The Karma of Love

This essay examines Vietnamese tales of marvels [kỳ] and the uncanny [quái] composed in Literary Sinitic and offers close readings of four narratives through focusing on the theme of predestined love [duyên]. The essay shows that the discourse of duyên was embedded in both Confucian and Daoist voices and that this reflected a common cultural repertoire in which the discourse of social karma was a part of a shared moral metaphysics. The essay offers a theory and methodology for examining tales of marvels and the uncanny, arguing that heretofore scholars have read around the depictions of religious phenomena, rather than by means of them.

Constructing Vietnam, Constructing China

Vietnamese studies in China is a contentious field that is dominated by three frameworks: the central-regional relationship, the tributary relationship, and the diffusion thesis. It emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to French scholars’ questioning of the extent and duration of Chinese influence on Vietnam. It then became highly politicized between the 1970s and 1980s due to the issues of both the ethnic origins of the bronze drum and the nature of Sino-Vietnamese relations. In the twenty-first century, even though China began to address the issue of Sinocentrism, its claim to the South China Sea has been a source of great tension among the scholars in the two communist countries.