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Rethinking the Status of Vietnamese Women
in Folklore and oral History

• Introduction
• Gender Relations in Legends and Vietnamese history
• Challenging confucian Values on Women's Status
• The Representation of Incest in Oral Tradition
• Modernity and Women's Quest for Equal Rights
• Conclusion
• Glossary

Challenging confucian Values on Women's Status

Let us concentrate a moment on the confucianist component of Vietnamese morals. As a child, every Vietnamese had to learn at school the following poem by heart:

Cong cha nhu nui Thai Son ⁹
Nghia me nhu nuoc trong nguon chay ra
Mot long tho me kinh cha
Cho tron chu hieu moi la dao con.

that may be translated thus:

The good deeds of father are as great as Mount Thai Son
The virtue of mother is as bountiful as spring-water gushing out of its source
Wholeheartedly, is mother to be revered and father respected
So that the child's way be accomplished.

This proverb, epitomizing the gist of the confucian morals, had probably been diffused during the sinization period, which roughly corresponds to the beginning of the Christian era to the XVth century, perhaps a little later. Here one is not so much faced with a problem of dating as of meaning? The third verse tells us that mother is «to be revered and father respected». However, «revere» and «respect» are not synonymous, one generally reveres gods, deities, supernatural beings or humans erected into divinities. But in this precise case, it is the mother one reveres and not the father. How blasphemous for a society which gives a dominant, let alone omnipotent, position to the father! How contradictory with confucian values! Ought one not to see, through this anodine formulation, the survival of some archaic social model where the mother is more important than the father? In other words, this lecture of confucianism - which apparently gives precedence to the father in the family structure - has been unable to eradicate all traces of a more ancient (or perhaps at the time still extant) society of a matrilineal type that revered the motherly figure. Great is the temptation to locate this cult of a Mother Goddess in a more universal pattern, ubiquitous in the history of mankind. Here, one deals not only with linguistics but also with semantics. The permutation of the verbs «revere» and «respect» could have been done without so much altering the rhymes, besides, such contraventions of the versifying rules are often encountered in the oral tradition. And when one knows the rigour with which the classical scholars made their choice of words to express their ideas, one can only assume that the terminology used in this moralistic proverb did not merely answer the requirements of poetics, but surely expressed another consideration, i.e. that of reminding ancient practices in order to keep them alive. In that way, one could say that the author, despite his confucian background, did not wish entirely to deny his deep social and cultural origins.

Another material may be found which makes us lean towards this interpretation. The following folksong brings further evidence thereof :

Lay cha ba lay mot quy
Lay me bon lay con di lay chong

(Before father, I bow my head to the ground three times and kneel down
Before mother, I bow my head to the ground four times [When leaving home] to take spouse)

Lay, the act of touching one's forehead to the ground, is in Asia a sign of submission, respect or veneration. Why does the daughter bow only three times before her father and four before her mother? Why this dissymetry in favour of the mother? Contrary to the confucian lecture mentioned above, this folksong (ca dao) is no deed of a scholar, it just mirrors those customs common to the non-sinized Vietnamese society, or at least, widespread among the social classes ignorant of the confucian morals. This presumption is reinforced by the fact that here, the daughter tells her parents that she is to take spouse, she does not submit passively to the parental will. This ought to be stressed: the normally « done thing » for girls of confucian education was to leave one's decision to marry at the discretion of parents.

In the spoken language, the married couple is phrased vo chong (wife-husband). If one refers to social precedence - and one only knows how much importance the Vietnamese give to such matters - the ordination of the words puts the woman before the man. How ironic! These two words (vo-chong) belong to the vernacular and not to the Chinese-based vocabulary used in the more literary, philosophical or scientific domains. The phrase may have be constructed when the Vietnamese still lived under Chinese influence, and their language, being less rich, sufficed to express their vision of the world. It is most likely that in distant times, Vietnamese women had a more important role than men. It explains why one used to and still continues to say vo chong, and not the converse. Does the saying not go thus : Nhat vo nhi troi (First comes one's wife, then comes heaven)? Absolute basphemy for whom places heaven above everything else and so much so that it has been deified and a cult to it rendered! This proverb contains two Chinese words nhat, first, and nhi, second, and could only have found its origin during the sinization period. Nonetheless, the state of affairs seems to have been in total contradiction with the established order. One finds oneself again on the matrilineal side.

