Theo tác giả Trần Văn Dĩnh, truyện Kim Vân Kiều thể hiện tâm cảnh, tâm hồn và khát vọng của dân tộc Việt Nam. Vì như vậy nên truyện Kiều có thể giúp ta hiểu được động cơ chiến đấu của quân du kích Việt Nam rõ rệt hơn bất cứ tài liệu nào bắt được trên chiến trường Chỉ cần với lý do nầy, ông Dĩnh đã khuyến cáo tất cả nhân viên dân sự cũng như quân sự Mỹ cần phải đọc, nghiên cứu và phân tích truyện Kim Vân Kiều thay vì dựa trên các con số thống kê để xét đoán cuộc chiến tranh Việt Nam.

Tác giả Trần Văn Dĩnh đã từng nắm những chức vụ cao cấp trong “quân đội giải phóng” (SH: "Vệ Quốc Quân") tại Việt Nam và Lào, ông đã di cư vào Nam sau hiệp định chia đôi đất nước (1954) và làm việc trong Bộ Ngoại Giao của chính phủ miền Nam. Năm 1963, ông giữ chức Tham vụ tại toà Đại sứ Việt Nam Cộng Hoà tại Hoa Thịnh Đốn [dưới thời Ngô Đình Diệm]. Sau đó ông đã từ nhiệm và hiện nay [khi viết bài nầy năm 1968] đang cư ngụ tại Hoa Thịnh Đốn. (The Washingtonian)

Thà rằng liều một thân con,

Hoa dù rã cánh, lá còn xanh cây

Trăm năm trong cõi người ta

Chữ tài chữ mệnh khéo là ghét nhau

Có tài mà cậy chi tài.

Tính bài lót đó luồn đây

Có ba trăm lạng việc nầy mới xuôi

Râu hùm, hàm én, mày ngài

Vai năm tấc rộng, thân mười thước cao

WHY EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD READ KIM VAN KIEU

By TRAN VAN DINH,

adapted from an article in The Wasingtonian, September 1968

Thuy Kieu, the heroine and central figure of Kim Van Kieu, is Vietnam: beautiful, talented, condemned by her pale fate. Kim Trong, her chivalrous lover is the Vietnamese dream of thong nhut, of the unity of the Vietnamese nation that somehow the Vietnamese had never attained. Even if it is attained, it would only be by compromise, an imperfect unity: Thuy Kieu did not marry Kim Trong, although they did finally meet again. Her sister, Thuy Van, “a moon-face beauty,” is rather dull and unromantic, a suburban housewife, so to speak. And she was the compromise.

But, above all, Kim Van Kieu is the embodiment of the Vietnamese soul, the Vietnamese psyche. A friend of mine, a poet and writer who visited the United States, said to me when we discussed U.S. policy in Vietnam: “Had President Johnson, Mr. Rusk, Mr. Rostow, Mr. McNamara, the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, and all of the U.S. civilian and military personnel in Vietnam read Kim Van Kieu, instead of basing their judgments on meaningless facts and statistics, they would have avoided many serious and even fatal mistakes. The situation in our country would be different.”

“But how can they read and understand it?” I asked.

“Well, that is the difficulty,” my friend replied. “And that is why we as a nation survive until today. Nobody really could understand Kim Van Kieu but the Vietnamese. Perhaps a Jew can understand Vietnamese history; an Irishman, the Vietnamese romantic mind; the Russian, the Vietnamese pessimism; and the Italian, the Vietnamese sense of optimism and drama. No one, no American, can be a mixture of all these,” he sighted.

President Ho Chi Minh and Premier Pham Van Dong of North Vietnam have often told foreign visitors that “we Vietnamese revolutionaries are romantic and optimistic.” They just told them half of the truth.

