Ordinary People With Diverse Personalities And Fates

Noi always wants to give comments and perspectives on people considered the quintessence of the country. About Hanoians, you can be impressed with the articles of Hoang Hung and Le Phu Khai. Although they are not researchers, they are native Hanoians talking about native Hanoians: Hoang Hung has eight comments about Hanoians:

1. Value family life. A family is stable, orderly, with superiors and subordinates, with love and loyalty. It is difficult to sacrifice family for career and ideals.

2. Have a strong sense of personal interests and property rights, not easily violated by others, easily considered "petty", calculating, but also do not like to violate other people's interests, fair and clear ("love each other, fence it tightly").

3. Respect your personal freedom as well as that of others. In relationships outside the family such as relatives, friends, colleagues, neighbors... keep the limits at a reasonable level, "with a hint of jasmine". Avoid disputes and confrontations, "peace is precious". It is easy to be seen as "smart", easy to become indecisive, "harmonious with the whole village".

4. Be polite and tactful in social interactions, both in dress and speech. Hate vulgarity, ridiculousness, and blatantness. Afraid of "speaking bluntly". Just want to be a decent and reasonable person.

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5. Don't just work hard but know how to enjoy life, and enjoy it in a lavish, elegant, and moderate way, without being infatuated, indulged, or "overindulged".

6. Respect existing traditions: family traditions, rules, social conventions. Be able to adapt to change but not proactively create change.

7. Respect honor and trust in relationships. Self-respect in work, professional conscience. Able to be patient to rise up or slowly restore lost rights and status. Does not like taking risks or succeeding at all costs.

8. Moderate, moderate. Moderate, neither extreme nor drastic. Reason is stronger than emotion. Logical thinking is stronger than intuition and instinct.

Le Phu Khai talked about the general characteristics of Hanoians: "Hanoians prefer integrity, purity, no "blood" of corruption, do not like to bully subordinates, Hanoians are elegant and polite. They are very gallant, elegant, intelligent, have sharp thinking, tight arguments, have clear and concise language, and are attractive to everyone. If in a peaceful era, Hanoians would be honest scientists, they have the qualities of "good subjects" in a court with an "enlightened king", a wise king. Hanoians do not have the will to progress, do not dare to do great things "opening mountains and breaking rocks" "moving walls and uprooting mountains" like Mr. Phan, Mr. Ho in the Lam River and Hong Mountain area. Hanoians live a closed life, taking care of their family and children, not infringing on anyone's property, relationships are give and take, not generous like people in the South. Hanoians live peacefully, elegantly, respect morality and justice, like to gnaw on loneliness and sadness of human life. Hanoians do not like noisy ostentation, hate the ridiculous and vulgar "rich people pretending to be rich". They live quietly, but are very stylish and playful.

And of course, in his work, To Hoai also presents a perspective on the people of Hanoi in the past and present. He sees the beauty of sophistication in behavior, the beauty in their speech, in their elegant hobbies, in their way of eating, dressing, thinking, and feeling. It is rare to see in To Hoai's Old Hanoi Stories portraits of workers with a typical character's fate or personality. Obviously, in To Hoai's mind when writing this work, he did not intend to build great characters, as the central characters of the era. People often see in it the silhouettes of ordinary, honest workers instead of the image of the upper class, the noble people of a luxurious Hanoi. But what is noteworthy is that in them, there still exudes the beauty of the soul of the common people, kind-hearted, and respectful of love.

That was Mrs. Viet, a poor peasant woman, with a bent back who worked as a seamstress, specializing in mending torn clothes for families in December when the cold came. “Mrs. Viet was really good at patching up the hems and shoulders. My aunt’s long brown dress was completely re-dressed without needing a single piece of new fabric. My clothes, the bottom of my pants, the knees, the elbows, wherever the tables and chairs were worn or torn, Mrs. Viet would patch them up. Mrs. Viet cut the front down to the hem, then sewed the flaps, filled in the buttons to make a strip, and took care of everything herself.” Mrs. Viet sat chewing betel “phôm phém” because she had no teeth left, but she was a treasure trove of stories, a treasure trove of rhymes that the children could not leave. Remembering those random rhymes, Tô Hoài had to exclaim: “Oh, the silly songs of the past, the wild, joyful wishes and mocking laughter”. As for her stories, not the story of Tam Cam, but she had a treasure trove of village stories from ancient times, remembering them for a long time, remembering them until you don't know how many stories: ghost stories, stories about the New Year, stories about selling chicken paintings, stories about uprising men, stories about people leaving the village, stories about broken dikes... It feels like this type of character is what To Hoai likes, because they are the ones who keep and pass on the legends about the village, making the souls of poor children in the countryside bathed in an atmosphere of imagination, illusion and reality. Mrs. Viet is like a character often seen in Gorky's stories, To Hoai himself also affirmed the influence of the stories Mrs. Viet told on his works: "Later, when I became a writer, in my imagination, the distant Nghia Do village from whence it came back to me, perhaps those images were piled up and printed from these old stories". That is the beauty in the souls of ordinary people that To Hoai is grateful for and remembers forever.

