especially in the domain of poetry. It should be noted, however, that although the Vietnamese used Chinese scripts, they had their own pronunciation.
Nguyen Du apparently was not interested in worldly wealth, nor did he accumulate it. Even when he was a mandarin under the Nguyen Dynasty, he had difficulty making ends meet. While living with his brother in the capital, he was a reveler himself and developed a compassion for prostitutes, singers, and call girls. During his sixteen years of exile and abject poverty, he witnessed the sufferings of the populace, who had to toil from morn ‘till eve but still suffered from want and from the oppression by the feudal administration system in which self-serving mandarins could do whatever they wanted to build up their wealth to the detriment of the populace. He was well aware of the fact that he was difficult to understand as revealed by the following verses of his:
I wonder, more than three hundred years after I die,
Whether anyone would understand me and cry.
He was also an emotional type of person. During a cabinet meeting where state affairs were being discussed, Nguyen Du burst into tears, to the surprise of the Emperor who presided at the meeting and of all the mandarins present. Being a true Confucianist, he should have controlled his emotions. Is it true that strong emotions make great poets?
Kieu, the greatest masterpiece of the Vietnamese literature and probably the longest poem on earth, consisting of 3,254 verses, borrowed its theme from a second-class Chinese novel by Thanh Tam Tai Nhan, an almost unknown Chinese author. Why did a great poet like Nguyen Du have to use another author’s theme for his masterpiece? Probably he wanted to use a Chinese story as an alibi. Should there be anything in his work that could be interpreted as critical of the dynasty he was serving, he could easily reject any critic by saying that the story he told happened in China hundreds of years ago, not in Vietnam. Apparently, he wanted to confide in his work an aspiration dear to him but not in favor of the emperor he was serving, to launch an outcry against the injustice to which he and his countrymen were submitted, and to depict the miseries and harrowing ordeals of the populace under the oppressing monarchy. Probably that’s why he warned the readers right at the beginning of his work that the story he was going to tell took place in China
under the Ming Dynasty (1368-1566) hundreds of years before, not in Vietnam.
Under the reign of Gia Tinh Emperor (1522-1566) of the Ming Dynasty, there lived a small bourgeois, Mr. Vuong, who had two girls and a boy. The eldest child, a girl named Thuy Kieu, the heroine of the poem, was a great beauty endowed with exceptional poetic and musical talents. On a festival day, when people went out to visit and clean graves as well as to enjoy the green and clean air of springtime, Kieu cried over the abandoned grave of Dam Tien, a singer, and courtesan. On the same day, she had an unexpected encounter with a handsome young man, a former schoolmate of her younger brother Vuong Quan. They were irresistibly attracted to each other. That night, Kieu dreamed of the ghost of Dam Tien, who informed her that she belonged to the corporation of “Rent Trails Girls” or courtesans. Kim Trong succeeded in seeing Kieu again, and the two exchanged a solemn love oath, disregarding the Confucianist ethic prevalent at the time. Unfortunately, Kim Trong’s uncle died, leaving no descendants, and he had to return to his native place to conduct the funeral as dictated by tradition. This terribly agonized the two lovers, who had just begun to know each other.
After Kim Trong’s departure, a catastrophe fell upon the Vuong family: Mr. Vuong, a victim of a slanderous denunciation, was arrested, and Kieu had to sell herself for a large sum of money needed to bribe the authorities and save her father. Thus, she became the concubine of a certain Ma Giam Sinh. Before