Et tu, ca tru?

Quan ho and ca tru, priceless jewels in Vietnam’s musical heritage, have achieved UNESCO recognition, but can they survive indifference and the onslaught of pop culture and commercialization?

Singers in the northern province of Bac Ninh perform quan हो

Vietnam’s rich musical heritage has survived decades of war and its deprivations that robbed the nation of resources could have been dedicated to cultural preservation.
Ironically, it is peace-time prosperity ushered in by the market-based economy that is apparently pushing some of the most precious traditional music forms to extinction.
On September 30, UNESCO recognized the 800-year-old quan ho folk music as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Mankind, and followed it up the next day by giving the same recognition to the even older ca tru.
It was the culmination of a ten-year campaign, spearheaded by Professor Tran Van Khe, that united Vietnamese and foreign scholars and received enthusiastic government backing.
The newfound status brings to four the number of Vietnamese members of the exclusive club, the earlier two being the royal court music of Hue and the gong culture of the Central Highlands.
While the UNESCO recognition will direct some attention and resources to preserving these art forms, it is their popular acceptance and reintegration into daily life, especially in the rural areas where they originated, that hold the key, some scholars say.
Hanoi University lecturer Nguyen Hung Vi has said that quan ho’s simplistic nature improves its survival in the current, but watching doyens of this art perform in Bac Ninh Province underlines that its rendition takes years and years of practice.
It is said that in the old days village elders would select two pairs of matching voices among four to eight year old children and, hold a ceremony to get their parents’ permission for them to sing together. The pairs would then sing traditional songs in perfect harmony and be prepared to participate in contests between villages. Many songs were practiced in secret for the contests to prevent opponents from preparing strong repartees. The contests would sometimes last two or three days, until one of the pairs failed to respond to the other’s poser.
Nowadays, most Vietnamese have never seen a traditional performance of quan ho, which is said to date back to the 13th century.
Today, only five of the six singers, honored by the government in 1993 as torchbearers for quan ho, are still alive.
It takes a quan ho artist decades, even a lifetime, to master the sophisticated antiphonal singing, yet even the best of the best can barely make a living from it.
Even in Bac Ninh Province, the cradle of quan ho, appropriate venues are hard to come by as factories replace the paddy fields and bamboo groves that are the art’s quintessential stage and backdrop.
Three years ago there were still 49 villages where quan ho was performed, but many of these have since disappeared, as has a cappella singing, lost in a web of microphones, amplifiers and loudspeakers.
Today’s quan ho performers must oblige thousands of people in well-lit auditoriums and modern theaters in order to make a living, and even the tunes and notes of some of the oldest songs have been changed over the years.
Dr. Nguyen Chi Ben, head of the Vietnam Institute of Culture and the Arts, laments the sorry situation.
He thinks reviving the contests between the villages might be a good way to produce good singers and gain a wider audience for quan ho.
However, outward migration from villages to cities by young people looking for jobs, and the popularity of pop, rock and other Western music that has become mainstream music in the country makes this an uphill task.
Geisha music?
Ca tru used to be mainstream entertainment in the north for centuries before fading into obscurity in the mid 1940s.
It originated in the northern delta in the 11th century and enjoyed great popularity from the 15th century until French colonization in the 1800s. By then, ca tru had degenerated into a type of chamber music for the wealthy.
Based on poetry, true ca tru involves at least two male musicians playing the trong chau (a special drum) and dan day (a long-necked lute with three strings), and a female vocalist who also beats a bamboo phach with two wooden sticks.
The singing, chanting and reciting of the lyrics, many of which were written by famous poets of the past, are stylistic in the extreme.
The bell tolled for ca tru in the 1940s, when it was criticized as being a form of geisha entertainment.
Authentic ca tru performances in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi are few and far between in the 21st century, even on television or radio, though there are clubs trying to revive it.
In Hanoi, the Ca tru Club meets on the last Sunday of the month at Bich Cau Dao Quan Temple near the Temple of Literature.
Another started up in August 2006 and is simply called “Thang Long – Hanoi.” The club in Alley 73 off Giang Van Minh Street is open every Saturday night and attracts musicologists from the US, Britain, Germany and Japan.
“Ca tru va Hat Tho” in Tran Te Xuong Street, Phu Nhuan District is the only such club in HCMC। It is struggling to draw young people as they find it hard to appreciate the melodies and the meanings behind the lyrics.

