To Love and To Be Forced Love Duong Thu Huong and The Sleeping Tigers

To Love and To Be Forced LoveDuong Thu Huong and
The Sleeping Tiger

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To Love and To Be Forced LoveDuong Thu Huong and
The Sleeping Tigers

Nguyen Viet Nu
Editor: Nam Truc

IN GUISE OF FOREWORD

    A many-wretched thing is
    Love handled improperly,
    Or a love unpredestined,
    Or misplaced affection,
    Or a treasure ill-received
    By a lover unworthy.

                          and

To love is to die a bit,
For much that one has given
Little is seldom returned.
And who may know whether or not
There’s betrayal or neglect
At each corner of the way?

Those immortal verses were composed by poet Xuan Dieu.
There has always been much talk about unhappiness resulting from a love affair, but very little has been said about unhappiness incurred in being loved by somebody.
So there have been frequent references to the death of people who had been betrayed, or neglected by their lovers, but one has rarely heard mention about deaths caused by a faithful and devoted love, and one was almost never aware of the tender happiness incurred from having one’s love neglected or betrayed!
The origins of these contradictions concerning love can be explained as follows:

People suffer from being passionately loved
By lovers with a brain, but with no heart, who own them.
People die for being yoked to a frenzy love
By tigers with a heart who fake to be asleep.
The people who have a mind but not a heart appeared in the Tran Duy’s article * “The Giants” published in the Giai Pham Mua Thu (Fall Literary Works) Journal, 1956 Edition, on the occasion of the government of the North’s redress in the Agrarian Reform.
    Born in 1920, Party member Tran Duy had participated in the revolution for 11 years in the capacity of a Viet Bac resistance zone Communist Party cultural cadre.
    When the Agrarian Reform that took place to seize the land of the wealthy and share it with the poor farmers and lead to a million deaths among the landowners’ isolated, starved relatives...Tran Duy made use of this legend to warn that the Communist regime caused more evil than good to man and would never bring happiness to mankind.
    That prophecy has proved right today, and it would be out of place recalling it unless there is a good reason for it...and in fact there is.
Indeed, some half a century ago, Prophet Tran Duy did not just alert on the fact that the Communist “lover” was a calamity to the humanity whom “their love would yoke”, but that he also furnished a means to eliminate the scourge. This means works especially well today; it deserves to be analyzed for application in present Vietnam.  Thus, we invite you to read Tran Duy:

      The author related that as humanity was being tormented by vicious demons, the Emperor of Jade dispatched the team of giants down to earth to come to the rescue. But in reality this team killed man more than it did the demons.
The misfortune of those “loved”  humans was even greater than when there had been none of the
celestial “lover” troops dispatched to earth. When the laments and cries echoed to the heavens, the Emperor of Jade summoned back the Kitchen God and the team of giants.
    The Emperor of Jade was filled with wrath:
    -Your merits are small compared with the enormity of your crimes; how dared  you go out on a spree where human lives were at stake?
    -How dared you be so callous to the feelings of the human soul and mess up man’s very livelihood?
    -How dared you stomp about on their very songs, laughter and worldly flirting?

    During the whole time the Emperor of Jade was holding his inquisition the  Kitchen God wept copiously (perhaps recalling the scenes of the denunciation movement, of the execution of landowners in front of the People’s Courts, and the reeducational concentration camps on earth?), but the team of giants were gaping at each other, looking at the Emperor of Jade without
understanding the reason for his wrath, watching insensibly the copious weeping of the Kitchen God...
    The Emperor of Jade asked:
    -Don’t you feel pain at all?
    The Venus Star noticed the strange countenance of the giants. To him, their inability to differentiate between the laughter and the cries suggested that there must be some organs missing in them.
   After the Emperor of Jade had the Southern Cross Star and the Polar Star go over the data he realized that, since the giants had been molded essentially for their size and that there had not been enough material to make hearts, some of the giants dispatched to earth did not have a heart.
The Emperor’s face turned pale. He then delivered a heartening address:
    -...You must treasure mankind. Whatever you do that makes man suffer, and continue to suffer, is considered failure even if you have discharged your function well. You cannot live with man if you only have a brain and not a heart.
After those instructions the giants returned to earth, and like before, they leveled mountains, dammed rivers, drains seas, toiled to clear the earth of all obstacles before they rested.
The Emperor of Jade watched the earth from his window: he wondered why there were still cries...?
Using the Emperor of Jade’s heartening address above to allude to the Marxist-Leninist ideology Tran Duy was able to unveil the chimera, the contradictions, and the no-way-out vicious circle of the Communist doctrine:
Despite his instructions that “For people who possess a brain but not heart life is impossible among human beings” the Emperor of Jade kept letting the nonhearted people come back to earth to share human life in order, “just like before”, to level mountains and dam rivers. The word cluster “just like before” of  which Tran Duy made use, is barely three short words, but it spanned a half century up till now, and has been the cause of some ten million deaths as well as the cruel rope that has tied 70 million Vietnamese! And yet the Emperor of Jade was still surprised as he asked why the weeping persisted on earth!

