No one knows how my grandfather died. No one knows if he was brutally tortured and left to die or if he simply met a Vietnamese communist bullet. No one even knows where in Vietnam or when in 1947 it happened. Like so many other stories about his life, his disappearance remains a mystery, twisting and intertwining like vines that hide some solid trunk of fact-something I've always felt a certain distance from. By blood he was Ong Ngoai to me, my maternal grandfather. In my mind, he was simply a name: Nguyen Duc Kinh. He lived in a time and place so far removed from mine that I'll never get a clear picture of his person. But when I stick my fingers into that tangle of vines I begin to feel knots and grooves, contours and texture that, if nothing else, allow me to imagine who he was.
Born in 1908 to a county official in Northern Vietnam, my grandfather was the youngest of five children in a poor urban family. His name is a word for "glass" or "eyeglasses," but its list of meanings also includes "respectfulness." Like many of his contemporaries, Kinh's father secured a low-ranking position in the colonial bureaucracy. The two boys and three girls therefore grew up and went to school in the city of Khuong Ha, quite unlike the rural childhoods of most other Vietnamese.
Between 1920 and 1938, less than ten percent of school-age Vietnamese children actually received a formal colonial education. Those who had the means entered grade one, but few students made it past grade three. My grandfather was among the tiny minority (only 20,000 students between the two world wars) that completed grades seven through ten, the upper primary level. Vietnamese instructors during this time had a profound influence on their students, expressing distaste for tradition and disgust at colonial practices. Some teachers espoused anti-colonial and Marxist ideologies that directly challenged the colonial government and even the moral instruction of parents.
During Kinh's teens and early twenties a major change in political and social consciousness swept over a significant segment of the Vietnamese population. Frustrated by the complacency with which the Vietnamese people had allowed their colonization, students and young intellectuals adopted an attitude of severe self-criticism. This new intelligentsia questioned traditional Vietnamese perspectives and condemned the passive acceptance of fate. Underneath this self-deprecation lay a sincere belief in mankind's ability to change-a belief which prompted students, including Kinh, to publish pamphlets that encouraged readers to "reform" themselves.
By the time my oldest uncle, Bac Son, entered primary education, the metropolitan schools had undergone a transformation. Nineteen thirty-eight saw the introduction of "civics texts" into early primary classes. Abandoning the old Confucian principles of filial piety and fraternity for a more utilitarian take on the modern citizen, the author of one text wrote:
Society is a mechanism, and each citizen is a component of that mechanism. If you want it to operate successfully, the entire
mechanism must transmit power to the appropriate components, while each component simultaneously contributes its strength to the
total mechanism.
(Nguyen Khoa Toan, Cong Dan Giao Duc, p.iii)
My mother still remembers these civics texts, from which she learned a favorite idiom: "When you eat fruit, remember who planted the tree." In that text the saying was intended to promote respect toward people of authority, but prior generations had used it to encourage the veneration of one's ancestors. Kinh's parents were of the older generation who still believed in ghosts, still arranged marriages and still strove to reach Confucian ideals of social harmony. And in fact, most of the students who graduated from upper primary school rarely studied further, but rather went back to their childhood homes where the men worked desk jobs and the women raised children and obeyed their in-laws.
Unlike his classmates, Kinh postponed marriage in order to distribute anti-French pamphlets, publish a political newsletter called "Century News," head a nationalist student group, and eventually get exiled to the mountainous region of Son La.
As I should have expected, my grandfather's personal politics are a perpetual matter of speculation. My aunts and uncles who remember him were most likely too young to understand his ideologies completely, and my poor Vietnamese prevents me from asking my grandmother about it. She herself probably knows relatively little because, according to my uncle Bac Hai, "he never told her anything about his political activity, for her own safety."
By different accounts, Kinh was anything from a moderate anti-French nationalist to a high-ranked, radical communist revolutionary. I have heard family members call him a 'freedom fighter,' an 'intelligence agent,' and a 'spy.' During one of their conversations about him, my cousin Mai asked my grandmother to clarify as much as she could; she answered, "Well...he did a lot of things." As specifically as possible, it seems my grandfather was highly active in the anti-French movement and generally aligned with nationalist sentiment.
Yet regardless of the conflicting stories, everyone remembers that he was sincere and devoted to his political work. As Bac Hai puts it, "He loved his country and he sacrificed three of the best years of his life in jail for fighting the French." He was young and idealistic and a true believer in the undefeatable spirit of his people.
And in the Hanoi of the late 20s and early 30s, marriage and family may have been the furthest thing from Kinh's mind.
It is difficult to imagine Ba Ngoai, my tiny, frail grandmother, as a brilliant, independent young woman. It is difficult to imagine her as Le Thi Canh, the poor country girl from a farming village whose father borrowed money to send her to school in Hanoi. Even back then, it was unheard of for anyone from a rural background to receive an education. "The way my mother made it sound," says Mai, "is that [Ba Ngoai] was so smart that her father didn't have a choice but to send her to school."
On some regular, routine day during her education, on what could be considered her 'campus,' Canh's gaze fell upon a young, handsome, simply-dressed man who was distributing anti-French pamphlets to passing students. His voice proud, his face enthusiastic, Nguyen Duc Kinh took hold of young woman's emotions and never let go. And he had no idea.
Canh never approached my grandfather directly, but rather grew to know him through his passions. She joined the student political group that he led and got involved in the student newspaper he was attempting to produce, and yet never spoke a single word to him. "She fell in love from a distance," says Mai.
Sometime around 1930, the French colonial police arrested Kinh for his anti-French activities and sent him away to a prison in the mountains of Son La. When she heard of his arrest, my grandmother began sending him packages containing newspapers, books, and long letters from herself. For three years, she wrote love poems to a man she had never met. Upon his release, Kinh returned to Hanoi, found my grandmother and proposed to her.
