Colonized & Catholic Archives | Navigating Vietnamese Identity

Uncover Vietnamese lore from the origins of bánh mì related to the French as well as Chúa Nhật / Chủ Nhật related to the Portuguese. These historical rabbit holes lead Moe to share their personal reckoning with diaspora, belonging and selfhood as a Việt Kiều ("Vietnamese sojourner") adult.

RECORDING CORRECTION: Chủ =/= chú (uncle). BUT! My confusion still stands!!!

Contact: hellomangomoe@gmail.com 

Intro/outro music credit:   

• Title: "feeling happy today [upbeat happy beat]
• Artist: snoozy beats
• Source: Free Music Archive 
• License type: CC BY

Transcript

Speaker 0:02

Hello everyone! Welcome to The Gossip Practice, a thoughtful take on talks as a tool for reading between lifelines. I'm your host, Moe. Every episode is another interesting story I've come across. Here we merge a sort of amateur investigative journalism with fun thoughts and opinions. It's gossip as a lens for how we relate. Thanks in advance for listening. Okay, chào mọi người (hello everyone). Today, we spread the based yet baseless rumors of Vietnamese lore. Base"less" because I haven't quite found whether these are 1,000 hundred% (What?) legit. (1,000 hundred... right...) But "based" simply because I believe. Again, this is coming from your em út, your youngest Vietnamese sibling. I need an older, more educated Anh Chi (older sibling) to verify, so if you like today's episode, please do share it far and wide and get me in touch with the brains that be. The first of two stories here. How the iconic bánh mì is rooted in French occupation. Yes, bánh mì literally translates to bread, but I'm talking about our delicious, buttery, crispy cold-cut moment as a colonial sandwich. Its existence is an [inherent] fusion concoction. The French arrived in Vietnam under the guise of being missionaries, but later occupied and colonized Vietnam for nearly 100 years from the mid-1800s to 1954, which is relatively recent. To put time into perspective, 1954 was when Brown v. Board of Education finally ruled school segregation as unconstitutional in the U.S. Related to schools but more about the larger system at hand, then -President Eisenhower also signed a bill that summer adding the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance. The reasoning was because the 1950s saw major McCarthyism and experienced a wide wave of the Red Scare. Those who wrote the original bill and Eisenhower, who pushed it through, all essentially wanted to position the U.S. as starkly different from the so-called "godless" republic that Russia was. How the Pledge of Allegiance came to be could, in and of itself, be a whole separate episode. I simply raise this now, though, to share what was happening across the ocean around the same time. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries of French colonial rule, the "rich people sandwich" was nicknamed Banh Tay, the predecessor of the Banh Mi. Banh Tay translates to Western -style bread or pastries. It was a bread stuffed with pâté, (mayo [mispronounced] hehe), mayo and pickled vegetables. The story goes: French people had their riches about them, their elevated sense of power, clothing and food. They brought their cold cuts and flaunted it about, but they eventually caught on to how gas Vietnamese foods and flavorings were. Hmm, no, they mustn't. The food of the locals were beneath them and cheap and poor, but dang, is it kind of really tasty. So, French officers and all that jazz would carve out their very French baguettes to hold very Vietnamese foods and close it up to eat. On the outside, French, and rather socially acceptable for them. But on the inside, a guilty pleasure like none other. Past the end of French colonial rule, Vietnamese folks continued with using the French baguettes as a sort of fuck you by proudly displaying their options using this co-opted bread. The simple French ingredients were really made anew with meats of all sorts, along with spices, herbs, and of course our sweet and crunchy pickled vegetables. This is a knockout sandwich that we love to eat openly today, when the French was once ashamed of eating and therefore had to hide within their buns. Moving on to our second story though, we see more historical effects of colonialism even earlier in time. We're being taken back to the 17th century with an even earlier set of European missionaries. Yes, Chinese culture has deep roots and influence over the Vietnamese language, along with the French, actually. But have you heard of the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who arrived in Vietnam in the 1600s? Well, the names of week days came directly from their influence. Portuguese missionaries edited the first bilingual dictionaries between Viet and Western languages, which effectively broke the Chinese chokehold on Vietnamese language by essentially creating the Romanized script for Vietnam, becoming the basis of the modern Vietnamese system of language writing, or orthography. Everyone was really in cahoots with one another in Vietnam, man. I found Alexandre de Rhodes was responsible for one of these earliest works of said Vietnamese-Portuguese dictionaries and religious manuals and doctrines. And this man was actually a French Jesuit who was building on the work of Portuguese Jesuits. Sure, that makes sense. Regardless, one of Rhodes' religious catechisms included a sequence