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My family owes its good fortune to a mysterious man. What he did one night changed my ancestors’ destiny, leading them from poverty to social prominence.
When this enigmatic figure appeared in my family’s story toward the end of the eighteenth century, Vietnam was still in the throes of a civil war that would erupt intermittently and last over 200 years. It was an unsettled time, with several clans backed by armies vying for domination. After their province in the central region of the country had turned into a raging battlefield, my ancestors fled. But there was no safe haven in the next province, or the next, as the opposing armies swept swept back and forth destroying everything in their path. So, along with thousands of other desperate peasants, my ancestors kept moving further and further north, trying to escape warfare, drought, and hunger. The trek finally took them to Van Dinh, where they settled down. This village is located on the bank of the Day River, about forty kilometers south of Hanoi. People here earned their livelihood by growing rice. They also grew vegetables in the soil along the bank of the river and sugarcane on higher ground. For extra food, they caught fish, shrimp, and freshwater clams, as well as crabs and snails that became plentiful in the flooded rice fields during the rainy season. The industrious villagers also sold bricks, cooking pots, and toys that they made by using clay scooped from the riverbank.
The Day is a branch of the mighty Red River, which irrigates and nourishes the delta of northern Vietnam with its rich silt. From its source in the mountain range in southern China, the Red River flows for hundreds of miles before pouring into the sea. As it penetrated into the flat delta, this river, enlarged by tributaries, began to course in a bed that was higher than the surrounding plain. During the monsoon, especially in July and August, the river would become menacing. Swollen by the incessant and torrential rainfall, it raged its way to the sea, frequently overflowing its banks and threatening to drown the surrounding land. To tame the floodwaters, an elaborate network of dikes had been constructed centuries before. But the dikes, built with wooden pillars, bamboo poles, and compacted earth, could not always contain the river and its branches. Inundations continued to occur almost every year, killing people and animals, and destroying crops and houses. Bandits usually emerged after the most disastrous inundations, as destitute peasants resorted to armed robbery for survival.
For villages like Van Dinh, the Day River was both a blessing and a bane, providing water to irrigate their lands, but also threatening them with flooding. The river drew the villagers to its rich alluvial soil, but also compelled them to keep their distance, shielded by the dike or safely perched on the higher ground near the market place. The thirteen-foot-tall dike, whose flat and wide top also served as the main road into the village, dominated Van Dinh’s landscape. When my ancestors arrived, all the desirable housing spots had been taken, so they built their hut near the river’s edge, on the “wrong side” of the dike. Whenever the water level rose, the river overflowed into their back yard and occasionally even into their house. As outsiders, my ancestors were viewed with suspicion and discriminated against by the clannish villagers. Most of the rice fields were the communal property of the village and were distributed only to the indigenous residents for cultivation. Migrants who came to settle like my ancestors were not entitled to a part of the land, and so were deprived of this main source of income. Some of the migrants earned their living by making clay pots, while others survived by doing odd jobs, fishing in the river, and by catching crabs and snails in the rice fields. The only hope for them to escape their lowly status and poverty was to produce sons who could become mandarins—officials in the imperial bureaucracy and the elite of society at the time.
Scholars who aspired to become mandarins had to spend years mastering classical Chinese, introduced when China ruled the country from 111 B.C. to A.D. 939, and thereafter retained by the royal court, even after independence had been achieved, as the official language for all its documents. In addition, these scholars had to digest a daunting body of Chinese writings, learn how to compose elegant prose and poetry, and memorize Vietnamese and Chinese history, in order to pass a series of progressively more difficult exams. The goal of this education was not to encourage original thinking, but to produce men of culture who could master the wisdom of Confucius and his disciples and apply it to protect the welfare of the people. The higher the degree earned, the higher the potential appointment would be within the imperial bureaucracy and the faster the rise to the top. Only a relatively small number of people had the ambition and the persistence to pursue this career path.
My ancestors, who descended from scholars, were determined to continue their family’s tradition, in spite of their poverty. The men focused on their studies and did odd jobs on the side. They survived mainly because their wives were able to contribute to the meager income by buying and selling goods at the various local markets. Every three years, the men tried their chances at the civil service exams, hoping to pass and to earn a position in the bureaucracy. If they succeeded, they would have power and prestige, though they certainly would not become rich, as the court paid mandarins only a low salary, supplemented with a rice ration sufficient to feed their families. Joining the imperial bureaucracy was, in fact, like joining the priesthood, as mandarins were expected to dedicate themselves to a life of virtue and duty and to accept a standard of living that was only slightly above that of the people they governed. In the view of the court, when it made a scholar a mandarin, it gave him such an honor—anointing him as one of the country’s most wise, most educated, and most virtuous men—that it did not need to pay him generously as well.
