Latest / The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen / 500 - P2 AMA - Is Modern Vietnamese Writing the Colonizer’s Alphabet? Viet Origins w Prof. John Phan

Transcript

500 - P2 AMA - Is Modern Vietnamese Writing the Colonizer’s Alphabet? Viet Origins w Prof. John Phan · The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the Vietnamese podcast.
• 0:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have John back on for our professor from Columbia.
• 0:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we are back with an AMA to talk about the last episode on Goknud.
• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome back, John.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hey, how's it going, Kenneth?
• 0:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's been a minute.
• 0:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Good to see you.
• 0:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's a blink of an eye and months go by.
• 0:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's true.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's probably this spring.
• 0:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's been busy, but it's good to sit down with you again, after so long.
• 0:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we are going to get into the comment section on our last episode on Kuknud and we have a few things that we can talk about that reflect back on the comments some people brought in really interesting topics.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I thought it was interesting.
• 0:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm thank you to everybody who engaged in the conversation.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: We were a little spicy with our title, I think, trying to bring people in, but it was gratifying to see that some of you not only clicked on the video, but you watched the video or you listened to the whole conversation and you had some intelligent and thought provoking questions to ask.
• 1:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that was nice.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: So don't fault just for the clickbait.
• 1:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's something behind the clickbait as well.
• 1:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: So thanks for staying for the episode.
• 1:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, one of the first questions is this idea of literacy and how we can kind of clock it and how we can understand what the literacy rates were back then.
• 1:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Can we talk about that?
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that was a really good point that was raised in Q and A or the disc, the comments thread.
• 1:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: The question about specifically the literacy rate of the high, the late dynasty under late hanktong, and there was a little bit of a back and forth between some commenters, which was great.
• 1:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: The question was, how do we understand the literacy of that time?
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because in the context of the episode, we were talking about quaknu and the jump in literacy
• 1:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: later in the 19th and 20th centuries, we're really the 20th century.
• 1:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And how does that compare with literacy say going way back to the 15th century?
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the first thing I want to note about the 15th century, which is the late dynasty, especially under late, Hank Thump, the sort of most famous emperor who was celebrated for his educational reforms.
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was a staunched new Confucian.
• 2:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: He implemented rigorous civil service examinations, and he also endorsed poetry very famously.
• 2:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, so the first thing I want to note is that when we talk about literacy in that time, we are not really talking about literacy in two-nome or in, and that means not literacy in the Vietnamese language.
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're really talking about literacy in literary Chinese or literary
• 2:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: So you can go back to a previous episode where we talked about the legacy of literary cynetic as a part of Vietnamese culture, part of Vietnamese history, very, very true for the 15th century.
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can almost think of this as the zenith of that kind of educational system.
• 3:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: We don't have any idea of what literacy was like in Rome.
• 3:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: We do know that when we and I had lived his life by this point, famous poet,
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: and had written a body of poetry in the in-nome, which survives to this day.
• 3:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: We also know that late-hanktum, well, at least according to tradition commission, that kind of poetic group, that also composed a body of poetry in-nome.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there was some known literacy, no existed at this time.
• 3:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: But what I'm about to say is not statistics for no literacy or Vietnamese literacy, but statistics in literary Chinese.
• 3:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And once again, when we talk about literacy in general, the default is literary synthetic.
• 3:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's not literacy in Vietnamese-known.
• 3:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: So with that said, it's hard to know, of course, what the literacy rates are so long ago, because there is no such thing as a census for literacy at that time.
• 3:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have estimates about the population.
• 4:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not an expert here, and I didn't take the time to look up verifiable numbers.
• 4:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I think this is purely oppressionistic, but I think it's something like four millions, low millions for the entire kingdom.
• 4:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I'd have to look that up again, but the main, the one of the main ways we can sort of try to detect what the literacy level is is by looking at the civil service exam because we do have pretty good numbers and records for who took that exam.
• 4:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's very famous in East Asia is an exam that was implemented across the kingdom or across the empire, if you're in China, to elect men to serve in the government.
• 4:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it was an exam based on essentially on the classics, but also on poetic composition.
• 4:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: But so there was a civil exam, and then there's a bunch of exams for the professions like law, astronomy, and things like that, military exams as well.
• 5:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, of course, the first question you should ask yourself is, in what language did you take that exam, and the answer you should all know already is, you took that exam in literary synetic, right?
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was not an exam administered in Vietnamese.
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, so if we have numbers of people who took and passed an exam, then we can sort of a map, we can kind of extract an impression of how many people were able to read and write, because it's a written exam, of course.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the numbers I'm about to give you are I rely on my teacher Keith Taylor, who wrote an excellent history of Vietnam called The History of the Vietnamese, which is available you know, anywhere you can buy books.
• 5:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: I highly recommend it.
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a very rich book and it relies heavily on Navi Sakeet, on who which is the main chronicle of the late dynasty.
• 5:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: So in late Hanktham's time, he implemented a triennial exam, starting in 1463, which means they did exams every three years.
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: But there was different levels to the exam.
• 6:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there was a kind of provincial level.
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: There was also probably a lowest level, like a village level.
• 6:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then you go to the provincial level.
• 6:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then you go to the metropolitan level.
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then you go to the, there is another level at the highest level.
• 6:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in 1463, there were 4,400 regional or provincial graduates.
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in 1514, there were 5,700.
• 6:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that means that there's about 4,000 men graduating from regional exams every three years that go on to the capital exams.
• 6:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that suggests, in turn, five applicants from every district in the kingdom.
