Be a teacher

There were once very strange teachers. In them, career, personality and temperament were intertwined and indistinguishable. Their career haunted them and their lives were like the embodiment of their career. In other words, Buddha - Dharma - Sangha were all united in one image: the teacher. I have learned from such teachers.

Every time I read Lao Tzu and Zhuang Zi, in my mind, those sages do not appear through Chinese paintings and statues, but the image of Professor Tran Dinh Huou appears, with a high forehead, flying silver hair, relaxed arm movements, and hearty laughter when finishing an ideological postulate. And his life is like a giant crane soaring through space. When I wake up, I do not know if Zhuang Zi has become the teacher or the teacher has become Zhuang Zi.

Professor Vo Quang Nhon's teaching hours were different. He seemed to have walked straight down from the communal house, as if he had just dropped his backpack, thrown away his axe, and entered the lecture hall. His voice was as if he had just come down from the village house, smelling the smoke and hearing the grass growing after the rain. His laughter was sometimes innocent, sometimes shy. He taught us the great epics of the Central Highlands. Everyone thought he was an Ede, but few people knew that he was a true Kinh, who had come to Cambodia and spoke French like the wind, translating for a group of experts for three or four months. When he returned to Vietnam, he was silent.

There are many more teachers like that, but let’s not mention them here, because talking nonsense, the teachers are still healthy. I want to tell a little about Professor Bui Duy Tan, a teacher like that to many of us. He has just passed away.

We entered university after the Paris Agreement of 1973 was signed. The school had been evacuated to Me Tri, Hanoi. Mr. Bui Duy Tan lived alone in the attic on the third and a half floor. His property was a spoon to eat rice from the kitchen. Because he ate rice together, he walked diagonally across the yard in brown pants. I stood at the base of a tree and muttered: "Mr. Lunar calendar!". Peel. A senior student knocked a bowl of B52 on my head: "You fool! That's Mr. Nguyen Trai!". And so I loved and respected him. From that moment on, I had the chance to study with him at Nguyen Trai.

What did I learn? I went up to the attic and asked the teacher a question.If you don't want to be a petty person, you will have to work hard.in Nguyen Trai's Nom poetry that I didn't understand a thing about. The teacher explained, I listened for a while and then accused Mr. Uc Trai of feudalism. The teacher raised his glasses: "What a reason!". The teacher picked up a spoon and stuck it in a line of poetry and read: "Prick your ears and listen.Reading books is to understand the meaning of books.. Nguyen Trai taught that. The meaning here is not only the meaning of words. It is also the morality people live in life. Are you broken yet? If you want to be understood, then follow it and live a good life. Go home and read books, you city people!". So the teacher lent him the book.Confucius posterby Phan Boi Chau. The people in the room were very impressed when they saw that I had borrowed all the teacher's valuable books and praised me for my flattery. So I readConfucius poster.

In 1976, I made a directory of Nguyen Trai for my thesis. One day, I walked from the National Library back to the dormitory because I didn't have 5 cents for the train, and they ate my rice, so I cried. My teacher knew about it and called me up to give him two cents to finish the work. At that time, we were close friends. He taught me that the remaining books of humanity were all good things. Reading books was first of all about learning good things to live on, and then researching something.

Ah, I see. Literature of a time is first and foremost the morality of literature. Whether ancient or eternal, it is like that. But clearly living with people for whom literature is morality is often more reassuring than living with people for whom literature is just the art of words. My teachers are often like that.

Later, I had the chance to work with him. I learned from one introductory lesson to another as he grew older and the students grew older too.

In 2000, after finishing the book about Phung Khac Khoan, the teacher invited me and some students to Phung Xa to burn incense for the church. When I saw the teacher put 500,000 VND on the plate to offer, I was startled. At that time, my family spent a month on such an amount of money. On the bus, I asked the teacher why he offered so much money, he said: I started my career since Phung Khac Khoan, at that time it was 1960, I didn't know anything, all the Nom characters were read by Mr. Dinh Gia Khanh, I couldn't copy them all down, but recently I heard someone say that Mr. Khanh didn't know Han Nom, I was surprised, why was that?

Another time, I followed my teacher to Hiep Hoa, where Khoa had been evacuated. I saw the teachers sitting together to pool money to buy a buffalo for the nephew of a deceased female owner, and I thought I still had a lot to learn from them.

Recently, a group of commune cadres with all kinds of members and gifts went from Dai Tu, Thai Nguyen to my school to ask for certification of families who had let cadres stay during the evacuation years so that the province could give them certificates of merit. The representative of the Board of Directors did not dare to sign because none of us in the next generation had evacuated there. They asked the commune cadres to find some retired people to certify. It was also difficult, coming from the forest to Hanoi to find people who had been raised by the people was too difficult. Who was lost and who was still alive in this bustling city. At noon, I took them to see Mr. Nguyen Kim Dinh first. He exclaimed, "Oh my god, I signed everything, I signed everything, if I can't repay the debt, then why are you guys still making me go all afternoon like this?" When I went to Mr. Bui Duy Tan's house, he was having a sore throat and couldn't talk (at that time he didn't know he had cancer), he signed and cried. I said, it's better to be careful, sir. He waved his hand and said hoarsely: "Does no one trust anyone anymore? Is that so?"

My teachers are like that. For them, literature must first of all be the morality of being human, a person and a citizen of the country.

Hearing that he had passed away, Dr. Nguyen Kim Son and I went to visit him. That was the day he regained consciousness and could speak a lot. He confided: "My life has been full of torment, especially when it comes to family matters when I was growing up... I stayed at school for a long time and witnessed a lot. Recently, someone threw a flyer into the yard telling me to write this and that... but I think the country is like a person, with its ups and downs. We should look at the big picture, don't resent each other because of small details. You guys are still working, taking the common cause as the main thing. At first, I was not born into a family of scholars like others. My life only has one experience: diligence makes up for lack of ability. If you want to hear it, then listen...".

I didn't expect that to be my teacher's last words.

• Nguyen Hung Vi