Note: What follows are papers written by students
in English 240: Vietnamese Literature in Translation, a course taught at
Nathan Campbell
Mr. Schafer
English 240
Comparing
and Contrasting Novels
The four books I
read were Novel Without a Name by
Duong Thu Huong, The Sorrow of War by
Bao Ninh, In Country by Bobbie Ann
Mason, and Going after Cacciato by
Tim O’Brien. All of these books have differences and similarities that I will
discuss in this paper. The two books
written by Vietnamese authors were both from a Northerner’s perspective about
the war. The other books written by
Americans were from the American’s perspective.
The
first book I read was Novel Without a
Name by Duong Thu Huong; it is about a soldier in
He starts out on
his trip to go find Bien and also to visit his family. A bunch of different things happen to him on
his way home and his way to find Bien.
He goes home also and speaks to his father who he has not seen for a
while. His father and he have a very
strained relationship, because of his mother’s death. When he goes home everyone in the town
surrounds him and asks him a lot of questions about the war and what he is
doing home. He goes and talks to Bien’s
family to tell them what he is doing.
While home he finds out that the woman that Bien loved is already married
and has kids in the village. When he is
in village he is also asked by political leaders in the town to come and speak
to young people about the war and try a recruit them into the army.
He
finds out that the women he was courting became drafted and then pregnant, but
she did not know who the father was; so she became shunned in the
community. She had to move out of the
village and into a hut on the other side of the river.
He goes and visits
her in her hut. At first she didn’t know
who he was and then she warmed up to him and was sad that they didn’t get
together, but he knows that
she has changed and that he has
also. When he leaves her he knows that
he does not love her anymore. The baby
inside her is not his and reminds him that she was raped by a party officer.
He leaves after a
party that is thrown by the village for him.
He gets on a train and heads for the front. On the train two people are talking about the
war and what effect it will have on them.
He gets off the train and walks towards a camp he thinks is there. He finally makes it to the camp and finds
Bien chopping down trees to make coffins with a whole bunch of people. They are all trying to fill an order for
their people.
In the end of the
story Quan is the commander of a battalion and he meets up with Luy, the man in
the beginning of the story who killed a fellow soldier by accident. He thought
he was an orangutan. They bring in a
“soldier” prisoner who is American; even though the Americans left two years
earlier. No one can speak English in
their battalion. Everyone in his battalion
wanted him to make a decision regarding the prisoner, but Quan did not tell
them anything and they just led him away.
That is the end of the story.
The next book I
read was In County by Bobbie Ann
Mason. This book is based after the war;
the main character is Samantha. She did
not serve in the war but all of her relatives did and her friends. The story is about her quest to find out what
really happened in
Her father died in
goes into the woods and camps out
without telling anyone where she has gone.
She thinks she is in
I did not like
this book very much. It was more a love
story than about
The next book I
read was The Sorrow of War by Bao
Ninh. This book was about a writer named
Kien who was part of the MIA team charged with gathering the remains of the
dead from the worst battlefields (Ninh 25).
He is writing
his story after the war is
over. He slips in and out the war. His memory’s take him back to the
battlefield. He also thinks about
Phouong, his girlfriend before the war.
He has a couple of encounters in the book with women. One is when he saves a woman from a
mugger. When he takes her back to his
apartment he finds out that she is a prostitute and that she wants to “repay”
him for his kindness. He says no he does
not want to have sex with her and realizes that he knows her.
He writes about
battles he is in and looking for dead soldiers.
In the end of the book he reflects on when he came back to visit and
missed the train back to the front. He
was with his girlfriend Phuong. They
caught a different train to try and catch up with his. Phuong gets raped twice on the train that
they are on. He falls off of the train
and can’t help her. Finally he gets her
off the train and in the end of the book someone finds his manuscript in an
apartment and decides to publish it.
The fourth and
final book I read was Going after
Cacciato by Tim O’Brien. This book
was about a soldier named Cacciato who deserts his platoon and tries to make it
to
Cacciato; following him threw Deli
and a lot of other towns until he leads them to
In the end they
get to Paris and Paul find Cacciato in an apartment. Paul goes back to tell the others and they
all go back to his apartment and he is gone.
Within these four
stories there is a lot to compare and contrast.
Two of the stories are written by North Vietnamese authors and two from
American authors. That lends itself to
two different perspectives on the war.
The book In
Country was the book I did not like out of the four that I read because it
was not about the war in was about the aftermath of the war and what it did to
the Vietnam Vets. It was more a love
story than a war novel. It does lend
itself to similarities between In Country
and The Sorrow of War. Both were about the sorrows of war. In In
Country, Sam is trying to connect with all of these Vietnam Vets, but all
they can do is talk with each other.
Some of them are trying to deal with pain and sorrow they feel
emotionally and physical. In The Sorrow of War Kien is dealing with
the pain of his emotions when he tries to write his stories about the war. Also in both books the love elements are in
it. Sam is trying to find love amiss all
these wounded and emotionally scarred people.
Kien is trying to keep love with his girl Phouong.
The way The Sorrow of War was written was
different from all of the other books because it did not have
chapters. Its just kept going with no breaks in the
story. It was a little hard to read
because of this. There was no place to
stop. It just kept going. The other Vietnamese book Novel Without a Name was a little like
that but it had breaks in it. The
American novels were standard with chapters.
They were all good
books except In Country which I did
not like. I enjoyed reading them and
learning more about the war from the different sides.
Philip Ercolini
Viet. lit
Confucian teachings throughout
Vietnamese history
Confucianism as a philosophy and way
of life has been a central theme throughout Vietnamese history. The effects
that Confucianism has had on the country’s culture and literature are
undeniable. Chinese governors Hsi
Kuang and Jen Yen introduced Confucianism to
As opposed
to Buddhism, Confucianism teaches that man is above all else a social being
bound by social obligations. The Confucian philosophy is concerned with the day
to day life of the individual. Everyday
life can become trivial to most people; one of the purposes of Confucianism is
to show how important everyday activities are.
Rituals and traditions are stressed; more emphasis is put on the
collective community than the individual. This goes for all levels of society.
A child is subject to his/her parents, wife is subject to the husband, and the husband
is subject to the king/government. There are rigid rules governing how every
man in society must interact with his peers. This idea of every citizen having
a specific place turned out to be a double edged sword. On one side it fostered
a spirit of nationalism and pride in the land, on the other side it “bolstered
established institutions and long-standing social divisions” (Berling) meaning
it acted as an informal caste system; if you were born a farmer you stayed a
farmer.
The themes of family and social
obligation over personal will are common in literature dealing with a Confucian
moral. “The Tale of Kieu” is
Severance
takes an attacking tone towards Confucianism and especially the three submissions. Again the protagonist of the story is a
woman. This time her name is Loan and she has received a modern education. Her
education gives her a longing to be something more than a housewife; she finds
the Confucius system to be oppressive and in the end meaningless. Nhat Linh(the author) portrays Loan as a
“modern person who then went back to live with old-fashioned people”. The
modern way being a rebellion from the three submissions, Loan cannot see why
she must be forced into what was just above slavery. She understands and
accepts her duty as a daughter, but at the same time cannot fully accept her
fate. I see Severance as a severe indictment of a social system rather
than any one particular account. Nhat Linh makes a very persuasive argument
with his epic novel of heartbreak, but it is also a one sided argument. It is
good to keep in mind that while Confucianism was not a perfect system, it was
capable and served to steer followers towards a moral life. The rigidity and
corruption of the system are Linh’s main complaints. Loan’s step-mother is
morally corrupt; she hurts Loan because after so many years of getting hurt she
is glad to have the roles reversed. This implies a vicious cycle inside the
Confucius system, a never ending series of marriages and abuses. Another
corruption the story points out is at the governmental level. Village officials
are painted are painted as heartless, bribery and extortion are common place.
Again, we must remember that Severance is more of a reaction against the
years of suffering women have endured rather than historical
documentation. The purpose of the story
is more to influence than to inform. One of the main differences between “Kieu”
and Severance is “Kieu” can be considered classic poetry while Severance
falls under the category of social propaganda.
“The Boat in the Distance” is a short
story that shows how Confucian loyalties still remained in
Another
example of stifling Confucian traditions is the mandarin competitive
examinations. To gain a governmental or high level job, citizens must pass
tests that encompass Confucian literature, law and mathematics. Only the people
who passed the examinations could become the intellectual elite so the tests
were basically controlling the scholars. “Precise ideas were not needed, it
sufficed to not contradict the spirit of the classics” (Phan Dao). As long as
the person taking the test went along with the accepted Confucian philosophy he
would do fine. Examinations were “aimed
at forming people deprived of ideas and feelings, instruments at the services
of superiors, kings, fathers” (Phan Dao). We know these principles of
subjectivity go hand it hand with the teachings of Confucius. This rigid system
led to the uniform nature of
The internal conflicts that are
highlighted in both stories typify most authors’ complaints about the 3 bond
system. The cold indifference to young
love by parents and the accepted tradition of abuse of women make reform or
revolution seem inevitable. The strong anti-Confucius themes that came out
preceding the revolution highlighted only the negative aspects. It can be
argued that the Confucius system never changed; the people involved in the
system changed. It was not purely a failure of the system but a failure of morals.
The three submissions do not explicitly state that daughter in laws must be
beaten; generations of people slowly developed the culture that allows the
abuse. Confucianism encourages moral actions in a person’s day to day life. The
failure comes when people forget that what has been done in the past is not
always moral and oppressive customs are kept without question.
Confucianism’s spirit of moral reform
coupled with reverence for the past is put to the test during
From my research I found that the two
main reasons for the backlash against Confucianism in
Works Cited
Linh, Nhat. Severance translated by James Banerian
Du, Nguyen. The Tale of Kieu. Translated by Huynh Sanh Thong
Vien, Nguyen Khac.
Confucianism and Marxism in
Nguyen Minh Chau, A boat in the Distance translated by Nam Son.
Curbstone press 2003
Vien, Nguyen Khac. Tradition and Revolution in Vietnam translated by Linda Yar.
http://www.askasia.org/frclasmrm/readings/r00004.htm, Judith A Berling,
“Important Lessons
of Confucianism”
Fisher, Mary. Living Religions (fifth edition). Upper saddle river N.J 1991
Jennifer Ferrell
The Prevalence of Traditional Vietnamese Cultures in Exile Literature
Vietnamese
exile literature encompasses a wide range of both authors and topics. Exile refers to those people who no longer
live in their home country, whether it is a forced or voluntary absence. For Vietnamese authors, exile can mean
either those who fled the country voluntarily or those who were forced to leave
out of fear for their lives. Despite the
fact that these authors no longer live in
Catfish
and Mandala, by Andrew Pham, is one of the latter; the story of a young
Vietnamese-American’s journey across
Another
essay in this vein is contained in the Michigan Quarterly Review,
entitled First Words of a Native Daughter, written by Sibley Que Th
Baigent. This essay, although that may
not be the correct way to refer to this piece, is written about Baigent’s
attempt to return to
Fictional
novels also show how strongly traditional culture can affect the work of an
exile author. One such novel is The
Book of Salt, authored by Monique Truong.
This novel is the story of a homosexual exile from
Farewell
to
There are many debates as to why Vietnamese exile literature contains so many references to Vietnamese culture. In the book The Viet Name War, The American War, Renny Christopher looks at some of these reasons. Christopher speaks of exile as becoming increasingly common and the exile author as becoming a more commonplace figure. One of her ideas is that that “Vietnamese exile authors, while becoming “American”, insist on remaining Vietnamese at the same time…the struggle to remain bicultural, to bring Vietnamese culture to America, is a theme that runs throughout most Vietnamese American literature” (30). Christopher also mentions a “lingering nostalgia”
(31) that she feels many exile authors exhibit in their works. This feeling of remembrance is apparent through most of the exile literature, in the form of non-fictional narratives and through the memories of fictional characters. There also seems to be a fear of losing cultural identity. Andrew Lam, another Vietnamese exile author, brings up these points in an article entitled “One Soul, Two Hearts”. He states “Yesterday, my heritage was simple and self-evident…today, however, my identity is multi-faceted and complex…I am not alone…they are simultaneously aware of two or three different cultures” (5). These statements show how these authors are very aware of the cultures that they belong to and what aspects of these cultures they bring to their work.
