict between cultures. But it also involved conflict arising from different ways of looking at the world—different metaphors, models, or paradigms through which people perceive, organize, and interpret their experiences—within both Vietnamese and American cultures. At the most basic level, I came increasingly to believe, the Vietnam War was fought over competing and incompatible paradigms in Vietnamese society. But it also involved, and exacerbated, similar paradigmatic conflict in American society. It became virtually impossible for anyone to sort out the paradigmatic discourse within cultures from misperceptions and miscommunication across cultures.

This assessment led me to focus increasingly on the debates in twentieth-century Vietnam, the ways in which images of Vietnamese history and culture and society were contested and redescribed in the decades preceding American involvement. I was trying to place the war in a broader context of social change as it evolved and was perceived and expressed by the Vietnamese themselves. This effort led to the 1981 doctoral dissertation, a comprehensive analysis of continuity and change in Vietnam from ancient to modern times. The book that follows is a distillation, revision, and updating of that manuscript, rewritten to share what I have learned with a larger audience in the hope that, by providing new perspectives on old events and issues, it may contribute to an understanding of a complex, divisive, and painful period that continues to plague us.

Acknowledgments

Many people and institutions have helped me in many ways over the years I spent researching, writing, and revising this book. I can mention only a few of them here. It was Francis Lee Utley of Ohio State University who stimulated me to begin thinking about the process of cultural change. I first studied Vietnamese at the U.S. Army Language School at Monterey. Later, at the University of Washington, Nguyen Dinh Hoa guided me to a deeper understanding of Vietnamese language and literature and Nguyen Ngoc Quyen subsequently provided further help and encouragement, while Charles Keyes and Melville Jacobs opened new doors of anthropological thought to me.

At Human Sciences Research Corporation (HSR), where I worked off and on for several years, my interest in Vietnam was indulged and stimulated by many people: M. Dean Havron, Peter G. Nordlie, Herbert H. Vreeland, E. Frederick Bairdain, Herbert White, Martin Sternin, A. Terry Rambo, Jerry Tinker, John Lenoir, Carol Hayward, Gary Murfin, Edith Bairdain, Robert Silano, Janice Hopper, and Bruce Allnutt.

In 1969 a grant from the Southeast Asian Development Group (SEADAG) enabled me to do field research in the Mekong Delta. In 1970 I began some of the translations in this book under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1972 I did fieldwork in Vietnam as part of a study by the National Academy of Sciences to assess the effects of the use of herbicides in Vietnam.

Alexander Leighton and Jane Murphy have been sources of insight and encouragement ever since, and I learned much from other team members: A. Terry Rambo, Gary Murfin, and Jeary Glenn.

Much of this book comes from my doctoral dissertation at the University of Hawaii, where I benefited greatly from the comments of my graduate committee: Alice Dewey, Alan Howard, Philip Jenner, Nguyen Dang Liem, and, especially, Takie S. Lebra, who chaired the committee with great skill and patience. Many other faculty members and graduate students also made significant contributions. And I would not have survived the process without the support of a wonderful office staff, especially Ethel Okamura and Irene Takata, and the typing and editing skills of Freda Hellinger.

A. Terry Rambo and Gerald C. Hickey deserve special thanks for many years of intellectual colleagueship, practical help, and valued friendship. Le Thi Que, also a good friend and colleague, has contributed immeasurably to this manuscript in many ways, especially through help with and advice on some of the translations.

The dozens of Vietnamese who helped me gather data in the field shall remain anonymous, although my gratitude to them is immense, but Pham Hung Dung deserves special thanks for providing me with many useful books, articles, and comments over the years.

Alexander Leighton, Reuel Denney, and especially Samuel Popkin provided help and encouragement in getting this work published. Herbert Vreeland, Thomas Kirsch, and Hue Tam Ho Tai have provided many useful suggestions in the revision process. Nona M. Sanford made useful comments on earlier versions and indexed this volume as a labor of love. I am grateful for both her help and her friendship over the years. At the University of California Press I was fortunate to work with Sheila Levine, whose competent and supportive help carried me through many difficult times.

