CONG HUYEN TON NU NHA TRANG
A CINDERELLA DREAM ©
By 1948, our family had settled in Hue, the capital of Vietnam where the Nguyen Emperor Bao Dai resided. Toward the end of summer, just a few weeks before another school year began, Father took half a day off and gave me a ride on his bicycle to Dong Khanh School for girls. It took us about twenty minutes to arrive at our destination. The school was three blocks away from my father's office.
After a short discussion between the head mistress and Father, followed by a few simple tests given to me who had missed the kindergarten year, I was admitted as a first grader. The evacuation from Nha Trang to Hue had made me a little late for school, as I was then almost seven.
I could not wait to tell my neighbor friend Nga My that I would be going to the same school, enrolled in the same class with her. It seemed she was anxious to know the outcome of our visit to the head mistress, as not long after Father and I reached home, I heard her call my name. From the front veranda of our terraced house, I smiled at the questioning look on Nga My's face that emerged above the top of the wall separating the tree-filled backyard of her house from Grandmother's modest vegetable plot. She was standing on the top rung of a ladder set against the wall. I told her what had transpired. She was full of excitement.
“Ah! So we'll be in the same class. You, Hanh, Lien, and myself. We'll walk to school together. I'm going to let Hanh and Lien know right away. Come to my house this afternoon and we'll talk about school.”
The talk about school which I had with my friends that afternoon ended with the agreement that all four of us would gather in front of Nga My's house from where we would together walk to school, expecting to spend about three quarters of an hour for the trip. My three friends lived on the same street named after Pham Ngu Lao, a national hero. It was, however, better known by its more descriptive name “Street of Tamarind Trees”. The tall trees, with dense branches of tiny pinnate leaves and seeded fruits of sour pulp, lined and shaded this narrow and short street, making it cool and pleasant.
The days which followed were marked with excitement for me. The first thing I did each morning after breakfast was open the small closet I shared with my sister and feel again what mother had bought for me -- as though I was afraid that during the night they would somehow have managed to “fly away without wings” as a folk idiom goes. They were all there for me to behold: two pencils, a pen and a jar of violet ink to go with it, a ruler, and brand new notebooks. I also loved to touch the two blouse-and-trouser sets of beige calico that were my school outfits, and a pair of wooden clogs.
The first school day saw me get up before anyone else in the family, with a mixed feeling of enthusiasm and anxiety. I waited for a while before my friends showed up outside Nga My's gate. It was indeed a forty-five-minute walk to school as anticipated. But the continuous chattering and explaining by my friends about buildings and sites along the way made me unaware of the distance and the passage of time. The girls also helped make my entrance into the class smooth and easy. Their friends immediately became mine. We all walked home for lunch, then walked back to school for the afternoon classes. The cooler weather of September and the pleasant company turned the four trips to and from school each day into no more than “good exercise”, as Grandmother put it. Not all school girls traveled on foot, however. A very small number came by car. For quite a few other girls, a rickshaw pulled by a man was the means of transportation. It looked like fun, I noted, without feeling envious.
Our school, the most prestigious public school for girls in the province, was the first sphere of social activities which hinted at the less accommodating nature of life beyond the family surroundings. Eternally grateful for having been admitted to a tuition-free public school, we could never even have imagined requesting that things be improved. No electric fans were available to reduce the intensity of the midday heat which was absorbed and transmitted by tile roofs and concrete walls. A couple of toilets were meant for hundreds of us, and by the time one was near one's turn to make use of them, a drum was heard announcing the end of a recess. As a result, the thick bushes adjacent to the back wall of the school compound, about twenty meters from our classrooms, were the popular spots where many of us little girls relieved ourselves. There was no potable water ready to quench our thirst. We brought along our own drinking water in small bottles. Those of us who had some pocket money would buy a glass of lime juice or cordials loaded with crushed ice, or a bar of ice cream, from street vendors who regularly displayed their wares just outside the school gates during class breaks. For snacks, we had quite a variety of fruits, ranging from sour carambola and tamarind to sweet mango and custard apple, from soft succulent mangosteen to crunchy guava, depending on seasons. We girls mostly preferred sour fruit of all kinds, which we dipped in a mixture of salt and ground fresh chili pepper -- I thought this apparently natural preference of ours might explain why Mother usually craved sour things when she was pregnant with a baby girl.
