Tam and Cam

Everyone calls it the Vietnamese Cinderella. The oldest printed version anyone can actually read tells it the other way round. In tale XXII of A. Landes's Contes et légendes annamites, printed in Saigon in 1886, the heroine is Cám and the sister who steals her fish, fells the areca palm beneath her and takes her place beside the king's son is Tấm — the reverse of the version taught in Vietnam today, and not a slip: the same assignment runs through seven entries of Landes's own index, including the one that fixed the comparison for good, "Cendrillon. Voir Cám." That 1886 text has no Buddha but a génie descending from the sky, no festival and no slipper lost at a ball, and no talking loom. The reversed names travelled intact into English as late as 1992. The tale's other famous feature has been edited too, and much more recently: the ending in which the winner has her rival's flesh salted and sent to her mother, who eats it until a crow tells her what it is, was replaced in the Ngữ văn 10 school textbook by a pit of boiling water — a substitution that became a public argument in the Vietnamese press in November 2011. Two edits, both datable. That is the story worth telling.

Everyone calls it the Vietnamese Cinderella. The oldest printed version anyone can actually read tells it with the good sister and the bad sister the other way round. That version is tale XXII of A. Landes, Contes et legendes annamites, printed in Saigon by the Imprimerie coloniale in 1886 as an offprint of the journal Excursions et Reconnaissances, where it had run serially between 1884 and 1886. Landes was an Administrateur des Affaires Indigenes in the French colonial administration. His tale XXII is titled Histoire de con Tam et de con Cam, and it opens: "Un mari et sa femme avaient chacun une fille ; la fille du mari s'appelait Cam, la fille de la femme s'appelait Tam." The husband's daughter Cam is the heroine. The wife's daughter Tam is the one who steals her fish, cuts down the areca palm she has climbed, and takes her place beside the king's son. This is not a slip on one line. Landes glosses the names in a footnote on the same page -- "Cam est le son, tam les brisures de riz", bran and broken rice -- and his own alphabetical index carries the same assignment through seven separate entries: the goby whose bones become Cam's fine clothes; the flock of pigeons that helps Cam sort the sesame and the beans; the successive metamorphoses of Cam into a fly, a hoanh hoach bird, a bamboo shoot and a thi fruit; and, flatly, "Sale. Cam fait saler le corps de Tam et l'envoie a leur mere." The index also contains the entry that launched a century of comparison: "Cam. Nom d'un personnage que l'on peut rapprocher de Cendrillon", with a cross-reference reading "Cendrillon. Voir Cam." The Cinderella label was fixed to this tale by its French colonial collector, in his own back matter, in 1886 -- and he pinned it on Cam. Read beside the version taught in Vietnam today, the 1886 text is missing three of the tale's best-known furnishings. There is no Bụt, no Buddha: what comes down from the sky to the weeping girl is "un genie". There is no festival and no slipper lost at a ball -- she puts her new shoes out to dry in a field after they get wet, and a crow carries one off and drops it in the crown prince's palace. And there is no talking loom: the chain of rebirths runs bird, bamboo shoot, thi fruit, fly. What the 1886 text does have, and keeps in full, is the pith of the story's machinery: the rooster who asks for three grains of rice and shows her where the fish bones were thrown, the four little pots buried at the four corners of her bed for three months and ten days, and the pigeons sorting grain. Landes described his own method in the volume's Avertissement, and it is more candid than anything later writers said on his behalf. His principal informants, he wrote, were a diviner and a lettered man, both from Nghe An province, which is why so many of the legends concern Tonkin and Annam. He explained that a European could not simply take the tales down: a storyteller falls silent the moment a foreigner crosses the room, and interrupting one to ask a question stops him dead or sends him back to the beginning. So he worked through willing intermediaries who wrote out first what they knew themselves and then what they could get others to tell them -- and he admitted that "toute cette partie a ete ecourtee par le fait meme de la redaction", shortened by the very act of writing it down. He insisted he had added nothing, then footnoted the one place he had forced the sense: in tale 75 he had named a character Oreille fine, and only later realised he had lifted the name from Biade's Contes gascons by unconscious reminiscence. The reversed names did not stay in French. In 1992 the American folklorist Judy Sierra put the tale into English for Cinderella, in the Oryx Multicultural Folktale Series, on pages 141 to 144. Her source note credits "A. Landes. Contes et legendes annamites. Saigon: Imprimerie Coloniale, 1886. Translation by Judy Sierra", and her headnote opens: "This story of Cam and her evil stepsister Tam was collected from a Vietnamese storyteller in the late nineteenth century." The assignment travelled intact for a hundred and six years. Two things shifted in the crossing. Sierra's headnote states that Landes "employed native translators to collect and transcribe tales exactly as they were told by local storytellers" -- which is the reassuring half of what Landes actually wrote, with his own warning about abridgement dropped. And the translation is, in small ways, freer than its source: Landes's girl finds "un habit, un pantalon et une paire de souliers", while Sierra's finds "a beautiful dress, and pants, and a pair of golden slippers"; Landes's text sends her across the river for "une fleur de nenuphar", a water lily, with a footnote noting "Du jasmin suivant d'autres", and Sierra promotes the footnote's jasmine into the story. The tale's other famous feature has also been edited, and much more recently. In the Ngu van 10 literature textbook used in Vietnamese schools, the ending reads: Tam has her servants dig a deep pit and boil a pot of water, tells Cam to climb down, and has the water poured in; Cam dies; the stepmother, seeing it, drops dead. The older ending -- the one printed in 1886 -- does not stop there. In Landes, the loser is not pushed: she is talked into it. Asked how she became so beautiful, the heroine tells her to boil water and jump in, and she believes her and does it. Then "Cam fit saler sa chair et l'envoya a sa mere", who took it for pork and began to eat, until a crow in a tree called out that the greedy crow was eating her own child's flesh and cracking her bones, and she reached the bottom of the store and found the head. The removal of that ending from the schoolbook became a public argument in the Vietnamese press in the first week of November 2011.

