5 - The Tale of Kieu

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome back to Nam Phong Dialogues. - We're two Vietnamese Americans have casual conversations about Vietnamese history. - We're your host, Kevin. - And Yen. (upbeat music) - I hope you're all doing well. This week we are talking about a Vietnamese classic one that we are sure you have heard about. It's the tale of you. So why this topic? If you're Vietnamese, you know that this is a fundamental aspect of Vietnamese culture. Even if you don't know the actual story from the self-sacrifice to familial duty, these are things that are very familiar. We wanted to talk about it because it's actually still very prevalent in Vietnamese popular culture today. One thing that I came across recently was something called Maikiu. I'm not sure if any of you have heard of this, but in general, in Vietnamese tradition, during the New Year, you go see a fortune teller to tell you about your coming year and Maikiu is going back to this text of the tale of Giu and pulling verses that can tell you about your life for the upcoming year. And these verses hold these prophetic messages and truths and wisdom for our actions. Essentially, then it tells us that this epic story of the Giu encapsulates not only history, but also the future. So it's this timeless piece of culture that is extremely important. - Yeah, so the tale of Giu is like the cultural rock, the foundation. Everyone in Vietnam knows the tale of Giu. During Boulan, a professor of history at the University of Hawaii, he was saying that the tale of Giu occupies a very special place in Vietnamese literature and virtually all Vietnamese know some parts of its plot or memorize some of its 3,254 verses. So he says that when he was little, he remembers being on the benches of elementary school and they were assigned long passages of the poem to learn by heart. And he said, he never needed to carry the text with him. He simply needed to hang out with some adults in the village. While they busied themselves with menial work, they would recite the signed passage for me to repeat after them until such time as the passage was registered in my mind. So that's how much this poem is infused in Vietnamese daily life and culture. I had never even heard of this, actually, and I'm embarrassed to say until about maybe eight years ago, I was in graduate school. And I was in the backyard with my dad and I was wondering, you know, what is an example of indigenous Vietnamese literature? Like what is a famous great work of literature in Vietnam? And he said, oh, winds who? And I was like, what, who's that? And my dad was like, oh, he wrote the tale of Giu. And so that's how I learned about the tale of Giu. And I actually want to emphasize why this topic is so important, simply because yes, it's a classical piece of literature, almost like the equivalent of Homer's Iliad, an epic poem. But it's also super accessible to the general public, just like how Kevin was talking about Duong Muulam remembering or learning these signed passages from adults. People just knew these verses by heart. So it's very low register. You don't have to be someone that's really educated to know this poem and to know it's significance in Vietnamese culture. You just knew it. And so it's really interesting that still today, we have these aphorisms that are taken from this piece of literature and that it's not high brow, not hard to access, but something that everybody can know and love. Kevin and I gave ourselves the hard task of reading one of the most refined translations of the tale of Giu. And that is by scholar Huynh Sangthong, who was a professor at Yale for some time. He really put so much work into this translation and what I really love about it is how faithful he is to the original Vietnamese. You can tell that he's searched far and wide for the right words. What also makes this translation interesting and good, I think, is he has a meter. There's an dynamic, I want to say pentameter, but anyone who works on poetry, police correct me. So there is a certain rhythm to the translation, which is so hard to do as you can imagine in a translation, especially from Vietnamese. The Vietnamese original of Giu is written in Lubat, which is a classic Vietnamese poetic form of six to eight syllables alternating. It's as hard as the sonnet, maybe even harder. And this is why I think the Huynh Sangthong translation is so interesting because he tries to say faithful to the certain kind of meter that exists in the Vietnamese version. So I have a friend, Jam Lung, who is a PhD candidate at Yale University, who made this film called An Elegy for the Time Being, which is a tribute to Huynh Sangthong and his career, and focuses a lot on this work in this translation that he did after Giu. But what I really loved about this film, and I'm mentioning it briefly here, is how she ties together her arrival to Vietnamese studies with Huynh Sangthong's career, with just our general interest in Vietnam. And I feel like the search for history is something that connects so many of us. So I thoroughly enjoyed the Huynh Sangthong translation. It was, however, admittedly, very hard, right, Kevin? Yeah, so I tried to read the Huynh Sangthong translation twice. And at the moment, I have to admit, it was