Vietnam
A long country down the eastern edge of Southeast Asia, shaped by the rice paddy, the worship of ancestors, and a long history of outside rule resisted. The complete guide, the forces first.
Vietnam is a long, narrow country down the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, home to more than a hundred million people and to a culture shaped by the rice paddy, the family, and a long history of outside rule resisted. Its way of life rests on a few deep forces: the worship of ancestors, kept at a small altar in nearly every home and held to be the soul of the whole culture; the village and the wet-rice farming around which life was long ordered; a Confucian respect for family, age, and learning that came from a thousand years under Chinese rule; and a fierce pride and endurance born of centuries of struggle for independence. From these come a blended religious life of several faiths held lightly together, a fresh and balanced cuisine, the great family holiday of the Lunar New Year, and a daily life of warmth, sharing, and respect for elders.
The family and the ancestors
The deepest thing in Vietnamese life is the family, and within the family the bond between the living and their ancestors. In nearly every Vietnamese home there is a small altar to the ancestors, set in a place of honour in the main room, holding the photographs or name tablets of the family's dead, an incense burner, and offerings of fruit, flowers, tea, and food. Before it the family lights incense and bows, on ordinary days and above all on the great occasions, honouring the parents, grandparents, and forebears who came before and keeping alive the tie between the generations.
This honouring of the ancestors is older and deeper than any of the religions that later came to Vietnam, and it runs beneath them all. Vietnamese of every faith keep it, Buddhist and Catholic and unbeliever alike, for it is felt less as a religion than as the very ground of being a family and a people. Behind it lies the belief that the dead do not depart but live on in a near, unseen world, watching over their descendants, and that the living owe them remembrance and care, while the ancestors in turn protect and bless the household. The death anniversary of a parent or grandparent, kept each year on its date, is a major family gathering, marked with a feast laid before the altar and shared by the kin.
From this flows the duty children owe their parents, the honouring and care of them in life and the remembrance of them in death, taught from childhood as among the first of virtues. The family is felt as a single line reaching back through the generations and forward to those not yet born, and the eldest son in particular carries the duty of keeping the altar and leading the rites. To understand Vietnam is to begin at this altar, where the family and its long line of dead are joined, for it is, as the Vietnamese say, the soul of their whole way of life.
The village and the rice land
For most of its history Vietnam was a land of villages and rice fields, and from that life came much of the culture. The country's heart is the wet-rice paddy, the flooded field in which rice has been grown for thousands of years, and the patient, cooperative labour it demands, the sharing of water and the work of many hands, bred a deep habit of community and mutual help. The village, often set behind a hedge of bamboo, was the world within which a person lived, worked, married, and died, bound to its land and its people, and a Vietnamese was known first as a child of a particular village.
The village was a close and self-governing world. It held its land and its customs in common, ran its own affairs through its elders and notables, and guarded its ways jealously against the outside, so that an old saying held that the emperor's writ stopped at the village gate, that the king's law yields to the custom of the village. To belong to a village was to be held within a web of kinship, obligation, and shared work, and to be cast out of it was a heavy punishment.
At the centre of the village stood its communal house, a large hall that was at once the seat of village affairs, the place of its festivals, and the shrine of its guardian spirit. Each village honoured such a spirit, sometimes a god, sometimes a hero or a worthy ancestor who had founded the village or served the country, watching over the community as the family ancestors watched over the home. Though Vietnam is now fast becoming a country of cities, this village world remains close beneath the surface, in the ties to ancestral land, the bonds of mutual help, and the pull that draws people home to their villages for the great days of the year.
Respect, age, and learning
Over a thousand years of Chinese rule and influence, Vietnam took deeply into itself the teaching of Confucius, with its careful ordering of society by relationship and respect. In this view each person stands in a settled relation to others, and society holds together when each keeps their place and meets its duties: the child honouring the parent, the young deferring to the old, the wife and husband, the ruler and the ruled, each owing the other a fitting conduct. Respect for one's elders runs through all of Vietnamese life, shown in countless daily courtesies and felt as a plain duty.
This order shows itself even in how Vietnamese speak to one another. There is no simple neutral word for you in Vietnamese; instead a speaker addresses another by a term drawn from the family, elder brother, younger sibling, aunt, uncle, grandparent, chosen to fit the other person's age and standing in relation to one's own, so that every conversation places the two speakers in a kind of kinship and marks who is senior and who junior. To speak at all is to weigh another's age and to give them their due.
