I’m visiting Vietnam next week. It’ll be my first time at the airport alone. I don’t have a succinct answer for why I’m going. When people ask, I give them some variation of: the street food, the relative affordability, or just because.
To know something is to love something - I suppose that is the succinct, but inappropriately heavy for water cooler conversations, answer. A rich history underlies every inch of the surface of the Earth. But I couldn’t tell you, gazing up at, for instance, the pyramids of Giza, what they mean, why they’re there, or how they were built. I would feel an obligatory dumbstruck awe, and yet I would have no way of taking that emotion any further: an enormity I would have no way of interpreting.
But if I were standing on the coastline of Vietnam, looking out at the South China Sea, I would think that thousands of years ago, this wasn’t underwater yet. It was what prehistorians call Nanhailand (Nanhai meaning “South Sea”), a broad coastal plain that extended one hundred miles beyond the modern coastline. And Hainan Island wasn’t yet an island, but the peak of a mountain. Twelve to eight thousand years ago, the ice age glaciers started to melt. The sea level rose, the coastline shifted westward, and the relics of the people who inhabited that area sank to the bottom of the sea.
And long before then, the Homo Erectus roamed the area. Homo Erectus appears to have evolved in eastern Asia and lived there for perhaps as long as 1.5 million years (the first hominids themselves appearing in Africa seven million years ago) - ten times longer than modern humans have been around. Some of the oldest fossils of Homo Erectus have been found in Southeast Asia.
There isn’t a direct line of continuity in cultural and ethno-linguistic development from the peoples inhabiting prehistoric Vietnam to the modern Vietnamese. What makes Vietnamese history Vietnamese is that the events of that history took place in what we now call Vietnam and that certain versions of it “have been taught as a common memory” to people who speak Vietnamese.1 So what, if anything, endures?
I am not an expert on Vietnam, just a boy in adoration, but what seems to be salient about its history is its amphibiousness. A history of the Vietnamese is in some ways a history of thresholds: a history of a people on the edge of an empire, and a history of a people on the edge of the sea. Centuries ago, Yue was pronounced more like Ywat, which is how, much later, it came to be rendered as Viet. Yue was a generic designation for southern non-Han peoples, but it meant something like ‘other’.2 Qin texts describe the people of Nan Yue (or Nam Viet in Vietnamese) as people who tattooed their bodies to resemble scaled aquatic animals.3 A 135 BCE text says that “people carry out few occupations on land and many on water.”4 A description from the 1800s shows that the aquatic culture persisted: “Water is like a system of blood vessels for the land … People use boats as their homes or to go to market or to visit their relatives [and to] transport firewood and rice or engage in itinerant commerce … The boats fill the rivers both day and night”.5 It is of note that the Vietnamese word nước means both “water” and “country”.
There is a thirteenth century Vietnamese story entitled Truyện Trê Cóc (Chronicle of the catfish and the frog). In it, a female frog goes to the pond of a catfish to give birth to tadpoles. The catfish covets the tadpoles and steals them. The frog and her husband go to a Chinese Confucian mandarin to complain but the mandarin and his corrupt inspectors are bribed to award custody to the catfish. The frogs consult a famous legal scholar who tells them to simply wait for their tadpoles to mature. And so they wait, the tadpoles mature, shed their tails, and appear on dry land. It is obvious then who should get custody. The catfish confesses its theft and submits to exile.6 Though the Chinese bureaucrat is in charge here, he fails to understand the amphibian nature that the Vietnamese scholar knows well.
Maybe thats why I like reading about Vietnam: everyone feels a little amphibian, no? Maybe I feel it a little stronger these days. My brother got married recently. When I got home, I laid on the floor of my room in the dark. I feel a little alien at traditional Bengali events. My sister-in-law said when she first started dating my brother, it was concerning to her that he was born and raised here in America. She was concerned whether he was raised with the right values. At the wedding, when the Imam was explaining the rules of a legal Islamic wedding, he paused to emphasize that a wedding is between a man and a woman only. I was in the front row, with my hair straightened, wearing the most makeup I’ve ever worn in my entire life, and wearing earrings so heavy my earlobes would be swollen by the end of the night, giving nothing away.
To know something is to love something. Knowledge begets affection begets further acquisition of knowledge - and so on. But there has to be a point of entry somewhere. The first boy I ever had a crush on was Afghani. And I still have two books on my shelf about Afghanistan. I read them a few years ago so the details are fuzzy, but I think I still remember enough to stumble through a conversation on the Soviet-Afghan War. So it will not be particularly surprising for you, dear reader, to know that I have a crush on someone Vietnamese. I don’t go out of my way to talk to her much. The Jewish Study Bible says, “The love is the impetus for the study; the study is the expression of the love”.7 I show affection the way I know how. I don’t even know if Vietnam holds any meaning for her, but it does now for me.
Footnotes
Keith Weller Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese, 12↩︎
Keith Weller Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese, 34↩︎
Ben Kiernan, Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present, 68↩︎
Ben Kiernan, Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present, 68↩︎
Ben Kiernan, Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present, 19↩︎
Ben Kiernan, Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present, 161↩︎
Jewish Publication Society, The Jewish Study Bible, ix↩︎