Word: kieu
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...prominent of them has vowed that he will go elsewhere. Ex-President Nguyen Van Thieu was on Taiwan last week along with his wife, daughter and 89-year-old mother (and ten tons of baggage). The first family of the refugees was staying at the home of Nguyen Van Kieu, Saigon's Ambassador to Taiwan, in suburban Tienmu. The sprawling gray stone building was concealed behind a high wall. Before it stood casually dressed Chinese security officers who could have passed for college students but for the antennas sticking out of the newspaper-wrapped walkie-talkies that they carried...
...entirely appropriate, both for Viet Nam and the U.S., that The Tale of Kieu, a long epic poem that has captivated the Vietnamese for more than 150 years, should now be published in English. Ho Chi Minh incorporated many lines from Kieu into his own poetry. Students in South Vietnamese high schools study it today just as English-speaking students study Shakespeare. In remote villages, mothers recite it to their children as moral instruction and entertainment. If Americans are to understand the Vietnamese and their war -even at this late date-The Tale of Kieu is a good place...
...poem, based on a 16th century Chinese novel, is romantic, melodramatic and at times mildly erotic. Westerners will detect elements of The Perils of Pauline and The Story of O. The 3,525-line poem recounts 15 hellish years in the life of a young girl, Vuong Thuy Kieu. She is beautiful, talented, virtuous-and just headstrong enough to make her interesting in spite of her other sterling qualities. To help pay her family's debts, Kieu sells herself into concubinage and is tricked into becoming a common whore in the house of a ruthless madam. Thereafter Kieu...
There is much more to Kieu than escapist melodrama. Written by a renowned Vietnamese classicist named Nguyen Du (1766-1820), the poem in Vietnamese has a wide range of wordplay. The meter is a flowing iambic called luk-bat, full of rhyming and nearly as easy to memorize as a song. Much of this is unavoidably lost in the otherwise excellent English translation by Huynh Sanh Thong, a Vietnamese scholar who has lived in the U.S. all his adult life. Jaded Western readers who may find Kieu's plight unconvincing can still enjoy the poem for its language, especially...
More important for Americans are the clues Kieu provides to Vietnamese attitudes. Like the heroine of the poem, a great many Vietnamese today believe that they are being punished for some collective sin committed in the dim past. The Tale of Kieu holds out hope that virtue will be rewarded, that free will can alter a person's karma. But it is a slim hope for a people who have known centuries of war and endured a series of foreign occupations. As Translator Thong writes in the introduction: "By an accident of history, the autobiography of a divided soul...