With traditional beauty deeply ingrained in their core, even in the scene of debt collection and debt begging, the true Hanoians of the past still showed emotional restraint and kindness. The debt collector (in The days before Tet ) became poorer each year, the year before he even used a handkerchief to spit when

cough, in the following years, using diary paper (coughing and spitting phlegm onto the paper, then folding it up and putting it in your pocket), the debt collector never had any significant assets for the debt collector to collect (“no money, no coin, nothing in the house worth half a cent, what are you going to do with each other”). Money should have made people treat each other rudely, especially when the debtor was “stubborn and daring”. Yet Mr. Phan still sat still, at the end of the meeting he only said one sentence, his voice seemed to be broken: “You promised… You promised me something definite, I will come back next January”. What was remarkable was their actions when the debt collector left. “My grandmother then took out a few coins from her belt and put them in his hand: I am giving you a tram ticket, you can hold it for now”. Many years later, the debt was still not collected, the debtor was already starving and suffering even more, the polite act of “giving you a tram ticket” was no longer there. In addition, the debt collector had to ask for…the fare. Yet, the judge only told my grandmother: “Please give me a train ticket.” Putting that behavior “in the middle of the late-year afternoon market scene, bustling, hurried, the market was like a robbery”, did To Hoai find it pitiful and heartbreaking? Yes, that scene was pitiful, but their heartbreakingness spoke of something very precious, when people were fighting each other for food and clothing, that small gesture still had the ability to warm people’s hearts, because it contained humanity.

2.2.2. Ordinary people with diverse personalities and fates

2.2.2.1. Discovering Hanoi people from the perspective of everyday reality, discovering diverse personalities...

To Hoai inherently has a humanistic sense of everyday people, he does not have the habit of looking at people with an idealized, one-sided view. Therefore, even when many writers of the same period fall into "simplicity, illustrationism", To Hoai's characters are still very real, that is, vivid, because they are viewed in a multi-dimensional way, revealing diverse personalities, as real as their everyday nature. In Old Stories of Hanoi , many classes of Hanoi are described, including the upper class and the lower class.

But it is worth noting that, whether describing the Western class, the Western bosses, the Western ladies, or the gangster bosses, the ticket inspectors on the tram, the scholar teaching in the countryside, the rickshaw pullers on the street, the crazy woman who lost her child... To Hoai's perspective still maintains objectivity, composure, and no bias. Each character, in their personality, is a mixture of good and bad, good and bad mixed together, and lively in everyday life, that is, diverse and memorable, and cannot be simply concluded in just one word.

Therefore, there was a scholar who, at a time when "the times were chaotic, when brushes and pencils were mixed up, many teachers taught both Chinese characters and national languages, both teaching children very majestically and "like a brooding hen spreading its wings" to cover a bottle of wine when the "proper" soldiers from the office came to catch them drinking.

He did not hesitate to point out the limitations of his class, who were very poor but “no one had ever worked for hire to earn a living”, simply because “people often pretend to look good, especially in Ke Cho land, the outside is often full of crab fat” [14,423]. He never painted a beautiful scene where the character appeared in a sterile atmosphere, but on the contrary, he always let the character appear in an everyday artistic space, sometimes “sloppy”, but because of that, it was lively and realistic. That was the scene of a classroom in the early summer room, where “a hen led a flock of chicks to scratch in the corner, running through chicken droppings, dust and garbage, but when the students came, how clean and orderly it was”. Even the mat spread out for the teacher to sit on was “a mat that had been spread out for a long time and had a big hole in the middle”. However, the slovenliness did not make people forget morality and etiquette, so the children, when spreading out the mat to invite the teacher to sit and teach, still "had to be considerate, even though the edge of the mat was torn and dirty, they had to look at the left and right sides, they could not spread the mat upside down" [14,424]. In the same way, the teacher appeared both neat and dignified in front of the students and "mischievous" in the case of escaping from the mandarin's arrest for alcohol. Even

In the neatness there is also the ordinary in the poverty that cannot be hidden: "The teacher wore worn-out shoes made of yellow buffalo hide; a square silk scarf tied around his hair bun; the long dark silk shirt was faded at both elbows, and had just been replaced with two brown cloth tubes" [14,424].

The world of characters in To Hoai, each person has a personality, many times, people see those people as too bland. I think, that is not a weakness of To Hoai. Because when looking at life with ordinary eyes, we must be honest and see that blandness is also one of the characteristics of human existence. How many people have lived and then disappeared in this life, having such a bland existence. However, haunting the reader does not always require typical personalities, blandness itself is also a way to haunt and evoke sorrow. It is worth mentioning that the blandness of To Hoai's character is also extremely diverse, it is a diversity arising from this very messy and messy life. Therefore, the reader encounters a grandmother who is both kind, rich in faith and seemingly lost her self-respect (miserable, because self-respect is sometimes too luxurious for the poor); an out-of-date Mr. Am who is both depressed and trying to show off, a crazy man "like a butterfly, but a ghost butterfly" because he is only used to asking for smiles from unmarried girls, a cold and imposing Mrs. Hai, a noisy crowd, who likes flattery and is cunning...