of eight days. Each day began with ngày thứ, translated as day number, aka the modern names of the days of the week. This is basically where the patriarchy continues to ruin everything. Knowing Saturday and Sunday are considered ngày cuối tu, which is weekend, I just... weekEND implies Monday is the start of the week, but no, Monday is translated to Day 2 in Vietnamese. Why? The Portuguese, and especially this one Alexandre det Rhodes person's name, I found. While the ideal modern work week starts on Monday, the Christian calendar starts the week on Sunday, hence Chúa Nhật, deeply rooted in religion as it translates to the Lord's Day. Anyway, we follow along the week with Monday, thứ hai, aka day 2, Tuesday, thứ ba, aka day 3, then Wednesday, thứ tư, aka day 4. "But Moe, I know the number 4 as bốn, so why isn't Wednesday thứ bốn?" Okay, smarty pants, you get a cookie. The number 4 is bốn, but we still sometimes use the Sino numbers for ranking purposes. You may notice this when referring to the month of April. Instead of Tháng Bốn, as in month four, we would say Tháng Tư as in month four but Sino influenced. Folks who study linguistics ultimately call the reasons we may use the Sino numbers as "euphony," where us humans naturally want to balance high and sharp tones with low and flat tones to make our sentences more melodic. It's also why we call the number 21 hai mươi mốt instead of hai mươi một. We continue on with thứ nam, sau, bay as in days 5, 6, 7 / Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Yeah, okay, all of that makes sense. But then when we get back around to Sunday, again, the Lord's Day, which is Chúa Nhật, right? That's forgivable, sure. And Chúa means God, sure. But there's a variant of Sunday also called Chủ Nhật. What does that mean? Chu is uncle. So why ! Why are we doing all of this? All week long, It's Thứ . Thứ this, thứ that, thứ hai, thứ ba, thứ bốn. Well, not even thứ bốn- thứ tư. See, even I mess up. But then, Chủ? Chủ Nhật? Who is Chủ Nhật? Legend has it, it's due to a mistake someone made long ago due to sloppy handwriting. They were supposed to write thứ, but then the T looked like a C, and the tone marks looked a little different. All I have to say to this is boo. Boo. If this were true, then why wouldn't the rest of the days also be chủ instead of thứ. Sorry. Thứ? There we go. Instead of thứ? I don't know. It's all odd and pieced together and dictated by individual people or groups, then given to everyone as a whole to accept or adopt. Meep momp. It's fun hashing out Vietnamese lore as a first-generation person born in Louisiana. The Vietnamese Catholic community across the Bible Belt of the U.S. is strong, but especially that in the boot. Living out my mid-20s in the Midwest comes with a sort of reckoning. I realize I am not in close proximity to other Vietnamese folks as easily, which means I am in constant conflict with the fact I grew up Catholic and equate my ethnic roots to religion. Growing up, any and all brown parties I went to had a priest at the party to lead us in a mini-mass or extended prayer session. Then he would also stay for the actual dinner and karaoke party to follow. My mom even had the priest of a larger city, towns away from my hometown, someone I actually had never met before a day in my life, come to my college graduation celebration. He literally sat through the entire ceremony, took photos with my family and close friends, and came to the lunch that also followed. In no part of my understanding of heritage is non-religious. It's fascinating to realize time and time again how your family structure and upbringing really shape you into who you are, as opposed to the larger sense of culture [doing so]. What's also of interest is knowing Catholicism is not the sole predominant religion of my whole source land of Vietnam, but also Buddhism. My best friend through middle and high school is Buddhist, but her celebrations in our hometown's Tet, or Lunar New Year moments, were almost always her putting her best foot forward to participate in the Catholic structure of it all. It's too much to get into right now, but the gist is everything Vietnamese we engaged in growing up was tied to the Catholic Church. That's where the resources were. Very seldomly did it tie back to the Buddhist temple, even for my Buddhist and a-religious family friends. It's a bit isolating, really. I am proud to be Vietnamese, but I am slowly putting my building blocks together from borrowed crafts stores, so to speak. I am not hoping to redefine my ethnicity but rather step into it more authentically. I unfortunately feel as though I've only borrowed my own heritage for decades until recently, when I am slowly relearning the language, reading more lore and asking my siblings to help me fill in the gaps. This is especially true of the fact that when I moved from my hometown to my college town, all within Louisiana, the Vietnamese community there was immediately less religious, but I refused to join the local Vietnamese and general Southeast Asian student organizations because, from the outside looking in, it seemed as though they kept themselves still in close proximity to whiteness. I think this is why I'm still hesitant to join any specified diaspora club or event within the city of Chicago or even its suburbs now. I do value values over visible identities, but it has resulted in me being that