Chronicles of a Village by Nguyen Thanh Hien

Author:Nguyen Thanh Hien
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2024-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

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ever since humans discovered fire, this element has carried in its body a host of indecipherable tragedies, kindling truths and errors alike, kindling many downfalls also, in my village, the story of a man with the surname of Dương was the kind of chronicle that kindled a ceaseless fire in the minds of future generations, a fire capable of burning down all of the sumptuous citadels along with the didactic theories that hide the vile seeds of the previous dynasties, it burns the mind of not only the well-travelled and the learned but also those who had never touched a single book, in the afternoon, after a workday in the fields, having rested the plough on the porch and reunited with his wife and children over the last meal of the day, one couldn’t help but reminisce about the death of a certain man, a prime example of wretched suffering, ‘the man with the surname of Dương served the Nguyễn lords as a soldier in the imperial city; after the Tây Sơn rebellion, he disappeared,’ this is the most simplified version of the biography of the body lying in the grave on the edge of the village road, a distinctly oral kind of biography, according to a popular tale, these words were once engraved on the gravestone that belonged to the man with the surname of Dương who died mid-journey, although whether this gravestone existed no longer matters, for hundreds of years now, my fellow villagers have continued to believe that the body in the grave belongs to the villager whose surname was Dương, but because the floods throughout the centuries have eroded the village road, nowadays whether his bones still remain there, beneath the edge of the road, is unknown, these days people can only give estimations: his grave is here, right around here, according to the way that the villagers think, the bones of the dead (which exist mostly in the form of thoughts now) have moved with the changes of the village road, this movement from the bodily to the conceptual presented an altogether different way of thinking about human existence, ‘the man with the surname of Dương served the Nguyễn lords as a soldier in the imperial city; after the Tây Sơn rebellion, he disappeared,’ these lines about the Dương family have remained in the genealogical records of my village, the words ‘after the Tây Sơn rebellion, he disappeared,’ is proof that the records were made after the collapse of the Tây Sơn dynasty (who would dare to say such a thing when the Tây Sơn dynasty was still in power?), but how did this soldier who had served the Nguyễn lords in the imperial city end up dying in his hometown, my fellow villagers must have spent an awful lot of thought on this mysterious death, perhaps, back when the Nguyễn dynasty had settled in the imperial city of Huế, on a winter night in my village, there was a reader sitting in his house,

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