Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Do you know what loyalty is? When you are loyal and when you are not? Try to stop reading for one minute to answer these two questions before you continue reading, so that you can compare your idea to my idea.

I have the feeling that, for the last 50 years, most of the Vietnamese have no idea what loyalty means. A couple of years ago, some young Vietnamese even emailed to ask me what loyalty means.

I think the main reason is that since the time Vietnam overthrew Emperor Bảo Đại (the last king of VN) in 1955, there has been a strong movement to criticize the old-days monarchy and everything going with it. Loyalty has been considered as the strongest foundation of monarchy, and everyone has looked at loyalty as a disease.

In the monarchy time, there was a thing called Three Bonds (Tam Cương): Loyalty between king and subject, father and son, husband and wife (Quân thần, phụ tử, phu phụ). Since loyalty between a king and his subjects were the foundation of monarchy, people threw out loyalty along with the monarchy – throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.

For many years, the Vietnamese consider loyalty a dirty word. When you say the word “lòng trung” people look at you like you speak a foreign language.

However, loyalty is the most important element in human relations. We need to be loyal to our parents, our brothers and sisters, our spouse, our friends, our teachers, our companies, our leaders, our country…

There are many bonds between us and people around us and communities surrounding us. Those bonds exist and survive on everyone’s loyalty. Without loyalty, those bonds wither and die, and the society collapses.

In the pre-1975 South Vietnam, you couldn’t see loyalty – the generals killed their President and killed and fought each other for power. Friends fought against each other when they had different political ideas. I rarely heard anyone mention the word trung thành (loyalty). That was a society without any long-lasting bonds. You know the result in 1975.

Loyalty doesn’t mean you are loyal when you like each other and no longer loyal when you are angry at each other or have different opinions on something or disagree on something.

Loyalty means you are always loyal, regardless of what happens.

Your friend does wrong to you, you forgive and wait for a good time to talk to the friend about the issue.

Your friend violates the law and is sent to prison, you are still loyal to him/her.

Your friend has a political path opposing to your path, you are still loyal to him/her.

Your friend switches to a different religion, s/he is still your friend.
…

Loyalty means the bond is always there, regardless of what happened between the two persons.

My friends, if you don’t have loyalty or don’t even know what loyalty is, well, I don’t know what to say. Even your dog is extremely loyal to you.

With compassion,

Hoành

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Trần Đình Hoành
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