In Vietnam's traditional society, in a wedding, it is the man who asks the woman's hand, and all costs are incurred by him, it is the very meaning of cuoi in the expression cuoi vo, «take wife». However, the reading of ca dao (folksongs) teaches us otherwise, and in many cases, quite the contrary. For instance :

Rap renh nuoc chay qua cau
Ba gia tap tenh mua heo cuoi chong
(Troubled, runs the water neath the bridge,
The old woman prepares herself to buy a pig and take spouse)

or even:

Gia bao nhieu mot ong chong
Thi em cung bo du dong ra mua
(How ever much it costs to get a man,
I'll have saved enough to purchase one).

If one may be reticent in the case of the first ca dao, owing to the woman's old age, the phrase cuoi chong is unambiguous and probably gives an insight as to what used to be common practice. As for the second folksong, there is little doubt as to who is speaking: it is a young girl, to wit the personal pronoun em which is used by a girl/woman when modestly speaking of herself. In the second verse, the verb mua, «purchase/buy» is explicit enough: the woman buys her husband and not the converse. So it seems that in the olden days, when Vietnamese society did not yet conform to the Chinese moral and social organizational model, it was the woman that made the choice; moreover, she could marry more than one man. Existence of polyandry is testified by various folksongs :

Nguoi ta thich lay nhieu chong
Toi day chi thich mot ong that ben
(Others would fain have many a husband
I'd rather have only one but ever close at hand)

Tram nam tram tuoi tram chong
Phai duyen thi lay chang ong to hong nao xe
(In a hundred years' time, you're a hundred years old and can wed with a hundred husbands
Finding a man is no doing of some genie of matrimony)

The first folksong needs no further commentary; as for the second, «a hundred husbands» is not, of course, to be taken literally, but means that a woman may marry as many husbands as she will. Here is an interesting point: according to the woman, if she weds as many times as she wishes, it is not due to the goodwill of some genie. The Chinese notion of a genie (ong to hong, the oldster who weaves the red threads of marriage) capable of sealing happy unions is being rejected. Two practices and two moral codes are clearly in contradiction, one being local while the other has been borrowed and grafted upon the former.

Ngay sau con te ba bo
Sao bang luc song con cho lay chong
(Though when I die you will make an offering of three cattle,
I'd much rather you granted me permission to marry while I am still alive)

In Vietnamese, this ca dao is without ambivalence. The mother speaks to her son. The confucian morals forbade the widow to remarry, and obliged her to submit to her eldest son's will in virtue of the three precepts of obedience (tam tong). «Marry» here means «remarry», for one is concerned with a widow, that which is not explicit in the folksong. Doubtless, this was a time when confucianism triumphed in Vietnamese society: note the importance of the son's position, from which the mother expresses her desire to substract herself. As the woman is the depositary of traditions, and the conveyor of collective memory, her wish - as illustrated in this folksong - must refer to some prior social pratice. This ca dao not only gives an example of a conflict of generations but also that of two antagonistic sets of values which succeeded one another or had become intricately intertwined. In other words, it could be roughly dated from the beginning of the sinization period.

As regards the term tê, one ought to dwell on it a little longer. Te is a ritual which consists in a sacrifice made to a revered person (say, Heaven, Confucius or a tutelar genie). Only males are allowed to officiate, pronouncing out loud codified formulae of Chinese origin, which, albeit short, are incomprehensible to the mortal coil. Since this ceremony is borrowed from the Chinese tradition, the spectacle has an exotic semblance: precise and solemn gestures, pump and circumstance, ornate vestments, etc. In the colloquial sense, tê carries an altogether different meaning when used by an angry woman in the expression: ba te cho mot tran that could be translated : «[This] old woman/grandmother [standing before you] is going to teach [you]». So here, the woman assumes a superior status (that of grandmother) in order to express her wrath and scorn, and te means «abuse and ridicule somebody with insults». Could this change of significance be a deliberate act on behalf of women to mock and mimick the original male ritual? The ritualistic formulae having become in their mouths terms of abuse and foul language. When the Vietnamese woman is ready to fight her enemy, any enemy, one can grant it to be a show worth any spectacle of a man sacrificing before the altar. She shakes and makes gestures towards the despised individual, blatently abusing him, she might even lift up her skirts before an assembly of witnesses to show her parts and shame the person. The scene lasting as long as she deems necessary. Facing such a situation, the «victim» has no choice but to clear off as quickly as possible not to be exposed any longer to the public ridicule. Could this be interpreted as the response of a gender, excluded from certain rituals, who expresses their rebellion? If this be the case, this would take us back to the times when the Chinese morals were the rule but when women kept on affirming their social position, and wanted to repossess the relics of a remote past when she was still the chief.

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Notes

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