Lam’s
final conclusion of “ If there is a metaphor for it, all, the wall in a
restaurant in
Works Cited:
Ÿ Baigent, Sibley Quy Th. “First Words of a Native Daughter.” Tran. 679-685.
Ÿ
Christopher, Renny. The
Ÿ
Hang, Train Dieu. “Farewell to
Ÿ
Lam, Andrew.
“One Soul, Two Hearts.” San
Francisco Chronicle.
Ÿ
Pham, Andrew X.
Catfish and Mandala.
Ÿ
Tran, Barbara.
Ÿ
Truong, Monique.
The Book of Salt.
Kena Marie Foster
Professor Schafer
English 240
The Tale of Kieu’s Honored Status in
There
was such an appeal in the nineteenth century to Nguyen Du’s The Tale of Kieu that the long narrative
poem came to be honored as a national poem for
First,
before giving a textual analysis, it is necessary to have a full understanding
of the context in which it was written and to provide a summary of the
poem. At the beginning of the nineteenth
century the Vietnamese regarded themselves as devoted to traditions, social
theory, and morals (Woodside x). Ideas and values of the great Chinese
philosopher, Confucius, were still in practice and although
With the context established, a brief summary is now appropriate. Kieu was a very beautiful and talented young lady. She was in love with a young man, Kim Trong, and the two made a pledge of betrothal. However, the plot thickens when Kieu was forced to make a quick decision when her father was arrested on false charges. Out of loyalty to her family, Kieu sold herself into marriage with Scholar Ma to release her father, knowing she would never be able to be with Kim again. Therefore, in order to fulfill her marriage vow to Kim, Kieu enlisted her sister, Van to take her place. Kieu was brought to a brothel where she lost her chastity by sleeping with her husband, although he was already married. After the catastrophe of being separated from her true love, only to be held captive in a brothel and marry an evil man, Kieu faced a string of misfortunes including being cheated by So Khanh. He gave Kieu false hope that he was going to rescue her from the brothel, but really he had plans to sell her to someone else. She faced being beaten, lied to, held captive numerous times, tortured, and kidnapped. Finally, Kieu escaped this all by plunging into a river and was rescued. Meanwhile, Kim took care of Kieu’s family and sent emissaries looking for Kieu, but nonetheless married Van. When Kieu was reunited with her family she had to admit to her first love that she led a promiscuous life even though this life was forced upon her. She revealed that she no longer was worthy of Kim’s love as she had not remained chaste. Still, Kim loved Kieu and married her. Van became a concubine. Although Kim and Kieu acted more as friends due to the fact that there was no sexual relationship between them, they were happy to live that way and loved each other all the while.
Now that we have distinguished the background of The Tale of Kieu, we can reason how it stands as the supreme achievement of Vietnamese literature, which can be found within the components of the work. One aspect which contributed to the poem’s status is the precise use of literary conventions. In the original text (not the English translation), the poem is written in six-eight verse where a line of six syllables is followed with a line of eight syllables and those couplets are strung together into a continuous whole. This is not monotonous because end rhyme (at the eighth syllable) and internal rhyme (at the sixth syllable) are used, making each line rhyme with the next and at the same time introducing a new rhyme every other line. The tones follow a pattern, as well. In the Vietnamese language, diacritical marks are placed above vowels to indicate special pronunciations or tones. In this work, flat and sharp tones create a pattern of assonance. Therefore, the meter, rhyme scheme, and tonal patterns cause The Tale of Kieu to be easier to memorize and recite, allowing the uneducated majority of the population to have access to the work through oral transmission (Thong 4).
Another literary
convention and alluring feature of The
Tale of Kieu is the use of language which entranced
A final literary convention worth mentioning
is Du’s use of allusions in his work that helped raise the work to its
status. As mentioned in the background,
due to
A
second factor contributing to the status of the work has to do with the fact
that the story of Kieu is one that is
deeply enveloped with issues of morality and virtue, centered on a heroic and
divine character, Kieu. Such issues were
revered by the people of
Not only does Kieu yield to her family, she painfully submits herself to her husband, as well, who felt he had “caught his prey” (Du 60). Although Kieu had been saving her virginity for Kim, she was at the will of her new husband no matter his evilness or her absence of love for him; “A storm of bestial lust broke forth—it raged against the virgin scent, the flawless jewel” (Du 61). Throughout the novel, these moral choices caused Kieu to endure much suffering and Du’s overall message can be depicted. Morality can be painful and difficult and is not always accompanied with happiness. Yet, in the end, it brings positive results and is therefore, worth it. And this message resonated with the nineteenth century audience who most likely found Kieu’s character, including what she accomplishes and her internal qualities of moral excellence, to be ideal; “[Vietnamese Peasants and scholars] have found in it some common denominator, some truth about their world that touches a chord in their collective psyche” (Thong 20). Hence, the work was so celebrated.
Finally, The Tale of Kieu was held in such high regard as a masterpiece and
national poem for the Vietnamese because, like Kieu who was forced to live in
hardship due to her allegiance to her family, all Vietnamese were held in a
stranglehold of foreign power. Hence,
Kieu personified the political situation in
To
conclude, through his imaginative use of language, Nguyen Du’s The Tale of Kieu not only displays
Vietnamese values and beliefs, but also an amazing allegory where Kieu’s
situation symbolizes the Vietnamese nation that had a range of foreign
rulers.
Foster, 8
Works Cited
Du, Nguyen. The Tale
of Kieu. Trans. Huynh Sanh
Thong.
Vintage Books, 1973.
Henry, Eric. On the
Nature of the Kieu Story.
Schafer, John. Sino-Vietnamese Classes and Hierarchies.
Thong, Huynh Sanh. Introduction. The Tale of Kieu. By Nguyen Du. Trans. Huynh
Sanh
Thong.
Woodside, Alexander. The Historical Background. The Tale of Kieu.
By
Nguyen Du. Trans. Huynh Sanh Thong.
Froome 1
Matt Froome
Prof. John C. Schafer
Engl. 240
“Love isn’t always on time”:Vo Phien’s Intact
Set against the backdrop of war, Dung a second year college student struggles to retain the traditional ideal of love while faced with the reality of an uncertain modern world. Dung’s understanding of a loving relationship is influenced by those around her and her own blossoming emotions which at first only further her confusion. Dung’s transformation into an exiled Vietnamese refugee leads to her discovery of a living force within her which unconsciously acts to manifest the emotional desires she has repressed. Dramatic weather events and changes in location further emphasize the evolution of Dung’s emotions, often times expressing what the protagonist herself cannot.
Amongst friends Dung would be considered a free thinking modern woman, yet her ideals concerning love are markedly traditional. When the story begins, Dung considers her present boyfriend, Trieu, to be her future husband yet realizes “if they were more intimate, freer with each other, they might kiss. But one passionate kiss might destroy this delightful, suspended feeling,” (Phien,21) that was Dung’s structured idea of a perfect love. Without realizing the eroticism which stems from the natural world interacting with them Dung and Trieu adhere to a traditional path for lovers. As Trieu walks through the garden he unknowingly is affected by what he observes: “a mong bo tree lifted high its flowers of shriveled and drooping petals. A bee wavered awkwardly around and around the branches, bumping lightly into the flowers and making the dry petals fall gently into the empty hour. The dull odor of the heat entered his
Froome 2
nostrils” (Phien,21). Trieu’s suppression of his desire leads Dung to also suppress her emotions, neither is willing to admit they are in love. Visiting her father in Long Xuyen Dung is affected by the natural world surrounding her as she walks with professor Trung along a canal as an innocent exploratory stroll leads to Dung having a feeling of trepidation.
Standing beside the professor, Dung felt [...] he was not a stranger, but she had never been so close to him before. What made her feel this way- -the brilliant sunlight in the trees or the intimacy of the shade and the canal [...] At that time of year the plum trees were in blossom [...] A wasp buzzed by Tung’s face, then slipped into one flower, and from there into another. (Phien,45)
Dung’s trepidation was more a matter of not knowing how to identify and react to the emotions which were influenced by the surrounding scene, so again Dung suppresses her feelings. We see Trieu’s love for her signified in an innocent and awkward bee whereas professor Trung’s subconscious emotion is signified by the wasp who is not awkward and has a sense of maturity. These two instances represent the structured idea of love, Trieu’s and the confusing war inspired idea of love, Trung’s. Dung finds through observation and personal experience that the old ideal of love has given way to a new ideal of love which has its roots in wartime.
Beginning to see love is not at all as certain and structured as she once thought, Dung observes others around her. listening in on a flirtatious conversation between a soldier and a woman, Dung notes how “the young man’s brash and flirting talk” (Phien,9) stunned her “yet at the same time she was fascinated by it. If she were the girl selling tickets, how would she respond” (Phien,9)? By wondering how she would react Dung is beginning to interpret her emotions, but Dung’s emotions do not affect her ideal of love until she herself is an active party.
Froome 3
As the threat of evacuation becomes more prominent Trieu’s love for Dung is expressed not in relation to tradition but in relation to the war. “Do you think we can get married soon? [...] I want you with me. From now on we must always be together. When we leave, we leave together. I’m afraid if we should become separated and an emergency arose, I might not make it back here in time to get you out” (Phien,74). While Dung is stunned by this outpouring of emotion she answers the question of marriage by saying, “I’m sure if we have to mother will agree” (Phien,74). Dung still clings to her tradition by including her mother in the decision but has begun to redefine her ideal love within the context of war.
Evacuated into exile by the war,
Dung travels with her friend Lan’s family. During the days at the refugee camp
at Orote Point Dung realizes that Lan’s younger brother has feelings for her.
Dung “had never noticed him before and couldn’t say when his fondness began for
her. She was aware of his feeling’s” (Phien,112) though. While the fact that
Lan’s brother developed a crush on Dung is not significant the fact that Dung
realizes others beyond Trieu find her appealing is. Up until this point Dung
had only ever envisioned being with Trieu. Now that the war has intervened Dung
has begun to realize but not accept the reality that she may not end up with
Trieu. Dung meets another of her old friends while staying at the refugee camp
in
Dung has the opportunity to confront her emotions as she reservedly follows Nghia into the woods just outside of camp. As Dung enters she soon “began to feel a chill in the hushed
Froome 4
surroundings. No one had lived there for a long time [...] where she was standing there was a narrow footpath - perhaps it was not even a footpath at all, but just a natural space that had formed between two trees [...] She shivered. No, she would not stay any longer” (Phien,149). Unable to comprehend her feelings she returns to emotional safety outside of the forest, but she cannot escape the uneasiness she felt. Dung and Nghia both notice a change in the atmosphere around them as “clouds were taking on strange shapes with somber colors, shades of gray and blue, clouds of one color joining with those of another in huge masses banking on the horizon [...] in the distance a change was taking place” (Phien,152).
Weather and location play an important part in the awakening of Dung to her emotions. Weather is used by Vo Phien to accentuate the emotional element of a character in a given situation. Dung’s first major emotional change occurs after a heavy down pour has left her and Trieu seeking shelter from the storm. As Trieu professes his desire to marry, Dung is at first shocked by his forwardness but then realizes it is due to the war interfering with their love. The storm rains down on the lovers and confines them to a small shelter just as the war robs them of the leisurely time traditional to falling in love. While at Orote Point Dung’s emotions were signified by her chosen surroundings. Dung chooses to not stay in the camp but rather to go and sit by the ocean and spend her days contemplating her future. This is an unconscious choice by Dung, but it signifies her acceptance of the war and the reality that she may not see Trieu again. Dung’s re-birth has begun as she at this time has found solace in the ocean and emerges as a more mature young woman more grounded in reality.