• 6:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: So every district, that means all across the entire kingdom of David, not just the area around Hanoi.
• 6:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then of all of those, so that suggests pretty high, when we say district we mean huyen, if you know what a huyen is, so five people from every huyen are literate enough to apply for the exam.
• 7:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you've got to think that that's a pretty high bar of literacy because it's the exam on the classics and on poetry.
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: So if you think about it that way then there's must have been a much higher level of people who just could read or write, you know, to write the menu on their restaurant or to write a receipt, you know, or to write in a diary or to write a letter, that type of literacy is lower bar of literacy.
• 7:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: So if we've got five peeps or go ahead, but John, how do we extrapolate that that's a high number from a whoin and how many people weren't a whoin right I mean yeah that's a good one right yeah to the next question so it is if you look at the if you look at the estimates of the overall population of the country it's very low for a country for a for a kingdom of this time it's very high because literacy is low literacy is an elite practice at this time.
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, but that was exactly the point I wanted to make was that if you're talking about a kingdom of 4 million people, that's, you know, that's not very high.
• 8:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's in the low, you know, single digits, I think percentage wise.
• 8:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: For that high level of literacy, and it gets really tricky though, because then how many people could read in that more casual way that I just described.
• 8:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: and it gets even trickier as per that person's question, because in that lower kind of more casual literacy, how many people don't know literary cynetic, but maybe no enough gnome to write a letter to their mom, you know?
• 8:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that's just we have no idea.
• 8:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, there's also another question that I have to, that's related is that what if
• 8:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why did they limit it to just five pro-widen when what if they could have had 20 take the test pro-widen right and that would maybe reflect a bigger proportion.
• 8:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 8:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, it's not limited.
• 8:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it's not that there was a law that said only five brilliant.
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: What what it means is that according to these statistics, which again, I'm borrowing from Professor Taylor.
• 9:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I haven't done an in-depth analysis of these numbers.
• 9:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: But what what Professor Taylor and others have done has have looked at the number of graduates.
• 9:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: in those years and said this means there must have been around five per district, but the reason why that's striking is because we're talking about per district across the kingdom.
• 9:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: You have to remember this is not a modern kingdom, right?
• 9:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it's not striking if it's five people from the districts around Hanoi because that's the metropolitan area, but we're talking about across every district going all the way down to Tanghua.
• 9:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, and all the way west all the way north.
• 9:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: So this is widespread.
• 9:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: The idea, the idea of these numbers is that the preparation and literacy trading for the exams is widespread across the entire kingdom.
• 9:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it is a pretty low number when you look at overall numbers, and I don't know the numbers for contemporary France, for example, which is probably would be a good kind of counter example,
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: But, of course, in general, you want to remember that literacy is very, very low compared to modern times at this moment.
• 10:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: What we talked about last time is that there is never the less, a culture of literacy in David.
• 10:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: That is tied to the civil service exam.
• 10:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: And these numbers demonstrate that despite the fact that we have no
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, mass printing yet, you know, we do have printing, but we don't have, you know, mass industrialized printing, this is a striking level of literacy.
• 10:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: And also, again, remember that those numbers are low because that's just from the civil service exam.
• 10:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: So many more people must have been able to read and many and more people must have been able to read at various levels, then what we're seeing just in these, this is like,
• 10:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know the top essentially of the educational system.
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And if the very top of the educational system, excuse me, is already so robust.
• 11:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's why we say we have this impression of high literacy, quote unquote, high literacy in the lay.
• 11:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: But when you compare that with the 20th century, there is no comparison.
• 11:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: So those of you who are like, well, guaknu must have been responsible for a spike in literacy, you're 100% correct.
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it has much more to do than with, has more to do with, rather, it has to do with many more things other than the simplicity of the alphabet.
• 11:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because the main thing that happened is that the printing press was invented in Gutenberg.
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we already had printing in East Asia in the form of woodblock printing.
• 11:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the movable,
• 11:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: print.
• 11:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: There was a kind of moveable print in East Asia as well, but that's in the weeds.
• 11:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: The European invention of the Gutenberg Press stimulated an industry of printing, which made it cheap to print a bunch of literature to disseminate.
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that is the main factor in the spike in literacy, you know, in both in Europe and then in Vietnam.
• 12:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: So by the time of the 20th century,
• 12:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: But you have a concept or a precedent of industrialized printing.
• 12:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And when you have industrialized printing, that facilitates widespread education in a way that was not possible before that technology.
• 12:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that Gutenberg Press is really fascinating to think about how knowledge spread.
• 12:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a letter press, which is, uh,
• 12:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: You put these letters on a board and it just moves and prints on the page.
• 12:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I wanted to, since we're on that topic, is this a total weird tangent?
• 12:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because you know Chinese characters.
• 12:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: did it affect Chinese in that same way because I know that the typeface for like individual like romantic alphabets are movable but what about the Chinese characters because there's so many Chinese characters and how does that relate to Vietnamese or synthetic literary synthetic at the time?
• 13:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's a great question.
• 13:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: We touched upon it a little bit in a previous episode.
• 13:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: But again, there was actually a kind of movable print in East Asia, invented in East Asia, long before the Gutenberg press it.
• 13:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And but when you think about it, so when we say movable print, what we mean is that we have a little like,
• 13:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: seal kind of for each letter in in the Gutenberg press and then you can rearrange them to spell any kind of word you want right so as to your point kind of there there aren't letters in the synetic writing script right there characters.