really just beautiful. Some of the lines were just very pleasurable to read. However, much of it, honestly, I found it pretty difficult. I finished it, but I knew that I would have to eventually read this again. But I had found out that there was a new translation of the Tale of Giu, published in 2019, pretty recently, by a man named Timothy Allen. And that was with Penguin Classics. And so I bought that, and that experience was honestly really different. It was actually really great. I loved the Timothy Allen version more. It was just more pleasurable to read. It was a lot easier and it was fun. I actually found it hard to put it down and actually looked forward to reading it. I was like, "Yes, I get to have my coffee and I get to read this." And it was a smooth ride. The plot was very clear. But I would recommend both versions. So that's my experience. There's been so many translations, actually, of this text. And we went with the Huynh Sangthong initially, just because it was most official, the most scholarly. But I can understand why a version like Timothy Allen's would be more accessible. And, you know, it's not even called the tale of Geo. It's called the song of Geo. Tab up, we'd just like the first five lines of the Huynh Sangthong translation and then the first five lines of the Timothy Allen translation, just to give people a taste. Okay, so the first five lines, the first stanza of Drint Geo begins like this. A hundred years in this lifespan on Earth, talent and destiny are apt to feud. You must go through a play of Ebb and Flow, and watch such things as make you sick at heart. Is it so strange that losses balance gains? Blue heavens want to strike a rose from spite. What? Right? So, and here is the Timothy Allen, first five lines. It's an old story, good luck and good looks. Don't always mix. Tragedy is circular and infinite. The plane never believe it, but good looking people meet with hard times too. Okay, it's like two different stories, two different meanings. And at a certain point, you do have to question yourself. Is it better that this text reaches a broader audience? Or do we prefer that it respects the integrity of the original? I think it's a hard question. Yeah, you can go both ways. So, let me now just talk about the context of this book and the author, Wenzoo, and why he wrote it, which is an interesting question because we can ask ourselves, why did he write this? But here's the context. So, the Vietnamese people were ruled by the Chinese for a thousand years. So, from 111 BC to 939 AD. And for this reason, the Vietnamese ruling elite barred a lot from the Chinese. They borrowed ways of governing. They borrowed Chinese culture, Chinese language. Classical Chinese was the official language in Vietnam until the French came in the mid 1800s. And Wenzoo actually did not invent this story himself. He borrowed the plot from a Chinese novel that he probably found when he was traveling in China as a diplomat around the early 1800s. And the Chinese novel was called Jinyun Zhao. The tale of Jinyun Zhao. And so, what Wenzoo does is that he takes his novel and he just makes it his own. He changes things and he makes it more beautiful, really. And that's what many scholars say. In the words of Wenzong, he says, "Wenzoo's masterpiece is a celebration of the Vietnamese language in all its diversity, with all its resources of rhythm and tone, of sound and image of curse in which expression." So, Wenzoo's poem, the tale of Q, is also just a treasure trove of classical Chinese learning. So, when you read it, you might not know. And when I say you, I mean the Western reader, but there are some like 50 quotations from the Book of Odes, which is a Confucian anthology. There are some 50 references to other Confucian classics, some 60 translations of various Chinese poems, some 70 illusions of Chinese works of fiction. And also like some 20 mentions of Buddhist or Taoist scriptures. So, this text is extremely erudite and he knows a lot, but he weaves all these Confucian and Buddhist ideas into the text in seamless way. And it all works. - I didn't know that, wow. This conglomeration of these materials, but it really calls into the question what is original. - Exactly. And I think that's what makes it beautiful. He's an artist and that he takes from the world and he gives back something that is new. It's a reassemblage of things. And I like the way that UnSantong writes in the introduction that it all fits together so gracefully into the texture of the poem. It is so opposite to the purpose in each case that it may elude the average reader while it surprises and delights the connoisseur. And so, the average. The eluding, the average reader, I feel like that capture so well the reading experience that we were just describing. - Right. And actually, UnSantong in his translation, he has like all these little stars next to the lines and then you would have to go to the back of the book and it's like, oh, this line refers to this Chinese text. And so I did that for the first 10 pages. And if you really want to understand this, you would have to go through slowly, but maybe it would be good to just read it all the way through and then go back and do it again and read the little stars. Anyway, so the point here is that this is known as one