Daughters of the River Huong – a Vietnamese royal concubine and her descendants
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Title: Daughters of the River Huong - A Vietnamese Royal Concubine and Her Descendants
Author: Uyen Nicole Duong
ISBN: 1-928928-16-1
Description
Amid the turmoil of history, the daughters of Hue’s River Huong in Vietnam struggle to fulfill their destinies in a cross-cultural ethnic saga stretching from ancient Hue to romantic Paris to today’s Manhattan. Beginning in the Violet City of Hue, these stories of a Vietnamese royal concubine and her descendants span four generations, portraying Vietnam’s struggle for independence. Taken together, the tales of survival for these women reveal a Vietnamese female cultural identity that traces back to the extinct Kingdom of Champa in central Vietnam. This tale is wrapped in the nostalgic mystique of the dying days of the last Vietnamese monarchy, the brutality of colonization and revolution, and a family feud that brings together Andre, a troubled French Romeo and Si, a romantic Vietnamese girl. The web of history and Baudelaire verses supply the texture for a "taboo" love story told in the knowing voice of a Vietnamese girl who, as she grows into adulthood, ennobles her forbidden bond into a spiritual love that transcends age, generations, and cultural barriers. The love story between Andre and Si signifies the death of French romanticism in her colony and the opening of war-torn Vietnam and its exotic culture to the inexorable modernism of global interdependence. This impressionistically painted portrait will remind the reader of the sweeping stories in Gone with the Wind and The Thorn Birds, with the humanist touches of The Joy Luck Club.
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Sample Chapter
Dew’s Memoir ( Hue, 1949)
1) Aunt Ginseng, Daughter of the Revolution
The first beautiful woman I met in my life was my own mother. The villagers ofQuynh Anh called her Princess Cinnamon. The silk merchants called her Madame Que. I called her Ma.
The silk traders and villagers of Quynh Anh who came to the house to take orders from Ma and helped her prepare festivities for ancestors’ worships said the porcelain skin of her cheeks was like lotus petals. They said the stream of her black hair was shinier than polished lacquer, and compared her slender frame to the best of willow trees that bent graciously in the strong wind without breaking. They alleged that as a young girl, Ma once took a nap under a magnolia tree, her stream of black hair spreading around her head, emanating the fragrance of cinnamon oil, which she loved. A snake was enticed by the fragrance, and crawled onto the stream of her hair. Struck by the beauty of Ma’s face, the snake became spellbound, frozen as though it had seen a goddess. When Ma woke up and moved her head, the snake silently crawled away. Even the meanest of creatures would be awed by Ma’s beauty, they said.
I was the ugly daughter of a beauty queen. The silk traders and villagers said I was a cute and nice little girl, but no one described me in terms of lotuses, lacquer and willow trees. My nose was too flat, my mouth too full, my skin so pale it almost reflected a bluish shade. Only my eyes resembled Ma’s, which the traders and villagers compared to longan nuts in autumn ponds.
Ours was a household full of women and no men. Ma had all kinds of domestic help, all coordinated by Nanny Mai. Like a fortress of humans, they surrounded Ma, catered to her needs, and supposedly protected her. Yet, unknown to Ma, the servants gossiped, feeding me with information about certain things. For example, the servants disputed the traders overblown ideas about Ma’s beauty. Even Nanny Mai would join in and agree that Ma was not anywhere as pretty as the Mystique Concubine herself. Or Ma’s twin sister, my Aunt Ginseng.
Ma told me the Mystique Concubine had died at the height of her beauty, falling into a deep slumber from which she never emerged. Her soul just simply flew away, escorted by nightingales. Ma was twenty-five years old when the Mystique Concubine passed on. Aunt Ginseng had already left home, too busy fighting in the jungles of north Vietnam to return home for her mother’s funeral. Like Lady Trieu of ancient Vietnam fighting the Wu’s from China, Auntie Ginseng wore her golden armor, pointing a sword to the sky, riding an elephant. Every little girl born in Vietnam (even a product of French elementary school like me) knew the legend of Lady Trieu who pledged she would ride the wind to save her people from drowning in slavery. The enemies were looking for Aunt Ginseng all the time, so, I had to keep a secret. I was never to mention Auntie Ginseng to anyone, except within the household.
