Nguyễn Hữu Loan (1916-2010) is an acclaimed, iconoclastic Viertnamese poet. I have translated below an article he wrote shortly before his death.

I was born in a poor family. In my childhood, I did not have the opportunity to go to school like other children of my age. Only my father taught me a few words now and then at home. Although my father was a tenant farmer, he was smarter than most people. In secondary school, I went to school in Thanh Hoá earning my diploma there but I did not have money to further my studies in Huế or Hà Nội. In 1938, when I was 22 years old, I took my chances and went to Hà Nội to take the French baccalauréat exam to prove that even a self-taught child from a poor family could get a degree just like anyone else.

I had absolutely no intention of joining the ranks of the mandarinate. Everyone knew that passing the baccalauréat exam was very hard in those colonial times. The number of those who passed it was extremely small and even 50 or 60 years afterwards people of those times could still remember the names of the ones who passed it such as Nguyễn Đình Thi, Hồ Trọng Gin, Trịnh Văn Xuân, Đỗ Thiện, and … me Nguyễn Hữu Loan.

With the baccalauréat degree in my hands, I left my village to go to the city of Thanh Hóa to be a teacher. My reputation as a poor but brilliant graduate caused Mrs. Kỳ, the wife of a government official, to invite me to come to her home to tutor their two boys. Her maiden name was Đái thị Ngọc Chất, and she was the wife of Lê Đỗ Kỳ, the general inspector of agriculture for Indochina. He was later elected to be a representative in the first national assembly. In Thanh Hóa, Mrs. Kỳ had a store selling fabrics as well as books and newspapers. I went there quite often and that made her notice me.

Mrs. Kỳ was a kind-hearted lady who treated me very well as if I was no different than a member of her family. I remember the first day I came as a tutor, she had to repeatedly call her daughter, who was then 8 years old, before she finally appeared with her arms crossed across her chest.

“Teacher, may I present my greetings!”

Her greetings done, she unexpectedly opened her eyes wide and looked at me directly. Those big black eyes, round and bright, made a lasting impression on my mind and soul, and they would follow me throughout my life.

I taught her reading, writing. Her name was Lê Đỗ Thị Ninh. Her father had been a forestry inspector in Sài Gòn. She was raised in the South and was used to calling her mother Má. She was very intelligent and easily absorbed my teaching. She understood and remembered everything. She did not speak much, but every time she opened her mouth she sounded like a “young grandma”. She especially took care of me every day in a discreet way. At meal times, she would put on the serving tray, near the spot where I used to sit, several red peppers, or a juicy lemon that she had just picked from the garden. In the summer, when I had a midday nap, she would surreptitiously grab my white shirt that I had hung up in a corner of the house, and took it away to the well to wash it.

One time, I told to Ninh’s two older brothers my story of the “young grandma”. Unexpectedly, the story got to her ears and she sulked. For a whole week, she lay down in an inner room, refused to study. Mrs. Kỳ took me into the room where she was sleeping. I don’t remember much of what I said, but I only know that I talked a lot. I told her stories, then I recited poetry to her. She got up that afternoon, ate a bowl of chicken congee, and walked out of the room.

The following afternoon, she resolutely requested that I took her up to the pine forest. The whole family disagreed. “You were just sick! You are still too weak, you can’t go!” She would not listen and wanted to go anyway. I was afraid she would sulk again, so I asked her parents to let me go with her up the mountain.

The rickshaw took about an hour to take us to the bottom of the hills. She climbed the slopes like a young squirrel, and I was out of breath trying to keep up with her. At the top she sat down and asked me to sit next to her. We remained like that for a long time, neither of us saying anything. Suddenly she looked at me then cast her eyes toward the horizon. I did not know what she was thinking. Then she asked me:

“Teacher, do you like to eat the fruit of rose myrtles?”

I looked down at the slopes covered with the purple rose myrtles. She stood up and walked toward the myrtles. As for me, I was so tired that I lay down on the grass and fell asleep.

When I woke up, she was sitting beside me with her conical hat filled to the brim with myrtle berries. They were black and fully ripened.

“Teacher, eat some.”

