John BalabanAbout Ho Xuan Huong
Ho Xuan Huong was born at the end of the second Le Dynasty (1592-1788), a period of calamity and social disintegration. Nearly 900 years had elapsed since Ngo Quyen had driven out the Chinese to establish an independent Vietnam modeled, nevertheless, on the Chinese court and its mandarinate. By the end of the Le period, the Confucian social order had calcified and was crumbling. In the North, the powerful Trinh clan controlled the Le kings and their court at present-day Hanoi. The Trinh warred with the Nguyen clan whose southern Hue court was aided by Portuguese arms and French troops recruited by colonial missionaries. Finally, adding to decades of grim chaos, in 1771 three brothers known as the Tay-Son began a populist rebellion that would vanquish the Trinh, the Le, and the Nguyen rulers, seizing Hanoi, Hue, and Saigon, and creating their own short-lived dynasty (1788-1802) that would soon fall to the Nguyen.This period of social collapse and ruin was, perhaps not surprisingly, also a high point in the long tradition of Vietnamese poetry. As Dante says in his De vulgari eloquentia, "the proper subjects of poetry are love, virtue, and war." The great poetry of this period--like Nguyen Du's famous Tale of Kieu--is filled with individual longing, with a sense of "cruel fate," and with a searching for something of permanence. Warfare, starvation, and corruption did not vanquish poets like Nguyen Du and Ho Xuan Huong, but deepened their work.
What is immediately surprising about Ho Xuan Huong's writing is that she wrote at all--further, that she earned immediate and continuing acclaim. After all, she was a woman writing poetry in a male, Confucian tradition. While women have always held high position in Vietnamese society--sometimes leading armies, often advising rulers, and always involved in the management of wealth--few were acclaimed as poets, perhaps because few were tutored in the rigorous literary studies given young men preparing to take the imperial exams in hopes of finding their places in the bureaucratic hierarchy that governed Vietnam from 939 AD into the twentieth century. (1)
Also surprising is what she wrote about. At the end of the Le Dynasty, when the social status of women was sharply reduced, she constantly questioned the order of things, especially male authority. The rigid feudalism of the latter Le Dynasty took the 2000-year-old Confucian Book of Rites as its fundamentalist guidebook in which a woman "when unmarried, should obey her father; when married, her husband, and, if widowed, her son." There were "seven justifications for abandoning a woman: 1, if she bears no child, 2, if she commits adultery, 3, if she does not respect her in-laws, 4, if she gossips, 5, if she steals, 6, if she is given to jealousy, and 7, if she has an incurable disease." To make matters worse, dowry and wedding rules had become so expensive and complicated by Ho Xuan Huong's time that fewer women of her class were getting married; more were becoming concubines. (2) While Ho Xuan Huong's poetic attacks on male authority might seem normal enough for fin de siecle Americans and other Westerners, for her time it was shocking and personally risky.
In addition, she chose to write in NomÑa writing system that represented Vietnamese speechÑrather than Chinese, the language of the mandarin elite. Her choice to write poetry in Nom, as Chaucer chose to write in English and Dante in Italian, gives her poetry a special Vietnamese dimension filled with the aphorisms and speech habits of the common people. (3) Indeed, the modern poet Xuan Dieu called her "the Queen of Nom poetry."
But, finally, the most surprising fact is that the greater part of her poems--each a marvel in the sonnet-like lu-shih style--are double entendres: each has hidden within it another poem with sexual meaning. In these poems we may be presented with a view of three cliffs, or a limestone grotto, or scenes of weaving or swinging, or objects such as a fan, some fruit, or even a river snail--but concealed within almost all of her perfect lu-shih is a sexual design that reveals itself by pun and imagistic double-take. No other poet dared this. Sex, of course, is a forbidden topic in this literary tradition. As Huu Ngoc and others have pointed out, Confucianism even banished the nude from Vietnamese art. (4) For her erotic attitudes, Ho Xuan Huong turned to the common wisdom alive in peasant folk poetry and proverbs, attitudes that from her literary pen might be read more accurately as defiance rather than as a psychosexual malady, as some of her critics have charged.
So, in a time when death and destruction lay about, when the powerful held sway and disrespect was punished by the sword, how did she get away with the irreverence, the scorn, and the habitual indecency of her poetry? The answer lies in her excellence as a poet and in the paramount cultural esteem that Vietnamese have always placed on poetry, whether in the high tradition of the literati or the oral folk poetry of the common people. Quite simply, she survived because of her exquisite cleverness at poetry. Khen ai kheo ve canh tieu so, she sometimes writes in response to natural wonders: "Praise whoever sketched this desolate scene." It was her own skill in composing two poems at once, one hidden in the other, which captured her audiences--from common people who could hear in her verse echoes of their folk poetry, proverbs, and village common sense, to Sinophile court mandarins who bantered with her in verse, who valued her poetic skills, and who offered her their protection. (5) Her verbal play, her wicked humor, her native speech, her spiritual longing, her hunger for love, and her anger at corruption must have been tonic.
Notes
- A visitor to Hanoi can still see, in a courtyard of the Temple of Literature, the magnificent stone turtles with huge stele set upon their backs and carved with the names of the highest-ranking scholars from 1442 to 1779. The last exam was in 1919.
- Following Hoa Bang, Ho Xuan Huong, Nha Tho Cach Mang, (Saigon: Nha Xuat Ban Bon Phuong, 1953), pp. 100 and 103.
- Recent scholarship has also turned up poems that she wrote in Chinese. See Dao Thai Ton, Tho Ho Xuan Huong (Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Giao Duc, 1996).
- Huu Ngoc and Francoise Correze, Ho Xuan Huong, ou le voile dechire (Hanoi: Fleuve Rouge, 1984), p. 31.
- Such as Chieu Ho, fond of teasing her in poetry, who some scholars (but not all) identify as the high-ranking official Pham Dinh Ho.
John Balaban's own poetry has received two nominations for the National Book Award and has most recently received the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award for Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems. He teaches at North Carolina State University, Raleigh.