• 13:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: But in the in the in the previous version of the East Asian invention of movable print what you did was you created an individual block for each individual character.
• 14:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: So in woodblock printing, you know, the the normal kind of printing, the the first kind of mass printing that was invented by humans is woodblock printing and it was most certainly was probably developed in China at the end of the Tom dynasty early song.
• 14:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: indications of West Asia or Middle Eastern sort of movements in that direction, but it's fairly accepted that it's a Chinese invention.
• 14:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in a woodblock print, you have to carve the entire page of a book.
• 14:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like you have a big van, a big woodblock, right?
• 14:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: A huge slab of wood, and you carve in reverse,
• 14:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: page by page of the book you want to print and then you run the in Vietnam is called it's a kind of paper called name zazha you run the the paper across the whole block and you printed one page actually you printed two pages right because there's A and B side per time but what does that mean it means that you have one set of woodblocks hundreds of woodblocks for one book
• 15:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then you have to carve all over again, you know, if you have another book.
• 15:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: So moveable print when it was invented in East Asia was based on the concept of woodblock printing.
• 15:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: But instead of page by page blocks, you carved individual.
• 15:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: blocks for individual characters that you could then rearrange to compose a page.
• 15:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that's the basic idea of moveable print and it exists.
• 15:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was invented in East Asia.
• 15:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: The oldest example I think, someone fact check me on this.
• 15:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: of a printed woodblock, a printed movable type book is actually a Korean book that was printed using Korean movable type that was on display in Paris for a little while, but I don't know where it lives forever, probably in Korea somewhere.
• 15:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: That said, the Gutenberg printing press was invented completely independently in Europe.
• 15:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's basically principle, but it has a different kind of mechanics to it, of course, it's developed around the alphabet, but it also, it was sort of a associate with a kind of like a whole movement of mass literacy, you know, because, of course, the most famous thing that the Gutenberg press printed was the vulvee Bible, exactly.
• 16:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Bible that was not
• 16:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: in Hebrew and Greek, or even in Latin, Latin is a translation of the original old and New Testament, right?
• 16:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it was written in the vulgar languages, you know, German, whatever.
• 16:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, it's a combination of a new technology, which is the printing press.
• 16:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: together with a kind of new attention towards literacy or reading at the popular level, and the technology allows for the spread of literacy across the popular level.
• 16:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there's a whole movement there, and it, it
• 16:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I think I'm not sure, but I think that general levels of elite literacy are higher in places like Vietnam and China than in medieval Europe, but then this combination of factors totally transforms the landscape of literacy in Europe and we get that in Vietnam.
• 17:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: uh, with Quoc Nu, you know, and with Quoc Nu printing in the 20th century and Quoc Nu literacy does just sort of spread like wildfire because the alphabet is easier, because there is now an attention towards popular literacy as a mode of modernization, many, many intellectuals in in colonial Vietnam were like, we need to make the masses literate because that's what's holding us back.
• 17:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, and then this technology allowed for Quotnou magazines to be printed just in the thousands.
• 17:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have so many literary magazines from the early 20th century that are evidence that literacy was exploding across of Vietnam at this time.
• 17:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: So when we say there was high literacy in the lay, we mean it, but not in the same proportion.
• 17:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a total different game when we get to the 20th century.
• 17:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's heartbreaking to kind of like meditate and reflect on the idea of populations of people, like in the United States and Vietnam or China being literate or not even maybe literacy as much as being able to ingest a lot of knowledge to make decisions.
• 18:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that when we, it's the total tangent when I think about the United States today and how many people are actually reading and just being just deep diving into politics or policy that's happening in the world, it's frightening to think about how little we as a society is doing the reading in the work.
• 18:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's a great, you're so good at these interesting time and tangents, I think it's really fascinating because the condition now and also the dangers are so different than they were back then.
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: And people were like, our weakness, what they have thought two things, one they thought in the 20th century, our weaknesses that the masses are not literate, right?
• 19:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: we have to educate the masses in order to progress.
• 19:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: And even before then, we can talk about examples where that sentiment is expressed.
• 19:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: For example, in Korea, in the 15th century, are one of the same time that Latankton was implementing the exam, the Hungle alphabet is invented in Korea.
• 19:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: and the Korean king, Sejong, writes exactly that in the preface to the book that releases hunger.
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: He says, you know, literary cynic is too hard.
• 19:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's all these people who want to express their ideas and they can't do it because it's too hard.
• 19:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now I've amended this alphabet where even a stupid person can learn it in like 45 minutes.
• 19:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, so it's a little harsh, but he's being kind of compassionate, you know, and there is this sensibility that, oh, some people are suffering because of the block to literacy, you know, and that's so different than today.
• 19:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: But at the same time, you know, especially if you go way back in the history of literacy, there's also this other idea which is literacy is dangerous, you know, like, for example, you go all the back to shings of one of the most famous
• 20:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Joe Dine is even before the Joe Dine is the rather the classical era and shings us like you need a teacher
• 20:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you don't have a teacher, you don't have a proper teacher, you're going to kind of become a poisoned mind.
• 20:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you're going to do more damage than good.
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's better that you're ignorant.
• 20:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's better that you can't read than to not have a teacher.
• 20:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in a weird way, like we're in that moment now, we're like everyone can read.
• 20:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Everyone has just limitless information at their fingertips, but so much of it is bad information.
• 20:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: So much of it is fake news, our favorite word of the era.