From the same root comes a deep reverence for learning. In the long centuries when Vietnam was governed in the Confucian manner, the path to honour and office lay through study and the passing of examinations, and the scholar who rose by his books was the most admired of figures. That respect for education and for the learned has never faded; Vietnamese families prize the schooling of their children and the honour that learning brings, and the teacher is held in high regard. The ordering of people by age and relation, the honouring of elders, and the love of learning together give Vietnamese society much of its shape and its courtesy.
Endurance and independence
No force has marked the Vietnamese sense of themselves more than their long struggle to remain free of outside rule. Vietnam lies beside a far greater neighbour, China, and for about a thousand years, from before the time of Christ, it was governed as a Chinese province. Through those centuries the Vietnamese took in much from China, their writing, their Confucian order, their Buddhism, and much else, yet they never became Chinese, and at last, in the tenth century, they won their independence and held it, founding their own line of kings.
The centuries that followed told the same story again and again: a people on a narrow strip of land, often threatened by powerful invaders, repelling them through endurance, cunning, and a fierce will to be free. The heroes most honoured in Vietnamese memory are those who rose against foreign armies and drove them out, among them two sisters who led a revolt against Chinese rule two thousand years ago and are revered to this day. This long record of resistance bred a deep national pride and a belief in the people's power to outlast any foe.
The same spirit met the modern world. In the nineteenth century France conquered Vietnam and ruled it as a colony for some seventy years, and the twentieth century brought a long and terrible age of war, against the French, then in the great conflict in which the country was divided and the United States intervened, ending only in 1975. Through all of it the will to independence held, and the Vietnamese came through as one country. That hard history, and the pride and resilience it bred, lies close to the heart of how Vietnam understands itself.
The three teachings and the spirits
Onto the old worship of ancestors and spirits, Vietnam layered three great teachings that came from outside, and learned to hold them all together. From China came Confucianism, more a guide to society and conduct than a religion, and Taoism, with its concern for harmony with nature and its world of gods, charms, and fortune; and Buddhism, which came both from China and from India and which, in its Vietnamese form, is the most widely followed faith, bent less on distant enlightenment than on compassion, merit, and the care of the dead. These three, the Vietnamese say, are of one family, and most people drew on all of them without troubling over the borders between them.
Beneath and around the three teachings runs a rich world of folk belief. The Vietnamese honour a crowd of spirits and gods, of the household, the kitchen, the land, and the village, and seek their favour for good harvests, health, and luck; they consult fortune and the lucky day before a wedding, a journey, or the building of a house. Vietnam has its own distinctive worship of mother goddesses, with its trance ceremonies in which spirits are called into a medium, found nowhere else in quite the same form. To these older strands was later added Christianity, brought by European missionaries, so that Catholics today form a sizeable and long established minority with their churches across the land.
What marks Vietnamese religion is not which faith a person holds but how lightly the lines are drawn between them. A single family may keep the ancestor altar, burn incense at the Buddhist pagoda, mind the Taoist gods of luck and the kitchen, live by Confucian manners, and see no conflict in any of it. The Vietnamese do not sharply divide the sacred from the everyday, and they draw on whatever serves a need, weaving the many strands into one practical and tolerant whole.
The table
Vietnamese food is fresh, light, and balanced, and like the Korean and Japanese table it is built around rice and around sharing. A family meal is a bowl of rice for each person set among several dishes placed in the middle of the table, a dish or two of meat or fish, a plate of vegetables, and a bowl of soup, all shared by everyone, each person reaching in to take what they like. The cooking seeks a balance of flavours and of fresh ingredients, leaning on herbs, vegetables, and light methods rather than heavy sauces or much frying, which gives it the clean, bright character admired around the world.
The soul of the cuisine is fish sauce, the salty, savoury liquid pressed from salted fish that flavours nearly every dish, most often mixed with lime, chilli, garlic, and sugar into a dipping sauce set on the table. Around this the country has built a vast variety of dishes, among them the famous noodle soup eaten across Vietnam and now around the world, pho, and the filled baguette, a tasty inheritance from the French years. Each region keeps its own style, the north milder, the centre spicier, the south sweeter, and street food, eaten on low stools at the roadside, is a great part of daily life.
