Scholars in the English-speaking world really did not start to research and write about Vietnamese history until the 1960s-1970s. At that time Vietnam had already become independent from French colonial control, so scholars understandably sought to understand how this had happened.
We can see this in the early work of someone like David Marr who’s Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925 and Tradition on Trial, 1920-1925 document the people and events that contributed to circumstances that eventually enabled Vietnam to become independent (although his later Vietnam, 1945 offers a more complex picture).
While all of these works, and the works of many other scholars on the same period are extremely valuable, they all tend to leave out one important voice – the voice of Vietnamese “officialdom.”
I remember years ago seeing “political cartoons” in journals like Phong Hóa in the 1930s that criticized Nguyễn Dynasty officials, and I was surprised to see this, because it showed me that 1) Nguyên Dynasty officials were still important at that time and 2) that I knew nothing about this, because they are not discussed in detail in the writings of people like Marr or anyone else (that I am aware of) who has written on twentieth century Vietnamese history.
So if the editors of Phong Hóa did not like Nguyễn Dynasty officials, why was that the case? What is it that Nguyễn Dynasty officials were doing/saying at that time?? I have no idea.
Recently, however, I came across a newspaper called the Thanh-Nghê-Tịnh News (Thanh-Nghê-Tịnh Tân-Văn) that first started to be published in 1930. This newspaper clearly reflects the view of Nguyễn Dynasty officials who were working under French “protection.”
In that paper, I found a long document from a Nguyễn Dynasty official which made the following comments:
“The country of Great France has recently offered a lot of quality knowledge to our Southern Land [Nam Thổ]. It is evident to everyone that this has led the young people who pursue New Learning to have a true sense of patriotism, and they sincerely seek the guidance of Great France so that the people of the nation can get on the road to civilization and progress.
Great nations have great writers, great politicians, great examiners [cách trí gia 格致家, I think this term is meant to refer to “scientists”], and great military men who are world-famous. If the country of Đại Nam can follow in Great France’s footsteps there will still be no harm to its reputation.”
The Thanh-Nghê-Tịnh News was published in both Vietnamese and Hán. The above document was originally written in Hán and then translated into Vietnamese.
What this shows is that as late as 1930 there were Nguyễn Dynasty officials who still felt more comfortable writing in Hán than in Vietnamese.
It also shows that there are voices in the Vietnamese past that historians have not looked at and discussed.
Modern Vietnamese history is not all about “resistance.” There were many Vietnamese who “collaborated,” and before 1945, those Vietnamese probably had a more profound influence on Vietnamese society than those who resisted (and were arrested).
So to understand Vietnamese society in the twentieth century, we need to listen to the voices of people who spoke through media like the Thanh-Nghê-Tịnh News.
These are voices that scholars (both in and outside Vietnam) have not listened to yet.
LMK: “Modern Vietnamese history is not all about “resistance.” There were many Vietnamese who “collaborated,” and before 1945, those Vietnamese probably had a more profound influence on Vietnamese society than those who resisted (and were arrested).”
Roughly the same can be said as well of the French in metropolitan France during the Second World War. In the postwar years, they, for understandable reasons, tended to view themselves as a people who, either actively or passively, had resisted German occupation. It was a foreign historian, an American from Virginia to boot, who bluntly informed them, on the basis of extensive research in German archives, that eager and active collaboration are the much more accurate words to designate their conduct under the Nazi rule.
haha, yea but actually, in writing that I didn’t mean to emphasize the “collaboration” part (although that’s probably how this reads). I’m more interested in what they encouraged people to do so that Dai Nam could follow in France’s footsteps.
My father worshiped Roosevelt and disliked “the French” because of WWII. I heard that view of history many times growing up, particularly any time that he saw news on the TV about the French government doing something or making some decision that he didn’t like (“Oh! Those damn French!!”) I don’t know if he ever read that book, but it sounds like he would have liked it very much. 😉
A great deal of the vituperation was reserved for Phạm Quỳnh. The Tự Lực Văn Đoàn folks and the communists both were very critical of him and what he represented. And he was rapidly assassinated following the August 1945 uprising. David Marr’s new book shows the overall tone at that time was to eliminate (murder) anyone who advocated any sort of collaboration with the French. That atmosphere I think created the situation that you note above – has caused those voices to go missing.
