ABSTRACT
Phạm Duy (1921–2013) was Vietnam’s most prolific and varied songwriter, and as such is known to all Vietnamese. He was also a song lyricist, memoirist, and musicologist. Most of his countrymen express deep admiration for his music and deep disapproval of his personal conduct. The disapproval stems from his refusal to identify with any particular political group or set of doctrines, which was an aspect of his more general refusal to submit to any form of external control. In his memoirs he said that it is impossible for the word “patriotism” to refer loyalty to any person, group, faction, or philosophy. The only thing the word can possibly mean, he says, is loyalty to the language and customs of the people with whom you grew up. In the present article, Ngô Thế Vinh does full justice both to the huge musical legacy he created and to his troubling personal characteristics. — Eric Henry.
KEYWORDS
Pham Duy, patriotism, song writing, computer technology
Figure 1. The Musician Phạm Duy at age ninety. “This photo was taken when he was preparing to celebrate his ninetieth birthday. On Thống Nhất Boulevard, clinging to the wall surrounding The School of Pharmacy is a large and beautiful banyan tree. I chose that place with the thought that Phạm Duy is like a great and ancient tree in the music of Vietnam.” (Words and photo by Nguyễn Phong Quang).
Preface
I thank all my near and distant friends who love the music of Phạm Duy and the man as well, who, reposing trust in me, have given permission to me to use many precious materials, including personal correspondence extending over a period of close to thirty years with no motive other than to help the writer have a sufficiency of documents. They, in fact, have given me enough to serve as the basis of a book—but that will be a project for the future. This is merely a short essay, in which I hope to be able to sketch a few features of a great artist, Phạm Duy, the idol of many people through many generations, with a life both inspiring and complicated. Phạm Duy lived in two successive centuries, “weeping and laughing with the evolving fortunes of his country” (Pham Duy’s words), and experiencing the prolonged tragedy of modern Vietnamese history, at once heroic and endlessly sad.
Phạm Duy and his Distances
Phạm Duy was born in 1921, so he is separated from me by a generation in all aspects of his activities and environment. In the 1940s, when the anti-French Resistance War broke out, and I went with my family to seek refuge in a countryside spot in Thanh Hóa in Sector IV, I too, together with my little companions, would sing and hum the song, “Countryside Child” (“Em Bé Quê”), and other Resistance songs by Phạm Duy. My memories of the war in that period consist simply of the image of a beautiful capital in Thanh Hóa that was leveled to the ground due to the scorched earth policies of the Việt Minh. Sector IV was still regarded as a relatively secure area; no western legionnaires came there to conduct sweeps, and if there were bombs, they were dropped from on a great height from French “B vingt-neufs” (B-29s) that flew along the length of the Mã River, roaring and moaning in the sky, and then at intervals releasing cascades of booming shells that would sink passenger boats. There were no infantry units, just people on the river going here and there to sell merchandise. The greatest instance of mass death that I witnessed was the bombing by two French planes of Rừng Thông (Pine Forest) Market—the scene was full of blood and dead bodies.
In 1951, when I returned to Hanoi to attend to a family matter, I learned that Phạm Duy, the composer of “A Countryside Child,” had for a time worked as a radio repairman for an uncle of mine on Hàng Gai Street in that city. Having heard this detail, I soon forgot it, but now, seventy years later, reading Volume One of The Memoirs of Phạm Duy, I have learned for the first time about his childhood:
I was expelled from the Industrial Training School before I had completed my first year there because my violations of school regulations were a bit frequent: getting into fights, sneaking away from the school when I was supposed to be confined to the premises, and so forth. My worst offense occurred one day when I had made some mistake or other, but wouldn’t put up with having my ears boxed by Besançon—so I traded insults with the “factory chief,” and raised my hammer to strike him as well. I was expelled immediately afterward. Not daring to return home for fear of facing “Mr. Elder Brother,” I boarded a bus for Trạm Chôi and went to stay with the family of my wet nurse.
After a few weeks in hiding, I crept back home and was immediately banished to quarters in the garage. And thus, after long being looked upon as a stubborn, incorrigible child, I became, after my expulsion from the school, the object of the disparagement both of my elder brother and my elder brother-in-law. On a particular night during a meal, one of those two, I don’t remember which, said something that went too far, and I left, slamming the door. True to the sarcastic words of my brother-in-law, who often remarked that I was a “sans foutiste” (total screw-up), I was totally through with the need for the loving attention or the protection or support of any adult whatsoever!
I stayed for a few weeks with a family I knew and then obtained a job at the Nguyễn Đình Thụ radio repair shop on Hàng Gai street.
Author’s note: Nguyễn Đình Thụ was my mother’s elder brother and a friend of Phạm Duy’s elder brother, the aggrégé Phạm Duy Khiêm, from the days when they were both students in France.[1] Phạm Duy continues:
Though I was only a little into my sixteenth year, I had some understanding of radio technology and had assembled a small radio myself to which one could listen by means of a crystal, so I found much to interest and delight me in this new job. Radios in the formative era of electronics still used vacuum tubes and electric circuits of the hétérodyne type. If one were to compare this to the electronic “chips” now in use, one could say that I entered electronics in the era of its actual genesis. The Nguyễn Đình Thụ radio repair shop was right at the entrance to Hàng Gai Street, so I had the opportunity to witness how the young people of Hanoi lived in the last years of the 1930s.
I take note of these matters here, because they serve to explain Phạm Duy’s superb technical abilities when he subsequently entered the high-tech realm of digital technology. When this occurred in the 1980s, he became the earliest Vietnamese musician to be able to use computers to write and distribute music, and to write his memoirs.
Phạm Duy and his Multimedia CD ROM of 1995
During the months and years when he lived in the United States, a land of science and technology, Phạm Duy very swiftly found ways to study and adapt to this technology. He was very proud to be the first in the overseas Vietnamese community to create a multimedia CD ROM. Near the end of Volume 4 of his Memoirs, he writes:
I was the most fortunate of people, because I was able to make the acquaintance of the computer from the very dawn of this invention. My son Duy Cường and I began to use computers toward the end of the 1980s. At first, we used them simply as a substitute for typewriters, but back then no one had as yet been able to put Vietnamese fonts into computers. We had to search and search before we found an engineer, Mr. Nguyễn Văn Tâm, working for the NASA Space Agency, who had made a set of Vietnamese fonts—he was the first person to do this.
Author’s Note: Up to the present moment I have known only two Vietnamese engineers in the United States who created sets of Vietnamese-language software. The earliest was Nguyễn Việt. He was born in Hanoi and grew up in Đà Lạt. From 1969 to 1975 he served as an officer in the navy of the Republic of Vietnam. He emigrated to the United States in 1975, gained a bachelor’s degree in 1979, and a master’s degree in 1985. He founded the company “Diplomat,” formerly located in Newport Beach. He created a set of Vietnamese fonts bearing the imprimatur “VN Labs,” and gained an honorary certificate recognizing this creation in 1985.
The second person was the engineer Hồ Thành Việt. Born in Nha Trang, he was six years younger than Nguyễn Việt, and also emigrated to the United States in 1975. After gaining a bachelor’s degree in engineering in 1985, he worked for Diplomat, and after that established his own place of business in Westminster, California where, in 1988, he produced his own set of Vietnamese fonts, called VNI, though the set produced by Nguyễn Việt of VN labs already existed. Hồ Thành Việt had better marketing skills, so his fonts came to be more widely used in traditional and overseas Vietnamese communities.
Because Phạm Duy referred twice to “the NASA engineer Nguyễn Văn Tâm” as “the first person who made a set of digital Vietnamese fonts, the present author got in touch with Dr. Trương Hồng Sơn, that is, the writer and artist Trương Vũ, who emigrated to the United States in 1975 and worked for NASA until his retirement, to make a respectful inquiry concerning this person. I received the following email response from Dr. Trương Hồng Sơn: “My dear Ngô Thế Vinh, I really have no idea! It’s rather strange. I know of no engineer working for NASA named Nguyễn Văn Tâm. NASA has many centers. Aside from former colleagues of mine, NASA had many contractors, the names of whom are not necessarily known to me. Nevertheless, my impressions regarding the first people to create Vietnamese fonts are the same as yours.
Figure 2. Left: an article from the Los Angeles Times, February 21, 1993, by the journalist Dean Takashima. It concerns the two Vietnamese-American computer engineers who were the first to create Vietnamese fonts: the engineer Nguyễn Việt with his VN Labs set, and the engineer Hồ Thanh Việt with his VNI set. Right: A document showing that Nguyễn Việt received a diploma in 1985 recognizing his creation of the VN Labs fonts, and stating that he was the person who went to Phạm Duy’s house on Hunter Lane in Midway City to help him install the VN Labs set on Phạm Duy’s IBM PC computer. (Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives).
Figure 3. The book Phạm Duy: A Thousand Sets of Lyrics (Phạm Duy Ngàn Lời Ca) was first published in 1987. One of its pages has the following notation: A Thousand Sets of Lyrics was laid out on an Apple-Macintosh computer with Vietnamese fonts created by Nguyễn Văn Tâm. The typesetting was done at home by the author using the programs Desktop and Pagemaker 2.0. (Đỗ Việt Anh, personal archives).
In 1985, the only existing Vietnamese fonts were those of VN Labs. In 1988 VNI fonts became available as well, but these two sets of fonts could be used only with IBM PCs. It is thus possible that there was an engineer named Nguyễn Văn Tâm who was the first to create a set of fonts for the Apple Macintosh used by Phạm Duy.
I, the present author, have reached no conclusion on this matter—and can only hope that after this article is made generally available, the engineer Nguyễn Văn Tâm will read it and make himself known to me, so that “what belongs to Caesar may be rendered unto Caesar.”