Signifying another awakening for Dung, a change in weather at Indiantown Gap correlates to an intense stirring of emotions within her. As Dung stands with Nghia the two share
Froome 5
a moment of closeness due to the beauty and savageness of the approaching storm.
Sunlight thickened and the warmth became intense. There was no wind, not even the slightest breeze [...] In the bushes before them, a small yellow butterfly fluttered, its delicate airy movements contrasting with the threatening stillness of the horizon. Standing beside Nghia, Dung suddenly became aware of tranquility lost, of impending storm. Unconsciously she moved a step closer to him. He turned to her, smiling reassuredly. (Vo Phien,152)
Dung reacts to
her observation of the landscape and it forces her to respond unconsciously
displaying her emotion without her consent. Later in Minnesota Dung receives a
letter from Nghia saying “after all the time we spent together in
Outside, the sun came out for a moment, but clouds covered it again. It began to snow [...] it fell in light flurries, indifferently, just enough to make a fair day seem sad. Snow fell in soft flakes, like cotton puffs, painfully soft. They dropped haphazardly, without any clear direction. Halfway to the ground, they seemed hesitant, unsure whether or not they ought to land. Hesitant, as if questioning themselves and their fate. (Vo Phien,178)
Dung feels the full effect of the war on her structured ideal of love. Trieu thousands of miles away not wanting her and Nghia seeking her out and professing his long time love for her. Dung cannot reconcile these emotions and the structured ideal of love is replaced with an uncertainty
Froome 6
much like war, life and ones own emotions.
As Dung fled her country a year ago her emotions began to change like the seasons. Though she felt like true love was imminent, Dung’s idea of true love changed as her emotions matured. No longer under the guise of a traditional structure Dung’s ideal love became a realistic one. I think Dung blamed the war for not letting her and Trieu’s love blossom. Realistically though it was Dung’s traditional ideals about love and marriage which had stifled their love. Dung’s emotions had come full circle like the seasons and finally she is able to express and feel fully the emotions which were so long suppressed. In an orgasm of emotion
the riotous sun made her feel helpless and weak...urgently calling forth the life inside her. She trembled in euphoria...Dung closed her eyes and shuddered. She felt herself expanding, slowly, gently billowing out like a sail in the breeze, and she became dizzy... . Oh Trieu! I miss you! I miss the clumsy bee making the mong bo petals fall. Oh, I miss the bee. (Vo Phien,196)
Froome 7
Works Cited
Phien, Vo, Translated by James Banerian. Intact.
Uyen Huynh
Professor Schafer
English 240
Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong
From my standpoint, the stereotypical image of a Vietnamese woman--demure, submissive and obedient--is an American myth, which does not paint a complete picture of the role of Vietnamese women. Historically, women have always contributed to the revolutions and questioned patriarchy. The most well-known heroines are undoubtedly the Trung sisters, who led the first successful insurrection against the Chinese in 39 A.D. (Bergman 30). And particularly, a courageous woman in her own right, Ho Xuan Huong (meaning “Spring Essence”) was perhaps the first Vietnamese feminist and poet. She wrote poems consisting of “double entendres” and “sexual innuendos” to criticize male authority, which was quite risky during her time, but she and her work survived because of her extraordinary poetic talent (Balaban 4-5). In this essay, I will briefly discuss Confucianism and place emphasis on the poetry of Ho Xuan Huong.
After
her in-laws, (4), if she liked to gossip, (5), if she liked to steal, (6), if she had a jealous nature, and (7), if she had a deadly illness (Balaban 4). Consequently, most Vietnamese women dealt quietly with the subordination and suffering imposed by cultural constraints, except for one courageous woman.
Because of the lack of facts, scholars tend to agree that Ho Xuan Huong was born between 1775 and 1780 and probably died by the early 1820s. This suggests that she lived under the Nguyen Dynasty (1802-1945) during the last twenty years of her life. The Nguyen Dynasty is known as the most sinister and male-dominated period, which incorporated more Confucian principles than the Le Dynasty (1428-1788 A.D.) (Frenier & Mancini 32). Nevertheless, Ho Xuan Huong was perhaps the first woman to compose poems during this male dominated era. She wrote in demotic characters, Nom, which is “a writing system created by Vietnamese literati to represent the sound system of their language through a native, or ‘southern’ calligraphic script” (Balaban 12). Since Nom uses Chinese characters to stand for Vietnamese phonemic value while other Chinese characters are used for their semantic value, as a result, the number of characters double for any given statement. This makes it twice as difficult to learn Nom than standard Chinese. Nowadays, out of millions of Vietnamese, Balaban believes that probably “only a few dozen can read this thousand-year heritage in Nom, despite the fact that it is almost always around them--inscribed over old doorways, printed on restaurant calendars, and incised on ancestral tombs that sit in all the rice fields” (13).
In her poetry, Ho Xuan Huong often criticizes ideological and societal problems derived from patriarchy. Her poems almost always contain hidden double meanings, the latter, usually sexual. This is because the reader “may be presented with a view of three cliffs, or a limestone grotto, or scenes of weaving or swinging…” but hidden within her lu-shih (eight-line sonnet) is a sexual implication (Balaban 5). Because of her “habitual indecency,” some critics have called her work “a psychosexual malady,” but admirers tend to view it as an act of defiance against cultural norms (Balaban 5). She was truly gutsy in this aspect because sex was a forbidden topic, and no other poet dared to challenge the stifling literary tradition. Nevertheless, she has successfully captivated both the high and low class audience; the common people could hear in her verse folk poetry, proverbs, and village common sense while the mandarins valued her poetic skills and had offered her their protection.
In “The Floating Cake,” Ho Xuan Huong describes her life as a woman--having no control over her destiny--floating every which way the male society dictates. However, she asserts that she does have control of her heart, and it will always be “red and true” despite social restrictions:
My body is white; my fate, softly rounded,
rising and sinking like
mountains in streams
Whatever way hands may
shape me,
at the center my heart is red and true. (Balaban 33)
In the “Jackfruit,” Ho Xuan Huong continues to ignore social constraints and explicitly describes the act of lovemaking between a man and a woman. It is this very poem that stirred my interest in her work because I was flabbergasted after reading this poem for the first time. I could not believe that a Vietnamese woman during the early nineteenth century could have written such a poem. Ho Xuan Huong is quite an intriguing woman thanks to her rebellious nature. She was not afraid to explore poetry on the forbidden side:
My body is like the jackfruit on the branch:
my
skin is coarse, my meat is thick.
Kind
sir, if you love me, pierce me with your stick.
Caress me and sap will slicken your hands. (Balaban 37)
In “The Unwed Mother,” she seems to have a condoning attitude towards a woman who had a child out of wedlock, a view not shared by most of the people of her time. She believes that the unwed mother should not encounter any further consequences because she already faces the burden of raising the child by herself. She also advises the unwed mother to ignore the gossip from meddlers:
Because I was too easy, this happened.
Can
you guess the hollow in my heart?
Fate did not push out a
bud
even though the willow
grew.
He will carry it a
hundred years
but I must bear the
burden now.
Never mind the gossip of
the world.
Don’t have it, yet have it! So simple. (Balaban 53)
In “The Condition of Women,” Ho Xuan Huong questions the traditional role of women by rhetorically asking the women what their duties are. Moreover, in contrast to the warm, familial scene in which the mother wholeheartedly tends to her kids and fulfills their every wish, she paints a picture of an overburdened mother with needy kids pulling on both of her arms while the husband is on her stomach performing a sexual act, an image which many people may find inappropriate:
Sisters, do you know how it is? On one hand,
the bawling baby; on the
other, your husband
sliding onto your
stomach,
his little son still
howling at your side.
Yet, everything must be
put in order.
Rushing around all helter-skelter.
Husband and child, what
obligations!
Sisters, do you know how it is? (Balaban 73)
In “Confession (I),” Ho Xuan Huong questions male authority in a sarcastic manner--asking the learned men if she should abandon her radical way of thinking and metaphorically walk like an old, hunchback grandmother since she is aware that people think of her as being “too bold” for a female. There is no doubt that she was proud of her intelligence and poetic talent, and was not afraid to display it. For that matter, she probably offended most of her male contemporaries and damaged their egos, as illustrated in this poem:
Gray sky. A rooster crows.
Bitter, I look out on
thickets and folds.
I haven’t shaken grief’s
rattle, yet it clatters.
I haven’t rung sorrow’s
bell, though it tolls.
Their
noise only drags me down, angry
with a fate that says
I’m much too bold.
Men of talent, learned
men, where are you?
Am I supposed to walk as if stooped and old? (Balaban 21)
But similar to women of her generation and also past generations, Ho Xuan Huong could not escape concubinage. She was married twice and hated the experience of being the second-wife. In the poem titled, “On Sharing a Husband,” she denounces polygamy and wishes that she could have lived by herself:
Screw the fate that makes you share a man.
One cuddles under cotton
blankets; the other’s cold.
Every now and then,
well, maybe or maybe not.
Once or twice a month,
oh, it’s like nothing.
You try to stick to it
like a fly on rice
but the rice is
rotten. You slave like the maid,
but without pay. If I had known how it would go
I think I would have lived alone. (Balaban 35)
Since Ho Xuan Huong detests the popular concubinage and arranged marriage practices, she continues to express her contempt in “Consoling a Young Widow.” In this poem, she tries to persuade the young widow not to shed her tears over the death of her husband because her marriage is a farce--the young widow is from a poor family and the dead husband seems to be from a rich family. Instead of acknowledging that this marriage is a union between two people in love, she presumably sees it as a business transaction, and so, asserts that the poor should not associate with the rich:
Your funeral cries just hurt our ears.
Stop wailing or you’ll
shame the rivers and hills.
Let me advise you on
your tears:
If you’ve got weak blood, don’t eat rich food. (Balaban 69)
Because
she was a free-thinker, Ho Xuan Huong eventually sought refuge in a Buddhist
nunnery hoping that she would find spiritual fulfillment. Nevertheless, she saw corruption in the
religious institutions and did not hesitate to expose and ridicule the “venal,
lazy, or decadent clergy” (Balaban 9).
At “The Ambassador’s Pagoda,” she states the place was deserted. In “
Weeds sprout outside the royal chapel.
I ache thinking of this
country’s past.
No incense swirls the
Lotus Seat
curling across the
king’s robes
rising and falling wave
upon wave.
A bell tolls. The past fades further.
Old heroes, old deeds,
where are they?
One sees only this flock of shaved heads. (Balaban 93)
She even writes about monks who could not resist temptations in “The Lustful Monk”:
A
life in religion weighs heavier than stone.
Everything can rest on
just one little thing.
My boat of compassion
would have sailed to
if only bad winds hadn’t turned me around. (Balaban 85)
Eventually, she decided to give up on institutionalized religion. But still adhering to Buddhist precepts, she wandered the countryside and reflected her peaceful state of mind in the following exquisite poem, “Autumn Landscape”:
Drop by drop rain slaps the banana leaves.
Praise whoever sketched
this desolate scene:
the lush, dark canopies
of the gnarled trees,
the long river, sliding
smooth and white.
I lift my wine flask,
drunk with rivers and hills,
My backpack, breathing
moonlight, sags with poems.
Look, and love everyone.
Whoever sees this landscape is stunned. (Balaban 19)
Moreover, “Spring-Watching Pavilion” is an unquestionably beautiful poem that illustrates the world seen through the eyes of a devout Buddhist:
A
gentle spring evening arrives
airily, unclouded by
worldly dust.
Three times the bell
tolls echoes like a wave.
We see heaven
upside-down in sad puddles.
Love’s vast sea cannot
be emptied.
And springs of grace
flow easily everywhere.
Where
is nirvana?
Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten. (Balaban 115)
In
conclusion, despite the prevalence of Confucianism, amazingly, there existed Ho
Xuan Huong--a woman ahead of her time.