While the French were the source of plenty of wickedness, the VIetnamese did benefit a great deal from their tutelage, and probably could have benefited from further tutelage had there been amicable circumstances to allow it. (The very profession of journalism would not have existed in Vietnam without the intrusion of some colonial power or other.) I think the French were better teachers than Mao and Stalin became.
I also think a certain amount of the resentment was a general resentment of youth towards elders who were thought to be ineffectual. The elder generation had “lost” the country. They were given what must have seen like token powers within the French governance of the region. I think a lot of the criticism came from the young people’s belief that with their new educations they deserved positions of authority, and also a perception (not groundless) that they were second class citizens in their own country.
I agree that there should be a reevaluation of the pre-1945 scholars and officialdom.
I agree, and there is a section early in this document which is as follows:
“Those whom I am criticizing are just some members of the New Learning faction. These gentlemen take advantage of the education that Great France benevolently provides, and once they have come in contact with some European writings they become so confident and self-assured.”
The Vietnamese translation is kind of sloppy/weird. It’s not an easy document to read, and so maybe the person who translated it struggled with it, but there is quite a bit that gets lost in translation.
The Hán text talks about the “New Learning faction” (tân học phái 新學派) and the “Old Learning faction” (cựu học phái 舊學派), and that way of dividing people doesn’t come through as clearly in the Vietnamese translation. And the above passage criticizes “some members of the New Learning faction” (新學派中之一部份子耳) whereas the Vietnamese translation talks about “nhiều kẻ tân-tiến về thời tân-học này.”
It may be pointed out that virtually everybody in Vietnam’s recent history seemed to have his or her own reasons to denounce Phạm Quỳnh. Ngô Đức Kế and Huỳnh Thúc Kháng alleged in a thinly veiled manner that he was a prostitute (“con đĩ Kiều”), because of his celebration of Truyện Kiều, in whose protagonist he might have found a symbol for sincere accommodationism…
In South Vietnam in 1962, during the reign of Ngô Đình Diệm, Quỳnh’s erstwhile political rival, the Catholic scholar Nguyễn Văn Trung subjected him to yet another denunciation in a lecture delivered at the Trường Quốc gia Âm nhạc in Saigon. The attack would be resumed in the 1970s, when Professor Trung’s lecture as well as his polemical study of the Nam Phong magazine was published. I suspect that by then Phạm Quỳnh himself had become in the eyes of not a few a symbol for the Saigon regime…
It may also be pointed out that the French had to bear the gravest responsability for the absence of “amicable circumstances” in colonial Vietnam, given their obstinate unwillingness to grant even modest concessions to accommodationist natives like Quỳnh. To quote the conclusion of a JVS-article on this controversial figure:
“Last, while Phạm Quỳnh’s campaign against one of Indochina’s most hated and exploitative institutions may have been inimical to the kind of collaboration demanded by A.R. Fontaine, it was very much part of Phạm Quỳnh’s vision of a more genuine Franco-Vietnamese collaboration. If ultimately the reforms of 1933 instituted a regime that looked more like Fontaine’s vision than Phạm Quỳnh’s, the fault lay with the colonial regime and not its Vietnamese collaborators.”
Thanks for these comments. They really make me think. I don’t know much about anything, but I definitely don’t feel qualified to talk about the 20th century (even though I write about it on the blog). That said, what you say here makes me wonder, if people like Phạm Quỳnh ultimately were held back by the French, wouldn’t a time could when you would decide that what you were doing was not the best way to achieve things?
At the same time I’m wondering that, I’m reminded of some articles I read in Modern Asian Studies on everyday technology. The two articles below on the radio were particularly good, and what you see in both of them is that the radio starts as something that Europeans were interested in, but by the 1930s there were “radio groups/clubs” that were very mixed (although there still appears to have been a hierarchy).
This makes me wonder if for some people a realization of the limitations of working with the French might have happened at the same time that many aspects of life were getting interconnected.
I think you would agree that it’s too easy to classify someone simply as a “prostitute” or something like that. People and the times they live in are always more complex than that.
Thanks again for the thoughtful comments.
