Poetic Transformations: Eighteenth-Century Cultural Projects on the Mekong Plains by Claudine Ang

Abstract

Reviewed by: Poetic Transformations: Eighteenth-Century Cultural Projects on the Mekong Plains by Claudine Ang Nam Nguyen Poetic Transformations: Eighteenth-Century Cultural Projects on the Mekong Plains by Claudine Ang. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019. Pp. xvi + 291. $49.95 cloth. Nguyễn Cư Trinh 阮居貞 (1716–1767) and Mạc Thiên Tứ 鄚天賜 (Ch. Mo Tianci; ca. 1710–1780) are two outstanding figures in Vietnam’s southward expansion history. In contrast to the notable Vietnamese general Nguyễn Cư Trinh, whose effort in southern border protection was acknowledged as his great contribution to this enterprise of the Nguyễn lords (who ruled central and southern Vietnam 1558–1777), Mạc Thiên Tứ received and developed a heritage from his father Mạc Cửu 鄚玖 (Ch. Mo Jiu; 1655–1735), a Chinese Ming loyalist who [End Page 493] pledged allegiance to the Nguyễn lords and established Hà Tiên as a prosperous town in the far southern territory of present-day Vietnam. Although Nguyễn’s Sãi vãi (A monk and a nun), a long satirical conversation in verse, and Mạc’s Hà tiên thập vịnh 河仙十詠 (Ten songs of Hà Tiên), a collection of poems, have been studied separately by several scholars since the 1880s, Ang’s work is the first monograph connecting their literary writings. Ang convincingly treats these works as “cultural projects” of the two pioneers in the political and cultural contexts of Vietnam’s southern expansion in the eighteenth century. Ang’s work consists of two main parts, which follow an introduction. Titled “Cultural Projects on the Southern Vietnamese Frontier,” the introduction lays out the geopolitical and historical contexts of the “two political actors” (p. 6) and presents her research approach. Part 1, “Drama on the Frontier,” is reserved for in-depth analysis of Nguyễn Cư Trinh’s Sãi vãi. Part 2, “Lyrics and Landscapes,” deals exclusively with Mạc Thiên Tứ’s Hà tiên thập vịnh and Nguyễn Cư Trinh’s response poems. In the introduction, Ang cites a passage from Xiao Tong’s 蕭統 (501–531) preface of Wenxuan 文選 (Selections of refined literature): “observe the patterns [wen 文; lit. writing] of man to transform the world” (p. 16). Although she acknowledges that the word “patterns” can mean both culture and writing, Ang decides to focus on patterns as writing to emphasize the transformative power of language: “through writing, humans are able to refashion and give structure to the unpatterned parts of the world” (p. 17). Ang goes on to treat the writings of the two chosen Confucian literati as “cultural projects [that] bring writing to bear on the people and the landscape of the peripheral regions in their care” (p. 17). As for Mạc Thiên Tứ, his cultural project consists of a series of landscape poems written in Chinese script, to which thirty-one poets from China and Vietnam responded. In chapter 1, “Frontier Humor and the Inadequacies of Orthodoxy,” Ang links Sãi vãi to a memorial that Nguyễn Cư Trinh submitted to the Nguyễn lord in 1751 (about one year after he wrote Sãi vãi). She suggests that Nguyễn composed these two pieces of writing in order to find a solution for burning issues in the southern Vietnamese frontier society. Ang divides her close reading of Sãi vãi as a drama into eight sections. She delicately indicates that during the course of the play, the monk continuously changes his roles, moving “from an errant religious [End Page 494] figure, to a dubious Confucian gentleman, to a reluctant village bard, to a perfected Confucian official, and finally to a terrified villager” (p. 34). Based on her reading of the first three sections of this literary work, Ang believes that, through satire and a formal petition, Nguyễn Cư Trinh endeavors to address local villagers, power holders, and the Nguyễn lord about the pressing problems of errant monks and incompetent officers on the frontier: he expects to figure out a solution. In chapter 2, “The Classical in the Vernacular,” Ang shows how a Nôm (Vietnamese vernacular) text...