 

Then he summoned the Giants and the Kitchen God back to heaven to confer and to report, and he gave them his humanism filled instructions:
”To win the human heart you must love mankind. To show love to mankind you must know what happiness is in order to share it with man, you must know what suffering is to partake human pain (...). Should a happy event come amidst a time of sadness for mankind, do not force them to smile (...). If  something is praiseworthy, but humankind had not been filled in on it, do not force them to praise. Although something is the will of Heaven, but it has no place yet in their hearts, then that will is still not right (...).
The use of the sword or the arrow is not necessarily the only means to coerxe the human heart, etc...”It is truly a paradise of love of which poet Xuan Dieu was able to unveil the negative side:

The path was so soft, so who would care what it was?
When one realized lastly, thorns had been in one’s flesh.
Sadlly, one saw one had just crossed the Rubicon!

Indeed in his heavenly realm the Emperor of Jade taught that there had to be sharing of happiness and misfortune with the human beings, but what had happened as he was making his address was that mankind was actually enduring a life shared with the nonhearted giants whom the Emperor of Jade knew well that because they lacked a heart they could not discriminate the people who laughed from those who cried!
The Emperor of Jade nevertheless persisted in his resolve to plug the source of sorrow of the human world as the Kitchen God reported:
“With regard to the tears that the demons have caused, humankind, who added their strength to that of the celestial beings, would be able to destroy the demons. But with regard to the tears that the celestial beings have caused, should humankind dare offend the Celestial Court by clashing with the celestial beings? Consequently, humans shedded tears again, but their cries were more muffled and lamenting...”
It could not be more logical. The Kitchen God was the God of the hearth who was permanently present in every Vietnamese household. Having witnessed “the  cries more and more muffled and lamenting” of our Vietnamese nation - the injustices, the oppression, the corruption caused by the colonialists, the imperialists – the nation dared unite with the Communist Party to exterminate them. But when the Communist Party members were corrupt would the nation dare to clash with them? To clash with the Communist Party members meant one was anti-Communist, then one was jailed!
The reality was the nonhearted giants were living among the humans, and so the Kitchen God’s following conclusion about these giants constituted a frightening calamity to mankind:
Ignorance could be altered by education. Inexperience could be improved by performance. Skills could be perfected by practice. But in the absence of a heart, what books, what reasoning, what instructions could generate sentiments!
Dispatching beings without a heart, without sentiments on a mission of love for which they were now present on earth and which the earth could not do without...Then, what was there to be done? The Emperor of Jade pressed his forehead with his hand to think hard and consulted the Celestial Court for a plan.
The stars respectfully suggested:
-...Why didn’t the Celestial Court create lots of flowers, lots of butterflies, lots of songs and laughter to the earth?
The Kitchen God said:
-If we did that it would be like creating more flowers and butterflies, more songs and laughter for the nonhearted giants to keep treading on.
Then the Kitchen God suggested the manufacture of more hearts for the giants, but the Celestial Court unanimously warned that there was no material left! Finally the Celestial Court agreed with the Kitchen God that it would be wise to make the celestial beings the size of man only, that is,
with small hands in order not to crush to death the human beings; but with a heart to live in rythm with mankind...

Like all the plays performed in theaters, in the Vietnamese tradition, though they might be extremely dramatic, they had to have a “happy ending”. Tran Duy ended the legend by letting “the earth rejoice hoping for the day The Emperor of Jade would make more hearts for those giants”.This was the chimera by means of which the Communist “lover with a brain but without a heart” led his mankind “yoked to his love” to her demise.
He knew well the Celestial Court was out of building material, and yet he sowed the hope for mankind that one day the Emperor of Jade would make more hearts to the nonhearted giants!

If the plant had run out of material, how would the skilled builder, the Emperor of Jade himself, be able to mold an item as he had wished?
It was sowing a chimera ideal to entertain the hope that:
“Walking on clouds to seek paradise on earth” caused the persons “ being imposed love” to forget the stark reality that they were living by the side of the persons who-love-but-do-not-have-a-heart who were increasingly becoming some kind of hungry tigers, who not only devored the “loved
persons” outside their organization, but also the skulls of the hearted giants.

