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[HISTORY] Vietnamese Characteristics
Potentially explosive and disturbing to some/many. However, too educational
and interesting to ignore. This should not be viewed as anything but a starting
point for a brutally frank discussion about the Vietnamese. Looking forward
to hear viewpoints and assessment of those interested in serious discussion.
I find it utterly fascinating that the French not only saw through, but
manage to articulate, failings in the Vietnamese. It is noteworthy that the
observations below explains many of the less-than-flattering phenomena, most
demonstrative via on SCV.
Certainly hope we will all confront these issues now that they have been well
articulated. I have asked for a copy of the dissertation and permission to
make archives on VN-CDROM. Hoping to get the necessary permission. Cheers, KyAnh
My thanks to the original author of this note.
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Dear Ky-Anh,
... I came across the dissertation of a doctoral student from Northern
Illinois University. I'd forgotten a colleague at NIU had sent it to
me two years ago, and it had become buried under other volumes.
The dissertation was a treatment of early, pre-colonial French perceptions
of and attitudes toward what they called Indo-China.
I was scanning through it, mostly interested in the primary source
materials that had been translated and included in the dissertation:
government reports, correspondence from military and civil agents,
diaries of missionaries and traders, etc.
I found included among these an interesting letter to a French
government minister from a Catholic missionary, a Father Alphonse de
Bordeleau. I know the name and the man, and he is credited with
introducing many Vietnamese students to trigonometry, to European
concepts of anatomy and physiology, and to venereal disease. At the
time of his writing, he'd been in Indo-China twenty years already, and
much of that time in Vietnam.
In the letter de Bordeleau recounts many of what he regards as the
distinguishing national and cultural characteristics of the Vietnamese
people. He devotes much of the letter to a discussion of The Three
Legged Stool, and his descriptions of Buddhism, Confucianism, and
Taoism were fairly accurate and objective.
He goes on, however, to suggest to the French minister that Vietnamese
people have a second and more interesting Three Legged Stool, one
which he and his fellow priests rely on and exploit daily, but which
the Vietnamese people seem unaware of. This other Three Legged Stool
was comprised of gullibility, timidity, and apathy:
- Gullibility: the capacity of many Vietnamese people to
uncritically believe and embrace even the most preposterous
notions, including those which are slanderous or divisive, and
particularly those unsupported either by evidence or by
experience.
- Timidity: the capacity of many Vietnamese people to recognize
something as wrong, harmful, or perilous, even to comprehend
it as an immediate and direct threat to themselves, and still
not respond or react out of fear somebody may say or do
something bad to them, or that they may lose face.
- Apathy: the capacity of many Vietnamese people to look no
further than their own fish ponds and to routinely ignore
things seen to be harmful or dangerous to their neighbors or
their nation, partly out of hope they'll go away, partly
because they really don't care.
De Bordeleau advises the French government minister that this
particular Three Legged Stool is an appropriate metaphor, and that
once some Vietnamese take their seat upon it, you'd need to put a bomb
under the stool just to get them to stand up again. De Bordeleau also
suggests that this Dda.o (he uses the term) makes Vietnam especially
inviting for future colonial exploitation and conquest, and suggests
that three battalions and a dozen French gunboats could take the
country in less than 10 years.
Once the fighting is over and Vietnam is conquered, de Bordeleau says
there will be a great wailing among the people, but that the noise
can be minimized by putting them all to work on rubber plantations.
Even though he'd been in Indo-China for so long, de Bordeleau must
somehow have remained in contact with European intellectuals. His
writing suggests he was aware of developments and trends in
philosophy, ideologies, political trends; it was not merely an
intellectual or linguistic affectation when he suggested to the French
minister that the values and behaviors deriving from this other Three
Legged Stool be called "Vietnamism".
A footnote in the dissertation references the reply from the French
government minister, in which he advises de Bordeleau of the need to
keep Vietnamism a secret and instructs him to take precautions to
cover-up anything they may do to exploit it.
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