• 20:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: and so much of it is good news but then we don't have the intellectual training to sift it it to make sense of it instead we're kind of compiling our own bubbles of conclusions that are really extremely dangerous you know so in a weird way we are in a moment I'm I'm not pro ignorance I don't think that we should offer get to read
• 21:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the challenge is different in this moment.
• 21:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: The challenge is how do we become a literate people responsibly?
• 21:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there's just a lot of irresponsible dissemination of information and processing of that information in the world in this moment.
• 21:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting.
• 21:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Such a fact.
• 21:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Are you going to dedicate a whole episode just to this idea of gatekeeping literacy, gatekeeping ideas both in Vietnam and the United States,
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's a really good question and that tension between gatekeeping and the dangers of
• 21:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: of the I don't want to put it I mean I'm going to get canceled for the dangers of mass literacy like again I want I think everyone should be able to read but there is there's a danger right it's you know like in martial arts you're like in Zangho literature there's this idea of like a dump like a poison dragon you know like like if you learn like my favorite character my favorite
• 22:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Wang Laotada, Eastern Poison is the unorthodox guy.
• 22:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm sorry, this is a total radical.
• 22:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: My Siopong steals the most powerful martial arts manual.
• 22:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Guamton King, if you remember, Guamton King.
• 22:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And she steals it from Wang Wanda and she learns it wrong.
• 22:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: She doesn't have the training to learn how to practice that martial art.
• 22:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: And she learns it in such a way she comes super powerful, but she has to kill people like she has to...
• 22:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: like she has this claw martial art where she hits you in the forehead and there's three little holes in your head and you die.
• 22:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: She has to do that over and over again to maintain her power because she learned the martial art wrong.
• 23:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in a way, if you look at the history of reading, like literacy is a kind of magical art like that, you know?
• 23:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you know, it equips you to learn so much, but you can learn in really very wrong ways, you know?
• 23:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think there's something about that that's important for us now when we have so much information at our fingertips,
• 23:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we have a kind of arrogance about processing that information, you know, like we can learn it on our own.
• 23:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: We don't need any help.
• 23:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then you end up with very wrong conclusions sometimes.
• 23:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: So because I haven't gone down this rabbit hole, we have to keep it going just for a little bit longer because I can't stop it.
• 23:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: I love her so much.
• 23:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's such a tragic one.
• 23:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: She gets reformed at the end, you know?
• 23:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And she dies.
• 23:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: She dies spoiler alert.
• 23:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're trying to sign blowing that you remember all these details.
• 23:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because I remember watching this with my family when I was like eight years old.
• 23:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I was so young.
• 23:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's no way I could remember it.
• 23:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: But to bring it into academic, you know, speak.
• 24:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's amazing.
• 24:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: But who's actually qualified?
• 24:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: to to say what is the correct learning?
• 24:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: What teacher can we trust to say, you know, that guy, that woman is the perfect person to kind of guide us all through the right morality.
• 24:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that is such a good question.
• 24:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's such a good question.
• 24:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's no good answer to that
• 24:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think, you know, in this day and age, we have abandoned the hope of, like, finding a Quentin, like finding like a gentleman that will, you know, in Confucian terms, that we recognize as having the sort of moral sagacity to lead us.
• 24:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I think in borrowing, like in the ancient time, that was the idea.
• 24:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Shings, it was like, go find yourself a real Quentin, you know.
• 24:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: We don't, we're, you know, we don't live in that time anymore.
• 25:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: the humility of what shings it was saying, which is like you shouldn't just trust your own judgment.
• 25:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, what you should do is you should challenge your own judgment all the time.
• 25:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like what you should do is you should try to, if you have an, I mean, it's encoded in the scientific process.
• 25:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like what you do in science, you come up with a hypothesis and what you immediately do when you have a hypothesis, you try to disprove it.
• 25:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know,
• 25:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think one part of the answer is, if I have a belief, if I have a passionate belief, what I should try to do, when I look across the sea of information on the internet, or if I engage with AI, is I should try not to confirm or validate my belief
• 25:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: I should try to invalidate it.
• 25:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: I should try to disprove it as a method of testing that belief.
• 25:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And of course, what we're all trying to do algorithmically with social media is the opposite.
• 26:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Social media algorithms give us things that will validate our ideas.
• 26:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And what we need to do is we need to do the exact opposite.
• 26:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: If we now have such incredible power, like we can just access so much information now, then the responsible thing to do is the opposite of that self-validating intellectual process.
• 26:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: The process is, now let me see if I'm wrong.
• 26:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let me see what other ideas are out there that I couldn't even have imagined, you know.
• 26:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's what you should do with the incredible power of modern and knowledge information, you know, networks.
• 26:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: But what we tend to do is see how all these other people agree with me, see how that guy is an idiot.
• 26:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Again, that's the way to become increasingly stupid, despite the fact that you're increasingly literate, you know, like that's just a great irony, you know.
• 26:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then the other thing is I think we need to learn just intellectual cognitive skills, especially in this moment of AI, with AI is so powerful.
• 26:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm very pro-AI in a lot of ways, but it has crystallized
• 26:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: that we need to work on particular human critical skills like critical, what we call critical thinking.
• 27:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: What is an argument?
• 27:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: What is evidence?
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: How do you logically piece together logic, really?
• 27:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: I say it all the time in my closet.
• 27:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Learn logic.
• 27:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Learn the basic discipline of logic.
• 27:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: be able to spot fallacies, you know, and those skills also in the in the context of the modern year, like learn to spot AI style, you know, learn to spot an algorithmically produced piece of, uh, of journalism, you know, um, those are all critical skills that are super important, um,
• 27:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: in lieu of having a Messiah who is going to just lead you through, you know, there's no one's going to be like that.
