Nhị Độ Mai, or why we know so little about Late Imperial Vietnamese Popular Culture

Over the past couple of months, I have spent some time exploring Vietnamese materials that the National Library of France has digitized. As I have done so, I have asked myself: “What is here that we don’t already know about?”

The answer is: “A lot!!” In fact, I can see that there are massive gaping holes in our knowledge about Vietnamese history that could be filled if people studied the many materials that are now readily available.

One example of this is what we might call “Late Imperial Vietnamese popular culture.” What is that? This is a name that we can use to label the many stories and plays that were produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Vietnam by people who were not members of the most elite Westernized level of society.

Historians and literary scholars have spent a lot of time studying the new generation of writers that emerged in the 1930s, young Vietnamese who were Western-educated and who wrote in the vernacular language using the Latin script (quốc ngữ). Thanks to their work, we know a lot about these people and their writings, such as the members of the Self-Reliant Literary Group (Tự lục văn đoàn) or “reportage” (phóng sự) writers like Vũ Trọng Phụng.

Very few scholars, however, have studied literary and dramatic works from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century that were written in Hán, Nôm (a demotic script based on Chinese characters), and quốc ngữ by writers who were not directly part of the modernizing culture of the above writers.

Yet, in looking through the French National Library’s digitized materials, I can see that MANY such works were produced during that time period.

And yet. . . we know very little about most of those works, and as a result, we don’t know what they can teach us about Vietnamese society during that time period.

Let us take as an example the story “Nhị Độ Mai” 二度梅, or what we can translate as “The Plum Blossoms Twice.”

The Plum Blossoms Twice was written during the Qing Dynasty period and was set during the time of the Tang Dynasty. Lu Qi 盧杞, a traitorous official, has another official by the name of Mei Kui 梅魁 wrongly executed. Mei Kui’s son, Mei Bi 梅璧, flees.

What then follows is a dramatic story with many twists and turns, but it culminates in a happy ending, as Lu Qi’s evil deeds are revealed and Mei Bi passes the civil service exam and marries a beautiful woman.

At some point, this story made its way to Vietnam and was translated into Vietnamese 6-8 (lục bát) verse.

While readers undoubtedly enjoyed the plot of The Plum Blossoms Twice, the story also contained a strong moral message.

This story was also called “Loyalty, Filial Piety, and Fidelity, the Complete Story of the Plum Blossoms Twice” (Trung hiếu tiết nghĩa Nhị độ mai toàn truyện 忠孝節義二度梅全傳). As one can guess from this title, the purpose of this story was to inculcate Confucian values.

It did so by using concepts that were central to popular culture such as “moral reciprocity” (báo ứng 報應). Lu Qi is bad, so bad things happen to him in the end. Mei Bi is loyal and filial, so good things happen to him in the end (he becomes successful and gets the girl!!).

When literary scholar Dương Quảng Hàm compiled the first modern history of Vietnamese literature in 1941 (Việt Nam văn học sử yếu), he included The Plum Blossoms Twice in that work.

Since that time, as far as I know, less attention has been paid to this work, and today there are probably plenty of people who don’t know about this story at all.

One big “problem” with The Plum Blossoms Twice is that it is “Chinese” in origin, and therefore, people don’t think it is relevant for understanding Vietnam.

However, the National Library of France holds multiple versions of The Plum Blossoms Twice in Nôm and quốc ngữ. One version was printed at least 5 times between 1926 and 1934. There was also a drama (cải lương) version. So, clearly, people “used to” think that this work was important.

Further, there are MANY stories like it from the same time period that are held in the French National Library. Again, many of these are “Chinese” stories, but they were clearly very, very popular in Vietnam.

Why is it that we know so little about these stories? Again, one of the reasons is because they are “Chinese.”

Another reason is that they are difficult to read. The language in The Plum Blossoms Twice is much more difficult to understand than the language in the writings that were produced in Vietnamese from the 1930s onward.

History is something that human beings “construct,” and when they are constructing it, they can be influenced by various factors. Nationalism is one factor that has had a strong influence on the construction of history in the modern era, for instance.

That has certainly been the case with Vietnam, and cultural products like The Plum Blossoms Twice are generally excluded from Vietnamese history for a nationalist reason, because people think it’s more “Chinese” than “Vietnamese.”

However, there is another factor that has strongly influenced the modern construction of Vietnamese history, and that is the ease or difficulty of historical sources. Simply put, Vietnamese history (and Southeast Asian history more generally) in the modern era has been constructed from the sources that are the easiest for modern scholars to read.

Again, it’s a lot easier to read novels from the 1930s onward than it is to read The Plum Blossoms Twice. Not surprisingly, we know a lot more about authors and writers from the 1930s onward, and in the version of modern Vietnamese history that we have constructed, those works and their authors play an important role, while The Plum Blossoms Twice and other works like it are usually not even mentioned.

However, if we could go back in time and talk to the many Vietnamese who read one of the 5 editions of The Plum Blossoms Twice in the 1920s – 1930s, or who watched a cải lương performance of the story, or even earlier, who read the story in Nôm, I wonder if they would understand why we don’t pay any attention to them and their cultural world. . .

I doubt that they would, but thinking about this can help us understand why we know so little about Late Imperial Vietnamese popular culture.