Culture trader

13:27' 15/07/2007 (GMT+7)

Huu Ngoc VietNamNet Bridge – At 90, Vietnam-Sweden Cultural Fund Chairman Huu Ngoc is still leading an active life: walking 10 km to his small office to do the work he calls culture export and import. “I’m now reviewing my whole life,” said culture expert Huu Ngoc one day. He is certainly doing a lot of reviewing these days since he intends to publish all the Vietnamese essays he has written for many years past in a collection that may well be over 1,000 pages. As for what he has written in English and French, they have already been published and warmly received. Wandering through Vietnamese Culture, the 1,100-page collection of his English essays written for Vietnam News’ Sunday edition for the last 13 years, is an acclaimed publication. It won the Vietnam Publishing Association’s gold prize last year and has gone through 5 editions and been used as a reference work at many American colleges. And his 1,200-page French collection titled À la découverte de la culture Vietnamienne is also on his bookshelf now. Huu Ngoc likes to be called a culture trader, a bridge connecting Vietnamese culture and that of the world. Asked what products of Vietnamese culture he had exported the most, the trader said they were the differences between the Vietnamese and Chinese cultures. ”I’ve cited much evidence just to prove that though Vietnam was influenced by China, she still has her own unique identity. Vietnam is Vietnam from the history of her name to her cultural symbol, the Dong Son bronze drum, which is different from the symbol of Chinese culture, the bronze cauldron,” said he. In his eyes, Vietnamese culture, and all cultures for that matter, are constantly changing, interacting with and learning from each other and this is what makes them vibrant and beautiful. “Even our ao dai (traditional dress), which is considered by many to be the very traditional feature of our culture, came from an effort to imitate French fashion,” Huu Ngoc said. As for imports, he said French culture was particularly appealing and closely related to Vietnamese culture. Colonialism aside, French culture offered many positive things including a scientific western way of thinking. What about Sweden or the Vietnam-Sweden Cultural Fund? According to its chairman, the fund has sponsored about 2,000 cultural projects in Vietnam over the past 15 years. Of these, the most effective is the effort to revive 10 water puppetry villages in the Red River Delta region. Other projects serve diverse purposes ranging from helping to preserve southern folk opera and music to familiarising local people with democracy and quintessential works of Vietnamese, French or American culture. At present, the Vietnam-Sweden Cultural Fund is trying to preserve historical honour-conferring documents at 500 localities nationwide, since as Huu Ngoc said, one vision of the fund was to preserve old things as the first step towards constructing new ones. (Source: Viet Nam Net)