15 Things about Vietnam #12 - Ancestor Worship

On a certain day of the year, the day her mother died 35 years ago, Mrs Như places a tray of flowers and a cup of plain water on the ancestral altar in the family home in central Hanoi, then lays out a modest meal on a collapsible table below. With her hands clasped to her chest, she bows three times to the image of her mother that sits atop the altar, separated from the equal and opposite image of her father by a bowl of fruit and an incense holder. 

On the day his villa in the suburbs of Ho Chi Minh City is finished, Mr Dũng does something similar: on the family altar in the expansive new guestroom, he sets a representative sample of the meal his wife has just cooked. There's enough food to serve an army, a lavish selection of fruit, red and white wine as well as two neat pyramids of Heineken and Coke. Mr Dũng bows to the images of his father and grandparents, then he waits for his 50 guests to arrive.

Nobody knows exactly when or where ancestor worship started in these parts of South East Asia, but one thing's for sure: it started way back in the deep, dark past, and it continues right up to today.

Historians argue whether the Vietnamese worshiped their ancestors before the Chinese invaded North Vietnam in 179BC and imposed their own forms of the practice - themselves fixed by Confucius many centuries earlier.

Whether or not there were once distinctively Vietnamese ways of paying one's respects to forefathers and foremothers, the ways the Vietnamese ended up with were essentially Chinese. Ancestor worship is probably the most definitive mark of Chinese cultural influence on Vietnam and it's interesting to note that neighbouring peoples like the Thais and Cambodians don't go in for it.

The long-term irony being that, at least as far as ancestor worship goes, the Vietnamese have turned out to be more Chinese than the Chinese. Over the past 50 years, the cult of ancestors has fallen into disuse in most of China, while in Vietnam it remains the most popular religious observance of them all. Since the 1990's it's actually seen a major revival.

As the activities of Mr Ngọc and Mr Dũng attest, the cult is and always has been celebrated in the home. There's no better indication of its homeliness than the Vietnamese name for it; while "ancestor worship" sounds like a slightly chilly business, the Vietnamese name suggests otherwise: "đạo ông bà" means literally "the belief in grandpa and grandma".

So central is the belief in grandpa and grandma to the Vietnamese view of life that all the main Vietnamese religions have had to adapt to it in one way or another.

The belief in grandpa and grandma has been comfortably integrated into Vietnamese Buddhism, along with all sorts of other fairly wild Vietnamese cults. Although the main hall of a typical Vietnamese pagoda is devoted to the worship of a shiny white Buddha the size of a small truck, out the back of the pagoda you'll find the "reverse hall", housing shrines to the pagoda's spiritual forebears (monks and nuns who found Enlightenment, or enlightened others, in the pagoda's general vicinity). Further out the back or in a separate out-house, you'll find boards or miniature shrines covered in photos of earnest Vietnamese faces, normally shot against a monochrome blue background; pious Vietnamese Buddhists worship their ancestors as close as they can to the chubby stone Buddha figure in the main hall.

In recent decades, Vietnamese Catholics have also started to practice a little low-level ancestor worship too. These days, altars in Christian homes are allowed to house photos of grandpa and grandma, as long as Jesus, Mary and Joseph occupy the prime positions on the wall up above. In fact it was attachment to ancestor worship that limited the spread of Christianity in Vietnam in the first place. Since the Sixteenth Century, when it was brought to South East Asia by European missionaries, Catholicism tried to oppose ancestor worship, which went against the Christian demand to worship God rather than ordinary people. Potential converts were forced to choose between grandpa and grandma and the God who died on the Cross. So ingrained were the habits of ancestor worship that only a small minority took up the Cross and followed the French Jesuits into the cultural wilderness.

And then there's the Communist connection.

Once you get here, it will become obvious pretty quickly that Vietnamese Communism doesn't follow the strict Marxist line about religion being the opium of the people. As an organization which rules in the name of the people, the local Communist Party is happy to go along with the nation's most popular religion, especially given its homely, apolitical nature.

In fact, you could say that belief in grandpa and grandma has found its way into Vietnamese communism. Having a credibly progressive history whose moving spirits people can get in touch with is something that the Party has successfully cultivated for many generations. The Party's founding father, Hồ Chí Minh, is worshiped to this day as a kind of super-ancestor of the entire nation; ordinary Vietnamese place his photo next to the photos of their literal progenitors on the family altar, or just above them on an "upper altar" of its own:

Belief in grandpa and grandma is a light, warm-hearted affair. So while the cult of Hồ Chí Minh might at first glance have some similarities to the cults of personality instituted by demonic nasties like Mao and Stalin, it passes over into an attitude of general fondness. Uncle Hồ died in 1969, six years before North Vietnam won The War. Patriotic Vietnamese still want to keep Uncle Hồ aware that they finished the job, while others invoke his blessing for more recent plans and schemes, in the same way they do in a family context in the guest room of the family home.