Above all, my family has always been a vital source of support and encouragement. The patience and unfaltering love of my parents were truly special. For many years my wife Ginnie held a demanding job while keeping our household going. In addition to the support of her love and friendship, she helped substantially with editing, typing, and useful criticism. Ruth, Jim, and Joe tolerated my parental inadequacies with patience and affection.

Despite all the help I had, many errors and deficiencies may remain in the following pages; for these I alone am responsible.

1 How the Vietnamese See the World

It is not actions but opinions about actions that disturb men.

Epictetus

Throughout the twentieth century the Vietnamese have been in upheaval, wracked by conflicting images of the past, the present, and the future. For more than six decades now, the emphasis has been on change, even revolution. During the 1930s many debates in Vietnam were expressed in terms of the old versus the new. Modes of social interaction, claims to status, dress styles, marriage customs, literature, religious practices, medical treatment, even haircuts, were polarized around this dichotomy. A Western- educated, urban middle class had developed, producing a vital new publishing industry to voice its aspirations and to serve as an arena where conflicting visions of the future would compete for influence. Many young writers argued that a sentimental attachment to traditional culture was a major obstacle to progress.

The Communists, a tiny minority in the 1930s, had, of course, a blueprint that purported to provide them with insight into the future. But most young intellectuals in Vietnam before World War II simply knew they were dissatisfied with the way things were and that Vietnam had to discover, or create, a viable modern identity. As Nhat Linh, the editor of a popular Vietnamese-language newspaper, argued in 1932: When the old civilization is brought out and put into practice before our very eyes, we are dissatisfied with the results. We can only continue to hope in Western civilization. Where that civilization will lead us to we not know, but our destiny is to travel into the unknown, to keep changing and to progress (Mores [Phong Hoa], 20 October). But change to what? To become what kind of people? What kind of society? This is what the subsequent decades of fighting were fundamentally about. Competing ideologies concerned with the issue of modernization abounded. People were divided in their opinions, even within families. To complicate things further, there was considerable regional variation in Vietnam, dating back to earlier times.

Both regional variation and debates between advocates of competing ideologies in Vietnam are best understood, I believe, as specific outgrowths of, or reactions to, the dominant traditional culture. All major changes and variations are responses to particular circumstances (environmental, political, social) with which the old culture was not designed to cope. Despite all the variability and all the change, the culture of nineteenth-century Vietnam is within— and often constitutes an important part of—the various twentiethcentury innovations, just as in its fullest development it contained all of its predecessors. Memories of the past remain an important part of all contemporary Vietnamese sociocultural systems—from the politburo in Hanoi to Little Saigon in Los Angeles to Saigonsur-Seine in Paris.

Traditional Vietnam in the following pages refers to this generalized picture of what has existed in the minds of more recent generations. It is a broad portrait gleaned mainly from widely known literature, commonly used school textbooks, popularized historical and biographical writings, thousands of conversations with Vietnamese of diverse backgrounds, reminiscences exchanged over teacups or beer, in a village home or in the back of a jeep, in a temple, a church, or a Saigon nightspot, in offices and classrooms and refugee camps.

We must learn what people had in mind when they spoke of the old before we can understand their debates over the new that would replace it. All Vietnamese people are today still, as they were fifty years ago, interacting with that past in the process of shaping their future. And so, in a sense, are we.

Our experience in Vietnam is now part of us; and we are part of Vietnam. We cannot forget Vietnam, but neither can we fit what we know about it into our sense of self and country. A grinding tension persists, generated by the discrepancy between our memories and our views of who we are and our proper place in the world. We have tried to resolve this tension by revising our views of ourselves, our society, and the larger world, or by suppressing these memories or denying their importance. But the dissonance remains, and our functioning as individuals and as a people is still impaired.

By putting our old and partial perceptions into a new and broader context, we may transform them. By working to understand the competing Vietnamese paradigms, we may clarify the muddled debates about our involvement in Vietnam, and perhaps in the process transform the lingering pain and doubt into more positive insights. In trying to understand the Vietnamese, we may learn something important about ourselves.

