A Song of Vietnam
LO KHE, Late at night, when the silence of the village
and the emptiness of her damp stone cottage become too deep to
bear, Pham Thi Mui begins to sing - familiar songs of her ancestors
that transport her back into what seemed a time of certainty.
Her husband dead, her children grown, her era past, Mui, 85, is
alone in the dark on her broad wooden bed with only her past for
company. She sings of mandarins and courtesans, love and
loneliness, great wars and teasing dalliances, tapping the jaunty
rhythms of her songs with the tip of one finger.
"Daytime is fine," she said. "There are plenty of people around.
But at night I can't keep the sadness away. That's when I sing. If I
had the strength, I'd sing all through the night."
The songs she knows could last her even longer than that. Mui is
one of the last masters of Ca Tru, a 600-year-old form of sung
poetry that was once hugely popular, inspiring famous poets and
drawing lively crowds to musical contests. It is one of the
disappearing traditional art forms that Vietnamese are struggling to
preserve as the modern world overwhelms them.
There was a time when great mandarins called Mui to their courts
to sing, when she was young and beautiful and knew how to play
with words and tease her audience. Now her audience is all but
gone. And she knows that once she dies, much of her art will die
with her. "There's almost no one left like me," she said. "There's so
much to teach, so much to save, so much work, so many different
songs. Even if I can teach some of it, I can never teach it all. And
who would come to listen?"
Three decades of war isolated most of Vietnam from the cultural
changes that are sweeping it now. But the years of conflict also
hastened the death of many of its traditions. "It was wartime," said
Mui's daughter Nguyen Thi Sen, 43, who lives nearby. "No one
was thinking about singing. If we hadn't had the war, Ca Tru
would be more popular now. Bombs, bullets, where was the time
for Ca Tru? It all came to a stop for 30 years."
The warfare also broke a four-generation chain of Ca Tru singers
that began with Mui's great-grandmother. Her daughter, Sen,
never had a chance to learn the art, and today she is a farmer like
the other women in the village.
But then, four years ago, something happened that seemed to Mui
like a miracle. Her 12-year-old granddaughter, Lan, sitting over
the cooking pots at her family's hearth, began tapping the Ca Tru
rhythms with her chopsticks and singing to herself.
"I don't know why," said Lan, now 16. "I heard my grandmother
singing and I just remembered the words. It was easy."
On a recent evening, as some old friends drifted off to sleep on the
broad wooden bed, Mui began quietly to sing, a long-remembered
tune about wine, flirtation and the contentment of intimacy.
"Wait, wait!" cried her granddaughter, running to the cupboard for
a notebook and a pen. "O.K., Grandma, go on. Do that again."
"Slow down," she ordered. "You're singing too fast." But Mui
couldn't stop. "I have to sing this way," she said. "It's the only way
I can remember the words."
By Seth Mydans - The New York Times - March 30, 2001.
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