• 27:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: We do have to learn those types of skills.
• 27:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And since you brought this up, Kenneth, I have to say that is what the humanities are.
• 27:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I hear a lot of different defenses of the humanities out there in the world.
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't love a lot.
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't think we've done a good job branding the humanities, but this is what the humanities are.
• 27:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think in the age of AI, it has made the humanities
• 28:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: absolutely priceless, absolutely important.
• 28:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And unfortunately, we're at the lowest point of valuing the humanities as an educational sort of system.
• 28:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there has never been a time where the humanities have been more important.
• 28:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: And everything we've been talking about is what constitutes what we call generally speaking the humanities.
• 28:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's crazy that you brought us here because I was gonna ask you, so this idea of Quintu,
• 28:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're roughly translates to noblemen of the mind.
• 28:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 28:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is that close enough for us right now in our conversation?
• 28:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because I'm going to about to jump off.
• 28:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, there's a very well-established etymology to that, where it's a good, you're right.
• 28:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Literally, as noble man, a good is a Lord, like in the classical period.
• 28:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a aristocratic Lord, and the
• 29:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: which means a prince, basically a prince.
• 29:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: But Confucius sort of used that word in a special way because he used that word because he was teaching princes.
• 29:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was teaching children of lords in the hope that they would grow up to not be sociopaths.
• 29:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: So he was trying to make them moral beings.
• 29:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: But what he has made his very famous reworking of that word is that to be a real Quintu.
• 29:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like you were all Quintu because you're born with the noble blood.
• 29:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: But to be a real quintu, to be a real child of a Lord, a real noble person, as you put it, you have to have morals.
• 29:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: You have to have an ethical value.
• 29:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that is the true definition of a quintu.
• 29:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the, excuse me, so there's a superficial definition which is a Lord, but the real
• 29:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's the small person, a petty person.
• 29:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the young literally means small folk, like peasants in the classical time, like non-lawards.
• 30:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: But what he's saying is that the real definition of a small person is not a peasant.
• 30:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: The real definition of a small person, a petty person is one who does not have these morals.
• 30:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: So he never said it outright, but his implication was quite revolutionary.
• 30:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was saying, you can be the son of a lord, but you can be a petty person.
• 30:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: right you can and most of you are most of you are nobles but you're not truly noble you know um so that's the etymology of that word and and yeah I remember growing up in my parents would always say you know don't be petty be quintu be heroic be big
• 30:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: make sure your morals and your ethics are in place as a quente, as a hero man, as a nobleman.
• 30:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every such an interesting concept to kind of like live that way.
• 30:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I do sort of, I'm a little, well, my students do, I, I probably am a little bit too profusion in general, but I do, I, I think that that's a nice, it's a nice thing that we don't have as much anymore, this, the, the concept of a moral person, like I, I feel in some ways, we're maybe, I'm being a little affected by my American identity.
• 31:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: at this point.
• 31:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's intersecting with my Vietnamese identity, but I think we, especially in the West, but also in just contemporary, the contemporary global atmosphere, we don't, in many places, not all places, but in many places, we don't, um,
• 31:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: we're ashamed to talk about morality, like we're afraid to value morals, because we get in the quagmire of what is right and what is wrong and we don't want to have that fight.
• 31:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: But what could be more important than discussing what is right and what is wrong?
• 31:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like what could be more important than figuring out what is moral and what is not moral?
• 31:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think in some ways we miss the very idea that such a thing could exist and that we should be searching for it.
• 31:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Even if we can never find it, even if there is no Quinto in the world,
• 31:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: The idea that there could be a quintu is a very valuable thing, I think.
• 32:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: But going back to our conversation earlier, like Shingsu was saying, go find yourself a sage to teach you.
• 32:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: And as to your point, you know, you might not find one, but you can train yourself, you can train yourself to challenge yourself, and you can learn from other people according to what their expertise is.
• 32:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: in the current moment like trust experts like you're not a doctor listen to a doctor you know like and don't listen blindly like use your intellect but you don't have that training so use your intellect uh and then you know educate yourself listen to the opinions of experts you know um learn from the knowledge of experts i think we just we have such a distrust of
• 32:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: in America right now, and it's, and now I'm being very specifically about America.
• 33:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think it's, itself, destructive.
• 33:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's what it is.
• 33:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 33:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think we've lost this idea of Quanto, or we don't have an institute it so strongly in our, in our modern culture.
• 33:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think all over the world, because I think when I think about like Japanese culture, we think of the samurai
• 33:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: we think of them as whatever they kind of like put out into the world at the time was sort of this code.
• 33:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then when you think about maybe like the American sort of like golden era of Guantua or respectability, you think of like the golden age of like the 1950s or films that portrayed the hero of that time.
• 33:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Quinto.
• 33:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't really have a reference for anybody in our maybe contemporary time in the last hundred years.
• 33:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't really know.
• 34:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe when I think about Quinto, I think about quans, which are the the quans of the king, right?
• 34:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The advisors to king.
• 34:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: When I think about
• 34:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: How I'm being told, hey, you know, this is sort of like the, the, the sort of the, the mark of honor, the, the, the level that you should be playing at and striving to become is that's all I, I don't, it's very nebulous when I think about who my heroes, the Quintos of Vietnamese culture is.
