Familial Properties: Gender, State, and Society in Early Modern Vietnam, 1463-1778 (iii)

from historian Nhung Tuyet Tran and Vietnamese studies

In many national histories, certain features become distinct signifiers of the country’s heritage. In Vietnam, the image of ‘woman’ serves as the embodiment of authentic tradition and as a sign of the country’s readiness for modernity.

John Phillips founded a national academy at Exeter, New Hampshire over the final years of the Tay Son rebellion (1773-1802). After the Nguyen victory, George Bancroft studied at my academy, leaving by age 13 (1813), when

Nguyen Du, serving as envoy to Beijing, began to compose the novel readers call Kim, Van, and Kieu. George toured Europe, founded his own American school, then published his History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent for the first time in 1834,

during the reign of Minh Mang. He published one revision after another through 7 more Nguyen administrations, the final version of the last volume appearing under Dong Khan (1885).

When I studied at Phillips’ academy, in the Ho dynasty years 30, 31, and 32, the first 3 years of re-unification of Viet Nam to Nguyen boundaries in 1975/6, my first academic year, I marveled at many of those I studied with, women, who slept in a dormitory named for George. They would have arrested his attention as well.

His academy had no dorms let alone women students or teachers. Bancroft did not mention a single woman, or the sex in general, in his introduction to his national history,

which was the national history of the United States of America from publication through well after his death. Nguyen Du’s novel, also called the Tale of Kieu, is still often spoken of as Viet Nam’s story, although the author was a contemporary of Bancroft’s father.

One weird choice for a national epic, George might have thought, reading Du’s soap opera in verse. His own saga of the USA follows the same span of years as Nhung Tuyet Tran’s of Viet Nam, with the same regard for the preparation of a polity to join the modern world.

Bancroft begins, The United States of America constitute an essential portion of a great political system, embracing all the civilized portions of the earth. Nhung rather begins with women.

The Viet Nam Women’s Union (Hội liên hệp phụ nữ Việt Nam) declares that Vietnamese women ‘preserve and develop the uniqueness and cultural genius of [our] people.’ (giữ gin phát triền bản sắc tinh hoa văn hoá dân tộc).

Have you ever met a Vietnamese woman? Helle Rydstrom (2003) has documented how every woman in sight schools each girl from birth to notice who is in the room and what they want. Not to please or serve them but to strategize.

To what end? To preserve and develop the uniqueness and cultural genius of our people. That would be the guys, whose characteristic personal names are Literature, and Meaning, and Purity, the force and value of that thing hanging from between their legs.

To that end the Women’s Union takes part in the Fatherland Front, which mobilizes all the people of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam. Being a Vietnamese woman is in this sense like being a Vietnamese journalist or lawyer or indeed a Communist. It is a way of working for the nation.

As the embodiment of tradition, this ‘Vietnamese woman’ exists in three reified forms in academic literature and in the popular imaginary: as a sign of Confucian oppression, of Vietnamese uniqueness, or of Southeast Asian cohesiveness.

Historian Nhung Tuyet Tran observes from Toronto, after passage through Houston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Ha Noi, Paris, Rome, and London in a network of women and men that grew with her brain,

three images of the life world of Vietnamese women that make up any discourse about them. I myself credit only with deliberate effort that anyone else ever believed they were bossing these women around.

I also have known unique Vietnamese women. I do see them all as distinct, that is, sharing some qualities not others, from all Southeast Asian women. I am aware that these are ideas with a past,

contingencies from which agency has begun, because the Vietnamese women I have listened to for hours, staring at their books, are historians not of Viet Nam alone but of modernity and how we got this way, Bancroft’s story of democracy.

Nhung begins with the Confucian order, with Vietnamese nationalism, and with Southeast Asia studies because she goes on to show in what other roles women have worked. The way I think of it is you can look at the three images of women on your placemat at the Vietnamese restaurant,

each in the characteristic ao dai of Northern, where the Confucians are, Central, where the nationalists came from, and Southern, open to Southeast Asia. You really should take them in. Then you should raise your eyes to the women in the room.

What do they want?

This was the third Viet Nam letter of 7 so far addressed to Familial Properties: Gender, State, and Society in Early Modern Vietnam, 1463-1778 by Nhung Tuyet Tran. The letter discusses Vietnamese women and Southeast Asia in light of the book’s introduction.

The first letter judges the book by its cover, on March 30, 2022.

The second letter reads the title page, on April 30, 2022.

The fourth is the first letter with the poem, “Like a female stork drudging by the banks of the river,” on July 18, 2022.

The fifth is the second letter to discuss epigraphy from steles women raised in the markets they built, on December 12, 2022.

The sixth is the third letter to show and the second to discuss “Like a female stork drudging by the banks of the river,” on December 15, 2022.

The seventh letter, on March 27, 2023, presents 2 more poems to make the point that the work of history is also an anthology.

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.