Truyện Kiều: some other thoughts

1/ In Truyện Kiều, Nguyễn Du focuses on the eponymous character, but there’s another female character I’m curious about—her younger sister Thúy Vân. 
When the Vương family get into trouble, and their father and brother get arrested, Kiều decides to sell herself, and asks Vân to fulfil her promise with Kim Trọng by marrying him. Vân agrees. 
Is that not a sacrifice? 
For the entire story, we never have access to her thoughts and feelings. Near the end, when Nguyễn Du goes back in time and switches to the perspective of Kim Trọng to tell the story of the family after Kiều’s departure, we can see that they get married but Kim Trọng never forgets Kiều and still wants to search for Kiều. It is Vân who has a dream about Kiều’s first location (Lâm Truy instead of Lâm Thanh as everyone believed), which offers a clue for the search. At the reunion, it is Vân who suggests that Kim Trọng and Kiều get back together. 
But how does she feel about it? 
On 2 occasions at the beginning of the text, Nguyễn Du depicts the contrast between the sisters. The first time, standing at Đạm Tiên’s grave and hearing Vương Quan's account of her life, Kiều tears up, thinks about the fate of women in society (“Đau đớn thay phận đàn bà/ Lời rằng bạc mệnh cũng là lời chung”), and thinks about her own uncertain future. Vân doesn’t react that way, and thinks it’s silly of her sister to cry for someone dead (that she never knew). 
The second time, after the family calamity, Kiều cannot sleep that night—she knows she wants to save her family but struggles to choose between her duty as a daughter and her promise with Kim Trọng. It’s because of her sobs that Vân wakes up. 
For years, critics have read these 2 scenes to mean that Kiều has a sensitive soul and more depth of feeling, whilst Vân is shallow and carefree. But does it? Or does it suggest that Kiều is more sensitive but also more sentimental, with a tendency for self-fulfilling prophecy, and Vân has a calmer nature? 
Even if it’s true that Vân’s shallow, she knows that she’s a substitute and her husband never stops thinking about Kiều, how can we say that she doesn’t feel anything about it? Nguyễn Gia Thiều writes about a royal concubine’s loneliness in Cung oán ngâm khúc. Hồ Xuân Hương writes about the life of sharing a husband in her poetry. Even Nguyễn Du writes about the feeling of sharing a husband, through Hoạn Thư. Why do some critics assume that Vân feels nothing? 
I feel sad for Kiều, but also for Vân. 

Spoiler alert: those who want to read Truyện Kiều and do not want to know the plot are warned that I shall discuss significant plot points in the rest of the blog post. 

2/ When Kiều, with Từ Hải’s help, repays people who have helped her, the people she thanks are Thúc Sinh, Giác Duyên (the Buddhist nun), and the housekeeper at Hoạn Thư’s house. She forgets Mã Kiều, her benefactor at Tú Bà’s brothel.

3/ In an earlier blog post, I wrote that it’s remarkable that Kiều has 3 loves in her life. I like that Kim Trọng, Thúc Sinh, and Từ Hải are all different—Kiều falls in love with 3 different types of men at 3 different stages in her life, and her feelings for them are also different. 
Now that I’ve finished Truyện Kiều and counted—it turns out that Kiều marries 6 times! 
Throughout the story, Kiều gets married to Mã Giám Sinh (sham marriage), Thúc Sinh, Bạc Hạnh (sham marriage), Từ Hải, viên thổ quan—a local official (forced marriage), and Kim Trọng.
She’s also forced into prostitution twice. 
I can’t help thinking, how easy was it to get married back then? Did people not need to register their marriage or something? Did people have anything like divorce or just easily have another marriage? And how common were brothels that Kiều’s sold twice into them?
It’s no wonder that for years and even now, many men think that Kiều is impure and immoral, and Truyện Kiều shouldn’t be hailed as Vietnam’s greatest literary work*. The wonder is that Nguyễn Du, in his time—in a Confucian society, could sympathise with her and love her.


*: They’re wrong.