Blacken the teeth– a feature of ancient culture of VietNamese

Blacken the teeth is an old custom of the Vietnamese nation, dated from Hung Vuong times. It is together with the custom of chewing betel has become a typical feature of Vietnamese culture, distinguishing from other ethnic groups. Not only Viet people, one ethnic group of Vietnamese people, but also other groups such as Muong, Thai, Si La... have this custom but it differs from place to place within the territory of Vietnam. Besides women, men also blacken the teeth and this custom is popular everywhere in Vietnam. A set of black teeth used to be one of ten traits of beauty of Vietnamese women in the past:

"First love the tuft of hair

Second love impassioned way of speaking

Third love dimpled cheeks of girls

Fourth love glossy teeth blacker than apple's pip"

People only dye their teeth after their milk-tooth have been changed. That is the most suitable time to dye because the teeth are just formed and in the completing process and consequently the dye will easily penetrate into the teeth to make them more invory-coloured. The method of dying is often simple; however, the upper strata, noblemen and madarin prefer to dye with more fussy way by different methods from the previous generations. Hue is considered to be the thriving capital of blacken the teeth because the king, queen, imperial maid, mandarin, scholar gentry and patricians there love to blacken the teeth very much.

In order to have a set of shining black , glossy and charming teeth "Black teeth who dye for me", you must follow specific steps. To begin dying, your mouth and teeth have to be sanitised until they are totally clean. In the first three days, you ought to brush and pick your teeth with dried betel-nut husk and stewed powdered coal mixed with salt. One day before dying, you need to chew lemon, hold it in mouth and rinse your mouth by white wine mingled with lemon juice. The effect of the first extract of this juice is to erode the enamel to make depression on it. This time is when you feel most painful and your teeth, lip, tounge, gums and mucous membrane swell and two jaws are very sore. The dye substance is made of shellac prepared 7-10 days ago with the right portion of shellac and the first extract lemon juice, depending on individual. It will be daubed on a white piece of cloth or silk. Using dye substance happens after dinner, then the pad will be replaced at midnight.

In the next morning, the pad will be disengaged softly in order to avoid rubbing off the paint which has just been made in the previous night. After taking out the drug, it is imperative to rinse your mouth with fish sauce, or maybe bittern to eliminate the substance completely. The person dying must close his mouth nearly all the night to prevent from the pad going out of the mouth. He needs to do this two times each night and in seven nights. In this period of time he can only gulp food but not chew. When you see the dark red colour, the colour of lac, it is time for the second stage of spreading blackening solution on your teeth. Blackening solution is a mixture of iron sulphate and shellac and is applied in two days. Then you have to rinse your mouth with a drug called black powder liquid. The last stage is to fix it by sap from dipper made of coconut shell. This sap is used by this way: dry coconut shell many times under the sun, then burn it on live coals and put this burning shell on an iron bush-hook. From that coconut shell, a liquid of black sap drops out and it is used to apply on the teeth. After that, it creates a layer of ferment on the teeth. This stage is called "killing teeth". After finishing this step, that person can have a set of teeth which is as black as seed of custard-apple.

Since the Western civilization penetrates strongly into our country (1862), especially in the 1930s, many people have scraped their black teeth hurriedly to have white teeth slovenly in order to prove that they were pioneers attending the social reform advent, renovating movement and women's liberation movement. The custom blacken the teeth has gone into oblivion.

Source: Vietnam Simple

The Vietnamese Girl in Popular Poems

The Vietnamese girl never complaints about the condition and the role a Confucian society has assigned to her since the dawn of time. From her young age, being used to hearing popular poems incessantly sung by her mother or sister and continuing to grow up with the rhythm and the sound of the swinging hammock, she began to absorb unconsciously the recommendations found in these poems.

In spite of their simplicity, these poems began to give her not only an education worthy of Vietnamese tradition but also an incomparable resignation and the four virtues that any Vietnamese girl is deemed of possessing at her adolescence: Công, Dung, Ngôn, Hạnh (Homemaking Skills, Appearance, Speech Manners, Good Behavior). This will help her to be able to become in turn, sister, wife, mother, grand-mother during her existence. Therefore, it is not surprising to see that she has thus become one of the themes most talked about in Vietnamese popular poems.