Phạm Duy continues as follows:
And so, the two of us installed Vietnamese fonts on the machine and began using computers to write articles, write my Memoirs, and write books on music, and especially to preserve the contents of my many messy files [—the words of Phạm Duy—] and it took a long time for us to find musical software to produce scores and arrangements, and to purchase artistic software so as to create images and graphic designs—until at last, thanks to the computer, we gained the ability to create CD ROMs.
Just as we had been the first people to produce audio CDs, now, with the cooperation of a young engineer in San José, Bùi Minh Cương, we produced the first Vietnamese CD ROM. [Author’s note: the engineer Bùi Minh Cương was the maternal nephew of Bùi Bảo Trúc].
This was a very beautiful marriage of technology with art. We created this earliest Vietnamese CD-ROM, “A Journey through the Motherland (Hành Trình Trên Đất Mẹ),” in the hope that we could bring a bit of the cultural heritage of our country to present as a gift to the coming generation, which, perhaps because its members had been born and raised overseas, had been cut off from the spiritual life of our people. (The Memoirs of Phạm Duy, Vol. 4).
Figure 4. Images of a CD ROM given by Phạm Duy to Ngô Thế Vinh. This was the first Vietnamese CD ROM created overseas in 1987. An American Jewish doctor who worked in the same hospital with me was quite surprised at the high proportion of Vietnamese who came here to pursue careers, and when he held in his hands the audio CD of the song-set entitled “The National Road” (Con Đường Cái Quan) by Phạm Duy, and then another that had performances of Chopin by the pianist Đặng Thái Sơn, he observed to me that, “You overseas Vietnamese have advanced further here in twenty years than other peoples have in a hundred. I never supposed that you all would be able to enter so early into the world of high-tech.” (Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives).
Twenty Years of Splendor in South Vietnam
To return to the period 1954–1975: after the Geneva Agreement divided the country in two, more than a million people who had experienced life under communist rule, abandoned their homes, lands and belongings in the North, and emigrated to the South.
Phạm Duy had abandoned the Resistance War and returned to Hanoi, and then moved to the South in 1951. From the South to the North, he and his family grew famous through the Thăng Long Performance Group (Thăng Long Hợp Ca), the members of which were Phạm Duy, Hoài Bắc, Hoài Trung, Thái Hằng, Thái Thanh, and Khánh Ngọc.
Figure 5. The Thăng Long Performance Group featured in “Pink Nights of Saigon”; front row, from left: Thái Hằng, Khánh Ngọc, and Thái Thanh; back row from left: Phạm Duy, Hoài Bắc (Phạm Đình Chương), and Hoài Trung (Phạm Khắc Viêm). (Source: Internet).
In the 1960s, when I had entered the Saigon School of Medicine and was active as a journalist through my connection with the periodical, Tình Thương/Medicine and Compassion, I became acquainted with Lê Ngộ Châu, and through him met Phạm Duy a couple of times in the editorial office of the journal, Cyclopedia (Bách Khoa). He was not one of the writers who worked for that publication, but he was very close to Lê Ngộ Châu—the two of them had been friends in Military District IV during the Resistance War. Bách Khoa published a number of studies of Phạm Duy and his music written by George E. Gauthier, a musicologist from Canada (Cyclopedia 334, January 11, 1970, pp. 334, 335, and 337/338; and Xuân Tân Hợi, August 15, 1972, pp. 339, 340, 342, 345, 346, 347, 350, 353, 354, 355, 363, 367, 372, and 375), and also an interview with him conducted by the journalist Lê Phương Chi (Cyclopedia pp. 241-242, 243). (Phạm Lệ Hương, personal archives).
Through some stories told to me by Lê Ngộ Châu, I got to know a few other aspects of Phạm Duy, including the circumstances surrounding the creation of the song, “A Little Something for a Keepsake” (Còn Chút Gì Để Nhớ), a setting of a poem by Vũ Hữu Định.
Anecdote 1: Lê Ngộ Châu and Trí Đăng (1970)
Around the year 1970, the editorial office of Cyclopedia received a poem entitled, “A Little Something for a Keepsake,” by Vũ Hữu Định, a person virtually unknown to Lê Ngộ Châu, but because he thought the poem was particularly fine, with its graceful images of the mountainous neighborhoods of Pleiku, he had Trí Đăng (the head of the Trí Đăng printing house that published Cyclopedia,) ride on a motorcycle to the home of Phạm Duy in the Chu Mạnh Trinh residential quarter, a crossroads in Phú Nhuận (a sector of Saigon), a place where many famous performers and writers (including Năm Châu, Nguyễn Mạnh Côn, Duyên Anh, Minh Trang, and Kim Tước) lived with their families. Lê Ngộ Châu suggested to Phạm Duy that he set Vũ Hữu Định’s poem to music—though he didn’t yet know who that author was. In only two days, Phạm Duy gave wings to the poem by writing a song of the same title that was aired on the Saigon Broadcasting Station with the ageless voice of Thái Thanh. Setting poems to music was one of Phạm Duy’s special gifts.
Figure 6. Cover of the first edition of “A Little Something for a Keepsake,” lyrics by Võ Hữu Định, music by Phạm Duy, 1970.
Anecdote 2: A Recollection of Trương Điện Thắng, with an Account by Phạm Duy
According to an in-country journalist, Trương Điện Thắng, the song “A Little Something for a Keepsake” was in 1971–1972 among the most requested songs on the program, “Music by Request,” on the Saigon Broadcasting Station. The author of the poem, Vũ Hũu Định, was at that time just over thirty . . . he was in Saigon dodging the draft, drifting here and there between Lâm Đồng, Bảo Lộc, and Pleiku. He lived in the shade with many pen names, such as Hàn Giang Tử and Vũ Hữu Định . . . he was a young fellow whose place of origin was An Cựu, but he spoke with a Quảng Nam accent. He never expected that the gifted songwriter, Phạm Duy, would pay him any attention. Using the pen name Vũ Hữu Định, he began to appear in Lê Ngộ Châu’s journal, Cyclopedia, and the weekly Arts magazine, Khởi Hành, managed by Viên Linh. The poem, “A Little Something for a Keepsake,” appeared in Khởi Hành and was copied into a notebook by the author Võ Phiến. Later on, when we met Phạm Duy in Nha Trang for a Duyên Dáng program (no, 16, 2006), Phạm Duy told us at dinner that he once went to pay a visit to Võ Phiến, but found that he had gone elsewhere. Seeing Võ Phiến’s notebook as he waited in the study for the writer’s return, he turned over a few pages and happened upon the poem. “At the time I didn’t know who Vũ Hữu Định was, but the language and rhythm of the poem made me decide to set it to music.” (“Còn Chút Gì Để Nhớ,” or the Fate of Each Creation, Trương Điện Thắng@T.Van 2017).
Anecdote 3: Phạm Duy, Late in Life, Recollects an Event
In his Echoes of a Former Era (Vang Vọng Một Thời, Phương Nam Books, 2015) Phạm Duy offers yet another account of the song’s origin:
Saigon 1972: I went to Pleiku to investigate the music of the Western Highlands (Tây Nguyên). During the week that I spent there, I got to meet a young poet who had been stationed with his military unit at that border region. Back then, the provincial capital of Pleiku was very small. The young poet, Vũ Hữu Đình, described in an adorable little poem the little city, “where he had gone for a moment or two to revisit some old haunts.” I set it to music at once, making no alteration in the words. Since I was just then studying the music of the highlands, I gave it a pentatonic (do mi fa sol la do) melody. (Echoes of a Former Era by Phạm Duy, Phương Nam, 2015).
Figure 7. The book Echoes of a Former Era (Vang vọng Một thời) in which Phạm Duy provides an account of his musical setting of the poem, “A Little Something for a Keepsake,” by Võ Hữu Định. (Phạm Phú Minh, personal archives).
What is beyond doubt is that Phạm Duy set the poem, “A Little Something for a Keepsake,” by Vũ Hữu Đình to music, but there are three anecdotes that purport to tell how this occurred, and there may be others as well, so it seems I should record what I can in this location, so that the reader may decide for himself “which of these truths is true.”
I perhaps met Phạm Duy on a few other occasions in the restaurant, La Pagode, where my literary friend Nguyễn Đình Toàn came almost every day to sit and write. He related to me, as a diverting anecdote, that Phạm Duy was desperately afflicted with stinginess; he could never conduct his hand out of his pocket after it had come into contact with his wallet. Though Toàn was fifteen years younger than the songwriter, the two of them nevertheless used the casual pronouns “mày” and “tao” with each other in conversation—that was like Mai Thảo and Vũ Hoàng Chương, who did the same, though Chương was almost a dozen years older than Mai Thảo. In that period, too, I got to read a couple of books about Phạm Duy: Phạm Duy Still Sits There Dejected (Phạm Duy Còn Đó Nỗi Buồn) by Tạ Tỵ, and The Death Process of Phạm Duy (Phạm Duy đã Chết như thế nào) by Nguyễn Trọng Văn.
After 1975, when I was still in labor reeducation camp, my friends and I heard a number of strange rumors—one was that General (and former Vice President) Nguyễn Cao Kỳ had returned to the Catholic settlement of Tân Sa Châu, where he was heading a resistance organization dedicated to retaking the country; stranger still was a story that Phạm Duy had vomited blood and died on the stage with a guitar in his arms while singing his song-cycle, “A Flock of Birds Forsake Their Land.”
“The National Road” Goes Out to the Spratly and Paracel Islands
I crossed to the United States eight years later and met Phạm Duy in southern California in a totally altered set of circumstances. I’m not too clear about when my connection with the Mekong/Cửu Long River started, but the song, “Dusk Falls Again Upon the River” (“Chiều Về Trên Sông”), by Phạm Duy had more than a little to do with my strengthening attachment to that river turned deep red by its alluvial soils.