She was sharp-witted and had the courage to write poems with sexual
implications that were forbidden during her time, along with other socially
stigmatized issues that no one dared provoked.
Her poems in Vietnamese are absolutely beautiful and relatively easy to
remember because of the luc-bat rhyming
scheme. The English translations of her
poems are also wonderful, but since I’m bi-literate, I find that lack of the
rhyming scheme and some cultural beliefs in the translations make the poems
less exquisite. I think any given translator
would find it difficult to incorporate cultural ideologies to the translations,
and at the same time, try to preserve the poetic beauty of the poems. It is a challenging job because it entails
two totally different languages and cultural beliefs, and consequently, some
aspects of the poems are bound to be lost and/or could not be included. Overall, I think John Balaban did a wonderful
job at translating Ho Xuan Huong’s poems, and thereby, introduce English
readers to her work and Vietnamese culture.
Even though she lived a short life, Ho Xuan Huong has greatly enriched
Vietnamese literature with her work. She
is definitely immortal in Vietnamese history/literature, and would be an
inspiration to future admirers.
Works Cited
Bergman,
Arlene Eisen. Women of
Frenier, M.D. & Mancini, K. “Vietnamese Women in a Confucian Setting: The Causes of the
Initial Decline in the Status of East Asian Women.” Vietnam’s Women in Transition.
Ed. Kathleen Barry.
Ho Xuan Huong. Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong. Trans. John Balaban
Katie McCluskey
Professor Schaffer
Eng 240
Fall 2004
The Revolutionary
Individual
Although it is easy to identify the French influence, modern Vietnamese poetry has a style that is distinctly unique. This uniqueness can be seen in the works of poets who joined the Communist Revolution. The pivotal point in all their lives and their work is tied to the joining of the revolution, not just because they adapted new ideas into their lives, but also because their collective poetry changed so drastically that it cannot possibly be ignored. The three main poets in this unconscious plot to alter the landscape of Vietnamese poetry, Xuan Dieu, Luu Trong Lu, and Che Lan Vien, all exhibit monumental variety in their writing when comparing their pieces not only side by side against each other, but also when comparing works of differing time periods by each individual poet. The new shape that their poetry takes in the latter period of their writing is an obvious reflection of the turbulent time in Vietnamese history and a poignant testament to adapted thoughts and lifestyles within a demanding social construct.
For the Vietnamese, the 1930’s brought an onslaught of change to their once simple, Confucian lives. However, with a generation of young people who were educated with French ideals came the inevitable shift in thought that comes with introductions to new, dominant cultures. For the Vietnamese and their literature, the French and their western ways would add a dynamic to the aspect of Vietnamese literature that would take the country and its people by storm. In 1932 Phan Khoi published a letter and poem stating that there is a need for a new style of poetry, one which does not bend to the Confucian moral code, and one which expresses the new contemporary thoughts and emotions in a manner free from the stifling and oppressive style demanded by traditional Vietnamese poetry (Jamieson 109). Public support for Phan’s radical poetic notions first came from young Luu Trong Lu, who would later go on to become one of the best loved writers of New Poetry. Luu wrote a letter in response to Phan “commending his effort but complaining that since its publication neither Phan Khoi nor anyone else had written any additional works in the new style” (Jamieson 110). With his letter, Luu attached two of his own poems written in the new style and a poetic revolution was officially born.
The
advent of this new, freer style of poetry is to be expected from people who
experience such a swift onslaught of influence from an outside source. While
As
a result of this shift in consciousness, poetry also changed drastically,
shifting from the traditional focus on family and community to the seemingly
selfish “I” and the emotions felt by one person: the poet. With this new poetry came the sense that it
was perfectly fine to not only express one’s own emotions, but to revel in
them, leaving them for others to see in case someone else might understand
them. Yet, if nobody did understand the
poet’s emotions, that was perfectly acceptable, too, because the poems
expressed in the New Poetry form are completely about the individual. “Both the excitement and the despair of
individualism in
The idea of the individual was exemplified by the era of New Poetry, but especially by Xuan Dieu, Luu Trong Lu, and Che Lan Vien, all of whom unashamedly expressed their deepest desires and emotions in their poetry. Despite how interesting this drastic shift in thought is for the history of Vietnamese poetry, an even more drastic and thus more interesting shift for all three of these poets did not come until they all joined the Communist Revolution years later. Where the New Poetry focused on the individual and forgot the family, the poetry of the revolution, commandeered by Communist thought and Social Realism standards, returned all three of these poets to a more centralized thinking with a focus once again on the community. Though the community this time was that of Communist comrades, the poets were able to use the skills they developed from New Poetry to make their poems more than simply a return to traditional Confucian influenced poetry.
Instead of transferring emotion from themselves to their party members, all three were able to focus on their individual feelings and emotions for the party and the land while still caring about their country and their party as a whole. In Xuan Dieu’s poem, “Nights on the March (Nhung dem hanh quan),” which he wrote after joining the revolution he writes,
Body and soul, flesh and blood, I am with my people,
Warm with the ardor of their heart, sweating their sweat,
Sharing the life and the struggle
Of millions who suffer . . . the people I love. (1-4)
While his focus is clearly on the people with whom he is sharing the monumental struggle of war, his use of the pronoun “I” shows that the emotion being shown is clearly his own, and he thinks that the emotions he feels must certainly be shared by all the people who are “sharing the life and the struggle (3).” While the style of the Revolutionary poetry may seem to be a return to the traditional Vietnamese style with the focus on community, it is rather clear that the tenets of the New Poetry and the individual had a much more profound effect on the poems of the Revolution than did the traditional poetry styles.
Likewise, the other two New Poets cum-Revolutionaries also retain this stylistic “I” in their post-New Poetry eras. While Luu Trong Lu’s poem “The Girl of the River Gianh (Nguoi con gai song gianh), which was based on an account he received from a soldier in the navy, is clearly about a girl, Luu inserts himself into the poem in a seeming endeavor to make the poem more personal. Though the story is not about him, but about the soldier telling the story, the choice to of “I” rather than “he” clearly demonstrates Luu’s inability to disassociate himself from his poetry.
Who are you?
Are you the girl
I met at the dock of the river?
Was it at Minh Cam or Canh Hoa,
Tho Ngoc or Thuan Bai?
I don’t remember clearly. (17-22)
While his insertion of “I” is effective in drawing the reader into the fold of emotion, it is also clear that this is the continuation of his style from the New Poetry era. In his pre-Revolution poem, “When Autumn Ends (Khi thu rung la),” he writes,
But, tell me, sometimes do you
Still remember the vivid summer,
And my love lingering
In a corner of my heart? (29-32)
In his earlier, pre-Revolution poetry, his emotions were similarly expressed through the use of his own presence in the poems.
To a lesser extent, Che Lan Vien also demonstrates the transference of “I” across poetry eras. In “Silk Threads of Memory (Nhung soi to long),” he starts out by writing,
I want the world to stop and spin no more,
Cease gushing forth the flow of days and months.
Spring, don’t come back; and summer, snuff out fire.
Autumn and winter, quit distressing me. (1-4)
He completes this extremely selfish view of the world when he writes,
Give me a planet full of frost and ice,
a star that shines alone where ends the blue.
There, living out my days and months, I’ll hide
from all the pain and anguish I have known. (17-20)
His dreary,
morbid poem is the epitome of selfishness since he wants the entire world to
stop simply because he alone is miserable.
While it could be possible that Che is speaking from the experience of
all people who were suffering at the time, there is absolutely no indication of
this in his poem as he writes only about his own emotions. Because of his profound selfishness in his
earlier writings, Che makes the greatest leap from depressed individual to
united Communist party member after he joins the revolution. While he still speaks in terms of his own
emotions, he does not actually use the pronoun “I” in his fierce poem “To Be
Hamlet in
Hamlet, say what you like, you are a Medieval man,
Beside
the men of
But in our ears you still keep harping on that cry
“To be or not to be”—
Yet who is listening now? (13-16)
Though he
obviously keeps his Poe-influenced morbid tendencies, Che more than the other
two, managed to transfer his rage about the state of his country onto other
people, showing the true focus of the revolution. However, even though he does not explicitly
use “I” during his tenure as a revolutionary poet, Che makes it quite clear
that it is his personal rage that is being felt in the poem through the use of
“we” toward the end of “To Be Hamlet in
While it seems that the focus on the individual is profoundly an effect of the individualism discovered during the 1930’s, it is amazingly something that is not abandoned even when the poets join the party-centered revolution. Now, instead of focusing on the individual’s emotions, the poets are using their emotions to focus on the rest of their country. Instead of selfishly assuming that all of their thoughts only apply to them, the poets are using their emotions to demonstrate how all their comrades feel, too. Yet, despite this attempt to be one with the party, the influence of the Western world through French literature was so deep that the poets could not completely abandon it even after they refused its notions of individualism. The continued use of “I” and the foci of emotions in their revolutionary poetry show that though their poetry altered alongside the changing mindset of the times, the influence of individual thought could not be completely abandoned even after joining the Communist Revolution.
Works Cited
Jamieson, Neil
L. Understanding
Jodie A. Olympia
Modern Vietnamese Literature in
Translation
Prof. John Schafer
A
Comparison Between the Philippine-American War and the Vietnam War and the
Literature Arising From It
From initial
surveys of limited literature speaking of the Philippine-American War, many
historians and writers liken it to the Vietnam War. Mark Twain’s anti-imperialist writings
criticizing the Philippine-American War saw a revival during the anti-war
protests in the 1960’s against mounting
Another
interesting similarity between the two wars is that the
In the colonial
education of the Filipinos, they were taught to believe that capitalism and
democracy were the ultimate solutions to the evils of the world, and that they
should feel grateful to the
The difference in
the production of literature dealing with these wars is very stark because in
This difference in
attitudes towards the keeping of memories about the war also had an effect in
how the Philippine-American War would be written about almost a century
later. In F. Sionil Jose’s Dusk, readers do not get the same kind
of feeling as if they are reading propaganda literature, definitely not in the
realm of socialist realism by any stretch of the imagination, because the main
character was himself unconvinced that the new set of White people should be
repulsed and not just welcomed because maybe, they would be better masters than
the Spanish, not even thinking that he and the rest of the nation should not be
under anyone else’s dominion.
By comparison,
Jared Ourique
John C. Schafer
English 240
A Life of War
The Vietnam War was fought for many
reasons. The North Vietnamese were fighting to unite the country under
Communism. The South Vietnamese were fighting to uphold their republic. The
Americans were there to try and stop the spread of Communism. Some of the
soldiers went to war voluntarily and some were drafted. After the war the
soldiers went back to their homes. The Vietnamese soldiers trekked back to
their towns and villages and the Americans boarded planes and boats and went
back to
Looking at four novels, two from Vietnamese
authors and two from American authors gives a better look at the effect that
the war had on soldiers. Sorrow of War
by Bao Ninh tells the story of Kien and his life before, during, and after the
war. A main thread throughout the novel is his relationship with his childhood
sweetheart Phuong. Novel Without A Name
by Duong Thu Huong is about a soldier Quan and his mission to help his friend
Bien and other events that happen to him and his company during the war. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is
a collection of short stories that O’Brien wrote about his and his friends’
experiences before, during, and after the war. Some of the stories appeared in
other works but they were collected here. In
Country by Bobbie Ann Mason deals with the narrator Sam’s life and her
desire to understand more about the Vietnam War in which her father died. These
books all deal with the effects of the Vietnam War on people directly and
indirectly involved in it. Though the authors are from different ethnic
backgrounds and from different sides of the war, Vietcong and Americans, the
books deal with very similar issues.