Tran Duy and over 300 writers and artists in the group Humanistic Fine Literary and Artistic Works, in majority Communist Party members, were the hearted giants, the hungry tigers who, every time earthly blood and tears rose to immerse anything below the Celestial Court, and the Kitchen was summoned back to the heavens to make his report, and because they had a brain, knew how to fake being asleep, to let the grumbles and the laments quiet down...so that the Emperor of Jade would reissue imperial “decrees”  ordering “resolutions” to “Rectify”, to “Innovate”, etc,,,, in order that “just like before”...continue to raze forests to the ground, to fill up the seas, to pulverize rocks, in a fashion that convulsed the world...to toil  and toil until the earth had become clear of all obstacles, and no less!
This was the Vietnamese nation’s cruel vicious circle: the knowledge that  “Unfamiliarity was curable by practice...Ignorance was treatable by education...But where the heart was absent, what books...what decrees would generate feelings?” Yet, the Emperor of Jade persisted in asserting that the corps of celestial troops was essential in their role of “lovers” to the
earthlings. So when the blood and tears of the people being loved filled up like a sea of suffering that “number of non-hearted giants kept on thinking they had successfully brought back laughter and joy to the world!”
The Vietnamese nation has writhed in pain, having been caught in this sphere of cruelty for over the past half century.  The cruelty was due for sure to the natural disaster the Emperor of Jade had sent down, in the fact that the team of giants had been mistakenly molded without a heart, but it was also due to the fact that the people who already had a heart even before the team
of giants descended to earth have now lost their heart too! This was truly hereditary injustice, because our nation could no longer make out which people were hearted and which were nonhearted, in order either to give trust, and love, or to run away  promptly to avoid “being yoked to their love”!
A typical example of the people who had a heart vibrant with feelings, but  which was later lost, was in the person of Luu Trong Lu:
Did you not hear autumn
In the dim thrilled moonlight?
.............
You did not hear the forest in the fall, my love;
Those rustling dry forest autumn leaves turned yellow,
Which the bewildered fawn-color deer treaded on.

The vibrant heart of the poet had stirred the emotion in tens of thousand earthly hearts; it had given the world the songs, the music, the flowers, the butterflies that embellish life. But after the Emperor of Jade created paradise to the world, the poet’s heart was robbed.

 Luu Trong Lu had had to carry out a mental struggle, to strip off, to destroy his former personality
in order be in tune with the Team of Giants to do the “real literary and artistic work”, to give up the romantic dreams.

 Here is a poem after poet Luu Trong Lu had lost his heart: No more bewilderment under the autumn moon:
...Quietened down were my former day sufferings,
The yellow leaves fell but the cold wasn’t there yet.
And the fawn deer no longer felt confused, my love...

Unfortunately, because they did not have a heart, the team of giants was stupefied when the Emperor of Jade made them account for their crimes:
How dared you tread on the very songs, even on the laughter, and on the butterflies themselves of the worldly realm?”
They did not know they had committed any of them.  On the contrary, “The team of giants was rather rejoicing and was persuaded they had done heaven and man’s will”.

Poet Xuan Dieu was rejoicing, too. After a series of stirring “love” poems that had brought fame to him as a poet, Xuan Dieu had to struggle...to erase that fame, to struggle to strip off the old Xuan Dieu, and finally lost his loving heart, as he showed it when he boasted:
”In every hard struggle we were engaged
We received the visit of Uncle Ho.
Listening to his advices and teaching
We yearningly wished to follow his steps...
We solemnly pledged to heed his counsels:
We’d resolutely... Strip off our old self.”

In the words of Nguyen Chi Thien, because the people of North Vietnam had to live in the region where everyone was slowly going to lose his heart, his soul, they were resolved to abandon it, to relinquish the love they had in childhood:

