VIETNAMESE LITERARY WORKS

A Classical epic poem with book cover in Chinese text, 
published 1967 Also known as Truyện Kiều.

 THE TALE OF KIEU 

by Nguyen Du

Vương Thúy Kiều— a beautiful and educated girl — is visiting her ancestors' graves with her younger sister Thuý Vân and brother Vương Quan. On the way she met a grave of a dead performer—Đạm Tiên, who was said to be as beautiful and talented as she is but lived a life full of grief. There, she also met and promised to marry Kim Trọng, a young and talented scholar, but their marriage is delayed because he has to go back home to mourn a relative for half a year.

During that time misfortune started to happen to Kiều. Her family is framed by a silk dealer, all their wealth has been taken away by the government, and her father and brother are facing imprisonment. Kiều decides to sell herself to Scholar Mã to free her family, therefore showing her deeply rooted love for her family, while not forgetting the promise with Kim Trọng and has it resolved by asking her sister, Thúy Vân, to fulfill it. Scholar Mã turns out to be a person who is in charge of finding girls for a brothel run by Madam Tú. He rapes Kiều and takes her back to the brothel, but she refuses to serve any guest and threatens to commit suicide if she is forced to do so. Madam Tú devised a plan to crush Kiều's dignity by hiring Sở Khanh, a playboy and con artist, to meet Kiều and coerce her into eloping with him, and then lead her into Tú's trap. With nothing left to hold on to, Kiều finally submits and becomes a prostitute.

Kiều's beauty attracts many men, including Student Thúc, who uses his wealth to buy Kiều out of the brothel and marry her, although he already has a wife named Lady Hoạn, who is the daughter of prime minister Hoạn. Upon knowing this, Hoạn burns with jealousy and secretly tells her henchmen to kidnap and force Kiều to become a slave in her house when Thúc is on the way to visit her. Thúc is shocked at the sight of Kiều as a slave, but never dares to reach out to her in front of his first wife.

Kiều runs away from the estate, stealing two candlesticks in the process. She goes to a Buddhist temple, where nun Giác Duyên graciously accepts her. However, after realizing that Kiều is carrying stolen property, she is thrown out and again gets tricked into another brothel, Madam Bạc's, where she meets Từ Hải, leader of a revolution army. Từ Hải and Kiều get married and live together for five years, together reigning over a temporary kingdom.

Later, she has been tricked by Hồ Tôn Hiến, Kiều convinces her husband to surrender all in favor of amnesty. This eventually leads to the invasion of Từ Hải's kingdom, and the death of Từ Hải himself. Mesmerized by Kiều's beauty, Hồ Tôn Hiến forces her to perform in his victory banquet, where he rapes her. To avoid bad rumors, he hurriedly marries Kiều off to a local official. Feeling devastated, she throws herself into the Tiền Đường river. Once again, Giác Duyên saves her, as she prophesied about Kiều's fate long ago. Meanwhile, Kim Trọng, Kiều's first love, becomes an official and is providing housing for Kiều's parents. He has been searching for Kiều, and eventually finds her with the Buddhist nun Giác Duyên. Kiều is reunited with her first love and her family, thus ending her cycle of bad karma. She is married to Kim Trọng, but refuses to have a physical relationship with him because she thinks she is no longer worthy.

Source:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Kieu?fbclid=IwAR1mCBFX-4Q3wlkV2HHj8pbsQ6k3u8wXt5YDykhtxGXcdWuLh7RnYkZMD1g

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THE SORROW OF WAR

Published in 1990 with original title, 

Thân phận của tình yêu (Identity of love).

by Bao Ninh

Kien has become Missing-In-Action in the fallout of the Vietnam War. He is tasked with the clean up and treatment of the bodies and remains of bodies in the Jungle of Screaming Souls. In the aftermath of the recently ended war, Kien and his friends attempt to forget the horrors and atrocities they have witnessed, all while literally burying the dead.

But Kien is not actually still in 1975. Rather, he has returned to his nearly apocalyptic experiences of trauma for the specific purpose of finishing his novel. It has been forty years since the war ended, but Kien can re-experience it all as if he were still there. Kien remembers the devastation the war brought to his community. His father abandoned hope, burned his paintings and died. Phuong sacrificed herself for Kien's life after Hoa raped her. He remembers the hosts of soldiers in the bars following the war, drinking to erase the traumatic memories, taking prostitutes in Hanoi.