Source: TN, Agencies

Beyond the sorrows of war

For Vinh Quyen and Edward O’Connell, there is no such thing as a language barrier.

Foreigners at a bookstore in downtown Ho Chi Minh City
They did not exactly make this claim।

But what they have done – the former has written a novel about postwar life in southern Vietnam in English and the latter has managed to find an American publisher willing to print a work by an unknown writer from a foreign country – has shown language barriers their proper place.
The making of Hue writer Vinh Quyen’s first English novel, “Debris of Debris,” had much to do with what is more common than language differences: the empathy of human hearts.
It started with an acknowledgement in David Bergen’s “The Time in Between.“ The Canadian writer thanked Quyen for the conversations and late night company that helped him create a moving story of a Vietnam War veteran’s troubled journey back to the former battlefields.
Bergen could not have known that his expression of gratitude would trigger a daring act. Bergen’s novel, with images of locals so familiar to Quyen, made the bureau chief of Lao Dong newspaper in central Vietnam ask a question that had never before crossed his mind.
“Why don’t I directly tell the story of my people to foreign readers, and to the whole world?”
From what he’d heard, no Vietnamese writer living in Vietnam had ever written a novel in English. Yet, to be the first to do so was not important. Quyen didn’t aim to impress. He was motivated by whatever it is that sparks all acts of creativity.
It was exciting, he said. So at a “ripe” time, he started “Debris of Debris,” with “self-taught English.“ The work wasn’t easy. The writer, whose forte is anything but English, soldiered on with the help of a friend, Tran Thanh Lieng, who is fluent in the language.
But Quyen completed it at last. And the novel, which Quyen says delves into everything that isn’t touched by Bao Ninh’s famous novel “The Sorrow of War,” found its first foreign reader.
“An English novel right in Vietnam? This interested me, to be exact, made me curious,” said Edward O’Connell, an American education investor in Vietnam who accidentally met Quyen while drinking beer with their common friend, Tran Thanh Lieng, on one fine day by the Han River in Da Nang last year.
Afterwards, things happened as they should happen.
O’Connell struck a friendship with Quyen, read his novel once, re-read it a few times to dig for the meanings hidden between the imperfect English lines. He found enough to recommend the story to the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University in the US.
The schools added “Debris of Debris” to their reference book systems and introduced it to
Graywolf Press, a non-profit publisher. Graywolf Press took it further and the novel will hit the bookshelves later this year.
“American readers have very few books or other information about postwar Vietnam to read, to understand,” said O’Connell, who understood the American publishing world well enough to know that ”Debris of Debris” would have no chance with a commercial publisher.
As far as the novel’s literary worth was concerned, he didn’t feel qualified to comment. Yet, its cultural value was so obvious once he read it that he tried to have it published only because he wanted other Americans to have a chance to read it too.
The story, about southerners who chose to stay in Vietnam after 1975 and struggled to integrate into a new social order, would help Americans understand Vietnamese better, he said.
O’Connell is not worried this understanding could be hampered by the difficulty in reading an English novel written by one whose first language isn’t English. For him, the more slowly “Debris of Debris” is read, the deeper the understanding.
That said, it is fortunate that there are not-for-profit publishers like Graywolf Press, which, is supported by the academic and literary communities, can afford to publish the likes of “Debris of Debris.”
Graywolf Press saw the novel’s cultural significance as clearly as O’Connell did and has decided to keep as much of Quyen’s original English as possible.
For his part, Quyen said he has also aimed for better understanding – not just between Vietnamese and Americans, but among Vietnamese as well.
He said more than 30 million southerners who stayed in their homeland after the war aren’t sufficiently represented in contemporary local literature.
Bao Ninh has dealt with “The Sorrow of War,” but the toil and tears of healing that sorrow, especially in the south, is another story.
“Debris of Debris” sifts through the rubble to deliver that narrative.
Reported by Ngo Thi Kim Cuc (With additional reporting by Thuy Linh in Hanoi)