After, and even during, the war soldiers were changed. Kien at the beginning of The Sorrow of War is young and naive. He heads off to war with no idea what will happen to him out there. Exposed to war Kien becomes much more hardened towards war and life itself. He feels that there is no hope in the future only in the promise that the past presented. Before the war he was in school, then after the war he had nothing to do with his life. In Novel Without A Name Quan thinks back to the days that he and his friends joined the army. “All we had wanted was to be able to sing songs of glory. Who cared about mortars, machine guns, mines, bayonets, daggers? Anything was good for killing, as long as it brought us glory” (Duong Thu Huong, 72). Before they came to the war they were idealistic young men who dream of glory. In the next paragraph Quan holds onto the hope in his previous statement. “Here I am, twenty-eight years old, temples graying, trampling through fields of glory, soil consecrated by my ancestors” (Duong Thu Huong, 72). He realizes that he’s not young anymore but he feels a connection to the land that his ancestors fought for and he sees himself walking in their footsteps.
In The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien continually brings up the man
that he killed. In the story “The Man I Killed” O’Brien describes the grenade
going off and the damage that it inflicts on the young Vietnamese soldier. That
one occasion changes something within him permanently. In the next story,
“Ambush,” O’Brien takes the reader through the story of killing the young man
again and reveals his feelings about it. “Even now I haven’t finished sorting
it out. Sometimes I forgive myself, other time’s I don’t” (O’Brien, 134). In
Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country the
narrator Sam’s uncle, Emmett, is a
While war is seen as a masculine activity its effects aren’t only felt by men. The war changes the women as well. In The Sorrow of War Kien is in love with a woman named Phoung. They had been in love since they were in school together. However, things start to go sour when Kien is about to set out for the war. Phuong berates Kien for going to the war, saying that they are very different people. Kien goes off to training and continues to think about Phuong. He is worried about Phuong because Phuong is in the middle of danger. Phuong goes with him and gets caught in an air raid. She is grabbed by a group of soldiers and then she is gang raped. Kien saves her and kills a man in the process. Phuong is alive but things are never the same between the two as Phuong herself states. “‘We’re prisoners to our shared memories of wonderful times together…. I thought we would face just a few small hurdles. But they aren’t small, they’re as big as mountain.” (Bao Ninh, 84-85). A woman from Quan’s home village is affected by the war in Novel Without a Name. Hao and her sister were spoiled by their parents because they were the only children that they had. They didn’t have to work and Hao was taught to play the mandolin by her father. She and Quan loved each other and pledged their love to each other and Hao said she would wait for him. Returning to his village for a few days during the war Quan learns that Hao lives in a small hut in a field and she is pregnant and won’t reveal the father. Quan realizes that both he and she had changed so much that their love could never be.
Possibly the best illustration of change in women in The Things They Carried this is the story that Rat Kiley tells in
the story “Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong.” A young soldier pays to have his
sweetheart come over to
The spirit of the land is very
important in the novels from both cultures. In Sorrow of War Kien mentions the Jungle of Screaming Souls and
The story “How To Tell a True War Story” in The Things They Carried tells about the
In Country has
This is a major difference between the two areas of literature. They both
talk about haunted places but approach them in different was. Spirits are more
common in Vietnamese culture so the Vietnamese soldiers are quick to believe
that spirits are there and their presence can be felt. The areas that the
Vietnamese felt spirits were areas that bad things had occurred in. They felt
the restless souls of those areas. The Americans, however, are much more
skeptical of these spirits. The spirits that the Americans witnessed were just
on a random hill in
The stories also explore reasons for going to war. In Sorrow of War Kien joins in with his classmates, who join the army. He doesn’t seem to have any strong belief in joining the army and can’t really explain himself to Phuong when she questions him as to why he’s joining the army. When the army recruits more people later in the book and many of the soldiers Kien knew rejoin he has no interest in joining them. He realizes that it’s not the soldiers that want the war but it’s the politicians and men who don’t go and fight. The war wasn’t the war of the soldiers but the soldiers were just used by people who wouldn’t go and fight. That is the case with Quan in Novel Without a Name. He and his friends join for glory and honor and find that war is quite different. People die and get killed and then there are long stretches where nothing happens and they get bored. Both Quan’s brother and childhood friend are killed and he starts to see no glory where he once saw plenty.
In The Things They Carried
there is a story called “On A Rainy River.” In this story Tim O’Brien tells a
story that he had never told before he wrote that short story. It is the story
of how he almost fled to
The memories are what stay with the
soldiers from the war and one of the main ways to get rid of the memories is to
write about the war. The Sorrow of War
is mainly occupied by Kien’s writing, in fact that is what the story is, Kien’s
manuscript. Writing is Kien’s form of therapy. He sees it as his duty to write
an account of the war. He tries to plan out what happens and have his
characters to be heroic but his pen seems to have a mind of its own. His
troubles reflect the pace and actions of war. In real life the actions of war
are unpredictable and the soldiers are often all but heroic. Kien’s writings present
a different look at the soldiers than the government of
Life after war is also addressed in
these books. Kien has no idea what he will do after the war. He writes stories
and that consumes his life. He doesn’t sleep; he stays up all night and wanders
the streets of
The novels that deal with the Vietnam War from both sides deal with many of the same issues. They went to war yet they were all there for different reasons. Once there they experienced the same war. The war changed them and those that they loved. It changed the land that they fought in and the land changed them. They went home and the war followed them in their lives and they deal with it every day. Winner or loser war has its effects, and those effects last a lifetime.
Works Cited
Bao Ninh. The Sorrow of War.
Duong Thu
Huong. Novel Without A Name.
Mason, Bobbie
Ann. In Country.
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried.
Tiang Pathammavong
Professor Schafer
Vietnamese Literature
Vietnamese
culture and values are very much influenced by the philosophy of Confucianism.
The Tale of Kieu written by Nguyen Du and Severance by Nhat Linh are both great examples of how Confucianism is
portrayed in everyday life and choices. In Culture their customs and tradition
are very important to Vietnamese and this philosophy is an imperative
foundation. Confucianism influences the way the Vietnamese live and clarifies
how and why they do the things they do. But as time passed on family roles did
as well. Traditions and principles have changed for some Vietnamese here in
certain areas in
Confucianism
has been in existence in Vietnamese culture for over 2,000 years now.
Confucianism plays a big role in family values and tradition, “The Vietnamese
family has been strongly shaped by Confucianism, which regards the family unit
as the blueprint for the State and as the highest point of reference of
individual loyalty,” “
Family
is essential to the Vietnamese. It is the backbone of their culture, values,
and society overall. Unlike the traditional American family the Vietnamese have
both immediate and extended family living under the same roof. A typical
traditional family usually includes the father, mother, son, son’s wife, son’s
children, unmarried siblings, etc. Each person plays their own role in the
family. The father is the leader of the group and is charge of the family. The
mother’s task is to teach her children filial piety and take orders from her
husband. For the children, they have to take commands from their parents but
when they aren’t available, then from the eldest son. If the mother didn’t bear
a son then the child must take instructions from the oldest daughter. Females
were not really treated as equals in the sense that they have to always be
under a male’s commands. They have to honor their father, when he dies their
husband, and lastly her son. Women in the past did not have any rights and
weren’t very important. Their role when married off is a housewife and a
mother. They weren’t allowed to be educated or have equality with the males.
But things have slowly come to a change.
Vietnamese
are supposed to be very respectful and loyal. The children are taught how to
admire and be devoted to their parents at a very young age. The offspring’s are to honor their father and mother until
their death. Out of the siblings the eldest son has the most important role in
the family because he is has to be the one who take care of the parents in the
end:
He is obliged to
care for his parents throughout his life. He usually remains living in his
parents' house. He is expected to give financial help in an emergency, even if
it only affects distant relatives. After the death of his father, the eldest
son takes over the role of the head of the family. “
The daughters are not as valued
compared to the sons because they can’t carry on the family’s names. But if the
family doesn’t give birth to a son then the oldest daughter must remain
unmarried and take care of the parents.
Family
is always a priority and that’s why it is so significant for the children to
represent their families in good light in the public eye. If children do not
obey their parents and don’t follow filial piety they are rejected by the
community and the parents are given bad names for not teaching their children
well. That is why parents’ roles of teaching their children are so important.
The Vietnamese love their heritage and they will easily expel those who
disrespect it.
In
Nguyen Du’s The Tale of Kieu,
the writer really emphasized on filial piety. In the story Kieu
falls in love with Kim Trong but doesn’t marry him in
the end because she sells herself to a pimp as collateral to bail her father
out of jail:
Kieu had to save her kin, her flesh and blood. When evil
strikes, one bows to circumstance. When one must weigh and choose between one’s
love and filial duty, which will turn the scale? Kieu
brushed aside her solemn vows to Kim- she‘d pay a daughter‘s debt all else. Resolved on what to do, spoke her mind: “Hands off my father,
please! I‘ll sell myself and ransom him. (Du, Nguyen)
Kieu chooses to keep to filial piety and perform her duties to
her father instead of having a chance of true happiness with her lover. Also in
the tale, Du shows the younger sister Thuy Van obeying Kieu’s request
for her to marry Kim Trong. This illustrates the
younger sister fulfilling her duties to her eldest and showing filial piety for
her sister. Kieu gives up her own contentment bring
her family back together. Du also shows Kieu’s obedience to her “owners” and how she continues to
play her role as wife and serves her husbands even after all they’ve done to
her.
In
Nhat Linh’s Severance,
filial piety is represented very much throughout the story. In this narrative Loan also sacrifice a
chance at happiness with her true love with Dung to be married off to Than. She chose to make her mother happy and married a man
she did not love. By honoring her mother’s wishes she is married into a family
that doesn’t even see her as another human being with feelings and rights but
rather someone to cater to their every need. Loan’s mother gave up her only daughter
as collateral to pay off a debt to the husband’s family and even after having
knowledge of her mother‘s deal with her husband‘s family she still continued to
stay faithful to her duties, “For her parents‘sake
she would once more accept the sale and do her best to please her mother-in-law
and husband to put Mrs. Hai at peace“ (Linh, Nhat).
All through Loan’s settlement with Than’s old
fashioned family she is ridiculed and cursed for everything she does. In the
beginning of her relationship with them she had hoped to find peace with her
new family but only came to find chaos. When times were rough for her she
continued to stay strong and never once ran away when she had the chance.
Throughout her residency with her new relatives Loan lost her child and father
and was put on trial for murdering her husband. She was acquitted of the
accusations and was set free.
Some
may take these two stories as tragedies because the main characters all had to
endure a life of pain and suffering to fulfill their duties to their parents.
But if one views them through the eyes of a traditional Vietnamese then one
might see otherwise. If these characters were untouched by Western influences
then they might not have rejected the old fashion life styles, “problems were
caused by their flirtation with Western values of individualism and romantic
love, not by the structure of the traditional family”(Nguyen Thi Dieu). In Severance, Loan
continues to have her confrontations with her new uneducated in-laws because
she was exposed independency and rights, and then was thrown into a family that
didn’t follow her views, “Nhat Linh
expressed the yearning of urban youth to be free of the constraints of the
traditional family while urging them to struggle for independence”(Nguyen Thi Dieu).
Both these authors stress how outside influences don’t mix with the traditional
family ideas. Unlike American novels that don’t contain any culture clashing
and all their characters live happily ever after.
Vietnamese
family’s roles have gone through changes because of outside influences.
Confucianism is no longer the core of Vietnamese society. Christianity has
become a part of many Vietnamese homes today. Vietnamese Americans have come to
adapt to American society and lost some of their values. Living in a country
where equality is given and opportunities are available one can lose their own
sense of culture. Families in
In
conclusion, being able to experience first hand of how families are today I can
clearly conclude that they aren’t as strongly bonded together as they are in
the homeland. I was able to stay with a family over break and observe their
behavior. Since coming to
Work Cited
Dieu, Nguyen Thi and Mark W. Mcleod. “Culture and
Customs of
Du, Nguyen “Tale
of Kieu.”
Linh, Nhat. “Severance.”
Copyright 1988 by James Banerian.
