A.L.Tuan In the late 1960s, as the U.S. found itself increasingly embroiled in Vietnam, a quirk of circumstances brought me from Vietnam to Michigan. I had initially aspired to a musical education (at the U of Mich to study with composition Professors Malm and Finney), but instead, I formally pursued degrees in civil engineering in the hope that one day I could contribute to the rebuilding of my native country. While my peers questioned the war and protests raged on many campuses, I felt both fortunate and torn as I witnessed nightly, at a distance on the television screen, scenes of an escalating war that ravaged Vietnam and its people, and which exhorted an increasing toll on American youth. At a campus record store, I discovered a Folkways album of Vietnamese traditional and folk music, with folk songs by Pham Duy [dan ca] along with his recently published ''soul songs'' [tam ca] which I heard for the first time. The words and the melodies seemed to clarify for me my lot, 'the life puzzle' of a Vietnamese in America. In college, I grew to love songs by Pete Seeger and the Weavers, and writings by Steinbeck, which colorfully depict an America of common men and women laboring, struggling, and triumphing. Pham Duy's Ho Lo [''Work Chant''], and Ganh Lua [''Carry the Harvest''] are similar vintage, written about the peasantry who toil to feed a nation. Giot Mua Tren La [''The Rain on the Leaves''], one of ten ''soul songs'' written at the height of the war and which was translated and sung by Steve Addis, echoes the simple eloquence found in American folk favorites ''Blowin' in the Wind'' or ''Where Have All the Flowers Gone''. In another ''soul song'' titled Hoa Binh [''Peace''], Pham Duy put to music the poignant words of Zen Master, peace activist and Nobel prize nominee Thich Nhat Hanh:
An Introduction To Pham Duy Music
I awaken this morning to the news from the front of my brother's death. After college and when I got married, my Vietnamese-born wife and I found common ground in sharing Pham Duy's sentimental and romantic songs such as Ngam Ngui [''Consoled''] which speaks of hope that comes from true love even in harsh times; or Thuyen Vien Xu [''Setting Sail''] which ranks with Roger Whitakker's ''The Last Farewell'' in its melancholic longing of a homeland faraway. Later on, I worked with youths in San Francisco's Vietnamese community, and taught them Pham Duy's songs from his Tuoi Than Tien [''The Wonder Years''] song set, songs that resonate with love of family, tradition and folklore. Our children, born in America, were taught Ba Me Que [''The Village Mother'']:
In my garden, unknowing, a flower blooms, yes yet another flower.
I am still alive, I must eat, I must breathe,
I am still alive, I must eat, I must breathe.
But I really wonder when that day comes that I can speak openly my hopes!The yard is planted green, While on assignment in Pasadena to manage the design of historic Mariachi Plaza and the First & Boyle subway station in East LA, I took time this past year to visit with Pham Duy. Through our periodic visits at Pham Duy's home, I am honored to know him and his family, culminating for me many years of only ''knowing about'' them-all famed musicians and accomplished performers in their own right. In our visits, I had a chance to revisit with Pham Duy the origins of his music, his views on Vietnam's history and the plight of its people, and his hopes for the future. My first discovery of Pham Duy's music in 1967 had connected the young idealist college student in me with my native land, and had helped affirm my identity in a time of external turmoil and of introspective self-discovery. Thirty years later, this more recent personal acquaintance with this great historic figure reinforces my belief that America, my adoptive land, is indeed strong because it is ready shelter to those like Pham Duy who will to live free for their beliefs and their art, like Solzhenitsyn and Casals. An energetic 77 year-old who leads a disciplined daily routine of physical exercise, meditation, research and composition, Pham Duy is a living relic who is to me friend, mentor, writer, musician, lyricist and composer extraordinaire, philosopher and advocate, and at the risk of sounding presumptuous, an adoptive uncle for those of my generation who are dislocated by that common experience called the Vietnam War.
The chicks nuzzle by mother hen.
Mother's busy with a hundred chores
Caring for her young brood.
She awakened before the rooster crowed but has yet come home from the market,
Her children wait for her smile and simple sweets...
The rain soaks her clothes, but rain's good for growing rice,
The sun burns the earthen floor, but sunshine helps dry the sheaves.
Pham Duy's music links three generations in my family. My extended clan includes aunts and uncles who remain in Vietnam who sing Pham Duy's songs upon my several return visits, and aunts and uncles who left Vietnam who sing Pham Duy more freely in America, France, Australia, or wherever they landed in their escape from communism. My grandparents and parents know the harmonious refrain of Thuong Binh [''Wounded Veteran''] which hints at the heroic welcome of soldiers who return from the revolution against the French. Ngay Tro Ve [''The Return''] describes the soldier returning to his village on crutches, his mother ambles out to grasp him in disbelief for she is now blinded from years of waiting and crying, the kitchen is full of kin and folks eager to hear stories of the front, while the fallow fields and a young buffalo await outside beckoning him to come back to till the land. Pham Duy's third ode to the war veteran written in the midst of the Vietnam war carnage of the late 1960s, Ky Vat Cho Em [''A Souvenir for My Beloved''] reflects the widely held despair of an escalating war, and is less hopeful in tone; its lyrics contain the brutally honest final parting words of a soldier to his love: ''I may return to you without limb, or in a plain wooden casket...You ask me when, I can only promise that, yes, I will return one day.'' His folk songs and popular songs have captivating melodies, full of musical inventions, appealing initially to youths, but the poignancy of their lyrics is timeless, their appeal lingering on through our lives. His treatment of love transcends the ordinary, raised to a poetic level, where true love between man and woman is compared to the devotion to one's homeland. Even love sometimes trails into heartbreak and separation (as is often the case in a population dislocated by war), but Pham Duy's sad songs usually end in redemptive hope (as in Nghin Trung Xa Cach). Pham Duy's romantic songs are poetic and sublime, but direct in its honesty, and transcends the passage of time to be favorites of adults young and old in our Vietnamese communities overseas and in Vietnam. The irony is that Pham Duy's music is not sanctioned by Vietnam's government, many who sing and play them do so discretely.
