Vietnamese culture : Bat Trang
hyt...@my-deja.com
Destination VN, 5-6/95
Bat Trang
Dana Sachs
Dana Sachs visits Bat Trang with one of Vietnam’s
contemporary writers.
Nguyen Huy Thiep is a man of many professions. He may be one
of his country’s most acclaimed contemporary writers, but
he’s also got to make a living. These days, he carries a
business card that reads "Nguyen Huy Thiep-writer and
owner." The "owner" refers to his new restaurant, the Hoa
Ban, which sits near the eastern bank of the Red River, just
across the Chuong Duong Bridge from Hanoi.
The Hoa Ban is in a large nha san, a wooden stilt house that
is traditional among the Black Thai minority people of
Vietnam. Two-storied and covered with thatch, the nha san
walls are open to the world, drawing in the river breezes.
Restaurant guests can either eat upstairs,
looking out over the surrounding neighborhood, or sit in the
quiet dining area below. In keeping with the particular
culture of the mountain regions, the restaurant menu
includes such foods of the forest as skunk, venison, and
snake (as well as free-range chicken, although one would be
hard pressed to find a chicken that wasn’t "free-range" in
Vietnam.) The fact that Thiep’s restaurant has a forest
theme is no accident. For many years, the writer taught
history in a minority village in the northwestern region of
the country, near the border with Laos. He’s famous in
Vietnam for 10 interconnected short stories, "Nhung Ngon Gio
Hua Tat" ("The Breezes of Hua Tat"), which are
folktale-like, almost mythological accounts of life in a
remote Black Thai village.
My friend Cam and I have been working on translating some of
Thiep’s work into English and so one day we went to the Hoa
Ban for lunch. It was a quiet afternoon and only one other
table was occupied, also with people who had come to the
restaurant as much in order to see the writer as to try his
food. Although Thiep is a rather reserved man, he seemed to
have learned the skills of restaurateur very quickly,
gracefully moving back and forth between the tables.
Cam and I decided against the skunk and venison, opting
instead for less exotic spicy chicken salad and roasted
prawns. By the time we’d finished our meal and ordered
coffee, the other customers had headed back toward Hanoi,
and Thiep settled down at our table with a glass of lemonade
and a pack of cigarettes. We talked for a while about his
work. "One critic called me Vietnam’s J.D. Salinger," he
said, not without a hint of pride. "It’s true that I have
been influenced by Salinger’s work."
Only one of Thiep’s books has been translated into English,
the Oxford University Press collection of short stories
entitled "The General Retires." These stories would not
contradict the comparison to J.D. Salinger. Thiep’s style
does have a simplicity of language, dry wit, and emotional
power reminiscent of the American writer’s work.
But comparing Nguyen Huy Thiep to J.D. Salinger does Thiep a
disservice. Rather than offering the uninitiated any sense
of Thiep’s own writing style, the reference to Salinger is a
too-simplistic attempt to make an unfamiliar writer familiar
in terms that are easily comprehensible to Western readers.
Such comparisons under-acknowledge Thiep’s own vast talent
as a writer, as well as the social and cultural influences
that make his work so very particularly Vietnamese.
On the day of our visit to the restaurant, though, Thiep was
more interested in tourism than literature. "Where have you
gone in Vietnam?" he asked me. "The city is awful. You’ve
got to see the countryside."
We decided to go to Bat Trang, the small pottery village
where Thiep had lived for several years after returning to
the Hanoi area. Saying good-bye to Cam, I got on the
motorcycle behind Thiep and we started down the road that
led south along the river away from Hanoi. Following along
the ridge of a thousand-year old dike built for flood
control during the Ly Dynasty, the road offers wonderful
views of the flat green countryside, the rice fields, stone
villages, brick kilns, and ancient pagodas of the Red River
Delta.
After about 20 minutes, we took a right turn down a road
that descended off the dike and into the village. From the
very first house, the front doors and sidewalks of Bat Trang
were covered with pottery: flowery vases, hand-painted urns,
pedestals for potted plants, even ceramic columns to be used
as slats on the balconies of new houses. The whole town was
a factory, its roads full of trucks and cars, motorbikes,
bicycles, and even horse carts, all engaged in the business
of the pottery trade.
Our motorbike snaked through all this busy commercial
activity, making turn after turn through the mazy streets of
the village. Within the stone courtyards of each house, I
could glimpse pottery in various stages of production. The
sides of buildings were covered with the black patties used
for kiln fuel. A mixture of coal and dirt, they were stuck
on the walls to dry in the sun.
Deep within the village, we pulled up and stopped in the
large courtyard of the Lo Gom Toan-Khanh, the ceramic kilns
of a couple named Toan and Khanh. Through one doorway, I
could make out the wooden furniture and wall decorations of
a private house, but everything else in the compound was
devoted to the manufacture of pottery. A pretty, middle-aged
woman walked out to greet us, wiping ceramic dust off her
hands. "This is Khanh," Thiep explained, introducing me to
one of the owners of the factory. "She and her husband Toan
are good friends of mine and I come here often."