AirAsia links Jakarta with Ho Chi Minh City

Budget carrier AirAsia has officially opened its latest route between Ho Chi Minh City and Indonesian capital Jakarta, a month after it had a soft opening।

Dharmadi, PT Indonesia AirAsia president director said the carrier’s fifth route will operate four weekly flights that would bring more opportunities for travel between the two destinations and foster new economic tie ups between Vietnam and Indonesia.

The director told Thanh Nien the carrier’s occupancy was about 65 percent in a month of soft opening and expected it to reach 75 percent in a year. When this happened, the carrier plans to open a new route between HCMC and Bali, he added.
The carrier has no plans for other routes between cities in Vietnam and Indonesia. The low cost carrier operates daily routes from HCMC and Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Bangkok, Thailand.
Last year, 30,000 Vietnamese visitors traveled to Indonesia and 22,000 Indonesia tourists arrived in Vietnam, according to the tourism ministries of both nations।

Reported by Minh Quang

Hospitals overcrowded by hand-foot-mouth, respiratory disease

Hand, foot and mouth has been more severe this year and is flooding hospitals with children, as are respiratory diseases, doctors in Ho Chi Minh City said.

The Respiratory Department at Children’s Hospital No.1 is so crowded that mothers have to care for their children in the corridor.

Nearly half of inpatient children at Children’s Hospital No.’s Infection – Mental Health Department on Friday were hospitalized with hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) and three of them were assisted with respirators.

Truong Huu Khanh, head of the department, said the department emergency room had received several HFMD children in severe condition for several days straight.

“The children have complications with their nervous, circulatory and respiratory systems, including breathing difficulties and high blood pressure.”

HFMD patients also top the list at the Children’s Hospital No.2, with 55 admitted Friday, including seven in the emergency room.

Tran Thi Thuy, deputy head of the Infection Department at the hospital, said late September and early October was the prime time for HFMD.

Doctors said more children were catching the disease and developing more critical conditions this year than in previous years.

The 80-bed Children’s Hospital 1 was keeping more than 200 respiratory inpatients on Friday.

Tran Anh Tuan, head of the hospital Respiratory Department, said changes in the climate have caused many children under 1 year old to catch pneumonia and bronchitis.

Doctors have also warned about the high threat of dengue fever in children this month.

Le Bich Lien, head of the Dengue Fever Department at Children’s Hospital No.1, said the rate of dengue infections had lost steam this week but could return even stronger, depending on the weather and the effectiveness of prevention measures.

There have been years in which the disease has peaked in November and December, Lien said.

Reported by Thanh Tung

US, Vietnam face Agent Orange legacy

Mai Khai contentedly grows his potatoes and melons smack up against an old brick wall surrounding a former US airbase in Vietnam which experts say remains highly contaminated.

An official from Agent Orange victims' Association of Da Nang looks over a wall surrounding an area believed to be contaminated with dioxin inside a former US airbase.

Almost four decades after American troops stopped wartime spraying of Agent Orange and other herbicides containing potentially cancer-causing dioxin, United States and Vietnamese officials are cooperating on preliminary clean-up measures at the Da Nang airport.

Full-scale decontamination has yet to begin, though, and could take years.

While the preparatory work continues, Khai faces only a limited danger from his vegetables, foreign and Vietnamese experts said.

But residents near the airbase do face a more general dioxin risk, they said. A Canadian study found elevated dioxin levels in people living near the north and east of the airbase although neither foreign nor Vietnamese experts could say exactly how many people are at risk from the contamination.

