Văn Hóa

French version

Being woman in Vietnam

Vietnam is a country where Confucianism exerts its considerable influence on political life as well as on society. Becoming a state philosophy under the Han dynasty, Confucianism was employed on several occasions as a single model of the state organization and of the Vietnamese society.

This Confucian influence is not foreign to traditional conditions imposed on the Vietnamese woman. She is subjected to the rule of the following three submissions: Tam Tòng

Tại gia tòng phụ, xuất giá tòng phu, phu tử tòng tử

• submission to the father before her marriage
• submission to the husband during her marriage
• submission to the elder son when widowed

This rule was reminded in « Family Instructions » (Gia Huấn Ca) by Nguyễn Trãi, the advisor of king Lê Lợi at the beginning of 15th century, and under the Nguyen dynasty. The Gia Long code which was in force in 19th century, was the most retrograde and rigorous that Vietnam has ever known.

In spite of that, the Vietnamese woman had a dominating role to play in the Vietnamese family and society. This is found through songs, poems, tales, and lullabies. There, the Vietnamese woman is described not only as a tender, submissive, and virtuous but also a hard working person endowed with an incommensurable patience.

The Trưng Trắc Trưng Nhị sisters are heroines as much quoted and venerated as the heroes Quang Trung, Hưng Ðạo Vương Trần Quốc Tuấn etc…They are also the first women who fought side by side with the men in the struggle for independence. The most illustrious case remains the example of Nguyễn Thị Giang. Faithful to the Vietnamese tradition, she committed suicide in 1930 after the execution of her husband, the nationalist leader Nguyễn Thái Học.

The Vietnamese woman is viewed as a perfect model to defend the motherland and national honor. One finds it in the story « Hòn Vọng Phu  » ( Waiting Rock ). It is the story of a woman petrified at the top of a hill, her child in her arms, looking out for the return of her husband who had left for the frontiers in the defense of the country. This model woman is found at several points all over the Vietnamese territory (Cao Bằng, Ninh Hoà etc….)

One also finds this model woman in the story « Thiếu Phụ Nam Xương » (« The Woman of Nam Xương » or  » The Contempt » ). It is the story of a woman who committed suicide because of an erroneous judgment her husband had on her fidelity. A man is allowed to have weaknesses but not a woman. She must be a perfect model. That constitutes for so many years a lot of stirs and discussions. Some women tried to break that Confucian yoke. It was the case of poetess Hồ Xuân Hương who criticized taboos while composing sensual poems at the end of 18th century. She has always been affirmed from the literary point of view as a free woman. Her verses are always filled with erotic evocations.

One finds this vehement dispute by a woman of a Confucian society through the following poem that describes the cake Bánh Trôi Nước ( a white and round cake, having a sweetened core, immersed in a caramelized juice ) :

Thân em vừa trắng lại vừa tròn
Bẩy nỗi ba chìm với nước non
Rắn nát mặc dầu tay trẻ nặng
Mà em vẫn giử tấm lòng son

My body is white, my shape is round,
I float and sink with water and mound.
My contour depends on the hand that kneads
But I always keep my heart pure and sound.

Hồ Xuân Hương referred to a woman who at that time, in spite of her tainted body and difficulties of life, continued to keep her heart pure and faithful. She was also the only one who dared approach her rights as a woman and talk shamelessly about carnal love. She succeeded in not being censored through her unequaled skill by proceeding with allusions and metaphors. To talk about eroticism, she used a soothing description of landscape and objects, things the most believed in a feudal society.

There was even an anecdote about her told by the poet Xuân Diệu himself:

It rained one day. The road became slippery. Hồ Xuân Hương fell suddenly. She spread herself all out on her body, her arms raised behind her head, her legs pulled apart. The boys laughed. She improvised a distich immediately:

Giơ tay với thử trời cao thấp
Xoạc cẳng đo xem đất vắn dài

I raise my arm to measure the vastness of the sky
I pull my legs apart to have that of the ground.

It was also the case of the favorite Ỷ Lan of king Lý Thánh Tôn. She took advantage of the campaign conducted by her husband against Champa to assure a brilliant regency. She undertook at that time many social measures to help the poor and women in particular. Only in 1907 for the first time were classes opened for girls in a private school. The feminist movement started to be launched.

Nowadays when the law recognizes equality of the sexes in all economic, political and social domains, there exists in fact this inequality. It is no longer a question of legality but a question of mentality. It continues to be omnipresent especially in rural environment.

