MEMORABLE MUSIC, TẾT EDITION: MIGRATION AND NOSTALGIA IN PHẠM ĐÌNH CHƯƠNG’S “SPRINGTIME IN EXILE” (“XUÂN THA HƯƠNG”)

Happy New Year! Chúc mừng năm mới!

One of the holiday songs I remember my family listening to at Tết when I was a teenager was Phạm Đình Chương’s “Springtime in Exile” (“Xuân tha hương,” 1956). Tết, or the lunar new year, is the most important holiday of the year for most ethnic Vietnamese, regardless of religion or regional origin. The holiday traditionally marks the start of spring, but I grew up in the US, so it usually came in the dead of winter. Nevertheless, I think “Springtime in Exile” resonated with my family because it expresses a migrant’s homesickness during Tết, something that refugees like us knew all too well. For my holiday post, I wanted to share my translation of the song.

Phạm Đình Chương was a songwriter from northern Vietnam who migrated south in 1954 when the country was partitioned by the Geneva Accords. The accords ended the First Indochina War/Resistance War, Vietnam’s war of independence against France, by dividing Vietnam temporarily into two zones. The communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) regrouped its forces to the northern zone, and the French and the anticommunist State of Vietnam (soon to be renamed the Republic of Vietnam) withdrew its forces to the southern zone. The accords allowed civilians to migrate to the zone of their choice, and more than eight hundred thousand Vietnamese fled south as refugees, among them Phạm Đình Chương.

The great migration of 1954 is known primarily for its heavily Catholic character, as many Catholic villages and hamlets in the lower Red River delta moved south as intact communities. But another defining characteristic of the migration was the movement of musicians, artists, writers, and intellectuals who chafed under the cultural restrictions imposed by the DRV. They hoped to enjoy greater creative freedom in the southern zone. Yet escape from the DRV also meant leaving home, and émigré intellectuals composed beautiful songs, poems, novels, and memoirs that expressed their love for northern Vietnam. The holiday of Tết must have been especially poignant because Vietnamese people traditionally return to their natal village or hometown at Tết to celebrate the new year with their family. There is even a specific expression in Vietnamese to describe this custom: về quê ăn Tết, meaning “to return home to celebrate Tết.” The phrase evokes similar sentiments as the expression home for the holidays in English. Phạm Đình Chương’s “Springtime in Exile,” composed soon after the migration of 1954, captures the bittersweetness that northern émigrés felt when they celebrated what should have been the happiest day of the year far away from their home and loved ones and not knowing if they would ever be able to return.

The song’s narrator remembers the joy of celebrating Tết in his/her village in the north and the beautiful springtime blooms that brightened the landscape. It is customary to display seasonal flowers to celebrate the holiday, and the narrator recounts that his/her mother instructed him/her to care for the flowers. Those beautiful memories seem impossibly far away now that the narrator has migrated south as a refugee, and s/he aches with homesickness and longs to see his/her aging mother once again. In the chorus, the narrator fantasizes about a holiday homecoming. S/he follows a dark road towards the village and can see flower petals in the air and smell the incense that evokes Tết. But the narrator can’t quite make out his/her home in the darkness, and the quaint little village remains out of reach even in imagination.