I was absorbed in my studies as much as engrossed in the fun and games of the playground. Many of my classmates brought their chattering and tittering into the classroom, but I tried to take leave of all that as soon as the beats of a drum announced the end of a break. My complete enjoyment of both work and play made me oblivious to the flow of time. Soon the flame trees in the school yard were spread with crimson flowers, the scorching sun dazzled one's eyes, and the trips to school grew less pleasant. The thought of the coming summer vacation, however, seemed to make more bearable the heat, the dust, and the noisy shrill notes of thousands of cicadas. I finished the year top of my class, and did not fully realize how good that felt until the award ceremony which was held before the 1949 summer holiday began.
Mother, dressed in her best silk ao dai, sat with Father amidst the audience consisting mainly of proud relatives. Though my teacher had briefed me and two of my classmates as to what to expect, I was still nervous. Sitting together with other girls who also were to receive awards for high academic performance and good behavior, I kept turning my head towards my parents. Once Mother caught sight of my gaze and gave me a reassuring smile.
When my name was pronounced, my heart started thumping violently and my legs felt like noodles. Discreetly tightening my fists for a few seconds to calm myself, I walked to the platform with my head high. Raising both hands to receive, from an honored guest, a bundle of goods wrapped in colorful cellophane, I bowed my thanks. Amidst applause, I cast a glance at my parents. Their shining eyes and broad smiles were a greater award which brought tears to my eyes. I thought of the honor conferred upon masters of literature in times long past. A fragment of that honor had just come true for me. I decided then that my parents would continue to be proud of me. A high standard of performance had thus been set. This formal recognition of my accomplishment also served to validate one of the moral lessons I had gathered from the stories Grandmother had told me, that with will power and hard work, one would eventually reach one's goal. I wondered then if I could apply that principle to the fulfillment of other dreams I would have in the future.
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“Mother! The moon is so beautiful. But it is too high” Looking up to the full blue moon in the sky that was dotted with sparkling stars, my two-year-old little sister Hong pouted.
It was a summer evening in 1951. A full moon always seemed to bring along with it a soothing breeze. After a good dinner with a lot of raw vegetables to cool our systems, we set some chairs in the small front yard where we could sit and enjoy being together, all three generations of us. Our neighbors from the other terraced houses were doing the same thing. The men of the families occasionally threw questions and answers to one another about their jobs or some news of the day that was exciting enough for people living in this quiet ancient city of Hue. Some young children were playing hide-and-seek. My baby sister Lien, almost one year old, was falling asleep in Grandmother's arms.
Mother gently pulled Hong toward her. “Come here, my little angel. What do you wish? Shall I bring the moon down for you? Wait here.”
To Hong's beaming agreement, Mother stood up and moved toward the back of the house. I looked up, and we exchanged a conspiratorial smile. Long ago Mother had told me, with happy twinkles in her eyes, that when about one year old I had regularly been given a bath in a backyard where I watched the moon and wanted it, and how Mother had brought it down for me. She considered that experience a romantic instance of connectedness between us.
I watched her slim figure gracefully move away from us. There was an indescribable quality in the way she swung her arms and held her head, and in the very delicate manner in which she set her feet on the ground. I always thought Mother exuded a majestic dignity befitting a queen.
Mother returned a moment later with a basin half full of water and placed it on the ground. The agitated water calmed, and the moon settled in the golden brass basin slightly darkened with age.
Hong clapped her hands, jumping up with joy. “Ah, now the moon is close to me. May I take it out?”
The little girl dipped her small hands into the water, with fingers interlaced, then carefully and slowly lifted them. Her hands came to the surface of the water, but they were not filled with her full blue moon. Hong burst into tears.
