A History of the Vietnamese (iii)

from K.W. Taylor, Professor of Sino-Vietnamese Cultural Studies at Cornell University

RETROSPECTIVE

The meaning I take here is the opposite from a retrospective exhibition in a gallery or museum. There the curator presents the artist to the patrons by assembling an oeuvre of enduring intent unfolding over a career.

That is, by the way, how I see this historian, an artist, one of my guys from the war who has been saying the same thing since I met him while growing deep and high and wide. That is not how he sees his topic.

What he means is that there is no such Vietnamese growth in time and space. He says he has not made any such presentation.

Considering the events discussed in this book, no conclusion can be drawn in the sense of discovering some deep logic governing a presumed destiny of the Vietnamese people.

I say that is true once you have considered the events. Before reading this account, you likely have drawn conclusions. You may have discovered a logic.

It would be unusual for you not to have presumed that the Vietnamese have some destiny. To resist China, for instance.

Well sure. Sometimes. But also to defer and submit to them, most of the time. The historian has suggested what seemed like a good idea at each time.

More appropriate than a conclusion is a retrospective in the sense of a reappraisal that keeps close to surviving materials from the past and that aims to see the Vietnamese and their ancestors through their own eyes in various times and places.

The sense I am getting here now of what the author means by retrospective is a rear view mirror in a vehicle moving ahead at the speed of life. We are not sailing with Scott Fitzgerald, eyes fixed on the goal while failing against the current.

We are not blown backwards into the future with Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, gazing only at the past wreckage of the storm of time. We are rather at a death anniversary, one after another every month, remembering each ancestor’s public life and times in the time of family life.

There is no discernible pattern to explain how times of prosperity and well being alternated with times of misery and violence. As this book demonstrates, the Vietnamese past is, among other things, a great swath of failed experiments in social organization and governance.

Anyone who reads their poetry is now reciting silently: trăm năm trong cõi người ta, chữ tài chữ mệnh khéo là ghét nhau. In any of our lives, talent and fate are at war.

Toward no conclusion at all, we hope. We each have got one but no one knows what. Take a look back. Carry on.

This was the third Viet Nam letter of 3 so far concerning A History of the Vietnamese by K.W. Taylor. The first posted on March 30, 2023 and the second on April 2, 2023.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.