The Antagonist in the Trickster Tales of (original) (raw)
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Vietnamese Folklore Seen from an Adult’s View
2019
Folklore, I believe, is a manual for learning to appreciate the value of hard work, honesty, and kindness that not only myself but also many other Vietnamese people who have been reading and listening to folklore take into their later life. However, as much as I appreciate its moral values and beauty, my worldview as an adult reader has urged me to reflect on the scarcely discussed contradictions of norms and virtues in folklore. The reading of ‘On how religions could accidentally incite lies and violence: Folktales as a cultural transmitter’ by a group of Vietnamese researchers has been enlightening to me in this regard.
Cogent Arts & Humanities, 2020
Basing on an analysis of social, cultural and historical contexts with bloody war and conflicts in Vietnamese medieval times in the 15th and 16th centuries, this study focuses on the discussion of the compromise as well as the implicit conflict between indigenous folklore and imported religions from China manifested from folktales to fantasy medieval literature. At the same time, we pointed out that with strong nationalism and Buddhist-Taoist colors of thought, Vietnamese Confucian writers adapted to the traditional folktales, reconciled it with the values and the aspirations of their own culture, and created a unique “antiConfucianism” discourse in literature. The dynamics of fantasy genre and the complex textual intersection between traditional narratives and literature will be analyzed through the special regenerated process of the archetypal journey from folktales to Vietnamese medieval fantasy short stories.
humanities and social sciences communications, 2021
The journey to another world is an archetype that exists in the forms of marvelous motifs and is also a typical narrative formula with the purpose of creating diverse versions of Vietnamese folk narratives. The archetypal journey was later reborn and expanded in medieval literature as Vietnamese culture, which has become more complex over time. With the aim of discovering the cultural identity of Vietnamese narratives using sociohistorical approaches and discussing the archetype grounded in specific contexts, this research focuses on journey motifs to the upper and lower world in folk narratives in early collections written in Han characters and in related historical and cultural bibliographies. At the same time, by analyzing the fantasy short stories in Excursive Notes on Weird Stories (Truyen ky man luc) by Nguyen Du, this study aims to discover the process of acculturation and creation of materials and motifs from folk narratives, and it discusses how these motifs have been adapted. This research reveals specific messages about the history, culture, era, voice and true identity of the medieval Vietnamese Confucian. Importantly, this study emphasizes the unification of spiritual power between folklore and Taoism and the powerful and influential competition between Taoism and Confucianism in medieval Vietnamese literature. The analysis shows that by recreating the motifs of the folk narratives, writers have built other world journeys to describe the hidden political discourses and religious conflicts in the thoughts of the human mind in the most ideal form.
A Comparative Study of Malay and Chinese Trickster Tales: Sang Kancil, the Rabbit and the Rat 1
2016
Trickster tales are told not only for amusement but also to convey lessons or morals via their humorous characters and sequence of plots. The characters, the stories and the morals of the stories can be a reflection of the culture and the values of the people in the culture from which the tales originate. Every culture is believed to have its own trickster tales. In Malaysia, unlike the popular Malay trickster tale Sang Kancil, not much is said about Chinese trickster tales, such as The Rabbit and The Rat. This paper juxtaposes the characters and motifs of these trickster tales to negotiate the similarities and linkages between the Chinese and Malay cultures amid striking differences in cultural values and societal norms. The findings not only provide evidence of the heuristic value of the current study but also suggest several directions for future investigations in the study area.
A Comparative Study of Malay and Chinese Trickster Tales: Sang Kancil, the Rabbit and the Rat
Kajian Malaysia, 2016
Trickster tales are told not only for amusement but also to convey lessons or morals via their humorous characters and sequence of plots. The characters, the stories and the morals of the stories can be a reflection of the culture and the values of the people in the culture from which the tales originate. Every culture is believed to have its own trickster tales. In Malaysia, unlike the popular Malay trickster tale Sang Kancil, not much is said about Chinese trickster tales, such as The Rabbit and The Rat. This paper juxtaposes the characters and motifs of these trickster tales to negotiate the similarities and linkages between the Chinese and Malay cultures amid striking differences in cultural values and societal norms. The findings not only provide evidence of the heuristic value of the current study but also suggest several directions for future investigations in the study area.
The Tale of Khun Chang Khun Phaen. (Siam's great folk epic of love and war) By Wilawan Janmeeted A folk tale is a traditional story originally transmitted orally. A story is told from one successor to another and thus may not be recorded as evidenced. In ancient times, there were only a few forms of entertainment in a multicultural society. Folk tales are often recorded and published after some times has passed and therefore differ from the original version. Furthermore the storytelling is often influenced by the narrator's tradition, culture, religion, and imagination. In Thailand, folktales are part of culture and plentiful in the number. The most popular is probably "The Tale of Khun Chang Khun Phaen". The Tale of Khun Chang Khun Phaen is the greatest classic of Thai literature and praised to be the real "Gem" of Thai literature furthermore the Literature club in King Rama VI reign had voted and rewarded it the title of most outstanding Thai literature in long poem category. The original folktale of Khun Chang Khun Phaen is long lost. The text is not the product of a single author or a precise time, but developed over centuries, with contributions from many storytellers. Some episodes developed in the oral tradition of storytelling for local audiences. The plot, is set in the provincial urban society of the central of Thailand. The minor characters of the original story are drawn from local society, neighbors, relatives, domestic servants, petty officials, incompetent doctors, monks, hunters, boatmen, and tribal villagers. The plot is wound around the notable events of everyday life, births, weddings, cremations, temple festivals, crime, house building, travel, and sickness.