Mother put Hong on her knees, gently wiping the tears from her eyes. “Listen, my child,” Mother said. “Let me tell you something. Do you know why the moon ran away from you? It's because you frightened it. My little angel, you may look at something beautiful around you, but you should not try to grasp it. If you do, it will disappear or it will die. Now, look! The moon has come back to you.”
To Hong's delight, in the ornamented basin, the moon shone again full and bright. However, the image of the moon was too abstract to hold the little girl's attention for long. Soon she began counting the stars she could see in the sky.
The lesson given by Mother might have had but a momentary effect on my little sister, but, to me, it was a revelation of truth, the manifestation of a valuable principle that served to explain the air of peace and contentment that Mother had. To simply appreciate beauty and enrich yourself with it. Not to possess it. From a reasonable distance, she sang of all beauty found in nature, religion, and human relationships. The poems she recited were no less melodious than the popular songs which she rendered with feeling to lull my sisters to sleep.
Almost ten years old then, I had just finished the third year of elementary school. Among the various subjects of study, literature was my favorite. I learned by heart all the poems my teacher had given the class to read. However, the small number of poems assigned by her proved not enough to satisfy my thirst for poetry.
“Mother,” I asked one day while she was mending one of my brother's shirts.
“Yes, child.”
“I have noticed that the lullabies which Grandmother sings for my baby sisters have rhymes. Are they poems also?”
“Yes, the lyrics of lullabies and other folksongs are folk poetry.”
“Who wrote those poems, Mother?”
“Nobody knows. We only know that our country is very rich in poetry. Poems by famous people have been recorded in writing, but folk poems have been spread by word of mouth, and their authors are not known.”
“But now that I know how to write, I can record them, can't I?”
“Of course you can, daughter.”
She dictated and I wrote down, in a special exercise book I had set aside for favorite poems, the verses that marked the beginning of my interest in oral literature.
“Mother, I have also heard you sing some longer poems. But you don't sing poems the way Grandmother does. Is that because you and Grandmother do not come from the same area?”
“No, that's not the reason, dear. Rather, it's because I recite modern poems, which are different from lullabies. I am sure you will learn all that at school sometime later. But I will show you my own poems, some of which you may have heard.”
And so I came to learn of the creative artistic side of my mother. Her poems were neatly recorded in her own handwriting, on thin sheets stitched together in a volume. Interspersed among pages of verse were drawings, suggested by the titles or inspired by the main ideas of some poems. I thought I was looking at mother in the refined face, the hands with long fingers, the slim silhouette of the female image in these drawings. I read the signature in the corner of each drawing.
“Mother, who is B.D. Ai My?”
“Oh, you are looking at your father's pen name. B.D. are initials for his real name Buu Dao as you know, while Ai My means 'Love of Beauty'. Beside essays and poetry in Vietnamese, under that pen name your father has also published articles in French about Vietnamese literature in a journal called France-Asie.”
I beamed with pride and pleasure at this information. At the same time, I thought Father must have loved Mother very much to have her image figure in all his drawings.
I spent a whole afternoon engrossed in the collection of Mother's poems. Though I was unable to comprehend the meaning of them all, the mellow rhythm which was produced by the lines gave me such deep pleasure. From then on, I reread Mother's poems whenever I had spare time, and memorized those I liked best.
“Mother, can one learn how to write poetry? Can you teach me how?” I gathered my courage to ask her this one day. I had the feeling that writing poetry was something quite apart from all the things I was doing well at school.
“I am not so sure, my child.” Mother appeared pensive for a brief moment. “I would think anyone can learn the rules of writing verses then arrange his words according to those rules. You will then have a poem, but it may not be a good poem. Many people can sing, but not all of them are true singers. A few can draw or learn to mix colors and paint them on a canvas, but they are not necessarily artists. Poetry is art. To produce a work of art, you must start with a natural feel for it. Techniques can be learned and improved upon, but this intuitive creativity is to me something you just have or don't have. If you enjoy poetry that much, it may be a good sign that the creative feeling is in you. I suggest that you work on that feeling by reading more poems. Don't rush into writing. Someday, when your vocabulary is richer, when you have ideas and feelings you want to express, before you know it you will feel the urge to write and verses will flow out of your pen.”