“
Virginia Rolla
English 240
Final Draft
Fiction From Both Sides of the Vietnam War
The
Vietnam war was arguably the most tragic conflict of the century. Because it was
such an important landmark in the history of both countries, there are many
works that have been published about the Vietnam War in both the
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Bao Ninh’s novel The Sorrow of War is a piece that is described quite well simply by the title. Although many events do take place throughout the novel, the main theme that is focused on is the sorrow that the main character, Kien, faces on a daily basis.
When will I calm down? When will my heart be free of the tight grip of war? Whether pleasant or ugly memories, they are there to stay for ten, twenty years, perhaps forever.
From now on life may be always dark, full of suffering, with brief moments of happiness. Living somewhere between a dream world and reality, on the knife-edge between the two. (Ninh 44)
Emilio DeGrazia’s short story, The Light at the end of the Tunnel, a piece of Fiction written about the war from the American perspective, often shows sorrow from a different angle. This story portrays Americans as less sensitive and articulate about their emotions than the Vietnamese soldiers. The sorrow that the Americans in this story feel was conveyed not through lengthy and emotional monologues, but rather through simple discourse between the soldiers.
His eyes drew back as if focusing on a memory that would not go away. “I was watching TV. I saw a Viet shoot a gook right in the head. He just fell down right there, the blood and all. He looked like a boy, his shirt hanging out. It was like a man blew his own son away, like he did it to one of his own kind, himself. I thought that was weird, couldn’t make sense of it. You know what I mean?”
Yes. I too kept seeing it over and over again. (DeGrazia 40)
There is one other difference between the way that sorrow is described in The Sorrow of War and The Light at the end of the Tunnel. While The Light at the end of the Tunnel focuses more on the suffering of a few individual soldiers, The Sorrow of War does not focus solely on Kien’s suffering and sorrow. In The Sorrow of War, sorrow is not solely caused by the tragic loss of human life, and instead it is caused by and applied to many other aspects the war. The personification of the land is one example of this.
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3
Since being recruited he’d been nicknamed “Sorrowful Spirit” and this now suited his image and personality, just as the rain and gloom fitted the character of the Jungle of Screaming Souls. (Ninh 16)
In The Sorrow of War, even land can be sorrowful in nature, while suffering in The Light at the end of the Tunnel is solely a human trait.
Sorrow
is just one of many ideas found in fiction from both sides of the war. Another
theme that is found in a great deal of fiction from both countries is love.
Vietnamese author Le Minh Khue has written several short stories dealing with
the idea of love during the Vietnam war, including The Distant Stars and
The Blue Sky. Because these stories deal with love, they both
romanticize the idea of war and tend to be much more lighthearted than stories
such as The Sorrow Of War, which focus a great deal on suffering. This
passage from The Distant Stars tells of a young volunteer woman from
There was no way that I could, right at this moment, run up and hold the hand of every soldier on this hill, bursting into tears because of the youthful joy that was rising inside of me. I loved everyone, with a passionate love, a love beyond words, that only someone who had stood on that hill in those moments, as I did, could understand fully. (Khue 20)
John Mort’s short story The Hero shows the love that many soldiers feel in a different light than in The Distant Stars. In this story, a young soldier named Sims believed that he was in love with a Vietnamese prostitute. At first the other soldiers scoffed at him, but as time passed, they began to reconsider their harsh reactions as several of them fell in love as well.
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What, after all, were the chances of someone like Norman Sims finding true love, in the middle of that war, as he pulled KP and was shunned by every fellow soldier? As if the filthy base were the campus of the little college I’d attended, back in Indiana, I sought the girl I’d seen walking home in the twilight, weeks before. I spent half a day wandering from the Filipino compound to the PX to the Red Cross Club - if she worked on the base, then where? (Mort 76)
In Khue’s short stories, these ideas of love and romance during such a tragic war often lead to a romantic view of the war itself being reflected in the writing. Another passage from The Blue Sky shows Vietnamese women holding a romantic view of soldiers.
Just like any other young person during the American War, especially among those close to the front, she felt such a deep affection for soldiers that she could have opened up to him about anything in her life. She felt awkward, ugly, and shy under his gaze. Oh Lord, those eyes, that face. It seemed at that moment that she had lived her whole life waiting for a person like him. (Khue 22)
This rose-tinted view of war, however, stands in stark contrast to all of the aforementioned pieces from the American authors. These authors had a style quite the opposite; any interest in love was described in short, quick quips, and the rest of the story was often harsh and straightforward, with very raw dialogue.
While
some authors from both
My life seems little different from that of a sampan pushed upstream towards the past. The future lied to us, there long ago in the past. There is no new life, no new era, nor is it hope for a beautiful future that now drives me on, but rather the opposite. The hope is contained in the beautiful prewar past. (Bao 47)
This
sentiment is not solely expressed in this work, however. In The Light at the
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end of the Tunnel, Sam ultimately realizes that there is no hope for the future after what he has seen.
I couldn’t explain the change that came over Sam. Maybe I was the only one to see the change because I was the one who saw his eyes when we pulled him out… one day I caught him sitting alone in the sun. He had something cupped in his hand and he was stealing glances at it, “The picture of the baby girl my kid sister had,” he explained. “Why was it a girl? They look funny, don’t they? I wonder when they open their eyes.” Later, inside, I found the picture in a wastebasket, all torn up. “Sam,” I said, “why did you tear it up?”
“Because it gives me the creeps.” (DeGrazia 45)
Earlier in the story, however, Sam had cherished this picture, and it was, for a time, the only thing that kept him going.
I’ll never forget the day he got the letter from home. “Well I’ll be, he said, “my kid sister had a baby girl.” He looked confused by the fact that it was a girl; he was not counting on that. But for a week he flashed the picture of that baby girl to every soldier on the base, and though she was so small her eyes were still half- closed, everyone said she was a beautiful thing. (DeGrazia 38)
Shortly after he tore up the picture of that baby girl, Sam killed himself because he feelt that had no reason to hold any hope for his future. In these two stories, both American and Vietnamese troops had many of the same reactions to the tragedies they witnessed in this war.
One
interesting movement in Vietnamese fiction was the trend of Socialist Realism.
During the war, the communist party expected writers to write stories that
would further their cause. Typically, authors that followed suit resided in
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a story about a young, beautiful
liaison girl who lost her father in the earlier stages of
The comb brought relief to Sau’s troubled mind though his daughter had not the opportunity to use it. On certain nights he was seen gazing at it, polishing it on his hair. Sau longed to see her again. But an unfortunate event occurred. It was by the end of 1958, at a time when we had no weapons yet, In a raid by American and puppet troops, Sau was killed by a bullet fired from an American plane which hit him at the chest. Before he died, he had not enough energy to confide his last will. He could only plunge his hand into his pocket and take out the comb. Handing it, he intently gazed at me. I lack words to describe his look at that moment. I can only tell you that from that day on, I have often seen him in imagination, riveting his eyes on me. (Nguyen 127)
This selection is an excellent example of how many Northern writers, such as Nguyen, glorified Vietnamese soldiers and tried to evoke sympathy in their propagandistic stories. This story, like many other stories written during the height of Socialist Realism, attempts to use emotions like love and sorrow to obtain the sympathy of readers and change some of their political and social beliefs.
Reading
about the Vietnam war from both perspectives, one can see that these two
countries often wrote about many of the same ideas and philosophies about the
war such as the ideas of sorrow and love.
Reading many different kinds of fiction about the Vietnam War is an
important way to gauge a culture’s understanding of what it meant and what it
felt like to be involved in this conflict. These pieces give us a kaleidoscope
of different perspectives to examine while trying to learn about the way people
in both
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Works Cited
DeGrazia, Emilio. The Light at
the end of the Tunnel.
Khue, Le Minh. The Blue Sky.
Khue, Le Minh. The Distant Stars.
Mort, John. The Hero.
Nguyen Sang. The Ivory Comb.
2nd Edition.
Ninh, Bao. The Sorrow of War.
Roland Romani
Professor Schafer
English 240
Victimization of the Poor
The
riches of the French in
The Vietnamese and
especially the Vietnamese peasants were essentially
In
1900 the old structure of Vietnamese government was destroyed and replaced with
French control on all levels of administration by Paul Doumer, Governor General
of French Indochina. Perhaps the only
benefit of French colonization if one must choose would be the improvements in
In October 1902
Paul Bert became the new Governor General of
Phi Van published four books from 1943 to 1949, which are considered documentary fiction. These four books outline the progression for lack of a better word of peasantry life under French colonial rule. These books describe peasant life and the changing attitudes toward the French and their own situation. In his literature, Phi Van illustrates one of the only forms of satisfaction for the peasants, where they sought revenge against the colonizers, which only caused them more trouble in the end. His first book is essentially an introduction to peasant life under colonial rule. The reader is sympathetic to the hardworking peasants because the exploitation for the Vietnamese is illustrated. His second book illustrates how the peasants began to organize, but without any ideological or political consciousness in terms of their social and economic position. In Van’s third book the peasants were becoming politically aware. They were beginning to understand the reasons behind their deplorable conditions, such as the destruction of their traditional education system. Co Gai Que, his fourth book illustrates the peasants taking action by means of a revolution. These four books give one a comprehensive view of the peasant’s evolution from colonization to revolution.
Chapter
two and four of Phi Van’s third book, The
Peasants, illustrate what peasants endured during colonial rule. Chapter two describes the structure of Binh
Tha, the largest hamlet in the
Chapter four vividly describes the abuse of the Vietnamese peasants faced by the corrupt French and Vietnamese officials. The representative and the village security chief eyed Carpenter Tam’s wife and the village security chief offers to help the representative out. Carpenter Tam was in prison because of the representative. The village security chief said he could force the carpenter’s wife to marry the representative. The village security chief also wanted the representative to give up one of his good tenants for marriage to him. The represenitive said,
Now if you like, let’s tackle the easy problems first!...Don’t you see my over design? My tenants are busy gambling and are so absorbed in the desire to win that they’ve left their wives and children to look after their homes. Tonight you and I will walk freely in there and stir up our own wind and our own rain.
In chapter three which was not translated, the represenitvie arranged illegal gambling parties so that his tenants would have to take our loans from him and so that women and children would be left home alone so that he could have the opportunity to rape them. The village security chief and the representative intended to go out and rape the wives and children. So, not only were the French taxing the peasants, using them as a slave labor force, but they were also raping the wives and children.
Dead End by Nguyen Cong Hoan was first published in September 1938. This novel also describes the plight the Vietnamese peasants faced, such as French and Vietnamese officialdom, abusive and exploitive landlords and the taxes the French placed upon the Vietnamese.
This time the villain is also a representative; Representative Lai exploits the peasants of An Dao. Lai was accused by the French customs officers of having a tenant with illegal alcohol on the property. By law, Lai should have been punished, but again it is the peasant who reaps the pains of corruption.
In a later chapter there is a scene where peasants are gathered outside of Lai’s house to pay their taxes and to request more time to gather money to pay him. One peasant said, “I beg you, venerable sir, please let me off until tomorrow. My wife is taking our daughter to sell, and she ought to be back home anytime now. To which the representative replies, “Only dogs would buy that dirty girl” (192 Long)! These peasants were unjustly taxed and feared for their safety so much that they were willing to sell their children. This is similar to the novel, When the Lights Put Out by Ngo Tat To. In the end what would they have left? What would remain for them to live for? Reading these depictions of peasant life, one can understand why it took them so long to rebel. Part of the reason must have been that they were too busy scrounging up money so that they could pay their taxes and because they were intimidated by corrupt officials.
“Who
Committed this Crime?” by Tran Van Mai is an essay in which the author
describes things he witnessed during the height of starvation between 1944 and
1945. Almost two million people died
between these years because of starvation.
