Fourth Uncle in the Mountain: A Memoir of a Barefoot Doctor in Vietnam

By Marjorie Pivar and Quang Van Nguyen

Set during the French and American wars, Fourth Uncle in the Mountain is a true story about an orphan, Quang Van Nguyen, who is adopted by a sixty-four year old monk, Thau, who carries great responsibility for his people as a barefoot doctor. Thau manages, against all odds to raise his son to follow in his footsteps and in doing so, saves his son, as well as a part of Vietnam's esoteric knowledge from the Vietnam holocaust.

Thau is wanted by the French regime, and occasionally must flee into the jungle, where he is perfectly at home living among the animals. Thau is not the average monk; he practices an ancient lineage of Chinese medicine and uses magic to protect animals and help people.

As wise and resourceful as Thau is, he meets his match in his mischievous son. Quang is more interested in learning Cambodian sorcery and martial arts than in developing his skills and wisdom according to his father's plan.

Fourth Uncle in the Mountain is an odyssey of a single-father folk hero and his foundling son in a land ravaged by the atrocities of war. It is a classic story, complete with humor, tragedy, and insight from a country where ghosts and magic are real.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Oct 3, 2006
• ISBN: 9781466800991

Marjorie Pivar

Marjorie Pivar has worked for the past twenty years as a Shiatsu therapist in the field of alternative medicine. She lives in Vermont.

Book preview

2

Good Fragrance from the Sacred Mountain

While we were on the ferry, my father gave me a grapefruit. A big part of the branch was still attached to the stem. Even my father looked surprised as he handed it to me. Some people laughed, pointed at the grapefruit, and asked my father why he didn’t leave the tree behind.

We got off the third bus at Cay Lay and walked down a street with many colorful shops in the Chinese neighborhood. The smell of roasting pork and frying noodles lured us toward an outdoor restaurant-bar.

Would you like to try some Chinese food? my father said.

Some of the other customers were dozing next to their cold drinks after a hard day’s work. Outdoor restaurants and bars sometimes had hammocks for people to lie down and take a rest. The restaurant owners didn’t usually mind if you slept for a while.

My father ordered me a plate of roasted pork with fried rice and salad. He ordered fish for himself. If it had been a fasting day he would have ordered tofu. In my religion there are certain days of the month when we are required to refrain from eating food made from animals and animal products. Most Buddhist people in Vietnam fast at least seven days a month, on certain days that are traditionally set aside for fasting: the first, fourteenth, fifteenth, eighteenth, twenty-third, twenty-ninth, and thirtieth day. I don’t know why these are the designated fasting days.

After dinner my father sat down on one of the hammocks and kicked off his shoes. He pointed to the hammock next to his. Let’s take a rest before we walk to the house.

I’m not tired, I answered. Can I take a look in the shops?

No. Tomorrow we will come back and buy you some clothes and shoes. Come lie down. Would you like a custard apple or some chom choms? How about a mango?

I want some candy.

I’ll buy you some candy later. Here, take this.

He reached his arm over to the hammock next to his and dropped into it a handful of chom choms.

A chom chom is a kind of fruit that looks like a mouth-sized exploding firework. I climbed into the hammock and split open the pink, orange, and red spiky skin of a chom chom and popped the slippery white flesh into my mouth as if I weren’t afraid to eat a dead, cold eyeball.

Ba, if I am going to be like you, don’t I need to learn some magic? Aunt Gioi’s friend said your charms really work. She said that one time, when you stayed in Cai Mon, her son went to you every day, and you put a charm on his forehead so he could stand next to a tree and not be seen. She said the soldiers walked right past him several times when they had come to take people to the army. She said it was because of you that her son isn’t fighting on either side.

My father said, It is not easy to use magic to help people. Many people can do magic, but very few can do magic without causing more problems than they started out with. Magic is not important right now. You must learn how to help people with medicine.

You help people with magic, I said.

Medicine is more important.

I had finished all the chom choms and had tossed the hairy peels over the side of my hammock.

Ba, can you buy me some candy now?

My father felt around with his feet for the strange-looking shoes he liked to make out of banana-leaf twine, and we headed down the busy street to a bakery. He bought some mung bean, and moon pastries to take home, and some sugarcane rock candy for me to eat along the way.