We walked inside and sat down. When Thiep picked up a teapot
on the table in front of us, Khanh rushed around the room in
a fruitless search for tea. "You don’t have tea?" Thiep
asked, laughing.
Khanh shrugged, looking flustered. "I guess we’re out." The
expression on her face reminded me of a busy career person
in the West, someone wealthy enough to have a beautiful
kitchen, but without the leisure time to use it.
Thiep and I went to tour the factory. To one side of the
main courtyard, three large stone basins held the clay in
its liquid form. Next to the basins, a young woman was
filling molds for small flower vases. In a room behind her,
another woman was organizing vases which had just come out
of the molds. We walked through a doorway and Thiep pointed
out the base of a two-story, chimney-like kiln, then led me
up a narrow flight of stairs to the top of the kiln, where
three more workers were busily packing it with pottery to be
fired. They filled round canisters with the small flower
vases and tightly closed them, packing them solidly, one on
top of the other, and stuffing fuel patties around them.
When the whole kiln was full, the workers would light it
from the bottom and let it burn for three days. Then they
would empty the kiln and start over again.
Because Bat Trang pottery is fired at the extremely high
temperature of 1200 degrees Centigrade, Khanh’s husband Toan
later explained to me, it becomes very strong and difficult
to break. After the tour of the compound, we sat talking in
one of the workrooms, which was filled with large vases and
urns in the midst of production. Toan, wearing work clothes
covered with fine ceramic dust, inadvertently proved his
point about the strength of his product when, searching for
a stool, he took a finished three-foot-high wide-mouthed urn
and sat on it. Besides being a writer, history teacher, and
restaurant owner, Thiep is something of an amateur painter.
Before we’d gone to his restaurant earlier in the day, Cam
had shown me a gift she’d once received from Thiep. It was a
white ceramic bowl on which Thiep had painted Cam’s portrait
in the deep blue color for which the village of Bat Trang is
famous. Now Thiep wanted to paint me. I sat down on a stool
and he began to paint, dipping his thin brush into a dish of
sludgy gray liquid he assured me would later turn the rich
Bat Trang blue.
"Is it okay if I talk?" I asked.
"Of course," he said. I could tell by the intense
concentration on his face that he wasn’t really looking at
me anymore. He was looking at the shape of my face, at the
relationship between my eyes and my mouth, at the height of
my nose. "Talk all you want," he said.
Toan and several of his dozen or so employees had gathered
around to converse with the foreigner. I asked them about
the history of the village and Toan told me that it is over
900 years old. "The other villages in the area also produce
pottery, but the roots of the trade are in Bat Trang," he
told me.
"How long has your family been here?" I asked.
He looked confused by the question, and I realized it was a
very American question. Americans always move. An American
born in Chicago might have a Minnesota German mother and a
New Jersey Italian father. The farther back you go in
American family trees, the farther the branches spread.
Sometimes that’s true in Vietnam, but mostly it isn’t. When
Toan told me his family came from Bat Trang, he was
essentially saying his family had always come from Bat
Trang. Nearly 1,000 families make up the village, and almost
all of them practice the pottery trade. Many have their own
particular ceramic specialties. Toan showed me one vase on
which streams of color seemed to flow like water down a
waterfall. On another, various shades of blue and brown
melted into each other like lava. On a third, brown jagged
lines crisscrossed the body of the vase in such a way that
the surface seemed covered with a forest of trees.
While Bat Trang has never ceased to be a center of pottery
production, the trade has blossomed since the Vietnamese
government instituted doi moi, its policy of economic
renovation, in 1986. These days, comparatively speaking, Bat
Trang is a very wealthy village.
Toan explained that "in the period between 1954 and 1986,
when we were all working for government- run pottery
factories, the work was really hard and we couldn’t earn
enough to live on. Now things are much better economically
and people have the freedom to do the kinds of things they
want." Bat Trang’s pottery is now being exported all over
the world. Taiwan is the biggest buyer, but France, Holland,
Denmark and Russia are among the many other countries
purchasing its ceramics. Buyers from the United States are
beginning to import the product as well.
Thiep had finished his plate. "It’s not very successful," he
said, shaking his head. He held the plate up so I could see
it. The eyes looked rather familiar, but the mouth was
mysteriously skunk like. I wondered if he’d spent too much
time in the forest.
"Let’s try one more time," he suggested, adding, "This time
don’t talk."
I nodded. For the next 20 minutes, I silently sat in
profile. Deprived of conversation with a foreigner, Toan and
most of the other workers drifted away. Next to me, a young
artist was painting a series of geometric designs on an urn.
He’d told me he could finish 15 such urns in a day, and now
I watched as his quick fingers painted a ring of
interlocking circles around the neck of the pot. I wondered
what would happen if he arrived back at his starting point
without enough room left to make another identically shaped
circle. It didn’t happen. Years of practice had given him a
sense of space that never wavered.
"Okay," Thiep said finally. "It’s still not very successful,
but I guess it’s finished." He held the plate up to me. It
was better.
"It’s good!" I said, as enthusiastically as possible.
Nguyen Huy Thiep shrugged and stood up. "I’m a writer," he
explained, "not a painter."
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.