Pham Duy's Music and Vietnam Pham Duy the young man, prior to his study of music, worked in numerous menial jobs and crafts, experiences that influence his later musicmaking. Like Woody Guthrie, his folk songs speak of the heroics of common man at work, in love, and in battle. He embarked on musical studies in Paris where he developed the first written records of Vietnamese folk music vocal and instrumental traditions. Even today, his composer son Duy Cuong is continuing this legacy in researching the various ethnic roots of Vietnam's many musical origins. Most notably, Pham Duy in the 1950s traveled the length of Vietnam from north to south to record his observations of the country's daily life, folk traditions and songs, from whence comes the epic symphonic poem Con Duong Cai Quan [''The High Road''].
At the conclusion of World War II, upon the departure from Vietnam of Japanese occupiers, many musicians and artists enlisted in Vietnam's continuing struggle to overthrow French colonial rule, Pham Duy included-he was revolutionary Vietnam's early ''Bob Hope'', traveling with his famed musical band from camp to camp to entertain and to sing popular folk and patriotic melodies. After the defeat and departure of the French in 1954, the communists took over the government in the north, immediately curtailing freedom of speech and imposing censorship of the arts. Pham Duy left the north and came south, and it was for this apparently ''counter-revolutionary'' act that his music to this day is officially interdicted inside communist- ruled Vietnam. In the past few months given the improving U.S.-Vietnam relations, there has been indications that conditions in Vietnam may be relaxed sufficiently to permit Pham Duy to officially return for a visit to his beloved native land.
Unique among Vietnam's most notable musicians, Pham Duy has been prolific throughout his life in creating music relevant to his time: from ethnic and folk renditions, to pre-revolutionary romantic songs [Nhac Tien Chien, ''Pre-Revolution Music'' denoted by its pure sentimentality and poetry of its lyrics], to popular songs that parallel Western protest song traditions as well as pop that are chart toppers in wartime Vietnam. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, while other musicians were more discrete in their protest of war and corruption, Pham Duy enlisted students in songfests where he sang out lyrics like Ke Thu Ta [''Our Enemy'']:
Our enemy is clothed in ideology Pham Duy has composed music in various genres. His trademark cycles of songs commemorate major events in the life of Vietnam: war, dislocation, the boat people diaspora, hope and redemption in meditation. He is a musical raconteur of Vietnamese folk stories translated to Western idiom, and even commands a following in France, Australia, Japan and elsewhere where there is interest in Vietnamese music. Likewise, he has translated into Vietnamese numerous Western pop and classical songs, including lieders by Schumann and Shubert. Pham Duy also wrote Vietnamese lyrics to popularize Western classic tunes.
Our enemy deals the freedom trump card
Its disguise a hollow shell
Its pail full of empty words
It flies colors that separate us.
Our enemy is the eyes that lust
It's in our prideful head
In the soul that despairs
In prejudices that fill our mind
In in-fighting among ourselves.
Chorus:
Our enemy is not man
Continue the killing and we'll be all alone.
Our enemy is not out there
It lurks here in ourselves.
Oh people, do care for the little people
Oh people, have faith in people
Care for those who are bought
Care for those who are fooled
Care for those in dark faraway places.
As testament to his adaptive and productive capacities, Pham Duy now works daily at his Midway City studio on his computer to compose and develop his latest CD-roms. His composition is Kieu, destined, he says, to be his last great oeuvre-a symphonic poem dramatizing the epic story by the Shakespeare of Vietnam, the great poet Nguyen Du. It's a labor of love with his son Duy Cuong who serves as his father's artistic director and musical arranger. Pham Duy's CD-roms cover a number of research and compilation projects. One has to do with the lineage and history of the Pham Duy clan, a travelogue into Vietnam's colonial era. Another is uniquely the compilation of modern musical history, a compendium of each and every one of his compositions, their lyrics and poetic source; this work is intended to be the single most comprehensive and unbiased uncensored record of Vietnamese musical and literary talents. If he has the resources to susthe effort, Pham Duy wishes to additionally complete a CD-rom on Vietnamese lullabies as they vary in different parts of the country (he made original field recordings dating back to the 1950s)-his thema being that most musical concepts flow from a baby's wail and the mother's soothing response.
Pham Duy came to settle America in 1975 with part of his family when Saigon fell to the communist-led government, at the time his sons still remained in Vietnam. In America, Pham Duy traveled extensively with his daughter and songstress Thai Hien to perform at gatherings of Vietnamese and Americans, seeking to bring attention to the plight of refugees, and continuing to work on the release of his family still in Vietnam. His family and clan are now united, mostly living in and around Midway City in Orange County, California [''I am midway around the world in no man's land,'' he quipped in his autobiography.] He is completing the fourth part of a previously published best-selling three-part autobiography. In this last tome, he describes his sojourn in the U.S. as refugee in a land of immigrants, and records his observations of life in America. He intends to complete the tome upon a hoped-for return to his beloved Vietnam-recognizably his muse, which he calls ''my land my love, first and last''.
A.L.Tuan
(Oakland, CA USA)