Tấm and Cám (Vietnamese folktale)

Author: Traditional

Time Period: 501 CE–1000 CE; 1851 CE–1900 CE

Country or Culture: Vietnam

Genre: Folktale

Overview

The story of Tấm and Cám is a popular folktale of Vietnam. A story of love and sibling rivalry, the tale features the triumph of a good sister, Tấm (Tam), over her wicked stepmother and Cám (Cam), her evil stepsister. A key element in the story is Tấm’s magically produced slipper, which is stolen by a bird. The bird drops it into the palace of the crown prince, and the prince, enamored, proclaims he will marry the owner of the slipper. This plot detail has convinced most scholars that this tale, like its familiar Western counterpart of Charles Perrault’s “Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre”(1697; “Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper,”1729), has its origin in the Greek story of Rhodopis, dating from the first century BCE. Rhodopis, too, gets to marry the pharaoh of Egypt because the pharaoh falls in love with her when a falcon drops her slipper in his lap.

From ancient Greece, the story of Rhodopis traveled farther into Europe, where it became the story of Cinderella, and reached as far as what is now Vietnam. It arrived there, most scholars believe, via the Middle East (specifically present-day Iran) and India, where existing folktales contain the core element of the slipper. The tale also came to Vietnam from China, where the story of Ye Xian (Yeh-hsien) was written down around 860 CE.

In Vietnam, there were many variants of the story of Tấm and Cám in existence when French colonial administrator Antony Landes hired Vietnamese translators to visit traditional storytellers, called nguời kể truyện. Their task was to collect and transcribe the tales they were told, then translate them from Vietnamese to French. Landes’s “Histoire de con Tam et de con Cam,” published in his collection of Vietnamese tales and legends in Saigon in 1886, contains the earliest European transcription of the tale. However, for all his care, Landes made a quintessential mistake: He mixed up the names of the good Tấm and the evil Cám! This error was carried over even in Judy Sierra’s somewhat free 1992 English translation of Landes’s text, which serves as source text for this essay. Readers must silently exchange the names of the two sisters when reading Sierra’s text. This correction has been made throughout this essay whenever referring to the source text.

Tấm wrapped the clothes in an old rag and ran out to the fields to try them on where no one could see her. But as she did so, the golden slippers became wet, and so she placed them on a rock to dry. A crow flew down and carried off one of them and dropped it into the courtyard of the palace of the crown prince of that country. When the prince saw the delicate slipper, he announced that he would only marry the girl whose foot it would fit.

“The Story of Tấm and Cám”

The Landes/Sierra text contains the basic elements of the many Vietnamese variants of the story of Tấm and Cám. Vietnamese storytellers added a substantial portion of indigenous material to the archaic core, continuing the story beyond Tấm’s marriage to the prince. This continuation focuses on the fierce battle between Tấm and Cám for the affection of the prince, during which Cám kills Tấm in numerous incarnations, ranging from human to animal to plant. Finally, after being reborn as a woman inside a fruit, Tấm reunites with the prince. She then exacts a terrible revenge on Cám and her stepmother: She tricks Cám into killing herself and sends her meat, labeled as pork, to the stepmother to eat. This original ending has proven controversial in contemporary Vietnam; in most texts, including the textbook version published by Vietnam’s Ministry of Education in 2011, the part where Cám’s mother eats her daughter’s flesh has been cut out to make the ending less cruel and discomforting.

The story of Tấm and Cám has been a key part of the body of folktales from Vietnam. Cultural criticism reveals how the tale corresponds to and addresses many issues in traditional Vietnamese society, religion, and culture. Literary analysis shows how the original ending is based on a key motif that unifies the narrative. A postcolonial critical approach questions how the transcription and translation of a Vietnamese folktale into European languages influenced later written Vietnamese editions of the tale, and feminist analysis shows how the battle between a strong female protagonist and a similar antagonist can be read as patriarchy’s warning of the chaos and mischief that would result. This latter interpretation leads back to the tale’s grounding in Vietnam’s traditional Confucian ideals for family and society.

Summary

As transcribed from the tale told by a nguời kể truyện to a bilingual Vietnamese story collector, translated into French for Antony Landes around 1886, then translated into English from Landes’s text by Judy Sierra in 1992, “The Story of Tam and Cam”unfolds as follows. Readers should bear in mind that Landes and Sierra mixed up the names of protagonist and antagonist. This error is silently corrected throughout the following synopsis and this essay as a whole.

A man and a woman marry. The man already has a daughter named Tấm, which in Vietnamese means “broken rice,” referring to valuable rice kernels to be processed for human food. The woman has a daughter named Cám, which means “bran,” the dark outer skin of a rice kernel. While bran is regarded as a nutritional supplement in the West, in Vietnam it was considered pig feed, and only the poorest of people would eat it.

As Tấm and Cám appear to be of similar age, husband and wife settle on a test to determine who the eldest, and thus the more privileged one, is. Both girls are sent out to catch fish, and the one who brings home the most will be given seniority. Tấm earnestly sets herself to the task and catches many fish. Cám, having fallen behind, tells Tấm to pick a jasmine flower on the other shore of the river. While Tấm is away, Cám steals all her fish, with the exception of one bông mú (a Vietnamese goby).

