A French travelogue has likened The Story of Kieu, a Vietnamese literary gem, to the famous French novel Justine où Les Malheurs De La Vertu (The Misfortune Of Virtue).

In an article included in an unfinished manuscript he sent to his Vietnamese friends shortly before his death, Georges Boudarel points to the many similarities between the two heroines created by two authors who were contemporaries but lived in different climes and grew up in different cultures: both are beautiful and virtuous, and both have to undergo atrocious physical and moral ordeals.

Kieu, the principal character of the three thousand verse epic penned by Nguyen Du (1765-1820), is the elder daughter of a respectable middle class family. To save her father from imprisonment for insolvency, she sacrifices her first love and sells herself off. Cheated by a pimp, who deflowers her, and then by a scoundrelous rascal, she falls into the clutch of a madam. She is then bought out of the brothel by an amorous bourgeois but is subsequently kidnapped and humiliated by his jealous wife. She takes refuge in a pagoda only to land in another house of ill repute. There, she meets a generous warlord and is rescued by him, but she unwittingly causes his death by talking him into surrendering to the Imperial Court. Desperate, she throws herself into a river but is rescued in time. Only then does she find happiness, in Buddhist renounciation of the world and in the pure friendship with her first lover.

In Comte de Sade’s (1746-1814) Justine, Justine is plagued by misfortune during the turmoil of the 1789 Revolution. The daughter of a banker, she emerges from convent life and falls prey to a horde of rascals, seducers, forgers, extortionists, murderers, and perverts of both sexes. In the end, this martyr of virtue is killed by Juliette, her own sister, who has found “prosperity in vice.”

Why are virtue, beauty and gentleness made to suffer? How to explain this obvious injustice? Nguyen Du looks to heavenly laws to find the cause, citing the belief that destiny always puts talent, beauty and virtue to the most severe test (tai menh tuong Do) and the law of compensation (bi sac tu phong). Nguyen Du also turns to Buddhism and karma to explain the misfortunes of Kieu: she has to pay for her debts in her previous lives.

Sade, materialist and atheist, goes beyond the boundaries of good and evil stating, “Nature has created man only for him to enjoy everything on earth. It has to be so, regardless of the victims. Only by heinous crimes does Nature continue to exist and wrest back the rights virtue has robbed from it.”

Boudarel expresses his doubt about the virtue of Kieu who, unlike Justine, does not remain virtuous to the end. More than once she succumbs to sentimental impulses. “Her suicides are nothing but abortive attempts, she yields under the whip, accepts compromises and is open to love whenever love can be found... She remains faithful and yet loves two other men – young bourgeois Thuc Sinh, tenderly, and Tu Hai the rebel, passionately... Isn’t she the first to join Kim Trong in his chamber to exchange pledges of love? Had the mandarin who ordered the death of Tu Hai shown better understanding, would she have thrown herself into the river?”

The same arguments have been used against Kieu by orthodox Confucianists in Viet Nam, who warned women against reading the book. However, the late Duong Quang Ham, a modernised Confucianist and my teacher, defends both the book and the heroine. His principal argument is that Kieu meets the two essential criteria of Confucianism – filial piety (sacrificing her love) and loyalty to the monarch (persuading Tu Hai to make peace with the court to save lives). As for the various “sexually immoral descriptions,” they are far from being obscene as the author describes them with subtlety.

Still, there is something in Kieu’s character that Boudarel found ambiguous: she is shattered like Princess de Cleve but eventually she behaves like Manon Lescaut, with a dual personality like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Yet, unlike the all too Manichean heroines of popular Nom (truyen nom) stories, Kieu, in her weakness, is more human and closer to Vietnamese hearts. - VNS