I took a berry from her hand and put it in my mouth.

“It is so sweet!” I marveled.

As I told you, I was born into a peasant family, and rose myrtle berries were nothing new, but frankly I never had any so sweet!

And so we ate them one by one. I looked at her. She smiled. Her teeth were reddish purple, and so were her lips. Both of her cheeks were also purple red, the color of the myrtle berries. I burst out laughing and she laughed with me.

At the end of that winter, despite her parents’ advice and promises to intervene on my behalf, I left to go join the resistance against the French. The day I left, she walked with me to the entrance to the village and stood there to silently watch me go. I climbed to the top of the dike and looked down. She was still standing in the same place, small and frail. She waved to me with her small hand which looked like a myrtle leaf. I waved back and continued walking away with gloom. I turned and looked back. She was still standing there. I continued walking and looking back until I could no longer see her.

During the months and years in the war zones, once in a while I received news from the village letting me know that she was in good health and had grown up. Later friends told me that when she was barely 15, many young men came to woo her but she always hid in her room and refused to see any of them.

After nine years, I came home. I went to Nông Cống to find her. The day I saw her at the entrance to the village I asked her many questions but she did not say anything, only nodding or shaking her head. She was no longer Ninh the stubborn student. She was almost 17 and a beautiful young woman.

We loved each other but I was afraid that her parents, due to their social status, would think that our marriage would be a misalliance. I only knew later that our wedding had all along been silently scripted by her parents.

A week later we got married. I discussed having a wedding dress made for her, but she brushed it off, saying that she did not need a new dress, and that “to love each other in a strong and lasting love was all that mattered.” I was tall, well educated, and a decent poet that happened to be good looking. She teased me often by calling me her unique husband.

Our wedding took place in the hamlet of Thị Long, village of Nông Cống, in Thanh Hóa province where her father, Lê Đỗ Kỳ, had hundreds of hectares of land. It was a very simple wedding, but it went without saying that the two of us had never been so happy.

My two-week leave was over very quickly. I was ordered to go immediately with the 304^th Division and function as the editor-in-chief of the  Chiến Sĩ [Warrior] newspaper. The day she said farewell to me, she stood at the beginning of the village, at the same spot where she had stood nine years earlier. The only difference was that she was no longer the little Ninh and had become my dear lifelong companion. I walked away, then turned back to look. While nine years earlier I had felt sadness, I then felt a real deep pain in my heart. My legs seemed to want to collapse.

Three months later I received the terrible news that my wife had passed away! She died a tragic death on the 25^th day of the 5^th month of the lunar calendar in 1948. She had taken clothes to wash in the river Chuồn in her hamlet of Thị Long, Nông Cống. As she tried to reach for a shirt that had fallen into the river, she lost her footing, fell into the river and drowned. The big river had engulfed her, it had taken away my soulmate, leaving me an immense sorrow that nothing could make up for. I have felt that pain deep within my heart over the past 60 years.

I had to hide that pain inside me. I could not let my fellow soldiers know about it to avoid affecting their fighting spirit. I was like a corpse without a soul. It seemed like the more I tried to suppress my pain, the more virulent it became. Fortunately, a period of political thought correction started and our leadership announced that anyone who harbored some inner thoughts should declare them out loud and tell everything. At that time we were stationed in Nghệ An. I sat by myself at the entrance to the village. My eyes filled with tears, I took out a pen and began writing. I did not have to think, the simple words just kept pouring out:

Her family had three older brothers who had joined the army.
Some of her younger siblings could not yet speak.
Her hair was still very soft…
I came home and did not see her …

[There are 65 lines in the poem. Vietnamese musicians  have used it to compose beautiful songs. The one by Pham Duy in the South is probably the most popular, and people have become very familiar with it.]

When I came home, I took the flower vase from the day of our wedding and used it as an incense vase. I had written my poem onto a paper fan and left it at the house of a friend in Thanh Hóa. My friend copied it and circulated it to his friends. It has been recopied and recirculated many times since then during the war years. That is the poem The Purple Color of Myrtles.