The mysterious man’s connection with my family began with his friendship with Duc Thang, my ancestor of six generations ago. By this time, my family had lived in Van Dinh for about a hundred years. Three generations had come and gone, without achieving any noticeable success. The family had escaped poverty at one point, when one of the men married into a rich household. But by Duc Thang’s generation, the family had once again fallen into abject poverty, victimized by the bandits that were taking advantage of the unsettled situation in the countryside. In their forays into Van Dinh, they had ransacked and burned down Duc Thang’s hut—not once, but several times. Instead of destroying his spirit, this motivated him to study harder to pass his exam and escape his predicament.
At this time, most people could not read or write. Whenever illiterate people needed to have something recorded, they would go to students, scholars, or retired mandarins for help. In exchange, they would pay them a small sum or, since barter was common, give them betel leaves, areca nuts, rice wine, tea, or a combination of these. Duc Thang used to sit outside the gate of a pagoda near his village and hire himself out to the faithful, writing prayers in Chinese characters in exchange for a small fee. When worshipers had a big favor to ask of the deities, they would burn such messages in a special trough inside the pagoda courtyard to convey their pleas to the...
It was at this pagoda that the mysterious man met Duc Thang, and liked him immediately. They became friends, but after Duc Thang stopped visiting the pagoda, the man lost contact with him. Several years later, he decided to look for him in Van Dinh. When he arrived, disguised as a poor traveler, he learned that the scholar had been dead for many years. He found Duc Thang’s house as evening fell. The poverty he saw was appalling. Without telling her who he was, he asked Duc Thang’s widow for some water to wash his dusty feet. Although he looked poor, she greeted him with kindness and hospitality. He thought she was worthy of help and revealed that he was a geomancer, someone who could read signs in the earth and identify auspicious spots for burial sites to ensure the good fortune of future generations. He said, “I can show you where to put your husband’s grave so that your descendants will have a better life. But you must tell me first whether you want them to be rich or to become successful scholars and mandarins.” She answered, “I want them to have success and prestige, not wealth.” Her choice made sense because, during the time in which she lived, scholars and mandarins were the most respected social classes. The wealthy, on the other hand, were despised because people believed that commerce, the usual source of money for the rich, was a parasitic—if not dishonest—occupation. Over time, as social values changed, my relatives would come to regret the widow’s selection. In my generation, many of my relatives would rather have traded their academic successes and poorly paid government jobs for wealth. And in my family, whenever we had money problems, my siblings and I would half-jokingly condemn Duc Thang’s widow for her bad judgment.
After the widow told him what she wanted, the man said, “I’ll help you get your wish. I know of a very good location for a grave in the village. I want you to dig up your husband’s bones and rebury them there.” But she protested. Exhumation was out of the question: she did not have the money to buy a clay pot in which to put the bones for reburial, as required by custom. The stranger reassured her, “Don’t worry, just use a bamboo basket, if you can’t afford to buy a clay pot.” At exactly midnight, the man asked Duc Thang’s widow and son to take him to the grave. After the bones had been dug up and placed in the basket, he told them to follow him. Guided only by starlight, they made their way to the new site the man had chosen. It turned out to be located in the middle of a common graveyard, where only wretched people without relatives or descendants to take care of their graves were buried. Wandering souls resided here, forever disconsolate because no one was burning joss sticks or making offerings to their spirits. Duc Thang’s widow wept with disappointment and clung to the basket, refusing to bury the bones here. The stranger soothed her, “Don’t worry. This is an auspicious site. In three years, all the other graves will be relocated. With them gone, the earth’s currents will be unblocked and will flow directly into your husband’s grave.” Before leaving, he told the widow not to build a tomb over the grave. He also wrote a cryptic poem predicting the successes of future generations:
First, a member of the Royal Academy
Second, two governors
Every twenty years, a generation of scholars
Every twenty years, a generation of mandarins
Earth termites later built up the mound so that the grave, unrestricted by construction, kept growing year by year, an encouraging sign that it had been placed in powerful earth currents. It is said that if you stood on high ground and looked down at the grave, you would see that the contours of the earth around it formed the shape of an ink slab and a brush, the writing implements used by a scholar. You would also see the shape of a horse, the animal that a scholar rode on his triumphant return to his village, after winning the tien si , or doctorate degree—the pinnacle of academic achievement and a door-opener to a high position in the government. When I visited Duc Thang’s grave in October 1993, I was astonished to find that, after almost 200 years, the mound had not been leveled by the passage of time. While all the old graves in the vicinity had disappeared, Duc Thang’s burial site could still be seen protruding over the rice fields surrounding it. The ink slab and the brush had, unfortunately, been turned into rice fields, and the horse had had his left foot clipped when a nearby road was built. Because of this injury to the horse’s left foot, people in my clan have become prone to accidents involving the left leg. When I fell and broke my left kneecap in 1981, I became another casualty of the carelessness of those road builders.