“We have globally, collectively, agreed that this stuff is bad,” said Koos Neefjes, an adviser on dioxin to the United Nations in Hanoi.

Khai, 76, is not worried.

“There’s no pollution here,” says the longtime area resident. “I’m still alive.”

During the Vietnam War, US forces stored Agent Orange at Da Nang and other bases where it was loaded onto airplanes for defoliation missions.

Jungle areas that were sprayed do not have high levels of dioxin today, said Thomas Boivin, president of Canadian environmental specialists Hatfield Consultants, who have spent years studying dioxin contamination in Vietnam.

But the US and Vietnamese officials have identified the old US bases in Da Nang, Bien Hoa – near the former Saigon – and Phu Cat as significant “hotspots” where spillage, washing of aircraft and loading of the herbicides contributed to contamination.

At Da Nang airport now, dioxin levels are still 300-400 times higher than internationally accepted levels, Boivin said.

Almost two years ago Vietnamese officials, assisted by the US, installed a concrete cap over the former Agent Orange mixing and loading area and improved drainage and filtering of lake sediment inside the Da Nang airbase.

Authorities also banned people from eating fish or other foods from lakes on the property.

These temporary measures have prevented contamination from spreading, officials from both sides said.

The affected area is under Vietnamese military control and is separate from the passenger terminal in Vietnam’s fourth-largest city, which authorities want to promote as a tourist destination.

Without further action, contaminated material at the hotspots will continue to be dispersed through soil particles as well as water currents, wildlife and air, Neefjes told annual US-Vietnamese Agent Orange talks this month.

Dioxin can be passed through the food chain via fish or fowl.

Other donors are also assisting but at Vietnam’s request, the US is focusing its help on the Da Nang site.

US officials told AFP that “such a complex and politically sensitive issue” has required consensus both within the US government as well as between the US and Vietnam.

The US has “certainly worked as fast as we possibly can to get moving on this project,” US ambassador Michael Michalak said after a senior Vietnamese official complained at the recent talks that US funds had not been disbursed quickly enough.

Bids have been received and a contract will soon be announced for an environmental assessment and preparatory work at the Da Nang site, Michalak said. In June both sides began testing “bioremediation”, the use of biological organisms to destroy dioxin.

The cleanup will require moving tainted soil to a landfill before it can be decontaminated either by biotechnology or another method, said Lai Minh Hien, director of Vietnam’s Office 33 which deals with Agent Orange.

Decontaminating all three former bases could cost about US$60 million or more, Hien told AFP in an interview, calling for additional funding from the United States.

“We want the US to put in more effort,” Hien said.

Michalak countered that it is too early to say what a cleanup would ultimately cost.

Le Ke Son, co-chairman of the bilateral talks, agreed. He said the scope of contamination in Bien Hoa, for example, is greater than initially thought and requires a new study.

The Vietnam War ended in 1975 but the US and Vietnam did not normalize relations until 1995. Twelve years later, with US approval of $3 million for dioxin mitigation and health activities in Vietnam, American policy changed to support a cleanup, US officials said.

President Barack Obama this year signed a bill doubling that assistance to $6 million.

Vietnam blames dioxin for a spate of birth deformities but the US says there has been no internationally-accepted scientific study establishing a link between Agent Orange and Vietnam’s disabled and deformed.

Hoang Thi The, 71, a widow who lives near Da Nang airport, said she knows nothing about the $6 million but would like US funding for her disabled children.

She kept one hand, as if protectively, on the damaged wheelchair of her son, Tran Duc Nghia, 35, who sat with his mouth open and eyes vacant. His sister Tran Thi Ty Nga, 31, held onto a walker, sweat forming on her neck.

The said doctors told her the children, normal in their earliest years, became affected by Agent Orange.

“I was told that if we lived near the places where Agent Orange was stored or was sprayed, we may be hit by these toxins,” said The, who remembered the sound of planes taking off during the war.

“But I did not know that they carried Agent Orange.”

Source: AFP