thương
by Xen Nhà
My body is a map with no beginning or end in sight.
Some days I am acutely sensitive to touch, smell and listening. The rustling of the banana tree outside my bedroom reminds me of where I am and where I come from. Every time my mother sees the banana tree, her face blushes like her name Hồng—a rose. Her childhood memory is alive.
One rare early morning, I woke up to see Venus as a morning star. Venus, the brightest luminary in the sky (Aside from the Sun and the Moon) rises before the Sun shines bright. I see everything before me but am overwhelmed at what to take in and rushed by capitalist time to make the day worthwhile. During the most recent Venus retrograde, which lasted for 40 days and 40 nights and happens about every two years, we lost a few teachers of love and justice; bell hooks and Thầy Thích Nhất Hạnh. It was also during this Venus Retrograde, that my great maternal grandmother, Bà Cố, passed away and where my family and I grieved her in a seven-week long funeral. That’s why I’ve come to love Venus—a crisp and bright star gazing directly at me before sunrise—she reminds me of my reasons to love and my teachers, living and passed, that have taught me love.
For a decade, I would eat any morsel of the Vietnamese language, just to feel close to it. Every word or phrase that I’d stumble on were butterflies fluttering before me. I would try to catch them, only to find myself wind-swept in language.
A song wails on the wings of the wind. A tonal language that insists that I speak each word with feeling. ‘Feeling’ is a wide enough scope for me to digress into infinite possibilities. But with love, this is more than a feeling. There are many words we use to express love in Vietnamese. Though, most of the time, it is through our actions and not our words that we show love. However, two words come to mind—yêu and thương. In a conversation I had with dear Nu, we were discussing these words. They told me that thương has a deeper meaning. It means you respect and care for each other, whereas yêu is more for romantic love. Dear Thảo, also told me that bị thương means wound. I imagine the repair work we are doing in the name of love: dabbing dầu xanh at the back of the throat, arnica oil for bruised skin, therapy to heal the deeper invisible wounds.
For a decade, I would eat any morsel of the Vietnamese language, just to feel close to it. Every word or phrase that I’d stumble on were butterflies fluttering before me. I would try to catch them, only to find myself wind-swept in language.
I learnt at a young age to never touch a butterfly’s wings, for it is extremely fragile and delicate. A creature of the sky that licks the nectar of the earth; born with a body that ascends delicately, and kisses death with its fragility.
Riding on the wings of a butterfly, my mother tongue recites a poem to me. It’s an epic poem. A poem that has been recited and cited by a whole country and its children for generations:
| Trăm năm trong cõi người ta,
Chữ tài chữ mệnh khéo là ghét nhau. Trải qua một cuộc bể dâu, Những điều trông thấy đã đau đớn lòng. Lạ gì bỉ sắc tư phong, Trời xanh quen với má hồng đánh ghen.7 |
A hundred years – in this life span 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 Heaven's wont to strike a rose from spite.8 |
Kiều is loved because she reflects the values that honour her family, her nation, her country: loyalty and filial piety. Her character has been used as means of collaboration to advance national liberation or to agitate social change throughout Việt Nam’s history.9 In the 1920s, French collaborator Phạm Quỳnh evoked Truyện Kiều to push forward his belief that Vietnam’s nationhood should collaborate with French colonisers. He was well-known as the editor-in-chief of Nam Phong—a magazine used to promote collaboration with the French colonial regime. For this, he was regarded as a pro-colonial collaborator.10 He believed that Việt Nam needed to embrace ‘both the Vietnamese vernacular, and the romanised alphabet (Quốc Ngữ) as the new linguistic vehicles of modern Vietnamese nationalism’.11 He uses Truyện Kiều to appeal to the mass. He states, ‘[Among] the people of our country, who does not know The Tale of Kiều? Who has not memorised some measure of lines from The Tale of Kiều? Who does not know clearly the story of the maiden Kiều, or does not feel for Miss Kiều—a beautiful lady, cursed by fate, full of talent and beauty, but who encountered a destiny of broken hearts, fifteen years of bitterness in life, as though cruelly spurned by Heaven so as to make a shining mirror for all those of shallow disposition?’12 Imagination is a powerful tool, and here Kiều has been imagined, written and evoked throughout history to ascend patriarchal and nationalist ideas of Vietnamese women.
