Immortality
To teach and be taught
Dear friends,
My professor passed away.
He was one of my faculty’s founding members. I studied with him during freshman year.
In a school where most teachers are diplomats who embark on their missions every four years, being a student of a professor is part of an exclusive cultural zeitgeist.
“Are you a student of Prof.V?” was the way someone opened up with me, learning I matriculated at Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam in the early 2010s.
Very often, receiving my nod, the person would enthusiastically start recalling some of his lectures and exclaim how impactful his teaching was to their perspectives till that day.
In Milan Kundera’s Immortality, the condition of living forever is revealed not as a blessing but as a ceaseless trial in the court of public opinion.
To be a teacher – a great teacher – is to be immortal.
The first tension in Chazelle’s Whiplash built up, not at the studio band room, but at a family gathering of Andrew – the film’s central figure.
UNCLE FRANK
And that’s your idea of success, then?
ANDREW
Becoming the greatest musician of the twentieth century would be anyone’s idea of success.
JIM
Dying broke, drunk, and full of heroin at 34 would not be my idea of success.
Andrew turns and looks at his dad. Can’t believe he joined in.
ANDREW
(to his dad)
I’d rather die broke and drunk at 34 and have people at a dinner table somewhere talk about it than die rich and sober at 90 and have no one remember me.
Later in the movie, during their unexpected encounter at a jazz club in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Fletcher – once Andrew’s teacher at the prestigious Shaffer Conservatory – revealed his real life mission.
FLETCHER (CONT’D)
The truth is I don’t think people understand what it is I did at Shaffer. I wasn’t there to conduct. Any idiot can move his hands and keep people in tempo. No, it’s about pushing people beyond what’s expected of them. And I believe that is a necessity. Because without it you’re depriving the world of its next Armstrong. Its next Parker.
Le Ba Khanh Trinh is among Vietnam’s most famed teachers. He won the gold medal and a special prize for the best solution at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in 1979. In a profile on VNExpress commemorating his retirement after 35 years of teaching, Trinh said he found teaching to be the right path after 35 years in the profession and still feels inspired to continue advancing, even though many had expected him to accomplish something monumental following his perfect score and special solution at the IMO.
Answering Tuoi Tre Newspaper’s question of whether he satisfied with the current career and life 35 years since his returning to Vietnam, Trinh said each day at school still brimmed with excitement, as he looked forward to introducing a new “trick” to students and to seeing what surprises they would bring him in return.
“People say that I lift my students up, but in truth it is they who lift me, drive me forward, and inspire me to renew myself every day,” Trinh added.
Vietnamese education is at a crossroads.
According to Professor Nguyen Van Chinh of the Vietnam National University, Vietnam’s education system still holds on to the old philosophy of ‘shaping the new socialist human being,’ without a clear idea of what that means, even as the economy has moved to a market model with multiple sectors and global integration.
The 2025 university admission season might be the most chaotic in the country’s history. With unprecedented numbers of applications and numerous different scoring formulas, the national admissions system has to handle a massive and complex database to optimize its algorithms and filter out redundancies.
Amidst the turmoil, it’s painful to not know where we’re heading to and for what reason; as Kundera put it: “The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism.”
Learning is suffering, so is teaching; so is teaching and learning in an education at a crossroads where research activities are forced to ultimately aim at creating material wealth and contributing to the nation’s development.
Fortunately, immortal spirits of great teachers carry us beyond the trivial desires of material life and march further into the future’s unknowingness. Half agony, half hope.
Till next time,
T.
P/S: This week marks two years of me writing on Substack. Thank you so much for hanging out with me on this digital space. Please do send some words.
This week’s top picks
A glimpse of Hanoi's street style in the early 2010s.
https://ilovesorbet.blogspot.com
The subway
A trip to Vietnam some 30 years ago. The train ticket was to my hometown.
https://vnexpress.net/chuyen-xuyen-viet-gan-30-nam-truoc-cua-nu-du-khach-anh-4929408.html