Latest / The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen / 437 - What Is Real Freedom? Phan Khoi - Viet History Makers

Transcript

437 - What Is Real Freedom? Phan Khoi - Viet History Makers · The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen

0:00
[SPEAKER_03]: We are back with vid history makers with my co-host Kevin.
0:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Today we are exploring very similar to the last few episodes.
0:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Somebody that I haven't heard of at all ever.
0:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And I am looking to
0:15
[SPEAKER_03]: these figures and I feel so blessed to be able to go along this journey with you.
0:22
[SPEAKER_03]: I pray that it never stops.
0:23
[SPEAKER_03]: I begin to understand the, you know, the people, the notable people that have shaped the country.
0:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, Ken.
0:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, you make me want to say something, which is that as I was doing some research on the person who we're going to discuss today, I felt almost a sense of this kind of sadness
0:45
[SPEAKER_01]: but also happiness sadness in that we're really just scratching the surface.
0:50
[SPEAKER_01]: really just scratching the surface like there's so much we don't know that I don't know but so much that's so interesting so these episodes are really meant just introduce people to these figures and hopefully inspire them to learn more about these figures to read more about them and to read their writing so it's kind of sad on the one hand that there's only so much we can talk about but it's also great that we are so yeah
1:19
[SPEAKER_03]: And I just want to remind the audience one more time that you spend a lot of time working on these episodes to bring life to these figures.
1:28
[SPEAKER_03]: So we can introduce and invite the audience to donate on our YouTube page.
1:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, thank you very much.
1:38
[SPEAKER_01]: So listeners, if you find these helpful and arcaneing, if you feel like you've learned from them,
1:46
[SPEAKER_01]: We appreciate donations.
1:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I work on these typically at a cafe.
1:50
[SPEAKER_01]: You could buy me a coffee by buying a super thanks on YouTube and seeing those super thanks make me really happy and motivate me to keep going.
1:59
[SPEAKER_01]: So thanks for your support.
2:02
[SPEAKER_03]: We'll get right into it.
2:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Recently, I went to a here ocean view and speak at a big event.
2:10
[SPEAKER_03]: There's like, eight hundred people at this downtown theater, and it was amazing.
2:15
[SPEAKER_03]: It was absolutely wonderful to hear him.
2:18
[SPEAKER_03]: And what I began to realize is that so many thinkers in our diaspora that I know about, and now I'm beginning to figure, I'm beginning to see this pattern a lot, or poets,
2:34
[SPEAKER_03]: people who are intellectuals who are writers and journalists and novelists and Pulitzer winners and you know a lot of these people come from poetry backgrounds and
2:48
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really interesting to know this.
2:52
[SPEAKER_03]: And as I'm listening to Ocean Talk, I can understand the structural side of how poetry is put together.
3:00
[SPEAKER_03]: And it makes you really think about the economy of words as you're putting lines together.
3:07
[SPEAKER_03]: And as you're doing this exercise of words, you're thinking about how society is organized.
3:15
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think
3:16
[SPEAKER_03]: The figure today is somebody who probably came up in that sort of way of thinking.
3:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you know, I never really gave that much thought, but you're totally right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So many of these great writers are poets.
3:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the poet we're looking at today, he wasn't just a poet.
3:36
[SPEAKER_01]: He was a huge, a major intellectual, cultural figure in the first half of the twentieth century, his name is Fencoi.
3:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Hugely influential journalist poet translator.
3:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, we're really just scratching the surface here.
3:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, he is so famous for different things, but he's really famous for his writings about reforming the Vietnamese language.
4:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's famous for his journalism, his critiques of Vietnamese society, and his involvement also in the Nyanvenzai Fund movement, which we've talked about.
4:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's interesting due to historical reasons.
4:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think this might be why you really haven't heard of him, Ken, is because it wasn't until nineteen ninety-one that Thancoy was officially mentioned in Vietnam in this dictionary of Vietnamese historical figures published by the official publishing house, the social sciences publishing house.
4:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a reason for why he was kind of hidden from history.
4:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's
4:41
[SPEAKER_01]: likely because of his involvement in this sort of free speech movement, the Nyanvenzai Fund movement.
4:48
[SPEAKER_01]: But there is one scholar in Vietnam, his name is Light and Wind.
4:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's one of these rare scholars in Vietnam who has devoted his whole life to studying Fancoy.
4:59
[SPEAKER_01]: He's published many books in Vietnamese on Fancoy.
5:02
[SPEAKER_01]: When I was in Vietnam, I picked up one of his books.
5:05
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's also somebody who devotes their life to studying Fancoy Cho and another person to Fancucian.
5:12
[SPEAKER_01]: But Fancoy is one of these titanic figures.
5:17
[SPEAKER_01]: I think if listeners don't know who he is, and listeners probably don't know, I think this is a nice description of him by Christopher Gosha, who's seen as probably one of the most influential important historians of Vietnam writing in English.
5:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Christopher Gosha, he calls Fenjoi, sorry, Fencoi, one of the staunchest defenders of human liberty in Vietnam.
5:43
[SPEAKER_03]: So he probably was not liked by the Vitt Ming at the time or the Communist Party, the early Communist Party.
5:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And probably the history as the country was developing in the seventies and eighties, we have to bury the sky.
6:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe, I'm not going to answer that question, but perhaps it's more complicated, but I think there's some truth in what you're saying there.
6:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, he was a defender of human liberty.
6:12
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's what this episode's going to be about.
6:14
[SPEAKER_01]: What does that mean to call him a defender of human liberty?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And why do you say human liberty and not human rights?
6:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Is there a distinction?
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[SPEAKER_03]: No, I really, the, the word play here is important, I think, because when I think about somebody defending human liberty, I'm like thinking, why don't you just call it human rights?
6:37
[SPEAKER_03]: No, you Kevin, why don't you call it?
6:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Or is it just in the literature human liberty is
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[SPEAKER_03]: Is a human liberty or is it human rights at the time?
6:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Or is it morphed into something that became human rights later that we know comes from human liberty?
6:55
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a really good question.
6:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's take a really quick detour here into the word liberty and rights.
7:01
[SPEAKER_01]: So what does a right mean?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Typically, when we talk about human rights, we are talking about something that you cannot violate.
7:09
[SPEAKER_01]: We are all entitled to the right to free speech, for example, or the right to move, right to movement, or a right to physical integrity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You cannot just punch me.
7:22
[SPEAKER_01]: But the question is, who protects these rights?