At this point in your reading, you may have known that I am Nguyễn Hữu Loan, known as Hữu Loan, born on April 2, 1916. I am currently home tending to my garden in the hamlet of Nguyên Hoàn. I call this place my birthplace. It is within the village of Mai Lĩnh, district of Nga Sơn in Thanh Hóa province.

My wife Ninh used to like wearing dresses in the purple color of myrtles. Strangely enough, the place where she lost her footing and drowned was known for its myrtle bushes full of flowers. That is why I was able to write lines in my poem such as: walking during our operations through foothills filled with purple myrtle flowers/ endless hills colored by myrtle flowers in the afternoon sun.

When I lost her, I lost everything. I became bored with life, and fed up with the war. I left my fellow soldiers. I gave up literature and went home to farm. It was also partly due to my quarrelsome and rebellious nature, my inability to do things that ran contrary to my conscience. “They” scolded me, criticized me for being too soft, made all kinds of demands from me, and rejected my petition to leave the resistance. I did not care. In missed my myrtle flowers too much. Also, I was already so sick of those people.

They did not spare me after I went home. They followed me to continually create difficulties for me, but I didn’t care! After years of swallowing bitterness, I was given the opportunity to open my mind in two interviews on the 5^th and 12^th of October, 2002 with Hương Ly, a Vietnamese reporter working for the BBC.

I told her that in general everyone was simply stepping on the necks and heads of the people. After telling the interviewer the origin of The Purple Color of Myrtles and the aftermath of that poem, I talked about my life in poverty and the plots to assassinate and to destroy me and my family starting in 1956. While I suffered and almost died many times, I was determined not to submit to them.

In those times, if you wanted to go work outside of the center of the Resistance against the French, you had to follow the Party’s orders. So when I left them to go home, they would not leave me in peace. They devised all kinds of traps and punishments, they wanted to eliminate me. I believe I had the protection of Heaven, of the Buddha, and they could not kill me despite many poisoning attempts.

These were the years of 1955 and 1956 when writers and artists led the Nhân Văn Giai Phẩm (Humanism and Beautiful Works) movement to oppose the Communist Party and its dictatorial policies. They denounced those writers and artists who lent their pens to inform on their teachers and friends while praising the Party hoping it would grant them favors and crumbs.

To be a poet means to have a soul, and that soul must have noble sentiments in order for the poetry to be any good. Good poetry is everlasting. A poet that has no sentiment, no soul is worthless. In those times, poets had to extol the Party, praise communism, and glorify the war. I saw that as what made the people suffer the most, and so I opposed it with all my strength.

In those times, one had to praise Hồ Chí Minh nonstop, while I praised romantic love. I cried about the wife who had been so kind to me, my unique life partner. They said that I was crying about personal matters. In my poem I said I got married then went to become a soldier. We had been married just over a month when she went to wash clothes and drowned in the river. I was devastated, I wrote that poem and cried. They said my poem was reactionary! One had to write poems about Uncle Hồ, not about one’s personal suffering. Why could we not cry about our personal loss?

They insulted the honor and the sacred sentiment that bound my dear wife and I together. So in 1956, I left the Party, I abandoned my organization to go home and till the land. They did not want me to do that. They told me to write an application. I did not write one. I considered that to be my personal freedom, to leave the Party when I wanted to leave it, no one could tell me otherwise!

I went home. I had to till and harrow our land. I went into the forest to gather firewood, and pulled a cart carrying rocks for sale. They created all sorts of trouble for me, confiscated my cart. I had to build my own one-wheeled cart, with a wooden wheel in front and two legs in the back to push or pull the cart. They would not allow even that, and forbid everyone to sell me a wheel. I had to take on jobs that required using my shoulders to carry loads. I kept carrying my burdens, I never gave up.

Still they followed me everywhere, obstructed me in every possible way. Security people followed me, and some were sent to harm me. But there were people everywhere who helped me. What is strange is that one time it was my own poetry that saved me. That time a security guy told me that he had received the order to kill me. However, he was a man who loved his homeland, who missed home. He often took out my poem Yên Mô about his home of Ninh Bình to read and to feel a little less homesick. That’s why he could not bring himself to kill me.