Erich DeWald, “Taking to the Waves: Vietnamese Society around the Radio in the 1930s,” Modern Asian Studies 46.1 (2012): 143-165.
Chua Ai Lin, “‘The Modern Magic Carpet’: Wireless Radio in Interwar Colonial Singapore,” Modern Asian Studies 46.1 (2012): 167-191.
As you mentioned Pham Quynh here, I would really appreciate some insights into Truong Vinh Ky as well, as accounts around his life and what kind of contributions he made to Vietnam then have been highly contradictory and controversial up to now.
I came across a history novel by author Hoang Lai Giang who wrote “Truong Vinh Ky: Ong la ai?” and I could see that the author made great efforts in giving Truong Vinh Ky a significant position in Vietnam’s history, particularly in relation to his (TVK) genuine intent in collaborating with the French for the interest of Vietnamese people. Hoang Lai Giang, in his book, draws on original materials in different languages, particularly in French, to re-depict TVK’s life. He even spent a significant amount of time searching for materials in libraries and archives in writing the book. A good read, but I am unable to justify the reliability of these sources, although the arguments made throughout the book are well sustained and supported.
Saigon Buffalo, I think you have much more expertise about this then I do. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
An interested outsider, I am inclined to trust the judgment Professor Nguyễn Thế Anh has rendered on Trương Vĩnh Ký: It is very probable that this southern scholar had sincerely believed that, given the circumstances, French domination was a necessary mechanism to pull Vietnam into the modern age. This belief, however, was what might have led him to implicitly advocate the conquest of Tonkin by France, one among the acts that provided fodder to his detractors…
Compared to Phạm Quỳnh, Trương Vĩnh Ký may enjoy a historiographical advantage in the fact that he was a Catholic. On the basis of what I have read here and there throughout the years, it seems that Ký’s fellow Catholics are quite committed to a defense of his reputation. Quỳnh, meanwhile, does not possess a similar constituency among Vietnamese.
In this regard, it is highly revealing that the Catholic scholar Nguyễn Văn Trung, who had castigated both Trương Vĩnh Ký and Phạm Quỳnh during the 1970s, would announce in the 1990s that he has changed his mind on Trương Vĩnh Ký… Ký is now proclaimed a “nhà văn hóa”… It is unknown whether Trung has modified his views on the non-Catholic Phạm Quỳnh as well…
But rather than reading what I say on the basis of what I have read, you may want to have direct access to those sources themselves…
1/ Nguyễn Thế Anh on Trương Vĩnh Ký in his Monarchie et fait colonial au Viet-Nam, 1875-1925:
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2/ Trương Vĩnh Ký’s letter to the French governor of Cochinchina in which he indirectly advocated the conquest of Tonkin by France…Reprinted in P.J. Honey’s Voyage to Tonkin in the Year of At Hoi.
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3/ Nguyễn Văn Trung on Trương Vĩnh Ký in the 1970s:
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4/ Nguyễn Văn Trung’s change of mind, as recorded by Nguyên Vũ [Vũ Ngự Chiêu] in Ngàn Năm Soi Mặt…
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Thank you very much for sharing all of this. Well I am very happy that I was smart enough not to try to respond, because I definitely don’t know much about this topic, and without going and reading primary sources myself, I don’t feel comfortable trying to “pass judgement” on Trương Vĩnh Ký.
There are a few points, however, that these documents make clear to me.
1) Scholars in Vietnam do not (or can not) do what Nguyễn Thế Anh can. And I don’t get the sense that scholars in Vietnam understand this. It’s not a question of people having different “interpretations,” because Nguyễn Thế Anh’s scholarship is simply in another category. His knowledge of the sources and his description of that period of time is much more nuanced and sophisticated. Scholars in Vietnam don’t produce scholarship like this at the moment.
2) Without producing solid scholarship like Nguyễn Thế Anh does, the “debate” about Trương Vĩnh Ký will go on forever because the differing views will continue to be based on (personal) politics and not on deeper and more sophisticated understandings of the past.
3) More specifically, the “debate” is based on generalized, abstract ideas – Trương Vĩnh Ký was a modernizer, a collaborator, he promoted the use of quoc ngu. . . etc. And the complexity of the past is pushed aside and we just have “the” Vietnamese, Trương Vĩnh Ký and “the” French. However, from the detailed information that Nguyễn Thế Anh provides you can see that the situation was much more complex, and that Trương Vĩnh Ký was one person in an already very interconnected world.
