Tấm and Cám: The Girl Who Came Back

In 1886 A. Landes, a French colonial administrator in Saigon, described what children did when they passed under a thị tree, whose yellow fruit has a strong, quince-like scent: they held out a flap of their clothes, whistled for the wind and called, “Thị, fall into the old woman’s bag!” The words come from a tale Vietnamese schools still teach, about a girl who is killed by her stepmother’s household and comes back, again and again, until the last time she steps out of a thị fruit.

1 The Telling

This is the version most Vietnamese know, in the text on Vietnamese Wikisource, which names no author and no source. Up to Cám’s death, its last scene is word for word the one the grade 10 textbook prints. The oldest written version differs in many places (sections 2 and 3).

1-1 The Basket and the Goby

Tấm and Cám were half-sisters, daughters of one father by two wives, and close in age. Tấm’s mother died when she was small, and later her father died too. Tấm was left with her stepmother, who worked her from dawn to night, herding the buffalo, carrying water, husking rice, while Cám was petted and did no heavy work. One day the stepmother gave each girl a basket and sent them to the fields to catch shrimp and little fish: whoever filled hers would get a red bodice. Tấm filled hers by noon; Cám caught nothing. So Cám told her sister that her head was muddy and she should duck deep in the pond, or their stepmother would scold her. While Tấm washed, Cám tipped the catch into her own basket and ran home.

Tấm sat by the empty basket and wept. Bụt, the kindly Buddha of Vietnamese folk tales, appeared and asked why. One goby was left in the basket. Bụt told her to keep it in the well, to save it one bowl of rice out of every three, and to call it like this:

Bống bống bang bang, / lên ăn cơm vàng cơm bạc nhà ta, / chớ ăn cơm hẩm cháo hoa nhà người.

Goby, goby, come up and eat our golden rice, our silver rice, / not other people’s stale rice and thin gruel.

1-2 The Bones in the Jars

The stepmother saw Tấm carrying rice to the well and sent Cám to spy. Then she told Tấm that the village had closed the near fields, so she must take the buffalo far away to graze. While Tấm was gone, the stepmother called the goby with Tấm’s words, caught it and cooked it. That evening Tấm called and called, and only a clot of blood rose to the surface. Bụt told her to gather the bones, put them in four jars and bury them under the four legs of her bed. She could not find them until a hen offered to scratch them up for a handful of paddy.

Then the king held a festival. The stepmother mixed a measure of rice with a measure of paddy and told Tấm to sort them before she went anywhere. Bụt sent a flock of sparrows to do it. Then he told her to dig up the jars. In the first were fine clothes, a silk bodice and a headscarf; in the second, a pair of embroidered shoes; in the third, a tiny horse that neighed and grew full size as soon as it touched the ground; in the fourth, a saddle and bridle.

1-3 The Shoe at the Ford

Tấm rode to the capital, but at a ford she dropped one shoe into the water. When the king’s procession reached the ford, the two royal elephants at its head dug their tusks into the ground, trumpeted and would not go on. Soldiers searched the water and brought up an embroidered shoe. The king had it proclaimed that he would marry the woman it fitted. The women at the festival tried it one by one, Cám and her mother among them, and none could wear it. When Cám saw Tấm waiting her turn, her mother sneered: bells and gongs had failed, never mind a shard of a jar thrown out by the bamboo hedge. But the shoe fitted Tấm exactly, and she took its pair out of her scarf. The king had her carried to the palace in a palanquin.

1-4 The Areca Palm and the Oriole

Tấm went home for the anniversary of her father’s death. Her stepmother sent her up an areca palm to pick nuts for the offering and began to cut the trunk from below. When the palm shook, she said she was chasing away ants. The palm fell, and Tấm fell into the pond and died. The stepmother dressed Cám in Tấm’s clothes and took her to the palace, telling the king that Tấm had drowned and her sister would take her place.

Tấm came back as an oriole (vàng anh). She found Cám washing the king’s clothes at the palace well and scolded her: dry my husband’s clothes on a pole, not on the hedge, or you will tear them. The king said to the bird, “Oriole, oriole, if you are my wife, fly into my sleeve,” and it did. He kept it in a golden cage and forgot Cám. So one day, while he was out, Cám killed the bird, ate it and threw the feathers into the garden. She told the king she was with child and had craved it.

From the feathers grew two xoan đào trees, whose branches bent down to shade the king like two parasols, and he hung his hammock between them. On a stormy day Cám had them cut down and made into a loom. But whenever she sat to weave, the loom creaked at her: cót ca cót két, lấy tranh chồng chị, chị khoét mắt ra, “creak, creak, you stole my husband, I will put out your eyes”.