Soon after their marriage, my grandparents started what would become a large family. "One thing I'll never be able to reconcile," Mai tells me, "is how such a forward-thinking man ended up with so many children." Indeed, it seems that after his imprisonment my grandfather toned down his political activity in favor of a more traditional paternal role. But he devoted just as much of himself to that role as he did to the movement for independence.
"He was a loving father and a devoted father," says Bac Hai. "He absolutely loved his children. As a matter of fact he never raised his voice at us that I can recall." Though not strict in discipline, he still managed to instill his values in his children. "I remember one day he taught me how to ride a bicycle," says Mai's mother, Bac Anh. "I almost gave up after the first try because I fell, but he didn't let me. He encouraged me to continue and I was able to ride by myself on the same evening. That principle of working hard I learned from him."
And his love for my grandmother never faded. "It was a beautiful relationship, between him and Ba Ngoai," says Bac Anh. "The only difference was that Ba Ngoai wanted to save money for an unpredictable future, and Ong Ngoai wanted to spend a lot on us, because he wanted to make us happy and have a good life. I think they were both correct."
Kinh's occasional tendency to spend on his children was perhaps akin to his political fervor and idealism, which ultimately got him a three-year prison sentence. He was "someone who didn't always have his feet on the ground, someone who was not always practical, but really believed in what was right," says Mai. While some of his friends and contemporaries saw this as recklessness, "it's what Ba Ngoai fell in love with. And she honors that memory-I've never heard her say anything disparaging about him."
Though genuinely happy, Kinh's family was quite destitute, and my grandmother worked endlessly to feed her children: she founded and ran a one-room primary school, opened an ice cream stand and baked pastries to sell on the street. My grandfather mainly worked as an editor for a magazine called "The Ky," but according to Bac Anh, worked as many as three jobs at a time to support the family.
His tireless devotion to his wife and children-'recklessness' to some-led him to be employed by the rapidly growing Indochinese Communist Party (ICP). Again, details escape me: some say he was an intelligence agent with access to sensitive information, and that he fell on the wrong side of a power alliance within the party. Others say he worked as a bike courier, and at some point was running messages for both the ICP and the French. "He had to get money where he could," says Mai.
Whatever he did, it was enough to arouse suspicion of treason within the Communist Party; my grandmother remembers party officials ransacking her schoolroom in search of anything that would confirm their allegations. Luckily, he had done whatever he could to protect his family from potential consequences of his political activity: ironically prescient for a reckless person.
When he received the summons, he knew it was sinister. Though it was an official written order from the ICP, it was conspicuously benign: he was expected to attend a social gathering of ICP officials-a party of sorts. Suspecting that he would die, my grandfather collected his ICP-issued pistol and official documents and anything else related to the Party and hid it far from his home in a final attempt to ensure his family's safety. My grandmother begged him not to go, to take the whole family and flee to the South, but he refused. He would not allow his wife and children to be hunted. On the specified day, he left and never returned.
My grandmother tried desperately to find out what had happened. She spoke to countless friends and associates of his-anyone who had any relation to him at all. She wrote to numerous ICP officials, people she had considered his "friends," but received no response. Finally, some time after his disappearance, a close friend of Kinh's met my grandmother in secret and recited a poem he had composed on his last day:
Tuyet Menh Tu A Final Farewell Hoa hong rung ngoai them lac dac, The rose petals fall on the veranda, Hay hon ta tan tac vi em? Or is it my soul torn up because of you? Vi dau tinh ai em dem, We have not savored our tender love, Em dem chua nem lai them han long? Yet we endure our despair again. Nay anh chua thoat vong lan dan, I am ensnared in the perils, Dan than vao phai buoc chan theo, But once committed, I must step further. Thoi danh canh the cheo leo, In this dangerous situation Tam than troi noi bot beo can chi? Why should I dwell on my own existence? Nay anh con quyet ghi trong da, I have determination in my heart No tang bong phai tra cho xong. to pay my debts to the nation. Hum thieng dau co xa vong, Although the tiger has fallen into the trap, Xin em cho co ban long thuong ai! My love, have no distress because of me. Xac thit dau mot mai tan nat, My body may someday become dust Hon anh con bat ngat huong bay! But my soul will be at peace forever.Without looking at the poem to see his name, without discerning his handwriting, my grandmother knew it was her husband speaking to her. She destroyed the poem, but recites it by memory today.
My grandmother never remarried, and for years she supported her six children on her own, living in poverty. Some of her relatives lamented that Kinh had brought this misfortune on his own family by making rash, dangerous choices. They contrasted him with my grandmother's more cautious younger brother, who also worked for the ICP as Minister of Science: "One was a scientist," they'd say, "and he lived. The other was a politician, and he died."
Whether or not it was Kinh's own doing, the situation only revealed what a remarkably capable woman my grandmother could be. In 1954 she took her family to the South, where she eventually served as Director of Social Services for all of South Vietnam. All of my grandmother's children graduated from college and now live in the United States, where her grandchildren celebrate success and wealth, and her great-grandchildren continue to grow in number.
At the rare reunions of my mother's entire family, a quiet comment about my grandfather sometimes slips out on the vapor of a relative's breath, only to disappear in four generations of voices. Likewise, the stories I've heard about Nguyen Duc Kinh and his brief life take little time to tell, and I always suspected that they are more legend than fact. But while those stories may always float somewhere between bare truth and embellishment, I can finally anchor them to the complex personage that, to me at least, he has become: a writer, a politician, a prisoner, a devoted husband and father, a foolhardy idealist, a defective component, a tiger in a trap, and a tree planter. He has finally become Ong Ngoai in mind as much as in heredity.