kind of outside looking in type of community participator. There is a Substack article by Naz at BDS babe that highlights bullies disguised as apolitical or supposedly neutral personalities within Iranian communities. She writes, "We cannot afford to romanticize community as inherently liberatory. Communities reproduce violence, hierarchy, white supremacy and imperial domination, too. And perhaps that is the most painful realization of all, that sometimes distance from home does not free us from its wounds, but simply repackages them into forms more palatable to Western cultural life." Yeah. This piece includes specific examples of terrible harassment against Iranian individuals, yet I do still take away secondary lessons from this short read about how important it is to be in community with shared values. It is not enough to accept your accidental group here or join a group there without really doubling down and ensuring the people within said groups are truly there for you, community member or friend alike, and you being there for them, for that matter. The quote saying, Everyone wants to be a part of a village, but you have to be a good villager, or whatever, prompts people to show up. However, at a certain point, you do know how to show up, but you look around and see people vastly misaligned with your quality of life. What good is it worth to show up in alleged community if the community at hand is neutral, is misaligned, is fear-mongering, is breeding of more and more bullies in life? I am at that point where I am learning there is the option to (and importance in) choosing your village, cultivating it and being the spearhead for culture where you need it to be. We cannot continue to navigate through channels that we ultimately feel defeated showing up within simply because they were never going to empower us. There is a sharp learning curve for me though, because it is all interconnected. Although I have prided myself on loving people so openly that making friends and hosting events has come rather naturally, I do still struggle heavily with the balance between showing up in accordance to how people perceive me and showing up in an autonomously feeling action. I think about this often and how my chronic people pleaser personality was likely birthed from the small-town Vietnamese Catholic environment. The very tendencies that I pay hundreds of dollars in therapy for monthly. Seriously, I am always subconsciously waiting for permission to do anything, say anything, which makes it hard for me to more naturally share my feelings dynamically. I am always trying to meet other people's and greater society's expectations of me. It was terrible when in a school setting, because academic validation is soooo, so reportable and standard across the board of everyone's experiences. It's getting better these days since my brain's hardwiring of validation conflicts with my heart, which rejects career validation or working too hard for anyone else but me and my loved ones. That's the thing. I hate, hate, hate people-pleasing, but it's absolutely my default. It's debilitating yet a North Star of sorts..? I know I do not want my nieces and nephews to grow up with these same patterns, so why exemplify them? I know I feel rejected, humiliated, and overall tired every time I try to meet someone else's mark throughout life, so why still do so? Maybe the names of the days of the week not following easy-to-follow rules is meant to be my subtle linguistic reminder to derive from the blueprints given to us by greater society. To understand: even though Vietnam was colonized time and time again, we can't change the past, but we can learn about it and understand why we do things. We can then also approach our routines with acceptance or a curious mind to shift patterns where we can. For example, I know these days in the modern Vietnamese language, there is a gender-neutral pronoun for siblings and kind of peers, kind of. Instead of Anh Chi, there's also Chanh, which means lemon but is also a gender-neutral merging of Chi and Anh - Chanh. So I think that's lovely. I'm thinking I may apply this same thought to my personal life. Even though I was raised a certain way and wasn't given the tools to navigate life differently, I can remember who and what has contributed to my modern-day identity and love myself more easily with a sense of acceptance, as well as love myself more strongly with a sense of curiosity, and meeting a personal challenge to learn. All in all, culture and heritage are based in remembrances. They are widely different person to person, family to family, state to state, and country to country. Being Viet Kieu, my identity is rooted in storytelling, and I am now tasked with telling my own story, present day to future. If you enjoyed today's chat, let me know what you think and share it with a friend. Your follow and comments on your preferred listening platform- be it Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and more- are reminders that we may be better when we talk. Share your reflections. What is your understanding of culture through history? What can you do to feel one inch closer to your family unit or heritage as a whole? Do you like cilantro on your bánh mì? I personally do not have the unfortunate gene that comes with it tasting like soap, so I am marked safe to put all the cilantro on my bánh mì. Until next time, XO Moe.