The meal carries the culture's respect and warmth. The eldest is served and begins first, and the young invite their elders to eat before they themselves begin, a courtesy spoken aloud at the start of every meal. Food is taken from the shared dishes with care, the host pressing the best pieces on the guest, and the chopsticks are never stood upright in the rice, for that recalls the incense of the dead. To share a Vietnamese meal is to be drawn into the warmth, the sharing, and the courtesy that lie at the centre of the culture.
Tet and the family year
The great holiday of the Vietnamese year is the Lunar New Year, called Tet, which falls in late winter and outshines every other festival. It is the time when the whole country comes home, when Vietnamese travel in their millions back to their family villages to gather across the generations, and when the year is begun afresh. In the days before it, homes are cleaned and decorated, debts are settled, new clothes are bought, and special foods are prepared, above all a dense cake of sticky rice wrapped in leaves that is the taste of the season.
At its heart Tet is a festival of the family and the ancestors. The family altar is cleaned and laden with offerings, and on the eve the ancestors are invited home to share in the new year with the living, the bond between the dead and their descendants renewed at the turning of the year. The first days are kept with care, for the Vietnamese hold that how the year begins shapes all that follows: the first visitor to cross the threshold is chosen for their good fortune, kind words and good deeds are favoured, and elders give children money in red envelopes for luck. To say one celebrates Tet, the Vietnamese say one eats Tet, so central is the feasting to it.
The rest of the year has its own days. The death anniversaries of the family dead are kept through the year, each a gathering of the kin. The mid-autumn festival, under the full moon, is a time of children, lanterns, and round cakes, once a thanksgiving of the harvest. Smaller festivals mark the villages and their guardian spirits, especially in spring when the fields rest. But none rivals Tet, the one time when every family, scattered though it has become, gathers whole again around its elders and its ancestors.
Courtesy and the dress
Vietnamese manners are warm and easy but carry a careful respect, above all toward elders. The Vietnamese greet and deal with one another with a courtesy that flows from the family-based way they address each other, treating an older stranger as an aunt or uncle and a younger as a niece or nephew, so that respect for age is built into the very words of daily life. Things are offered and received with both hands as a mark of respect, and a younger person shows deference to an elder in posture, speech, and the giving of the better seat or the first share.
Some courtesies a visitor soon meets. At a temple or pagoda one dresses modestly and behaves quietly. The feet are thought the lowest and least clean part of the body, so one does not point them at people or at an altar, and sitting, a person tucks them away. Hospitality is generous and pressed warmly on guests, who are offered tea on arrival and urged to eat their fill, and to refuse too firmly can seem cold. The Vietnamese are widely found warm, good humoured, and quick to welcome the stranger who shows their people and customs respect.
Two images stand for Vietnam the world over. One is the conical leaf hat, worn against sun and rain in the fields and markets, plain and graceful. The other is the long dress worn by women, the ao dai, a flowing tunic of silk slit to the waist over loose trousers, close-fitting and elegant, now kept mostly for festivals, weddings, and special days, where its grace marks the occasion. Around these, in the water puppet shows of the north, the village festivals, and the crafts of silk and lacquer, the old culture shows itself still beneath the fast pace of modern life.
The nation
Vietnam is a long, narrow country curving down the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, shaped, the Vietnamese like to say, like a bamboo pole bearing a basket of rice at either end, the two great river deltas of the north and the south. It is home to more than a hundred million people, most of them of the majority Vietnamese, with many smaller peoples in the hills, and it is one of the more crowded and fast rising countries of Asia. Its capital is Hanoi in the north, an old city of a thousand years; its largest city is Ho Chi Minh City in the south, long known as Saigon and still the country's busy commercial heart.
The nation carries a long and hard history. After the thousand years under China and the centuries of its own kings, Vietnam fell under French rule in the nineteenth century and was governed as a colony for some seventy years. The middle of the twentieth century brought a long age of war, against the French and then in the great conflict that split the country into a communist north and a non-communist south, drew in the United States, and ended in 1975 with the fall of Saigon and the reunifying of the country under the rule of the Communist Party, which governs the one-party socialist state to this day.
From the poverty that followed the wars, Vietnam has risen with remarkable speed. A turn to economic reform in the late 1980s opened the country to enterprise and trade, and it has since become one of the fastest growing economies in the region, a busy centre of manufacturing with a young and hard-working people. The old culture endures beneath the new prosperity: the family still gathers at Tet, the ancestors are still honoured at the altar, the villages still keep their festivals, and the respect for family, age, and learning that this guide has described still orders the life of a people moving quickly into the modern world.