COLLECTION
Stories connected by a shared idea.
A woodcutter found the tree whose leaves bring back the dead, and it carried him off to the moon. The oldest written telling, from 1886, never calls its hero Cuội, and the oldest Cuội we have found, in a dictionary of 1651, is a liar with no moon at all.
Read story 10 min readKilled by her stepmother's household, Tấm comes back as a bird, two trees, a loom and a fruit until the king finds her again. The tale is often called a Vietnamese copy of Cinderella, yet its oldest written version, printed in 1886, names the heroine Cám, and its second half has no place in Perrault or Grimm.
Read story 13 min readEvery year on the 23rd of the twelfth lunar month, Vietnamese families send their kitchen gods to heaven on a carp, with two men's hats and one woman's. Their tale, a wife and two husbands who died in one fire, was already written down in 1659, but the gods' names, their number and even the meaning of Ông Công have shifted since.
Read story 12 min read