In the 1990s, when I was writing the final chapters of my book, The Nine Dragons Drained Dry—The East Sea in Turmoil (Cửu Long Cạn Dòng Biển Đông Dậy Sóng), I was confronted with the grim prospect of a Vietnam hemmed in by China, not only by that country’s actions along the Mekong River pouring south from its plateau origins, but also in the East Sea, where China had seized and occupied Vietnam’s Paracel Islands (1974) and the submerged Gạc Ma reefs that form part of the Spratly archipelago (1988).
The appearance of Phạm Duy’s song-cycle, “The National Road” (“Con Đường Cái Quan”), referring to the long highway in the united Vietnam that runs all the way from the Nam Quan Pass down to the southernmost province of Cà Mau, had a unifying influence on people’s hearts. But if we take a more comprehensive view, “the National Road” does not stop there, because deep in the hearts of every Vietnamese person, the road has a further section stretching across the ocean, so as to join Vietnam to her islands, the Spratlys and Paracels. That is what impelled Phạm Duy and I to meet twenty-seven years ago. He surely remembered the conversation we had one day at his home on Hunter Street in Midway City, for from that time on he regularly sent me materials concerning all his activities.
In 2006, I sent him another discussion of the Spratly-Paracel matter in the form of a chapter in my book, Mekong; the Occluding River, that peered three hundred years into the future, and that expressed confidence that those islands would one day be returned to their rightful owner.
The Memoirs of Phạm Duy
Figure 8. The front covers of the first three volumes of The Memoirs of Phạm Duy, published by Phạm Duy and Phạm Duy Cường. Volume 4, “The Period of Residence in the U.S.” (“Thời Di Cư Qua Mỹ”), was distributed on the Internet in the form of a pdf. The cover design for these books was by Trần Đình Thục. (Nguyễn Công Thuần, personal archives).
Phạm Duy’s four volumes of memoirs with their more than one thousand five hundred pages, record quite faithfully all the spectacular ups and downs of his private life and of his country over a span of two centuries, and all of this in a lively, straight-forward style. A positive quality of the work is that, throughout its four volumes, he speaks ill of no one, and also does not hide many details of a very personal nature concerning himself. He is not only a musician of immense talent—some call him a genius—but in this set of memoirs, so full of life and feeling, he shows himself to be a true writer as well, just as he shows himself to be a true poet in A Thousand Sets of Lyrics.
An American scholar, Dr. Eric Henry, has expressed the view that this set of memoirs is not only attractive, but can help scholars understand the nature of Vietnamese society both when convulsed by war and when enjoying times of peace. He has completed an English translation of the entire work that has been accepted for publication by Cornell University Press. The two-stage project of (1) completing the translation, and (2) securing a reliable U.S. publisher was a thing that Phạm Duy desired with all his heart when he was still alive. But after his passing, his children withheld agreement for this to be done, so publication of The Memoirs of Phạm Duy is still prohibited. [2]
Figure 9. Here, Phạm Duy is displaying a copy of his four-volume Memoirs, translated by Dr Eric Henry, to two journalists working for Phố BolsaTV. According to the translator Eric Henry, a lack of agreement among the surviving children of Phạm Duy has made it impossible to gain permission for the publication of this work.
(Materials from the archives of BolsaTV, Jan. 26, 2012).
Figure 10. Phạm Duy (right) and Dr. Eric Henry, the translator of The Memoirs of Phạm Duy met each other in a Saigon café on July 30, 2009. This set of photos with humorous subtitles by the photographer Nguyễn Phong Quang, a friend of Eric, are here arranged in clockwise order from the photo in the upper left: (a) “Recounting Stories to Each Other,” (b) “Arguing,” (c) bottom right: “Convincing Each Other Isn’t Easy,” and (d) “We finally Reach Agreement.” (Photos and captions by Nguyễn Phong Quang; materials sent to Ngô Thế Vinh
by Eric Henry).
Anti-communism and supporting a family
Though Phạm Duy is “celebrated” for his many extramarital romantic adventures, all who are acquainted with him know that this father was enormously devoted to his children. Though he was a songwriter of great stature whose songs are performed all over the five continents, and though the fees paid him by singers who perform his songs were perhaps high, the income he derived from this was still not a suitable recompense for a composer of such remarkable gifts. One can say that, during the two decades following 1975, the life-in-exile of Phạm Duy and his family was fairly arduous; but Phạm Duy remained optimistic, and didn’t shrink from any activity that might help improve the life of his wife Thái Hằng and his eight children. During the first two years, when he lived in Florida, he not only went on a number of small performance tours, but wrote a self-study book for guitar beginners, and produced by hand copies of some old cassette tapes that he had managed to bring with him[3] that he sold and distributed by means of the U.S. postal system. . . . thus, he “was able to support his family, the half that was in the United States, and the half that was in Saigon.”
Phạm Duy saved all the money he could earn to help support his four eldest sons, who were stuck in Vietnam, and then remitted additional sums to them, so they could successfully escape by boat and be reunited with their parents. Phạm Duy was economical to such a degree that he would sometimes not grant his children’s requests for small sums to buy toys, and the children would refer to him among themselves as “stingy dad.”
This “stinginess” in him was in fact a virtue, but many people referred to it in order to make fun of him. His wife Thái Hằng was kind, gentle, and devoted, and was regarded by many as a saint. She sacrificed her career as a singer very early after bearing her last child, Thái Hạnh, and devoted all her time to caring for her eight children. But she was not a Madame Tú Xương, who, as the verse says, “throughout the year sold goods along the river, so that five children and one husband might be fed.”
Unlike the poet Tú Xương (that lady’s husband), Phạm Duy with one wife and eight children, took upon himself the entire responsibility of supporting his family. He was not only an artist richly endowed with creative power, but traveled everywhere performing, concerning which the poet Nguyên Sa remarked that he was a “formidable athlete,” and, more humorously, that he presented the spectacle of “a youth of twenty aged a thousand years” (excerpted from “Vietnamese Artists Abroad” [Nghệ sĩ Việt Nam ở Hài ngoại]). Not only that, he was a very responsible father who loved his children. And he once confided to a friend, “If I were not like this, who would take care of my children?” This can only cause us to admire him the more.
From Florida he moved to California, which has a large expatriate Vietnamese community. There, he still had to work with energy to support a crowded family with twelve people: Phạm Duy, his wife, and eight children plus two grandchildren in a three-bedroom house in Midway City, a place that Phạm Duy dubbed the “Mid-journey Settlement (“Thị Trần Giữa Đường”).
Figure 11. The crowded family of Phạm Duy, with twelve people gathered in a three-bedroom house in Midway City. (From The Memoirs of Phạm Duy, Vol. 4).
A thing not everyone knows about Phạm Duy is that for a time he considered opening a restaurant or becoming a real estate agent, and that he even consented to act as a driver transporting patients on a daily basis to and from doctors’ offices in Orange County, California. At the same time, he reserved all his remaining time for his chief passion: music.
In Volume IV of his Memoirs, he records the following:
During the period when I ‘met’ Nguyễn Chí Thiện,[4] Dr. Trần Ngọc Ninh, a friend of mine, moved down from Denver, Colorado and opened an office in Santa Ana. I had just bought a little house right next to my old one to “save the lives” of the twelve people in my family who, because they had been living communally for a long time in a house with only three bedrooms and a single bathroom, had to “murder” each other (just kidding) every morning if they wished to relieve themselves, brush their teeth, wash their faces, or bathe! After spending a bit more money to put additional bedrooms and bathrooms in each house, my family lived from then on in a state of gentle amity worthy of the scenes described in the National Language Education Textbook (Quốc Văn Giáo Khoa Thư). I was then surrounded with sufficient tranquility to complete two jobs I had just begun: putting together a lecture on “Fifty years of Tân Nhạc,” and setting poems by Nguyễn Chí Thiện to music, so as to complete my cycle of twenty Songs of Imprisonment.
Having solved the problem of quotidian existence for my entire family, I had lots of free time on my hands; and since my friend Ninh and his wife needed someone to take patients to and from his office (old people and newly arrived people who didn’t yet have cars), I had no hesitation in taking on this work. During my youth, I had been a steelworker, and electric plant worker, a farmer, and a teacher. When I came to America, it seemed quite likely that I would have to resume doing work of a physical nature, but since I was resourceful, I found ways of making a living with my mind instead.
But now I had the means (a car), the health, and the time—and at this juncture, I was not yet receiving invitations to come and sing from as many places as I would in subsequent years—so why shouldn’t I do this to earn some money? Even if it was only petty cash—just a little bit more than what I had to spend on gasoline! But this very leisurely kind of work didn’t last long, because a number of doctors were taken to court for defrauding the Medicare system. When I agreed to take on this work to help both patients and doctors, I was totally naïve and straightforward; I knew nothing of the abuses that were occurring, for the simple reason that my friend Ninh never did such things. But now I saw that I had to distance myself from this milieu in which such a big scandal was occurring, so I stopped helping patients get to their doctor’s appointments. I had moreover started getting more invitations to sing, once my twenty Songs of Imprisonment were completed.
In any case, I wish to express my gratitude for the days when I practiced the distinguished profession of chauffeuring (just like the White Russian refugees in Paris), because this work gave me an opportunity to enjoy contact with ordinary people, some of whom had been here since 1975, and some of whom had only recently escaped from Vietnam by sea.
I got to know by this means the thoughts and feelings of the refugees, and to know more about the concealed joys and sorrows of refugee communities. This intimate contact with the people was no different in nature from my experiences in the days when I went to sing by train, bus, and boat, or when I traveled everywhere on foot during the Resistance. Wherever I went, I learned a lot from the people.
