Andrew talks about his visit to the Tay Ninh province, and his great-grandfather's tomb. Tay Ninh is the home of Cao Dai, a sect that was an early attempt to globalize world religions.

We had gone yesterday to Tay Ninh province east of Saigon, where the fighting was heaviest during the war. But Tay Ninh is also home to the Cao Dai temple and the Cao Dai sect. Apparently there are now 6 milion adherents in the world and 3 or 4 million in the Tay Ninh province.

My great grandfather was living in the Tay Ninh province and owning a lot of land including a rubber plantation, in fact we found his tomb in one of them. Of course, the land has been confiscated and redistributed to others long ago. But still, people remember him at the Cao Dai temple.

The Cao Dai religion is a fascinating one, I think, because it was an early effort to globalize world religions, or rather to absorb world religions and reinterpret it into a kind of universal language for those who lived in the Tay Ninh province.

It was created by another Vietnamese administrator named Ngo Van Chieu, who in 1926 started to receive visions to create the temple. Now people of his class and education are very interesting way back when during the colonial times. I suppose because they studied in France, but being educated Vietnamese they also inherited traditional Vietnamese cultures, namely Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism. They are not necessarily Vietnamese cultures, but they are what Vietnamese call [Tom Yao?], which come from China. And Vietnamese have this tendency to integrate religion, and before the West came in Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism were integrated into a three-tiered way of cosmology, and it was only natural that when the French came and introduced Christianity and Western ideas that those who inherit that civilization as well would try to integrate it. But long before East meets West, at least the idea that West and East COULD meet and create some kind of hybridity, in 1926 that vision was coming about in Tay Ninh.

And apparently, my great-grandfather, also a French citizen, was enamored by the idea and had given a lot of money to the Cao Dai temple, simply because he found it fascinating.

And I myself find it interesting. I mean the architecture of the place was very colorful, it's sort of like Disneyland meets, you know, Indiana Jones somewhere. But it's still fascinating to see this effort to integrate religions when back in the 1920s most colonial subjects were still trying to decipher what it means to be colonized by the West. At least, struggle to shrug off that Western grip on their lives.

And in some way I find myself a kind of direct inheritor of my great-grandfather's largesse. I do not mean that I have become a Cao Daist by any means, I think essentially I'm still a Buddhist. But I'm a Buddhist only in personal, experiential practice and philosophical understanding, not a religious Buddhist in any sense of the word. In any case, my ideas of integrating East and West are literary, but still there is something about the effort of the 1920s in Tay Ninh that I find endearing, and in fact Cao Daism itself is growing, and there's no way to say that it won't in fact even begin to proselytize beyond its borders. In California itself there are Cao Daists who are now in practice, and I hear that there are even American converts.

We saw that movie The Quiet American the other day, and though it was not in the movie, in the book by Graham Greene there was a section about Cao Dai temple, and Graham Greene was enamored, was seduced by the idea of converting to Cao Daism himself when he was living in Vietnam in the 1950s, while writing the book. After all, Cao Dai is a bit hokey but a bit fascinating at the same time to him. You know, what other sect that would worship Buddha and Jesus Christ, and having its saints as Victor Hugo and Chang Kai-Shek? I mean, here you have a man who, a Chinese who tries to liberate China from Westerners and unite the country, and on the other hand you have a writer who is full of compassion for the poor. Yet the fact that the writer is French and the rebel is Chinese does not deter the Vietnamese at all, in fact they find that beyond race and historical background, these are people who have a kind of deep insight into what needs to be done as you live in your own historical stream.

Today I think we're going to go see my cousins who live in a suburb of Saigon. These are three sisters who never left Vietnam. The other three siblings of theirs have gone to live in Canada. They decided to stay in Vietnam because their mother had a stroke for years, and needed constant care. And so their lives in Vietnam became permanent. What I mean is that a lot of Vietnamese in Saigon in earlier decades were living with ideas of leaving on their minds, especially so many of them have had relatives escape overseas or being sponsored overseas and they themselves live in kind of semi-preparation for that departure. And that was the state of mind after 1975 for many people. But the cousins decided to stay because they were growing older and they had to really decide to keep their roots here in order to live fully. Their mother died after several years of being an invalid, and now the sisters, Mimi, Cathy, Lili, live here in Saigon and no longer see themselves as people who are waiting to leave. I think that's also a significant change in mentalities here, at least in Saigon, and it's proper because leaving is no longer a predominant preoccupation in Vietnam. Life has changed for the better, and people who have middle class, who can do well, say, having a store that's you know, makes a decent living, their children in school and so on, are now rather, you know, decide to stay, rather than thinking I should have to live in America in order to be happy.

The situation, as they say, has changed in this country. And so I guess we're going to go find out what it's like for them to have gone through all this period of Vietnam's recent history. The thing is the minder will be there so I'm a little bit worried as to how much the sisters will talk on camera. But we'll see. Apparently the other trips that filmmakers have gone to Vietnam to make, they got honest declarations and the minder didn't seem to mind, which is what we always hope for. Because when the minder minds, things can go awry. Okay, I think that's it for now and I'll talk a little bit more tomorrow.