When Tấm discovers the theft, she is dejected and cries. A spirit appears and tells Tấm to take care of her remaining fish and feed it from her own food. Tấm does as she is told and places the fish in the well at her home. One day, when Tấm is out tending the family’s water buffalo, Cám, who has been spying on her, calls for the fish. She catches, cooks, and eats it. When Tấm finds out, she is distraught. However, a rooster speaks to Tấm, saying that for three grains of rice, he will tell her where to find the fish’s bones. The spirit reappears and tells Tấm to put the fish bones in four pots to be buried at the four ends of her bed. She should unearth and open the pots in three years and ten days.

Uncovering the pots after the allotted time, Tấm finds in them a beautiful dress, pants, and a pair of shoes (Landes: shoes or loafers; Sierra: golden slippers). Tấm goes into the fields to try on the splendid clothes in secret, but her slippers get wet, so she puts them on a rock to dry. A raven (Landes) or crow (Sierra) sweeps down and picks up one of the slippers, which it then drops at the palace of the crown prince. The prince announces that he will marry only the girl whose foot fits the slipper. Tam’s stepmother forbids Tấm to go to the palace to try on the slipper until she has separated a specially prepared mix of lentils (Landes: beans) and sesame seeds. The spirit sends pigeons to perform this task, and Tấm is finally permitted to go to the palace. When she arrives, the slipper fits her foot, and the prince marries her.

Soon after the wedding, Tấm is called home to attend to her sick father. Her stepmother puts crisp rice crackers (Landes: bánh trán) under the bed covers next to him. The cracking noise they make when Tấm’s father turns in his bed, the stepmother explains, is the cracking of his bones, which can be healed only from the fruit of a tree (Landes: an areca palm) in the garden. Once Tấm has climbed the tree to get the fruit, Cám cuts it down, and Tấm falls. Sierra’s text states that “she did not die—she was transformed into a quanh quach bird” (143); in Landes’s text, Tấm does die and is reincarnated into this bird, a Vietnamese bulbul. Cám then puts on Tấm’s clothes and travels to the palace, where she tells the prince, “My sister, Tam, is dead, so I have come to take her place” (Sierra 143). Even though the prince is saddened by this news, he accepts Cám.

One day, when Cám is washing the prince’s clothes, Tấm, in bird form, admonishes Cám to wash her husband’s clothes carefully. The prince says to the bird, “If you are my wife, fly into my sleeve.” The bird does so, incensing Cám; once the prince is away, she seizes the bird, cooks it, and eats it. Confronted by the prince, Cám answers, “I must be pregnant. I had such a craving for bird’s meat” (Sierra 143). When the prince asks where she put the bird’s feathers, Cám tells him she threw them over the palace wall.

Over the wall, where the feathers landed, a bamboo shoot grows. The prince waters and speaks tender words to it. While the prince is hunting, Cám cuts down the bamboo shoot and cooks and eats it. She throws away the bark, which then grows into a tree. According to Landes, it is a thị tree (golden apple, or Diospyros decandra); Sierra turns it into a durian tree. This tree bears only one fragrant fruit, but “no one [i]s able to climb the tree and pick its fruit” (Sierra 144), including Cám, who wants to eat it (Landes).

Eventually, an old beggar woman asks the fruit to drop into her basket, and it does. At home, the old woman places the fruit on a shelf of her hut. When she goes begging the next day, Tấm emerges from the fruit. She cleans the hut and prepares a meal. Astonished, the next day the old woman hides and surprises Tấm. Sierra’s translation cuts short their ensuing interaction, but it is rendered in full by Landes, providing another example of Tấm’s devotion to her elders. Tấm asks the old woman to invite the prince to a feast at their hut. The prince tells the old woman he will come only if there is “a silken carpet, embroidered with gold, that will reach from my door to yours” (Sierra 144). With the help of the spirit, Tấm weaves this carpet in one night.

When the prince arrives, he looks at the feast while Tấm hides behind a curtain. Landes relates that it is the especially artful arrangement of betel leaves, a local stimulant ingested by chewing, that convinces him that Tấm must have prepared the feast; in Sierra’s text, the prince simply comments, “My wife prepared food exactly this way.” Tấm appears before the prince. Sierra gives only a brief account of their reunion, again rendered in more detail by Landes, and concludes that “joyfully he took Tam back to the palace” (144).

At the palace, Cám is much surprised and asks Tấm how she has become so lovely since she last saw her. Tấm answers, “If you wish to be as lovely as I am, fill a large cauldron with boiling water, and jump in.’” Cám believes her, throws herself into boiling water, and dies. Then Tấm has “[her stepsister’s] flesh salted and sent to the stepmother,” who thinks it is pork and starts to eat it. A nearby bird (Landes: raven) derides her, saying, “The hungry crow eats her child’s flesh and cracks her bones.” Angrily, the stepmother insists that this is meat sent to her from Cám from the palace. However, once she reaches the bottom of the barrel in which the meat was sent, she discovers her dead daughter’s head. This version of the story of Tấm and Cám ends here. Other versions have the stepmother die of grief afterward. Most contemporary versions cut the meat-eating scene and end with Cám’s death and that of her mother’s, the latter out of grief.

Bibliography

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