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's always a state.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You need a powerful strong state to protect your rights.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so, when I say I have a right, that means that nobody can violate that right, and if they try to, the state will protect me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If you have no state, you have no rights.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because who's going to protect you?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: You need a powerful state.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And also, one justification for rights is human dignity, this idea that we all have, this precious inner worth, this dignity, and that's why we have rights.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But there are philosophers who say that there's rights are co-extensive with power.
8:11
[SPEAKER_01]: So you need power to have the rights.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's why I'm talking about the state.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You have exactly as much right as you have power.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So let's say I say I have a right to free speech.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But if I don't have a pen and pencil or if I don't have a microphone or if I don't have a way to publish, do I really have that right?
8:30
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, so it is co-extensive with how much power I have.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's why even in Vietnamese, the word for rights and power have the same root, Gwyn, Gwyn look, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Power.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Power on rights are the same.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The philosopher Spinoza even said that.
8:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's turn to the word liberty.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is a really interesting.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is my research right now, the meaning of freedom or liberty.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So there is a philosopher named Isaiah Berlin, who famously says there's two kinds of freedom, negative freedom and positive freedom.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Negative.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, let me ask you, Ken, since you're the student, what does freedom mean?
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[SPEAKER_03]: Wow, what a crazy question.
9:12
[SPEAKER_03]: What does freedom mean?
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[SPEAKER_03]: I mean isn't it obvious to most of us?
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[SPEAKER_03]: Freedom means just the ability to...
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[SPEAKER_03]: do what you want to do without.
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[SPEAKER_03]: I think there's an implication in my mind without harming society or other people.
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[SPEAKER_03]: You should be able to say and do whatever you want without harming other people.
9:32
[SPEAKER_03]: That's freedom.
9:33
[SPEAKER_03]: I think the minute you start to encroach in other people's area of space, then it becomes something different.
9:40
[SPEAKER_03]: But for the most part, for me, being able to say, think, you know, act
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[SPEAKER_03]: in my own space without touching or, you know, getting other people affected is freedom.
9:53
[SPEAKER_01]: That's great.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is the prevailing conception of freedom in the West.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And this comes from many different philosophers in the Western tradition, but Thomas Hobbs, for example, exactly says that freedom is simply the absence of obstacles.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You want to do something, you have freedom if there are no obstacles,
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[SPEAKER_01]: in between you and the thing you want to do, right?
10:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you also evoked another philosopher, John Stuart Mill, who comes up with the harm principle, which is that we should all be free until it harms someone else.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I am free to swing my fist around
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[SPEAKER_01]: until it hits your face, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I must stop at your face.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So you evoked these very famous ways of understanding freedom.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So this is what Isaiah Berlin calls the negative freedom.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's freedom from interference.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So in the West we tend to think that we have freedom if there's a small government or even no government.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's why there are anarchists or libertarians who say I care about freedom and what they mean is when there's no government interfering with them, stopping them, taxing them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's a kind of interference.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But that's one conception of freedom.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's also positive freedom.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What that means is that let's say I have no obstacles in front of me to become a professor.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But at the same time, let's say that I have no money and I have very little food and I'm hungry all the time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I have to worry about Renton.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I might not have a roof over my head.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Am I really free to become a professor?
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[SPEAKER_01]: There are no obstacles in front of me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Physically, I know when stopping me, but am I really free?
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[SPEAKER_03]: No, you are not.
11:54
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that there are these invisible measures and metrics that block society from creating paths that humans want to take, such as being a doctor or a professor.
12:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
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[SPEAKER_01]: To do, to become a doctor or professor, I need an education.
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[SPEAKER_01]: To have an education, I need a certain environment.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I need money.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I need food in my belly so that I can think I need clothes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I need to be free from fear.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Therefore, some people who believe in positive freedom, they say, actually, we need government to come in and create welfare for us.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We need healthcare.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We need universal access to education, to housing, for example.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We need to tax people so that we can have these things.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the libertarians might argue back and say, no, that's imposing on my freedom, but the other positive freedom people will argue, no, this will enhance the freedom of everybody.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because you positive freedom is freedom too, not freedom from interference, but it's freedom to become your own master.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's where positive freedom is.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's freedom to become your own master.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so, yeah, I don't want to be a slave to other people.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I want to be a slave to myself.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's what freedom is.
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[SPEAKER_03]: You know, when I hear you break down these ideas, and I think about funcoi from eighteen eighty seven to nineteen fifty nine, I think about
13:25
[SPEAKER_03]: idea that what we're talking about is in the ether already in the world.
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[SPEAKER_03]: It's like, these principles were probably floating around years before he even got to understanding, frankly, got to understanding the universe of human liberty in Vietnam.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Is that true?
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[SPEAKER_03]: Is it already existing and floating around in books in the library in Vietnam in the eighteen hundreds or late eighteen hundreds?
13:55
[SPEAKER_01]: absolutely absolutely so the first version of freedom that we were talking about this negative freedom that is what scholars and philosophers would look back today and they would say that's a kind of liberalism that's the meaning of generally what liberalism is liberalism emphasizes individual freedom and it's a negative freedom it's freedom from in position and this comes from a tradition of philosophers by fighting against tyrannical governments
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[SPEAKER_01]: and autocratic monarchs.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So back in the past, when you had monarchs in Europe, they would impose their will.
14:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you had philosophers saying, no, we have human rights.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You need to leave us alone.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so that is a kind of freedom.
14:40
[SPEAKER_01]: However,
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[SPEAKER_01]: with the emergence of capitalism, because one ideology that supports capitalism is liberalism.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's individual freedom.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Give me the freedom to do what I want in the marketplace.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I should be free to buy and sell whatever I want.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm an individual, leave me alone.
15:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, this is capitalism, so everybody's free to buy and sell.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But of course, that generated massive inequalities, exploitation, sufferings, so you had theorists such as Karl Marx argue against this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But they also care about freedom, but they're going to see freedom in a different way.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And they're going to promote that version of positive freedom that I was talking about.
15:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, can I ask you, can you see any
15:25
[SPEAKER_01]: possible problems with this positive freedom.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This idea that freedom is really, you know, you need things to become your own master.
15:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you see any problems with that?
15:38
[SPEAKER_03]: The first thing that comes to mind is, well, if you need to have somebody carve out
15:45
[SPEAKER_03]: special sort of privileges or abilities for you to become a doctor or professor, the state has to jump in and control these things.
15:55
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that when you have the state instituting these programs, then I think that could be a problem because it's sort of an artificial thing that has to be created and enforced by the state.