of the masterpieces, not only of Vietnamese literature, but of Asian literature, and there's an eminent professor of Vietnamese history named Alexander Woodside. And he even said that Western readers who are curious about Vietnam and the Vietnamese may well gain more real wisdom from cultivating a discriminating appreciation of this one poem, then they will from reading the entire library of scholarly and journalistic writings upon modern Vietnam, which has accumulated in the West in the past two decades. Now, Professor Woodside wrote that in 1982. And so the literature on Vietnam was not that much as it is now, but I think the point still holds is that there's a kind of idea that the Vietnamese spirit is somehow captured in this poem and we'll talk more about that. So at the beginning of the 19th century, so 1800s, Vietnam had about 78 million people. And Vietnam belonged to what we might call the East Asian classical world. They are heirs to the traditions of government, philosophy, literature developed in China by Confucius, Mensius, et cetera, and even Buddhism in Buddhist sutras, the teachings of the Buddha were written in classical Chinese. But the point here is that the Vietnamese were not just copycats. They weren't just taking and not changing anything. They developed a distinct cultural world. They were very deliberate about what they would borrow and what they would change. And so they borrowed from Chinese philosophy. For us in the West, we might think of how Europeans looked to the ancient Greeks and Romans to get their traditions. So Nguyen Zhu, the author, was born in 1766 and he died in 1820. And the tale of Giu was written some time around the early 1800s. Some people say it was published in 1820 when he died. But Nguyen Zhu was living through a really tumultuous time in Vietnam. He was trying to survive this revolution called the Dyson Revolution. And this revolution was trying to get power away from what was then called the Lea Dynasty. And the revolution was eventually destroyed and replaced by the Nguyen Dynasty. And so Nguyen Zhu, he then had to reluctantly collaborate with this new dynasty. He's writing in a time of great change in Vietnam. I want to add two things to why this text is not just a copycat. First is what I had already mentioned regarding the Lu Kbath form. It's a distinct Vietnamese form of poetry. And it's what makes this text very rhythmic. And this is why it's so easy to turn it into lyrics and songs. And a lot of this has been done in contemporary renditions of this text. The other thing is that Nguyen Zhu wrote this in Du Nong, which is a distinct Vietnamese language that was created to distinguish itself from Han Chinese. But as you know, I think we mentioned in the past, Vietnam had a tradition of Han Chinese characters that was the written form of writing for a while. And then in the 13th century, the Vietnamese wanted to create this new language that would be useful to indicate local cultures, local things. And so they came up with Du Nong. This is a language that Nguyen Zhu wrote in. This is what makes it distinctly Vietnamese. And this is also why scholars say it's the celebration of language. Because Nguyen Zhu was writing in this tumultuous time, this gives extra weight to this text. Some scholars say that it was a metaphor. Nguyen Zhu was himself putting all of his experiences into the experiences of his protagonist, Gu. And this is the same metaphor that we'll see is taken up by Vietnamese scholars throughout the 20th century to talk about the fate of Vietnam. So already, Nguyen Zhu is pioneering this use of literature as a reflection of social situations of his society. And so the tale of Gu is actually a political allegory. There are so many different metaphors that can be read into it. So now you'll get to see exactly what the tumultuous experiences of the protagonist are. So it begins with Tui Keu, who is born into this low-ranking Mandarin. And she has two siblings, Tui Van, who is also a pretty important character in the story. And Vun Quan. And Gu was described as this perfect, beautiful, talented, ideal woman. She's obedient, she's chast, and when I say talented, I'm referring to these specific qualities that you had to have when you were in the 18th, 17th century as an upper middle-class woman. So you had to master Kam Gi Ti Huat, which is referring to your ability to play the lute, your ability to play chess or cards or entertain people, your ability to write poetry, and your ability to draw. As an ideal woman, she mastered all of these things. And these were things that would also serve her well later when she's in these moments of turmoil. Yeah, throughout the story, she will just whip out a brush and then write beautiful poetry. And she does that like a magic trick. If there was a superhero who could produce poetry, she would be one of them, basically. So one day, when Gu and her two siblings are out and about, they were coming back from a festival to honor ancestors. And so Gu was walking with a brother and sister, and then she sees a neglected tombstone. And she's like, why has this grave alone been left untended? And then her brother says, well, I can answer that. And so he tells her the story of this woman named Dantin. And it's a really sad story. Dantin fell in love