1-5 The Thị Fruit

Cám burned the loom and had the ashes dumped by a road far from the palace. There a thị tree grew, and it bore a single fruit whose scent carried everywhere. An old woman who kept a tea stall nearby held up her bag and said: “Thị, thị, fall into granny’s bag; granny will only smell you, not eat you.” The fruit fell, and she kept it in her room.

Every day, while she was at the market, a girl no bigger than a finger stepped out of the fruit and became Tấm, swept the house and cooked, then went back inside. At last the old woman pretended to go out, hid, and caught her, and tore up the peel. From then on Tấm lived with her like a daughter, cooking, making cakes and folding betel quids for the stall. One day the king stopped at the stall. The old woman offered him betel folded in the shape of phoenix wings (trầu têm cánh phượng), just as his wife used to fold it. He asked who had made it, sent for the old woman’s daughter and knew his wife at once. He brought her back to the palace.

1-6 The Ending

Cám, frightened, asked Tấm how she had become so beautiful. Tấm offered to help. She had servants dig a deep pit and boil a pot of water, told Cám to go down into the pit, and had the servants pour the boiling water in. Cám died. Tấm had the body made into fish paste (mắm) and sent the jar to the stepmother as a gift from her daughter. The stepmother ate from it at every meal and praised it, while a crow on the roof called: “Delicious, delicious! The mother eats her child’s flesh; is there a bite left for me?” When the jar was nearly empty, she saw her daughter’s skull at the bottom and fell dead.

2 Where the Story Is Written Down

• A. Landes, Contes et légendes annamites (Saigon, 1886), tale 22, “Histoire de Con Tam et de Con Câm”, pp. 52–57. Landes, an officer of the colonial native affairs service, first published the collection in parts in Excursions et Reconnaissances, and notes that an earlier summary of this tale had appeared there. His main informants, he writes, were a diviner and a scholar from Nghệ An province; helpers wrote the tales down, and he translated them into French. It is the oldest written version we found.
• A. Landes, Contes tjames (Saigon, 1887), tale 10, “Kajong et Halœk”: a Cham tale with the same fishing contest, a fish in a well, a crow that carries a shoe to the king, a chain of transformations and the same ending. Its old woman is “an Annamite”, that is, Vietnamese.
• Nôm verse. Literary histories list an anonymous verse tale in Nôm script, Tấm Cám (糝感), among the verse retellings of folk tales. We found no date for it.
• Modern texts. Nguyễn Đổng Chi’s Kho tàng truyện cổ tích Việt Nam (Treasury of Vietnamese Folk Tales, in volumes from 1957) gives the tale with notes on its versions; we cite those notes only as others quote them. The Wikisource text retold in section 1 gives no source. The grade 10 literature textbook, Ngữ văn 10, prints the tale on pages 65–72; the press quoted its ending in 2011.

3 Competing Versions

• Which sister is the heroine? In Landes the good girl is Cám (he writes Câm), and Tấm is the stepmother’s daughter. A footnote explains the names: cám is bran, tấm is broken rice.
• Sisters or strangers? In Landes a husband and a wife each bring a daughter. The girls are the same size, so no one knows which is the elder, and the fishing contest is meant to decide it. Landes adds that in other versions they are half-sisters, which he finds more likely. On Wikisource they are half-sisters, and the prize is a red bodice.
• Who helps? A genie who comes down from the sky in Landes, Bụt on Wikisource. In Landes a rooster shows where the bones are for three grains of rice, and they must stay buried three months and ten days. The grain to be sorted is beans and sesame, picked out by pigeons (others, Landes notes, say glutinous rice); on Wikisource, rice and paddy, picked out by sparrows.
• How does the shoe reach the king? In Landes the shoes get wet, and while they dry a crow carries one to the palace of the crown prince. On Wikisource it falls into a ford and the king’s elephants stop.
• Who cuts the palm? In Landes the father is alive. The stepmother spreads dry rice crackers on his bed so that they crack when he turns over, tells the heroine it is his bones creaking with illness, and sends her up an areca palm for fresh nuts; the stepsister cuts it down. A note gives a version in which the girl leaps from palm to palm until the whole garden has been felled. On Wikisource the father is dead and the stepmother wields the knife.
• What does she come back as? In Landes, a bird he calls hoành hoạch or quành quạch, after its cry; then a bamboo shoot from its feathers; then, from the shoot’s sheath, the thị. On Wikisource, an oriole, two trees, a loom and the thị. In the Cham tale, a golden turtle, a bamboo shoot, a bird and a tree.
• How is she recognized? In Landes the old woman is a beggar. The heroine has her invite the prince to a death-anniversary feast; he mocks her and demands a road carpeted with embroidered silk, which the genie lays. He asks who folded the betel quids. The heroine becomes a fly to guide the old woman’s hands, and when the prince drives the fly off with his fan, the old woman can go no further and confesses.
• The ending. In Landes the stepsister asks how to be as pretty as the heroine and is told to boil water and jump in. She does, and dies. The heroine salts her flesh and sends it to the stepmother, who takes it for pork. A crow cries that “the greedy crow eats its child’s flesh and cracks its bones”, and when the meat is gone the mother finds her daughter’s head. The Cham tale ends the same way, with a hand wearing a ring. The textbook, as quoted in 2011, ends: “Cám died. The stepmother, seeing this, fell down dead too.” A reader recalled that year that his grandmother ended it with mother and daughter exiled to the sea.