And aside from this, whenever I took a patient to the doctor’s office, I had to wait a long time before I could take the patient back home, so I had a lot of time to compose. So while Dr. Ninh was having his patient stick out his tongue for him to look at, or passing his finger over the length of a patient’s hand to measure tension, I would sit in his office biting a pencil while writing an “imprisonment” song next to bottles of antibiotic fluid. No wonder those songs are imbued with a hospital atmosphere, as well as the prison atmosphere of the poems. In moments of leisure, we would sit and exchange artistic gossip in the examining room, or over lunch at a nearby restaurant. One could say that Dr. Trần Ngọc Ninh was the earliest auditor of the “imprisonment” songs.
Figure 12. The musician Phạm Duy (left) with Dr. Trần Ngọc Ninh in the 1980s. Dr. Trần Ngọc Ninh was among the earliest “boat people”; he arrived in Maylasia in 1977, then took refuge in the United States. After gaining a new medical degree in his new country, he moved from Denver, Colorado to Santa Ana, where he established an office. Phạm Duy wrote, “As Mr and Mrs Ninh needed someone to take patients back and forth to his office (old people, or newly arrived people who didn’t yet have a car), I didn’t disdain doing this sort of work and entered into it right away.”
A Letter from 1995, the Year “Ắt Hợi”
Spring Festival Congratulations, late February, 1995
Phạm Duy shared the following pieces of news in a letter to his friends:
Today, the first day of the lunar year, I’m taking up my pen (actually opening up my computer) to announce a few joyous pieces of news:
(1) My family just enjoyed the addition of a maternal grandchild, the daughter of Thái Thảo/Tuấn Ngọc. She came into the world on the last day of the old year, just as a former maternal grandchild in my family did sixty-five years ago.
(2) The Phạm Duy Foundation, an organization I have thought of establishing for years, has now officially come into being. The founder is Ms. Phan Tú Khanh of Los Altos, California. There is now a copy of the by-laws to send to those whom I have invited to serve on the Board of Trustees. Naturally I wish to respectfully invite you to be a member or supporter of this foundation. It is possible that the foundation will officially announce its existence or hold its first meeting in April 1995, to mark my twentieth year abroad. And one of its first tasks will be to organize a symposium on the music of Phạm Duy to establish the position of that composer in the history of Vietnam’s “new music.”
(3) Though it has not yet come into formal operation, the foundation supports in principle the creation of a CD ROM on the music of Phạm Duy. I and the engineer Bùi Minh Cương (the person in charge of technology) have agreed to put the work, The National Road, into this CD in such a way that people will be able to sing its melodies in Karaoke style—and perhaps have their grandchildren sing along as well, so they will not forget the Vietnamese language.
Because it will be an audio-visual product with a multi-media character, this CD ROM, aside from music, which shall be its chief component, will possess the following features:
(a) A section that will explain, in Vietnamese and English, the people and events in the work that have mythological or historical significance.
(b) A section explaining how the song-cycle came into being and how it was promoted.
(c) A section analyzing the music and lyrics in the song-cycle.
(d) A section with all the articles written about the song-cycle in Vietnamese journals and newspapers.
(e) A section with many images of scenes in the homeland.
These glad tidings came to me before I stepped into the new year, a year in which I think it will not be necessary for me to say or do anything further. I never dreamed that, before closing my eyes, I would see that, of all the appreciation that has been expressed to me, the most precious has not come from the government in the home country, or from some international learned organization, but from people who love music, of whom Ms. Phan Tú Khanh is the most outstanding representative. No less precious to me has been the appreciation of the engineer Bùi Minh Cương, who has helped me promote my music through the medium of the CD ROM. In the near future, with the help of all my friends, I will easily be able to add to this all my literary work, comprising the Thousand Sets of Lyrics and my four volumes of Memoirs, together with about a thousand songs, all of which can be put into CD ROMs as well.
I think that, on this first day of the new year, the most beautiful thing of all for me is to ask to share my joy with all my friends. I am not as bashful about this as I might have been in my first years of exile. Twenty years have passed, and I have been able to continue my career as a wandering singer, and above all I have been able to live in the most technologically advanced nation in the world, and have been able to bring that technology into my own work, with the most positive possible results. It has been thoroughly worthwhile! Hurrah for life!
I wish, my friend, that you will be able to step into the new year with a joy that equals mine! With much affection, etc.
(1) The first page is attached to this message. Please look at the Purpose of the Organization in Article 2: Purposes.
(2) I hereby solemnly invite my friends Đỗ Văn (England), Thụy Khuê (France), Mộng Thường (Australia), Đỗ Quý Toàn (Canada), Steve Addiss, Nguyễn Ngọc Bích, Đỗ Ngọc Yến, and Phạm Văn Kỳ Thanh (U.S.)…
(3) Who among you can help with French?
PS: Lê Hữu Khoá will supply some food at the symposium. Attached.
Figure 13. On top: A handwritten letter from Phạm Duy to Ngô Thế Vinh. Middle: Lunar New Year’s greeting from Phạm Duy to his friends. Bottom, left: sketch of a plan for a conference on “research into the musical output of Phạm Duy” by Lê Hữu Khoá, Director the Southeast Asian Immigration Research Group (Groupe de Recherche sur l’Immigration du sud-est asiatique or GRISEA), from Paris, and bottom right: a copy of the by-laws of the Phạm Duy Foundation. (Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives).
Return to Vietnam: Exploratory Journeys
Many people think that it was only after the death of his wife, Thái Hằng, in 1999 that Phạm Duy began to think of returning to Vietnam to live, but this is not altogether the case.
In a personal letter, written on August 16, 1994, sent to a young friend of his working in Singapore, Võ Tá Hân (an MIT graduate and an expert in banking, the director of Singapore Finance, a skilled classical guitar player, a devotee of Phạm Duy’s music and a paternal nephew of the writer Linh Bảo), Phạm Duy wrote: “Anh Hân, you know full well how much I am loved by the people in the overseas community. If I now return to a still-communist Vietnam, they will at once boycott me entirely.”
In the same letter Phạm Duy continued:
You should remember that starting in 1988, with the ten-song cycle “Wanderer’s Songs” (Rong Ca), I stopped creating the sort of music referred to as “anti-communist.” With that song-cycle I cast aside the twentieth century so as to welcome a new mode of life. What, then, are the Zen Songs (Thiền Ca)? They are: “round, like bullets of black bronze, on which the marks of blood have dried, and which have forgotten war.” Bullets are created to kill people, so if even they can forget the war, how much more must that be the case with people. (The regime, too, has forgotten “the American bastards” who bombed us, don’t you see?) And if you listen to “The Flock of Birds Who Forsook their Homeland” (Bầy Chim Bỏ Xứ), you will see that I advocate the idea that the peaceful birds and the fierce birds can all coexist with each other. Near the end of the cycle the lyrics say, “Let the hawks, however fierce, live near the border. . . ” meaning that we stand much in need of the communists to guard against China, which is always eager, surely, to invade our land.
Anyway, I am immensely pleased when I see that I am understood by some young people, such as Đỗ Trung Quân and Lưu Trọng Văn [the son of the poet Lưu Trọng Lư.] When I met Trần Tiến in France, I heard that [the songwriter] Dương Thụ always speaks on my behalf. That’s enough for me! There’s no need for me to meet with one or two officials who will take pity on me as if welcoming a prodigal son! I hear that Trần Văn Khê has said that in the executive council there are only a couple of people who remain opposed to me (Phạm Duy, Letter, August 16, 1994).
Figure 14. This is the first letter that Phạm Duy wrote to Võ Tá Hân on June 19, 1994, sent by fax to Singapore, so as to be forwarded to Hanoi. (Võ Tá Hân, personal archives).
Hoàng Thượng Khanh and Songs in the Style of the Central Region
Phạm Duy was overjoyed when, through the writer Phan Lạc Tiếp in San Diego, he found the means to contact an old friend from his Resistance War days half a century hence, who was now living in Hanoi. This was Hoàng Thượng Khanh. And in the days that followed he wrote a series emotion-filled letters to him.
Letter Number Two, July 4, 1994:
My dear Hoàng Thượng Khanh,
Two weeks ago, when Phan Lạc Tiếp let me know in a phone call that he had met Hoàng Thượng Khanh in Hanoi, and, after writing a few hurried lines to Khanh, I received Khanh’s letter. The letter was still that of the “super-sensible” person whom I knew in Huế in 1944 when I was a singer in the Đức Huy Troupe, and in 1948 when you shared the sweet chia ngọt sẻ bùi with me during a fairly long period in the military district near Ba Lòng, Quảng Trị.
After the half century that C.V. Gheorghiu[5] and Gunter Grass called “the era devoid of decency” and Camus called “the plague era,” and Marquez [Gabriel Garcia-Marquez] called “the era of vomit and diarrhea,” because the machinery of the world’s governments turned the world into a vast killing field (and Vietnam was the victim of those mighty powers), and especially after nearly half a century of mutual separation, the two of us have survived, so that we may meet again today by means of letters, and some day not far away by means of a warm embrace, laughing amid tears and weeping amid laughter—ah me, what happiness!
I remember most the days when the two of us sat by some river in the military district, rubbing and washing all the deep red sores on our feet—our lives then were wretched in the extreme, so why were our hearts so blithe? Why, eating only moldy rice and enduring a terrible storm (do you remember that storm?) and living in danger and difficulty in the midst of the enemy stationed at Đại Lược. . . why was I still able to compose such fine songs as “Returning to the Central Region” (“Về Miền Trung”), “The Gio Linh Mother” (“Bà Mẹ Gio Linh”), and “Twelve Lullabies” (“Mười Hai Lời Ru”)? The answer is quite simple: at that time we were still very young, we intensely loved our land, and I in particular was able to enjoy a friendship bestowed on me by you. In your letter you wrote, “I have not even for a moment forgotten Duy.” And in this letter I beg to imitate that sentence: “I have not even for a moment forgotten Khanh.” And I ask to add: “If it were not for Khanh, it is by no means certain that I could have written ‘Returning to the Central Region.’”
