American writers

Vietnamese literature, body of literature produced by Vietnamese-speaking people, primarily in Vietnam.
Like the river basins that have nourished Vietnam’s agricultural civilization for thousands of years, Vietnamese literature has been fed by two great tributaries: the indigenous oral literature and the written literature of Chinese influence.
The oral poetry tradition is purely native. Older even than the linguistic separation of the Muong and Vietnamese languages 1,000 years ago, the oral poetry tradition probably has its origins in the agrarian prayers common to the prehistory of the Mon-Khmer language family. The oral poetry, still sung today in the countryside, remains a strong influence in contemporary poetry and fiction writing. Its word stock, prosodic patterns, and themes show few foreign influences. And, while its main contemporary feature is the lyrical, first-person, sung poetry of ca dao (“folk ballads”), the oral tradition also contains third-person narratives, as in the ca tru (“ceremonial songs”) tradition in the north and the vong co (“echoes of the past”) tradition in the south, as well as in the tuc-ngu proverbs (“customary words”), related to ca dao.
Chinese influence on the written literature of Vietnam is nearly as old as its conquest of the country in the 2nd century BC. For nearly 2,000 years after that, most Vietnamese writing was in Chinese ideograms. In other words, to express themselves in writing, the Vietnamese had to use a writing system that represented their ideas but not their speech. However, with national independence and the establishment of a Vietnamese state in the 10th century AD, scholars began to develop an ideographic writing system that represented Vietnamese speech. This demotic writing system, called Chu Nom, or “the southern script,” existed beside Chinese writing into the early 20th century when both Chinese and Chu Nom were supplanted by a Roman alphabetical script, first proposed in 1651 by the Jesuit priest Alexandre de Rhodes. The alphabetical system of writing, called Quoc-ngu, or “the national script,” was much simpler to learn than either Chinese or Chu Nom. Its general adoption, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, spread literacy throughout Vietnam and sped the introduction of Western ideas and literary forms, including the appearance of the Western-style novel and short story.
Along with the borrowed conventions of Chinese literature came Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. Over the many centuries of Chinese acculturation, these “Three Religions” grafted themselves, more or less successfully, onto similar, indigenous habits of belief. The choice of writing in Han-Viet (Chinese-Vietnamese) or in Chu Nom gave individual authors a wide range of formal and thematic possibilities, including the luc-bat (“six-eight,” referring to a basic couplet of six syllables in the first line and eight in the second) prosody of the oral tradition. While concurring on the prestige of Chinese writing, Vietnamese literati were intent on establishing the independence of Vietnamese writing, even as they accepted models from the full range of Chinese literary forms, especially the “regulated verse” form, or lüshi, of the Tang dynasty. Both in Chinese and in Chu Nom writing, lüshi (tho duong luat in Vietnamese) became the classical carrier of lyrical expression. In its borrowed origins and in its formal compression, its cultural function was similar to that of the English sonnet. The form reached aesthetic heights in Vietnamese hands in the 19th century, with poets such as the concubine Ho Xuan Huong, who composed regulated verse poems that were complete double entendres, filled with tonal puns (noi lai). Still others created regulated verse palindromes that would be in Vietnamese from start to finish but then, going backward, ideogram by ideogram, became poems in Chinese, switching languages on the reversal. Perhaps the most extraordinary proponent of this kind of virtuoso play was the emperor Thieu Tri (ruled 1841–47), who wrote a poem for his intellectual recreation that was a circular palindrome offering 12 different readings. This poem, carved in jade inlay for a wood panel at the Long-An Palace, can still be seen at the Imperial Museum of Hue.