The Vietnamese believed that the French purposely caused starvation to
make the Vietnamese people weak so that they would not be able to revolt. This is reflected in the essay, but history
ascribes a different story. The French
had grown very concerned about their own future and began to horde rice by
means of taxes and take other precautionary measures (Long 221). This is not to say that the starvation of the
Vietnamese people was justified. Nothing justifies starvation. The bigger point is that this would not have
happened if the French were not there in the first place. Tran Van Mi describes the horrors of
witnessing thousands upon thousands of people die of starvation. All the while, he is just as helpless as
anyone else in
All
of the literature I read written about colonial times is very bleak and
depressing. The destructive nature of
colonialism on the land and the people bleeds though the pages of these
stories. One cannot help but think that
Works Cited
Buttinger, Joseph. The Smaller
Dragon.
Duong,
Pham Cao. Vietnamese Peasants Under French Domination. Lanham:
University Press of
Long,
Ngo Vinh. Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants Under the French.
David Thorpe
Professor Schafer
English 240: Vietnamese Literature
November 2004
When assessing the effects of a rapidly changing culture through literature, it is useful to concentrate on one element’s change over time. No matter what the external and internal politics of a changing nation are like, certain elements of human life are bound to exist within almost any work of literature. With Vietnamese culture’s traditionally strong focus on family life, looking at how changing attitudes toward love and marriage are portrayed in literature can provide valuable insights into the mechanics of cultural change.
One
of the most prominent classic works of Vietnamese literature, Nguyen Du’s The
Tale of Kieu, published around 1800, can be seen to represent a more traditional
view of love in
Kieu brushed aside her
solemn vows to Kim—
she’d pay a daughter’s
debt before all else.
Resolved on what to do,
she spoke her mind:
“Hands off my father,
please! I’ll sell myself
and ransom him.”
The sense that Kieu owes it to her family to help them in their time of desperate need is not a particularly radical one even in our culture; the choice to help her family is not presented as a particularly difficult one in this story, perhaps because to weight the options (staying with Kim versus saving her family) more evenly would change the focus of the story. Nonetheless, the old standard of filial piety is certainly exemplified by the work. Although this tale is of quite some age, the social relevance of Confucianism and especially of filial piety over romantic interest remained quite important in Vietnamese literature long after the verse-narrative period. More than a century later as the Vietnamese novel began to develop as a form, the love-at-all-costs romanticism of French novels, popular among educated Vietnamese youth in colonial times, began to collide with the old standard embodied by works such as The Tale of Kieu.
Hoang Ngoc Phach’s 1925 novel To Tam (considered by some scholars to be, in fact, the very first modern Vietnamese novel) presents a striking example of this collision. The central conflict in the novel is between romantic love and family loyalty. The two central characters are star-crossed lovers named Dam Thuy and To Tam; Dam Thuy is unable to have a relationship with To Tam (aside from frequent letters and secret longing) because he is already betrothed to a woman that his family has chosen. To Tam, however, refuses to marry the suitors chosen by her family due to her love for Dam Thuy. Dam Thuy, like Kieu, does not even really consider the possibility of submitting to his true love and pursuing a relationship with To Tam, because his duty to his family effortlessly trumps his heart’s desire. I mentioned earlier that Kieu’s case is weighted unevenly; in this case, Dam Thuy’s decision is motivated only out of loyalty, not out of his family’s impending destruction should he choose to follow his heart.
To Tam, however, is a different story. Due to her feelings for Dam Thuy, she spends quite a long time refusing any suitors, despite her family’s wishes. It is only when her mother falls gravely ill that she gives in to her family’s wishes and takes a husband to fulfill what she takes to be her mother’s last request. Even after she’s married (or perhaps especially after she’s married), To Tam is unable to face the agony of betraying her feelings, and eventually wills herself into sickness and death. The plot seems to be modeled after French romances of the time, in which the circumstances of tragic love often brought about such grim results.
The French-influenced plotline of tragic romance can be seen as a radical statement about Vietnamese society. Although the characters do not end up betraying their families and submitting to their love for each other, the reader is left with the distinct impression that things would have turned out a whole lot better if they had. On the other hand, it may be argued that To Tam’s eventual demise was her punishment for subverting the traditional family structure and allowing her mind to become occupied with such frivolous thoughts as those expressed in her letters. Perhaps it was symptomatic of the changing moral climate that younger readers overwhelmingly declined to interpret it this way; nonetheless, it brings the conflict between old and new values to light. One would imagine that, in a society where the conflict between the emerging standards of independence and the traditional standards of filial duty was not often openly discussed, a novel like To Tam would be quite a powerful statement. If the novel is a reflection of social conditions, we see To Tam as the statement of a culture struggling with its identity, questioning its traditional values in light of newer ideas of how to lead a satisfying life.
Nhat Linh’s novel Severance, which came out in 1934, is an even more damning account of the traditional structure. It audaciously brings to light not only the question of following the family’s wishes at all cost, but also the concept of a woman’s role in society, her education, and her duty to her husband. Severance tells the story of a young woman who reluctantly follows her family’s wishes that she be married to a rich but bland cad; she enters the relationship reluctantly, and her loyalty to her family’s wishes is rewarded with nothing but bitter misfortune. The story is far more didactic than To Tam, and the author’s point of view takes center stage. Loan, the central character, finds herself trapped in an extremely abusive relationship due to her wicked mother-in-law’s unmitigated cruelty. The implication that Loan would be entirely better-off if she had gone her own way instead of doing as her family wished is abundantly clear; in the end, she ends up stabbing her husband in self-defense and standing trial for his murder. The attorneys prosecuting and defending her represent the two sides of the cultural debate: to the prosecutor, Loan is one of the contemptible new breed of women educated by foreign standards, corrupted by French novels and disrespectful of traditional society. In the eyes of her defender, she’s the victim of a system which traps women in terrible family situations with no hope of escape; in fact, the opening of the novel contains grim foreshadowing of tragedy, as a woman in a situation similar to the one Loan finds herself in commits suicide rather than face her cruel family. In the end Loan is acquitted; the new values win over the traditional ones.
Of course, the one-sidedness of the story is deliberate and pervasive; Loan’s mother-in-law is treated as the cruel and inhuman product of a vicious circle of abuse and violence, and Loan is the innocent bystander who is caught up in the middle of it. The story is certainly not a balanced look at the benefits and weaknesses of traditional Vietnamese family; it is an unequivocal condemnation of the system’s faults.
The communist revolution and decades of war in Vietnam brought about fundamentally different ideology; the traditional Confucian view of familial submission was put on the back-burner in favor of a model which favored loyalty to the Party above all else. The newer works of critical and socialist realism portrayed a different view of family life. Ngo Tat To’s early critical realism story When The Light’s Put Out is primarily a story about the dire fallout of the French colonial era; it is a tale of corrupt officials who oppress their people and treat them with contempt, but it does contain an element of family life. The central character helps and cares for her husband during his illness, and in general the story presents a more equitable view of the male-female relationship than earlier stories. As the revolution commenced, the view of submission to the husband seemed to be almost entirely discarded in revolutionary literature in favor of the pragmatic ideals of serving the party. In a poem by Luu Trong Lu entitled O, The Supply Carrier, the heroine is more concerned with helping the revolutionary cause than with pleasing her man:
Suddenly, she stopped to rest,
Looked down at the water and saw her face.
O noticed, all at once,
The bloom of spring was fading.
Her white complexion was turning brown.
O feared her husband’s frown,
But she walked on at a steady pace.
She was working for her nation.
If he didn’t like it, let him frown.
The idealized heroine shows the
confidence with and submission to her nation that heroines once showed to their
families; the Communist Party and the revolution is now the central figure of
strength and benevolence in the lives of the characters, with love coming in
second place. This concept is elaborated on with a great deal of complexity in
Duong Thu Huong’s novel Paradise of the Blind, which was published in
1991 and promptly banned in
Paradise of the Blind, as well as Vietnamese literature in general, seems to deal with the unique difficulties of sudden and jarring cultural shifts. Values are quite evidently both incredibly difficult to hold on to (in the face of such cultural earthquakes as foreign colonization and ideological revolution) and also incredibly hard to let go of. From To Tam to Paradise of the Blind, the older system of beliefs is juxtaposed with the newest factor to come along, be it the French romantic novel or the communist party; in each case, the gulf between tradition and new ideals tears characters apart and shakes up opinions.
Hoang Ngoc Phach. To Tam. 1925
Luu Trong Lu. “O, The Supply Carrier” 1948
Nhat Linh. Severance [Doan Tuyet]. Translated by James Banerian. 1934
Ngo Tat To. When The Light’s Put Out. 1939
Nguyen Du. The Tale of Kieu. 1800
Thu Huong Duong. Paradise of the Blind: A Novel New York: HarperCollins. 2002.
Kathleen Walthall
Professor Schafer
Struggling for Survival in Le Minh Khue’s
Le
Minh Khue was born in 1949 in Thanh Hoa province, south of
Society
in postwar
Le
Minh Khue’s short stories in The Stars, The Earth, The River are about
postwar
Idealism
changed to consumerism in postwar
“Scenes from an
Alley,” written in 1992 also shows the greed and corruption that took hold of
many people after the war. Some had to
go work in foreign places, people like Quyt whose mother bribed someone so he
could work in
In
“Tony D” selfishness and individual greed have replaced the collective struggle
as people struggled to make a day-to-day living. “Tony D,” was written in 1991 and takes place
during renovation. This story is a
criticism of the immoral ways of making money and obtaining possessions found
in postwar
“The Almighty Dollar,” written in 1990, also shows how jealousy and greed take over the lives of those involved, splintering the relationships with family and friends. The sanctity of family is no longer found in this story; it begins with Old Man Troung’s family fighting violently between themselves. “Things had come to such a point that nobody could stand each other anymore” (79). This altercation ends with a pregnant woman being stabbed by her sister in law. Cripple Diem stated, “Fuck! It’s worth it if you kill each other over dollars”(96). Once again Le Minh Khue shows that money has become much more important than any family loyalty. Dishonesty and bribery are also seen in this story when Old Man Troung’s daughter Trang attempts to go the district school. The English teacher wouldn’t allow her into the classroom “until she paid him extra money” because she was apparently so ugly (91). Trang eventually marries a Westerner and has lots of money available to her, and then the teacher was jealous of her. Her sister in laws looked at the wedding as a chance to make money, each thinking “This is a gold mine. What can I do to exploit it” (90)? Corruption and greed have taken over traditional values. Yet again we see that to make it after the war the people have become self-centered, feeling it is worth it to kill for dollars, and to not even care about the fact that the one murdered is another member of their family. Le Minh Khue reveals there is a great crisis in the traditional family values once held dear.
“The
Last Rain of the Monsoon,” was written in 1991 and shows the devastation of
love, which because of timing, it becomes, a love that is lost forever. Mi, who is already married, falls in love
with a married man, also an engineer. They
are on a construction project to help rebuild
The characters in Le Minh Khue’s book are presented honestly, and as human beings, both good and bad. Many of the problems presented in her stories came about because of the rather abrupt change from the collective struggle during the war to a more individualistic, and selfish struggle after the war. The portrayals in most of these stories are not very flattering; the characters resort to some pretty desperate acts to get ahead. Le Minh Khue delivers to her readers an emotionally scarred people as they attempt to rebuild both their lives and their country. She shows that rebuilding the countryside is easy compared to the rebuilding of lives. Just as Duc is blamed for his materialistic greed in “A Day on the Road,” so is the rest of Vietnamese society for trading traditional Vietnamese values for sponges, toothbrushes and Western jeans. Le Minh Khue shows people are still struggling to survive after the war, but their struggle has become an individual, selfish and many times a materialistic one.
Works Cited
Le Minh Khue. The Stars, The Earth, The River. Trans. Bac Hoai Tran and Dana Sachs.
ed. Wayne Karlin.
Jordan Ramsey
Modern Vietnam Lit.
December 02, 2004
Professor Schafer
The Art Politics of Nguyen Huy Thiep
Nguyen Hue Thiep is very much a modern
writer. Though he has spent his whole life
in a nation without much of a modern literary tradition, thanks in part to the
heavy-handed censorship of the Vietnamese Communist government, reading Thiep
gives off the feeling that one is reading the work of someone well-schooled in
the post-modern theories of literature that have grown up in France and much of
the rest of Western Academia since the 1960s.