With this letter, I hope you will recall cherished memories from the three occasions when we met, write them down on paper, or record them into a cassette, and send them to me so that I may keep them as living testimony for a museum devoted to my work (a sure thing) that will come into being in the future. Here, overseas, I have organized a few “Phạm Duy conferences,” so that music lovers will be able to do the work of collecting materials and promoting the music of Phạm Duy. My music, as you will see, Khanh, does not consist of songs celebrating martial valor or mourning tragic events in a sad and glorious past, or songs concentrating on the human condition (especially the condition of those who know their homeland), or laments concerning the condition of the land. . . this music also bears the imprint of a witness to our era—the “Wanderer’s Songs” (Rong Ca), for example contain the inner feelings of a man who has lived through the twentieth century, and is now singing for the 2000s, but without the severity of C.V. Gheorghiu and Gunter Grass, who called it “the era devoid of decency,” or Camus, who called it “the plague era,” or Marquez, who called it “the era of vomit and diarrhea,” as I mentioned above.
A critic who wrote about me said, “he sings of the century, sings of open spatial dimensions and long stretches of time, and never sings of constricted emotions entangled with particular circumstances. One must have enough strength to fly with the mighty Roc bird—only then can one have a more all-encompassing vision.” My “Songs of the Dao” (“Đạo Khúc”) and “Zen Songs” (Thiền Khúc) also are not just the productions of the fellow wandering through villages beating a wooden clapper to summon the faithful; they rather reflect the voice of an old fellow who has witnessed the times he has lived in. To have this type of singing, it seems to me, satisfies our needs: “round, like bullets of black bronze, on which the marks of blood have dried and have forgotten battlefields.”
Naturally, Khanh, you will let me know how you have lived in a land afflicted with more injustices than can be resolved in a year, a month, or a day. We shall avoid talking about politics. We shall exchange only the confidences that lie close to the hearts of two old friends. Just as you have said, “The time that remains is short!” And I too have sung the line, “when one day remains, give way to that day’s joy!” So, write a long letter, okay? And let my friend Ms. Văn Dương Thành—whom I’m sure you’ve met—send it in order to avoid the expense of stamps.
Finally, since I have the honor to know Tố Uyên, the friend of Băng Thanh [author’s note: the younger sister of the writer Linh Bảo], please send my affectionate greetings to the Huế damsel surnamed Võ, the girl who with her younger sister and I strolled along a Vỹ Dạ street—how gentle the summer sun was, and the sultry breeze!
With all my affection,
Phạm Duy.
Enclosed with this was another, handwritten, letter dated three days later, July 7, 1994, to Võ Tá Hân:
Figure 15. This is the letter that Phạm Duy wrote to Võ Tá Hân on June 19, 1994, sent by fax to Singapore, so as to be forwarded to Hanoi. (Võ Tá Hân, personal archives).
On Aug. 15, 1994, Phạm Duy, still in his Midway City home, faxed Võ Tá Hân a third letter for Hoàng Thượng Khanh, his old friend living in Hanoi. In this letter he wished to express everything that lay in his heart: “Hân: I have just received a letter from Hoàng Thượng Khanh. I wrote a reply, which I make haste to fax to you (see below) so as to ask you to do me the favor of forwarding it to him. Thank you very much.”
The third letter, August 15, 1994:
Dear Hoàng Thượng Khanh:
Today Mrs Nguyễn returned to the U.S., bearing your letter and the photo that you had her take. In it, you look more calm than in the photo that Võ Tá Hân took of you last month. Bravo!
Since you wish to know about my family circumstances, I’ll make a report: As of October of this year, I will have reached the age of 75. Though I had more love-partners than anyone else in the arts during the romantic period of 1945, I am nevertheless the most obedient of husbands, and still revere Madame Thái Hằng with whom I was married due to the good offices of General Nguyễn Sơn, who was also the chief celebrant on that occasion (say, if you should happen to meet Mrs Nguyễn Sơn, could you ask her if she still has a photo of the Duy-Hằng marriage ceremony?). This married couple have been together for almost half a century—we have eight children (five boys, three girls, and six paternal and maternal grandchildren). Almost all of them have husbands and wives, but they still live with us in three houses on the same street. We’ve been in the U.S. for twenty years, and have paid taxes throughout our working lives, so since the day of my retirement [Phạm Duy retired in 1985 when he was 64], I have received enough pension money to live on, and have not had to rely on my children. Speaking broadly, from the time we left the North and settled in the South (1951), we always had enough to eat in my family, and before I went to the U.S. I had three houses in Phú Nhuận. On arriving in the U.S., I had twenty dollars in my pocket, but I was able to build my life up again and now have three houses as I did before.
In recent years, my situation has changed. It has begun to seem to me that I can sell my house and live the years that still remain to me in my homeland. But as it happened, my wife and one of my sons went back to Vietnam in April 1994, and when they returned, I saw that my return would not be at all convenient—so I had to resign myself to remaining in this “temporary perch” abroad. To be quite frank, I have become excessively accustomed to life in the U.S. As one ages, health concerns assume supreme importance. The science of medicine over here is very advanced, which I find reassuring (I’ve had two operations, one on my lungs and one on my bladder).
Voila! You asked, so I had no choice but to lay out these details—I hadn’t the slightest intention of bragging.
Your evocation of the Hàng Vôi school on 16 Carreau Street in Hưng Yên moved me very much—but if someday I should return to my old haunts, will they still have traces of their old charm?
One individual* wrote about me as follows: Phạm Duy, perceiving a huge turning point in the life of our people, wrote “Feeling for the Homeland” (“Tình Hoài Hương”) as a kind of summation, a recognition that from now on we would be far from the homeland not only in space, but in time—an immensely extended time—forming a nostalgia that was like a witness to the period. After 1945, Vietnam stepped into a new era, a new world, that forever erased the concept of “the old homeland,” as it had been understood before. So Duy portrays the homeland with all the alluring traits of a former time—the fields, the bamboo fences, the waves of smoke, the rivers, the banyan trees, the water buffalo, the aged mothers—but without a single word that suggests the dream of return. What is there now to return to! He does not entertain fantasies of going back to the past, as in the early days of the Resistance; he perceives the blow of fate that has descended on Vietnam, which shall force her to enter a totally new era. From ‘feeling for the homeland,’ he has sensed signs heralding a new sensibility.
The slanting rays tilt differently,
I live in joy on ten thousand paths;
Love lodges in a thousand places
Let our love be like a mighty sea!
In this era he can only sing notes giving voice to a premonition: the people of Vietnam must now step out of the warm cradle of the countryside that has belonged to them for thousands of years, this outward step entered people’s consciousnesses and began to be realized from the days of the Tonkin Free School and the ‘Eastward Bound Movement,’ but never came fully into existence. Writing further about this period, he said, “It was pain-filled, because I was far from my native land and had no hope of returning. After nine years of warfare the dream of Hoàng Giác—
Go back to the ancient homeland and relive the gentle dream;
Go back to the ancient homeland and seek the begone days—
clearly could never again become a reality; the image of bygone days had flown quite away.” Phạm Duy gazed at the changing rays of preceding dusk and saw nothing that required him to gaze back without cease at the homeland, and instead exchanged the warm clouds of smoke for love lodging in a thousand places, and exchanged his love of country for a wide and mighty road of love. He became a human being embarking on adventures, not a person attached to one slender strip of territory. The adventures are those of a man whose homeland has disappeared.
[*The individual referred to was Phạm Xuân Đài, the author of the article “On Homeland Dreams” (‘Giấc Hương Quan”) in his book of occasional essays Hanoi in my Eyes (Hà Nội Trong Mắt Tôi, published in 1994) that Phạm Duy quotes from in this letter. Phạm Xuân Đài also wrote an article entitled “Death in the Songs of Phạm Duy” (Cái Chết Trong Ca Khúc Phạm Duy), which appeared in the journal Twenty-first Century (Thế Kỷ 21). That article inspired Phạm Duy to make a series of videos introducing and explaining those of his works that deal with this theme.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uzseMiSGOo
Phạm Xuân Đài is a person who has long admired and revered Phạm Duy. When he heard that I was writing a portrait of Phạm Duy, he supplied me with relevant materials and photos. He also urged me to write only of the larger aspects of his work and avoid petty details concerning his everyday existence. — author’s note].
Phạm Duy’s letter continues:
I borrow the above words of Khanh because they concern a topic that can easily give rise to tender feelings: the homeland! The homeland is more than just a cluster of sweet star-apples [chùm khế ngọt]. The homeland is above all the people one has known—the friends, the love-partners. . . Who are Vietnamese people of today? Of my friends, who are still around? If I hadn’t by chance come upon you, Khanh, then perhaps Văn Cao would be the only friend I have left. As for lovers (meaning those who love my music), what freedom do they have to listen to music? In view of this, if I should never return at all to Vietnam (for whatever reason), then I will have chosen long ago to become a person of a thousand places.
Time to end, eh? This has been a long letter. I promise to write another and shall hope for one from you. I send my greetings to Tố Uyên and Băng Thanh and hope that all goes well for them.
Phạm Duy
These three letters sent by Phạm Duy to Hoàng Thượng Khanh, his friend from the Resistance—both now departed from the world—are also a very truthful record of the very complex developments taking place in his feelings of this man who loved his country.
Through these letters we can see that Phạm Duy, though writing with some abandon, was at the same time patiently seeking a way “to transcend all barriers,” and find away to return to Vietnam. Only in 2000 did he obtain permission to return, so that he could personally observe the new aspect of the land. And when he returned, he gave me, as a souvenir of that trip, a photo of himself pouring alcoholic spirits on the grave of Văn Cao, a dear companion of his in the long ago days of the Resistance.
