Tran and Pork Ribs

A friend came by.

He kindly brought me two books by Tran Duc Thao — two books I had been searching for, for quite some time. As a gesture of thanks, I asked him to sit down and try the Manado-style spiced pork ribs I had cooked. Since the two books he delivered are of such value, serving food whose knowledge I inherited from my childhood kitchen seemed an appropriate expression of gratitude. The pungent, fiery spices sizzled as they were stir-fried, paired with water spinach and papaya blossom.

My mother taught me that cooking is a form of worship to God and a way of honouring fellow human beings. I clearly hold in high regard someone who has helped turn my dream into reality.

The two books were written in the early period when Tran began his work as an ethnologist. His initial notes concerned Vietnam. Many people in Indonesia still do not know who Tran was. Yet in the 1950s and 1960s, figures now idolised by today’s philosophy hipsters — such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Althusser — were referring to Tran.

Information about Tran Duc Thao is indeed scarce. Two references I rely upon are Silvia Federici’s essay Viet Cong Philosophy: Tran Duc Thao and Shawn McHale’s article, published in the Journal of Asian Studies in February 2005, entitled Vietnamese Marxism, Dissent, and the Politics of Postcolonial Memory: 1946–1993.

From these two sources, I learned that Tran was born in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam in the north, in 1917.

From Federici, I learned that Tran studied at the École Normale Supérieure around 1936. He received a scholarship after completing his undergraduate degree in Vietnam, which was then still a French colony. It was during this period of study that he encountered Merleau-Ponty, an encounter that sparked his interest in phenomenology. In 1951, Tran published his major work, Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique. To this day, the work is regarded as one of the finest critiques of Husserlian phenomenology.

While in France, Tran was also actively involved in anti-colonial political activities. This led to his imprisonment for three months in 1945, as he was deemed a threat to state security. He also worked with Jean-Paul Sartre and Merleau-Ponty as a contributor to the journal Le Temps Modernes, although Tran did not agree with what he perceived as the petit-bourgeois tendencies embedded within existentialism.

Yet it was not his time in France that most interests me. Rather, it was the period when Tran returned home and assisted the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV).

In the early 1950s, his book on dialectical materialism and phenomenology had just been published to remarkable acclaim. Instead of remaining in the land of aesthetes — where his career as a world-class intellectual was already assured — he chose to return in 1951.

Full of zeal for a new Vietnam, Tran underwent the rectification programme required by the CPV. During this period, he abandoned Western dress and clothed himself like an ordinary peasant. He was fond of wearing a conical hat and believed he had much to learn in order to overcome his own shortcomings.

In Tran’s view, his years in Paris meant nothing if he did not fully immerse himself in the revolution unfolding in his homeland. That is why he willingly descended to the grassroots, living in hardship when ordered by the CPV to undergo rectification in the jungles along the Lô River.

The Lô River is one of Vietnam’s principal rivers, alongside the Mekong. It flows through three provinces: Ha Giang, Tuyen Quang, and Phu Tho. Tran left traceable footprints in Ha Giang, one of the northern provinces bordering China. There, he participated in building party infrastructure and rehabilitating agricultural technology devastated by the recently concluded national liberation war. This ardent philosopher spent his days in the cold, mosquito-infested mountains around Mo Neo. Yet he did not retreat, even though he slept without a mosquito net like most of the poor peasants there.

Ha Giang also left a deep impression on Tran. His later interest in biology — particularly flora and fauna — was indirectly shaped by his rectification years there. The subtropical forests of Ha Giang are home to tigers, peacocks, pangolins, and pheasants. More than a thousand species of medicinal plants grow there, commonly used by local communities for remedies or as cooking spices.

The region holds an important place in Vietnam’s history. In Dreams of the Hmong Kingdom: The Quest for Legitimation in French Indochina, 1850–1960, Mai Na M. Lee writes that Ha Giang’s past is marked by rebellion and stubborn refusal to submit.

France occupied the region in 1886, establishing a military garrison east of the Lô River, which later became one of the four major military companies in French Indochina in northern Vietnam by 1905. In 1901, the Dao people rebelled against French colonial rule, led by Trieu Tien Kien and Trieu Tai Loc. Tien Kien was killed in battle.

In 1913, Tai Loc organised another uprising with the assistance of Trieu Tien Tien. This time, the French faced considerable difficulty, as resistance lasted two years. The rebels’ slogan was: “No corvée labour, no taxes for France, expel the French, and independence for the Dao.”

This episode became known as the “White Veil Uprising”, so called because the rebels often carried white flags inscribed with four ideograms — Quoc Bach Ky — literally translated as “White Flag of the Fatherland”.

The rebellion spread to Tuyen Quang, Lao Cai, and Yen Bai. In 1915, the French brutally suppressed it, deporting many Vietnamese and executing by hanging at least sixty-seven individuals regarded as key leaders.

In the early twentieth century, the French attempted to prevent further rebellions by supporting the Hmong ethnic group. Vuong Chinh Duc, a Hmong clan leader, was recognised as king and granted authority in the border regions with China. In return, he actively helped suppress uprisings by other tribes seeking to expel the French.

Yet this alliance did not last. Chinh Duc died in 1944.