The Land of Vietnam: Ecology as History

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is the twelfth most populous nation in the world. Although it has one of the world’s largest and most battle-hardened armies, it is also one of the poorest nations in the world. The territory of Vietnam is slightly smaller than the state of California, but its population, about seventy million, is more than a quarter as large as that of the United States. Vietnam is elongated along a north-south axis that extends from China to the Gulf of Siam. It is evident that Vietnam is a crowded country, and the population is stretched along a fairly narrow band of land. But the topography of Vietnam exaggerates this phenomenon. Most of the people live in a relatively small portion of the land area (see map on p. 4).

Only about a quarter of Vietnamese territory is good farmland (i.e., suitable for wet rice cultivation), and that is where most of the ethnic Vietnamese, who make up roughly 85 percent of the population, live. Wet ricefields, people, and political power have always been assodateti and concentrated in relatively small core areas. Even today, most of the paddy fields, most of the people, most of the wealth, most of the industry, and most of the economic, political, and cultural activity are in one of two core areas. One core area consists of the Red River delta and the City of Hanoi in the north; the other consists of the Mekong River delta and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) in the south. These two concentrations of people are joined by a long thin band of coastal plains along the South China Sea. The bulk of the central portion of Vietnam is mountainous and has been traditionally inhabited by ethnic minorities, tribal peoples who have been seen by almost all Vietnamese as backward.

Ecological and historical factors have combined to produce very significant regional differences between the two core areas that dominate the country.¹ The Red River is subject to rapid and extreme variation in water level, and both flood and drought have

Significant Vietnamese settlement areas, early twentieth century always occurred with ominous regularity. Epidemics and pest infestation have also been common. The Red River delta has simultaneously been one of the most densely populated and least safe regions in the world. In an uncertain and dangerous environment, hunger and social unrest have been constant threats. As a result, the local culture has emphasized the subordination of the individual to collective discipline of family and village. Both the family and the village have been relatively closed, corporate entities, self- reliant, and responsible for the action of their individual members.

In the south, the flow of the Mekong River is regulated by its link to the Tonie Sap, a large inland lake in Cambodia, which absorbs any excess flow of water and supplements a reduction in flow from its large reserve storage. The Mekong environment is more predictable and more benign than that of the Red River. These ecological differences between the Red River and the Mekong delta have been of immense significance in generating differences in cultural emphases and social organization between the two core regions of Vietnam. But historical factors have exacerbated these differences. The Mekong delta has been the recent frontier area. Not until the seventeenth century did Vietnamese seriously begin to settle the southern delta region, and the lower Mekong delta was not heavily settled until the nineteenth century.

Life has been easier and more secure in the southern third of Vietnam, and the harsh discipline found in the north has always been considerably moderated there. Southern villages have always been more open, less corporate, more tolerant of individual initiative and cultural heterodoxy. Then, under the French, who began colonizing Vietnam in 1859, the southern third of Vietnam, known as Cochinchina, was the first part to be colonized, and it was directly administered by the French authorities as a colony. The south thus experienced relatively greater Western influence and more political freedom than did the rest of the country, which was administered as protectorates (Annam in central Vietnam and Tonkin in the north). The protectorates came under French rule later and were administered indirectly, through local Vietnamese administrators.

There are, then, two common ways of talking about Vietnamese geography. We think of the north and the south, divided by the seventeenth parallel. This makes sense in recent political terms. It also makes sense historically, because Vietnam was divided not too differently for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

But Vietnamese have more commonly spoken of their country in terms of three sections: north, central, and south. And this makes some sense culturally and linguistically, although all Vietnamese share a core culture, have a common historical heritage, and speak mutually understandable dialects of the same language.

The point to be emphasized here is that traditional Vietnam refers primarily to the Red River delta and the central coastal plains regions, mainly as they existed in the nineteenth century. The discussion does not always apply directly to the villages of the Mekong delta. In fact, when the French arrived only a small percentage of the Vietnamese population lived in the Mekong delta. The French opened much of the Mekong delta for settlement with massive engineering projects that drained swampland to make it arable. The later chapters of the book will examine southern Vietnam as a variant development of Vietnamese culture.