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Birthdays are relatively new to Vietnam - a commercial Western import dating back to the early 90's. The really important days are death days (Vietnamese "đám giỗ), which memorialize the occasion on which one of the family's main ancestors turned up his or her toes.

The idea may seem slightly morbid, but the way it is put into practice isn't. A đám giỗ is a pretty relaxed affair. Before the event gets into full swing, a real, fully cooked meal is offered to the relevant ancestral spirit. A few stories about grandpa/grandma are told, then everyone hops into the meal that was originally placed on the ancestral altar. Mrs Như and Mr Dũng in the two scenes at the top of this essay were preparing for their respective đám giỗ.

Đám giỗ make for great get-togethers. Friends and friends of friends are welcome to tag along; the Vietnamese truly understand that the best type of party is a well-organized, regularly repeating event with a solemn core that takes up about 10% of party-time.

Now if the two most basic questions relevant to the cult of ancestors are "who are your ancestors?" and "when are their đám giỗ?", then the next basic question is "Where did your ancestors come from?"

Here we come to the all-important Vietnamese notion of "quê" or "quê hương" (homeland). For Vietnamese, your homeland, you see, is where your ancestors' graves lie:

 
No matter how far the graves of their ancestors are from their current place of residence, many Vietnamese make a yearly pilgrimage to the spot – to pay their respects, to tidy headstones and to . . . burn assorted paperwork. The simple belief, of vast antiquity, is that ancestral spirits have need of worldly possessions in the afterlife. Nowadays such things are conveyed to them by incinerating paper images. (The preferred currency in the Vietnamese nether regions is the American dollar not the Vietnamese dong, so don't be fooled if you see greenbacks drifting down the street after a đám giỗ.) 

When Vietnamese visit the graves of departed ancestors in their ancestral homelands, the first thing they do is light incense. This creates initial lines of communication between this world and the next. Then up go the paper clothes and play-money. As in the case of đám giỗ, once everyone’s said what needs to be said, the festivities begin: the men go on a spree, the women go on a spending frenzy at the local market.

Pious Vietnamese invoke their ancestors on all of life's important occasions, and on plenty of minor ones as well. They get married in sight of the relevant ancestral images. They also pay their respects before the family altar when babies are born or journeys undertaken - even when kids get decent grades in exams. The good, the bad and the indifferent are to be communicated to grandpa and grandma, because grandpa and grandma don't just share in the family's ongoing successes, they also bring luck and support - some vague degree of aerie benevolence - when times are tough. At the most basic level, grandpa and grandma apparently just want to keep up with family news.

Unburied ancestors are a problem for real followers of the cult of grandpa and grandma because their spirits are thought to wander the earth in a distressed state that is also liable to cause distress in living, breathing human beings. Hence the efforts many older folk have been making in recent years to track down the war dead and return them to their rightful places - in the rice-fields on the margins of their home villages.

When military records fail to show up useful information about the location of war dead, there are always the services of the specialists: traditional Vietnamese fortune tellers (thầy bói) have been doing a roaring trade since the problem of remembering The War started to be framed in traditional terms. Though they are treated as figures of fun by more educated folk, ordinary Vietnamese treat thầy bói as guides to a wide range of irregular spiritual beliefs. Their gifts don't just include communicating with the spirits of lost relatives, but assessing the likely success of human relationships and investment portfolios, as well as the feng shui (Vietnamese "phong thuỷ") of new homes.

Whether Mr Dũng consulted a thầy bói before he laid the foundations of his bright new palazzo is something I'll have to ask him. Blocks in new Vietnamese suburbs are usually subdivided in rigorous rectilinear patterns, leaving little scope for individuals to accommodate the underlying spiritual lay of the land.

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It would be wrong to think of ancestor worship as a set of beliefs that mainly shapes Vietnamese attitudes to the past. Future generations are just as vital a concern - and it shows in the approach that Vietnamese take to having children. Vietnamese 20-somethings who are in any way wary about getting married are intensively worried over by their families. Newlyweds who choose to pause for a year or two before popping out heirs to the ancestral line can expect to get a lot of unsolicited advice from concerned mothers.  

The issue of heirs is the gut reason why older generations of Vietnamese have conservative views about homosexuality and career women: in short because not having children is considered poor form vis-à-vis one's ancestors. Ancestors, as we've seen, require the ongoing deference and care of the living if they're to lead half-way contented lives in the afterworld. So if your kids don't have kids, then you might be condemned to wander after death like a famished ghost for many eternities. (No suckling pig for you at Tết.) As we've also seen, ancestors bring luck and give a certain metaphysical backing to the lives of the living. If you don't produce heirs, then to a certain sort of Vietnamese mind you are depriving yourself of one of the most substantial bases of support that life in this difficult world affords.