“Is that how you began to write poetry, Mother?”
“Yes, you could say that, in a way,” Mother smiled. “Let me explain.”
Mother was the second of my grandparents' four children. She had finished only a couple of years of elementary school in Da Nang city when my grandfather moved southward to Qui Nhon, then on to Nha Trang for business, taking her along as she was his favorite child. Her schooling was disrupted because of the move, while her three siblings, one sister and two brothers, remained in Da Nang with my grandmother and were allowed to continue school. When Mother was about twelve, the family was reunited in Nha Trang. Nothing changed for her. She was still house-bound, spending her time learning the domestic arts of cooking and cleaning in addition to getting familiar with some small retail businesses.
Unobtrusively, every evening when her older brother Nguyen Huu Loc and younger brother Nguyen Huu Duong sat down to their home work, Mother installed herself in a chair immediately behind them and stealthily looked over their shoulders, determined to resume her interrupted schooling the best way she could manage without inconveniencing anyone. Thus she learned by watching, listening and repeating to herself how words and sentences were represented in the modern Vietnamese alphabetic script called quoc ngu, which uncle Duong practiced with the help of uncle Loc. Eventually, uncle Loc took notice and gently pried the secret thirst for literacy out of Mother. Sensitive to her need and intelligence, he took upon himself the task of tutoring her in reading and writing, all surreptitiously behind my grandparents' back. My grandfather held the opinion that it was futile to teach girls how to read and write, for they would end up having no use for their literacy other than to compose love letters -- a damnable activity leading to loose morals.
Not long after, even when he was sent back to Da Nang for his high school education, uncle Loc did not neglect Mother's education. He wrote her care of the address of a kind and discreet neighbor friend of hers. He gave her topics to write essays on, and regularly checked them and made valuable comments and corrections. Mother strove to improve her mind through that channel of informal home schooling. Uncle Loc also sent Mother a number of popular periodicals, including a Buddhist journal called Tam Bao, 'The Three Jewels' (the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha). In particular, Mother devoured all the poems she found in the periodicals, increasingly absorbing poetic rhymes and rhythms found in New Poetry which dominated contemporary Vietnamese literature in the early 1930s.
More significantly, at the age of fourteen, influenced by what she had read in the Buddhist journal Tam Bao, Mother wanted to renounce the world and join monastic life. This longing lingered for awhile, and impacted its inspirational force in her mind. One morning she woke up hearing herself think in verses. She scribbled the lines on a piece of paper before starting her day. That was her first poem, which she secretly sent to Tam Bao after several revisions. It was published right away. Encouraged by this recognition, in the following years Mother read more major literary journals from both Hanoi and Saigon.
In 1937, at the age of sixteen, Mother took a chance and sent two of her poems to Trong Khue Phong, 'Inside the Boudoir', a popular magazine in Saigon. The poems, signed by her pen name Trinh Nu, were published two months later, followed by others on a regular basis. A significant turning point was marked when Mother looked toward Hanoi and had a poem published in a journal there. This poem exemplified her early work which, flowing with the literary current of the time, focused on a young woman's dream of a romantic, idealistic love. Subsequent poems in the same vein were published in Tieu Thuyet Thu Nam, 'Thursday Fiction', and Dan Ba, 'Women', in addition to Trong Khue Phong. They earned her many fans as well as friends in the literary circle -- among whom were a few celebrated New Poets like Pham Huy Thong, Thuy An, Van Dai, Yen Lan, Che Lan Vien, Vu Dinh Lien, Vu Trong Can -- who either came to Nha Trang to look her up or became her loyal pen pals. On the home front, meanwhile, her becoming a published poet could not remain a secret for long. Her neighbor friend had secretly received complimentary copies of magazines sent through the post for Mother, who furtively read them during my grandparents' afternoon nap, and late into the night. But one day, a money order from the magazine Trong Khue Phong came for her as an honorarium, in appreciation of her many poems it had published. It was enclosed in a registered letter, and her friend could not sign for it. She excitedly called Mother over. The truth came out. My grandparents realized for the first time that not only could their daughter read and write, but she also did it all very well in an honorable way. Grandfather promoted her to the position of a bookkeeper to help him run his Shell gas station in town, and henceforth her household chores were reduced in half.