16:09
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that is sort of the problem.
16:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, let's think of a drug addiction, right?
16:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And addict is not free.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They are a slave to drugs or alcohol or whatever.
16:22
[SPEAKER_01]: But let's say you have the state jump in and say, all right, well, help you be free.
16:26
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll take this stuff away from you.
16:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you think that's good?
16:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Would that state then enable freedom if they took away these drugs?
16:36
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, I think that their societies that prove that that works.
16:40
[SPEAKER_01]: But Ken, somebody would argue against you and be like, that's so problematic.
16:45
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the state treating us as if we're children.
16:48
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the state deciding what's good for us and then forcing that upon us.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Therefore, in the name of freedom, the state is actually oppressing us.
16:58
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's an argument against positive freedom that when the state pretends to be wiser, more paternalistic, that's really dangerous because it's a slippery slope to the state saying, OK, well, then drugs and alcohol are bad for you, then reading this or this idea is bad for you.
17:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, word, line.
17:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Does it end exactly?
17:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
17:18
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is all to say it's a debate, right?
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's freedom, the positive version or the negative version.
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[SPEAKER_01]: These Vietnamese thinkers are very much aware of these tensions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So let's continue with Fencoi here.
17:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so one important thing that I should say about Fencoi is that he was really influenced by a Chinese writer named Lusen.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Have you heard of Lusen?
17:48
[SPEAKER_01]: L-U-X-U-N.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He was one of China's greatest writers of the twentieth century.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I did not know much about Lusson as well, but if you look at, you know, if you were interested in who were the great writers in China in the early twentieth century, he is one of the greatest figures.
18:08
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's important to say a little bit about Lusson, and that way, I think we can better understand Fankoy.
18:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, back by the way, such influence from China, right?
18:20
[SPEAKER_01]: That's one theme throughout all these episodes.
18:23
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, China is really influential here.
18:26
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I am, I am starting the conversation with John Fam over Columbia in linguistics and, you know, we're trying to do what we do here at vid history makers, but for linguistics.
18:41
[SPEAKER_03]: And this equation of China is, it's like the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room.
18:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
18:49
[SPEAKER_03]: It's there.
18:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, because we have to keep in mind that in the early twentieth century, all these older scholars in Vietnam, they were writing in classical Chinese or Jo Nome.
19:03
[SPEAKER_01]: These are Chinese characters.
19:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Gwoku no, the Latinized version of the Vietnamese language will not become popular until the nineteen thirties really, and that is even when they were trying to develop it.
19:14
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll talk more about that.
19:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Basically, Lou Sun was influenced by social Darwinism.
19:20
[SPEAKER_01]: This idea that the strong will devour the weak, and if you want to survive as a people, you must become strong, and you must embrace what's new.
19:30
[SPEAKER_01]: and it's only the new that will make you strong and it's probably the the old that makes you weak like when when Britain
19:40
[SPEAKER_01]: and France were encroaching into Asia in the late nineteen hundreds many confusions were saying why is this happening is it because we've been dabbling in this confusion nonsense talk about morality and all that stuff meanwhile the west is learning science and technology and you know ways of reorganizing their societies democracy that's why they're so strong so from that perspective back then
20:08
[SPEAKER_01]: the obvious answer was let's re-evaluate Confucianism.
20:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, Lucen travels to Japan in nineteen-o-two, and he learns from Japanese modernization, and he starts to condemn.
20:24
[SPEAKER_01]: traditional Confucian culture in China and his writings.
20:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Luzhan is also translating Marxist theory.
20:31
[SPEAKER_01]: So he's a key figure in the May fourth movement.
20:35
[SPEAKER_01]: The May fourth movement is a very significant event in Chinese history.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So this was in nineteen nineteen and really quick for listeners.
20:45
[SPEAKER_01]: In nineteen nineteen
20:48
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's the end of World War I and in nineteen the great powers who emerge victorious from World War I they meet in France at in Versailles to do the Versailles treaty to come up with how are we going to create this new world order after the World War I. Well the Chinese were very upset that at the Versailles conference the Versailles treaty awarded
21:15
[SPEAKER_01]: these German controlled territories in China to Japan.
21:20
[SPEAKER_01]: They gave them to Japan rather than giving them back to China.
21:23
[SPEAKER_01]: So China, Chinese people were very humiliated.
21:27
[SPEAKER_01]: They were very angry at this decision.
21:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And so this sparked a student movement
21:33
[SPEAKER_01]: against this perceived Chinese weakness, but it became much more than that.
21:38
[SPEAKER_01]: It became a movement for new ideas, democracy, science, nationalism, rejection of Confucianism.
21:48
[SPEAKER_01]: It became a movement to learn about Marxism.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Basically, you need to imagine a lot of really angry Chinese people at the Versailles treaty.
21:57
[SPEAKER_01]: So, Luson is participating in that, and he's writing about all this.
22:01
[SPEAKER_01]: He's criticizing traditional Chinese society, and Thancoy is really inspired by Luson.
22:07
[SPEAKER_01]: So, Thancoy is reading a lot of Luson, so that I think that's a good contact.
22:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
22:14
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, so let's do a brief bio of Thancoy.
22:18
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, so Thancoy was born in eighteen eighty seven, so he's a little younger than
22:27
[SPEAKER_01]: a fantry chin who was born in nineteen hundred and no no no the fantry chin was born in eighteen seventy two i think yeah eighteen seventy two and hoochie men was born in eighteen ninety so fanko is born in between them
22:44
[SPEAKER_01]: So he began studying Chinese characters at age five.
22:49
[SPEAKER_01]: By the time he's nine years old, he gets sent to study with a really famous but progressive Confucian scholar.
22:56
[SPEAKER_01]: So the point here is that he was really immersed in Chinese writings and Confucianism.
23:01
[SPEAKER_01]: By the time he's nineteen, he earns his what we would call a bachelor's degree in exams in Hawaii.
23:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And at this point, he was also really interested in learning Guqnou, so Latinized Vietnamese in French.
23:15
[SPEAKER_01]: So he's studying French in Guqnou.
23:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And while studying French, he works as a teacher of Chinese characters at a school.
23:24
[SPEAKER_01]: So these teaching also Guqnou in Chinese characters.
23:29
[SPEAKER_01]: So he's learning these languages.
23:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And by nineteen oh six, Fen Chuchin, who we've talked about,
23:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Came back from Japan.
23:41
[SPEAKER_01]: and inspired Thancoy to famously cut off his hair.
23:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is really important because the hairstyle back then was to keep it like long in this kind of traditional Chinese way.
23:54
[SPEAKER_01]: But the new thing to do was to cut off the long hair and make your hair short.
24:00
[SPEAKER_01]: This was really famous and really powerful.
24:02
[SPEAKER_01]: This is symbolic act in nineteen oh six nineteen oh seven at the Dunkin Nieto.
24:07
[SPEAKER_01]: There were even songs and poems about this.
24:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Fencoi made a poem and it became a song that went something like a comb in your left hand and scissors in your right and we are modernizing, we are civilizing, you know, and we're gonna stand up to the French.
24:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And so these young people would cut off their hair as a way of showing their being modern, you know?
24:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And this also is a symbolic of this rejection of this old Confucian tradition.
24:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, so,
25:00
[SPEAKER_01]: So after he's released from prison, he goes to Huay and by this time he's in his mid-twenties and he enrolls in school to continue studying French.
25:11
[SPEAKER_01]: In nineteen fifteen, he begins teaching Chinese characters in Guigno in a classroom in his own home.
25:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And then in nineteen sixteen, the examination system is abolished in the north of Vietnam, Tomkin.
25:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And at this point, this is interesting.
25:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Fencoi tells his students, his students want to learn Chinese characters, but he actually tells them, look, what's the point of learning Chinese characters?
25:41
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, what's the point?
25:43
[SPEAKER_01]: The future is good, no?
25:45
[SPEAKER_01]: and French, you should be learning those languages, instead of Chinese characters.
25:52
[SPEAKER_01]: So then he moves to Hanoi in nineteen eighteen, and this is interesting.
25:57
[SPEAKER_01]: He gets introduced to Thamquin, who we've talked about in this series.
26:00
[SPEAKER_01]: And so Thamquin has this journal that he's editor of Namphong, and Thamquay starts writing.
26:08
[SPEAKER_01]: For Namphong, starts working for the journal as a staff member.
26:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he resigns after two years, he gets into a fight with Femquin, which I don't really know why.
26:18
[SPEAKER_01]: I should try to figure that out, but some scholars say that, but they don't really say why.
26:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, he resigns from Femquin's journal.
26:25
[SPEAKER_01]: He writes for a few other newspapers and periodicals.
26:29
[SPEAKER_01]: He was also the first to translate the Bible from Chinese and French to Vietnamese.
26:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Interesting.
26:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, really interesting.
26:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
26:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
26:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
26:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So he is under surveillance, however, by colonial authorities because of his nationalist involvement.
26:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And he continues to write for journals
26:54
[SPEAKER_01]: in the nineteen twenty is in nineteen twenty nine a thank god moves to say gone and he writes for this newspaper called folk note done then so women's news which is a journal about gender issues but interestingly a lot of Vietnamese men would write in it
27:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And some of them would even pretend to be women like their names.
27:18
[SPEAKER_01]: That's interesting.
27:19
[SPEAKER_01]: So here he is writing publishing his writings about language.
27:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we're going to talk more about that.
27:26
[SPEAKER_01]: But another thing that's really important to say here is that in the second issue of Fulnote, Dunvann, he in nineteen thirty two, he publishes the short essay
27:38
[SPEAKER_01]: or it's kind of a poem, but I see this pop-up when you read Vietnamese history in different history books.
27:45
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a famous one, but it's called Dynhya.
27:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Old Love.
27:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And this poem is seen today as the poem that started this whole movement called the new poetry movement.
27:59
[SPEAKER_01]: This is significant.
28:00
[SPEAKER_01]: So basically what the movement was is that it's breaking from tradition and it's starting new ways of thinking about how to relate to people and society.
28:15
[SPEAKER_01]: So for example, it started the use of
28:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Doi, like calling yourself Doi.
28:21
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, in the Vietnamese language, it's very relational.
28:24
[SPEAKER_01]: When I go to Vietnam, I need to figure out where I am in the hierarchy.
28:28
[SPEAKER_01]: If I'm a young person, I'll call them am older person.
28:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And it can get awkward.
28:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Like one time, I met a young woman.
28:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And when I lived in Vietnam, when I was, I was, I was, I was, I was twenty-three.
28:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And I met a young woman and I called her G, and she was really upset because she was like, how dare you?
28:50
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'm, I'm, I'm.
28:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, the, the new poetry movement, they wanted to free up expression of the, for the individual from this, what they saw as oppressive family hierarchies and social relations.
29:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they, they promoted this idea of being an individual.
29:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And his poem Old Love, I'm just going to read part of the poem to you and ask you what you get from it.
29:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so some context, he is describing a meeting, a chance meeting of two lovers.
29:27
[SPEAKER_01]: long after they decided to part ways to accept their arranged marriages.
29:34
[SPEAKER_01]: So they had fallen in love when they were younger, but their parents made them marry other people.
29:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And then years later, they ran into each other.
29:41
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is the poem.
29:43
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, twenty-four years later, a chance encounter far away, both heads had turned to silver.
29:51
[SPEAKER_01]: had they not known each other well might they not have passed a known and old affair was recalled no more it was just a glance in passing I mean what would he make of that poem well thinking of what possibly could have gone before it what notions of
30:19
[SPEAKER_03]: order when notions of human connection and love comes before that thought of you know it probably existed and nobody actually wrote about it and that's sort of like I think in my mind because if everything was arranged marriages you know who dare who dare to speak out about
30:44
[SPEAKER_03]: The glance of an old lover or somebody you really, you know, was in love with when you were a kid.
30:49
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, that all of that swept under the rug and let's not talk about it.
30:53
[SPEAKER_03]: We will perform what is expected of us in this society of arranged marriages.
30:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
31:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
31:00
[SPEAKER_01]: So these poets, this part, this new movement, they were talking about true love was a way of saying, look, this is new.
31:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's against the traditional and the old true love going like loving people who you know, thinking for yourself essentially that's that's modern right so he's going to be praised for this.
31:24
[SPEAKER_01]: It's also quite iconic plastic you know going against the tradition expectations of the parents and the family and so on.
31:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Later, however, he is going to be criticized by some Marxists for being too much of an idealist.
31:42
[SPEAKER_01]: So Marxists are dialectical materialists.
31:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And they are going to focus on the economic relations.
31:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And they are going to criticize Fancoi for thinking too much in terms of ideas, change the world.
31:54
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a very hagg alien and non-Marxist way of thinking about historical change.
