Gia Long established a nation at Hue, including Ha Noi by the Red River and Saigon by the Mekong, at the beginning of the century when my grandparents were born, over the same years as the republic of France and the United States of America.
Yesterday, really. When Saigon fell in 1975, that was thirty years after victory in Europe and Japan fifteen years before I was born, when Ho Chi Minh accepted the seal of the Nguyen dynasty at Ba Dinh square.
Another age and epoch, I thought at the time, but now at sixty years old, I have pencils I bought thirty years ago and 1800 is just around the block. I feel I could walk there.
France and the United States and Viet Nam all look back deeper into time but we do it from imagined communities whose own time depth might not show up as a stratum at an archaeological dig.
That is the way I look at it. I feel sure you see things differently even if you too are an anthropologist who has mastered three million years of the past. Should ever we meet we could talk it over.
What I can do for you now, what I mean these Viet Nam letters to do for the next twenty years until someone is celebrating my death anniversary, is to refer you to good things to read,
in English, that Gia Long brought into being by unifying the nation whose shape we have all seen in clocks on the wall, on the place mats, in restaurants that serve pho.
These things to read are by persons who feel and see and think and write. Some of them have Vietnamese dynasty or family names. Some of them are telling you about Viet Nam. Many are friends of mine.
But if you want to listen to people just because they are Vietnamese, or have someone tell you what to think about Viet Nam, there are better places to go.
This is a place of entertainment and information, from intellect and talent, occasioned by the establishment of that nation.