The People of Vietnam

The story of the Vietnamese—of all Vietnamese—began in the north.² Many millennia ago Austronesians, remote relatives of the peoples of the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, were an important part of the population of this area. Then, some four or five thousand years ago, people, languages, and cultures flowed out of what is now southern China into Southeast Asia, where they interacted with indigenous peoples and cultures. The Vietnamese people, southern and northern, their culture and their language, are a rich mixture of these and other influences. The Vietnamese language is basically Mon-Khmer, related to Cambodian. But Tai influence (which produced the Thai and Laotian languages of today) is reflected in the tonal quality of Vietnamese and in many vocabulary items.³

Early Vietnamese shared many traits with their Southeast Asian neighbors. Chinese influence has been extremely important, but more recent. When genes and languages and cultures began interacting and intermixing and developing intensively in what is now northern Indochina, some five thousand years ago, much of what is now the Red River delta was still under water; the elevated sea level that had covered it for millennia had not yet receded completely.⁴ And as the sea withdrew much of the newly exposed plain was swampy. It was in the midlands, on the foothills and surrounding valleys of the Red River delta, about three or four thousand years ago, that a distinctive culture began to emerge that can be traced to the people who now call themselves Vietnamese. Vietnamese archeologists have come a long way in tracing the descent of these people down onto the emerging plain and into historical time.

Sometime in about the seventh century B.C. in and around the area where the Red River descends from the mountains and enters the plain, the kingdom of Van Lang came into being, ruled by the Hung kings.⁵ This tiny kingdom that existed over 2,500 years ago is an important part of contemporary Vietnam’s living past. The ancient site from which the Hung kings ruled, only recently discovered by Vietnamese archeologists (the French dismissed Van Lang as a fairy tale), is now a national park, like our Independence Hall or Valley Forge, but more than two thousand years older in significance.

According to ancient myth the Vietnamese are descended from dragons and fairies. When the Dragon Lord of the Lac fathered a hundred children by a mountain princess of fairy blood named Au Co, he returned to the sea with half their offspring while she settled in the midlands of the Red River with the other half. One of these children became the first king of the Vietnamese people, the first of the eighteen Hung kings featured in so many myths and legends and venerated in village shrines into the twentieth century.⁶ The last Hung king is said to have committed suicide in 257 B.C. after being defeated by a neighboring chieftain to the north; this led to the creation of the new kingdom of Au Lac. With the aid of a Golden Turtle spirit, the new king, An Duong, built a magnificent citadel at Co Loa, near present-day Hanoi.

Early Vietnamese rulers were often powerful mediators with the spirit world, high priests whose claim to office was based on a privileged relationship with a powerful spirit who could be persuaded to serve a supernatural protector of the realm. The Dragon Lord of the Lac served as protector of the kingdom under the Hung kings, as the Golden Turtle spirit guarded the realm of Au Lac. As these potent leaders and other major cultural heroes joined the spirit world after death, they too became powerful spirits whose aid and sympathy could be evoked by subsequent generations in time of need. The historical memory of the Hung kings and King An Duong was transmitted over centuries not only in myth and legend but through the physical presence of hundreds of village shrines and altars. Before these visible emblems of andent glory, rituals periodically bound the people to their shared past and to each other.

In 208 B.C. a new kingdom appeared in south coastal China, Nan Yueh in Chinese, Nam Viet in Vietnamese. Au Lac was soon conquered by Nam Viet, and the Red River delta and northern coastal plain of what is now Vietnam was incorporated into Nam Viet. Then the great Han dynasty unified China, and in ill B.C. Nam Viet fell under its control. The plains of northern Vietnam became a colonial province of China, although indigenous cultural patterns remained essentially intact and local leadership was little disturbed.