I savored the story of Mother's emergence from obscurity in much the same way as I had enjoyed Walt Disney's Cinderella, which I had seen twice.
My own Cinderella dream had nothing to do with a romantic meeting with a prince who would give me a life of luxury. In my limited, affectionate world of family, friends, and neighbors, I was aware only of the existence of the Crown Prince Bao Long, and he was a relative of mine. Mother had explained to me that the prince shared the same ancestor with me: Emperor Gia Long, who founded the Nguyen dynasty in 1802. The imperial extended family was huge. Its numerous members could tell that they were related by the unique composition of their middle name used by no other clan in Vietnam. And so Father and his children were of royal blood, bearing the royal name. Being related to the Emperor did not seem to have helped Father bring home more money for his growing family. Royalty thus had no part to play in my Cinderella dream. Rather, it was the overall meaning in both the Cinderella story and the story of Mother's artistic accomplishment that so impressed me. I saw a desirable pattern of rising above the confinements of one's own station in life.
If I work hard, I may make the prediction of my future come true, the prediction indicated by the tho^i no^i ritual on my first birthday, thereby I will become a professional person like Mrs. Hy, my favorite teacher, I thought to myself. Then I shall have money of my own to hire a rickshaw to take Father to work while I myself use his bicycle. For Mother, I will purchase an ivory comb whose color contrasts sharply with her raven black hair which falls almost to her ankles. I will buy Grandmother a new pair of clogs to replace the ones whose straps keep breaking loose. I will select for my brother and sisters the finest shirt and blouses that will make them look lovelier than they already are. From the market, I will bring home more than enough oranges and pomelos, custard apples and rambutans, jackfruits and persimmons to go around, so that Grandmother and my parents can have their fill. And I will be so happy to see those I love happy. Those thoughts recurred many times in my daydreaming.
The favorite spot were I sat with such dreams was the edge of the veranda, on the side looking to the cool vegetable garden of Grandmother. In early afternoon, especially on weekends, while many people were still deep in their naps, I would sit there leaning against the wall. In the quietude, I would watch the sunlight dancing among silken green leaves, sparrows hopping and chasing after one another. I would listen to the song of cicadas or the chirping of birds, to the crisp rustle of bamboo foliage against a breeze. Can one describe in a poem the sounds that now and again break the silence, the various shapes and colors of plants and trees, flowers and fruits, the pungent smell of baked earth after a cooling shower, I asked myself. To become a poet was one of the most cherished dreams I kept to myself. I also did not confide to anyone, including my sensitive mother, the secret I had with regard to my peculiar hearing of colors. It was normal to hear sounds, not colors, I thought, and therefore I was afraid people would think me queer. I actually sensed a color when certain words were uttered aloud by someone else, or by myself inaudibly in my head. The utterance had to be sufficiently slow and clear to allow each word to echo and pluck a color string somewhere in my brain. I heard Monday white, Tuesday beige, Wednesday orange, Thursday green, Friday blue, Saturday pink, Sunday red. Then I heard “eat”green, “drink” white, “arrogant” bright yellow, “modest” turquoise, both “love” and “gentleness” the color of the ocean.
At that point in time, I thought this special or unusual experience of mine might help make my verses, if I ever wrote them, more colorful, or, at least, it might make a poem sound like just the color I set out to capture.
I wondered how many hundreds of poems I had to read before verses would simply flow out of my pen, inspired by intuitive creativity, as Mother had put it.
Vancouver, B.C., Canada
1982
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