Kien explains that he's not sharing all this for nothing; he's trying to capture the horror of war, because he feels the reader will likely not understand how terrifying it really was. He shares battle stories and writes about the deaths of his loved ones and comrades.

After a considerable exposition from Kien, Bao Ninh introduces himself to the reader (in the book, of course). Bao explains that he has been working with Kien to finish the novel, and although Kien has departed from this life, Bao explains that Kien's decision to finally look into his own traumatized past yielded a reward for Kien in these final days of his life: he remembered the way things used to feel when they were all naive and innocent, before the war.

 Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrow_of_War

https://www.gradesaver.com/the-sorrow-of-war/study-guide/summary

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The first novel by Vietnamese-American about

 the Vietnam war and its result, published in 1997.

MONKEY BRIDGE

by Lan Cao

Monkey Bridge traverses several opposing worlds. The novel consists of two narrators: Mai, a teenage Vietnamese immigrant, who flees to the United States on the day Saigon falls in 1975, and her mother, Thanh, who manages to join Mai a few months after Mai is settled in the U.S.

Three years after their arrival in the United States, Thanh is in the hospital with a blood clot in her brain, suffering paralysis of half side. She has been calling out for Baba Quan, her father, in her sleep. Thanh and Baba Quan were supposed to meet in Saigon and leave for America together back in 1975, but this plan fails because Baba Quan, for some unknown reason, did not show up. Since then, Thanh has "never truly recovered from the misfortune that left him without the means to leave Saigon".

Mai, who worries about her mother's health and understands how desperately her mother wants to see Baba Quan, decides to make a dangerous trip to Canada with her best friend Bobbie, where they plan to make a phone call to Baba Quan once they cross the border and hopefully take a wild chance to bring her grandfather to the United States. The plan, however, did not succeed. Mai retreats at the last minute because she not only fears of being deported by the U.S government but also recalls what her father says all the time: "One wrong move ... the entire course of a country changed", in which he refers to America's decision to make the crucial commitment in the Vietnam War.

Thanh is discharged by the hospital and decides to temporarily leave her Vietnam past behind so she can move on. She becomes socially active again in the Vietnamese American community, Little Saigon. Meanwhile, Mai, idling around at home in the summer before attending college, gets very curious about her mysterious grandfather and starts to pry into things about Baba Quan from her mother and different acquaintances, such as Mrs. Bay, Thanh's best friend, and Uncle Michael, a Vietnam veteran who befriended her father and brought her to the United States when Saigon fell. After several attempts, Mai still fails to learn anything specific about Baba Quan; all they would tell her are some basic facts and superficial comments. She also fails to convince Uncle Michael to help her grandfather relocate in the United States.

Wanting to know more about her mother's and Baba Quan's Vietnam past—"the vivid details that accompanied every fault and fracture, every movement and shift that had forced her apart and at the same time kept her stitched together", Mai sneaks in her mother's room and steals the letters that her mother has kept writing her, but has not let her read them yet. From her mother's secret letters, Mai finally learns the unspoken family history that Thanh has been avoiding telling her and the reason why Baba Quan did not show up at their escape.

Unable to maintain his rental payments, Baba Quan, whom Thanh once believed to be her father, prostitutes his wife to his rich landlord, Uncle Khan, whose wife is sterile. Tuyet, Baba Quan's wife, later on has Khan's child, Thanh. From this act, Baba Quan secures his land and gets endless benefits from the rich landlord. The Khan's soon adopt Thanh and send her to a Catholic boarding school. Living with shame and rage, Baba Quan has been planning to get revenge on his landlord by committing murder but never succeeds. Later on when the war begins, Baba Quan becomes a Vietcong. His village is declared a free-fire zone, and his family is moved away from their ancestral land to a nearby strategic hamlet, while he stays there to keep working with the Vietcong. Thanh's mother dies during the transition. In accordance with Vietnamese ritual, Thanh has to escort her mother's body back to their home village for burial. By a riverbank on her way back home, Thanh witnesses Baba Quan murder his landlord. Struck with panic, Thanh runs away and leaves her mother's body behind. Because Thanh loses her mother's body and fails to perform the proper burial rituals, she is left with a permanent scar and never adjusts to her new life in America.

Source:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_Bridge?fbclid=IwAR0_iT4Jg_aOcez1QdZmr3LR9SUqgUQH0VCqwdar6HvyUZpzsJDwnMUhKFU

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