One can be “this” or “that” in a world in black and white, but the world that Trương Vĩnh Ký lived in was already grey. The “debate” that continues to go on is in black and white, but Nguyễn Thế Anh’s writings show that there was a lot of grey-ness at that time.
So I think that it’s always possible to say more about the past, but the way to do it is to 1) obtain the level of knowledge about the period and the sources for the period that Nguyễn Thế Anh has (and to write about the past in the detailed, well documented way that he does), to 2) read what people have written in the almost 20 years since Nguyễn Thế Anh’s book was published about the “colonial encounter” in other parts of the world (all of which emphasizes grey-ness) and then to look at the situation again.
That’s a lot of work, and I doubt that anyone will do it soon. So the “debate” about Trương Vĩnh Ký will probably continue. . .
And I am glad that I was prudent enough to pass the buck to a safe pair of hands 🙂 … Grey is indeed the color of history… What I find quite curious is the fact that men like Phạm Quỳnh tended to draw on female characters to drive home this grey-ness… Quỳnh likened himself to Vương Thúy Kiều, while Tôn Thọ Tường, a nineteenth century accommodationist Southerner, compared his political predicament to that of Tôn Phu Nhân, a figure from The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. His most well-known apologetic poem is named Tôn Phu Nhân Quy Thục … Is this a literary convention among Confucian literates? Did they assume that women are much more often exposed to morally ambiguous situations than men do?
I’m sure someone must have researched the phenomenon about men writing poems about, or from the perspective of, women, and there must me multiple ways that this was done, but my first sense is that it has something to do with the perceived “helplessness” of women. Without a man (particularly a husband) who can help them, they end up in a pitiful situation where they have to try to do things on their own. . .
Thank you so much Saigon Buffalo for your very detailed response to my question. And thanks for all the suggested materials too. I look forward to reading them. You obviously know so much. Thank you!
I have another question related to what you wrote here “On the basis of what I have read here and there throughout the years, it seems that Ký’s fellow Catholics are quite committed to a defense of his reputation.” This makes me think of Ngo Dinh Diem and his religion. Do you think one day Ngo Dinh Diem’s fellow Christians would do something to defend his reputation as what has happened in the case of Truong Vinh Ky? Please disregard the question if it is irrelevant or totally nonsense.
Thank you for your kind words and let me assure you from the outset that your “disclaimer” is not at all necessary: President Diệm’s co-religionists are even more committed to the defense of his reputation than is the case with Trương Vĩnh Ký. To take one example from my bookshelf:
Nguyễn Văn Lục, Một Thời Để Nhớ: Những Sự Thật Về Cố Tổng Thống Ngô Đình Diệm Và Nền Đệ Nhất Cộng Hòa (California: Nguyệt San Diễn Đàn Giáo Dân, 2011).
The reason I mention this particular book is the fact that its author, Nguyễn Văn Lục, happens to be the younger brother of the aforementioned Nguyễn Văn Trung, the scholar who has reversed his initial condemnation of Trương Vĩnh Ký… It might therefore be concluded that your two questions are even “genetically” related 🙂
Another significant detail: they are 1954 refugees from the North.
Dear Saigon Buffalo, I’m finding it harder and harder to believe that you are an “interested outsider,” and I definitely feel that I should be referring to you as “thầy,” but since we are interacting in the “anonymous” world of the Internet, and since you have decided to humbly refer to yourself as “Saigon Buffalo,” I will refer to you as such, although the things you say here clearly reveal that you are in the relationship of a thầy to me, and I thank you very much for everything that you have said here.
The comments that you have made here actually relate to the long discussion about scholarship in Vietnam that we had in the “Korea, Vietnam and Area Studies” post.
When I was growing up, my neighbor was a German language professor. He often had guests from Germany visit and I observed how they interacted. It was clear that they could easily get along and that they learned from each other.
That experience made me think that this was the “model” of what being a professor was all about. Foreigners can produce cutting-edge scholarship about a society different from their own, but the scholars from that other society should also be able to teach the foreigners about things that they don’t know.