“I don’t understand why your mother had to tell these tales,” Nanny Mai said one day.
“Your grandmother died in a fire in the middle of a war, and your Auntie has been in a French jail up north for having spied for Ho Chi Minh troops. There’s no such thing as a young woman riding elephants nowadays.”
When I repeated Nanny Mai’s words to Ma, she went after Nanny Mai and slapped the poor woman in the face.
“How can you betray me so?” Ma clenched her teeth.
Nanny Mai teared and apologized over and over again. Seeing the red marks on Nanny Mai’s cheeks, Ma knelt down on the floor and begged for the Nancy’s forgiveness, apologizing to the woman who had helped raise both her and me. Shocked to see Ma on the floor, Nanny Mai asked me to ignore the bad stories she told me earlier, saying she was very sorry to have confused me, confirming that indeed my aunt was a woman warrior riding elephants like Lady Trieu. I watched the two grown-ups with amazement and amusement. I knew, instinctively then, that not only did Ma have beauty, but she also had a genuine, fierce flare for the dramatic.
***
Despite the number of female servants, Ma insisted on doing certain things herself.Like taking care of the altar room.
It was in the altar room that my father, the black and white photograph of an Annamese mandarin, lived together with his father, the Hong Lo Tu Khanh, first rank literary officer and astronomer of the Nguyen court, and Admiral Nguyen Tung, who adopted Ma. They all lived in an array of black and white photographs framed in rosewood carvings, which Ma polished everyday with fresh lemon juice to make the rosewood shine.
All photographs and silk paintings were placed lower than the picture of my emperor grandfather, King Thuan Thanh of Annam, taken at his coronation. Later on, I discovered the same picture had made its way to history books. My grandfather had become the legend in Vietnamese history as an exiled, anti-French king, admired by generations of Vietnamese patriots. But in the picture sitting in that smoky altar room, my emperor grandfather looked like a boy and did not seem much older than I. He wasn’t even all that handsome or smart, just a dazed boy dressed up in fancy clothes. At least he was a real person. His wife, the dead Mystique Concubine, on the other hand, was preserved in a silk portrait. There were no photographs of her anywhere. In the silk painting, she looked surreal, and I could not imagine her face.
Much later, there was a time when I turned 16 and I was about to leave home to study at the French convent in the highlands. This was a costly and complex arrangement that Ma painstakingly accomplished, since the Convent wasn’t just for any girl. Before I left, I asked Ma whether she loved my father. She looked at me as though the question was totally inappropriate, as if love was a concept meant to remain unspoken forever.
I couldn’t remember exactly when Ma first took me to the altar and made me learn those names and faces of those dead men, including my father’s. When the children I played with asked me where my father was, I would say automatically that he was on the altar. Ma would burn incense everyday and place plenty of fresh fruits there. The spirits could only consume those fruits symbolically, so I got to eat them all, getting all the blessings of my ancestors by devouring their leftovers, each time Ma rearranged her tray.
***
Three items on the altar received Ma’s special attention. She polished them with cinnamon-scented oil and covered them with a satin red silk cloth. I often watched her handle them with utmost deference. Occasionally she let me touch them. Just a light touch. The bright green jade phoenix that shone under candle light, and the two ivory plaques, each bearing carved red Chinese characters, spoke of Ma’s royal and mandarin heritage. The jade, as well as the elephant tusks from which these plaques were made, must have been thousands of years old, Ma said. The older they were, the prettier they got. The phoenix, a gift from King Thuan Thanh to his Mystique Concubine, identified my grandmother as the uncrowned queen of Annam. The two ivory plaques were like ID cards, held by my two grandfathers, commemorating their lifetime career and loyalty to the Nguyen Court.