Figure 16. Phạm Duy visiting the grave of Văn Cao in the spring of 2000 with a belated bottle of wine. In the photo Phạm Duy is pouring wine on the grave in the course of his first return trip to Vietnam. (Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives).
With great seriousness and, naturally, with great savoir faire—an inborn quality of his—Phạm Duy continued his exploratory visits throughout the following five years and, after Resolution 36,[6] and especially after signing a twenty-year contract (2005–2025) with Phạm Thị Lệ, the director of the Phương Nam Book Company, Phạm Duy saw that he would be able to return to Vietnam to live, a request that he had formally submitted to the regime in 2000. The response of the government was that he must wait until 2005. And now that time had arrived for Phạm Duy and his family.
Seeing Off Phạm Duy on His Return Journey to the Homeland
At eighty-four, after living in the United States for thirty years, with many thorough preparations for this final decision of his life, Phạm Duy left to spend the rest of his life in Vietnam. Before his day of departure, the journalist Đỗ Việt Anh, a person who adored the sentiment-filled music of the composer—and who at that time was the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Người Việt—got together with friends and organized a warm going-away party for him.
Figure 17. Thái Thanh, the singer whose voice gave wings to Phạm Duy’s music, bearing a bouquet of flowers, says some words of farewell to Phạm Duy.
(Đỗ Việt Anh, personal archives).
Figure 18. A quartet of singers, Thái Thanh, Quỳnh Giao, Lệ Thu, and Mai Hương singing a farewell to Phạm Duy. All four have now joined the ranks of the departed. (Photo by Huỳnh Tuấn Kiệt; Đỗ Việt Anh, personal archives).
Phạm Duy, “The Day of Return”
One can say that in his early days, Phạm Duy led the swashbuckling life of a youth who, throwing himself into patriotic activities, left his footprints throughout the land, from north to south. Then, during his thirty years in the United States, he had opportunities to perform all over the five continents. At eighty-four, having earned the right to enjoy “Le Repos du Guerier,” he made a drastic choice, not devoid of inner difficulty and turmoil.
Having settled peacefully in his homeland in 2005, Phạm Duy enjoyed recalling that in the days following 1975, a colossal photo of him—his words—was exhibited in the “Exhibition House of U.S. and Puppet Crimes” at 28 Trần Quý Cáp Street, which was also the location of the Saigon School of Medicine in former days. The new regime at that time regarded him as a fellow who had betrayed the Resistance and also as a symbol of the poison of Western-Puppet culture.
[Author’s note: my novel Vòng Đai Xanh/The Green Belt about the Highland minority peoples was also exhibited there as a piece of cultural trash left over from the United States puppet regime].
But, very luckily, in the last days of April 1975, Phạm Duy’s name was included in a list of names that the Central Intelligence Agency operative, Ed Jones, was charged with rescuing, and so he got to the United States before it was too late. Phạm Duy knew perfectly well that if he had remained, and been lured into the “reeducation camps” like countless other artists of the South, he would have gone straight to perdition (đi đoong)—his words—and most likely would never have had an opportunity to “return to the homeland,” as he had now done.
Let me quote here some paragraphs from Volume 4 of Phạm Duy’s Memoirs, which will read here like a flashback:
That was also the day when Saigon was “liberated,” as it were, by the forces of the North. A man lying next to me was tuning in to the Saigon broadcasting station with a tiny radio. Everyone in the room drifted over to listen. When I heard announcements concerning the victory of the Northern troops and the defeat of the Republic, I was overwhelmed with sadness. It seemed pointless to keep on lying there with my hands over my ears, so I descended the staircase and went out from the barracks.
Only at this point did I become conscious of the fact that Guam was an island. I stood before the vast ocean, silent and indifferent. I noticed that I wasn’t the slightest bit stirred by the sight of the ocean’s endless expanse, as I had always been previously. I was no longer “me.” Turning away from the ocean, I walked listlessly back toward the barracks. On passing by the camp’s communication office, I suddenly heard the voice of a news announcer coming from all the loudspeakers: President Dương Văn Minh[7] is calling upon Republican soldiers to lay down their arms and surrender.
Feeling sadder still, I hastened back to the barracks and plopped down on the wooden floor. Everyone was still huddled around the radio to hear news concerning the day when Northern troops entered Saigon. Suddenly the voice of Trịnh Công Sơn[8] came from the radio singing the song “Joining Arms in a Great Embrace” (Nối Vòng Tay Lớn). The voice was out of tune and the guitar accompaniment full of mistakes. With a painful twinge, I thought about what my fate might have been had I been unable to get away. Would I have had to do something like that? The owner of the radio cursed and switched it off before the song was finished, upon which the listeners dispersed in sorrow.
More From Volume 4 of Phạm Duy’s Memoirs: Chapter Twenty
For ages, “people” have used every means they could think of to create a rift between me and Trịnh Công Sơn. But no one was ever able to do anything that hindered our mutual collegial affection, even though we sometimes held different points of view. In 1988, I happened to run into Trịnh Công Sơn in Paris. Together with Đặng Tiến, we strolled from place to place on the sidewalks or sat in cafés shooting the breeze. We didn’t spend a second discussing politics or art... but when I asked to entrust the “young lover” with the task of bringing the Ten Wanderer’s Songs back to Vietnam, Sơn’s reply was immediate: “Okay.” Due to this, the confessions of the “the old lover” got to circulate within the country. In the summer of 2001, when I had business that took me back to Saigon, I persuaded Trần Văn Khê,[9] a few days after Sơn’s public funeral observances, to go with me to burn some incense before his altar. As we did so, I made a particular point of bowing in recognition of the favor he did me in bringing the Wanderer’s Songs back to the homeland on my behalf. (End of quotation, Phạm Duy Memoirs, Volume 4).
Figure 19. In 1988, Phạm Duy had an unlooked-for meeting with Trịnh Công Sơn in Paris. From left: Trịnh Công Sơn, Phạm Duy, Đặng Tiến. (Phạm Duy, personal archives).
Today the “Exhibition House of U.S. and Puppet Crimes” has had its name changed; it is now the “War Remnants Museum,” but still maintains its exhibits, with cannons, bombs, and ammunition, including seven-ton bombs, CBUs, tanks, and helicopters that the imperialist Americans left behind, plus the “tiger cages” with barbed wire symbolizing the atrocities visited upon imprisoned revolutionary soldiers by the American puppet government, which were brought there from the Côn Đảo and Phú Quốc islands. This place has become a hotspot of tourism and propaganda attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors every year.
Pham Duy: Things He Wrote and Said
In interviews he gave after arriving in Vietnam, on being asked what impelled him to return, he gave very eloquent and convincing answers. He emphasized that he was after all a Vietnamese, so his return was like “a leaf falling to the tree’s base” or like “a fish returning to the river’s source.” He had brought along his Thousand Sets of Lyrics and was living with people who had long loved his music.
At first he would say, with a touch of reserve, that, having returned, his choice would be to “remain quiet,” and that if he made some noises, this would be only for commercial reasons—he would comply with the demands of the Phương Nam Company to help promote the sale of his CDs and books.
But later on, he ceased to “remain quiet,” but made bold observations about a number of things. I shall here quote a few things he said in the course of two interviews that he gave in January 2012, words showing that he was very consistent in his opinions and didn’t choose to qualify them in any way.
(1) Interview with P.D. conducted by Dr. Nguyễn Nhã on January 12, 2012.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBaGpXMqihQ
(2) Interview with P.D. conducted by two journalists, Eccetera and Vũ Hoàng Lân, for PhoBolsaTV.com on January 28, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gMKBykyp8Y
Figure 20. Phạm Duy at ninety-one in an interview with Nguyễn Ngã on January 12, 2012. Phạm Duy prepared carefully for this interview and read a number of notations that he had written out beforehand. (Phạm Duy, personal archives).
Figure 21. Phạm Duy at ninety-one in an interview conducted by the journalists Eccetera and Vũ Hoàng Lân on January 29, 2022. Phạm Duy praised their station, PhoBolsaTV, and said that he had watched it regularly since his return to Vietnam. (Phạm Duy, personal archives).
[Author’s note: these interviews with Phạm Duy are both more than two hours long—so to merely excerpt a couple of his remarks from them may not do justice to the context in which they occurred; I therefore suggest to the reader that he take the time to use the links provided here to listen to the interviews in their entirety. The English title of these interviews is “Pham Duy in his own words”].
A Couple of Excerpts
1. Comments on Vietnamese Refugees Living Abroad
When Phạm Duy spoke of the Vietnamese abroad, and the rifts among the refugee community, he was talking about a community he had lived with for thirty years. And now, in the three-story house on Lê Đại Hành Street in Saigon’s Eleventh District that the Phương Nam Company had supplied for him, he spoke of the refugees as follows: “One has to say that, before accomplishing a thing, they threatened their neighborhoods, and then they went to the U.S. without a single sou in their pockets and depended on handouts, while demanding that people somehow oppose the communists, and they organized a few associations for this purpose with three, or at most four members.”
As for people who still harbored hatred for the communists in their hearts, he said, as if offering counsel: “We must know enough to give thanks, know enough to beg for pardon, and know enough to forget!” And as for the former prime minister Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, who had some relationship to his family, he had words of praise: “Mr. Kỳ is courageous; though he was once vice president of the land, he was able to humble himself and return to Vietnam! He went on and said if in the future there should be a reconciliation between the people on the two sides of the war, “Mr Kỳ would be able to represent the people abroad to the Vietnamese government” [sic].
On reading Volume 4 of his Memoirs, we can see that throughout the first twenty years of his sojourn abroad, he participated energetically in anti-communist movements with the Vietnamese abroad. He set the satirical poems of Cao Tần (Lê Tất Điều) to music, created the twenty “Prison Songs of the famous ‘Prison Gentleman’” (Ngục Sĩ) Nguyễn Chí Thiện, and, in the course of his performance tours all over the world, expressed his agreement with the “reconquest” movement of Hoàng Cơ Minh.