What is most fascinating to me about this poem is how Vietnamese people have loved and lived Kiều’s story in their lives. How does Kiều live in the imagination of Vietnamese people and culture? Outside of the patriarchal and nationalist imaginations of who Kiều is, we have an infinite well of stories of Vietnamese women who have been touched by Kiều’s story, some even believing that they are the real Kiều. My mother is one of them. And to some extent, I have wondered if I am Kiều as well.
There’s a saying among Vietnamese people that if you are beautiful, then you will suffer. Kiều too was beautiful:
| Kiều càng sắc-sảo mặn-mà,
so bề tài sắc lại là phần hơn. Làn thu-thủy nét xuân-sơn, hoa ghen thua thắm liễu hờn kém xanh. Một hai nghiêng nước nghiêng thành, sắc đành đòi một tài đanh họa hai. Thông-minh vốn sẵn tư trời, pha nghề thi họa đủ mùi ca ngâm.13 |
Yet Kiều possessed a keener, deeper charm,
surpassing Van in talents and in looks. Her eyes were autumn streams, her brows spring hills. Flowers grudged her glamour, willows her fresh hue. A glance or two from her, and kingdoms rocked! Supreme in looks, she had few peers in gifts. By Heaven blessed with wit, she knew all skills: she could write verse and paint, could sing and chant.14 |
After an encounter with the grave of a woman who died, Kiều begins to believe that her fate is to suffer as well:
|
Một mình lưỡng-lự canh chầy,
đường xa nghĩ nỗi sau này mà kinh. Hoa trôi bèo giạt đã đành, biết duyên mình biết phận mình thế thôi. 15 |
Alone with her dilemma in deep night,
she viewed the road ahead and dread seized her. A rose afloat, a water fern adrift: such was the lot her future held in store.16 |
Yet as the poem progresses, Kiều overcomes her struggles. Perhaps this is why Vietnamese Buddhist monks love Truyện Kiều so much, to the extent that there is even a reading ceremony that references this epic poem. Every lunar new year, and on special auspicious occasions, Buddhist monks recite verses from Truyện Kiều in response to our most pressing life questions. Boi Kiều, we call it, where we pick a random number which corresponds with a verse in the poem. We ask a question and the monks give us guidance based on our chosen verse. When we recite from this epic poem, everyone can apply a part of Kiều to their life. Kiều’s beauty, her choices, her suffering and her happiness are all lessons that generations of Vietnamese people have turned to for guidance.
What feels true is that there is a multiplicity in the narrative of Kiều. Trinh.T. Minh-Ha explores this multiplicity and Kiều’s story in her film A Tale of Love. In Minh-ha’s film, the main character, whose name is also Kiều, is researching about Truyên Kiều. The film explores the multiplicity that exists between Kiều and the women that surround her. Her mentor and friend, Juliet, becomes the person whom Kiều knows will write back and listen to her. Even when Kiều is dreaming, it is the voices and songs of women that transports her from moment to moment and from dream to reality. Since the poem is written in a rhythm borrowed from Vietnamese folk songs and proverbs, it is easy for Vietnamese people of all classes to remember and recite verses. In an interview, Minh-ha points out that Kiều ‘personifies love… that she is not one heroine, not one character… but she is numberless. There are many Kiều’s as there are talented women across generations whose destinies Kiều story has typified’.17
It is no wonder that Vietnamese people who live in the diaspora are referred to as Việt Kiều. We are the ones who, like me, are continually threading narratives of where we’ve been, where we are going and where we are. The multiplicity of narrative playing out across time. Language as a relationship of love. The life cycle of a rose becoming compost becoming a rose. Venus, lifting the veil of the night. Answering the knock at the door of destiny. Fearless and in love.