In the first century A.D. this indigenous authority structure came into sharp conflict with more rigid demands for conformity as Chinese administrators from the north became more numerous and more assertive. One dauntless young woman sparked the leap from protest to revolt. Trung Trach was a member of the indigenous elite class through both birth and marriage. Her father and her husband were Lac Lords, hereditary district chiefs. With her sister, Trung Nhi, Trung Trach prayed at a shrine on Hung Mountain, where her ancestors once ruled in the name of the Dragon Lord, invoking their blessing upon rebellion. In A.D. 40 Trung Trach was proclaimed queen after her rebel army forced the Chinese officials to flee to Canton. As an expeditionary force recaptured the Red River delta for the Han dynasty in A.D. 43 the Trung sisters are said to have committed suicide. They became immortalized in song and story and today are still held up as exemplars of traditional Vietnamese values.

In the decades and centuries that followed, the population of the Red River delta and northern coastal plain was gradually Sinicized in many ways; ethnic Chinese in the region were also heavily influenced by local custom and regional perspectives. Genes and cultures mingled to produce a new Sino-Vietnamese elite. For seven hundred years this region would be Giao Chau, a province of China. But a distinctive local identity was retained.

Revolts broke out periodically, producing new culture heroes, more shrines, and more legends. During the ninth century rebellions grew more frequent and a renaissance in local cultural traditions emerged. With China plunged into weakness and disorder under the crumbling Tang dynasty, the Vietnamese gained independence in A.D. 939. During the early years of independence, no monarch could integrate the land firmly. Leadership in Vietnam rested ambiguously on two separate concepts of political legitimacy: indigenous tradition and a heavily Sinicized system of politics and administration that had been assimilated during a thousand years of Chinese rule. Most early monarchs were soldiers whose leadership was based largely on personal prowess. In this milieu, Buddhism played a vital role in stabilizing Vietnamese society.

Not until the Ly dynasty (1009-1225) did the development of what we now think of as traditional Vietnam begin to take shape. Shortly after taking the throne, the first Ly king moved the capital to what is now Hanoi, which he named Rising Dragon (Thang Long). In 1048 an agrarian cult was established, with the construction of a temple to the gods of soil and grain, formalizing the role of the king as a national high priest of agriculture. The Ly kings bore a dragon tattoo, signifying spiritual succession from the illustrious Dragon Lord of the Lac and the Hung kings. In fact, the greatness of the Ly dynasty rested to no small degree on a foundation of unprecedented moral force that was built by calling forth these spirits of past culture heroes to bolster the efficacy and legitimacy of their rule;⁷ this same kind of moral force has been significant in the rise to power of many Vietnamese leaders up to the present day.

Buddhism flourished. Many Ly kings spent part of their lives in a monastery, and one was leader of a major sect. The ideological viewpoint of the Ly court, as revealed in the extant poetry of the time, was strongly Buddhist in tone and content, with a marked Zen influence emphasizing insight and awakening rather than scriptures or good works. Noninvolvement, detachment, and paradoxical mysticism were pervasive values.⁸

But a modest rejuvenation of Confucian studies was also encouraged after a century of relative neglect. In 1070 a Temple of Literature dedicated to Confucius was constructed in Rising Dragon (its remains can be viewed today in Hanoi). In 1075 national examinations were held for the first time under independent Vietnamese rule, and in 1076 a national university was created. Confucianism began to revive under the Ly.

The Ly dynasty was succeeded by another great dynasty, the Tran (1225-1400). Vietnam slowly continued to expand in population and territory. The army, the bureaucracy, and the examination system were further developed. But the early Tran kings spent much of their energy in foreign affairs and national defense, fighting off threats from the north. In 1284 Vietnam seemed doomed to fall to Chinese forces, but under the inspired leadership of Tran Hung Dao, the invaders were driven from the land.

During the Tran dynasty the Confucian element in official ideology continued to develop while Buddhism remained important. Then, late in the fourteenth century, in the midst of economic crisis and peasant revolts, a powerful court councillor seized the throne. Under this unpopular new ruler, Vietnam once again fell under Chinese rule in 1407. For a time Ming dynasty administrators from China vigorously regulated village government, religious ceremonies, hair styles, modes of dress, the writing and distribution of literature, and virtually everything else of cultural, economic, or political significance. Both the Ming and the Vietnamese ruler they displaced encouraged the spread of Neo-Confucian doctrines.⁹

