The Tale of Kiều — a lecture by John D. Phan (Associate Professor of Vietnamese Humanities, Columbia University) was presented with support from Asia for Educators. Drawing on textual, cultural, and visual sources, Dr. Phan traces the poem’s extraordinary impact in Vietnamese life, its origins in a Chinese prose narrative and transformation into a Vietnamese narrative poem in Chữ Nôm, and the work’s layered genres—from Neo-Confucian romance and moral drama to giang hồ adventure and Buddho-Confucian reflection on desire and suffering. Listeners will leave with a clear roadmap to reading Kiều in context and appreciating why this classic continues to move audiences across centuries.

You’ll learn:

• Why Kiều is widely memorized and quoted in Vietnam, and how it circulates in film, painting, and popular practices (e.g., “Kiều fortune-telling”).
• How a Chinese novel became a Vietnamese masterpiece written in Chữ Nôm.
• Four reading frames that open the poem: fairytale of “talent & beauty,” moral drama, outlaw-adventure, and Buddhist-inflected contemplation.
   

Watch the lecture here.