The Song of Kieu: Poem as page-turner and Vietnam travelogue

Nov 30, 2024

12 min read

I spend a psychotic amount of time thinking about the ideal times and places to read certain books. The Victorians in the fall. The French in the spring (for some reason). I can’t read Russians in the summer, or Latin Americans in winter. I should probably just have a kid, rather than ring my hands over finding the perfect beach read. I’m 42. It’s time. But you chase that sweet, sweet dragon because every once in a while… you read something like The Song of Kieu in a place like Vietnam.

A couple years ago, M. and I travelled to Northern Vietnam for five weeks. It was notoriously cheap, food seemed great, Anthony Bourdain always talked it up, and M. wanted to do the Ha Giang Loop. (The Ha Giang Loop requires it's own post, maybe one about re-listening to the audiobook of Jack Kerouac's On the Road around that time.)

For the time and energy I spent on my Vietnam booklist I could have performed brain surgery or landed a rocket. I really do believe that. The booklist was this: The Quiet American by Graham Greene, The Song of Kieu by Nguyen Du, Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain, Lafcadio’s Adventures by Andre Gide and A Million Little Pieces by James Frey (which was a bad call… I overthought it… and I didn’t end up reading it in Vietnam anyway).

The Song of Kieu is a Vietnamese epic poem by Nguyen Du published around 1820. I believe it is the national poem of Vietnam. They read it in school, like we do Shakespeare, I learned.

(Sidenote: I was going to bring Paradise of the Blind by the Vietnamese writer Duong Thu Huong, a brilliant novel about three Vietnamese women set in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. But I learned the novel was among the books banned by the communist government there, along with 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell.)

The Song of Kieu was apparently based on a Chinese novel published between the collapse of one dynasty (Ming) and the early years of another (Qing). The novel, a proponent of the then-popular genre called the “talent-beauty” novel, was called Jin Yun Qiao Zhuan and published around 1660. It’s all loosely based on historical events, which even involves pirates.

This line from the Penguin Classics introduction talks about the source material versus the resulting Song of Kieu:

“A century and a half later … that old half-forgotten novel was picked up by Nguyen Du, who translated it into transcendent Vietnamese poetry.”

The Song of Kieu: M. and I go to Vietnam

M. and I flew into Hanoi. The first morning, I pounded five Vietnamese coffees in the hotel without realizing, good God, Vietnamese people drink strong coffee. Different bean, apparently. It’s like a notch below electric chair. When we stepped outside to greet the day, I was met by a wall of scooters and had a full-blown panic attack. I was scared I’d faint and fall into any one of the bubbling pots of chicken feet lining the streets. My terror was quenched by a freshly squeezed juice.

After getting ripped off by a cab driver in Hanoi, we bussed a couple hours to the mountainous rice fields of Pu Luong. That’s fun to say. When we reached the mountain roads, I was concerned for the driver’s mental state. He drove like we were transporting a human heart on ice. I had no idea you could experience turbulence in a bus.

On Day 3 in Pu Luong (pictured), I started reading The Song of Kieu.

On the first page:

This manuscript is ancient, priceless,

bamboo-rolled, perfumed with musty spices.

Sit comfortably by this good light, that you may learn

the hard-won lesson that these characters contain.

That day, Tom, our host at Inh La Home (homestay), took us on long walks through the mountain forests. We took a bamboo raft down a serene river.

We went to totally empty bar. You had to take the raft to get there. Outside the bar, farmers were drinking around a picnic table on the riverbank. They seemed to be suffering scurvy and a delirium of sorts. Whatever it was that killed Nietzsche. They’d been drinking for two weeks during the Lunar New Year, or Tet, our homestay host explained. Like we used to in Mary's Harbour in Labrador during the Crab Festival. Except these crazy bastards ripped off the tops of their beer cans and drank from the razor’s edge. We had a beer with them. Their fingernails were long and yellow. One of them swayed and leered at M. Our host determined now was a good time to go. We went.

On another walk, we heard karaoke blaring harshly from giant, communist-grade speakers. You sensed these were used during Stalin rallies. We walked toward the sound. This is in the middle of the forest, you understand. I have no idea where the electricity came from. Eventually, we passed a hut. Inside the hut was the silhouette of two men, sitting on the dirt floor facing each other. They were drunkenly singing karaoke at the tops of their lungs.

It was about the saddest thing I’d ever seen.

Farther down the same trail, we walked through a small village. There was karaoke there too. They kidnapped us and invited us to sing karaoke with them in a landing under their hut. It felt like a basement or a garage with four open walls, a 360 view. The floor was concrete. There was a giant speaker and microphones. Under the table was a glass and plastic pyramid of empty bottles of booze. Everyone was blackout drunk.

A bored 12-year-old girl sat apart from the group, looking out into the trees.