Under Le Loi, the Chinese invaders were expelled and the Le dynasty was established in 1428. Neo-Confucianism, based on Chu Hsi’s reinterpretation of the classics in eleventh-century China, became a vital influence on Vietnamese thought. During the thirtyseven-year reign (1460-1497) of the great king Le Thanh Tong, NeoConfucianism became a dominant element in Vietnamese ideology. But the Le dynasty then quickly fell into decline. For nearly three centuries internal conflict sapped the wealth and energy of the Vietnamese. Few heroes, little great literature, and only modest cultural innovations emerged until the second half of the eighteenth century, when cultural ferment was expressed in a lively body of literature in the Vietnamese language. One important element in this resurgence was the expansion and standardization of the writing system employed for transcribing Vietnamese (nom).¹⁰

The later decades of the eighteenth century were dominated by the Tay Son rebellion, which began as a peasant uprising against what were perceived to be unsatisfactory conditions. By 1786 rebel leaders controlled all of Vietnam. The Tay Son era is controversial and poorly understood. This revolutionary movement expressed deep-rooted discontent in rural Vietnamese society; but it also involved new commercial interests, overseas Chinese intrigues, religious heterodoxies, and a resurgence of indigenous tradition at the expense of borrowed elements in Vietnamese culture, especially Neo-Confucianism. Norn, the demotic Vietnamese script, replaced Chinese as the official writing system. The Trung sisters were revitalized as culture heroes of the first order.

But by 1802 the Nguyen dynasty held power, declaring the Tay Son reforms null and void. Perceiving recent Vietnamese history as characterized by decadence and disorganization, the Nguyen rulers strenuously sought to make Neo-Confucianism the foundation of the national culture. Under the Nguyen, traditional Vietnamese culture assumed its final form, the one that would persist into the twentieth century to interact with Western influences.¹¹

The Traditional Vietnamese View of the World

Over many centuries, Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism had become intertwined, simplified, and Vietnamized to constitute— along with vestiges of earlier animistic beliefs—a Vietnamese folk religion shared to some extent by all Vietnamese.¹² But over time, beginning in the late fifteenth century and becoming most extreme in the nineteenth century, Neo-Confucianism came to be a dominant influence.¹³ Neo-Confucianism focused on proper social relationships, but ideas about the proper form of social relationships were based on a wider set of ideas regarding the nature of reality.

The traditional Vietnamese worldview constituted an allencompassing cosmological scheme based on yin and yang, conceived as two primordial forces from which everything else in the universe was created. This root paradigm, through which one of the oldest and most fundamental elements of Sinitic influence eventually became a basic part of the way Vietnamese viewed the world, ran right through the entire system, from the family to the state. It suffused the entire world with a coherent system of meaning. Everything was a model, an icon, of everything else.¹⁴ Based on the assumption of a unified and orderly universe, this model provided Vietnamese with a sense of insight into—and a means of dealing with—the intrinsic structure of the universe.

In all things, when a proper balance was maintained between yin and yang, harmony was maintained and beneficent outcomes were assured. This was equally true in the individual human body, in families, in villages, and in nations. For example, the treatment of illness consisted primarily of restoring the balance between yin and yang, both within a person and between the person and the external world. According to traditional folk thought, all foods were believed to have an essential nature, to be hot, warm, cool, or cold. Hot and warm foods were yang, cool and cold foods were yin. Diet could thus disrupt or restore harmony between yin and yang.¹⁵

Exactly as the human body was perceived to be a microcosm of the natural world, so too was the family viewed as a microcosm of the social world. And just as the proper balance between yin and yang in the human body—and between the human being and his or her environment—produced good health in people, so would proper relationships between categories and groups of people produce social harmony, creating happy and prosperous families, villages, and nations. Both formal education and family socialization emphasized teaching children proper behavior within this framework, which formed the basis of a social system that served Vietnamese society well for hundreds of years.

The ancient paradigm of yin and yang can readily be interpreted as a metaphorical expression of cybernetic theory.¹⁶ Modern cybernetics, or systems theory, has provided us with considerable insight into how such a dynamic equilibrium system must work.¹⁷ Society is neither an organism nor a machine; it is—like organisms and machines—a system. It is composed of components that are related in such a way that the whole is greater than, and essentially different from, the sum of the parts. This is so because relations between the parts are maintained by mechanisms of communication and control that depend on the flow of information, on feedback, for effective operation.