with this man. But then she died before she could meet him. This story for some reason really moves Gu. And she starts crying. And she says, oh no, a woman's world is weaved from woe. And the only thing we dream of is despair. God rips off our wings. God makes us die. She sees and Dantin's fate stand in for all women. Gu says, since this earth began, cruel fate has cursed all women. I look on Dantin's mossy tomb and see my own in days to come. So this is for shadows, all the horrible things that are soon going to happen to Gu. And then soon after she meets Kim Chao, who is going to be the love of her life. But things don't always work out. And you'll see why. And their love blooms, but then Kim gets called away. And before he goes away, they promise to get married when he comes back. However, during the time that he goes away, Gu's father, who gets caught up in this dead scandal, that he may or may not be responsible for. And both he and the brother, Kuan, are arrested. And so the only way to get them out of this rut is for Gu to sell herself. And she does this to save them both. And so she's basically like, hold on, hold on, I can help here. She decides that she will get married to a rich person. And then that is one way that her father can pay off his debts. And but what actually happens is that she marries the guy, but then the guy takes her and puts her into a brothel, a low son. And so she is forced to be a prostitute. And from there, she's also still quite revered because of her good qualities in Gyeonggi, Tewa. But the first person that she meets is this guy named Tuksin, who is this very charming, handsome, smart guy who matches her and all her qualities. And he decides to marry her and save her from brothel life. And they live happily until you learn that Tuksin is actually married, and he needs to go back home to soothe his wife's jealousy. And on his way home, Gu gets captured by one of the wife's servants who brings her back and turns Gu into a slave. So when Tuksin gets home, he sees Gu and what a surprise. She's transformed. He's not the beautiful hostess that he knew, but is the slave that is serving his wife and his family. And she's so embarrassed. They have their encounter. She tells them her feelings. And then she runs away to a temple where she meets this nun. That's the way in. And this person is going to return to play a pretty important role later. But for now, she wants to help Gu and she brings her to this family who are made her donors on the temple, thinking that she's helping her. But actually, these people are awful. And they set it up with this other man and she gets sold once more to another brothel. But of course, Gu always has this talented, beautiful woman. She gets really popular with the guests. And then she meets another man named Duha, who is actually this pirate. He seems awful, but he's actually a decent guy. They live together pretty happily until he goes away. He gets set up and he's killed by enemies. So the enemies take Gu and abort the ship of the enemy. Gu actually jumps into a river because she didn't want to be taken away and she tries to kill herself. And this is when X-Wing comes back. X-Wing is the nun who saves her. All of this is happening. She was meeting all these people. It's been five, 10 years now. And of course, meanwhile, back at home, Gu jump finally comes back home from his trip and he's like, where's Gu? He eventually finds her family and finds out what happens. You tell him the situation about the debt. They also tell him that before Gu left, Gu had informed her sister to marry Gu jump on her behalf. So Gu does end up marrying one, but he's still thinking about Gu. And so he does this investigation. He tries to find her and he first talks to Tuk Singh, who then leads him to finding more about Duha. And then once they find more about Duha, they actually come across this grave because they think that Gu like Duha has also died. They're there at the grave. Their mourning gives death when suddenly Zakswin was nun again. She shows up. I didn't remember this moment was so striking because just as the bad things happen at nowhere, the good things also happen out of nowhere. So how Zakswin this nun shows up is this queer, queer fortune. Eventually, Zakswin brings them to Gu. They reunite. Everyone's really happy. He really wants to marry Gu. And she finally concedes. But on the day of their wedding, when they're supposed to consummate their marriage, Gu says, I can't. And we're going to only say friends because she wanted to respect her dignity. The ending of the story is this weird, ambivalent ending where they're happy, but Gu and Gu are romantic friends, whereas one, the sisters, the one who bears the children. That's the whole saga of what happens to Gu. So one thing that I wanted to add was that we started this story with the ghost of Dantian, this woman, magically appears to Gu that somehow makes Gu really sad. And so Dantian shows up near the end of the story right before Gu sees Kim again. She says to Gu, how fragile is your fate but how marvelous your actions. So here, Dantian is kind of summarizing what Gu has done in the last 15 years when she went through all these horrible things, being in a brothel, being a slave and all that. Dantian says, none can match your