This doesn’t happen in Vietnam today. The last time I gave a talk at a conference, a senior Vietnamese scholar talked to me after I gave my talk and said, “Anh nên đọc Bình Ngô đại cáo và Nam quốc sơn hà”. . .
Thầy Saigon Buffalo, your comments, however, fit the “model” that I think should exist. You understand the points that I’m trying to make here, and you don’t tell me to go read the Bình Ngô đại cáo. At the same time, you are clearly much more knowledgeable about many things than I am, and you share that knowledge with me. That is fantastic, and this is the type of interaction that I would love to see become the norm in Vietnam.
Rất là cảm ơn thầy ạ!!!
I discover that the link to page 114 of Nguyen Van Trung’s 1970s book has been corrupted. So, for the sake of completeness, here is the new link to that page:
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@ LMK… Your kind if vastly exaggerated words make me think that the money spent at California’s Vietnamese bookstores and Amazon.com has turned out to be a very good investment indeed 🙂 …But let me tell you something about life within the overseas Vietnamese community in the West, where almost every discussion quickly degenerates into a shouting match about who had committed which sins or crimes in the past. Defeated and pushed aside, there is very little overseas Vietnamese can do to shape the future of their homeland. Hence their obsession with history and “historical knowledge” thus becomes a baseball club to hit adversaries in blame games. I grew up in this community and soon joined the army of history addicts. I am also very fortunate to have received a good education so that I can dig a little deeper and know what to say and whom to quote in an august ( 🙂 ) forum like this, but that is all …
My background as an overseas Vietnamese explains my familiarity with Southern scholarship. My parents encouraged me to maintain and improve my Vietnamese by reading South Vietnamese books that were reprinted and sold in the Golden State. In that way, I became acquainted with the works of Southern scholars. Substantive arguments aside, I find their style both graceful and sophisticated, in particular when compared to the crude and ugly Vietnamese prose that is prevalent today. I wholeheartedly embrace the Southern heritage as it has been reproduced in California.
This should not sound all to unfamiliar to an American, whose many compatriots in the South still cherish a culture that is marked by a defeat in the past…
Much of the early scholarship on Vietnamese history produced in the US ended up reflecting the North’s view of the past. Over the past 20 years that has started to change. You have people who have taken a new look at Ngô Đình Diệm (Miller, Chapman) and Bảo Đại’s State of Vietnam (Goscha), and people who have started to deconstruct “received truths” about the North (Nguyen, Asselin, Vu).
That’s all important, but Southern historical scholarship still remains more or less ignored. There are works like Patricia Pelley’s Postcolonial Vietnam that look at the production of historical knowledge in the North in the 1950s-70s in Ngiên cứu lịch sử, but the production of knowledge in the South in journals like Bách khoa remains unstudied.
My sense is that this is starting to change. I’m aware of one article that will come out in the Journal of Vietnamese Studies soon that looks at the way that historians in the South examined certain issues (I think the Nam tiến). Then there are a couple of recent dissertations in the US by Vietnamese-Americans that deal with various forms of knowledge production in the South (I think dealing with nationalism, for instance). I know of a Vietnamese from Vietnam who is studying about Southern scholars like Nguyễn Đăng Thục. And I have an un-written chapter in an un-written masterpiece that looks at Southern scholarship on early Vietnamese history. . .
There’s probably more than this, but I think/hope that Southern scholarship will get some of the long overdue attention that it deserves.
Thank you again Saigon Buffalo for sharing your knowledge. Wow, I am so glad that my questions related to Truong Vinh Ky and Ngo Dinh Diem were “genetically” related :).
Given your knowledge and how well-read you are, I wonder if you have access to Bàng Bá Lân’s ca dao tuc ngu Viet Nam that was published overseas, perhaps in the 80s. I saw it in a friend’s bookshelf many years ago and did look at it. It is a collection of ‘ca dao tuc ngu’ that Bàng Bá Lân collected in numerous villages throughout Vietnam. My friend has moved far away and the book is no longer with him. I really like it and really hope that I could find it again one day.
I cannot offer you any help in this case, because being a political history junkie, I know next to nothing about ca dao and tục ngữ 🙂