Cybernetic theory informs social analysis in a variety of ways: by focusing attention on system properties such as entropy and redundancy and on the values that function as operating rules; by emphasizing the extent to which the meaning and function of any part of the system is determined by context; and so on. Above all else, it reminds us that it is the context—a set of relationships, rather than any single component in isolation—that evolves.¹⁸ The focus of this book is on the evolving context of ideas in twentiethcentury Vietnam.

Vietnamese Society as a System of Yin and Yang

In traditional Vietnamese culture we can find, in every domain of society, two different sets of operating principles, or values. These two sets can be used as the basis for a model of society and culture. One set can be seen as yang in nature; the other, as yin. Yang is defined by a tendency toward male dominance, high redundancy, low entropy, complex and rigid hierarchy, competition, and strict orthodoxy focused on rules for behavior based on social roles. Yin is defined by a tendency toward greater egalitarianism and flexibil ity, more female participation, mechanisms to dampen competition and conflict, high entropy, low redundancy, and more emphasis on feeling, empathy, and spontaneity.

Much of traditional Vietnamese culture, social organization, and behavior expressed the balanced opposition between yin and yang as interlocking sets of ideas (including values, conceptual categories, operating rules, etc.). At a high level of abstraction, a great deal of persistence may be detected in the system over time. At the level of specific cultural content, much change has taken place. The dozens of anecdotes and literary and ethnographic examples embedded in this narrative will serve to make these abstractions meaningful. Suffice it to say here that yin and yang coexist, that yang is normally dominant, but that when the yang system becomes too extremely dominant the stage is set for a yin reaction in the social system, and social change takes place.

The relationship between actual social systems and systems of ideas is real and important, but it is essentially metaphorical. The observable world of behavior and artifacts and the imagined or culturally construed world of concepts and categories continue to reproduce and reshape each other, maintaining the essential integrity of their relationships, more or less imperfectly, throughout a process of change. As these two worlds coevolve over time, each is built into the other. Thus the particular form and content of either category or both may change considerably over time while the symbiotic relationship persists at the abstract level of functional complementarity through logical opposition.

There is, I believe, great heuristic value in looking at Vietnamese history, into the twentieth century, as a case of patterned oscillation around a point of balance between yin and yang. The sages of antiquity asserted this to be the nature of reality, a universal process, the Tao. The yin and yang components of traditional Vietnamese society—from the family through literature to religion to economic structures to political systems—contained within themselves logically opposed but functionally complementary components that had a characteristic structure to them. These may be thought of as being separate subsystems at work within any given part of the total social system. When one or the other became disproportionately strong, the imbalance generated stress and strain in the social system, and a reaction set in as discomfited individuals and institutions sought a more comfortable social milieu. Gregory Bateson has likened this process to the setting of a thermostat.¹⁹ He suggested that the most significant points in history are the moments when attitudes are changed. These are moments when people are hurt because of their former values. What is truly important, for individuals and entire peoples, he insisted, is a change in the bias or setting of the thermostat that regulates social behavior.²⁰

Because human attempts to maximize values entail choice under conditions of uncertainty and competition, they give rise to a certain amount of conflict and tension, not only within groups, but sometimes within individuals. In men and women, and in societies, there are thresholds of tolerance for tension which, when approached, lead to some sort of remedial action. The result may be cultural or social change, including revolution. Twentiethcentury Vietnam represents an extreme case of social conflict over the setting of the social thermostat. It has been a time and a place when new attitudes have arisen and millions of people have been badly hurt because of their former values.

The true social analogy to Bateson’s metaphor of the social thermostat is the entire ensemble of values held and acted upon by individuals who interact and communicate with one another as they include the results of their own action and that of others in the new information by which they modify their subsequent behaviors. Sometimes, as in twentieth-century Vietnam, this process leads people to seek to change the codes of behavior by which they and others are expected to generate future interaction, to change the social thermostat by achieving patterned change in the