• 34:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think there's a disruption and it involves what we talked about like culturally speaking when we look at what forms modern Vietnamese culture, the colonial era is, you can't ignore it and it, it informs so much of the main tropes of our cultural icons, so you know what is much more, I think, present in our minds as,
• 34:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: cultural icon is not the quintu per se, but maybe like, yeah, like a literary, like, you know, the author, especially in some circles like the Vietnamese writer, you know, who like is smoking a cigarette is really thin.
• 35:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: is it can see the hills of the society and is writing about them in a kind of passionate kind of slightly depressive way.
• 35:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like it's a clear, you know, like I think you don't have to reach where I couldn't, it's like that person.
• 35:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, like there's a lot of the issues described.
• 35:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm an executive team, but it is a musical version of that kind of thing avant, you know?
• 35:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that, of course, is very Vietnamese, but it's also a Vietnamese identity that emerged from French romantic and symbolist literature.
• 35:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, there's a very kind of French complexion to that part of our culture, and it's present in our minds.
• 35:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you have to remember that in the colonial moment when all the Vietnamese intellectuals were struggling with the idea that we just got conquered, you know, they were like, well, it's because there was something wrong with the Confucian system.
• 36:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there was a kind of like a rejection of a purging of a throwing out of the bath water with the baby, in my opinion, of a lot of, you know, what we now call traditional Vietnamese culture and an embrace of what was at that point contemporary new modern.
• 36:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, now from the vantage point of the 20th and 20th, the late 20th and 21st centuries,
• 36:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: That is now the traditional Vietnamese idea.
• 36:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And like the Nha Van is a traditional Vietnamese icon that replaced an older traditional Vietnamese icon, you know, of the Gua Nthu.
• 36:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I love that you pointed out the Gua Nthu because that's exactly the replacement.
• 36:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you read someone like Fan Boi Tau, you know, who is a great reformist in the early 20th century from the south,
• 36:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was of the mandarin.
• 36:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was of the official Guadain kind of family, like the literary family.
• 36:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he had, he was most critical of his own class, you know.
• 36:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: So what our historical memory has now is a memory of officials failing the people.
• 37:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Guadain is not a good image.
• 37:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Guadain is like a conniving, you know, weak, corrupt, weasel.
• 37:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we as a, exactly.
• 37:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's, you know, fun by Joe was like, he was himself a squad, but he was like, we are, that's what we are.
• 37:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're conniving.
• 37:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're collaborating with the French, you know, we failed.
• 37:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, of course with that experience at the beginning of the 20th century, it's very hard to remember an earlier,
• 37:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: image of the Quinto.
• 37:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: But you look back, look at someone like Wintai, look at someone like Funui I mean, he's controversial, but I love him, notin' him.
• 37:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, these are winning him, who actually lived in what he thought of as a corrupt moment.
• 37:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: He quit the government, went into
• 37:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: These, you know, there are so many figures like this who had deep political moral things to say and they left them in writing, you know, but they're kind of not remembered very well in the mainstream because of more recent history, you know, does this indicate, I am making a huge extrapolation here, does this indicate our lack of
• 38:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: moral compass, our lack of heroes, our lack of, and I'm not saying that we don't have them.
• 38:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: What I'm saying is that we don't know enough about them in the Vietnamese diaspora, in the Vietnamese population, 100 million people in Vietnam.
• 38:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Currently, what is taught?
• 38:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: is there any one through, because if you, I think if you look into, I don't know, maybe English literature, you look into English history, Britain, mainstream America, Japanese literature, you see these characters all over the place.
• 38:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Are we asking that?
• 38:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, okay, I think two things.
• 38:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think one, this is different in the diaspora than it is in Vietnam.
• 38:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think it's one place where it's pretty clear, and I think the challenge is a different in each part of the community.
• 39:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: In Vietnam, there is good education on the main figures, you know, you know, Nien Vadix, the kind of like figures of history.
• 39:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you can go to any bookstore.
• 39:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: in Vietnam and pick up like a children's book, and it'll be filled with a kind of cast of characters.
• 39:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: It'll be high-budget, it'll be, we enter, I will be in their la la, it will be in the Le Heng Tham probably will be in there.
• 39:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there's a cast of characters that are in baked into the public educational system.
• 39:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's not the right word, but the educational system in Vietnam, but I think the challenge in Vietnam is that they are presented heavily editorialized by nationalist sentiment.
• 39:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: And by nationalist sentiment, I mean, specifically the government of Vietnam, you know, like the communist vision of history and anti-colonial history and modern nationalist history.
• 39:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that is a very heavy influence on the way in which these figures are presented and even who gets selected as represented.
• 40:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there's a set of challenges there.
• 40:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Nevertheless, there is good education, I think, there's great education on
• 40:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: on the cast of figures that are heroic figures of Vietnamese history.
• 40:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: In the diaspora, I think we, you know, we are a diaspora.
• 40:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we, you know, you're not going to learn about Leyla when you go to elementary school.
• 40:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, like it's part of what mean what it means to be a diaspora community, you know.
• 40:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so I think there is a lower level of general education about these, but there's been some great people in our community who have created great children's books and created other resources to try to sort of disseminate Vietnamese culture.
• 40:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Some really good, even websites coming out of California that are also have done that.
• 40:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I think there's been an effort to it, but I do agree that
• 40:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: We are also covered by our own version of nationalism, deep nationalism, and it also havers our selection and our understanding because, excuse me, very often what happens is the people who are trying to create these resources, their objective is cultural enrichment and there is there needs to be more collaboration with between between those community leaders
• 41:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the people who actually have the expert knowledge about those figures, so that can be a beautiful collaboration between artists, community leaders, and scholars to create a new kind of set of resources about what we could call traditional Vietnamese culture.
