The provincial road out of Hanoi toward Phú Xuyên doesn’t look like it’s following anything. It curves the way roads curve when they’re avoiding fields, not tracing history—past a stretch of laundry hung to dry on a grass slope, past a stall selling rice paper and battery packs, past a man patching a soft spot in the embankment with a shovel and a bucket of clay. For most of an hour I drove believing the road ran beside the embankment. Then the shoulder narrowed, the ditch on the right disappeared, and I understood I’d been on top of the dike the whole time. The route south toward Phượng Vũ village runs along the crown of an earthwork that has been rebuilt so many times it no longer announces itself as one.
This is, more or less, the same line of earth that
Phạm Duy Tốn followed south out of Hanoi in 1915. He was a working reporter
sent to see what remained after the dikes broke, not a writer seeking
atmosphere by retracing personal ground. What he found on this road, and what
he made of it three years later, is most of the reason this stretch of
embankment still matters to anyone who has never heard of Phú Xuyên.
South of Hanoi
Phạm Duy Tốn’s own address was urban: number 54 on what the French called Felloneau Street, now Hàng Dầu, in what is now Hoàn Kiếm district—a few minutes’ walk from the lake, solidly inside the part of Hanoi that had running water and French mail service by the 1910s. He was born there in 1883, or 1881 depending on which record you trust, and he died there too, in February 1924. But his family’s actual origin was rural, south of the city, in a village then called Phượng Vũ, commune of Phượng Dực, province of Hà Đông—territory folded today into the same city, Phú Xuyên district. In 1915 it was a full day’s travel from where he actually lived, across a landscape organized entirely around the river and its embankments.
That’s the geography that matters here—not the distance in kilometers, but the distance in kind. He grew up urban, trained as an interpreter, and was among the first men in Hanoi to cut his hair short and wear European dress. Then, in 1915, his job as a journalist sent him south, down this same dike, into the part of the country his own family was from and had, by then, mostly left behind.
Whose Job the Dike Was
What I hadn’t fully grasped, standing on this road, was how an embankment like this functioned. It was never only a public work the state built and maintained. Defending it during flood season was labor owed by the villages along it—a duty, not a service. When the water rose, it was the peasantry who were expected to hold the earth together with sandbags and their own bodies, under the nominal direction of local mandarins whose formal title, *quan phụ mẫu*, means something close to “official father-and-mother”—an official expected to treat the people under him the way a parent treats children in danger.
I had taken *quan phụ mẫu* to be largely ceremonial by the early twentieth century, the kind of title that survives long after anyone takes it literally. The expectation behind it was more concrete than that, and still carried real weight: a mandarin whose district’s dike failed while he made no visible effort to stop it was, at least on paper, failing a defined duty rather than a symbolic one. By 1915 what had hollowed out was the colonial administrative reality underneath the title—a bureaucracy answering upward to Hanoi and Paris rather than downward to the villages it was nominally supposed to parent. For that bureaucracy, a flood in a rural district was, at most, something to be reported rather than a duty to be met in person.
Phạm Duy Tốn himself never settled into being only one thing, which turns out to matter for what he did with this trip. He trained as an interpreter and worked at colonial residencies for a while, then left. He opened a noodle shop on Cầu Gỗ Street, then a gold shop, taught for a stretch in China, and helped found and teach at Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục, the reform school Hanoi’s Duy Tân intellectuals opened in 1907 before the French shut it down. He wrote under at least three pen names, among them Ưu Thời Mẫn—roughly, “one who worries over the times”—across half the newspapers circulating in the country. By 1915 he was, professionally, exactly the kind of person an editor would send south when the dikes broke: someone who could write fast, credibly, and with an interpreter’s habit of moving one world’s terms into another’s.
A Second Attempt
What Phạm Duy Tốn actually filed from that trip was a piece of reportage called *Hoạn nạn tương cứu*—roughly, “mutual rescue in calamity”—published in 1915. It described the collapse of the northern dikes in language direct and felt enough that it reportedly moved readers as far away as Nam Kỳ to organize relief donations for a province most of them had never seen. By any ordinary measure, that is a journalist doing his job well: he went, he witnessed, he wrote something that moved people to act, and it worked.
Three years later he wrote the same event again, this time as fiction. *Sống chết mặc bay*—a title that translates, roughly, to something like “let them live or die, it’s no concern of ours”—ran in *Nam Phong* magazine in December 1918. It tells, almost scene for scene, the story he had already reported as fact: villagers fighting the flood in the rain with their bare hands, and, inside a dry communal house nearby, a mandarin playing a tile game called *tổ tôm* with his subordinates, undisturbed. The story’s most-cited detail is timing, not description: the dike breaks in the same instant the mandarin wins his hand.
That is not a detail a reporter could have printed as literal fact in 1915 and expected to be believed as anything but coincidence. Which is more or less the point. The 1915 article was accurate, and it still wasn’t enough. A factual account of a dike breaking while officials failed to help left the reader with information, not with the specific, personal weight of watching a man choose a game over a village in real time. Fiction let him keep every fact from the trip and add the one thing journalism wouldn’t let him assert outright: that the mandarin’s comfort and the peasants’ drowning were the same event, with the same cause, rather than two separate ones that happened to be reported side by side.
None of this required him to have read a Western novel to get there. Before Phạm Duy Tốn, Quốc ngữ fiction mostly still opened the way medieval storytelling always had—a moral stated up front, characters built to illustrate it. *Sống chết mặc bay* opens instead in the middle of the flood, no lesson yet announced, the way a reporter opens a piece: here is where we are, here is what is happening. He had already written one earlier, smaller story in that mode—*Bực mình*, about an old rickshaw puller and an indifferent passenger, published the year before the flood—but it was this trip that gave him a subject large enough, and morally lopsided enough, to make the method impossible to set aside again.
Finding Either Place
Number 54 Hàng Dầu today sells shoes—wholesale, boxed to the ceiling, indistinguishable from the stalls on either side of it. There’s no plaque. If you’re looking for where he lived and where he died, you need the street number and nothing else, because the building itself gives away nothing.
The dike road is easier to find and harder to follow on purpose. It isn’t signed for anyone tracing a writer’s route—it’s simply the provincial road system south of Hanoi, threading along the Red River embankment through Phú Xuyên district. You end up on top of it less by navigation than by the fact that, out there, the embankment and the road have mostly become the same object. Ask for Phượng Vũ by name; the district has absorbed the old commune boundaries, but people along the river still know the village.
I never learned the name of the man patching the
embankment near the Phượng Vũ turnoff, and he never asked why a stranger wanted
to know about a writer who’d died a hundred years before either of us was born.
He’d finished packing the last of the clay in with the flat of his shovel by
the time I worked up a question worth asking him. He straightened up, pointed
further down the road—the direction I was already walking—and went back to it.
August 2026
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