32:01
[SPEAKER_01]: So after the August Revolution of nineteen forty-five, Fancoy is invited to join the anti-French resistance and he moves to the communist guerrilla zone in Vietnam to participate.
32:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's actually part of this in the north and he's going to become one of the major figures in the Nianvansai-Fan movement.
32:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, he never identifies as a communist, and if you read accounts by historians, some of them will actually call him an anti-communist, but if you read his writings, you don't see that.
32:38
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is actually puzzling to me, because if I read some writers like Van Vinci, he's going to say, Van Coi was an anti-communist, but if you actually read Van Coi's writings, he's praising communism.
32:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, we'll talk more about that in a bit.
32:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so he participates in the Young Vens iPhone and then he gets into trouble with the authorities and he gets under house arrest and he dies in nineteen fifty nine.
33:05
[SPEAKER_01]: So remember that the Young Vens iPhone movement was a free speech movement between nineteen fifty six nineteen fifty nine.
33:11
[SPEAKER_01]: So he dies at the end of that.
33:13
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's the brief bio.
33:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end
33:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
33:33
[SPEAKER_01]: So, all right, I want to talk about three things right now, and they all have to do with freedom.
33:38
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I want to talk about Fancoy and what he says about language and how he's trying to promote freedom through changing the Vietnamese language.
33:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I want to talk about what he says about speaking freely, so free speech.
33:57
[SPEAKER_01]: So, and then I want to end by talking about book banning because he has an interesting essay about that.
34:06
[SPEAKER_01]: So, okay, let's turn to language for listeners if you're
34:13
[SPEAKER_01]: of the scholarly type and your interested in reading some academic stuff.
34:16
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a great article by Jack Sidney recently published in the Journal of Vietnam via the studies.
34:23
[SPEAKER_01]: It's called the inconvenience of tradition, Fencoise pragmatism, and his proposals for modernizing language reform.
34:31
[SPEAKER_01]: So the basic argument that Jack Sidney makes is that Fencoise is so important because he wanted to reform the Vietnamese language
34:42
[SPEAKER_01]: to increase communication in public.
34:48
[SPEAKER_01]: so that people can debate with each other in public.
34:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, if you think about it in Vietnamese language, this is really tricky, right?
34:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Because if you're always calling somebody, Jew or Um or Am, there's all this relational stuff that you got to be mindful of, and it kind of gets in the way of just directly making our graphics.
35:11
[SPEAKER_03]: That's what held us back, right?
35:13
[SPEAKER_03]: It's honorifics, the titleing.
35:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and so Thancoy thought that a lot of this was happening in face-to-face context, but how do we modernize language to get out of the face-to-face context so that you could have debates in newspapers, for example, or like a form, a public form?
35:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And so basically,
35:38
[SPEAKER_01]: to have public reason and to get people to exercise their reason and rationality, you should start using doly.
35:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I, you know, use the word I instead of referring to yourself in relation to other people.
35:55
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's one way that he tried to reform the language.
35:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's interesting because he knew that language would modernize Vietnamese society.
36:04
[SPEAKER_01]: If Vietnamese people could start debating with each other using logic and reasoning in arguments, then that would
36:14
[SPEAKER_03]: body mind blowing pretty mind blowing to think about that because as a modern Vietnamese person I always thought that I always like oh we're hampered in communication because of the lack of linguistic technology inside of our culture that's what creates this
36:33
[SPEAKER_03]: lack of harmony between the generations living in America and our parents.
36:39
[SPEAKER_03]: It's this inability to really, we can't throw us conversation forward because not only are we, we're, we're hindered by our language skills, but we're also hindered by this honor of ethics, this respect, this way of talking that we cannot
36:57
[SPEAKER_03]: We can never tell them how we really feel.
37:00
[SPEAKER_03]: And I mean, I grew up feeling that way.
37:04
[SPEAKER_03]: But my parents were relatively open and liberal and encouraged us just to speak, but I would see it in other families and it would be so uncomfortable.
37:12
[SPEAKER_03]: But I never was able to put my finger on it until now, you know, the conversations that we have make me realize that before
37:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Fun coy now, this was not even the thing.
37:27
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, how could you say I to any grownup or anybody without putting a relational sort of, you know, you're you're you're triangulating your position.
37:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
37:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
37:42
[SPEAKER_01]: It really changes how you think too.
37:44
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like when I speak English or what immediately in Vietnam, I need to think about my relationship and what kind of respect I need to show to someone and so on.
37:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
37:55
[SPEAKER_03]: It's almost like you have to insert a different type of like you're not playing chess anymore.
38:03
[SPEAKER_03]: You're playing
38:05
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know, in Vinnie's language, you are playing chess because everything's positional.
38:09
[SPEAKER_03]: But I think in like English, you take a lot of rules out of the game and you're just able to really just put your opinions and your thoughts and observations out there freely without worrying about how you're going to get responded back to.
38:31
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's that word.
38:32
[SPEAKER_01]: You said freely, right?
38:34
[SPEAKER_01]: That's exactly what he's concerned with.
38:36
[SPEAKER_01]: How do we speak freely so that we can liberate reason?
38:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is really what we might call a modernist project, an Enlightenment project.
38:46
[SPEAKER_01]: The whole European Enlightenment was what Emmanuel Kant famously said.
38:51
[SPEAKER_01]: It's when we, when human step out of their immaturity and had the courage to think for themselves.
38:58
[SPEAKER_01]: to not be restrained and held back from custom and tradition, and all this older stuff to really think boldly.
39:07
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's the European Enlightenment.
39:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is what Chinese thinkers and Vietnamese thinkers were saying to themselves, maybe we need that.
39:15
[SPEAKER_01]: You know what's really sad, Kevin?
39:18
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm witnessing families in my family, my extended family.
39:24
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm witnessing
39:27
[SPEAKER_03]: just the breakdown of father to son mother to daughter relationships as we are continuing to live in America and father doesn't agree with son because you know whatever and it's and it's really just heartbreaking to think
39:49
[SPEAKER_03]: that the ability to actually communicate in a free way is not existed.
39:55
[SPEAKER_03]: It's impossible for the child to really have a real conversation with the parents because
40:04
[SPEAKER_03]: you know of this paradigm that we have and it's nobody's fault when I think about it you know I think the Vietnamese language and the structures beautiful if you're living in Vietnam if you're living twenty thirty years ago in society in Vietnam it's a beautiful thing because you know it's kind of like that flow but as soon as you hit foreign shores and you're trying to like
40:28
[SPEAKER_03]: You, as a parent, you're trying to change a little bit.
