Tradition, Revolution, and Market Economy in a North Vietnamese Village, 1925-2006

Introduction

1 Introduction Like virtually all other rural communities in the Red River delta of North Vietnam, the village of Sơn-Dương, lying behind a bamboo hedge, is well hidden from the paved provincial highway. In order to get to the village, one has to turn off the provincial highway onto a potholeridden dirt road. A one-mile ride along this road into the village leaves a vehicle completely covered either with dirt or red mud from the potholes, depending on whether the road has been baked in the hot sun or watered by a tropical summer downpour. The dirt road continues well beyond SơnD ương, plowing through the rice fields of this small fertile plain and turning back toward Việt-Trì, the provincial capital of Vĩnh-Phú and one of the three major industrial centers of the north. Familiar eyes can recognize the village of Sơn-Dương from afar among other bamboo clusters dotting the rural landscape by tracing the road against a background of mountain peaks rising in the west on the other side of the Red River. Arriving in Sơn-Dương, one leaves behind the main delta of North Vietnam to enter the midland district of Lâm-Thao in the heartland of the first Vietnamese kingdom, the kingdom of the Hùng dynasty (which lasted up to the third century B.C.E.).1 In the courtyards of many houses in the village are huge haystacks for oxen and buffalo, the draft animals used in the rice paddies . Towering over the cultivators’ dwellings are the areca palm trees. These provide the highly valued nut, chewed with betel leaves in a longexiting practice that is widespread in the southeastern part of Asia. The physical landscape may seem at first glance to have been frozen since time immemorial. Such an impression is misleading. Events behind the bamboo hedge have been partly shaped by the Chinese and Western capitalist world systems in the course of their economic, political, and ideological expansion. Map 1. North Vietnam Introduction 3 Sơn-Dương has withstood repeated foreign ravages throughout the past century, first by the Chinese, then by the French, and finally by the Americans . At the same time it has undergone fundamental ecological, demographic , socioeconomic, and political changes in one the most important revolutions of our time. As early as June 1965, three months into the sustained U.S. air war against North Vietnam, many young Sơn-Dương villagers experienced for the first time the bitter taste of modern technological destruction: The sky was vividly blue above the village of Sơn-Dương, LâmThao district, in the afternoon of June 24, 1965. Members of the [agricultural] cooperative all prepared to leave for the field, when two American “pirate” planes zoomed into sight. Incomprehensibly, Map 2. Province of Vĩnh-Phú, 1987 4 Introduction bombs exploded in the village. Fires instantly erupted. Smoke billowed into the blue sky. The burning smell of bomb powder filled the air. The earth shook. . . . [As soon as the bombing was over] the ground surrounding [the] bomb craters became the informal meeting place for almost 200 people denouncing [the] crime of [the] American “pirate.” The mourning cries of little Hồ’s father [over his bombing-victim son] and sister Ái’s five small children, now rendered motherless...registered deeply in the hearts and minds of every villager. (Phú-Thọ, July 9, 1965) Map 3. Province of Phú-Thọ and Lâm-Thao district (French colonial period) Introduction 5 This article in the provincial Communist Party newspaper, PhúTh ọ, was a harbinger of tough days ahead for Sơn-Dương villagers, even though they had heard of the U.S. bombing along the North Vietnamese coast in the summer of 1964. On July 24, 1965, the intensified second Indochina War struck home to the people in Sơn-Dương personally (estimated 1965 population 2,700). Bombs heavily damaged the village’s Map 4. Sơn-Dương village, 1987 6 Introduction junior high school and a few nearby houses. They also left deep craters in the surrounding rice fields. In the eleven years of the intensified armed conflict that followed (1964–1975), the village sent to the front, in both the north and the south, 360 of its own...