Thiep, born in 1950, did not publish his
first story in Vietnam until 1986.
Interestingly, that is the same time at which renovation began and censorship
of literature diminished. So, it is
likely that Thiep was writing well before the lifting of censorship and he was
only waiting for the opportunity to be published. By looking at Thiep’s stories from the
position of being censored and frustrated by the dominant role of socialist
realism in published works, instead of looking at Thiep’s work as something
that happily coincided with greater publishing freedoms, we can see the
underlying political messages that Thiep wanted to tell for a long time but was
unable to widely disseminate until censorship was lifted.
Thiep’s work is full of not just the
outright criticism of the government that would predictably draw their anger
and censorship, but also is laced with more subtle denouncements of governmental
ideals. Being an artist himself, it is
not surprising that many of Thiep’s political statements concern art and its
place in society and in politics as well.
One of the foundations of the Vietnamese government’s stances regarding
art has been that of socialist realism.
The government openly supported writers who practiced this form of art
which was used as a medium of positive propaganda to placate the people and
rally them around causes.
Thiep, however, falls victim to one of the
great paradoxes of post-modernism. By
the very fact that his writing purports to show the error of social realism and
other similar “teaching” forms of literature, he himself falls into an
educational role and his own art becomes that which he argues eloquently against.
There are those, though, who argue that
Thiep is not a post-modern writer but rather a post-Confucian author. Greg Lockhart argues quite persuasively that
while “the benevolent ‘heart’ of the Confucian scholar had usually produced
works that made people feel happy about society” much the way that more modern
socialist realist texts did, Thiep, in being a post-Confucian, was bent on
“reveal[ing] disturbing contradictions between social conditions and
established ways of viewing them” (160).
However, the problem with describing Thiep’s texts as post-Confucian is
that to do so would be saying that Thiep’s writings are not involved in the
“maintenance of old Confucian attitudes about the didactic political-moral role
of literature in society” (Lockhart, 164).
However, it appears, at least to my Western mind, admittedly more
steeped in modernism and post-modernism than Confucianism or post-Confucianism,
that Thiep attempts to remove his literature from a teaching role but
ultimately fails to do so. In this case
his writings fail in their attempt to overturn the Confucian idea that “the
purpose of literature is to carry doctrine” but succeed in fulfilling the
post-modernist concept that although there is no one true center, one
ideological absolute, despite our being cognizant of the fact we are still
powerless to root ourselves in no center: we must ultimately choose a center
from which to speak even though we may realize that it is not an absolute
center (Lockhart, 164).
Lockhart himself cedes the point that
although Thiep does not argue one dogmatic ideology as did Confucian socialist
realist texts, his stories ‘are entertained by multiple centers” (171). This multiple-centers idea is clearly a
post-modern one. The fact that Thiep may
not have been aware of its post-modernness does not negate the fact of its
existence. Similar is that Thiep’s texts
“make transparent and problematize the processes of [their] own creation”, a
characteristic typical of post-modern texts (Zinoman, 296). Even though Zinoman argues, while making a
case that Thiep’s texts are in fact retro traditional in their approach and
similar to old works such as the truyen tho work The Tale of Kieu, that
this characteristic is quite similar to “a habitual pattern of premodern Truyen
Tho narratives” in their pattern of
“assert[ing] their own authority by citing an older work as a source” it is
undeniable that this intertextuality is also a key feature of post-modern
writing.
In “My Uncle Hoat” Thiep tackles this issue
of art and what its role in society should be.
Uncle Hoat is “a burden, a hopeless appendage” on the narrator’s home in
a poor rural village (88). The working
family has no time for art; the only art they admire is the drawing on new
money which they describe as “beautiful and detailed” while Uncle Hoat is the
only one to criticize the artwork as unrealistic (87). Not being the kind who admires money,
literally or through his work-habits, Hoat, after attending a performance of
“The Story of Quan Yin,” a very traditional drama, decides to begin creating
art of his own.
When Uncle Hoat shows his brother his poems
dealing with “skies and rivers and mountains” Hoat’s brother loses his
composure: “who did you think you’d teach with your writing?” (90). Hoat did not have that as his intent but his
statements affirming his aim of creating literature without doctrine or
teaching only anger his brother and lead him to rip up Hoat’s manuscripts. Hoat soon leaves the family who later see his
poems in a newspaper to which his sister-in-law decries: “See! You used to
always say he was useless. Now he must
be really rich” (92). Literature is seen
by the family, who very much resemble the government in that they exile one of
their own when he is seen as being subversive, as being only good if it
produces something of worth: money; just as the government only accepts
literature that does good in their eyes, which means it maintains the status
quo in an upbeat manner that gives everyone pride of the past and hope for the
future.
“My Uncle Hoat” is a veiled attack on the
government’s heavy-handed role in literature publishing as well as their narrow
views of what purpose literature should fulfill. However, in Thiep’s world the censors do not
win. Uncle Hoat escapes to the city
where he publishes his poems just as Thiep himself, though censored in Vietnam
for the most part, has found an audience for his work elsewhere.
What’s just as interesting as the ideas
Thiep propagates regarding literature are the ways he presents them. Perhaps his most commonly used device is
metafiction, a fiction that is self-aware of its fictitiousness and actively
engages in self-reflexive critiques of the genre of fiction itself. “My Uncle Hoat” is presented as a story told
in a restaurant by the narrator who claims no connection to the characters
involved at all. The story itself though
deals overtly with literature, so by presenting multi-levels of literature and
word-play Thiep is drawing attention to the very act of creating literature.
Thiep very often uses the idea of
inter-textuality, the actual presence of one text within another text, and meta-textuality, when a text comments on
another text, in a way that helps to illuminate his ideas on literature, or art,
in general. “Love Story Told on a Rainy
Night” is a perfect example of this. The
story, as written down, is a retelling, which states openly that it is
conscious of its textuality, of a story of what once happened to the narrator
which happens to include another story within it that he is told as well as a
few song texts. Thiep uses this complex
format, and one often used in post-modern works, as a way to comment on the
indeterminacy of texts. As the narrator
says at one point: “Much later, after hearing many people retell the story, I
learned about the events that led up to that troubled day” (246). By positing the nature of texts as non-finite
Thiep undermines the necessary assumptions that must be held if you are to
follow the constricts that the government censors set up in favor of socialist
realist texts.
In “Fired Gold”, one part of the famous
“history trilogy,” Thiep not only undermines revered historical figures such as
Nguyen Du, the author of The Tale Of Kieu, but also deconstructs the stable ground that socialist realist texts,
and even older Confucian texts, relied on.
Theip not only provides three different endings, which he offers so that
“each reader can select the one that he or she feels is most suitable” but also
has the narrator say that even though he did assemble the story from a number
of historical documents, he took the liberty to “freely amend and reorganize
extraneous details and edit the documents so as to make them consistent with
the telling of my story” (197, 203). One
common thread among those who advocate Confucian, social-realist, or modern
texts is that they claim that these texts represent truth, and thereby believe
they have a right and duty to teach from their privileged position. Thiep, whether you call him post-Confucian or
post-modern says through his writings that he is not representing a stable,
absolute truth, yet that is his lesson: he is ultimately teaching something
whether he likes it or not.
Thiep uses another non-obvious technique in
“Crossing the River” to get out his message.
The most heroic person on the ill-fated trip across the river is the
robber who the teacher calls “a hero! A revolutionary! A reformer” (10). Of course, while the robber-by-night is
taking action to save the little boy, the poet on board is left with nothing to
do but “mumble” the meaningless “‘Love makes people noble’” (10). Here Thiep does not address the government
and literature in any direct way but rather in a veiled manner. The ferrywoman in the story is the only one
who knows that the robber, who is not at the time engaged in his vocation, is
indeed a robber beneath his veil of heroism.
She thinks to herself at one point about: “the misfortune of anyone who
happen[s] to meet that man alone at night” (10). The teacher and the poet, those in
traditional roles of knowledge imparters, remain action less and unable to put
into action any of their high ideas.
Instead, it is the robber, the enemy of the state and of the status quo
who takes positive action.
The robber is able to throw off the societal
expectations of him in large part because no one other than the ferrywoman, who
keeps silent about it, knows his terrible identity. Thiep is showing how if the government
removed all censorship devices and let literature come to people from a more
neutral position, that of the writers and publishers themselves, people would
be able to think for themselves more.
This free thinking would then inevitably lead to people moving beyond
passive thought as exemplified by the poet and into real beneficial action as
the robber does.
This is a wonderful idea and one most people
would agree with. However, Thiep, for
all his good intentions, undermines his argument by the very fact that he is
arguing it. He argues for people to be
allowed to come to texts from a place of non-partiality yet he also wants then
to accept his views as the best ones.
Thiep’s texts, though they often come across as simple stories or
fables, are at their root educative texts.
This is fine except that the main argument he puts forth throughout these
thesis driven stories is that texts should not be political or educative but
should just be: inert artworks largely removed from the political process and
instead tied to themes of nature and the heart.
In “The Woodcutters” Thiep attacks the
deceptive veil of positivism that socialist realism and the government censors
long favored. Buong, who is very
anti-intellectual, says mockingly, regarding the “deceptive names” of “wretched” places (“Future”,
“Self-Strengthening”, “Dawn”, “Self-Strengthening”), “‘The literature of our
country is truly rich!’” (322-323). Buong puts it best by calling these name
bestowers, understood to be social realist writers, “‘vile cheater[s]’”
(322). More interesting than this expected
denouncement of “sentimentalists” by Thiep is the character he uses to utter
it. Buong is not a progressive at all
but a rural criminal who calls his cousin “‘Mr. young Intellectual’” as an
insult and is shown throughout to be an anti-aesthetic (328).
Thiep’s reason for using this character of
Buong to espouse his ideas, even though he appears to have little in common
with him, is to show that he is not just speaking for relatively well off city
people or well educated people. Thiep
wants to actually speak for everyone in the country who has been silenced. He realizes that it was not only self-called
intellectuals who were dissatisfied with the falseness of socialist realism and
the heavy-handed strictures of the government censors, but the common people as
well.
At the end of “The Woodcutters” the camp is
attacked by a bear. Buong and is
intellectual cousin, who had just been in a fight with each other, come
together as a cohesive unit to defeat and kill the bear. This closing vision, not just of the story
but of his first collection of stories, shows that all Vietnamese must come
together to keep the heavy-handed government from desecrating the country
again.
Ultimately Thiep’s works are representative
of post-modern writing in many aspects even though he may not be aware of it or
have done it purposefully. Just as
although he attempts to write “without offering commentary of solutions” in the
end he cannot avoid doing so (Zinoman, 304).
Simply being aware or not aware of a concept is not enough to allow a
person to avoid treading upon the topic.
As Uncle Hoat mistakenly said to his brother, “You’re mistaken: I had no
intention of teaching anyone. I only
meant to express myself” (90).
Intentions do not necessarily equal the outcome. The general post-modern economy and climate
of post-war Vietnam were enough to saturate Thiep’s mind with post-modern
concepts just as a reader of the stories of an author who may intend not to
offer teachings cannot avoid gathering some moral, some new knowledge from the
text.
Works Cited
Lockhart, Greg. "Nguyen Huy Thiep's
Writing: Post-Confucian, Post-Modern?" Vietnamese Studies in a
Multicultural World. Ed. Nguyen Xuan Thu. Melbourne: Vietnamese Language and
Culture Publications, 1994. 158-181.
Ngueyn
Huy Thiep. Crossing the River: Short Fiction by Nguyen Huy Thiep.
Eds. Nguyen Ngeyet Cam and Dana Sachs.
Canada: Curbstone Press, 2003.
Zinoman,
Peter. "Declassifying Nguyen Huy thiep." Positions: East Asia
Cultures Critique 2.2 (1994): 294-317.