40:31
[SPEAKER_03]: You're trying to open up, but you're still, you're living in the words of your current culture.
40:39
[SPEAKER_03]: You cannot evolve quick enough with the children.
40:43
[SPEAKER_03]: If you're not understanding that there's this force of, you know, the Enlightenment,
40:52
[SPEAKER_03]: behind generations of these Westerners that your kids are now have now become.
41:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, there seems to be a real tension between this enlightenment approach in thinking for yourself, being an individual versus the filial piety and the respect.
41:12
[SPEAKER_01]: But at the same time, Ken, don't you think that it's possible to go too far in the enlightenment direction?
41:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's really bad as well.
41:21
[SPEAKER_01]: I come out.
41:21
[SPEAKER_03]: I, yes, I do.
41:22
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it could be very, very bad.
41:25
[SPEAKER_03]: And I can't believe I'm saying that.
41:28
[SPEAKER_03]: But in my heart,
41:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Because then the beauty of our culture, the respect and the nourishment, the warmth that comes from unspoken, certain unspoken addages is unable to pop up.
41:46
[SPEAKER_03]: So how do you make sense of all of this as first, second, third generation Vietnamese?
41:51
[SPEAKER_03]: living in the diaspora and then now you know they have a lot of families that are coming from Vietnam who are young families that that are not inhibited with the the ideas and narratives of the war and now they're going to be dealing with some other weird paradigm shift because of language
42:17
[SPEAKER_01]: much to think about here.
42:19
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's move on now to what Fencoise says about free speech and speaking freely.
42:27
[SPEAKER_01]: So I want to quote here from a text that he wrote in nineteen fifty six.
42:34
[SPEAKER_01]: This is fifty six fifty seven.
42:37
[SPEAKER_01]: This is during the Nianveng's iPhone movement.
42:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm just going to quote him here and I want to ask what you think about this.
42:45
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, I want to tell the truth, but some people say that there are truths that should not be told.
42:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't buy it.
42:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't believe it.
42:56
[SPEAKER_01]: That is under some other regime, but under our regime, which uses criticism and self-criticism as weapons, what truth is there that should not be told?
43:10
[SPEAKER_01]: So he says, I'm gonna continue.
43:11
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, I wanna criticize, but some people say that internal criticism is fine, but it should not be written written in books and newspapers because when the enemy sees it, they will distort it.
43:25
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't believe it either.
43:27
[SPEAKER_01]: The period of closed doors to teach each other is over.
43:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Today's the day when any internal conflict needs to be resolved in front of the masses,
43:37
[SPEAKER_01]: without the light of the masses to guide us, it cannot be resolved.
43:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Moreover, having acknowledged that we eat from the labor of the people, and we work for the people, and the people are the masters, and the people have the right to inspect everything we do, why should we keep it a secret from each other?
44:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Why should we not let the people know?
44:05
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll stop there.
44:06
[SPEAKER_01]: What is he saying?
44:08
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that the East and the West deals with this control of information, transparency, showing
44:18
[SPEAKER_03]: the different thoughts within the internal structures of government or family.
44:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Does that make you weaker or does it make you seem stronger because you're able to debate this all out, right?
44:30
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that when I think about the northern culture, it's much more closed.
44:36
[SPEAKER_03]: It's much more, you know, on the spectrum of openness and closeness, I think
44:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Even to this day, my mom is always like, unless that talk about it openly.
44:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's keep this within our family.
44:49
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's not share this out.
44:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's, you know, be very protective of this information.
44:53
[SPEAKER_03]: I see this a lot.
44:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, yeah.
44:56
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, yeah, some contacts here though.
45:00
[SPEAKER_01]: So in the north of Vietnam in nineteen fifty six fifty seven.
45:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Remember, they kick out the French in fifty four.
45:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And now at this point, there are
45:12
[SPEAKER_01]: There's the second Indo-China war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam.
45:18
[SPEAKER_01]: The Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North, which is led by Communists.
45:23
[SPEAKER_01]: That is where Fan Koy is.
45:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's telling that government in these writings, he's saying, like, look, I'm with you.
45:32
[SPEAKER_01]: I agree with our regime.
45:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Our regime is good.
45:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Our regime has the truth.
45:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And we all know that we make mistakes, and we need to rectify those mistakes.
45:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And the best way to do that is to discuss those mistakes in front of the people.
45:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I understand that you're afraid that if we write about our mistakes, the capitalist enemies in the south will take advantage of it and use it against us, but we shouldn't be afraid of that.
46:02
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's basically what he's saying here.
46:05
[SPEAKER_01]: it's also like what Malcolm X would say it's like if you're in a movement and you have disagreements you should get in a huddle don't let your enemies know because they're going to exploit the mistakes and divide you so anyway I think it's interesting here that he's he's
46:23
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I was about to say he's pretending, but who knows if he's pretending or not, right?
46:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe he really does think that the regime is good.
46:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Some people will say, oh, he's just pretending to praise the regime.
46:35
[SPEAKER_01]: I think he can be both.
46:36
[SPEAKER_03]: You can believe in the party and the regime and your team's vision, but you can also critique it and saying, hey, although I do decide with how we see things, but there are also other ways to identify progress.
46:53
[SPEAKER_03]: in within our own ecosystem.
46:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
46:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think, OK, what he does here, I'm going to read another quote, but what he does, I think, is really clever because he's going to say, look, our minds
47:07
[SPEAKER_01]: are they still have residues from the old bad regimes, the feudal regimes, the colonial regimes.
47:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we need to, we actually need to purify ourselves.
47:18
[SPEAKER_01]: So he's actually using this language of Marxism purification.
47:22
[SPEAKER_01]: So he says, quote, what do we do now?
47:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Granted, our regime is good.
47:27
[SPEAKER_01]: But who are we?
47:28
[SPEAKER_01]: We are people who have lived under feudal, colonial, and imperialist regimes, more or less.
47:34
[SPEAKER_01]: The evil thoughts of those evil regimes still linger in our minds more or less.
47:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And this gives rise to evil phenomena that we can only see if we close our eyes.
47:46
[SPEAKER_01]: It's so it's in our minds.
47:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Now we must have the courage to look straight at those dark phenomena, expose them, and demand that we correct them.
47:55
[SPEAKER_01]: correct them to the very root of our thoughts.
47:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Only them will our regime become better and more sustainable.
48:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Only then will we be worthy of Marxist, of being Marxist, communist, and citizens of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
48:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Isn't that interesting, like he's saying, like, we should be Marxist and communist, but we can only be worthy of that when we expose our bad thinking.
48:23
[SPEAKER_03]: that's so anti-ho-ho.
48:28
[SPEAKER_03]: When I think about the closed government of Vietnam, I think of, you know, the inability to critique anything in the government.
48:45
[SPEAKER_03]: For the most part, from the public, from the masses.
48:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
48:50
[SPEAKER_01]: How can I, you would have to like watch
48:53
[SPEAKER_01]: the debates they have in their assembly.
48:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Are those open for us to watch?
48:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah, yeah.
48:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you can watch it on YouTube.
49:00
[SPEAKER_01]: You didn't know that.
49:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah, yeah.
49:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Listeners, you can watch a national assembly debates on YouTube.
49:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And they are criticizing each other all the time.
49:10
[SPEAKER_01]: They get done like that.
49:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
49:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
49:15
[SPEAKER_03]: The weird thing that we don't know.
49:16
[SPEAKER_03]: Why don't we know about that, right?
49:19
[SPEAKER_01]: So there is a, I'll do a shout out here.
49:23
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a very popular YouTuber named Luna.
49:27
[SPEAKER_01]: She's a self-proclaimed communist.
49:30
[SPEAKER_01]: She's a young Vietnamese woman in Vietnam.
49:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And she has been criticized for being a tanky.
49:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, a tanky, do you know?
49:39
[SPEAKER_01]: So tankies are people who
49:47
[SPEAKER_01]: They are very pro-communists and they're called tankies because like there were communists in Eastern Europe and in China.
49:57
[SPEAKER_01]: And you remember the tanks like Crush Adam and kids.
50:02
[SPEAKER_01]: People in defense of those tanks.
50:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
50:08
[SPEAKER_01]: So like Stalinists are like, you know, really intolerant communist, you know.
50:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, I don't know how fair it is to color that.
50:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe she would embrace it who knows, but that is a that is a slur for for communist.
50:23
[SPEAKER_01]: But anyway, but she has translated some national assembly debates into you could just watch them on YouTube, just YouTube, Luna I.
50:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, I think she has some interesting perspectives and her perspectives are among other perspectives.
50:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, okay.
50:45
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, when I think about the current landscape of the Vietnamese government or any government modern, it's so huge to me.
50:52
[SPEAKER_03]: It's so big to me.
50:54
[SPEAKER_03]: But then when you think about Van Khoi and you're just quoting his thoughts
51:01
[SPEAKER_03]: It seems like a thinker that covers such a lot of ground, right?
51:08
[SPEAKER_03]: But he's just one guy in this period and how much voice does he really have?
51:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Because if you and I were like guys that were like funclaw, we have like this opinion and we have to stop, we're starting to write a lot, critiquing the government today.
51:24
[SPEAKER_03]: We're like a piece of like a sand pebble in this ocean of government.
51:31
[SPEAKER_03]: And, but guys like Fan Koi, are they insignificant or are they really bigger than, you know, they're thinkers that have like, do they have big ripples like somebody like Fan Koi in the government of his time?
51:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Can the answer is that he was arrested.
51:57
[SPEAKER_01]: He got in trouble with the party for saying exactly these things.
52:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's under house arrest, and he dies under house arrest.
52:04
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the party bans his writings for the next forty years.
52:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's enough to show us that he was very influential.
52:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, he was a big writer in those journals that I mentioned on the women's news and very prolific writer wrote thousands of essays.
52:26
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, he was really influential, and that's precisely why the government
52:31
[SPEAKER_01]: rest at him and like band his work.
52:35
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, one thing that feels like if we were to break down a percentage of all the people that we've covered in these figures in vid history makers, almost everybody went to jail at some point.
52:49
[SPEAKER_03]: That was everybody was like, yeah, they're by French colonial government or they're communist government.
52:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Like you, you cannot have street cred if you didn't do time.
52:58
[SPEAKER_03]: But it's just, there's no way to, yeah, you don't make it on the map if you didn't do a few years in jail.
53:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, one thing I wonder though in the quotes that I just read to you, I also wonder if he's just pretending to defend.
53:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, like, yeah, and is there a kind of inner sensor in him?
53:21
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, is anyway, who knows and does this even matter?
53:26
[SPEAKER_03]: It does matter because if you cut the line, if you cut the anchor entirely, then nobody's gonna listen to you.
53:34
[SPEAKER_03]: You have to be like,
53:35
[SPEAKER_03]: You have to be towing some party line for you to make an impact on listeners and your audience.
53:43
[SPEAKER_03]: You still have to be like, I don't know.
53:44
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm part of you guys.
53:46
[SPEAKER_03]: I buy into all this, but look, look at this this other way.
53:52
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think there's no way to really know if he believes.
53:56
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
53:59
[SPEAKER_01]: It also makes for clever arguments.
54:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me read another quote.
54:02
[SPEAKER_01]: This is really interesting.
54:03
[SPEAKER_01]: So he argues that artists need freedom to do their art.
54:08
[SPEAKER_01]: So he says, artists do not demand indiscriminate freedom to do whatever they want.
54:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Artists accept being under leadership.
54:19
[SPEAKER_01]: The only question they raise is what kind of leadership it should be.
54:24
[SPEAKER_01]: It must be said that artists also want freedom, but they only demand freedom in arts.
54:31
[SPEAKER_03]: So, this is what's circular.
54:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so what he's saying here is he's saying that look the artists in the north of Vietnam, the communist Vietnam, they support the government and they also support their leaders.
54:47
[SPEAKER_01]: but they need to have freedom in art because the leaders and the political movement, the communist revolution, it needs help from artists, but it needs for the artists to be free.
55:03
[SPEAKER_01]: So the leaders of the revolution should not tell the artists what to do, even though the leaders of the revolution need the artists help.
55:13
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's kind of, it's interesting this relationship between artists and the leaders, the political leaders.
55:20
[SPEAKER_01]: So he says, literature and art serve politics, and politics must lead literature and art.
55:29
[SPEAKER_01]: However, for politics to achieve its aims, it needs the help of art, but artists need freedom.
55:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if this is, is this like,
55:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Does this make sense, even?
55:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Let me make sense, because now circular.
55:45
[SPEAKER_03]: You're like saying, we need the freedom as artists to be able to do whatever we want.
55:51
[SPEAKER_03]: But then the people who should be controlling this, we should be able to control who those leaders are almost.