4 History and Tradition

• A Cinderella from the start. Emmanuel Cosquin, in the notes to his Contes populaires de Lorraine (Paris, 1886), read Landes’s tale as it appeared and called it a combination of Cinderella with another type, which he named after his Lorraine tale “The Golden Pear Tree”: a helping animal that goes on helping the heroine after it is killed. With the shoe, he wrote, “we enter fully into the theme of Cinderella”. In 1893 Marian Roalfe Cox made it no. 68 of her Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-five Variants, with the Cham tale as no. 69. The international index of folk-tale types lists Cinderella as type 510A.
• The oldest Cinderella is Chinese. Around 860 Duan Chengshi (803?–863) wrote down in his Youyang zazu a tale told to him by Li Shiyuan, an old servant of his family from Yongzhou, today’s Nanning in Guangxi. Ye Xian, worked hard by her stepmother, raises a fish with golden eyes. The stepmother kills and eats it and hides the bones under the dung heap; a man with loose hair comes down from the sky and tells Ye Xian the bones will grant her wishes. She goes to the festival in a jacket of kingfisher-feather cloth and gold shoes, loses one, and the king of an island country searches for the foot it fits. Her stepmother and stepsister are struck dead by flying stones. The Heibonsha World Encyclopedia calls it the oldest Cinderella-type story known. We have not read a scholar who compares it with Tấm Cám directly; they share the fish, the bones that give clothes, the festival and the lost shoe, which Perrault’s tale lacks.
• The second half. Cosquin set the heroine’s deaths and returns beside a modern Greek tale, one in Basile’s Neapolitan Pentamerone and one from the Deccan in India. In the Greek one a bride turned into a golden fish is killed, a cypress grows from her blood, and a chip of its wood comes home on an old woman’s skirt; the old woman finds her house tidied, hides, and catches the girl. Cosquin opened that discussion with the ancient Egyptian Tale of Two Brothers. Its hero, killed through his faithless wife, returns as a bull, whose liver she asks to eat, then as two trees, which she has felled for planks. The version most Vietnamese know, which Cosquin never saw, has two trees too.
• The ending and the schoolroom. Andrew Lang, introducing Cox’s book, called the revenge “that of Thyestes, and of Gudrun on Atli”: in the Greek legend Atreus serves Thyestes his own sons, boiled, then shows him their hands and feet; in the Norse poem Gudrun tells Atli he has eaten his sons’ hearts. Cosquin found the salted flesh in Sicilian and Icelandic tales as well, and warned that looking in folk tales for a people’s character is “most misleading”. In Grimm’s “Aschenputtel” (1857) doves peck out the stepsisters’ eyes at the wedding. Nguyễn Đổng Chi judged the cruel ending “almost a motif imported from outside, not native” (as quoted in Tiền Phong, 2011). The question returns: in 2011 the press reported the softer textbook ending and a survey in which over 70 percent of students and teachers approved of it; in 2019, when a Ho Chi Minh City high school asked grade 10 students for a different ending, many wrote harsher punishments still.
• A school text for scholars too. Đinh Gia Khánh (1924–2003), later director of the Institute of Folklore Studies, taught a course at Hanoi University in 1966 and 1967 on the problems of the folk tale through this one story, and printed it in 1968 as Sơ bộ tìm hiểu những vấn đề của truyện cổ tích qua truyện Tấm Cám.
• The betel quid. Folding betel well, Landes noted, was “a great art”: in Annam, the centre of the country, a guest was offered a few small, neat quids, and “by their elegance one recognizes the hand of young ladies of good family”. In both versions the betel gives the heroine away.