Despite her young age, her mother's labor and wisdom have been repeated to her time and again through nursery rhymes the most known of which remains the following:

Cái ngủ mầy ngủ cho lâu,
Mẹ mầy đi cấy đồng sâu chưa về.
Bắt được con cá rô trê
Tròng cổ lôi về cho cái ngủ ăn.

Little sleeper, you have to sleep as long as possible,
Your mother has not come back from the deep rice paddy replanting seedlings.
She caught a carp and a cat fish
That she will take home for you to eat.

Then at 7-8 years of age, she began to replace her mother and imitate her in singing again the same popular nursery rhymes to lull her younger brother or sister to sleep. She also provided much service to her family: knowing how to cook rice, keeping her younger siblings, feeding the pigs and the ducks, taking water to the family animals, weeding the garden, collecting eggs, participating in family chores.

She also saw the change in the nature of her work when she reached adolescence. The nursery rhymes were replaced by folk songs or popular poems she used to hear singing often in the rice field. It is here that she would know the boys of her age. It is here that we would hear the first revelations of love, the first teasing of the Vietnamese girl through poems or folk songs. Among them, this one reveals and hides the blossoming heart of the Vietnamese girl who is shy, tender, and constrained by traditionally Confucian conditions.

Vào vườn hái quả cau xanh,
Bổ ra làm sáu mời anh xơi trầu
Trầu nầy têm những vôi tàu
Giữa đêm cắt cánh đôi đầu quế cay
Mời anh xơi miếng trầu nầy,
Dù mặn dù nhạt dù cay dù nồng
Dù chẳng nên vợ nên chồng,
Xơi dăm ba miếng cho lòng nhớ thương,

I enter the garden to pick a green betel-nut,
I cut it in six and invite you to taste this betel.
This one is spread with lime from China,
And flavored with the spice of the spice of cinnamon ends.
Please have this betel prepared by me,
Even if it is strong or light, hot or mild,
Or even if we do not become man and wife,
Just taste its flavor for you to remember.

That teasing is quick to find sympathy from the boys. To praise her beauty, these boys would not hesitate to offer not only one but ten loves at the same time, which ended up in the composition of this famous poem entitled "Mười Thương" (Ten Loves) that any young men in the old days would be deemed to know by heart:

Một thương tóc bỏ đuôi gà,
Hai thương ăn nói mặn mà có duyên,
Ba thương má lúm đồng tiền,
Bốn thương răng nhánh hạt huyền kém thua,
Năm thương dải yếm đeo bùa,
Sáu thương nón thượng quai tua dịu dàng,
Bảy thương ăn nói khôn ngoan,
Tám thương má phấn ngó càng thêm xinh,
Chín thương em ở một mình,
Muời thương con mắt đưa tình với ai!

First I love your plaited hair,
Second I love your suave and charming voice.
My next love is your dimpled cheeks,
Then your lacquered teeth more lustrous than jet is my fourth love.
Fifth, I love your bra and your necklace.
And your grand hat with velvet ribbon invites my sixth love.
My seventh love is your manner in speech,
Comes my eighth love of the makeup on your attractive cheeks.
Ninth, I love you because you are still single.
And finally tenth, because you reciprocate my loving glance.

The seductiveness of the girl only lasted for a short time because generally for the sake of socio-economic interests, she would be married very early. Many times in the past, there were financially pre-arranged marriages, which provoked criticisms and jokes through the following popular poem:

Mẹ em tham thúng xôi rền,
Tham con lợn béo, tham tiền Cảnh Hưng,
Em đã bảo mẹ rặng: đừng !
Mẹ hấm, mẹ hứ, mẹ bưng ngay vào,
Bây giờ chồng thấp vợ cao,
Như đôi đũa lệch so sao cho vừa.

Even when I had said: No
But my mother, fond of the sweet rice bucket,
Fond of the fat pig and fond of money.
With uhms and ahhs, she brought this guy in.
Now husband little, and wife tall,
We look like an unmatched pair of chopsticks after all.

Despite this remark, she accepted to become a member of the new family and be willingly submissive to all the Confucian constraints commonly seen in the Vietnamese society. She tried to meet the norms expected of her in the new family by following steadfastly the recommendations found in popular songs that she used to hear time and time again when she was still in cradle. In one of these songs, the following is found:

Con ơi! Mẹ bảo con nầy:
Học buôn học bán cho tày ngưòi ta,
Con đừng học thói chua ngoa,
Họ hàng ghét bỏ người ta chê cười.