His successor, Vuong Chu Sen, shifted allegiance that same year to support Ho Chi Minh. This change reflected the growing strength of the CPV and the waning power of France. The choice proved correct, as the CPV ultimately expelled the French and secured Vietnam’s independence. During the transitional period at the end of French rule and the early years of independence, the northern border regions played a vital role. Ha Giang and its neighbouring provinces became key CPV bases and among the few areas where the foundations of Vietnamese socialism were laid.

It was here that Tran, freshly returned from France, tested himself and hardened his resolve after relinquishing the comforts of a promising philosophical career. Here, he witnessed firsthand how technological limitations, weak agricultural knowledge, and post-war devastation posed urgent challenges.

Five years later, when the first university was established by the CPV, Tran was appointed Dean of the Faculty of History.

At that time, the faculty used one of the buildings within Van Mieu in Hanoi — the Temple of Literature — constructed in 1070 south of the Thang Long Imperial Citadel. Its design resembles the temple at Qufu in Shandong, China. This is unsurprising, as Van Mieu was originally dedicated to Confucius.

Yet Tran’s life did not unfold as expected. Soon after becoming dean, he clashed with colleagues who were senior CPV leaders. The dispute escalated into mounting pressure and efforts to curtail his influence. The CPV feared he might become a serious threat if he gained the support of young people.

This unruly intellectual was gradually and quietly sidelined. According to McHale, the reason was simple: Tran was stubborn and fond of criticism.

In late 1956, when land reform policies in northern and north-eastern Vietnam resulted in the deaths of many peasants, Tran was the only member of the party elite to stand firm and declare that the CPV had erred. He demanded reduced centralisation and broader democratic space. He cited the Paris Commune as an ideal Marxist model of political association. He also criticised the CPV’s interventionist approach to integrating tribal highland communities.

These positions led to his quiet isolation. No one dared confront him openly. He worked in a publishing house as a translator, rendering many philosophical works — especially Marx and Engels — into Vietnamese, including The Communist Manifesto. He continued writing and spent thirty years studying his country without party funding, enduring brutal poverty, particularly during the American invasion.

By the end of 1958, he resigned as dean under pressure and was deliberately excluded from academic life. Other intellectuals avoided contact for fear of association.

Still, Tran did not surrender. In 1973, in Paris, he published Recherches sur l’origine du langage et de la conscience, combining psychology and biological materialism. Using Marxism, he explored subjectivity and consciousness and their implications for language as a cultural product.

In this work, Tran proposed a materialist model of signs and signals in the emergence of Homo sapiens, integrating developmental psychology with anthropological findings on tools, labour, social relations, language, and objective consciousness — what he termed a “semiotics of real life”.

The book complements his earlier masterpiece, published twenty-two years before. Yet these achievements came at the cost of worsening health. Isolation within the CPV hindered access to medical care.

His situation improved somewhat in the 1980s when the Vietnamese government recognised him and encouraged him to publish a critique of Althusserian Marxism. He returned to Paris in 1983 for treatment. Living in poverty, he attended public lectures by prominent philosophers, including Sartre, who helped support him financially. He lived in a small, modest flat near the Vietnamese Embassy.

He died ten years later, on 24 April in Paris, after being hospitalised the previous day as his health deteriorated. He was cremated at Père Lachaise Cemetery, one of the largest cemeteries in the capital of France.

The two books I mentioned earlier are Tran’s two self-criticisms of the CPV, published separately in Nhan Dan, the party’s official newspaper. They appeared after he resigned and spent time travelling through villages, producing remarkable ethnographic notes. These texts are important to me, as they affirm his intellectual position as a leading Marxist ethnologist in Southeast Asia. They were never formally released as books, appearing only as explanatory responses to criticism.

I first heard of these manuscripts circa 2013, when a friend cited Tran in a presentation at a monthly discussion series during our internship as junior researchers.

He spoke about proposals for agricultural industrial development in Vietnam in the early 1990s. Significant agricultural reforms helped Vietnam weather the Southeast Asian economic crisis at the end of that decade. Tran’s field notes on rural conditions became material for CPV leaders formulating responses to capitalist pressures. It was a time of incoming investment, beer corporations parcelling out major cities, garment factories rising in the south, soaring urbanisation, swelling job seekers, and fishing conglomerates displacing traditional fishermen.

In that period, Tran became a solid reference point. Three decades of quiet labour became part of the foundation that helped Vietnam survive, while Thailand was battered and Indonesia’s crisis culminated in the resignation of the bloodiest post–Cold War dictator. His earlier self-criticisms were revisited by a generation that understood that an accurate reading of material conditions can aid a nation.

In Indonesia, the opposite occurred.

The research of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was burned, and its intellectual legacy outlawed. Marxism was treated as a contagion. Thus, even as smartphones became cheaper, many Indonesians still believed the Earth is flat. In leading universities, Marxism was reduced to a crude joke.

That is why, rather than grumbling, I chose to serve spicy pork ribs to the friend who brought me Tran’s books. Pork ribs are a celebration of blossoming knowledge. With shallots, garlic, pepper, cloves, lemongrass, ginger, chilli, and a little palm sugar — after the ribs had been half-roasted over a moderate flame. The water spinach was simply stir-fried with sliced garlic and a touch of ginger. A cooking technique I learned from my mother in adolescence.

I did it all with cheerfulness, so that memory remains intact and self-awareness preserved. That studying history and refusing to indulge in prejudiced thinking about Marxism is a discipline worth practising.