”O land!  Northern half of the S land shape.
I wish... Yes, how I wish to leave you behind!
I have loved you since I was ten years old.
You betrayed me and so my life was ruined.
Sweet love had now turned into fierce hatred.
Should my leg be cut, and my hand severed,
To pay the price for abandonning you,
I am resigned and see it as sheer luck.
For, having lived near you I had lost all.
For courting you, I had turned animal!Nonetheless, after having shed his old body and soul, Xuan Dieu had become a giant without a heart, one who was no longer able to know that humankind was loathsome of him and that from him they had risked death to run away for fear of being subjected to the love of the people without a heart which he typified – But since the fact of being neglected and betrayed by the lovers without a heart was the most fortunate thing for the nation was unbeknownst to him, Xuan Dieu continued his mission of love assigned by...the Emperor of  Jade and clung to the flesh and bones of the love-subjected people:
“I am of the same flesh and bones as my PEOPLE,
We sweat profusely and our tears are boiling hot...”                                   ***
The denied love of Xuan Dieu during the period 1945-1954 and the suffering of this multitude of people on whom a match was forced only occurred on the northern half of the S-shaped land. But after 1975 this forced match also spread to the other lower half. The corps of celestial soldiers returned to impart love, to rid of thickets to clear the whole S-shaped land completely!
Among these celestial troops was the giant Duong Thu Huong who had volunteered to be a pioneering general on a mission to clear the land of undergrowth, and claimed to be the plowman “plowing the first furrow”...with her book Novel Without Theme or The Triumphal Arch about which literary critic Thuy Khue wrote:
The “Novel Without Theme” does not write only for the generation of youth, but also for many other generations ranging from the mothers forced to make the offering of their children, to the fathers delighted to take their children to deliver to the Triumphal Arch of Victory, to the young women, whose beauty had been ruined, who had thrown away a life in patient expectations.
“Written for the young, unfortunate, erotically overexcited women, sexually repressed for tens of centuries because the ‘nation’ had robbed their lovers, had killed their sweethearts.
“Written for the trains of heroic fighting men moving with an escort of prefabricated coffins to take care of the need for a final resting place.
“Written for the country people of the back-line regions who, during their entire life, had exchanged the word “sacrifice” for poverty, utter deprivations, a backward living standard and a religious doctrine of the Middle Age.
“Everything was but convulsive, moribund in the degenerate space where the occupants had been robbed of the meaning of life, of love, of happiness. In the name of The Nation the most precious values had been robbed from the people to sacrifice to the Gods, to use as offerings to the new God...”
The people “for whom” Duong Thu Huong wrote in The Novel Without Theme in 1991 were the masses on whom love had been forced by the giants without a  heart: they were forced  to love the Homeland,  forced to love the Party, forced to love the grand leaders Stalin and Mao tse-Tung, etc...
The Humanistic Fine Literary and Artistic Works Group had been writing “for them” since 1956. Tran Duy, personnally, had submitted a petition to the Celestial Court accusing that the Communist Party “had trampled on the very life, the soul and the livelihood of mankind”. Yet 40 years later Communism still marched toward the “Triumphal Arch”, prompting author Duong Thu Huong to reaffirm that all that the literary artistic group, of which Tran Duy was a member, had written, was the sheer truth.
Thus, contrary to what Duong Thu Huong had claimed, the author of the Novel Without Theme was not the plowman “to plow the first furrow”. But it didn’t matter whether it was the first or the last furrow.
The point that mattered was the search to understand why, from the pioneer plowmen, including Tran Duy, who went to clear the homeland of undergrowth in order to get the Hundred Flowers to Bloom in the North, to the plowmen among whom was Duong Thu Huong, who contributed to make the Hundred Flowers Continue to Bloom in the Homeland, the Vietnamese nation still fell in
ruins, tumbled to pieces, and the Vietnamese people still being robbed of their existence and of their many soul generations.
Time had come to put an end to that cruel “STILL” that drowned the nation in blood and tears; for that reason the writer of this work did the analysis of  the causes of the failure of Tran Duy: this hearted giant shouted his throat hoarse to make known the suffering of humanity and forcefully condemned the crimes being perpetrated by the hordes of inhuman people of the Duong Thu
Huong kind. But when Tran Duy mistakenly addressed himself to the Marxist-Leninist Emperor of Jade, the father of the nonhearted people, for help, how could he expect the suffering of humankind to cease? Moreover, the Emperor of Jade seduced, duped Tran Duy into: cheerfully waiting for the day the Emperor of Jade would make more new hearts for the nonhearted giants,
while the materials of the Celestial Court had run out completely. Tran Duy was caught in a vicious circle with no way out and he sowed chimeric hopes “for hearts” to the earth, prompting all the other plowmen to slow down, or worse still to cross their arms and wait for the day the nonhearted would become the hearted and would be capable of lending a hand in the clearing of
the undergrowth of the homeland. Unintentionally, they helped the hordes of  nonhearted people to have the opportunity to thrive, to swallow without  chewing Tran Duy, and to tread on the entire nation. A treading so violent that the giant Duong Thu Huong herself had to lament: Let alone man, even wood and rock would shed tears because of the pain.”
Duong Thu Huong had shared the pain of the nation. She was therefore a hearted giant. But like in the case of Tran Duy, the fact of owning a heart which could shed tears was not enough.

 There was a need for an effective, urgent way to stop the flow of tears. And also there was a need for a brain capable of replacing the tears with the smiles. There was the necessity to
use all the sincerity, the goodwill to prevent the smiles from withering on the chronically dried lips of Mother Vietnam. All that is necessary to revive and to preserve the freshness of this homeland has been presented in the book you are holding. The reason for using Duong Thu Huong in the title is that this hearted giant was repeating the song of the giant Xuan Dieu who
had lost his heart:
“I am of the same flesh and blood as my people”Duong Thu Huong was sowing the old love. I hope the Vietnamese “people” will be sincerely “loved” by the human heart, not have love “forced” on them like  in the past half century!
                                 Nguyen Viet Nu
                                 Northern California
                                 March 5, 1993