Ho Xuan Huong

Vietnamese poet

• Born: c. 1776
• Birthplace: Near Hanoi, Vietnam
• Died: 1820?
• Place of death: Probably Hanoi, Vietnam

Ho Xuan Huong’s clever and technically brilliant erotic poems have assured her a place among Vietnam’s finest poets, despite the fact that very little is known about her life.

Early Life

No public records survive to give birth information on Ho Xuan Huong (ho zoo-ahn hoo-ohng). Most scholars estimate that she was born around 1776 near the northern Vietnamese capital of Thanh Long in a place that is now part of Hanoi—the modern name for Thanh Long. There is also a general consensus among scholars that she was born into the aristocratic Ho family of Vietnam’s northern Nghe An province. Many historians believe that her father was Ho Phi Dien, who died in 1786. However, because her father was a scholar, some historians suggest that the man was actually Ho Si Danh, who died in 1783. In either case, Xuan Huong’s father was in his seventies when she was born. Ho’s mother, known only by her given name, Ha, was a high-ranking second wife, or concubine, to Ho’s father. Some historians also believe that Ho Xuan Huong was related to the Tay Son rebels of central Vietnam. In 1788, their leader, Nguyen Hue, proclaimed himself Emperor Quang Trung. It is possible that Xuan Huong was his cousin.

Ho Xuan Huong’s father decided to give her a classical education, allowing her to learn to read and to write. Tragedy struck the family when Xuan Huong was between seven and ten years old and her father died. To support herself and her daughter, her mother became the concubine of another man. It is likely that she herself taught Xuan Huong, who proved extraordinarily intelligent and poetically gifted.

Based on one of her later poems, some historians have argued that Ho Xuan Huong had somewhat dark skin, perhaps with small scars similar to those of a jackfruit, to which she seems to compare herself in her poem “The Jackfruit.” She appears to have been tall and energetic, and her poetic brilliance quickly distinguished her.

Life’s Work

The Tay Son rebellion changed life in Thanh Long while Ho was growing up. In December, 1788, Chinese forces invaded and conquered the capital before being decisively defeated by Emperor Quang Trung during the Tet festival of 1789. Ho’s poem “At the Chinese General’s Tomb” derisively challenges the valor of the invaders and pointedly asks if she herself might not have done better had she been a man.

Before Emperor Quang Trung died in 1792, he instituted reforms that affected Ho’s poetry. To assert Vietnam’s independence, he decreed that all official correspondence should be written not in Chinese, but in Nom, a Vietnamese writing system invented during the tenth century. Nom uses Chinese characters to express spoken Vietnamese phonetically as well as some Chinese words. It was used among the Vietnamese elite until the 1920’s, when a new national script that employs the Roman alphabet became the standard for written Vietnamese.

Ho Xuan Huong’s brilliance in writing poetry in Nom brought her immediate fame as a poet in the new society. As a young woman, she lived in western Thanh Long. According to some sources, she opened a tea shop near the Tran Quoc Pagoda overlooking West Lake that features in one of her poems. There she exchanged poetry and engaged in intellectual literary discourse with the male students and scholars who frequented her shop along the route they followed to take the imperial exams in the capital. Because Quang Trung had ordered that the third part of these exams must require compositions in verse and rhymed prose written in Nom, Ho’s advice, poetry, and intellectual banter became much valued by the people who patronized her tea shop.

Ho Xuan Huong soon became part of a vibrant intellectual scene, and her poetry became famous for its technical brilliance and its daring use of erotic double entendre. In a society that officially frowned upon erotic expression and female literary creation and intellectual accomplishments, Ho boldly stood out and continued to assert herself. One reason why she could continue writing and disseminating her widely popular poetry came from its sheer literary force. Using the prestigious, centuries-long tradition of the Chinese lu-shih poetry, she invigorated the form with her use of genuine Vietnamese terms and images, most of which have double erotic meanings.