55:58
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a very circular.
55:59
[SPEAKER_01]: No, no, no, no.
56:01
[SPEAKER_01]: So he's saying that the artists accept the leadership.
56:06
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't want to control the leaders.
56:08
[SPEAKER_01]: The artists don't want to control the leaders.
56:10
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
56:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
56:15
[SPEAKER_01]: The artists accept the leaders and their political goals.
56:22
[SPEAKER_01]: And the leaders of the political leaders need the help of the artists to promote communist revolution, for example.
56:33
[SPEAKER_01]: It's too neat.
56:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And then Thancoy says that the problem happens when the leaders start encroaching on the artistic privacy of the artists.
56:48
[SPEAKER_01]: So what he's saying is that you need to leave artists alone, and they will almost spontaneously do the right thing.
56:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, do the right thing.
57:00
[SPEAKER_01]: So he says quote, for the past two years,
57:04
[SPEAKER_01]: our artistic leaders, so the political leaders, have gone too far and failed to keep that unwritten agreement.
57:13
[SPEAKER_01]: The leaders have increasingly encroached on the artistic privacy of artists.
57:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so this is theory that it's just so much more complicated than that.
57:23
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's too simplistic what he's saying.
57:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, just as it makes enough sense to, I don't know, it maybe was a different time, but just to my ears today that, you know, I think art and politics have to kind of be at odds with each other, has to.
57:43
[SPEAKER_03]: I think the structure of a healthy society
57:48
[SPEAKER_03]: has artists speaking up against the government and the government cannot censor the artist in a robust society like America, you know, theoretically.
58:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
58:05
[SPEAKER_01]: So his faith, I would say, is that if you leave artists alone, then they will kind of automatically do the right thing, meaning they will become good socialists.
58:17
[SPEAKER_01]: or communist revolutionaries.
58:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And this actually echoes some theories, for example, Jean-Jacques Russo.
58:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Everybody's heard of Russo.
58:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And Russo is famous for thinking that, you know, the deep down inside, all of us, is a good person.
58:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Deep down.
58:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Really deep down.
58:37
[SPEAKER_01]: is a good person who cares more about the collective than themselves.
58:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And the thing that made us all selfish individuals is actually society, like the corrupting, like for example Instagram, you know, if Russo were alive to see Instagram, he would be like exactly.
58:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Like Instagram makes us all competitive with each other.
59:00
[SPEAKER_01]: We all want to appear like we're having nicer lives than others.
59:04
[SPEAKER_01]: We all have this vanity and this self-love.
59:08
[SPEAKER_01]: But deep down inside, we all are the good part of us.
59:11
[SPEAKER_01]: We all would serve society over ourselves.
59:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's what Thancoy is saying here.
59:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I don't know if he actually believes
59:22
[SPEAKER_01]: But it is what he's saying, you know, that if you leave artists alone, the good part of them will come out and it'll be inherently, it'll be revolutionary because that's what being good is according to him.
59:35
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, the exercise of talking about all these figures day in and day out with each other over the last few months has given me such compassion for
59:48
[SPEAKER_03]: The Vietnamese person is journey, especially like my own.
59:54
[SPEAKER_03]: There are so many things that I was not aware of about being Vietnamese.
1:00:00
[SPEAKER_03]: And the more we get into this stuff, the more we're just kind of blown away that these thoughts and thinkers were existing way before our parents were born.
1:00:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:00:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me wind down the episode by saying one more thing that I think is just fascinating.
1:00:18
[SPEAKER_01]: So here he's talking about book banning.
1:00:21
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you and me, Ken, we're talking about how these historical figures might speak to the present.
1:00:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, at present, the United States government has banned thousands of books.
1:00:35
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, okay, part of it is the government, but also like in local districts, bad state, like banning children's books, banning all sorts of books from the libraries.
1:00:47
[SPEAKER_01]: This is what Thancoye had to say about banning books.
1:00:51
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, if you want a ban a book, then fine.
1:00:57
[SPEAKER_01]: But you should say why you're banning it.
1:00:59
[SPEAKER_01]: You should say why it's guilty.
1:01:02
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, you know, arresting someone and putting them on trial.
1:01:07
[SPEAKER_01]: You need to show why they're guilty.
1:01:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he says, is it a good idea to not let anyone say anything?
1:01:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe, but usually when people cannot say something to relieve their anger, they feel angry inside.
1:01:23
[SPEAKER_01]: So he's describing, like, here's what will happen if you, if you censor people, if you ban people.
1:01:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And he says, people actually buy banned books for more money, often double the price before the ban.
1:01:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And after a long time, the price of the book will get more expensive.
1:01:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Banning it, I'm quoting him, banning it means not wanting people to read it, but unexpectedly it makes people read it even more.
1:01:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he says, there's no pleasure like the pleasure of closing the door tightly when it's raining and then reading forbidden books.
1:02:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I'm gonna say it in Vietnamese.
1:02:06
[SPEAKER_01]: So he says,
1:02:22
[SPEAKER_01]: So, um, and I'll end with this interesting bit.
1:02:25
[SPEAKER_01]: So in nineteen fifty six, there was a Saigon newspaper who accused him of serving the Viet Gump.
1:02:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And his reply was, you guys are wrong that I follow the Viet Gump and that I serve the Viet Gump.
1:02:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I am a servant, but I'm a servant of the people, not a servant of the imperialists and landlords.
1:02:45
[SPEAKER_01]: as for the Vietnamese communists, they are just servants of the people like me.
1:02:52
[SPEAKER_01]: I think those are interesting.
1:02:55
[SPEAKER_03]: The verbal jujitsu.
1:02:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah.
1:03:00
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, this is great.
1:03:03
[SPEAKER_03]: I am curious.
1:03:08
[SPEAKER_03]: The next few figures because we're taking a lot of big swings.
1:03:14
[SPEAKER_03]: You are.
1:03:14
[SPEAKER_03]: You're taking a lot of big swings and taking us to a lot of interesting places.
1:03:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you for that.
1:03:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
1:03:23
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a it's a journey with unexpected really is really is Kevin.
1:03:28
[SPEAKER_03]: I think the audience is really enjoying this.
1:03:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you once again.
1:03:31
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
1:03:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for listening to the Vietnamese with Kenneth Wynn.
1:03:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Special thanks to Brittany Tran, to Jane Wynn, Catherine Wynn, Tina Fam, Sydney Jamie, and Crystal Tran.
1:03:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Please find us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok at the Vietnamese podcast.