When I touched the items, the coldness of jade and ivory sent chills along my spinal cord. To reach them, I would have to stand on the lacquer divan, studded with mother-of-pearl inlay, imposingly situated in front of the altar table.
***
On the altar, there were two rosewood frames that remained blank. Ma reserved them for Aunt Ginseng and Uncle Forest. She polished the empty frames the same way she polished the dead men’s photographs. She said her sister and brother had left home. Either they would return one day, or they would become spirits to join the ancestral altar.
“Why did they leave home?” I asked.
Ma pulled me into her lap and whispered the stories to me. There was an airplane circling the air over the village Quynh Anh once, and a young village girl, friend of Auntie Ginseng, had taken out a hand-held mirror she always carried in her blouse pocket. French soldiers thought she was trying to send a signal to anti-French rebels who could shoot down the plane. So French soldiers shot the young village girl. Aunt Ginseng saw this. She became mad. So she left home to make sure no innocent young girls would ever get shot again.
Uncle Forest , on the other hand, left for an entire different reason. He had been raised, not only by his mother, the Mystique Concubine, but also by his adoptive father, Admiral Nguyen Tung. The Admiral died when Uncle Forest was eight years old. Years later, after a devastating flood swept through the village of Quynh Anh, the family had to move the Admiral’s skeleton to a new burial ground. The Admiral’s remains were uncovered, and the young Forest got to hold the skull of his adoptive father in his hands. Something touched the core of his soul during the experience. He made his decision then. He left a note for both my grandmother and Ma bidding farewell, announcing that he’d be joining Auntie Ginseng somewhere in the north. He even wanted to go to Japan to study the Japanese experience of industrialization and decolonization. That was what both his biological father and adoptive father would have wanted him to do, he wrote in his note.
The year was 1925. My Uncle Forest was fifteen.
***
“What do they look like?” I asked Ma.
“Like Lady Trieu and Thai Hoc the Patriot.”
It was easy for a young girl to get a notion of Lady Trieu, because even the maids who couldn’t read a newspaper would talk about the gold-armored woman. It was not as easy to get acquainted with Thai Hoc the Patriot.
“Did he look anything like Napoleon?” I asked once.
“No, no, no, no,” Ma’s voice shrilled. “Not at all! Napoleon was French!”
I was disappointed. Napoleon was the conqueror, the patriot, the greatest man of all men.
Something must have clicked in Ma’s head after my question that day. She abruptly withdrew me from French Catholic elementary school to enroll me at Lycee Dong Khanh. I had to sit through an examination first, and to the best of my recollection, I did very poorly. The maids in the house gossiped that when one was the daughter of the richest woman in Hue, one got admitted to wherever one wanted to be! There, on the steps of the red brick schoolhouse called Lycee Dong Khanh, a group of older students showed me a leaflet with Thai Hoc the Patriot’s face on it. I formed my first notion of Uncle Forest then. On the leaflet appeared a short-haired, square-faced man with a trim moustache and bushy brows, looking on grimly. He was no Napoleon, but he had his own appeal.
The students told me Thai Hoc the Patriot led a revolution and died at 26 years of age on a French guillotine before I was born. Before he died, he said something like: “if a man does not achieve success, at least he achieves a legend.” Thai Hoc the Patriot died, so he became a legend. Legend meant death. Death was what happened to a man who led a revolution and achieved no success. Those who succeeded lived.
At least my matriculation to Lycee Dong Khanh helped me understand why Ma left those two frames blank. Auntie Ginseng and Uncle Forest left home to become legends. They could be dead at any time. Then, they would join the spirits that became my roots, my home. Meanwhile, I was to keep another secret. I wasn’t supposed to mention Uncle Forest to any one, except within the household. I did not want Uncle Forest to be guillotined like Thai Hoc the Patriot. I pledged to myself I would keep my lips sealed.