Nguyen Vinh Phuc, in the introduction to Old Stories of Hanoi, affirmed that: “The entire inner city of Hanoi is spread out in the book: Thirty-six streets, The tram, New Street, Hang Dao Street, Hang Ngang Street, Craft Street, Western Association, Mrs. Ba Ty, Night Calling, Rice at the Head of the Chair, Ao Dai, Mr. Hai Tay… Just mentioning a few of the titles like that makes us see more clearly the presence of the multi-faceted inner city” [14;5]. Indeed, Hang Dao Street with its disdainful Mrs. Hai, full of gold and jade on its necks and arms, Hang Ngang Street with its black Western men who worship pigs, fabric shop owners, mysterious but also passionate lives, New Street has

Van Bao pawnshop "skinned" the poor, there was also a human trafficking market, a brokerage market that hired - and bought - nannies, boys, servants, poor people who offered their bodies as servants to the world...

To Hoai did not romanticize the upper class people in the old society like Khai Hung, Nhat Linh, but he also did not caricature them to the point of horror like Vu Trong Phung, or exaggerate them with a humorous tone like Nguyen Cong Hoan. He also described the lower class people with love, but To Hoai whispered rather than loudly like Nguyen Hong, was humorous rather than mischievous like Nam Cao, was subtle rather than rustic like Ngo Tat To, and did not mention major social upheavals like Nguyen Cong Hoan, Nguyen Hong... he only told daily stories in the ordinary lives of ordinary people, not exaggerated or embellished to attract readers, not exaggerated or forced for sensational effect. His laughter was also gentle, leisurely, not venomous.

2.2.2.2. The many fates

In Hanoi and Hanoi , To Hoai wrote: "The strange thing is that I can never fully explain the ups and downs of human lives in the past century in our country." The old story of Hanoi is the miserable fate of human lives drifting between light and darkness.

Only by living truly and deeply penetrating the life of old Hanoi can one know the humiliation of the urban poor from concrete images: “At that time, it was very hard to maintain a bicycle. The bicycle had to be attached with a piece of iron or copper engraved with the owner’s name, house number, and street name. There was no fine. If you pressed each other to fine, the bicycle looked so ugly, it was an eyesore, so you were fined”. At that time, “thatched houses were everywhere, the earthen walls were bumpy like crawling turtles”, at night “the sound of cuckoos calling at dusk was heartbreaking”. The writer touched on the miserable life of old Hanoi that few writers talked about. In the past, people were busy looking for food, barely making a living, having to

crawling far away, all the way to Dat Do, Dau Tieng in the "rapid rapids" never to return, a lot": Many details, seemingly recorded accidentally but bitter from the bottom of the heart, "the Westerners ate and sat around, while the rest of the people dug up duckweed to find bugs, lived on each other's backs, supported each other... Desperately looking for work to get through the day and night". In a very personal and profound perspective, writer To Hoai especially successfully portrayed a part of the life of the old Hanoians, from woodworkers, shoemakers, dusty and miserable, hungry, from the scene of the inner villages immersed in the scene of Westerners illegally catching alcohol leading to the tragedy of poor people having to "go to prison for alcohol so that their wives and children at home have someone to take care of", to the scene of the watchtowers, the hawker gates, Mo market, Ha Dong buffalo market wharf, Cau Go, Cau Cuoi..." full of disabled people, beggars, everywhere "the sad sobbing sound resounds on the lips of the poor begging for food" is the heartbreaking image of debt collection, the creditor and the debtor are both poor, so poor that every year on the days before Tet, the creditor comes to collect, they can only look at each other, every year is the same and ends with the promise "next January... next January" and then never being able to pay the debt. These very real images of life are interwoven together, creating the ups and downs of a hard-working life.

It is also a Hanoi with miserable lives - Lives of "climbing tamarinds, climbing crocodiles". To Hoai has thoroughly explained the popular saying "climbing tamarinds, climbing crocodiles" which is only commonly understood as a curse for children who wander around the city. But even in his explanation, there is also a taste of sadness about the lives of poor children who steal tamarinds and crocodiles "to sell for a living every day, sometimes to feed their whole family". Those children are always chased by the boss's team, just need the boss to threaten to shoot and "suddenly, from the tree, as fast as a falling areca tree, one, two, three or four children. Each child is naked, shivering, skinny, naked like a dry branch broken down. The pants, two pant legs of each child are tied around the neck, tightly packed with tamarinds up to the waist". Modern Hanoians may not be too unfamiliar with the sight of children wandering around the city, but these

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