A Queer Retelling of The Song of Kiều

một 𠬠


Let’s only listen to this love song in the rain,

Where history is muddied by our layers.

In the Chia-Ching reign of Ming dynasty,

There was peace among the people.

Sương lived just as any other woman might.

She was only loved by candlelight and by men

Who she wished did not always have to love her so.

She had a delicate body and spirit that sang

Like the birds out her window before flying away

To be part of some other, less mundane story.

Sương excelled in all she did. Her talent existed

For all those who glimpsed her. Her hair

Moved as her paintbrushes on canvas

And her poetry spilled out of her mouth

With every single breath. Yet Sương’s father

Kept her inside her home, 

No matter how often she wished to leave.

And so she spent her days besides the window

Looking out upon the country hills before her,

Wishing to be amongst them as a butterfly flies

Through the air without even knowing 

How beautiful the universe becomes

Because of their being in it.



Sương looked outside one fateful day

To a woman beyond her gate. 

The woman looked over the wall,

Into Sương’s home. Sương 

Looked right back. 



And as a bird calls over the trees,

The two spoke through letters 

Slipped beneath the iron gates

Sương’s father would never unchain.



Sương quickly learned the woman’s name.

Minh. Her name breathed through her

Like the butterflies, like the rain,

Like the birds. 



They wrote, and they wrote. 

And when they wrote, 

It felt to Sương like love.

No matter what, it was love. 

A sign-off was a promise

To write again soon

And to never stop writing again soon.



This became

Sương’s beautiful fate;

To write a letter

Day after day 

After day. 



Finally she felt as though

She were among the hills.





hai 𠄩 


Sương wasted away writing her letters,

Though never a moment was lost on her

When she was thinking of Minh.



Sương’s parents watched her write,

Though they never saw the woman

To whom she sent her affection.

It would not have mattered 

Whether she were rich or beautiful,

For all Sương’s parents had ever wanted for her

Was a man of prestige. They wanted value

In their family, and it did not matter

In what form it came. 



So when a young man came along,

By the name of Cành 

Sương’s parents begged their child

To finally take a man up into her life

And become the brilliant daughter

They had always wanted. 

Fate seemed to pull the two together;

Sương’s mother thought 

Cành and Sương

Would be perfect as a couple.

More perfect than a bird

Flying over a meadow. 

More brilliant than the lilac

Blooming in the late spring.



And even if they were not perfect,

Sương’s parents figured 

It would be better for their daughter

To have something of her life

Beyond just her own heartbeat. 



What else is a woman for but a man’s love?

And so Cành and Sương became engaged.  





ba 𠀧 


The wedding was in the hills.

The same hills Sương dreamt of

And, at night, saw Minh’s face

In the green folds of rolling grass.



In her dreams, Sương was a bird. 

Minh was a cloud. And Vietnam

Was so far away. She wished her parents

Did not want her to get married. 

They wanted to keep their daughter home, 

In their arms and behind their gate.



At least behind her parents’ gate,

She knew Minh would come to visit her.



How could Minh visit her 

When this mysterious man

Whisked her away 

To become a part of his life?



She was going to be a married woman,

Married to a man she did not love. 

All the love she had ever felt

Was going to be marred by his eyes

Piercing into hers at the altar.



His gaze was not kind. 

Sương had never seen such awful

Brown eyes. 



Minh had doe eyes. 

Sương saw them in the sunlight,

As the orange water in the distance

During twilight. 



The ceremony soon finished

And Cành and Sương left 

As married strangers.





bốn 𦊚


Despite every day of discomfort,

Time passed anyway.

Cành and Sương were married,

And it seemed as though nothing

Would change that. Nothing

Would tear the two apart.



There was little in terms of love between them.

There was the quiet 

At the end of every sentence.

Cành and Sương did not know

How to love each other. 

Cành, from ignorance, and Sương,

Still stuck on what she had felt before.



Every day, Sương looked 

Across the hills she loved as much as her,

Hoping that something in the grass would change,

And Minh would appear. But



She never did.



On the night of their anniversary,

Cành and Sương laid in the grass

Beneath the moon and the stars,

Which glimmered silently down upon her.



They were neither kind nor cruel. 

Yet Sương’s life had been filled with heartbreak.



She looked over at the man she was married to.

She saw a man who had never treated her well, 

But never poorly. She saw a man 

She silently despised. 



Cành knew nothing of Minh,

And Sương planned to keep it that way.

She planned to keep Minh hidden,

Only to be seen in the very back of her mind

When she was finally alone and could imagine

What she truly wanted from her own life.