There is nothing to visit, and saying so plainly is more useful than inventing an itinerary. Tam and Cam is a migratory tale type, not a local legend: it is told across Vietnam, it is attached to no village, no shrine and no landmark, and no source consulted for this entry anchors it to a place. The coordinates on this page fall on Hanoi and should be read as a national placeholder, not as a location for the story. Landes's own preface points, if anywhere, in a different direction: his principal informants were a diviner and a lettered man from Nghe An province, in north-central Vietnam, some 300 km south of Hanoi -- but that is the provenance of his collection, not of this tale, and it is not enough to move a pin on. What can be visited is the text, and most of it is free. The 1886 French original has been digitised and proofread page by page on French Wikisource, where tale XXII, Histoire de con Tam et de con Cam, can be read in full along with Landes's footnotes, his Avertissement and the alphabetical index that contains the Cendrillon cross-reference. It is short -- around 2,000 words -- and it is the single most useful thing a curious reader can do with an hour. The English text of Judy Sierra's Cinderella (Oryx Press, 1992), where the tale occupies pages 141 to 144, is held by many public and university libraries. Readers who want the version Vietnamese teenagers actually study should look for the tale in the Ngu van 10 textbook, whose ending differs from both. One small thing from the story is genuinely encounterable in Vietnam: the thi, the fruit the heroine finally emerges from. Landes identified it in 1886 as a Diospyros, a relative of the persimmon, described it as yellow with a penetrating scent close to quince, and noted that two and even three varieties were sold in the markets of his day. He also recorded the rhyme children called up at the tree as they held out a fold of their clothing and whistled for the wind: "Trai thi ! rot bi ba gia !" -- thi, fall into the old woman's bag. It is the line the beggar woman speaks in the tale. Whether children still call it is not something this entry has verified; what is documented is that they did in 1886.