• 41:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: there's a richness there that I think that is unexploided.
• 41:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: And last note on this general issue, first of all, if anyone wants to collaborate, I have a couple friends who are community leaders who have, we've talked a little bit about doing things like this and I think it's a great idea.
• 41:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: So if anyone wants to, you know, I am here for you, I would love to, you know, be a resource for anyone who has a project like that.
• 42:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Second to last point on this point, if there's a platform that you can use,
• 42:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: digital platform called digitizing Vietnam, that's a Columbia project in collaboration.
• 42:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's with Fulbright University Vietnam, but we serve as all parts of our community, including the diaspora.
• 42:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have a bunch of diaspora stuff up on the site.
• 42:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And our whole point is to produce what we have many levels.
• 42:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have a scholarly level that's really for highly refined research, but we have
• 42:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: basically pedagogy teaching about Vietnam and then in outreach level and on that level, we want to create verifiable information and resources on Vietnamese culture for exactly for this purpose, you know, to share it, to contribute to the kind of revitalization and modern branding of Vietnamese culture that I think is going on right now.
• 42:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: We talked about that last time.
• 42:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Can we spend a whole episode on this because I didn't know that this is
• 43:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: something you're involved with.
• 43:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that by getting into the weeds in this topic, right, what we just talked about, I think it will illuminate some of this trajectory of where we're going as a community of seekers and curious minds trying to figure out what the very,
• 43:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'd love to do that.
• 43:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let's do, let's set up a conversation there.
• 43:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: And let's, let's also remind everyone who's still listening.
• 43:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Good for you, if you're still listening, you never know where this conversation is going to go.
• 43:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: So she's in the same way.
• 43:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stay through the rest of the conversation.
• 43:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Don't just listen to that first.
• 43:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I hope everybody who's listening is having such a good time the way I am because this is what I come here for, right?
• 43:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's like, we know we know our basic structure for this AMA, but I mean at the same time, the beauty that comes out of I think these podcasts are these tangents that we find ourselves on.
• 44:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: I agree.
• 44:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it, you know, not to be too culturally crass about it, but I think it is also very Vietnamese.
• 44:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's like, you know, you sit down, got fake, I file, you know, they have like a got fake.
• 44:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, and you're sitting and you just don't know where that conversation's going to go.
• 44:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's, it's a kind of a sidewalk cafe, you know, experience, which I think, I mean, I really
• 44:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's important because, I mean, how often are we going to be able to talk about Quinto as it relates to Thuñan, as Thuñan is related to quans?
• 44:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, all of these things are so integral to kind of understanding the different layers of hierarchy in the Vietnamese world that really goes back, you know, to sometimes when I think
• 44:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: American diasporic kid.
• 44:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I take refuge in knowing that there are these things that are not discussed, that are seldom discussed in our circles.
• 45:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And to be able to talk about it here, grounds me a lot.
• 45:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, that's so nice.
• 45:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think it's, yeah, it's great.
• 45:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: I love it.
• 45:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 45:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: But we have straight a little bit from the end, let's tackle one more question.
• 45:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then we could probably tease out what I think is the next episode that we're, you know, that we're, that we're going to discuss next sounds good.
• 45:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 45:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there was, uh, you know, I think I think I just want to just say a word about,
• 45:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: the process of creating a national language and a national script, because I think a lot of the people who, there was a set of comments that were about like, that really were engaging with the title of the episode.
• 45:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Is it the colonizer's script?
• 45:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, you know, like, is the Chinese script colonizing to be, is no, myself, a kind of colonized script, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
• 46:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think, you know, I really like the choice of our title last time, because it puts its finger
• 46:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: a kind of a way that we tend to think about things like script and language in terms of nationalism.
• 46:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's another example of how we, even when we're not realizing it, we are thinking and interacting in the world informed by nationalist categories of identity.
• 46:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I was pleased to see some people in the audience being like, what do you mean colonized
• 46:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, it was is a derivative, the Roman alphabet is a derivative of an alphabet that's Phoenician, that's a derivative of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
• 46:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: By the way, I don't know if you learned that from our podcast or not, but we did talk about that a couple podcasts ago.
• 46:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, good for you for pointing that out.
• 46:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: The alphabet itself, you know, writing has only been invented four times.
• 46:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's no one is not using a quote-unquote colonizer script.
• 46:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like everyone is using an alien script, essentially.
• 46:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because the ancient Chinese,
• 47:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: the ancient Sumerians, the ancient Egyptians, and the ancient Mayans, none of them exist anymore.
• 47:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like nowhere.
• 47:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe you can make the greatest case for Maya people today, because that was pretty recent in history that they're closely related.
• 47:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: But in all of the other cases, those peoples are long, long gone.
• 47:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And their scripts and their languages have survived beyond those cultures.
• 47:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And like the 20th century was such a special moment
• 47:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because, especially in Asia, because Asia was like, oh, shit, excuse me.
• 47:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, oh my god, like we have to, you know, Europe is so powerful and Europe organizes itself according to nation states, so we need to develop a narrative of nations, you know, a nationhood and that involves.
• 47:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: creating, having a national language and having a national script in which you write that language.
• 47:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: But you've got to remember that no East Asian culture organized itself or thought of itself in terms of what we now think of as the modern nation state.
• 47:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, so, excuse me again.
• 48:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: They had to create modern Chinese, modern Korean, modern Vietnamese.
• 48:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it was a long process.
• 48:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: For example, in China, they had a series of national assemblies to determine what the national language should be.