Version française

Version vietnamienne

 
In spite of the war which devastated this country for so many years, the Vietnamese young people continue to crave for life. That amazes enormously those who do not know Vietnam. In this country,  » Being Young » concerns always boldness because the living conditions are extremely hard and nature is also extremely rude and pitiless, in particular for those who live in the North and on the Central highlands. It is necessary to know how to resist bravely the forces of nature but it is also necessary to learn how to live with wild creatures, tricking them and fighting them.

One also starts to work very young in Vietnam. From their youth in rural areas, boys tend buffaloes, make them feed on small floodbanks while girls help in the household chores. Very young, from six or seven years old, they know how to cook rice, carry their little brothers, feed the pigs and ducks, carry drinking water to the familiar animals or taking part in family artisanal work. During the years when the war was at its height, young people were also assigned to dig trenches along the small floodbanks to throw themselves in when airplanes approached, live in undergrounds and tunnels to escape the bombings. Girls have twice as much work as boys. It was they who were the first being proposed and sold like slaves or concubines for a few kilos of rice when one could not manage any more to feed a family of several children in the years 30’s and 40’s. Ngô Tất Tố, in his novel  » When The Lamp Dies Out « , appeared in 1930, reminds us this reality. To pay a corrupt official, a country-woman had to sell her daughter for one piastre.

Nowadays, even this practice is prohibited, one nevertheless notes a great number of young female prostitutes on the streets of big cities. There, in spite of free education, many of young people must work on little jobs such as selling cigarettes or newspapers, collecting plastic bags etc. to provide for the subsistence of their families. The living conditions are also distressing. Many young people coming from families afflicted by poverty and war continue to always crawl in tangles of badly erected huts that are dark and terribly dirty. There would be 67000 slums in Saigon at the end of 1994. It is the number maintained by the authorities and published by the press. One still finds the scenes described by novelist Khái Hưng in his work entitled « The Gutters » ( Ðầu Ðường Xó Chợ ) » with pavements and drains encumbered permanently with vegetable peelings, sheets of banana tree leaves and scraps of rags in the poor districts of the big cities.

Facing the indifference of society, novelist Duyên Anh did not hesitate to denounce the indigence of these young people in his novels, among which the most known remains the best-seller « The Hill of The Phantoms« . Inspired by this novel, movie maker Rachid Bouchareb recalled the history of the « Amerasians » who pay the price of the madness of the adults and the war in his film « Dust of Life » in 1994.

In spite of the deficiencies of life, one likes to be young in this country because, if there are no mountains of toys and gifts which submerge our children in the west as Christmas approaches, there are on the other hand popular games, unforgettable memories of childhood. In the countryside, one could go fishing in rice fields and placing hoop nets in the streams to catch shrimps and small fish. One could hunt butterflies and dragonflies with traps made with the stems of bamboo. One could climb trees to seek bird’s nests. Hunting the crickets remained the preferred game of the majority of Vietnamese young people.

While walking in group, ears wide opened for the song of the crickets, eyes scanning the least recesses, one tried to locate the burrows from where came out the song. It is one’s habit to make the insect leave its hole by flooding it with water or dejection, then to lock it up in a matchbox, to make it sing by exciting it with a small feather or to make it drink a little rice alcohol for excitement at the time of cricket fights.

In the cities, one played soccer with bare feet in the middle of the street, the goal posts consisted of stacked clothing. The matches were often stopped by the passage of bicycles. One also played shuttle cock game (Đá  Cầu) in the street. The flying object the size of a table tennis ball was made with a fabric end wrapping around a zinc coin. Born in the war, Vietnamese young people did not scorn war games. One manufactured oneself rifles out of cardboard or wood, one fought with swords made of tree branches. One could also fly kites. 
This childhood, this youth, all the Vietnamese had it, even novelist Marguerite Duras. 

She did not hesistate to point out her Indochinese childhood in her novel « The places« : My brother and I did not spend whole days in the trees but in the woods and on the rivers, on what is called the racs (rạch), these small streams that go down towards the sea. We never put on our shoes, we lived half naked, we bathed in the river.

In this country where the war devastated so much and where thirteen million tons of bombs and sixty million liters of defoliants were poured, being young in the years 60-75 was already a favor of destiny. The young people of Vietnam today no longer know the fear and the hatred of their elders but they continue to have an uncertain future. In spite of that, in their look, there is always a gleam of intense life, a glimmer of hope. It is what is often called  » the magic of Vietnamese childhood and youth « .

It is necessary to be young in this country to have such an attachment, an impression always poignant.