The Ghosts That Haunt: of Liminal and Dual Identities in Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer
Ghosts are, as Bosman argues, liminal entities. They blur ontological boundaries by embodying both “absence” and “presence” (4). Though these spirits do not reside in the physical world, they still occupy a substantial portion of the narrative. By underscoring the “indeterminacies associated with spectres”, the liminal status of our unnamed first-person narrator in The Sympathizer is also “emphasised” (4). Our undercover spy narrator must delicately tread between his dual political allegiances to both the Viet Cong and American-backed South Vietnam, while having to occupy an interstitial space of being both an “aggressor” and “victim” (10). Essentially, although the narrator commits acts of assassination in the novel (aggressor), he is also a pawn or puppet carrying out the orders of powerful authorities (victim). Building on Bosman’s article, I argue that the intrusion of these “liminal” spirits that torment the narrator repeatedly—manifested in the form of the crapulent major and Sonny’s ghosts—represents the psychological toll of “playing both sides”. In doing so, readers witness the complications of the narrator’s fractured self, where inhabiting these dual, sometimes contradictory identities becomes less an asset and more a haunting liability.
The Absent Father: A Vietnamese Folktale and Its French Shadows
GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies, 2017
She was called Vu-thi-Thiet and her husband was Truong-Sinh; they loved each other most tenderly. They had scarcely been married a year when he was called up for military service, to fight against Champa. She was already pregnant, and a few days after her husband's departure, she gave birth to a son whom she named Dan. xi Three years later, Truong returned home. The pair was overjoyed to see each other. Then, while she went to work in the fields, he stayed home with the child. 'Come, my son, climb up on your father's back. Daddy can serve you as a horse. Would you like that?' 'Are you my daddy too? How do you know how to speak? You don't look like my other daddy at all; he never says anything.' Astonished. Truong demanded that the boy explain himself. The child replied: 'When you were not here, my father regularly came at night. He walked when my mother walked, and he sat down when my mother sat down. But he never kissed me.' Being by nature an extraordinarily jealous man, Truong immediately made a dreadful scene, abusing his wife for her infidelity to him, without revealing the source of his suspicions. She tried in vain to justify herself, and the neighbours and her parents too defended her in vain. Truong remained convinced that she had wronged him. Then Vu-thi went to the bank of the Hoang-Giang and took her last breaths. 'My innocence has not been recognised; the only way I can justify myself is by dying. May the fishes devour me if I am guilty!' xii And she threw herself into the river. Night came. Truong-Sinh rested with his son in the cottage. He lit the lamp. 'Oh look, my other father has returned,' the child immediately cried out. 'Oh?' 'Over there,' the infant replied, pointing to Truong's shadow on the wall. The mystery had been clarified: During the absence of her husband, Vu-thi used to point to the shadow on the wall to calm the child's tears as he demanded his father.
Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2022
This essay investigates the evolution of the story of the semi-mythical King An Dương (third century bce). I show how the different versions of the story over time increased in complexity and narrative construction. Ultimately, the final and most complex version of the fifteenth century is comprised of multiple, intertwined narrative threads, one of which focuses on the fate of King An Dương's martyred daughter, Princess Mỵ Châu. The story depicts a morally responsive Heaven as a cosmic authority which sends miracles in response to the unjust death of the wrongly accused and which determines the rise and fall of kings and their kingdoms, in accordance with their virtue and their destiny. Furthermore, I argue that this concern with a miraculous Heaven that is morally responsive to the deeds of people from all levels of society reflects the late fifteenth-century burgeoning of a Neo-Confucian discourse, which began to shape the moral imagination of intellectual elites during the consolidation of the Lê Dynasty under Lê Thánh Tông (r. 1460-1497).
ChiMoKoJa: Histories of China, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan, , 2018
Contemporary Korea has been a multi-cultural society from the 1990s. The official figure indicates that there are a large number of Southeast Asians as well as East Asians (Chinese and Japanese) living in Korea. Among them the number of Vietnamese-Korean couples is one of the highest on record. The relationship of Korea with the mainland southeast country was launched through the Vietnam War in the initial Cold War era of the 1950-70s. Has there been any more interplay between the two countries? If, how do they relate to each other? Was the relationship positively interactive, as in these days, or was it complicated? This paper explores not only the transnational narrative of the Vietnamese royal family (the Lý dynasty: 1009-1225) commonly shared among contemporary Vietnamese and Korean people, but also argues the oral tradition that Vietnamese (‘Đại Việt’) political refugees exiled to Koryŏ (918-1392) contains a historical aspect in the ideas of Buddhism, Chinese language, Confucian culture, and international relations.