goodness. Despite your sins, heaven loves you. You sold yourself because you loved your parents. You did everything to make others happy. Your goodness at last makes the pendulum reverse. I cross out your name from the list of the company of sadness. I give you back your poems. They are the finest in our literature. Your future is now different. You will meet again your first love. You will know happiness. And there we see the scheme of, if you do good, you will be rewarded. - So all of these things that Gu goes through is this reflection of Vietnam and its own tumultuous times. And because of all of these fluctuations, it makes it so apt and so easy to be taken up by scholars in the 20th century and the early 20th century, especially those who were trying to determine and to defend a Vietnamese culture. - So in the 1920s, a very famous intellectual named Tham Quynh was one of the first to crystallize the tale of Gu as the cultural icon of Vietnam. So he very famously says, So basically, as long as the tale of Gu is here, as long as it survives, our language will survive and our country will survive. There's nothing to worry about. - And we have to remember the context in which he was saying this, because at the turn of the 20th century, a lot of enemies were concerned about the eradication of Vietnam. We know that there's social Darwinism circulating around this time and social Darwinism is this idea of competition and the only way for your culture to prevail or to continue to exist is to be strong. A lot of these intellectuals, including Tham Quynh, had this belief that we have to strengthen our Vietnamese culture, we have to highlight the good things so that other cultures like France would treat us differently and they wouldn't keep looking down on us. That we ourselves are capable of being able to think for ourselves. This idea of if Gio still exists, then our country still exists. I think it's at this really deeper resistance against condemnation. - This is really interesting here because at the time, some anti-colonial thinkers and I'm thinking of someone named Winnan-Nin, he was basically saying that the Vietnamese don't have an indigenous intellectual tradition. The Vietnamese should just create themselves a new. And so Tham Quynh is actually arguing with Winnan-Nin here and Tham Quynh is saying, "Actually, no. We have something to be proud of." And that is the tale of Gio. There's a famous essay that Tham Quynh writes and he starts it by saying, "No, I know you can't do." Like among the people of our country, who doesn't know the tale of Gio? Everyone knows it. Poor people know it, rich people know it, men, women. It's something that unites people across lines of class and regions. And so Tham Quynh just lavishes so much praise on the tale of Gio and uses us language like the tale of Gio shines every day with greater purity and brilliance. He totally glosses over the fact that it's a Chinese original. He doesn't even talk about that. He's like, "Yeah, it's from China, but still, this is completely Vietnamese." Right, he quickly mentions that it was borrowed from China, but he says, "Winnzu was able to add features to this work that were absent from the original." And what Tham Quynh is doing is so radical because we know this story existed since 18th, 19th century, at least a hundred years before Tham Quynh took it up and say, "This is the source and essence of our country." So sometimes I wonder about the critiques of Tham Quynh as this far removed elite intellectual, but really he's aware that this pertinence of Gio, he had to be in touch with some of the classes that were not just the elite. Yeah, Tham Quynh is doing political work here. By saying that the tale of Gio is this amazing thing to be proud of, he's basically trying to get the Vietnamese to have confidence because at this time, they're feeling inferior, that maybe the French defeated us, conquered us because they were stronger and better than us. And that's the social Darwinism that you were just talking about. Social Darwinism was the most influential explanation of colonialism at this time because the guy who coined the term, social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer, who was the most famous European intellectual at the time. And so Tham Quynh here, he's saying that this poem, the tale of Gio, the product of an enemy's mind, so a Vietnamese mind, as yet unaffected by any foreign influence other than the Chinese, should have so many features in common with the greatest production of the French spirit, is not the least originally striking thing about it. So basically, he's saying Vietnamese people, we are as good as the French. - And it's one of the earliest Vietnamese texts that would be translated into French by Wimimbing, like also comes for something. Okay, so there's so many interesting themes in Gio, and maybe talking about the themes will help us demystify this metaphor a little bit more. I want to start with the stanza that I read in the very beginning that really highlights one of the most important lessons of Gio, there's so many, but this is one of the first. The Vietnamese goes, In this lifespan on Earth, talent and destiny are apt to feud. The story encapsulates this tension between talent or your capacity or ability to do something or to