General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong - a lover of proverbs and folk songs

A big heart just stopped beating.

People across the country and international friends expressed their condolences to the beloved General Secretary, who devoted his whole life to the country and the people.

Each person will remember General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong in his own way. In a recent article, President To Lam assessed that General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong was a great intellectual, a great talent of the Vietnamese revolution, a thinker, a culturalist, a theoretical flag bearer of the Party, an excellent student who constantly studied and followed the ideology, morality, and style of the great President Ho Chi Minh.

Some people mention General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong as a great “furnace stoker” with strong determination and action in the fight against corruption, with no forbidden zones or exceptions. Some people also remember the General Secretary with Vietnam’s “bamboo” diplomacy or with the role of an excellent theorist...

As for me, with General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, I remember his image in his speeches at conferences or when meeting voters, talking with people, with cadres in many localities during his working trips. I was impressed not only by his close, simple style, warm, concise voice but also by the way he used proverbs, folk songs, traditional and modern idioms to talk about political issues that seemed very dry and abstract such as fighting corruption, fighting against degradation in political ideology, ethics, lifestyle, and cadre work...

In almost all his speeches, he quotes a few poetic ideas or passages from famous literary works, which are easy to remember and understand.

The mottos of action were briefly stated by General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong in the idioms “unanimity from top to bottom, smooth communication”, “front and rear support”, “one call, all respond”. The manifestations of degradation and negativity that must be avoided were pointed out by the General Secretary such as: “crabs rely on their claws, fish rely on their fins”, “your rights, my rights”… The General Secretary required cadres and party members to be exemplary, avoiding the situation: “While their own feet are still dirty/ They hold a torch to rub other people’s feet”; “If the superiors are not righteous, the subordinates will be in chaos!” or “If the superiors are not in power/ Therefore, we are rude to the subordinates!” Talking about the culture of behavior in society, General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong required knowing how to “respect the superiors, yield to the inferiors”, “respect the elderly, love the young”, “starve to be clean, be ragged to be fragrant”…

In his speech at the National Cultural Conference to implement the Resolution of the 13th National Party Congress on the cultural field, General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong said: “Culture is the soul of the nation, expressing the identity of the nation. If culture exists, the nation exists”. Therefore, one of the solutions to revive and develop culture, build Vietnamese people in the spirit of the Resolution of the 13th National Party Congress is to pay more attention to preserving, embellishing and promoting national cultural values, tangible and intangible cultural values ​​of regions, areas, and ethnic minorities, combined with absorbing the cultural quintessence of the times.

And General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong has set a shining example in preserving and promoting the cultural values ​​that our ancestors left behind by very specific actions such as applying proverbs, idioms, and folk songs in his speeches and writings. That is also proof of studying and following Ho Chi Minh's ideology, morality, and style in preserving the purity of the Vietnamese language.

There are many things to say about General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong that I, as a writer, understand that each of us can follow the example of the General Secretary by diligently reading and studying, knowing how to appreciate and love folk literature and more broadly the traditional cultural values ​​of the nation, and at the same time spreading that love to readers through articles with simple, easy-to-understand language like the way our ancestors used to speak.

Farewell to the person in the white clouds!