2. Comments on Resolution 36 and the Reconciliation Policy of Hanoi
Mentioning Resolution 36, he expressed satisfaction with the statement of Nguyễn Thanh Sơn, the Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs, with regard to the policy of reconciliation, and said that that statement was the factor that caused him to make the decision to ask permission to return to Vietnam. He asked to be instated as a citizen, and was proud of his new certificate of residency that was issued to him a year later, and his happiness was renewed every time the government granted permission for one of his songs to be performed.
On going to Hanoi, he praised the present modernity of life in the city, and the impressive scale of the residents’ dwelling places—that, he said, was a source of great joy to him. And he made similar comments with regard to the development of Saigon, as evidenced in such places as the Phú Mỹ Hưng urban development area, with houses more beautiful even than those in the United States. He praised Vietnam as a place where people could eat and spend money even more freely than in the United States [sic]. And people knew that one of his birthday celebrations had been organized in the home of Lê Thành Ân, an American of Vietnamese origin who had been the Consul General for the U.S. in Saigon City. His style of life in Saigon no longer resembled the one he had experienced in the days of “A Countryside Mother” and “A Countryside Child,” but had turned into an existence with the elite.
Figure 22. Phạm Duy and his family became American citizens in 1984. When he returned to Vietnam in 2005, he asked to resume his citizenship there, and the poet Nguyễn Quốc Thái, who held him in very high regard, helped him a year later to obtain certificates of citizenship and residency. But Phạm Duy still kept his “passport”—his proof of U.S. citizenship. And he remarked jokingly to Dr. Nguyễn Nhã, the man who interviewed him on January 12, 2012, that if the Chinese should attack Vietnam and get all the way to Nha Trang, he would still be able to seek refuge in the American Consulate in Saigon, because he was a U.S. citizen [sic]. (Source: Phạm Duy Memoirs, Volume 4, and Nguyễn Quốc Thái, personal archives).
3. Comments on the Chinese Threat and the Calamitous Developments in the Eastern Ocean
Phạm Duy praised the “wise foreign policy” of Communist Vietnam, which had to exist “beneath the armpit” of China. According to him, there was no real danger that Vietnam might turn into a Chinese protectorate state after losing the Spratly and Paracel Islands in armed conflicts. He placed his reliance on the possibility of negotiations between the countries involved. Any hurried protest against the situation might harm the chances of reaching a peaceful solution. In this connection he mentioned the heated protest against the annexation that had been made by Cù Huy Hà Vũ, the son of his one-time friend, the poet Huy Cận.
[Author’s note: in 2011, Cù Huy Hà Vũ made a public protest against the nine-dash line “shaped like an ox’s tongue” that China had drawn in the Eastern Sea, indicating a claim to a vast area that included the Spratly and Paracel Islands].
Then, in a scornful tone, he reiterated to Dr. Nguyễn Nhã the idea that he could take refuge in the U.S. Consulate in Saigon if China attacked and got as far as Nha Trang.
4. Comments 42 Years Later on his Firm Friend and Supporter Tạ Tỵ
In the autumn of 1970, when he learned that Tạ Tỵ had written a book devoted to him, he sent Tạ Tỵ a two-page handwritten letter to express his gratitude. I quote:
Sent to my dear friend Tạ Tỵ:
I was truly moved and at the same time truly embarrassed when I learned you had devoted such a capacious book about me after having written about ten other people active in the arts in our land.
Moved, because in the turbulence of these times, it is rare for anyone to want to shine a light on my person and my career, and especially when the person in question is Tạ Tỵ, who from the time preceding the Resistance War, the time of the Resistance itself, and throughout the post Resistance up to the time of the imminent dissolution of this war, you have always been close to me, and have always understood what is in me, both the good and the bad. . . (Phạm Duy Still Sits There Dejected [Phạm Duy Còn Đó Nỗi Buồn], published in 1971 by Nguyễn Nhã’s Văn Sử Học).
Figure 23. Left: the cover of the book Phạm Duy Still Sits There Dejected (Văn Sử Học, 1971); middle: a line portrait of Phạm Duy by Tạ Tỵ; right: the cover of the book The Death Process of Phạm Duy (Văn Mới, 1971, 1971). [Thành Tôn, personal archives].
Figure 24. From left: another line-portrait of Phạm Duy by Tạ Tỵ, 1970; and Phạm Duy’s two-page handwritten letter to Tạ Tỵ, thanking him for having written the book, Phạm Duy Still Sits There Dejected (excerpted from Phạm Duy Still Sits There Dejected, Văn Sử Học, 1971).
But forty-two years after the publication of Phạm Duy Still Sits There Dejected and seven years after he went back to live in Saigon—at the age of ninety-one—he spoke very differently about Tạ Tỵ, who for ages had been among the closest of his friends. When Dr. Nguyễn Nhã held the book in his hands the book that Tạ Tỵ had written about him—Phạm Duy, playing with an idiom used in the title, referred to it as “the Desire to Laugh” and “the Desire to Vomit,” and remarked that it was “miserably written,” but that he could not criticize it because the author had been in the psychological warfare division, and so could not do any better.
In his talk with Nguyễn Nhã, he also uttered the following words: “Tạ Tỵ didn’t tell the truth in the book he wrote about his days in labor camp” [Phạm Duy did not at the time remember the name of the book, but everyone knows that he was talking about Tạ Tỵ’s memoir, The Depths of Hell (Đáy Địa Ngục, Thằng Mõ, 1985)].
Figure 25: The cover of the book, Depths of Hell (Đái Địa Ngục, Thằng Mõ, 1986, United States), a memoir of the six years that the author spent as a prisoner in labor reform camps. It is not clear whether Phạm Duy ever read the book, but he said of it, “Tạ Tỵ didn’t tell the truth in the book he wrote about his days in a labor camp.” Tạ Tỵ was an old friend of Phạm Duy’s who had died seven years before the date of the interview, in 2004.
After the fall of the South in 1975, Tạ Tỵ did not enjoy the good fortune of Phạm Duy—unlike him, he was not conducted out of the country by the CIA. Instead, he was arrested and imprisoned in labor reform camps for six years. The Depths of Hell records his experiences in those years of imprisonment and heavy labor, with “food insufficient to make one full and hunger insufficient to result in death.” When he emerged from the camps in 1981, and met again with Lê Ngộ Châu in the former editorial office of Cyclopedia, Tạ Tỵ was a mere shadow of his former self, with white hair and loose teeth. After that, Tạ Tỵ made two brave attempts to cross the ocean. The second time, he managed to reach the island of Pulao Bidong in Malaysia, and began at once to write his memoir of imprisonment (Cultural Portraits, Volume 2, Ngô Thế Vinh, Việt Ecology Press, 2022).
The modern history of Vietnam has, as one of its products, a “white book” on the archipelago of Vietnamese prisons stretching from the South to the North, that emerged after 1975, a place where a great many southern writers, journalists, artists among whom there was no lack of friends of Phạm Duy, some even of his own generation, who died of neglect in prison, like Hiếu Chân Nguyễn Hoạt, Nguyễn Mạnh Côn, Hoàng Vĩnh Lộc, Phạm Văn Sơn, Trần Văn Tuyên, Trần Việt Sơn, Vũ Ngọc Các, Anh Tuấn Trần Tuấn Phát, Dương Hùng Cường . . . or who died soon after leaving prison, like Vũ Hoàng Chương and Hồ Hữu Tường.
And now, in the Vietnamese press, one sees images of Phạm Duy and his children as returnees, able once again to walk upon the National Road of former days. And one sees, as well, on brightly lit stages from Saigon to Hanoi, an utterly changed Phạm Duy, who, still with his head of white hair, holds scripts from which he reads to the audience, his arms holding multi-colored bouquets amid the avid applause of his audiences.
Phạm Duy: His Huge Accomplishment and His Moral Stature
After thirty years of living in the United States amid the love and regard of the overseas Vietnamese community, Phạm Duy chose to go back to Vietnam and end his days there. He had every right to make such a decision; it must viewed by all with respect. And in accordance with this desire, he lived and died in Vietnam.
Phạm Duy’s huge musical endowment may be seen especially in “Feeling for the Homeland,” (“Tình Quê Hương”), a song that has entered deeply into the hearts of many generations. Phạm Duy is in himself a gigantic, awe-inspiring monument in the modern history of music in Vietnam. The present generation, and the ones that are to come, will continue to sing a number of his songs.
Young people seek to draw near him as if he were a sublime spirit; they not only revere his great genius, but yearn to see in him a person of great moral stature. But then they see that he was not equally great in both realms.
Like many other artistic people, Phạm Duy abandoned the Resistance War very early and returned to the cities, for the perfectly justifiable reason that he could not accept participation in a “command culture” directed by communists, and was determined to protect his personal creative freedom.
Suffused with inspiration, and living in a free environment, he created songs in which both notes and lyrics were of deathless value. But as time passed, and as era yielded to era, those who loved his music could not avoid surprise when they observed that he “censored himself”; he revised the original lyrics of songs he had written during the Resistance to make them accord better with changed times and circumstances. Whoever followed all the steps in his career could not fail to be disappointed when they too lost their bearings in this pursuit.
Phạm Duy’s great longevity allowed him to experience two centuries, to live every phase as he “wept and laughed with the changing fortunes of his country.”
No one can suppose that Phạm Duy did not understand the communists; they can only imagine that in the last years his life, his powers of judgement were no longer sharp. That being the case, we can see only a person exemplifying the ordinary run of humanity, meaning a person afflicted with all the usual moral ills of human beings. I don’t wish to say a thing about his very complicated romantic adventures with women—that was an aspect of his private life and must be treated with respect. I wish to speak only of his relations with people in general and of matters related to his professional career.