The Vietnamese national behavior is basically and deeply formed by Buddhism, structured by the ethics of Confucianism, and mystified by Taoism. These were the three currents of religion and philosophy that penetrated Vietnam two thousand years ago, molded the Vietnamese character, and, in turn, were modified and influenced by the political and military fortunes of the country. Buddhism is erroneously pictured in the West as a religion of renunciation, of passivism, even of fatalism. In fact, Buddhism recognizes the realities of human sufferings, confront them, and tries to solve them. It accepts the intimate relations of cause and effect of the laws of Karma.

Each man is born with a Karma which in Vietnames is so or menh, meaning fate or destiny, which is the sum of not only his past but also his present actions. In other words, man is what he was and what he is. But, at the same time, man is not the eternal prisoner of his Karma: He can change it by correct and right behavior and good deeds. A Buddhist, therefore, relies on himself primarily for his own salvation, and, knowing the causes of man’s sufferings, he is tolerant and attentive to the shortcomings of his fellow man.

The Vietnamese believe that a man tuong (physiognomy) is not as important as his so, and his so is not as important as his duc (good deeds). Buddhism is a creatively active religion that opens hopeful alternatives, and that favors man’s struggle (dau tranh) for his betterment. The Viet Cong often use the word dau tranh in their pamphlets and programs.

Confucianism is not a religion, as it is principally concerned with social ethics. Confucianism reaches for order, not for salvation. Taoism admits a “universal order” and the participation of men in this universal order. Because of this concept of a higher order of the universe, Taoism was largely misunderstood and degenerated into all kinds of superstitious practices – ways to implore troi (heaven) to solve man’s problems. The usual exclamation is Troi, Phat (Heaven, Buddha).

Implacable Destiny

Thuy Kieu faces the brutalities of her Karma, the realities of life, and struggled with them to make them beter. She sold herself to save her family, acting in the true Buddhist compassion for the community of man in the true Confucian ethic of filial piety. In the darkest and most desperate moments of her life, she managed to keep her confidence in her good deeds, which she thought would eventually changed her Karma, her bac menh (pale fate).

When they describe the courage of the Viet Cong, and the North Vietnamese on the battlefields or in suicide raids, most Western journalists call them fanatics. But they are not. They face the realities of the Karma of their country (cộng nghiệp), which is the sum of the Karmas of all individuals, and they are determined to change it. The Vietnamese national Karma is marked by division among Vietnamese, by foreign invasions and interventions. That Karma is indeed hard, the Vietnamese national fate is indeed pale, the Vietnamese national destiny is indeed implacable.

Some thoughtful Vietnamese relate this Karma to the past conquest by Vietnam, often carried on with much bloodshed and brutality. From the eleventh century until the early nineteenth century, Vietnam, in her forceful nam tiến (march to the South) destroyed and exterminated peoples and civilizations. The Kingdom of Champa, a flourishing state, disappeared from the map at the end of fifteenth century. The Vietnamese military expeditions into Laos and Cambodia were usually bloody and ruthless. But today, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese are not giving up: They are convinced that fighting against foreign armies will change the Karma of their country for better. The South Vietnamese soldier, although Vietnamese, is not fighting as well; he is outside the stream of Vietnamese history, he is associated with the foreigners who divided Vietnam. He is feeling, in a way, less Vietnamese.

When the United States bombs North Vietnam, the North Vietnamese believe that the United States is accumulating wrong deeds that eventually will turn against it. By resisting American pressures, they believe they serve a just cause. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese soldiers accept death in order to allow the Vietnamese rivers and mountains to remain green, the Vietnamese earth and water to endure. When Thuy Kieu sold herself to save her family, she said: “It is better that I should sacrifice myself alone, It matters little if a flower falls if the tree could keep its leaves green”

The principal themes of Kim Van Kieu are life and fate, the inherent contradiction between tai (talent or know-how) and tai (disaster, misfortune), the cause and effect relationship between tai and menh (fate, Karma). The novel opens with these sentences: “Within the span of a hundred years of human existence, What a bitter struggle is waged between talent and fate,” and concludes with: “When one is endowed with talent, do not rely on it.”