change something, maybe self-determination, versus fate, all the things that are out of your control, whether that's the circumstances, your beauty, all of these things that Gio encounters that are out of her control. And how this interaction, this tension between talent and destiny play out in the story also touches upon so many other elements, so many other themes like karma, friliopiety. What do you think about this tension between fate and talent? - I think it's so central to the story itself, but it's also a universal theme, I mean, it jumps out to me as a political theorist, Machiavelli. Machiavelli was very famous for saying that there are really two forces in the universe here. There's fortuna, which is stuff that's outside of your control and vettu, your own talent, your own ability and skill to handle what comes at you. These are tensions that we also see in the tale of Q. - As with fate, as with talent, there's always this universal search for equilibrium. And so the last two lines of this first answer is really interesting. Is it so strange that losses, balance gains, blue heavens want to strike a rose from spite? One way to interpret this is because Guil is so beautiful because she is so talented, she has all of these things going on for her. She's bound to meet these awful things. And I don't know about you, Kevin, but this balance, these karmic energies, really map on to my life. - Oh really? - It's just like how I approach decision-making, how I narrate things that happen in my life. For example, maybe I'll overpay for an experience. And in my mind, naturally, I'm going to think, I'm going to get something else for free. So it's okay. This constant balance is always working in my mind, whether that's very menial everyday life experiences or larger encounters. - I have to share something. This is so appropriate. It's a yesterday. I got an email and I learned that one of my articles was rejected from a peer-reviewed journal. And I was sad, right? I was sad and then I taught a class. And then I came back to my office. I opened up my email again. And I'm not even kidding. I got an email from another journal that said, they accepted my other article. (laughing) I like, I got a rejection and an acceptance in the same day. - That's crazy. So that's exactly what happened to me literally two weeks ago. I got a rejection from this major opportunity that I thought I wanted. And probably did want to, I would have been nice. I think it was on Tuesday. And then on Thursday, I got an offer from this other opportunity. Very drastically different. But what I mean by how I nearly things is when you're always looking towards balance and sense-making through the lens of balance. In my mind, when I got these two different news, I thought, okay, well that makes sense. This is probably the better thing. This is probably more appropriate. And it just makes me think about, and you tell me if this is relevant, how a lot of immigrant experiences, we really try to narrow it losses to be gains. Another way to think about this is, I didn't get this opportunity, but you know, it's okay because this is probably not for me and it probably works out for the better that I didn't get this. That may or may not be true, but I think this, and I'm gonna say inherent because I'm Vietnamese, this inherent search for balance makes it so that when something bad happens, I'm gonna look for a positive. I'm going to try to find a server lining. Just because that's just how I feel like the universe should operate. - Yeah, that makes sense. The poem says, is it so strange that losses balance gains? Well, is it strange? We see that throughout the poem, especially at the end, when Demkin says to Kiu, look, you've gone through so much now, you're going to be rewarded. - This first dance actually warns us of all of these crazy things that are gonna happen in the Huincenthalm version. It's, you're gonna go through a play of Ebb and Flow. And this is why he says, is it so strange that this beautiful Kiu is going to have such misfortune? No, it's not, it's inevitable. - It's interesting that Timothy Allen version says, tragedy is circular and infinite. - I think both are quite beautiful in their own way. - Let's talk about the role of women here. - So in our last episode, one of my qualms, if you recall, is how the national fate gets mapped on to the Vinnie's woman's body. And this is exactly what's happening. And I think Drinkiu actually sets the precedent for why this mapping on of national history onto the woman's body is so prevalent. It started with Drinkiu. Thanks, Wenzoo. So if you look at this story, her father screws up. Her father gets into debt. At this time, it's men trading with each other and the men's group and then it's up to the women to resolve it. (laughs) I think that makes sense. But in a more optimistic reading, we might see that filial piety, but also this universal connection of karma and events makes everything connected. Whether you're in the living world or the dead, like the way that she encounters dampens. One of the possibilities why Kiu might have encountered such misfortune is that something might have happened in her past life. And the circularity, maybe the return of tragedy, as Tim Allen says, this equilibrium in the universe makes it so