The Tale of Kieu: An Overview Essay

On March 22nd, 2015, an inexperienced prospecting couple went missing. Raymond Kehlet, 47 years old and his wife, Jennie Kehlet 49 years old from Beverly both disappeared while prospecting for gold in Tabletop near Sandstone.

In The Tale of Kieu a young woman is forced into a lifetime of immorality and subservience to the dominant male culture of her community. The young woman at the heart of the story is not moral. However, her morality or not is really not what the story is about at all. Instead, it is the patriarchal society within Vietnam that is the true central character of the piece. In the history of Vietnam, members of the female gender have had a history of ostracism and oppression by the males of that society. Masculinity itself is found in the poem through the minor male characters of the piece. The character of Kieu is immoral because she is forced into actions against her own set of ethics by the society in which she lives. Morality is judged by the sociology of the surrounding culture. Under the moral rules of Vietnamese society, Kieu is immoral and the men around her who sexualize her and force her into immoral acts are in the moral right.

The main characters go through character development in the novel, maturing in both their thoughts and state of mind. After facing the intense guilt from thinking that her uncle was going to be caught by the Japanese government, Sun-hee makes sure to not jump to conclusions: “Tae-yul was going to be a kamikaze...But maybe I was wrong. Remember Tomo-remember Uncle. I’d been so sure, and had made a terrible mistake. Don’t make a mistake this time” (Park 143). After her uncle had run away because of her misinterpretation of a warning, Sun-hee had blamed herself, not trusting anything she thought. Instead of completely discrediting her thoughts, she only warned herself to think it through more. Her careful mindset allowed her to confirm her Korean identity and that her culture had to be protected. This maturity gave her the freedom in knowing her thoughts about her culture were well-thought-out. Tae-yul’s growth is evident by his body language and reactions to certain events. Near the beginning of the story, he is

Tusee is the daughter of the bravest Dakota warrior. Tusee is described as beautiful just like her mother, but sturdy and strong just like her father. Anything that Tusee wants, she receives. We see this when she asks her uncle to get her a pony, he responded, “I go if Tusee tells me so” (Zitkala-Sa 36). Tusee does not possess fear, but does possess compassion. We see this when she stays back, and rescues her lover. Tusee holds all the traits and quality of a great

This passage summarizing the scene highlights how Kim is commodified as an object of desire. First, being used to “solicit the crowd” by the Engineer (the owner of the bar), then bartered for by John, and finally won by Chris. Although Kim and Chris fall in love, it’s difficult to ignore the lack of participation on her part in order for their pairing to occur. Chris, a white American, benefits from the vulnerability of a female Vietnamese teenager, a fact that the musical does not criticize. Chris has a dominant position in the relationship,

In the re-telling of the Fa Mu Lan myth, Kinston shows the strengths and warrior like abilities of her character, rather than the weaknesses her mother scares her with, in the story of the “No Name Woman.” “When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talk-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves.” Fa Mu Lan helps her get out of the circle of the average subservient Chinese woman and strive to be something better than a housewife or a slave. She gets an abundance of inspiration from the heroine in the myth, pretending the hero is she. Kingston is inspired to break the mold of the typical Chinese woman. From this myth she learns that it is ok to be different, to be a Chinese-American woman. She proves to herself that she can be whoever she wants

The narrator doesn’t want to marry his girlfriend Kim at the time. The narrator thinks “The whole idea of marriage makes me want to pull a dry cleaning bag over my head”(XXX). Stating “maybe I’m just a typical guy, don’t want to pay for the cow if I can get the milk for free”(XXX). Wanting to hold on to the past “ I miss our punk rock days, Kim and me and our loser friends playing in bands, hawking spit at guys in BMWs, shooting drugs… and living in basements with anarchy tattoos poking through the rips in our clothing”(XXX). Unaware that Kim is having an affair with a cavemen in the basement, where she also spends a lot of her time in. Kim got tired of waiting for the narrator to man up. Kim finally had enough, having no choice but to leave him. The narrator was left having no knowledge, understanding on what happened to his

It tells the story of a couple who get a night pasera by car, trying to get a perfect date and mentions it to say that the moon was gold that night, indicating that this was his most valuable night and I had to seize the opportunity . She just kissed him and whispered no, continue driving better ,. In his rare walk without knowing where to stop in a place called Ko-ko-mo (Kokomo is a city in the middle of Indiana and is Also a small resort owned by Sandals Royal Caribbean in Montego Bay; Represent all the tropical places and Images that people think of When wishing to get away to some island paradise to escape the dreary work life. "That's Where we want to go.")