***
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Table of Contents
Part One - Simone’s Memoir (New York City 1985)
1 Christopher
2 Lotus Ponds
3 Mey Mai’s Séance
4 Spirit of the Perfume River
Part Two - The Memoir of Huyen Phi, the Mystique Concubine ( Hue 1910)
1. The Wait of a Royal Concubine
2. The Face of Brutality
3. That Paddle Girl
4. The King of Annam
5. The Eunuch Son La
6. Conjugal Bliss
7. The Luxury of Words
8. Servants and Confidants
9. The Pregnancy
10. Monsieur Sylvain Foucault, the French Resident Superieur
11. The Opera Network
12. Hatred and Independence
13. The Exodus
14. The Encounter
15. Conquering the Face of Brutality
Part Three - Dew’s Memoir ( Hue 1949)
1. Aunt Ginseng, Daughter of the Revolution
2. White Magnolia
3. A way homeward
Part Four - Simone’s Memoir (New York City 1990)
1. The Child Performer & Her Nightingale
2. Love between Generations
3. The French Villa on Nam Giao Slope
4. Andre Foucault and His Baudelaire
5. Birthday in Hue
6. Dominique Clemenceau
7. Farewell to Hue
8 Saigon
9 The Tet Offensive
10. Yellow Roses and Baudelaire
11. The Maiden who Practiced Singing
12. My Secret and Paris, 1970
13. Requiem in the Garden of Luxembourg
14. Refugees in Diamondale
15. That Day in April
16. Winter in Diamondale
17. His Black Rose
18. Rendezvous in New York City
19. The Phone Call
20. Requiem in New York City
19. Postcards
Part Five - Simone’s Memoir ( New Jersey 1994)
1. House and Trees, Mother and Daughter
2. The New Vietnam
3 Looking for the Marble Floor
4. The Lacquer Divan
5 The Coffins of Cinnamon
6 Mai Anh
7 O-Lan
8 Hue Recitativo
9 Last Gifts
10. River, Coffins, and Memory
11. Hope, Love, and Exile
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Main Characters’ Names and Context
First Generation
Huyen Phi (1895-1930) – the Paddle Girl from Hue’s River Huong, who became the Mystique Concubine to the King of Annam 1900-1910
Thuan Thanh (1875-1945) – King of Annam, formerly Buu Linh, the Crowned Prince, who reigned as king 1889-1910.
Son La (1845-1935) – eunuch, servant to Huyen Phi, the Mystique Concubine
Mai (1895-1968) – chambermaid to the Mystique Concubine; nanny to Dew; later a rebel and spiritual medium
Sylvain Foucault (1865-1950) – Resident Superieur, State of Annam, French Indochina
Second Generation
The Children of the King of Annam and the Mystique Concubine
Que Huong (1905-1976) – Princess Cinnamon, Grandma Que
Sam Huong (1905-1949) – Princess Ginseng, daughter of the Revolution
Que Lam (1910-?) – Prince Forest
Third Generation
Mi Suong (1934- ) – Dew, daughter of Princess Cinnamon, mother of Simone
Tran Giang Son (1934- ) – Hope, professor, husband of Dew, father of Simone
O-Lan – housekeeper for Princess Cinnamon, Hue noodle seller; daughter of Mai. Fortune teller and revolutionary
Andre Foucault (1935-1990) – lawyer, teacher, grandson of Sylvain Foucault
Dominique Clemenceau (1940 -?) – wife of Andre Foucault
Christopher Sanders (1930-1985) – American reporter in Saigon, who married Simone
Fourth Generation
Simone Mi-Uyen (1955- ) – first born daughter of Dew and Hope; singer, refugee, New York lawyer
Mimi Mi-chau (1958- ) – second daughter of Dew and Hope, younger sister of Simone
Pierre (Pi) Phi-Long (1963- ) – son of Dew and Hope, younger brother of Simone and Mim