The frenzy of confused language and meaning reached a fever pitch. I felt physically threatened into singing A Whole New World. So M. and I sang A Whole New World, the Aladdin song.

Inexplicably, these serpents were charmed by our sweet, sweet song, and we were mercifully able to extricate ourselves just before nightfall.

We were then chased by a pack of stray dogs.

The Song of Kieu: The plot

Later that night, I was able to focus on The Song of Kieu while M. and a group of beautiful Vietnamese women from Hanoi, each wearing shiny, tailored red dresses, sang karaoke directly beneath me. M. was drinking some sort of rice-based moonshine with them and singing Celine Dion at the top of her formidable lungs. Miraculously, I was able to focus.

The poem follows the eponymous tragic heroine, Kieu.

A fine painter, singer and poet,

she makes mournful melodies on her lute:

the saddest and the sweetest is ‘Cruel Fate.’

Kieu and her siblings, her brother Vuong Quan and sister Van, go on a walk during the Feast of Pure Light in April, “when families visit the graves of ancestors.” Kieu notices an untended grave, which her brother says belongs to another beautiful singer, Dam Tien, who died the same morning that a stranger, arriving by boat, had heard of her beauty and rushed to “woo and win her in her own homeland.”

Seeing herself in the fate of Dam Tien,

Kieu now brims with a strange melancholy

till tiny pearls run down her cheeks.

Disturbed, Kieu writes a poem of thanks to Dam Tien with her hairpin in the bark of a nearby tree, when a young man named Trong Kim, who is known to the siblings, rides by on a horse.

Kieu and Kim fall in love.

One night, a messenger comes to Kim’s door, saying he has to “fetch the corpse” of his uncle “from that far away country,” and the two lovers are forced apart.

They linger, hand in hand. They cannot part.

But the rising sun is now touching the roof beams.

He tries to tear himself away, and fails.

They whisper their goodbyes. They weep.

Step by step he struggles to leave.

They promise to love each other and reunite.

Within the same chapter, bailiffs burst into Kieu’s parents’ household saying, “A silk merchant wants his money back/Your father owes him a fortune.” The family is shamed. Kieu stands up to the bailiffs. She says she’ll get married and settle her father’s financial affairs. Desperate, she’s easily tricked into working in a brothel.

Yes, a brothel.

Throughout the course of her journey, she becomes a slave, a queen, a nun, and a wife, occasionally endearing herself to her tormentors through her poetry and singing. One such tormentor is named Hoan, who reads Kieu’s writing.

As Hoan reads, she feels as if

a shoal of silver fish

has flitted across her heart.

“She knows how to write,” she says.

“We should feel for her fate and her suffering.

Had she been born into a luckier existence

She might have been living by now in a golden palace.

Instead, she is a woman adrift in a harsh sea:

Blessed by talent, cursed by fate.”

That’s essentially what The Song of Kieu is about.

At this point, I realized I’ve never read a poem that was a page-turner before.

The Song of Kieu: M. and I get Ninh Binh’d

The next day, we were driven by motorcycle about four hours to Ninh Binh. We ripped through isolated mountains and forests, swerving past huddles of ox on the roads and kids outside their huts staring at their cellphones.

I imagined Trong Kim galloping to that far-away country.

Part-way, we stopped at a gas station for lunch. I used the washroom and had to walk through someone’s living room. Vietnamese kids were strewn about the couch watching Vietnamese kids on TV. I felt my way down a hall past buckets of I’m not entirely sure what, certainly I made eye-contact with nothing.

All I remember from lunch was a steaming pile of cabbage which would later haunt M. and I.

Our homestay in Ninh Binh was run by a husband and wife who were maybe 20 and who had a baby a few months old.

On arriving, I was immediately pissed off by the homestay. It wasn’t good enough, apparently. Our room was right off the little dining area. Everything seemed closed in, like we had no privacy. I was being so shitty about it too. I literally did nothing to prepare for this trip while M. planned everything. M. and I got into a huge fight in our room, wept bitterly like two psychopaths, and made up enough to walk around the darkening lake and vanishing mountains to see if the other homestays would be preferable.

That’s when M. started to feel off.

She was so sick she went straight to bed while I sat out in the main area of our homestay drinking a bottle of Saigon and reading The Song of Kieu. The part where Kieu is captured by the imperial army, forced to serve Hu Zongxian wine and play the lute.

Hu Zongxian frowns, and then he weeps.

He asks: ‘What do you call that song?’

All the world’s grief in a single lament.’

‘This song is known as “Cruel Fate,”’ she says.

‘I wrote it long ago, when I was young.

And now I have lived the very sadness

that my song predicts.’

This all turns into me trying to get the young father’s attention. He’s too distracted by his cellphone to grab another beer from the cooler behind the bar.

