Nam Cao Memorial

The Nam Cao Memorial is set in Đại Hoàng village. Some books are understood best at the place where their characters lived, and this is one of those places.

The village lies in what was once Hòa Hậu commune, in Hà Nam province. Since the recent administrative changes, that old Hà Nam area belongs to Ninh Binh province.

Nam Cao was born Trần Hữu Tri. According to the records of the Vietnam News Agency, he was born in 1915, on the 29th of October. He took part in the National Salvation Cultural Association, and he worked in journalism and the arts during the resistance years. After his death he was awarded the Hồ Chí Minh Prize for literature and art, in 1996. It is the state's highest prize for artists.

Readers remember him above all for Chí Phèo and Lão Hạc. They remember Đời thừa, Đôi mắt and the novel Sống mòn too. These works are about villages of the northern plain, about farmers in hardship, and about poor intellectuals caught between their ideals and real life. He wrote them in and around this very village.

In 2023, on the 28th of October, Hòa Hậu commune held a ceremony to receive the certificate that makes the Nam Cao Tomb and Memorial Area a national historic site. It was the state's formal recognition of a piece of literary land of national standing.

Inside, the site has three main parts.

The first is the memorial house and its exhibition space. The exhibition was reworked in 2011, marking 60 years since the writer's death. Its documents and objects record his life, his career and his homeland, along with the tributes of many generations of readers. Walking through, one can see the place as a layer of records, from his biography and his path as a writer to the links between his books and the land that fed them.

The second part is the grave, inside the grounds of the memorial house. In front of it are a portrait of the writer and two book pages carved with words of his artistic creed. They are taken from Đời thừa and Nhật ký ở rừng. This is not only a place for reading literature. It is also a place for remembering a martyr, a man who died before he could see the country change.

The third part is the story of Đại Hoàng village and the models for his characters. Here the site touches one of the strangest things about literature, the line between a real person and an invented one.

The memorial house was built on land that belonged to two elders, Trùm San and Trùm Luông. Reports describe them as the real-life models for the character Lão Hạc in the work of the same name. So the ground is not only where the writer was born. It is also where he watched and listened, and where he built the people that millions of readers now call Lão Hạc and Chí Phèo.

These characters are fiction, of course. But local memory and literary reading hold that they were shaped by real life, by this village, by lives that Nam Cao lived beside.

What sets the place apart is not only the writer's name but the way the local community keeps this heritage. Hòa Hậu Lower Secondary School has been given the task of caring for and protecting the memorial. Students sweep, tend the grave area and look after the exhibition house. It is a kind of education that no textbook can replace, with students standing before the grave of an author whose pages they have read in class.

The memorial is meant for students, teachers of literature, and anyone who loves modern Vietnamese literature and wants to put his books back in the very land that produced them. It is also for anyone curious about how a writer looked at the world, and then turned what he saw into pages that last.

This is the land that gave rise to a large part of Vietnamese literature in the 20th century. Lão Hạc and Chí Phèo, farmers in hardship who never lost their dignity, all came from here. They came not from pure imagination but from the village, the fields and the people around him. Nam Cao knew their names, shared their meals, and saw them every day before he took up his pen.