Last summer (2015) at the Engaging With Vietnam conference that was held in Hanoi, scholar Trần Trọng Dương gave a keynote presentation on “The Utility of History: The Case of Medieval Vietnamese History” (Tính hữu dụng của lịch sử: trường hợp lịch sử trung đại Việt Nam).
In this brief presentation, Trần Trọng Dương brought together many of the ideas that he has developed in various articles and books over the past few years.
Seeing how valuable that presentation was as an introduction to Trần Trọng Dương’s scholarship, after the conference I asked Trần Trọng Dương to “re-present” his talk so that I could film it.
At times it was just the two of us, with Trần Trọng Dương talking to an imagined audience and me filming, and at other times I filmed while Trần Trọng Dương presented his ideas while engaging in a conversation with Phan Lê Hà, a scholar and the founder of the Engaging With Vietnam conference series.
It has taken me a long time to get around to making videos out of this material, but here is the first part, and hopefully in the weeks and months ahead I will be able to create videos for the rest of Trần Trọng Dương’s valuable presentation.
His concept of Vietnamese historical representation as “tiểu Hán” is really telling.
Tiểu Hán can be regarded as Little China. Today, an ordinary Vietnamese would be felt offended if Vietnam is referred as Little China.
One time I mentioned that most of the Vietnamese last names were from China, and some of them objected to my view. If I rephrase and say that Chinese and Vietnamese share the same last names, they would feel much better.
Again, I would want to ask TTD to be sure, but the sense that I got was that he used that term deliberately to kind of show how “distant” the Confucian scholars were in the 15th century from the culture of common people, and by extension to point out how artificial their creation/depiction of the Hung kings was (tracing descent back to Than Nong, etc.).
Again, I could be wrong, but that’s the sense I got. I didn’t see it as accurate or offensive, but as a way to emphasize a point.
Actually, I think the issue is more one of wording, but that leads to other complex issues.
1) On the one hand, I don’t think that Vietnamese scholars pay as much attention as they should to the words that they use and how word usage affects what it is that they are trying to say about the past.
2) On the other hand, I also have seen Vietnamese scholars deliberately use certain words in order to “soften” the points that they try to make for an audience that might not be ready to hear them. So the concept that they have in their heads and the words that they choose to explain that concept can be deliberately different.
3) That said, if you are not really specific/careful in how you talk about the past (or any issue), then it is difficult to develop concepts that are as sharp as they could be (and that then creates a vicious circle that goes back to #1).
Ideally, what would be best would be to be able to go to a bia hơi with Trần Trọng Dương after hearing a presentation like this and to have a conversation about all of these issues. In that conversation, I think all of the above points would be present, but by having a conversation about all of these things then I think that everyone involved in the conversation would find a meeting point, or a place where they agree.
That, in general, has been my experience anyway. It’s the power of bia hơi and human interactions.