Van Hong Nguyen talks about a public art project she worked on called ‘Soul Connection’. One of the things that I remember talking with her about was the Vietnamese origin story of Âu Cơ and Lạc Long Quân.
I made a remark to her about how her sculpture was essentially the primordial egg born of Âu Cơ which hatched 100 children, half of which would go on to live and become the Âu Việt (Chinese: 甌越 Ōuyuè) and the other half would become the Lạc Việt (Chinese: 雒越 Luòyuè).
“Ah, I wish it was big enough to fit 100 of us in there,” I laughed one evening over tea with her. So many young people and cultural educators often talk about this story, but very few people understand WHY the story is shaped that way. Why 100 kids born of a single egg?
Within circles of amateur vietologists (i.e. those of us who study ancient Việt roots without really having a background in anthropology, archaeology, etc.), I like this one theory: the story was used to reinforce a belief in the value of fraternity. The children, all born at the same time from a single egg, means that they are all siblings. And as a lot of ancient civilizations implement royal succession by order of birth, having all one hundred children born simultaneously meant they were all equal; no one would rise to be a monarch above all others. (Of course, there are debates about why the Lạc Việt peoples still had Hồng Bàng dynasty kings, but we’ll save that debate for another post.)
Thus, it is interesting to note that in Vietnamese culture, we often address one another as anh, chị, em. Anh is a term you use to refer to a man who is older than you, usually of the same generation, and roughly translates as “brother”. Chị is similar but for women, roughly translating as “sister”. Em is the term you use for someone younger than you (but still in the same generation), which doesn’t really have a translation (perhaps “little brother/sister”). Vietnamese language does not really have a separate term for “cousin”. What’s interesting is that you still use anh chị with people who are complete strangers. (I don’t know about em, I haven’t heard anyone use it with a stranger. And though I have used it on younger people whom I met for the first time, I don’t know enough about social etiquette to know if this appropriate.) So why is that? Is it related to the origin story, helping to support the idea of communal fraternity?
If the idea feels strange to you, it’s not that far-fetched. Let’s look at the Hawaiian kinship structure. Let’s say you live in a Hawaiian society. You have a single biological mother. That mother has a bunch of sisters and sister-in-laws, what we would call your aunts. But all of your aunts would be referred by you as your mothers (makuahine). And likewise, for your father, his brothers and brother-in-laws, you would refer to all of them as your fathers (makuakāne). And thus all of the females of your generation would be your sisters (kaikuahine) and all the males of your generation are your brothers (kaikua’ana).
So coming back full circle, chị Van’s public art work, in my eyes, is a physical space that allows people to form a fraternal bond, a soul connection as it were. That it’s shaped as a sphere that reminds me of Âu Cơ and Lạc Long Quân is my interpretation, and is one layer of perceiving this art. Another layer which she mentions is the idea of the sphere as a symbol of earth. Yet another layer is that this space is in the form of a lotus bud.
Well actually, that’s the thing about art, especially public art: it means different things to different people. What I particularly love is collecting all these interpretations and weaving them into a collective narrative.
Image credits:
“AuCo and the Dragon” by Le Uyen Pham
“Lotus Bud” by Satoshi Kawase