As this is going on, M. starts audibly puking. There’s a young Western couple eating dinner a table over. They hear it too. They avoid eye-contact with one another and their plates.

Soon, the young mother materializes, approaching me with such innocent alarm as I’ve not seen before or since, asking, in her way, if she can make broth for M. She didn’t speak a word of English. She brought a tray of specifically made food that I was to deliver to our room, none of which M. could stomach.

It was a sleepless night. Kieu would have to wait.

The next morning, the young father was sitting in the common area on his cellphone. His wife placed my breakfast on the bar for him to bring to me while she rushed off to tend to the baby, I’m guessing. I pretended to read while watching the steam from my breakfast dissipate. When he managed to bring it over, he noticed the book cover.

“How did you even hear of this?” he said, looking at me for the first time.

“I wanted to read a Vietnamese book in Vietnam. Is this popular here?”

He told me they read it in school.

M. spent the entire day in bed, being quietly tended on by the young mother.

The young father rented me a scooter. I spent the afternoon driving around in what he called the sugar rain, because when the extremely fine rain lands on the black hair of the Vietnamese, it looks like sugar. The day was particularly dirty. The clouds felt a little like smoke from factory smokestacks.

I listened to John Prine.

At one point, I nearly ran out of gas. Three old hunks of coal were sat on something like lawn chairs in a gas station parking lot. I drove up to them and pointed to the gas tank. Sure, sure, the eldest one kind of said. He disappeared behind a truck and returned with a water bottle of gasoline. He opened the tank and poured the gas in. I pulled out my wallet to pay him, which was brimming with Vietnamese Dong. I pulled out a bill that made him recoil. No, no, he kind of said, stuffed the large bill back in my wallet, and took out a much smaller bill.

We kind of laughed and he waved me away.

At another point, I stopped into a tiny town on the side of the main road to get a Gatorade. The store was small, shiny, and empty. It was filled with candy. It was extraordinarily colourful compared to the grey buildings and day. I poked my head around looking for someone, blinking while I listened. Eventually two small children materialized. They came in through the front. In our non-verbal way, we came to an understanding about the Gatorade. I placed the money in the girl’s tiny hand. I backed away slowly, thanking them profusely. They were so still and silent I wondered if I was even there. As I drove away in the rain, I thought it was the gentlest robbing one could experience.

The next night I got sick and could not read The Song of Kieu. It felt like what I imagine happens to the human body in space. Looking back, I’m actually impressed by how sick you can get without dying. After my own sleepless night (M. had recovered at this point), I spent the next day rolling around in bed, truly writhing in pain, watching Kenny vs. Spenny on my cellphone.

The young mother brought me food and juice and water.

On the second day of my sickness, the couple’s child had his first birthday party just outside our room. But the party was cut short because the child had to go to the hospital for unknown reasons.

While this was happening, the young mother made sure I had enough food and juice and water.

The child was treated overnight and released from hospital.

On the morning M. and I were to take an eight-hour train to Phong Nha, the young mother ran out after our cab. It was all so rushed. She’d brought us something for our journey. I was kind of delirious at this point. Probably it was just bottles of water. M. gave her a nice tip for everything. I mean good God, the room itself smelled like someone had been dead in there for weeks. I was trying not to puke still, but M. said when she handed the young mother the tip, her face changed into such an expression of sheer innocent surprise and joy.

Anyway, somewhere in there is the definition of getting Ninh Binh'd.

The Song of Kieu: Contemplate the lessons of this story

On the eight-hour train to Phong Nha, M. and I shared a tiny room with a young Vietnamese family, this one with two small children. They were so sweet I almost felt bad for wishing them ill. I spent the entire eight hours watching An Idiot Abroad with Karl Pilkington.

At one point, the family got off and nodded somewhat contritely, knowing it was a lot to be stuffed in there with small children. Just as they left, a half-dozen train employees came into our room without even looking at us. M. and I were lying on the top bunks. This group opened a giant banana leaf of steaming food, loudly ate their lunch, and left as fast as they’d come. I didn’t even know who to complain to.

Phong Nha was my favourite place in Vietnam.

The sun came out. On the first day, we rode a scooter freely through the empty mountain roads. We found a place on the main strip that had amazing sandwiches. In the small busy town, you drive through streets lined with red Vietnamese flags fluttering in the warm breeze. Kids play everywhere. A church blared its Soviet speaker at the weirdest hours of the early afternoon. M. learned how to ride a scooter. I stood and watched her go on and come back. We visited caves that felt like enormous emerald cities.

We ate an awesome chicken dinner that’s delivered to you up a strange pully system along a grassy bank.

A dog chased our scooters and M. almost rolled backward down a hill, but I managed to catch her. We scootered along the river. Farmers worked in the fields, small and brightened by the orange sunset.