Young Vietnamese women face up to these issues in their most brutal form. If they're approaching the end of their third decade in this difficult world and not in a position to pop out heirs (within the socially acceptable confines of marriage, of course), then they tend to get into a serious tailspin. For Vietnamese women especially, not having a family is actually one of the greatest sins in this life. Unlike in the West, it is not something a woman can treat as a normal event (or a hidden blessing): the straightforward result of being born bug-eyed or having one great love that didn't work out. In Vietnam, not having kids is an existential condition, not a social condition, and definitely not one valid life-choice among many.

Strong-minded Vietnamese views about ancestors and heirs combine with narrow-minded Vietnamese views about female beauty to make many girls feel very uneasy in their own skin. Vietnamese family convention says a good woman ought to have popped out two heirs by 30. Vietnamese aesthetic convention says that a woman's beauty goes into steep and irrevocable decline from about the age of 27. Result? In the vital years between 25 and 30 many Vietnamese women lose the plot a bit. To Westerners the whole thing seems cruel and unnecessary, especially given how radiantly beautiful Vietnamese women remain well into later life.

Young Vietnamese men have it a little easier. The cult of grandpa and grandma leads some Vietnamese mothers to worry obsessively that their sons might be gay, and to give them the wind-up if they show signs of drawing out their bachelor days.

However a solid majority of Vietnamese men still believe, just as fully as their sisters, in doing the right thing by grandpa and grandma. One thing which makes them vastly different from Western men in their 20's and 30's is this: a certain percentage of Vietnamese men start getting just as clucky as their female contemporaries. In some cases, even cluckier.

Over the past decade, Vietnamese men have been experimenting, within the expanded limits of an increasingly affluent society, with various new social roles and sexual identities. The Vietnamese idea of masculinity has been influenced by all those grass-eating Japanese girly men who drift through their 20's working part-time jobs, living at home, spending their disposal income on clothes and hairspray and ignoring any signals they're getting from straight girls trying desperately to do what their parents and grandparents want them to do.

But for the solid majority who don't go herbivorous, producing heirs to the ancestral line is still pretty important.

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By Western standards, the cult of ancestors has something childish and superstitious about it, as do the not unrelated beliefs the Vietnamese still hold about ghosts and devils and omens. However there is far from being a single Vietnamese view about how to celebrate the cult and what its deeper meaning is.

Educated Vietnamese who lived through The War and have digested its meaning in secular terms, tend to be agnostic about the world of ancestral spirits. This doesn't make them any less attached to old memories or to family histories though. The meaning of ancestor worship for them comes to lie in its evocation of its own past meaningfulness - a shift in perspective which I guess goes to show that   attachment to the the very idea of religion can be just as powerful as conventional belief. Less educated older folk, on the other hand, take the cult of ancestors with full literalness; you might almost say it is out of deference to them that the cult continues in its full-blown form, even though Vietnam has become a radically modern, secular society over the past 100 years. Ancestor worship is the older generation's way of answering the claims of the past on the present - immense and painful as they are for many who lived through the period 1945 - 1975.

Younger generations have shifted sideways in a different direction. They are much less likely than their parents to care for the specific rituals of ancestor worship; most of them probably regard the way their elders duck and bob before the family altar as a quaint habit. Yet something of the habit still finds its way into their bones. That's because it's caught up with the Vietnamese belief in giving parents and grandparents their due. Even among the generations who have no direct experience of the War, you can still feel the main force of Vietnamese family ethics. At its heart is a sense of gratitude to parents and grandparents for their efforts in raising you - an obligation that extends beyond the grave.

Younger generations of Vietnamese don't take traditional beliefs about ancestral spirits wholly literally. But then they don't take them wholly metaphorically either. They believe in these things in the same way they believe in the miraculous history of Vietnamese communism: in the mode of unbelief. For many Vietnamese, both young and old, what ancestor worship boils down to is an order-giving ritual, an orientation-giving practice - something that is caught up in an unspecifiable way in Vietnamese beliefs about the importance and goodness of the family: a specific set of rituals that catches up the old-style believer, a general thought-pattern that hooks in the new-style agnostic and in both cases let's questions about its actual basis in fact take care of themselves.   

As one Vietnamese writer has pointed out, the persistence of ancestor worship in an increasingly disenchanted age can be put down to the fact that it speaks to something absolutely instinctive - as of course can the persistence of most forms of religious belief throughout the world.

The beautiful but childish idea behind ancestor worship is and has always been that when we think of the dead in a sense they live again.

In Vietnam, they arise from their slumbers in the rice fields and crowd round the family altar, eager to share in family festivity. And maybe, just maybe, in today's day and age, to metaphorically polish off the beer and Coke stacked up in front of their gently glowering images. . .