We followed the flow of outgoing traffic from the city to the villages. The dirt lane was crowded with bicycles, pedestrians, motorbikes, and larger motorcycles. Many people wanted to talk to my father on our way to Ben Cac village. I didn’t mind, because he wasn’t paying attention to how much candy I was eating. Both he and Aunt Gioi didn’t like me to eat too many sweets.

Even though my father’s house looked identical to all the others, it was really a temple on the inside as well as a clinic. Most people kept two altars outside, one on the boundary of their land for the nature spirits, and one closer to the house for heaven and earth. My father kept a third altar for the little people we call the cac dan. Did you ever see a painting of the Buddha with lots of children climbing on him? Maybe you thought they were children, but they are supposed to be the cac dan. I will tell you more about them later.

In Vietnam, everyone, including my father, kept a family altar just inside the front door to remind you of your ancestors every time you entered your house. We believe it is our responsibility to send daily prayers to our ancestors. My father kept nine altars inside his front door. On each one was a tray of Chinese teacups, a statue or two, fresh fruit and flowers, red candles, and incense. He used up many packages of incense each day.

Whenever my father had a house, it was because some wealthy person had donated it to him. That was the customary way to keep a doctor nearby. The only people who could afford to donate a house for my father were landowners and people who worked for the French. That was only a handful of people. Most people had nothing to spare.

Housebuilding was something the villagers did for one another, because it cost too much money to pay a builder. All the materials to build the house could be found anywhere. The frame of the house was made from bamboo and other straight, slender trees, lashed together with banana-stem twine. The inner and outer walls were made of water-palm or lemongrass thatch.

That evening when we went to bed, my father told me about the master of his religion, Phat Thay Tay An, the Buddha Master of Western Peace, who founded a spiritual community in the That Son Bay Nui, the Seven Sacred Mountains at the western border of South Vietnam. My father said he was going to take me there to live when I was older.

Phat Thay Tay An, or To Thay for short (pronounced Toe Tie), was the son of a poor widow and had suffered from poor health all his life. He left his mother to study healing, meditation, and magic in South Vietnam and Cambodia. My father said that even though To Thay himself was not strong, he was able to use his healing powers to save the lives of many people during the cholera epidemic that happened in 1849, one hundred years before I was born. People started to love To Thay because he had healed so many. That is how he earned his title.

My father said that To Thay could predict the future. He told his followers that Vietnam would soon fall under foreign rule. Everyone thought he was referring to the Chinese, because China had conquered Vietnam two times in the past and had ruled for more than one thousand years. When the French became a governing force in South Vietnam 1867, eleven years after To Thay died, many people began to have faith in his divinations.

To Thay had also predicted that in a hundred years’ time, the Vietnamese culture would be destroyed in a war of apocalyptic proportions. He told people that fire was going to fall from the sky and burn people alive, that the rivers would be poisoned, and that the earth would have the life burned out of it. He said we would be haunted by many tormented ghosts.

I told my father I didn’t believe what the Buddha Master predicted. The war is here now and people just hide underground in their bunkers.

My father said he hoped I was right.

Many people believed in To Thay and followed him into the wilderness of the Seven Sacred Mountains to build a new kind of spiritual community, in the hope of preserving the esoteric knowledge of Vietnam from the coming apocalypse.

In those days it was dangerous and almost impossible to reach the Seven Sacred Mountains. Each mountain was an impenetrable fortress of primordial jungle, home to elephant, python, panther, and tiger. Surrounded by crocodile-infested marshes and flood lands, the region was a no-man’s land where bands of rebels and outlaws hid out, and mystics and hermits wandered.

The exodus into the Seven Sacred Mountains continued long after To Thay’s death. Taoist sages, Zen Buddhist monks, and skilled Cambodian sorcerers who believed the Buddha Master’s prophecy founded new villages and added their skills, wisdom, and knowledge to the community. Some of them knew how to communicate with the jungle animals, and they created a trust between the animals and the people.

This is how the Buddha Master of Western Peace created our religion. He called it Buu Son Ky Huong, which means good fragrance from the sacred mountain.

In 1867, when my grandfather Ky Van Nguyen was twenty-five, he left Cai Mon for the Seven Sacred Mountains to study medicine, healing, and meditation with To Thay’s followers. A few years later, he went to Nui Cam, the one mountain that was forbidden to be settled, in search of a teacher from whom he could learn more about meditation and the cultivation of power and wisdom. He lived alone on the forbidden mountain for a year before finding such a teacher. My grandfather lived in the cave with his teacher for ten years before returning home to Cai Mon, where he started a family and a medical practice. Several times during his life, my grandfather went back to the cave to study meditation with his teacher, about twenty-five years altogether.

