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11 My Early Years and Education My Family I was born into a lower-middle-class family in 1937, not long before Japan waged war against China, beginning with the Marco Polo Bridge crisis in Beijing, which my father used to refer to when talking about my birth. My grandparents had not been rich farmers when they married in 1884, having nothing more than a small wooden house and a few acres of farmland. My great-grandfather was poor, but he managed to send my grandfather to school for ten years. My grandfather didn’t obtain a degree, but his education was enough to give him a decent position in the village. My grandparents had to work hard to raise their eight children and to send all their sons to school. Theireldestsonwasbornin1887.Theygainedrespectfrommostofthevillagers and also from people of the neighboring villages, and they had no enemies. My grandmother was a strong-minded woman who sometimes was more obdurate than my grandfather. When I was still a young boy, my aunts and uncles used to tease me, saying that I took after my grandpa and that I would be a henpecked husband. (They were right.) My grandma had a perfect memory. She could remember exact dates of all events in her family and in many others’ since she was seven. She could recite by heart 3,254 lines of Truyện Kiều, the famous verse story by the great poet Nguyễn Du. I inherited her good memory, which helped me in school and especially in writing these memoirs. But sometimes I wished I didn’t have any memory at all, so that I would have been much less concerned about the events in war and the hardships of our people and lived a much happier life. MygrandfatherwasoneofthemanysupportersofKỳĐồng(ChildProdigy), realnameNguyễnVănCầm,theyoungmaninourneighboringprovincewholed two • 12 · A Grain of Sand astruggleagainsttheFrenchatthebeginningofthetwentiethcentury.Someofmy grandfather’s cousins and a few villagers joined the fight and were defeated after a short clash. They brought back a battle drum and a large conch, which were later displayedinthevillagetempleforworship.WhenIwasachild,Ioftencametolook at them and to conjure up some heroic images of the people from my village who had fought desperately but bravely against the French. I was very proud of them. My father was born in 1904 and was his parents’ favorite son. At age six, he was sent to a private teacher’s Chinese characters class along with two elder brothers and some other children in the village. In the early 1900s, Chinese was stilltheofficialwrittenlanguageinViệtNam.Itwasgraduallyreplacedbyquốc ngữ (national language), Vietnamese written in the roman alphabet. This form of written Vietnamese had been in use since the mid-nineteenth century, but was not officially taught and prescribed as the language of administration in ViệtNamuntil1905.Bythetimemyfatherwasborn,manyfamiliesinViệtNam stillrefusedtolettheirchildrengotothenewschoolsestablishedbytheFrench colonial government for learning quốc ngữ. In 1912, my father’s uncles persuaded my grandfather to give up his passive resistance against the French and to let my father and my uncles attend the new school for quốc ngữ and French language. After months of thinking it over, my grandfather took their advice. As any other in their generation, my grandfather and his sons were greatly influenced by Confucianism. They wanted their children to be well educated more than to earn big money. My grandpa died when I was two years old. In 1925, my father participated in some anticolonialist activities in Hà Nội. In 1927, he joined the Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng (Việt Nam National Party), abbreviated VNQDĐ.1 The VNQDĐ, well known in Việt Nam as Việt Quốc, launched a bloody uprising in several provinces close to Hà Nội in 1930 but was crushed after a few days. The VNQDĐ revolt was an anticolonialism military action by the first well-organized revolutionary party in the French colonies. French authorities mobilized its forces to suppress the patriots’ movement, which resulted in hundreds of death sentences and thousands of prison terms for VNQDĐ members. Nowadays, the revolt is referred to as the “Spirit of Yên Báy,” named for the province where the fiercest fighting took place on February 10, 1930.The situation became even more serious to the French when the communists led the farmers’ protest, the so-called Nghệ Tĩnh Soviet. It was a violent movement against the French in the “Soviet” style that led farmers from several villages in Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh provinces to...

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