To be fair, if Nguyễn Du was dissatisfied, he probably had beef with both the Tây Sơn and the Nguyễn dynasty and maybe just the injustice of life in general. So if we entertain the idea that Truyện Kiều may have not been Nguyễn Du’s passive-aggressive dissident outcry against feudalism under the Nguyễns but rather a meditation generally on the torments of the Vietnamese people and the plight of women specifically, Truyện Kiều can be understood to be a brilliant adaptation that captured the tragic reality of Vietnamese lives with powerful transcendent verses that were versatile and malleable enough to serve as the perfect metaphor for virtually any situation where right meets might. In short, Kiều walked in to the 20th Century at the right time and with the right message, serving as the heroine that the nation needed to symbolize their timeless struggle to maintain their autonomy, uniqueness, and independence in the face of a string of foreign dominations.
If there is any true dissidence in Nguyễn Du’s work, it is in his elevation of the Vietnamese language to, as Taylor states, “an unparalleled aesthetic register,” showing the lyrical and poetic beauty of the Vietnamese language combining both common and classical language. Nguyễn Du adapted the novel following the poetic form, lục bát (“six–eight”) meter into 3,254 verses of alternating six and eight syllable lines that mimicked Vietnamese vernacular speech. In society, the poem infused poetic vocabulary into everyday speech and inspired a love for language and poetry such that the story was read orally despite the taboo scenes of sex, violence, and prostitution.
When recited, Nguyễn Du’s intricate selection and placement of words created a mesmerizing experience where every word uttered speaks of gentle raindrops and verbal music. With language so beautiful, Truyện Kiều’s existence nearly a century before French domination served as proof to a subjugated peoples of the racist preconceptions of colonial “missionaries” who arrived on Vietnamese shores with their French and Portuguese words to “civilize” us “barbarians.” How could that be true when Truyện Kiều, with its advanced poetic prowess, existed? Moreover, its complex tapestry of cultural references cannot be understated. Complete translations of Truyện Kiều are book length with extensive footnotes and explanations for all the language, historical, and cultural symbols that Nguyễn Du wove into Truyện Kiều.
Once translated into Vietnam’s romanized alphabet, Quốc Ngữ, it became a tool for increasing literacy in the populace. It allowed people to enjoy a wildly chaotic dramatic story and relate their own pains with an extremely likable protagonist who had been blown but not broken in a chaotic wind wrought by feudalism and Confucianism. It opened channels for the debate of the poem’s historical references and underlying metaphors— discussions that continue to this day.
The beauty of Nguyễn Du’s poetic lyrics can be experienced in English in Vladislav Zhukov’s translation which comes the closest to imitating the aesthetics of the poem. The opening lines of the poem in Zhukov’s hands:
Trăm năm trong cõi người ta,
Chữ tài chữ mệnh khéo là ghét nhau.
Trải qua một cuộc bể dâu,
Những điều trông thấy đã đau đớn lòng.
Lạ gì bỉ sắc tư phong,
Trời xanh quen với má hồng đánh ghen.
Were full five-score the years allotted to born man,
How oft his qualities might yield within that span to fate forlorn!
In time the mulberry reclaims the sunk sea-bourn,
And what the gliding eye may first find fair weighs mournful on the heart.
Uncanny? Nay—lack ever proved glut’s counterpart,
And mindful are the gods on rosy cheeks to dart celestial spite…
These same lines are ripe for interpretation as can be seen in Dennis Redmond, “Nguyễn’s Tale of Kiều as Post-colonial Classic,” where he hyper-analyzes verse upon verse plucked from Huỳnh Sanh Thông’s translation:
A hundred years – in this life span on earth
talent and destiny are apt to feud.
You must go through an event in which the sea becomes mulberry fields
and watch such things as make you sick at heart.
Is it strange that who is rich in this is poor in that?
Blue Heaven’s wont to strike rosy cheeks from spite.
Redmond dissects the term “bể dâu,” which translates literally to “sea-and-mulberry” which signifies “a profound natural or social upheaval” and Nguyễn Du’s indictment of the “Blue Heaven” as a metaphor for the turbulence he experienced and the cruelties of imperial bureaucracy.
Both Kiều and the poet, Nguyễn Du, have been called upon to serve as metaphor and historical allegory to any manner of oppression, appropriated by all with an ax to grind. For Vietnamese women in particular, Truyện Kiều presents a contradictory message. Women heroines are valued in Vietnam for their ferocity in battle and are honored as national heroines—so long as their outspoken nature does not step out of line with the state messaging. Despite having to kowtow to filial piety/prostitution/patriarchy, Kiều is ultimately able to redeem herself by choosing a life of celibacy, thus returning her to a state of Confucian purity. This resolution, however, has been reviled by female authors who have demonstrated through countless novels that Kiều’s resolution, in the modern world, is impossible and unrealistic (if not insulting).