5 Related Stories

• Thánh Gióng: The Boy Who Grew into a Giant: another story Vietnamese children learn in a school version that differs from the oldest texts. There it is the bamboo that came late; here it is the gentler ending.
• Táo Quân: The Kitchen Gods Who Ride to Heaven: another household tale that ends in death and transformation, where a wife and her two husbands die in one fire and become the gods of the kitchen. We link them for the theme.
• Osiris: The Murdered King Who Rules the Dead: a murdered body is shut inside a tree that a king cuts down, and the one who seeks it lives unknown in a royal household. We have not found a scholar who compares the two; the Egyptian tale Cosquin compared is the Tale of Two Brothers (section 4).
• Heungbu and Nolbu: The Swallow’s Gourds: a Korean folk tale of a kind brother and a greedy one. The same chapter of Duan Chengshi’s Youyang zazu that holds Ye Xian also holds the Silla tale of Bang-i, which is counted among the sources of Heungbu-jeon.
• Anubis: The Jackal God of Embalming: the Tale of Two Brothers, with which Emmanuel Cosquin opened his discussion of the heroine’s deaths and returns, is told in full there, with Anpu and Bata. Petrie, for his part, saw in the lock of hair “an early form of the story of the little slipper”.

6 Sources

• A. Landes, Contes et légendes annamites (Saigon: Imprimerie Coloniale, 1886), preface and tale 22, “Histoire de Con Tam et de Con Câm”, pp. 52–57: archive.org
• A. Landes, Contes tjames (Saigon: Imprimerie Coloniale, 1887), tale 10, “Kajong et Halœk”: archive.org
• “Tấm Cám”, a modern text with no author or date: Vietnamese Wikisource
• Duan Chengshi, Youyang zazu, sequel, book 1, the tale of Ye Xian: Wikisource (Classical Chinese)
• Emmanuel Cosquin, Contes populaires de Lorraine (Paris: Vieweg), vol. 1, introduction p. XXXIX and appendix B, pp. LVII–LXIII (second printing), and vol. 2, supplement to the remarks on tale 23, “Le Poirier d’or”: archive.org, Project Gutenberg
• Marian Roalfe Cox, Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-five Variants, with an introduction by Andrew Lang (London: Folk-Lore Society, 1893), nos. 68, 69 and 91: archive.org
• Strabo, Geography 17.1.33, trans. H. L. Jones (Loeb, 1932): LacusCurtius; Apollodorus, Epitome 2.13, trans. J. G. Frazer (Loeb, 1921): Perseus; Atlakvitha 39, in The Poetic Edda, trans. Henry Adams Bellows (1923): Project Gutenberg
• Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, “Aschenputtel”, Kinder- und Hausmärchen no. 21, 7th ed. (Göttingen, 1857): German Wikisource; D. L. Ashliman, “Cinderella: Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale type 510A and related stories”: University of Pittsburgh
• “酉陽雑俎” and “南寧”, Heibonsha World Encyclopedia and Nipponica: Kotobank, Kotobank
• Phạm Hoàng Giang, “Khảo sát hệ thống văn bản truyện thơ Nôm Kinh trong kho sách của Viện Nghiên cứu Hán Nôm”, Tạp chí Hán Nôm 4 (191): vjol.info.vn; Lê Chí Quế, on Professor Đinh Gia Khánh, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Hanoi (2015): ussh.vnu.edu.vn
• On the textbook ending: “Sách giáo khoa sửa đoạn kết Tấm Cám”, Tạp chí Công Thương after VietNamNet (4 November 2011); Giáo Huyền, “Khoác áo mới cho cô Tấm”, Giáo dục Việt Nam (4 November 2011); Vũ Trung Hiếu, “Bà tôi kể, mẹ con Cám bị đày ra biển”, VietNamNet (10 November 2011); Nguyễn Mạnh Hà, “Ác như cô Tấm”, Tiền Phong (17 November 2011); Cao Nguyên, “Giật mình với học sinh tiếp sức cho Tấm trừng trị mẹ con Cám”, Giáo dục Việt Nam (21 October 2019): tapchicongthuong.vn, giaoduc.net.vn, vietnamnet.vn, tienphong.vn, giaoduc.net.vn

Cover and illustrations: AI-generated images made for Arcana. They are interpretations, not historical artworks.