My grandfather brought my father to do the same, and my father said he would take me. So far my father had spent about twenty years meditating with the teacher in the cave.

My grandfather, my father, and others who studied healing in the Seven Sacred Mountains were known throughout South Vietnam as cuu dan do the, the ones who healed people and rescued mankind. I grew up knowing that my father was important and that many people loved and needed him, but I didn’t pay much attention to that. To me, he was just my father.

My father told me about his religion that first night at his house, and about the responsibility he carried for our people. He said that he was passing that responsibility on to me, and that over time I would master the skills and acquire enough power to be able to help many people, too. That night, my father told me many things about the person I would become in the future, but he didn’t tell me who I really was until I was fifteen.

Now I am going to tell you a story about who I really am and who my father really was. I will start from when I was just a few months old. By the time I finish telling you all the things I learned when I was fifteen, we will end up back at my father’s house, the next morning, on the day I began my education with my father.

3

The Year I was Born

September 1950

Cho Lach Village, Mekong Delta, South Vietnam

The early-morning sun was muted by shreds of white mist rising from the muddy, meandering waterways like cocoons of unraveling silk. Men and women in earth-tone-colored pajamas and conical sun hats rode their canoes and sampans over the rippling wakes of other boats. They stood or crouched on the stern decks of their boats, a triangular platform just wide enough for their feet, and rowed or paddled their way to market.

Some were carrying items to sell at the market, baskets of fresh fruit and vegetables from their gardens, mounds of polished rice from the mill, or buckets of this morning’s catch.

Boats were jammed five rows deep at the market quay with all the coming and going. Some villagers chose to do all their buying and selling directly from their boats without bothering to wait for a spot at the pier.

At eight o’clock in the morning, just like every other morning at the Farmers’ Market in Cho Lach, the French national anthem hissed and crackled over a tinny loudspeaker that was wired to the flagpole. Everyone had to stop doing business, face the flag, and stand at attention. Police in white uniforms scanned the crowd and swung their batons as a warning. If you were caught talking, you would have to pay a fine or go to jail. Either way, it meant your family would go hungry.

It was the anthem that woke me. When the song was over, everyone at the market could hear me crying from inside a covered basket that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere at the foot of the flagpole. Suddenly there was a large audience listening to me, as if my angry, trembling infant screams had been deliberately added to the tail of the anthem as an ironic commentary. The villagers remained silent a few moments longer than usual before reverting to a swarming mass of buyers and sellers that spilled out the sides of the open-air pavilion.

I continued to cry amidst the activity around me. As the morning progressed, it became obvious that my mother was not coming back for me. It wasn’t unusual for babies to be abandoned at the market, because people were starving. Everybody knew that if a stranger came up to you and asked you to mind her baby while she went to the toilet, you would think twice about it.

In 1950, there was a war going on in Vietnam, the Indochina War. Even though the fighting and the famine were mostly in the north, we in the south also suffered, because rice farmers were required to give a percentage of their rice harvest to the French to feed their army and to be sold on the European market for a profit. If for some reason a farmer’s rice crop failed, he or she would have to come up with his biannual quota of rice somehow or go to prison. After paying this rice tax, most families had barely enough rice to feed their children one meal a day.

Some of the villagers, mostly women and children, made their way to the flagpole, to my basket. When they lifted the lid, they were surprised to see how tiny I was. I couldn’t have been more than three months old. I was lying on my back, naked, on a stained and soiled cloth. My face was all slimy with mucous, tears, and sweat.

Nobody ventured to pick me up. Perhaps they were frozen with pity, or maybe they were afraid they would get stuck with me and have to take me home.

Several of the market children wanted to carry me down to the river to cool me off, but the adults wouldn’t let them. Instead, they gave them a cloth to dip into the water and bring back, so they could wash my face and drip water into my mouth. The children wriggled their way in and surrounded my basket. They tried to cheer me up, but I was far too young to respond to their playful hands and faces.