nothing is independent. And I think that's really beautiful. - That's a great way of putting it. That's also a very Buddhist way of putting it. Everything is interdependent. That is one of the major themes of this. I thought it was really interesting also that Timothy Allen notes that if you look at how the story begins, so Kiu is walking with her siblings through these fields, that would not have happened in the Chinese version because women's feet in China were bound. - That's right. - But in Vietnam, women's feet were never bound. And that is a major difference. And she has this agency that is more progressive than in China at the time. One other thing that I found really interesting and it just kept coming up over and over and over again is that Kiu would say, "Mother, you did so much for me. "I have so much debt to you. "You raised me, you gave me life. "You did so much, I need to give back." And so there's this sense of obligation running throughout the whole story. None of this is voluntary stuff. Like you said, yeah, everything is dependent, interdependent, and therefore just full of debt running throughout. Don't you think this is pretty different from how we Americans think? - Yeah, I use this meditation app called Calm. And one of the themes for the other day was how kindness is like a ripple effect. You throw a rock into the pond and then these ripple effects reach all the way to the edge of the water. And it's just this really beautiful idea of how one person's action can unleash events that you yourself are not aware of or in control of, but that you initiate it through that one little donation, one little smile. - That's also, I would just say, a very confusion way of looking at this essential continuum between the individual and society that for Confucius, the most worthwhile thing anyone could do is cultivate theirself and that will impact others in a gradation, like a circle. - Right. And so how do you think this comes into conflict with our experience in America where there's this emphasis on individualism, where you need to worry about yourself, where sometimes I feel like the things that are happening outside of my immediate world seem so far removed and it's so easy to not think about it. What's happening on the other side of the world can actually affect me, but I just don't feel it. I don't think about it. Obviously we know that it does. As Americans, maybe we can look to this confusion model a little bit more. - Yeah, I think the Confucian mode of thinking shares some similarities with American individualism, actually. So American individualism is focused on cultivating yourself. Confucius said the same thing. Focus on cultivating yourself, but Confucius said, cultivate yourself in a way that makes you have more run, which translates to care. So that's what it means to be virtuous and to be cultivated. It's you become a more caring person. So it's not this selfish individualism, but it's a kind of relational thing. Kiu is just full of care. That's all she's doing throughout this whole thing. She's just caring for other people. - And this goes back to the critique of the women's role in this literature, only one point in the story. Do I feel like Kiu has any say, any agency? Because she's just taken from one place to another, one marriage to another, and she's just going along with it. There's never any moment where she speaks against any form of authority or any decision that's made for her until the very end, when she's married to Kim, and they're about to have sex essentially, and Kiu goes, no. She says no because she's too embarrassed, she's too ashamed, but I also think there's an element of preservation of self-dignity there. And she's saying that this isn't necessary. This is her one moment of agency. So it says, "And everything they wish for comes true because it's their destiny to be together. Marriage turns these lovers into friends." - Friendship is ultimately the ideal here. It's platonic, and we think of the platonic forms. It's something more pure than love because it's not sexual. It's truer, it's more pure. - There's so many things that we can still say about Jiu and Kiu and what it represents, but just like how we mentioned last week, this empty container, Jiu and Kiu has been used up by so many different groups in so many different ways. And I'm going to talk about the political things, but I do want to mention all of the different adaptations of Jiu and Kiu in contemporary society. I don't know how many versions of a Kiu film has been released. There's just so many. And the most recent, when I think came out in 2019, it's this very elaborate Chinese drama-inspired aesthetic. And I wonder to what extent each realization of the tale of Jiu in modern media is a reflection of our society. I say this because I remember seeing a play when I was in Paris. Before years ago, it was a modern version of Jiu. It was in front, it was reduced, but one of the most striking things was that at the end, Jiu has a son who is handicapped. And at first, I was like, this is so irrelevant. What does this have to do with this story? But the point of the author, who is a Vietnamese writer, actually, who lives in France, was that Jiu struggles never end. And I think his implication is when you have a child who needs special