This can be seen in a close review of four French novels written by Vietnamese women: Trinh Thuc Oanh and Marguerite Triaire’s En s’écartant des ancêtres (Leaving the Ancestors Behind, 1939), Tran Van Tung’s Bach-Yên ou le fille au coeur fidèle (Bach-Yên or the Girl with a Faithful Heart, 1946), Ly Thu Ho’s Printemps inachevé (Unfinished Spring, 1962), and Kim Lefèvre’s Retour à la saison des pluies (Return to the Rainy Season, 1990). In each of these novels, Kiều serves as a motif for the exploration of the lives of Vietnamese women. In all four novels, the main female protagonists are beautiful and talented women who live in a patriarchal society and, as explained by scholar Nathalie Nguyen are “subject to an unenviable fate, to separation from their loved one, to misery or worse, death. Like Kiều, the main characters suffer for choosing duty over desire, but unlike Kiều, they are not eventually rewarded for it.” Tran of Printemps inachevé dies after a lifetime of blaming herself for being raped; Lefevre’s mother in her memoir, Retour à la saison des pluies, is ostracized when she has the love-child of a French soldier who abandoned her; Bach-Yen of Bach-Yên ou le fille au coeur fidèle, takes her own life when her scholar lover marries the woman his famly chooses for him; and Mai, of En s’écartant des ancêtres, loses the love of her life when she acquieses to filial piety to marry the man that her parents arranged for her, only to be abandoned by him.
Thus, the true reality of women’s experience is far from Kiều’s imagined redemption and happy ending. Rather, as Nathalie Nguyen explains:
“In each work, beauty is equated with an unhappy fate, and the…women…must make a difficult choice between duty and desire…those who chose duty over desire, like Kiều, have their lives marred and diminished, those who choose to follow their desire not only lose their virtue but suffer much worse punishment…what differentiates the modern female character from the classical heroine…is that her fate is even darker.”
Truyện Kiều has also been used to criticize rather than lionize the Vietnamese government. These have seen the usual dissident treatment—ostracism and banishment. Take the work of infamous and exiled novelist, Dương Thu Hương, a dissident socialist, whose work uses prominent allusions to Kiều. Her writing has resulted in her imprisonment for seven years, her expulsion from the Communist party, exile to France, and the banning of her work in Vietnam. Kiều is transformed in Dương’s books from a prostitute to a revolutionary fighter who has sacrificed her youth and her life for the Communist party only to be betrayed by the party’s incompetence and corruption, which Dương blames for causing much of the societal problems of modern day Vietnam.
In Hương’s novel, Lưu Ly (Memories of a Pure Spring), her protagonist, Sương, who lives a life that trails Kiều’s, struggles to fulfill her duty as a wife and mother while her husband in failing to uphold his role argues: “She is Vietnamese woman, born in a land where women are ready to bear any burden, make any sacrifice. Sương can carry a heavy burden, just like my mother did.” Sương’s husband represents patriarchy as well as the ills of Communist society which has subjected its people to wide-spread poverty. Sương, like Kiều, tries to save them all with her never-ending sacrifice and her hard work despite living in a world that sees her as inferior: “Nhất nam viết hữu, thập nữ viết vô” (one son is priceless, but ten daughters are worth nothing). Like the prior French novels, the cost to Sương is great—she never finds joy or fulfillment.
Similarly, Lệ Lý Hayslip, a South Vietnamese refugee and humanitarian, reveals a very Kiều-like life in her memoir, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, which details her survival from countless Kiều-like terrors, tragedies, and struggles: rape, prostitution, servitude, single motherhood, bargirl, refugee, widow, and wife. Male domination plays a prominent role as her tormentor as well as the chaos of war. The reader journeys with Lệ Lý as she goes from her peasant farming youth to the rape that launches her out of her hometown to Saigon where she is pushed into prostitution and an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Part of Hayslip’s story involves marrying an American in order to ensure her child’s future, a truly Kiều-like sacrifice. Unlike Kiều, however, Lệ Lý, who must live in a modern world, makes morally ambiguities decisions to deal with a world of continuously crumbling morality. In the end, even Lệ Lý’s humanitarian efforts cannot save her from the community criticism and ostracization that results from the publication of her book. Redemption is a hard journey for Lệ Lý.
Dissident Vietnamese author, Nguyễn Huy Thiệp, has infamously used Nguyễn Du to criticize the Vietnamese government in his short stories. Nguyễn Du appeared as a pivotal bit player in his controversial short story, Kiếm Sắc (Sharp Sword) where a line from the opening verse of Truyện Kiều, specifically, “[w]e all partake of woe, our common fate,” enlightens the overly loyal and pure-hearted protagonist of the story to abandon his search to find loyal Northern intellectuals to serve his Southerner Emperor, Nguyễn Ánh. The enlightenment, according to scholar Taylor, embodies the Vietnamese people’s “disenchantment with the cost of unification in 1975 and the arrogance of new rulers enforcing criteria for loyalty.”