In writing a portrait of Phạm Duy, it is easy to see that he himself created many self-portraits in the successive phases of his career. Phạm Duy always emphasized that he was simply a Vietnamese musician, and was completely unconcerned with politics. But in a manner totally contradictory, he chose at the end of his life, after building up a huge legacy of music, to live in a country that was not yet free, that was still a land with a “command culture”—he chose to resign himself to the life of a caged bird. No one forced him to do it, but often, on his own volition, he made public statements that had political overtones, or that seemed to express conformity with the tendencies promoted by the regime, so that even those who loved and defended him had to frown with disapproval.
After the passing of Phạm Duy, more than a few of Phạm Duy’s songs were still prohibited. The song “Vietnam, Vietnam” which the composer himself was very pleased with, and which he referred to in 2012, was never approved, though he had requested several times that approval be given to it. The hidden reason why the “winning side” was never willing to agree to this was that many people had suggested that this song could be selected as the national anthem of a future, democratic, Vietnam.
When Phạm Duy died, the new, “public” Phạm Duy, a creation of Resolution 36, died with him. Though there was no official pronouncement on the matter, it seemed there was a directive coming from high in the power structure, that Pham’s reputation could no longer be noisily celebrated or promoted. Books by Phạm Duy, including his four-volume set of memoirs, and books written about him, could no longer gain easy approval.
A Photo Book: Phạm Duy, The Day of Return
A typical example of this apparent decision to discourage all efforts to promote Phạm Duy is a book of images compiled by the photographer, Nguyễn Phong Quang, entitled The Day of Return (Ngày Trở Về). It had previously been accepted by the publishing house Trẻ (Youth) with the intention of bringing it out on Phạm Duy’s death anniversary (January 28, 2014), but it has not yet, as of 2022, been approved for publication, though eight years have passed since that date. The regime has given no reason whatsoever for this.
Though Nguyễn Phong Quang is an amateur photographer, he creates beautiful photographic images due to his reverence for Phạm Duy and his passionate devotion to his music; so as soon as Phạm Duy began returning to Vietnam, he followed the songwriter’s every step. Thus, it can be said that Nguyễn Phong Quang is the only person in possession of a complete photographic record of the last thirteen years of Phạm Duy’s life, from the time of his first return South until the day of his death on a hospital sickbed.
People with a thorough understanding of the state of affairs within the country have come to the following conclusion: in the days following Phạm Duy’s death, an unwritten directive came into being that no permission was to be given for the publication of any materials having to do with Phạm Duy! It appears that the regime had made sufficient use of Phạm Duy during the period when “openness” was an announced policy. This regime now had no further need of him! Another factor involved was that of professional jealousy—a number of leaders in the cultural life of the cities did not want Phạm Duy’s productions to stand beside their own, and did not want others to celebrate his accomplishments more than their own.
Phạm Duy and His Portraits
To draw a portrait of someone as full of life as Phạm Duy is not an easy matter. One can’t confine one’s observations to a single point of view; one must look at him from many points of view in order to see his many different faces. If one were to combine all his different layers, one could create a portrait animated by his spirit. To borrow an expression of Tạ Tỵ’s, it would be a “four-dimensional” portrait, or to borrow a technical term used in the plastic arts, it would be a “cubist” portrait. What this means is that there can be no single portrait of Phạm Duy; he was always changing in form and color as time went on.
A man who lived in two centuries, Phạm Duy did work replete with the turbulence and power of the four-thousand-year-long tragedy of the country—and the tragedy of a Vietnamese man who was both great and petty, both beautiful and ugly.
Phạm Duy died at the age of ninety-two—as poet Nguyễn Du put it, “The body falls away; the essence brightly stays” (“Thác là thể phách, còn là tinh anh”). The essence is the huge musical legacy he created. Once this legacy has been subjected to the winnowing process of time, of three hundred or more years, what remains will be deathless melodies filled with the fragrance of the homeland, and carrying some portion of the people’s soul. I wish him eternal rest in the embrace of the soil of the motherland that bears the sacred name of Vietnam—or, as people say, the homeland.
Figure 26. Left: a bronze bust of Phạm Duy by the sculptor Nguyễn Văn Anh, created on the basis of a photo by the photographer Nguyễn Phong Quang and under the direction of Duy Cường, Phạm Duy’s son. Right: A quotation written out by Phạm Duy, and engraved on stone from the song “Love of Country” (“Tình Ca”): “I’ve loved the language of my land from when I first came into life, oh people” (“Tôi yêu tiếng nước tôi, từ khi tôi mới ra đời, người ơi”). (Photos by Nguyễn Phong Quang).
By Way of Conclusion
On the day of Phạm Duy’s death—January 27, 2013—the poet Trần Mộng Tú, looking back on his life with emotion, wrote “A Thankful Tribute to Phạm Duy,” a composition splendid as a poem, that looks back on the totality of his career. Having been granted the author’s permission, I beg to quote this prose poem here as a conclusion to this portrait of the musician.
A Thankful Tribute to Phạm Duy by Trần Mộng Tú
From his ten fingers there poured down a thousand, thousand glistening, multi-colored tears, and there sprang up songs of victory filled with laughter for the people of Vietnam;
You wrote the history of our people by means of music, shooting notes instead of bullets throughout the long perspective of a war brought on us by invaders;
You made live on all our lips the achievements of our forebears, the heroes of our people;
You wept and laughed in notes and verses, gifts to love, to humankind, to our homeland, to our people;
You bound up the wounds of war, lit fires in pursuit of peace;
You swung your arm, and the clouds on high resembled silk, the seas became like broken crystal; you engraved the image of our Father Lạc Long Quân upon the mountains, then no longer made of stone, you cast the love of Mother Âu Cơ down among the seas, then no longer oceans.
The words in all your songs were limpid, full of feeling, tender, expansive as the feelings of our people, lovely as pieces of white jade, clear as drops of rain;
You went up to the forests, and the forests changed their leaves; you went down to pure springs, and the springs burst into tears; by means of music, and the feelings of our people, you went from the Ai Nam Pass to the promontory of Cà Mau throughout your life that knew no rest;
The love of country in your lyrics made both those who sang, and those who heard your songs shed tears;
The coursing blood running through your wounds turned into honey, your clouds were the breathing of people’s dwellings, your little children were water buffalo, your torn blouses and kitchen hearths were our mothers, your manioc tubers and bowls of tea were our children;
Beneath your hands our Việt speech became the sacred language of our land, the language of our people, you conferred the essence of our language on our people as a gift;
Your music is suffused with feeling for our native kind, our native land;
In the love of couples among our kind, you made immortal maidens fall to earth, and pink grass sprout on mountainsides, never afterward to fade; you shuddered with joy amid your melodies!
You were pure, you were vulgar, you were holy, you broke apart the world with music;
You drank, you ate, you breathed amid your melodies and lyrics.
You lived your life, all aspects of your life, by means of music, never letting a single second of it go to waste;
You bequeathed to your compatriots and to the treasury of the music of our people a legacy that no other land can take away.
You are a precious gift that the god of how many generations of our forebears nurtured into being and conferred upon our people in the present age.
You came to life and lay to rest within our homeland, this land of Vietnam.
And for this I beg to present to you a Solemn Word of Thanks.
- Trần Mộng Tú, January 27, 2013.
Ngô Thế Vinh, July 4, 2022
[1] The agrégé is one of the highest academic degrees in France and is obtained by passing a competitive examination. This degree entitles the holder to teach in secondary schools and universities.
[2] This barrier to publication is now (as of 2025) removed, and Cornell University Press is preparing to publish this translation, the first volume of which will probably appear in October or November of 2025.
[3] In the Memoirs, Vol. IV, Chapter 1, he says: “As we were hurrying to leave, the two of us managed to take two small suitcases with us to Guam; we lost the one that contained our clothes, but luckily held on to the other one, which had priceless items such as old photos and cassettes.”
[4] Nguyễn Chí Thiện (1939–2012) was a political dissident imprisoned in Vietnam for twenty-seven years. As Phạm Duy subsequently relates, he used twenty of Chí Thiện’s poems, written in prison, as song lyrics.
[5] Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu (1916–1992) was a Rumanian novelist.
[6] Resolution 36 was a decision passed by the Vietnamese Politburo in 2018 the purpose of which was to improve Vietnam’s economic prospects in the coming decades. It stipulated, among other things, that increased attention would be paid to the rights and interests of overseas Vietnamese.
[7] Dương Văn Minh (1916–2001), often referred to as “Minh Lớn” or “Big Minh” because of his large physical stature, was the last president of South Vietnam, a position that he held for three days, from April 28 to April 30, 1975. In 1940, after graduating from the Non-commissioned Officer’s Academy at Thủ Đầu Một, he joined the French army with the rank of “aspirant” (chuẩn úy). In 1955, after helping Ngô Đình Diệm by leading “Operation Hoàng Diệu” in which he destroyed the Bình Xuyên forces in the Mekong delta, he was made a brigadier general. He then helped put down the Hòa Hảo forces led by Ba Cụt. He soon lost favor with Ngô Đình Diệm, however, because the later doubted his loyalty. Later, when Minh, a Buddhist, observed the repressive measures taken against Buddhists by Ngô Đình Diệm, he began to be opposed to the regime, and in 1963 became the leader of the coalition that overthrew Diệm. In 1971, he briefly challenged Nguyễn Văn Thiệu in a presidential election, but then withdrew, saying that the elective process was rigged. In 1983, the Vietnamese socialist government gave him permission to resettle wherever he liked. He went first to France, but then joined the family of his daughter and son-in-law in California.
[8] Trịnh Công Sơn (1939–2001), a celebrated singer-songwriter.
[9] Trần Văn Khê (1921–2015), a celebrated Vietnamese musicologist who, during much of his career, lived and taught in Paris.