Austerity is Attractive

To the Vietnamese, the United States indeed has tai (the know-how), but it is courting with tai (disaster). So they are reluctant to be near disaster, to be impressed by it, or to be associated with it. In Vietnam, the United States displays plenty of tai – air bases, buildings, and machinery – but the Buddhist concept, the Confucian ethic, and the Taoist concept of universal harmony and universal order totally disregard material wealth. In the Vietnamese hierarchy of values, a rich man is a troc phu (filthy rich), and a poor scholar is thanh ban (immaculate poor). The traditional Vietnamese social order followed this scale: first the si (scholars, men of letters); second, the nong (peasants, farmers); third, the cong (workers); fourth, the thuong (businessmen, merchants); and fifth, and last, the binh (soldiers). It is too bad that the huge American military commitment has increasingly alienated the intellectuals, destroyed the life of the peasantry, and based itself on the mercants and the soldiers. Thuy Kieu herself was a victim of money, of corrupted officials who asked for bribes: “To bribe the officials here and to circumvent the authorities there, Three hundred gold taels are necessary to arrive at a satisfactory settlement.”

When the United States pours money into Vietnam, creating in the process hordes of corrupted officials and generals, when the big Americans walk among the frail and slender Vietnamese in the cities and in the countryside, they create a feeling of resentment and suspicion. There are no doubt, among the thousands of Vietnamese bar girls in Saigon, those who think of themselves as modern, mini-Thuy Kieu, longing for Kim Trong, who may be the distant image of President Ho Chi Minh in the North, or, more likely, the Viet Cong agitation cadre in the town. Some bar girls contribute generously to the “Viet Cong” funds for that reason. Those who marry the rich GI for money have to put on airs. They are called me my (mother of the American). Even the word my (which means “beautiful”) has been distorted to meo (deformed, ugly).

When, in the summer of 1966, the Saigon regime used American tanks and planes to suppress the Buddhists in the austere and intellectual city of Hue (as represented by the militant monk Thich Tri Quang, who refuses to ride in a motor car), a great number of Vietnamese concluded that the materialistic Americans are in Vietnam to destroy the ascetic good men of the country. The same feeling was aroused with the arrest and imprisonment of teachers and students, the “immaculate poors” of the Vietnamese society.

The disdain for soldiers, as well as for physically big persons, can be seen in the description of Tu Hai, the rebel in Kim Van Kieu. He was “an imposing man with a tiger mustache [ Vietnamese, especially old people, grow beards, not mustaches], a swallow jaw [very strong], a pair of eyebrows like silkworms; he was five decimeters broad-shouldered and ten meters high.” Although the old Chinese and Vietnamese meter is about one-third of the modern one, it is obvious that Nguyen Du purposedly exaggerated Tu Hai’s physical stature. Thuy Kieu did not love him; she used him. To her she was a vu phu (a man who uses force, a rude man) and he was not the scholar Kim Trong was.

Reunification: Difficult Dream

Vietnam has had a good crop of military heroes, but they have all been intellectuals and scholars. Marshall Tran Hung Dao who defeated the Mongolians three time in the thirteen century, wrote books; Marshall Nguyen Van Thanh, who helped Emperor Gia Long to unify Vietnam in 1802, has left the mot beautiful “funeral oration to the dead soldiers” in Vietnamese epic literature; General Vo Nguyen Giap, commander in chief of the North Vietnamese army and the architect of victory at Dien Bien Phu, was a professor of history.

When the United States talks about an independent South Vietnam it deeply hurts the Vietnamese dream of Thong Nhat, of unity, the Kim Trong dream. No one in Vietnam could advocate the permanent division of the country. Article I of the 1967 Constitution of South Vietnam says: “Vietnam is an independent country and territorially indivisible.” Article CVII of the same constitution stipulates that “This article and Article I can not be nullified or amended.” But, as in KimVan Kieu, the dream of unity will have to be satisfied with a compromise.

[Source: The Washingtonian - September 1968]