Tet, the Vietnamese New Year celebration

Calligraphers work overtime, in studios and on sidewalks, to write New Year greetings. Photo courtesy of Ngoc Chinh. 

January 23 began the celebration of Tet, which lasts longer than a week and takes the full attention of everyone in Vietnam.   
Chúc mừng năm mới!  Best wishes to everyone out there for the Year of the Dragon.

These three traditional sages offer health, prosperity and long life, written in Vietnam's distinctive Thư Pháp script. 

Part of the Dragon is formed here from letters.
Photo courtesy of Song Tran.

  

National Handwriting Day and your grandchildren's handwriting

National Handwriting Day might seem like the perfect day to wring your hands and bemoan the death of penmanship, especially if you're a grandparent who has given up waiting for thank-you notes from grandchildren for the holiday gifts you sent a few weeks ago.

But please: don't just grouse about what they're not doing.  Pick up that pen yourself. 

Whenever I hear complaints from grandparents about how the younger generation don't write to say "thank you," I ask them to think about how many thank you notes those children have ever received in their lives.  How can you expect children to give someone else a treat they've never experienced themselves?

Make it a project sometime this year to send children a thank-you note yourself, prompt and particular and written nicely by hand, for something--anything--they do for you.  Model what you want them to do while you also let them know how it feels to be thanked on paper. 

National Handwriting Day, January 23

National Handwriting Day is the perfect time to close your laptop, dust off your pen, open your box of notecards, and treat some friends to a real note, to only them from only you.  Maybe you could have thanked someone more warmly for a gift, or congratulated a young relative on an achievement, or sent your host a proper "bread-and-butter letter" for hospitality?  Ink on paper is the gold standard for saying thank you in ways that matter. 

A visit to master calligrapher Minh Đức Triều Tâm Ảnh, at his pagoda

Based on short syllables, the Vietnamese language, like Chinese, lends itself easily to comfortable layout on vertical pillars, left below, or on horizontal lintels--the natural wood slab here is a favorite format. 

On my recent trip to Vietnam, I was fortunate to visit Minh Đức Triều Tâm Ảnh, a calligrapher who contributed his work to my book Learn World Calligraphy.  I had written to him using paper and ink, more than a year ago, and had then exchanged email arrangements with one of his students, Tran, who offered to act as translator plus take me to Minh Đức's remote pagoda on his moped.

The 40-minute trek took us over some very muddy, bumpy roads, but the effort was repaid by the absolute beauty and tranquility of the grounds and buildings.  Many hand-lettered signs in the Thu Phap style blended brush techniques with Roman letters--a unique Vietnamese specialty and the reason I'm so interested in the style.  It looks like he was one of its first practitioners, or at least one of its earliest exhibitors, in the Hue Festival 1985. 

Minh Đức spent several hours with me, and sent me off to a simple lunch [the monks' single daily meal] at 11:00.  I'm hoping to follow up on his generous invitation to come back for longer next year.