Viet Nam. Hữu Ngọc

       The Four Facets of Vietnamese Culture

      To understand Việt Nam, you must first understand the country’s name. Since the Vietnamese language is monosyllabic, Vietnamese write and pronounce “Việt Nam” as two words, even though foreigners sometimes write our country’s name as well as “Hà Nội,” “Sài Gòn,” and other names as one word. “Việt” refers to the Việt (or Kinh), the largest of our fifty-four ethnic groups with 85 percent of the population. Thus, Việt Nam is the land of the Việt, just as, etymologically speaking, France is the country of the Francs and England is the land of the Angles. Since “Nam” means “South,” “Việt Nam” means “the country of the Việt of the South.”

      Yet if we modern-day Vietnamese are descendants of the Việt of the South, where are the Việt of the North?

      They became Chinese.

      And so, I define modern-day Vietnamese as members of the Việt ethnic community who did not want to become Chinese, who do not want to become Chinese, and who will never want to become Chinese, even though Chinese culture has imbued Vietnamese culture. Ill-informed foreigners sometimes regard Vietnamese culture as an appendage to Chinese culture, with a tinge of Hindu culture. Chinese and Vietnamese cultures were and are two different cultures. China has Chinese culture, while Việt Nam has Vietnamese culture.

      The cradle of Chinese culture is the Hoang Ho (Yellow River) Basin, which is north of the Yangtze (Blue) River. In contrast, modern-day southern China south of the Yangtze belonged to former Southeast Asia. Việt Nam is still farther south. Việt Nam’s first identity emerged three thousand years ago (around 1000 BCE) not in China but in the Red River Delta, or present-day northern Việt Nam, as a typical wet-rice-growing Southeast Asian culture. Many attributes from that ancient Southeast Asian civilization remain in present-day Vietnamese culture, for example, rice-growing traditions, myths, popular beliefs, language usage, and the Vietnamese lifestyle.

      We can represent the two cultures—Vietnamese and Chinese—with two archeological artifacts. A bronze drum typifies Việt Nam, whereas a bronze incense burner typifies ancient China north of the Yangtze.

      The Việt grew wet rice, which requires a long rainy season. Whenever the Việt lacked rain, it is said that they beat their bronze drums to summon the dragon—a positive presence in Eastern cultures—to bring rain. The Việt bronze drums with their finely wrought engravings date back three thousand years, when the engravers faced wild beasts, inclement weather, and hunger. Archeologists have found similar bronze drums in all Southeast Asian wet-rice-growing countries—Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Việt Nam. In contrast, the Chinese north of the Yangtze lacked the hot, wet, tropical climate needed to grow wet rice. Instead, they grew dryland crops, which require less water.

      Over the centuries, the Vietnamese people have preserved the substratum of their own Southeast Asian culture while enriching it with the foreign contributions—mainly Chinese (Vietnamese Middle Ages) and French (modern times)—that Vietnamese have grafted onto their own culture.

      Việt Nam’s geographical position and configuration determined its vocation and destiny. Situated in the heart of Southeast Asia, Việt Nam is also part of East Asia. The Pacific Ocean brought the first Western contacts. Those three geographical factors—Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific—engendered the four cultural facets making up traditional Vietnamese culture and Việt Nam’s unique identity. Throughout centuries, Vietnamese have preserved their Southeast Asian substratum—the first facet—as the essential characteristic of Vietnamese culture and then added enriching foreign elements.

      The second facet of Vietnamese culture is its East Asian side. Beginning before the Common Era, Chinese empires dominated Việt Nam for more than a thousand years. The Vietnamese waged persistent struggles to preserve their identity and avoid Sinicization. In 938 CE, the Việt won national independence, which they maintained for nine hundred years, until the 1800s. During the two thousand years before French colonization, Chinese influence translated into a double movement of repulsion from and attraction toward Chinese culture, which was richer and more varied than the Việts’ Southeast Asian culture. Together with Japan and Korea, Việt Nam integrated into the cultural system of eastern Asia under strong Chinese influence. This included direct influence (e.g., ideographs, Chinese Buddhism), but we should not forget other indirect Asian influences (e.g., Indian Buddhism and Hinduism).

      The third facet of Vietnamese culture is Western influence, which first arrived by way of the Pacific Ocean and the East Sea (sometimes called the South China Sea) in the 1600s and 1700s through trade and religious evangelization. Colonization followed in the 1880s. The dynamic of acculturation to foreign rule translated into repulsion from and attraction toward the French rulers’ culture. The contributions of Western culture changed the old Vietnamese culture with regard to science, technology, the arts, religion, and even everyday life, such as the consumption of bread, coffee, cabbage, and carrots. Thus, at the historic moment of the 1945 Revolution, Việt Nam’s traditional culture consisted of three facets: Southeast Asian, East Asian, and Western.

      The fourth facet of Vietnamese culture—internationalization and integration into the world community—began with the August 1945 Revolution and the re-conquest of national independence. Since then, the country has survived great upheavals, which have been both national (social revolution, thirty years of war, and policy renovation) and international (regional and global integration). The turning point in Việt Nam’s recent history was adoption of world integration a decade after the end of the war in 1975 in the framework of globalization. This change was inspired by Đổi Mới (Renovation or Renewal, late 1986), which had two main points: adoption of the market economy (thence creation of a private sector and promotion of competition) and an open-door policy (when possible, relationships with all countries irrespective of ideology).

      Over the last decades, Đổi Mới has testified to its effectiveness in Việt Nam’s economic development but has demonstrated its weakness in cultural development. Accelerated economic development has enhanced Western cultural influence, including increased individualism, which may erode our Vietnamese cultural identity based on community spirit. Thus, there arises a conflict between economic and cultural development. To solve this dilemma, we have adopted the following national motto: A country with a prosperous people strong enough to defend ourselves and with a democratic and humanistic culture.

Back to the Source in Southeast Asia

      In 1973, the Việt Nam Social Sciences Committee established the Southeast