Life and fate led me to another woman who has now lived with me until today. Her name is Phạm Thị Nhu, and she is also one with a deep soul. She is a victim of the land reform and the landlord denunciation campaign initiated by the Vietnamese communists.

I remember that during those times I was the political commissar of my battalion. I witnessed with my own eyes the denunciation trials. Being an educated person with deep morality and ethics, I was thoroughly nauseated and I no longer respected the old Hồ and communist doctrine. I had been a Party member for several years, but, frankly speaking, I was immensely disappointed.

In a village in the district of Nga Sơn, Thanh Hóa province, only about 15 kilometers from where I lived, there was a very wealthy landlord family with almost 500 hectares of land. The landlord was benevolent and kind to everyone. Seeing that the soldiers of my Division 301 did not have enough food, he often had his tenant farmers carry rice to where we were stationed to support us. As the Chief of the Propaganda and Political Section, I thanked him for his good will, and I also asked my Division Commander to reward him with an official commendation. Personally I admired him and always remembered his kindness.

Then one day I heard that he and his wife had been denounced in the land reform campaign. Both of them were dragged before the village people to be insulted, shamed, and finally buried in the ground up to their necks. After that a pair of buffaloes were used to pull a harrow back and forth over their heads until they both died. Only one member of the family, their daughter, was spared but the denunciation team chased her out of the house with only a few clothes. Furthermore they ordered that no one was to talk to her, give her food or hire her for work.

During those times, the political cadres forbid anyone to marry the children of landlords. Learning of the terrible persecution of the landowners that I admired, I came home to find out how their daughter was managing to survive. I had known her previously as a young girl who stood by the windows at the Mai Anh Tuấn school to listen to me talk about the famous poem of Kiều. When we met she told me that because she often came to listen to me teach about Kiều , she sometimes forgot to look after her buffaloes. They ate the rice plants and afterwards she had been punished.

As I came near her village, by chance I encountered her. Her clothes were in tatters, her face was dirty. She was bent over gleaning sweet potatoes that people had left in the fields. She put them in her shirt pockets, then took one out, wiped it on her trousers before bringing it to her mouth to eat. I became very emotional, tears pouring out from my eyes, and I went to her. She recounted in full the day her parents were brought before the people’s tribunal and how they were persecuted until they died. She cried as she told me how everyone had chased her away; how by day she had to go glean potatoes to eat; how she slept at night in a deserted temple. She said she was extremely worried not knowing whether she would still be alive the next day or die from hunger and thirst.

I listened to her sad story and was deeply moved. I thought for a long time and finally decided to bring her back to my village. Disregarding the ruling of the people’s tribunal, I decided to marry her. Fortunately, I had made the right decision. I lived in a poor village and came from a poor family. Then I was in the military and did not have any money. But the two of us endured life together. We worked hard and went hungry at times. But today, my wife has given me ten good children, six sons and four daughters, and we now have more than 30 grandchildren.

For several decades, I stayed in my home village, perfectly content with my very modest life. Every day I went to look for rocks to sell, taking with me French or Vietnamese books to read. Once in a while I would compose poems. Yet “they” would not leave me in peace. When they relaxed their grip, they came to flatter me and invite me to join the Writers Association. I turned them down.

In 1988, I reappeared in public after 30 years of forced isolation at my remote home. I wandered almost a whole year on the transViệt trip organized by the Lâm Đồng Province Litterature and Art Association and the Langbian magazine. The trip was to demand freedom of expression, freedom of the press and publishing, and real political renewal.

At the end of 2004, when I was 88, a company called Vitek VTB suddenly offered to buy the rights to my poem, The Purple Color of Myrtles, for 100 million Đồng (US$3,953).They said it was a way to preserve a national cultural asset. That was acceptable to me. The 100 million after taxes would be 90 million. I gave 60 million to my 10 children, kept 30 million as a reserve for illness in old age, and used a little bit of it to publish a book of 40 of my poems, titled Poems by Hữu Loan. After that, several groups of companies wanted to buy other poems of mine, but I turned them down. My poems are not for sale.