For about a hundred years after he first appeared in our history, we did not know who the mysterious stranger was. Then, one night, my great-grandfather spoke to the... of Tan Vien Mountain, Vietnam’s most sacred peak, through a medium. This spirit, a mythical figure associated with the origins of our people, told him that this enigmatic person was a monk who had taken the ordained name of Thanh Tinh Thien Su, or Master of Purity and Serenity. From that day onward, my great-grandfather began to worship the monk as if he were one of our ancestors. On the anniversaries of their deaths and at Tet, our lunar new year, when he prayed to their departed souls, he would also thank this holy man for his deed. This became a tradition for my clan. The predictions came true one by one. Duc Thang’s son received the honorific title of royal academician upon his retirement as the mandarin in charge of education for Son Tay Province, and launched the family on the path of success and better fortune. The two governors foretold by the monk, Duong Lam and Duong Khue, my great-grandfather and great-granduncle, did not appear until three generations later. Every twenty years—or so runs my family’s belief—one or several relatives should achieve prominence in government service or as scholars, just as the monk predicted.
Duong Lam, my great-grandfather, was born in 1851, the third year of Emperor Tu Duc’s reign during the Nguyen dynasty, the one that had emerged triumphant from the long civil war and that would be the last to exist. Considering the tradition in Duong Lam’s family, there was no question that he would train to become a scholar and an official. So he immersed himself for years in the study of philosophy, history, and poetry, under his father’s tutelage. He wanted success for himself, to earn fame as a scholar and prestige as a mandarin. But he also wanted success for his parents, who had great hopes for him, and whom he wanted to repay with the honor that society would bestow on them if he triumphed. He excelled in his studies, and mastered the art of writing prose and poetry. But scholastic brilliance could not always guarantee success. As is the case with any exam anywhere in the world, luck—or fate—has much to do with passing or failing. The Vietnamese also believed that justice beyond the grave was at work during exams. The souls of those that had been wronged would come back to seek revenge against the perpetrators, while those that owed a debt to those still living would return to help their benefactors.
The first-level examination consisted of three to four sessions. Candidates who passed all of them received what can be called a master’s degree—or cu nhan —and those who passed all but one earned a tutai —or a bachelor’s degree—the lowest in the system. The examination was extremely competitive, and only a few candidates were chosen out of a field of thousands, with usually twenty to twenty-five master’s degrees and seventy to seventy-five bachelor’s degrees at each site. Seven major categories of complex if not incomprehensible rules governed all the exams, and an infraction could result in disqualification or even imprisonment, depending on the seriousness of the oversight or offense. A careless juxtaposition of words unintentionally implying a criticism of the throne was considered lèse-majestié and could land the candidate in jail.
The exam tested not only a candidate’s intellect, but also his mental and physical endurance. Due to the huge number of candidates at each site, there were no permanent exam rooms. Instead, each candidate had to bring his own tent, a portable bamboo couch that also served as a writing table, paper, brushes, ink, water, and food, as each session lasted all day and candidates were not allowed to leave the site. On exam day, the candidates had to arrive before daybreak and submit themselves to a thorough search by the guards before being allowed inside, to make sure they were not smuggling in any written materials along with their paraphernalia.
Strict measures were taken to prevent cheating. Sentinels standing guard in watchtowers and soldiers patrolling on horseback kept vigil to prevent candidates from sneaking into one another’s tent and offering help. To make sure that the papers submitted by the candidate had been composed at the site and not prepared beforehand and smuggled in, the first ten or so pages used by each candidate were stamped with an official seal, and the manuscript had to be stamped again at noon on the exam day. An elaborate procedure for selecting the examiners and for grading was observed to prevent cheating. Mandarins appointed as examiners were chosen from outside the region where the exam was to be held. At the site, they were put in cramped quarters, and held virtually like prisoners until the sessions were over, completely cut off from the outside world, and even unable to communicate among themselves. The manuscripts submitted to them for grading were anonymous, with the candidates’ names removed and bearing only coded numbers. Two sets of examiners independently graded each manuscript, and the cumulative grade stood as the final grade, to ensure objectivity and avoid favoritism or cheating. As an added precaution, a military mandarin with no ties to the examiners was put in charge of keeping watch over them and enforcing order at the site.
