Nguyen Dinh Hoa
From: duffy.daniel
To: Vietnam Studies Group
Sent: Monday, December 25, 2000 12:26 AM
Subject: Nguyen Dinh Hoa
On my rounds yesterday I bought the December 15-31, 2000 issue of the biweekly newspaper Ngay Nay (Vol. 16, no. 448) at a music store in the Asian mall here.
"Ngay Nay" is a name that calls attention both to "this day" and to moments when talented novelists ran a journal by that name in Ha Noi in the 1930s and Saigon in the 1960s. Ngay Nay, also on sale at other locations in Paris, is published from Houston. It carries lengthy articles from its own correspondents as well as translations from such journals as the Economist.
In this issue there are two articles about Nguyen Dinh Hoa, each with a photograph. The proper obituary is in the second section "Xa Hoi, Khoa Hoc" under the title "Tin Trong Lang" (page B7). There is a column, "Nay Kia Kia No" (A7), whose author "Rau Cao" remembers meeting Hoa in New York in 1950. Ngay Nay would appear to be a careful source close to the dead man since a mourning announcement (page B5) includes both the board of the newspaper and his contemporary the scholar Nguyen Ngoc Bich among the signatories.
For the full texts, consult the newspaper's website at www.ngaynayews.com after the next issue comes out or correspond with the office at 4500 Montrose Blvd, Suite C, Houston, TX 77006 (713-526-5352).
Hoa was born 1924 and educated in Ha Noi before undergraduate and graduate school in New York City from 1950 through 1956. After service to the Republic of Viet Nam as a professor and cultural official in Hue, Da Lat, and Saigon he returned to the US as a diplomat in DC at the cultural section in 1966. In 1969 he began work as a US academic at Southern Illinois. In the course of his career as a linguist he held visiting positions at Hawaii, SOAS, and institutions in Morocco and Thailand. After his retirement in 1990 he continued to teach at San Jose and at Mission College and to publish.
I never met the man. Meeting an author is like shaking the hand of the janitor at a museum. The two of you may have business. You may get to know each other. But a museum is for looking at the work.
I have looked at Nguyen Dinh Hoa's work. When I sat down for the last time to learn Vietnamese language I used his "Speak Vietnamese" as a grammar, exercise book, reader, and glossary. I worked through his "Read Vietnamese". On my desk in my dorm room now is his student dictionary. His descriptive grammar should be on my reference shelf next to Hy Van Luong's pragmatic grammar but I loaned the Hoa book to a colleague last week. On a shelf of books to work on this year sit Hoa's history and anthology of Vietnamese literature.
If I was to supervise students learning Vietnamese I would suggest they look at "Speak Vietnamese." The primer is thoughtfully done. My hardcover edition opens flat and the type is legible. It is available at a discount on the used book market everywhere in the English-speaking world. I would suggest that my students consider using Ngo Binh's new book from the same publisher instead because it is also written by a linguist with teaching experience and is more current.
I would point to "Read Vietnamese" more forcefully. I learned to guess at Vietnamese from this book. The newspaper articles it excerpts say everything twice, often using four root words in a pair of synonyms for a single expression, so you have many hints for guessing.
I will use some of these newspaper articles for teaching. They express a view from Saigon in the 1950s that students in the US need to hear. Each is carefully attributed and has a glossary. I would like to find the US government training publication that preceded "Read Vietnamese" since it might have more or lengthier excerpts.
The reference books are written by a modern linguist with experience in teaching. The dictionary is good for what I learned to do from the reader, to guess, since it explains roots. I use the grammar to figure out constructions I have been guessing at. For teaching and writing there are handy lists of expressions and lucid explanations with select bibliographies of subtle issues in Vietnamese language.
The history and the anthology of Vietnamese literature are here in the room because I am wondering what a field of research and teaching of Vietnamese literature would do in the United States. Hoa's books speak to US students who come to college knowing some Vietnamese because their families came from that country. The books say that Viet Nam has a national literature. They introduce authors and works in narrative from past to present.
The books ignore two constituencies that will be important during the course of my active life. An enduring US constituency for Vietnamese literature is that of students interested in the war. Another is that of academics who want to know what research specialists in Vietnamese literature have to say to their peers in other area studies and in the disciplines in the US. The photograph over Nguyen Dinh Hoa's obituary shows him playing music at a book party for his recent memoir. Fretting a flat-bottomed mandolin, at the end of a strum, he stares off-camera as if intent on catching the beat or a chord change. The caption says that he played and sang old songs that night.
I would like to have heard him. Nguyen Dinh Hoa corresponded with my contemporary the historian Bruce Lockhart when he was a teenager learning Vietnamese. He taught John C. Schafer and James Banerian when Bruce and I were children. I worked on Lockhart's and Schafer's books and have carted Banerian's translations around the world. Nguyen Dinh Hoa kept up with Barbara Cohen. I could have walked over to her place one day six years ago and said hello.
Works in order mentioned
1. Nguyen Dinh Hoa. Speak Vietnamese. Tuttle, no copy on hand
2. Read Vietnamese. Tuttle? No copy on hand
3. Vietnamese-English Student Dictionary. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1971
4. Vietnamese. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1997
5. Vietnamese Literature: A Short Survey. Policy Studies in Language and Cross-Cultural Education, San Diego, 1994
6. Vietnamese Literature: An Anthology. Policy Studies in Language andCross-Cultural Education, San Diego, 1998
7. Inside the Red River. McFarland? No copy on hand
8. Hy Van Luong. Discursive Practices and Linguistic Meanings: The Vietnamese System of Person Reference. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1990
9. Ngo Binh. Elementary Vietnamese. Tuttle, no copy on hand
10. John C. Schafer. Vietnamese Perspectives on the War in Vietnam: An Annotated Bibliography of Works in English. Yale Southeast Asia Studies, 1997
11. Bruce Lockhart. The End of the Vietnamese Monarchy. Yale Southeast Asia Studies, New Haven, 1994
12. James Banerian. Vietnamese Short Stories: An Introduction. Sphinx, Phoenix, 1986 Intact, by Vo Phien. Vietnamese Language and Culture Publications,Victoria, 1990
13. At Night I Hear the Cannons, by Nha Ca. No publisher, no place, 1993.
14. Breaking Off, by Nhat Linh. No publisher, no place, 1997
______________________________
Dan Duffy
doctoral candidate
Department of Anthropology
University of North Carolina
Langues, Litteratures et Societies
Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales
laureat Chateaubriand 2000-1
______________________
Date: Mon, 1 Jan 2001 20:45:05 -0800
From: Charles Keyes <keyes@u.washington.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Nguyen Dinh Hoa
I would like to correct the record about Nguyen Dinh Hoa. He came to the U.S.in 1966 to teach at the University of Washington where he founded a PhD program in Vietnamese language and literature. Jane, my wife, was enrolled in this program in 1966-67. In 1967, he took up the position as Cultural Attache at the Vietnamese embassy in DC. He told me at the time that he did so so that his wife and family could also come to America. He had hoped to return to the University of Washington, but when he finished his appointment at the embassy, the politics at the University of Washington had resulted in the position for which he had been recruited being abolished. If it had not been, I believe there would have been a good chance that Professor Hoa would have returned to UW rather than going to Southern Illinois. That he retained a strong positive feeling toward the University of Washington is indicated by the fact that the UW Libraries was the recipient of a gift of his library.
Biff Keyes