However, two vibrant changes occur as the story progresses —Coyotito, his son, getting stung by a scorpion and Kino’s discovery of the pearl—broaden Kino’s horizons and outlook on the world. As Kino begins to strive for wealth and education for his son, the simplicity of his life becomes increasingly complicated by greed, conflict, and violence. Kino’s character then falls through a gradual decline from a state of innocence to a state of corruption and disillusionment. The factors promoting this decline are ambition and greed. Thus, when going got tough for Kinoo and he had to escape town he faced a lot of hardships, since he had to go into hiding and the only immediate help he had was from his brother. This had an adverse effect on his personality as he became increasingly negative, given the way he hit his wife shows how the pearl preoccupied his mind to such a great extent that he grew indifferent to everything else as evil and restlessness eloped him. In addition to these social changes, Kinoo, after attaining the pearl was on the move to gain economic sustenance, but not being able to find the right price to sell his pearl got him feeling even more uncertain and disappointed but he continued to strive and was reluctant to give up because he wanted everything in his reach for his son, who he consequently ended up losing in the

Ninh’s novel jumps between flashbacks of the war and Kien’s love affairs, in particular one with his childhood sweetheart Phuong. Ninh uses the reoccurring theme of Kien’s love, or loss of love, as a metaphor for the impact the war had on the Vietnamese people. The original title of the novel is actually The Destiny of Love. Kien likens the war to a soldiers love saying, “The sorrow of war inside a soldier’s heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia…It was a sadness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past” (Ninh, 94). Kien does find himself often reminiscing of his young innocent love with Phuong. The end of the novel focuses

Majority of the ancient societies portrayed similarities in the presentation of women and girls. In other words, women and girls in the traditional communities were given similar roles and were regarded as the inferior members of the society. Men were viewed as members of the superior gender and due to this; they were given the primary responsibilities in the society and were also regarded as the heads of the family and the entire community. In most cases, women took the roles and responsibilities of housewives, caretakers, nurturers, reproducers, and mothers while men were given the responsibility of managing the society. The classification of diverse roles for women and men was destructive on the side of the females as men sought to dominate them, take advantage of them and even oppress them and this resulted in the case of gender imbalance and inequality. It is clear that men were insensitive about this division and hence scholars rose to represent the fate of women through writing. The Tale of Kieu by Nguyen and the Separate Ways by Chiyo portray women as oppressed, voiceless and members of an inferior gender.

One of the most overarching themes found in Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Kairo (2001) is the central them of individuality and loneliness. The extreme situations caused by supernatural and natural situations found within the film allows for the emergence of a character’s true personality.

Kim is specialized in surveying and map-making, these are an essential skills for his future role as a spy, because he is answerable to Colonel Creighton rarely on stage and agents Mahbub Ali, Babu, and Lurgan who trains him in the art and science of spying. Kim is subjected to a psychological test in which Lurgan tries, through hypnotism, to make him believe that a broken jug has reconstituted itself. Kim resists Lurgan's attempts to manipulate his mind by silently reciting the mathematical tables he learned at school. Lurgan is impressed, saying that Kim is the first one ever to have resisted him, and Kipling seems to be showing that much as Kim found the ordered regimented thinking of white men repellent at first, the mental discipline

Vu Trong Phung’s The Industry of Marrying Europeans handled a topic that many other reporters at the time saw as “taboo” or “deviant” because he openly wrote about people many saw as “lowlives” who were shunned from traditional Vietnamese culture (10). While other Vietnamese reporters avoided writing about opium addicts, gamblers, rapists, and other corrupted characters, Vu Trong Phung was unique in blatantly centering his works on these types of people. Though many of his contemporaries claimed that his work was nonfiction, Thúy Tranviet, the translator of this edition, argues that Vu Trong Phung’s work is a mixture of both nonfiction and fiction (11), making this primary source unique for its truth-bending and its translation. Basing his

In the novella, The Pearl, Kino is faced with many decisions that later impact his life in ways that he could never image. The Pearl tells the tale of a great pearl that could change the life of any man. Kino happened to be this man, but this great pearl caused nothing but havoc and harm to come upon his family. When they were running from all of the trouble the pearl had caused them, Kino’s son died, their hut burned down in the attempt to get away, and Kino had become a man of anger and violence.