Children as young as five years old came to the market on their own, to sell whatever they could find. They were from the poorest and most desperate families. Many of them saw their siblings die of starvation, and many had fathers and mothers who were locked up in prison. Some didn’t even know where their parents were. People generally regarded these children as beggars and wouldn’t think of buying food from them, because they often ripped the fruit off the trees so carelessly that they would tear off the unripe fruit along with the ripe. Their leafy greens looked as if they had been yanked from the side of the road where someone might have peed on them. The market children were never allowed to sit inside the pavilion with the established vendors, so they had to look for a spot of shade under a tree.

Some of the farmers who had regular concession stands came forward and said they saw a woman who could have been my mother earlier that morning. They saw her ducking through the crowd as if she were afraid to be seen. Two friends who had walked to market together at daybreak told the group they saw a woman running like the devil toward the forest. We just took one look at her and knew she was fleeing for her life. All we could do for her was to say a prayer.

Some others went to the flagpole to report that they had seen my parents around Cho Lach but didn’t know their names or where they were from. They said my parents just showed up one day out of nowhere and kept to themselves. It was assumed that they were living somewhere in the forest. My father looked like a monk who had stopped shaving his head. People thought he must have been in trouble, because he didn’t even come looking for a midwife when I was born. Everyone knew instinctively not to approach or befriend my parents. We Vietnamese have learned that butting your nose into someone else’s business could mean the difference between life and death for everyone involved.

Sensing that the adults were distracted in conversation, one of the children lifted me out of my basket and snuck me down to the river accompanied by the others. The children waded between the boats and dipped my feet into the opaque, silty water, and I screamed even louder.

By then word had gotten around about the abandoned baby and the mysterious couple who were in trouble with the French. More people gathered around my basket at the flagpole. They took off their rubber flip-flops to sit on, or else took a banana leaf. They set their baskets all around mine and proceeded as they would at a village meeting.

Someone reported that a body had been found in a ditch that morning on the outskirts of one of the hamlets. It was my father, the runaway monk. He had been shot.

The children brought me back. He won’t stop screaming. He wants his mother. They put me back inside my basket just as miserable as when they took me out.

When Thau Van Nguyen (pronounced Tao Van Wing) arrived at the market with his wife Co, he was immediately informed about the troubling news and escorted to the meeting at the flagpole. Thau was a monk and doctor who carried great responsibility for his people. He had studied for twenty years in the Seven Sacred Mountains with the most learned and powerful monks and healers in all of Vietnam, and he practiced an ancient lineage of Chinese medicine. The market children knew and loved Thau, not because of his reputation, but because he was their best customer. Thau reached into his pockets for treats and distributed them to the small reaching hands that crowded around him. The villagers called him by his nickname, Ong Sau, which means he was the fifth-born child of his

Reviews for Fourth Uncle in the Mountain

[mcdenis-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A true but simply told story of Quang , a Vietnamese orphan, who was adopted by Theu, a senior itinerant monk and healer. Theu taught Quang how to read pulses, gather herbs and make curative medicine. Later as Quang matures he puts him under the guidance of various teachers and lastly to practice meditation under the guidance of “Fourth Uncle” in mountain caves. He returns to his father as war envelops Vietnam, becomes a young abbot of a nearby monastery as his healing skills are perfected. He ultimately marries and decides it is too dangerous to remain in his county and escapes to America. The narrative provides us with a snapshot of village myths, herbal medicine and wholesome humanity.

[brendart20 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Loved it. Enjoyed learning about Vietnam and the history of it and the people and their traditions in mysticism and in Chinese medicine and Buddhism and the ravages and hardships of being an occupied country. This is an amazing, true story of the tenacity and curiosity of a boy growing up during the French occupation and Vietnam War and the will of his father, trying to teach him responsibility and have him learn Chinese medicine and Buddhist discipline in the face of unbelievable hardship and suffering.

[cestovatela · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fourth Uncle in the Mountain is both a memoir and a record of an extinct culture. Born near the beginning of the Vietnam War and raised by a respected spiritual healer, Nguyen grows up in a world where spirits, ghosts and black magic are an accepted part of reality. The book shines in his description of Nguyen's wonder-filled boyhood in a poor village -- his narration of every day tasks like getting water, finding fruit and catching crabs are a fascinating record of village life. His education in monasteries across Vietnam is equally intriguing but I sometimes struggled to contain my American disbelief in sorcery and magic. Although the book could have been about 50 pages shorter, it rarely lags for too long and the growing intensity of the Vietnam War adds interest to the final chapters. It is certainly different from any other book I've read this year and I recommend it almost unconditionally.