care, it just requires a certain energy. And so even after she gets married with Kim, her struggles don't end. It also touches upon the struggles of motherhood. This version just extends it even more. And this is such a theme. If we take it to be true that this poem is the essence of Vietnamese-ness or something like that, there's this idea that Vietnamese people just go through so much. They were colonized by the Chinese, and then colonized by the French, occupied by the Japanese, and then war with the Americans, and then they become refugees. There's this victim, victim victim, but they're not just victims in refugees, but they're also survivors, and they make it through this whole thing. And they remain true to themselves. And I think that's what Tham Kwin was trying to say about this poem. They can stay true to themselves despite all these hardships being forced to serve others at some point. So if I can just actually modify something I had said earlier, regarding the lack of agency in Kiu, it's true that she's not involved in a lot of the decision making in her life. But, and this is what's tying back to what you're mentioning, Kevin, of perseverance, of hope, is she always makes it work. When she goes into the lo-sang, the brothel, she somehow becomes the most popular woman who's most desired, or when she meets the pirate. Somehow, we end up still having a very happy life. Yeah, yeah, obviously surprised by that. She actually is happy with these other dunes that she gets married to. There's this idea of making the best of what is given you. And I think goes back to the very beginning of what I was saying about always looking for the silver lining or the good in the bad. A one word that Kwin Santong uses at the end of his introduction, he says, "If, like Kiu, the Vietnamese accept an endure," that's the word, "with fortitude, whatever happens to them. Some day, they will have paid the cost of their evil karma and will achieve both personal and national salvation." The thing is, it's one day. We don't know when that's gonna happen. It's almost messianistic. We're waiting for the savior. Waiting for this day where karma's gonna be balanced. But it happens like every day. There's a bad time in the morning and then a few hours later, a good thing. So, three day is the day. I think the major point is that as long as you endure with fortitude, did we even mention that Kiu tried to kill herself twice? She doesn't die. Right, right. Fate still saves her. It's like saying, "Okay, the balance hasn't been restored yet, so you can die. You have to meet Gimjong first." There, again, is this play between talent and destiny, between your own control and stuff that's outside of your control. And just the circularity of life. Yeah, I think one thing that it has that the West doesn't have is really this belief in karma. This very Buddhist belief that there's this cosmic balance that kind of talk, we don't have that in the West. I guess it's a very viewed thing that I had never really appreciated until now. So going back to the very beginning when we started talking about why we wanted to broach this tale of Kiu in our podcast is obviously a return to a very essential element of Vietnamese culture and one that we want to make more familiar, more accessible. With all the themes that we've discussed, even if we're not familiar with the story, we're familiar with those themes. It's a topic really worth talking about because it puts those themes into this artistic form. It's such an easy way to get grounded in Vietnamese culture, I think. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are influenced by the tale of Kiu and by we, I mean Vietnamese people, Vietnamese Americans too. And in that light, I feel like there's a connection that we all share. And we were talking about these Buddhist and Confucian ideas of not only being self-sufficient individuals, but that everything that we do is connected. And I think the tale of Kiu, some of its themes about karma, about the world of women, filial piety are all things that connect us as people who are interested in Vietnam, as people who care about Vietnam. And so, because we're talking about poetry, I actually want to close with this poem that my friend jumped in her film on Hoing Santhong, LHG for the time being, actually reads in its entirety, but it's a beautiful poem. And it talks about the wind, and I think that's relevant because so much of our podcasts is about these energies and these ideas that emerge from Vietnam through this gust of thought. Anyway, this poem is called "Dorva Ting Iu Thoi Trinh Đer Thuc Thoi" and the English translation is "Win the Love" blow across the landscape of my homeland and it's written by a poet named Lu Quan Vũ. If only I can transform into a gust of wind to fully embrace this nascent nation, to blow warmth to those cold hills, to cool down the fire-hot rooftops, to always return back to life, wind, and love blow across the landscape of my homeland. You know sometimes I think maybe these pieces of literature like Kiu Kiu are also like these gust of winds that we encounter in our life and that bring us back to Vietnam and even if we're not there physically, there's always this pining, this appreciation and love for our country if we're not fully there. [BLANK_AUDIO]