Nguyễn Du’s appearance in Thiệp’s 1988 short story, Vàng Lửa (Fired Gold), was less innocent. In this story, the poet is depicted as the child of a Vietnamese woman who was raped by Chinese civilization. As a result, Nguyễn Du, despite his mother’s efforts, is tainted with Chinese literature and is incapable of truly understanding the suffering of everyday Vietnamese people. Nguyễn Du, then, becomes a metaphor for the intellectualizing of party officials which brings them no closer to understanding the suffering of their own people. Both of Thiệp’s stories, taken together, prominently use Nguyễn Du to question state pushed “heroism” narratives in a country that has banked a lot of their legitimacy on their “revolutionary heroism.”
Those who criticize Truyện Kiều have not fared well. Nguyễn Huy Thiệp saw copies of his books disappear from bookstores and a denunciation campaign launched against him in 1991 where he was attacked for betraying ‘the Vietnamese Revolution by toppling sacred heroes in Vietnamese history.” His house was raided, his books and manuscripts confiscated, and he was interrogated for ten days. Thiep was quoted as saying, “They took all my books and writings and accused me of destroying the success of socialism..They treated me like a dissident. I was shocked.” The event also marked the end of the Đổi Mới era.
In fact, Truyện Kiều wasn’t even well received at first when scholar, Phạm Quỳnh, stated in his journal in 1919, Nam Phong (Southern Wind) that “[A]s long as The Tale of Kiều lasts, our language will last; as long as our language lasts, our country will last.” Given his blatant pro-French leanings, his statements politicized Truyện Kiều, raising the ire of pro-independent scholars, Confucianists, Nationalists, and Marxists. He was later executed by the Việt Minh in 1945.
For centuries since its creation, Truyện Kiều has been a fixture in Vietnamese culture as a breeding ground for social critique of systemic oppression where the innocents are made to suffer with cruel disparity. It has inspired political, literary, and cultural debate. It is ironic then, that Truyện Kiều, which represents the heart of Vietnamese dissident writing, is the cultural foundation for a country and sometimes segments of the diasporic community that are intolerant of dissidence.
Sources:
- Thomas A. Bass. (2017) Censorship in Vietnam: Brave New World, University of Massachusetts Press.
- Dương Thu Hương. (1996) Memories of a Pure Spring. Penguin.
- Lệ Lý Hayslip. (1989) When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. Plume.
- Huỳnh Sanh Thông. (1983) “Introduction.” In The Tale of Kieu: a bilingual edition of Nguyen Du’s Truyen Kieu. Nguyen, Du, and Huỳnh Sanh Thông. New Haven: Yale University Press, xix-x1.
- Kim Lefèvre. (1990). Retour à la saison des pluies. Paris: Editions Barrault.
- Ly Thu Ho (pseud.). (1962) Printemps inachevé. Paris: Peyronnet.
- Anthony Morreale. (2019). “Misconceived: The Song of Kieu (translated by Timothy Allen).” Mekong Review, Issue 16.
- Nguyễn Du. (1983) The Tale of Kiều. Trans. Huỳnh Sanh Thông. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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- Nguyễn Huy Thiệp. (1950) Kiếm Sắc (Sharp Sword)
- Nguyễn Huy Thiệp. (1989) Vàng Lửa (Fired Gold), Văn Hóa, Hà Nội.
- Nathalie Nguyen. (2002) “A Classical Heroine and Her Modern Manifestation: The Tale of Kieu and Its Modern Parallels in Printemps inachevé.” French Review, The 73(3):454-462.
- Nathalie Nguyen. (2003) Vietnamese Voices: Gender and Cultural Identity in the Vietnamese Francophone Novel. DeKalb, IL: Southeast Asia Publications, Northern Illinois University.
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- Dennis Redmond. (2003) Nguyễn’s Tale of Kiều as Post-colonial Classic (2003).
- Phạm Quỳnh, Nam Phong (Southern Wind).
- K.W. Taylor. (2020) “Translating Content and Form from Vietnamese into World Literature: The Case of Kieu,” in Ken Seigneurie, ed., A Companion to World Literature. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 4, pp. 2217-2227.
- K.W. Taylor. (1996) “Locating and translating boundaries in Nguyen Huy Thiep’s short stories,” Vietnam Review 1:439-465.
- Vi Tran. (2002) “Women’s Heart of Sorrow: Versions of the Truyen Kieu in the Works of Dương Thu Hương and Lệ Lý Hayslip” (2002). Masters Theses. 1525.
- Tran Van Tung. (1946) Bach-Yên ou la fille au coeur fidèle, Paris: J. Susse.
- Trinh Thuc Oanh and Marguerite Triaire, En s’écartant de ancêtres (Hanoi: Imprimerie d’Extrême-Orient, 1939).
- Dr. Wynn Wilcox, , “Women and Mythology in Vietnamese History: Le Ngoc Han, Ho Xuan Huong, and the Production of Historical Continuity in Vietnam” (2005). History Faculty Papers. Paper 1.
- Vladislav Zhukov. (2004). The Kim Vân Kiều of Nguyen Du (1765–1820). Pandanus Books.
Contributor’s Bio
Z.M. Quỳnh is currently working on a novel that highlights the experiences of ARVN soldiers. You can visit her at zmquynh.com.
Really enjoy reading your essay!