My daughter! Listen to me,
Learn to wheel and deal as well as other people.
But try to avoid being sharp-tongued,
As this invites hate and sneer from friends and relatives.

Those are the last recommendations of her mother transmitted from one generation to the next through folk songs. The Vietnamese girl tends to keep them and apply them without failure until the end of her life. The Vietnamese woman accepts this resignation, this sacrifice, this injustice without reserve, which makes her an exemplary model worthy of admiration of her relatives, in particular her children. This is also one of the reasons that explains the profound and unshakable attachment of all Vietnamese to their mothers. The situation is illustrated by the following two verses found in one of the popular poems:

Em bán đi trả nợ chồng con,
Còn ăn hết nhịn cho hả lòng chồng con!

I do business to pay the debts incurred by my husband and my children.
It doesn't matter if I have nothing to eat, as long as they are satisfied.

Or in another, the following four verses depict not only humor but also tenderness, outstanding patience, even intangible proof of the sacrifice and love the Vietnamese woman always carries for her husband and her children:

Chồng giận thì vợ làm lành,
Miệng cười hớn hở rằng anh giận gì.
Thưa anh, anh giận em chi,
Muốn lấy vợ lẽ em thì lấy cho.

My husband is upset; I would try to calm myself.
Smile on my lips, I would ask what the reason is.
Come on, don't be frustrated any more.
Should you want a concubine, I'll get one for you.

Studying Vietnamese women

For this 32-year-old Vietnamese-American sociologist, it has been a homecoming in more ways than one.

Two years ago, Vietnamese-born American Hung Cam Thai registered with the University of California, Berkeley, to do a study on why, post-1975, Vietnamese women have “progressed” faster than their male peers.

He has since done many surveys of Vietnamese women born after the war.

“I want to discover common aspects among them in terms of work, love, success, courage, efforts and family,” Hung says.

“I feel close to them, love and admire them since I’m the same age as them.”

His assistants are senior students of sociology at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Social Sciences and Humanities (HUSSH).

They help him find subjects, including hundreds of diverse people like journalists, advertising executives and housewives.

The assistants have to convince the subjects, making friends with them and gaining their confidence so that they open up to talk honestly and comfortably, Hung says.

Hung returns to Vietnam six months at a time to conduct studies.

He and his group have done extensive surveys in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and some Mekong Delta provinces.

“I feel happy that I can know about many people’s destinies and make many new friends,” Hung says.

“Women are always an interesting topic. Who knows, maybe I can find my better half [amongst them].”

He wrote a book titled “For Better Or for Worse – Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy” based on his decade-long sociological studies in Vietnam.

The book depicts the development of society through marriages between Vietnamese women and overseas Vietnamese.

The book, which resembles a collection on different women’s lives, has drawn the attention of many foreign academics.

Some libraries in American and European universities have begun to use it as reference material, including Rutgers University in the US and the University of Rome, Italy.

The book is expected to be reprinted next October with 300,000 copies.

It will be translated into Vietnamese next year.

Interpreting Vietnam

Hung is invited to lecture on the Vietnamese community and Vietnam’s integration trends at many universities around the world.

He has been receiving more invitations since the book’s publication.

During a four-day visit to the University of Rome, Hung was amazed by the fact that hundreds of people attended his lecture.

The questions they posed showed how much they knew about Vietnamese society, Hung said, making him more eager to study his motherland.

Hung often brings a few excellent American students with him to Vietnam.

This is to give them an opportunity to learn about Vietnamese culture, life, food and drink, and the language, he says.

He has also organized trips to the US for HUSSH professors so that they can meet US students and discuss Vietnamese society.

Home, sweet home

Hung was taken to the US by his father when he was just four or five years old and he hardly remembers his mother.

But more than 20 years later, he found out his mother was still alive.

This persuaded him to choose Vietnam as the base for his sociological studies instead of Africa as he had originally planned.

Upon arriving in the country he met his mother in Dong Thap Province.

Later he kept coming back to Vietnam to work until she died of an illness.

But he has continued his research.

To him, studying Vietnamese society has been akin to finding his way back to his mother.

“Every time I came to Dong Thap, I felt as if I was coming home and back to my mother,” Hung says.

“My mother was always by my side, giving me love, warmth, encouragement and has shared [everything] with me.”