Sương had suppressed her love 

Deep down within herself. She did not even think

Of Minh around her husband, until one day. 



One day, Sương walked around her home’s garden

With one arm wrapped around Cành’s. And then,

She saw the fateful piece of paper slipped beneath the gate,

Just as the paper had always found its way to her

Back in her parents’ home. 



Sương rushed to the gate, picking up the paper

Before Cành even knew what was happening.



Quickly, she bent over, grabbing the letter,

Stowing it away. Then, she plucked a flower

And presented it to her husband, as though

This was why she had rushed away.



This was the first time she had ever given Cành anything.

He was touched. And Sương, unknowing to this,

Relived in an instant the life she wished she could have had.





năm 𠄼 


It was midnight and Sương sat 

Beneath the beam of light

Cast through the window

Beside her bed. 



She saw herself in the sky.

She was not a woman in a bed

Beside her husband. 



She was not connected to

Her humanity while she lay in that bed,

Waiting for life to happen to her.



Sương turned to her husband,

To whom she felt no ill will towards.

She felt nothing towards him. 

Nothing at all.



And so she turned away from him

And went back to sleep.



Tomorrow, she knew what she would have to do.

She was going to run away, 

Following the instructions on the letter

To the end of the Earth.





sáu 𦒹 


And they were two women

With hand in hand as they walked

Through the countryside with a breeze

Brushing through their hair and 

Pushing them towards 

Exactly where they needed to go.

They were also two girls

Looking at each other 

Over the wall between them,

Seeing the distance separating them

As a terrible, awful curse 

Which only they could break.

They were two women in love.

And they moved into the home

Of their long-lost relatives, 

To forever share the story with others

Of how they were best friends.

And so they were two women

Who were going to keep the secret 

of their love between just 

the two of them.



They were two women

Who were finally happy.

Reflection

The Song of Kiều was one of my favorite pieces that we read throughout the semester in Global Literature. I believe that this epic poem stood out to me because of its thematic concepts, and I was particularly interested in the way that Vietnamese culture affected the core of this work. Identity runs so deep through every work of literature that we have read this semester, but I personally thought Nguyễn Du did a lot of work throughout the epic to be very active within its critique of Vietnamese culture. Specifically, Nguyễn Du focuses on how the treatment of women, especially when intersecting with ideas such as poverty and colorism, separates a person from their own desires to such an extent that they lose parts of themself.

While I knew that I was not going to be able to create a story nearly as complex as Nguyễn Du’s for a variety of reasons, I did want to try playing around with my own version. Looking through similar critiques of familial expectations and forced sexual/romantic relationships with a different framing in mind interested me, so I decided to explore this through a queer retelling of this poem.

While queerness was never mentioned throughout The Song of Kiều, I was reading through the book and could not help but question the nature of heterosexuality and how the expectations of straight ‘culture’ can even harm straight individuals, especially since misogyny is so commonly interlinked with male-female couplings. Essentially, I wondered how I could explore this idea of the socially controlled woman through a role reversal of sexual/romantic identity. Part of this idea came from a question of what might be ‘original’ when it comes to a story that has been retold repeatedly in this manner. I mean this in no way to disparage the original epic poem, as it has obviously had a massive impact on what is considered canonical literature in both Vietnam and, to some extent, globally as well.

I started working on this project by going through and blocking out the story beats that I wanted to hit. I had decided that I wanted to keep the original ‘chapter’ sections somewhat similar, in an attempt to pay respect to the original poem. Additionally, it also seemed like a good way to go about block this poem out, because The Song of Kiều does seem to maintain one relative ‘theme’ within each section of the poem, through which the plot beats also become contained.

After that, I began to write. I did relatively little planning for this poem, and this was also helped by the fact that I had already read The Song of Kiều for class, so I had a clear idea of the direction I wanted to take, as well as the thematic ideas of a woman being separated from her own desires and familial expectations.

Obviously, there are some themes that I did not cover in this project. I did not personally feel comfortable writing and tackling the experiences of someone in sex work, as well as the traumatic experiences attached to the identity separation often required in such a field. I also did not cover suicidal ideation in the same way that The Song of Kiều did, because I was hoping to generally create a lighter and happier story that resolved itself in a significantly shorter amount of time. I felt as though if I were to jump into these themes of suicidality caused by expectations and living life for someone else, I would not be able to conclude the story within the same number of words and with as much lightness as I hope the ending currently contains. Additionally, I am perpetually tired of queer love stories that are riddled by such excessive loss and heartbreak. As a result of these creative choices, the above poem is what I have crafted into a queer retelling of The Song of Kiều.