• 48:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: And how it can't be lost by just a couple of votes.
• 48:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think we talked about that a couple of episodes ago, et cetera.
• 48:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: But they had to select and then create a national language.
• 48:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then decide, and it was a political issue, not a cultural one.
• 48:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like it was a political issue, what that language should be, what it sound like.
• 48:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then there was the separate question of what should we write it in, you know, so let me just, can I read something real quick?
• 48:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Do we have time for me to read something I want to read two quick things because the, the language of the people was an idea that was new, you know, and you know, I want to read something by Lucien who is the modern Chinese performance and then something by farm going who is a modern Vietnamese kind of guy.
• 49:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: So Lucien was writing.
• 49:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: He wrote about, because at that time, as in Vietnam, what he called, you know, classical Chinese or literary scenic was the most prestigious form of writing for the intellectual leads, right?
• 49:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: But, and he thought of that as the language of the tongue and song dynasty, you know, from hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
• 49:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: and Nushun writes, how can we, who are not living in the tongue or song dynasty, right in the style of an age so far removed from our own?
• 49:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Even if the imitation is convincing, the voice is from the tongue or song.
• 49:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Dynasty, the voice of Hanyu or Sudongpur, not the voice of our generation.
• 49:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: In other words, he's saying, he is trying to figure out what the Chinese, the national Chinese language would be and he's like, it's got to be something closer to what we speak, you know?
• 49:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then Fampuin, who's running just actually a few years before, we shouldn't publish that article.
• 49:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: wrote about something called Establishing Language Luck Moon in sign of Vietnamese.
• 50:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: He goes, what is Establishing Language?
• 50:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is to convey the highest ideals of ourselves, our most caring sympathies, to convey all our feelings in our natures, crystallized into the spoken language of our country.
• 50:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: That spoken language, which has already undergone countless generations to take form,
• 50:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: and which will certainly be inherited by countless generations never lost.
• 50:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: In other words, he's saying, when he's saying luck won, like, he means establishing a national language.
• 50:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he's saying what better language to be the national language than something close to what we speak because that's the language in which we feel all of our feelings.
• 50:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I guess I'm saying a couple things.
• 50:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: What I'm saying is like,
• 50:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: The world we live in now when Vietnamese is the Vietnamese language and Chinese is the Chinese language as we learn them.
• 50:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Chinese is Mandarin.
• 50:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: Vietnamese is either Northern or Southern or Standard language.
• 50:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: That took a long process to be created.
• 50:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it was a process of a kind of modernization that involved in fact the lifting up of what was perceived to be the masses.
• 51:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: And perceived to be the language of the masses.
• 51:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: But there was no actual language of the masses.
• 51:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: So they created a language that they called the national language and then through generations of education that became the national standard.
• 51:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, and so when you encounter a podcast that's called like, is this the colonizers script or when you, when you think about the language or script of a particular culture today, you've got to remember that that's manufactured.
• 51:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, and that there's no such thing as an essential Vietnamese language or essential Vietnamese script.
• 51:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is the theme of all of the Viet Origins episode.
• 51:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's going to all the way back to the beginning.
• 51:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: So.
• 51:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you were one of those people who are like, no, who is not the colonizer script, you're right and you're wrong.
• 51:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're wrong in the sense that, yes, it was invented by the French.
• 51:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: But you're right because it's just a technology.
• 51:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there is no essential Vietnamese language or script.
• 52:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Whatever Vietnamese people use or speak is Vietnamese.
• 52:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, that's the end of the story.
• 52:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's an every evolving, you know, question.
• 52:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's not just Vietnamese people.
• 52:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: The reason why I'm talking about you, Xing, is because the Chinese did the same thing.
• 52:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Koreans did the same thing.
• 52:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: A little earlier, the Japanese did the same thing.
• 52:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: So rather than get embroiled in a fight about what is the real Vietnamese script or language or what is the colonizer script or language, it should be an invitation to learn about the process of the creation of modern national identities, which happened in the 20th century.
• 52:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that's what I wanted to say about that.
• 52:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: John, thank you so much.
• 52:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: I always enjoy this.
• 52:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do you have the next topic that we can tease, or should people just tune in on the next episode?
• 52:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know what, let me think about it.
• 52:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I've given what you said earlier, I kind of feel like we should do a little chat about heroes or heroes of Vietnamese culture or like icons or the different kinds of who do we, who do we honor or who do we Valorize as expressions of greatness and Vietnamese culture.
• 53:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think that'd be a nice
• 53:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what time I was thinking about doing a series of Vietnamese heroes in terms of like the street signs and breaking that down.
• 53:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I had a series.
• 53:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: I had these older, you know, friends of mine say, no, no, no, you got to be careful.
• 53:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: You, you know,
• 53:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of booby traps here if you try to pick that up because, you know, street signs of Vietnam, and, you know, the DAS for heroes are two different categories here.
• 53:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So be very careful as you.
• 53:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 53:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I think we should make that.
• 53:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's a worthy topic.
• 53:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's try it.
• 53:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's do it.
• 53:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: All right, John.
• 53:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much.
• 53:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks, kind of.
• 53:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Great to see you.
• 53:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Good to see you.
• 53:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Bye.
• 53:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening to the Vietnamese with Kenneth Wynne.
• 53:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Special thanks to Brittany Tran, to Jane Wynne, Catherine Wynne, Tina Fam, Sydney Jamie, and Crystal Tran.
• 54:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Please find us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok at the Vietnamese podcast.