In his first try at the regional examination, in 1867 at age sixteen, my great-grandfather did not succeed completely, getting only the bachelor’s degree. If he was disappointed, he would also have felt comforted by the fact that he had done better than thousands of other scholars who never managed to earn even this degree, and spent their youth making repeated but fruitless attempts. Brilliant scholars who failed were not despised but simply pitied because fate did not reward their talent, and hoc tai thi phan —“learning depends on one’s ability, but succeeding at the exams depends on one’s fate”—became the common lament for those cursed with bad luck at the exam site.
In normal times, my great-grandfather would have focused his energy only on succeeding in the next exam. But he was not living in normal times. In 1873, French troops bombarded and stormed Hanoi’s citadel. This attack was France’s first salvo in its war to take over the northern part of Vietnam following its conquest of the southern region in 1867. Outgunned, the governor of Hanoi felt he had only one honorable response. Wounded and taken prisoner, he ripped off his bandages and committed suicide by starving himself to death. After taking over Hanoi, French forces moved out to conquer the surrounding area. The campaign gave my great-grandfather the opportunity to prove himself. He recruited and trained militiamen to defend a citadel in his native district that stood in the way of the French advance. Under his leadership, the citadel resisted the enemy siege for two months. It was ultimately spared when the invaders withdrew from the north following their commander’s death in a skirmish in Hanoi. For his achievement, Duong Lam was later cited by the court in its official account of those events.
With the departure of the French, things returned to normal. In 1878, Duong Lam took the mandarin exam again and not only earned the cu nhan degree, but took the highest honor as the valedictorian. In a country that revered learning, Duong Lam’s success won him instant fame. After that, there was only one thing left for him to do: pursue the most prized degree—the tien si , equivalent to the doctorate. But first, he would have to make the arduous trip to Hue, the imperial capital, where this series of exams was held. Hundreds of miles lay between Van Dinh and Hue. He would have to get there and back on foot and by boat, sailing along the shore of the South China Sea, then making his way by land through jungles and mountains. The trip took over a month.
The imperial exam, held every three years, was extremely competitive. Each time, only ten scholars out of a field of 150 to 200 candidates would be chosen. The exam would begin with three rigorous sessions. Those that passed would sit for a fourth, held in the Imperial Palace, with subjects chosen by the emperor himself. Sometimes, an emperor would even grade the exams personally. If the candidates succeeded, they would earn the doctorate degree. If not, they would become “Candidate doctors.” My great-grandfather entered the first round of exams with great confidence. But although he turned in brilliant papers, he was disqualified because of a minor infraction. For the rest of his life, this twist of fate would nag at him. When his oldest son, my grandfather, also failed the same exam years later, it was like rubbing salt in the. wound. The family was finally vindicated in 1919 when my oldest uncle Tuong earned the doctorate degree, in the last tien si exam to be held in Vietnam.
The failure rankled even more because Duong Lam’s older brother Duong Khue, whom he measured himself against, had taken and passed this exam in 1868, and had received many honors. My great-granduncle could easily have failed as well. When Duong Khue sat for the palace exam, he and the other candidates were asked to write an essay on a topic Emperor Tu Duc had chosen himself: “Make War or Make Peace.” The imperial Council of Ministers was then hotly debating this issue. The court was split. On one side were those that wanted to make peace with the French. On the other side were those that wanted to go to war to get back the southern provinces that the emperor had been forced to cede to France. The emperor took the opportunity of the exam to test the best minds in the country on this issue. For the candidates, it was a loaded topic, because they had no way of knowing what the emperor himself was thinking. However they came down on the issue, they might run the risk of offending the throne.
Duong Khue couched his essay in such diplomatic language that the emperor did not take offense. In it, my great-granduncle opposed the concession the emperor had made, but avoided criticizing the throne directly. He said simply that as a loyal subject he had wept upon reading the royal edict announcing the loss of territory to the French. Then he went on to recommend that the court go to war to expel the foreigners. The emperor liked the composition, but did not agree with this suggestion, and wrote the comment “Not appropriate to the situation” in vermillion ink in the margin. That was not the last time my great-granduncle recommended going to war. He would do this two more times in petitions he addressed to the throne. This audacity could have cost him his career, if not his freedom or even his head.
If my great-grandfather had passed the tien si exam, he would have enjoyed the many honors that his older brother had experienced. After earning the doctorate degree, Duong Khue was granted an audience with the emperor, entertained at a royal banquet, given a robe and a hat adorned with a silver flower design of his own choosing, and invited to stroll the imperial garden. The emperor also gave Duong Khue a gift of precious cinnamon bark that had been presented to the court as tribute, observing, “We notice that tien si Duong Khue does not look well. We instruct him to take care of his health so that he can serve the country.” This was great honor, since this cinnamon—a kind found on only a few trees out of thousands growing in a cinnamon forest—was believed to be a wonder drug, capable of curing innumerable diseases, and even of bringing the dying back to life.