Some of Ho’s most famous poems describe dramatic vistas of northern Vietnamese landscapes that she probably visited herself. Her poems “Three-Mountain Pass” and “Viewing Cac-Co Cavern” ostensibly describe a natural landscape of rocks, caverns, trees, and a little stream, but quickly turn into erotic images for human anatomy. Some of her other celebrated poems were highly personal. For example, she decried the patriarchal nature of her society that made women into concubines and generally suppressed women and their sexual desires. She also took issue with the hypocrisy of the Buddhist clergy in poems such as “The Lustful Monk,” about a Buddhist monk failing in his vows of celibacy, and a “Buddhist Nun,” about a nun struggling to remain chaste. At the same time, many of Ho’s poems joyfully embrace desire and mutual fulfillment, thinly camouflaging their content with natural images or popular metaphors.

Because Ho’s family situation, she accepted that she herself would have to settle for being a man’s second wife or concubine. According to some sources, she met her first husband at her tea shop. Impressed by his poetic skills, she married him. In her “Lament for the Prefect of Vinh-Tuong”—using her husband’s official title—she expressed her sorrow that their happy life together lasted only twenty-seven months before he died.

Much of Ho’s poetry asserts her longing for physical and spiritual love. After her first husband died, she became the concubine of another man. However, she mocked her second husband as a toad in her funeral lament for him. The poem begins traditionally but ends savagely, describing her dead husband as a man who was rich but stupid and had only a sexual interest in her. It is not certain who her second husband was. He may have been her last husband on record, Tran Phuc Hien, a governor who was executed for bribery in 1819. The proceedings against him stated that Ho Xuan Huong was his concubine. Those proceedings are the last historical record of Ho while she was alive.

As with her birth, details of Ho’s death are not certain. Most historians argue that she died around 1820. A poem written in 1842 by a brother of the reigning emperor mentions a visit to her grave by a royal prince. However, nothing is known about the exact circumstances of the event, the date of her death, or even if she had any children.

Significance

Even though Ho Xuan Huong’s poems were widely popular, because their erotic content violated Confucian decorum they were not published during her lifetime. In 1909, a first woodblock publication appeared in Nom; it could be read by the cultural elite. In 1914, the Nom texts were printed in the collection Quoc Âm Thi Tuyen (selection with the competing national writing styles) along with transliterations into the romanized national script. Her work became widely known and often secretly admired in Vietnam.

Ho Xuan Huong’s eroticism, her iconoclasm, and critique of patriarchy and religion gave unique force to her poetry, but official Vietnamese literary society remained ambiguous toward her achievements. A few of her poems that were not overtly erotic were taught in Vietnamese literature classes during the twentieth century. Her poem “The Floating Cake” was taught for its expression of nationalist sentiments, and its erotic allusions to the female body were ignored. In 1980, Ho was officially recognized in her home country when the Institute of Literature of Vietnam proudly included her in its official literary history. In the Western world, the French were the first to appreciate Ho Xuan Huong but sometimes claimed to be shocked by her. Marcel Durand published her work in French in 1968. In English, there were only occasional scholarly translations until the pioneering work of John Balaban in 2000.

By the early twenty-first century, it was generally recognized that Ho Xuan Huong’s mastery of Nom made her poetry a key to Vietnamese and Vietnamese American attempts to save knowledge of that early writing form. The popularity of Ho’s poetry gave fresh impetus to the efforts of a committed community of scholars to keep alive knowledge of the Nom script. Without a knowledge of Nom, several centuries of Vietnamese prose and poetry would be lost to posterity. To modern readers, Ho Xuan Huong’s poetry remains fresh and engaging.

Bibliography

Balaban, John. Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong. Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2000. Excellent introduction to the life and legend of Ho Xuan Huong. Her major poems are translated into English by Balaban, with the original Nom text as well as a modern Vietnamese text given for each poem.

Chapuis, Oscar. A History of Vietnam. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Chapter 6 of this book briefly discusses Ho Xuan Huong as the major woman Vietnamese poet to flourish during the Tay Son era. Discusses the Nom script of Vietnamese she used for her poetry; provides a historical framework for her life and times.

My-Van, Tran. “Come on Girls, Let’s Go Bail Water: Eroticism in Ho Xuan Huong’s Vietnamese Poetry.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 33, no. 3 (October, 2002): 471-494. Thorough and appreciative discussion of Ho Xuan Huong’s work, her life, her society, and her reputation among modern Vietnamese.