The Two Ladies Trung are historical figures, and the legendary accounts of their heroic deeds have catapulted these sisters into the firmament of the Vietnamese sense of self and mythic imagination. Trung Trac and Trung Nhi were two Vietnamese sisters who lived during the Han Dynasty of China (206 BCE–220 CE). The Trung sisters led the first successful Vietnamese revolt against the Chinese, a monumental accomplishment all the more noteworthy because of the gender of the protagonists. Many scholarly and popular sources attribute the rise and success of such capable women to the Vietnamese culture that spawned them, as other neighboring cultures of the time offered women far less autonomy and respect than did Vietnam. Trung Trac and Trung Nhi are remembered to this day as the greatest Vietnamese heroines, and as a matter of fact, the date of the death of the Two Ladies Trung is marked annually as a holiday celebrating women in Vietnam.
In 39 CE, Trung Trac, the elder of the two siblings, replaced her executed husband as a leader of an uprising against the Chinese; Trung Nhi and a number of other notables also took active part. According to legend, as the sisters and their armies marched toward their first encounter with the Chinese, the governor under attack fled, an act of cowardice as callow as the murder of Trung Trac’s husband was cruel. The sisters quickly consolidated a territory comprised of more than five dozen cities and strongholds. The Trung sisters became the joint queens of this independent region, holding the opposing Chinese forces at bay for about two years. In 42 CE, however, a disciplined and concerted campaign by the Han regained control of the free Vietnamese realm, effectively ending autonomy for the Viet people for centuries. The Two Ladies Trung, however, refused to submit, drowning themselves in a river rather than surrendering to their hated foes. Some accounts claim that many of their followers did likewise; it is of special note that a large number of female soldiers and leaders are said to have joined the Trung sisters in their fight and that some are purported likewise to have chosen death. For example, a notable legendary figure in her own right, Phung Thi Chinh, is supposed to have been pregnant during the fight against the Chinese, giving birth on the battlefield and returning to the front lines with her child swaddled on her back. Phung Thi Chinh is said to have chosen to follow the Trung sisters into death as she did into battle, drowning herself and her child in the face of capture and humiliation by the Chinese. Rather like their distant British sister-in-arms Boudicca, who led a roughly contemporaneous British uprising against the Roman Empire half a world away, the legend of the Two Ladies Trung echoes down the centuries, inflaming ethnic pride and nationalist fervor far out of any realistic proportion to the actual victories or respite from tyranny that were the fruits of their rebellion.
The accounts of the unbreakable spirit of the Trung sisters, in any case, are notable for a number of reasons: they provided a beacon of the light of liberty in the midst of the darkness of oppression for many generations; they underscored the heroic and autonomous roles of women in Vietnamese society; and they consequently gave birth to many legends as interesting for their portrayal of gender dynamics as they are for their nurturing of an independent sense of Vietnamese identity. A case in point is an account that the women warriors of the Vietnamese were overcome by shame—and were thus easily dispatched—when the male soldiers of the Han armies they encountered bared their genitalia before them. As unlikely as such a circumstance may seem, a legend like this underscores the gendered nature of the legacy of the Trung sisters. Moreover, understanding the importance of the Two Ladies Trung to the traditional Vietnamese popular imagination illuminates a legendary aura of obstinate rebellion in the face of external control, even—or perhaps especially—in the face of overwhelming odds. This clearly may be perceived by the Vietnamese as an aspect of their cultural identity, which outsiders ignore at their peril.
Hai Ba Trung, Two Ladies Trung, is a holiday celebrated in Vietnam and in Vietnamese American culture to this day. Pagodas, statues, and shrines dedicated to the sisters Trung abound in Vietnam, and even a major thoroughfare in Ho Chi Minh City and a section of Hanoi take their names from the Two Ladies Trung. Commemorating the dramatic and short-lived success of the Trung sisters in their rebellion against the Chinese Empire, reverence for these archetypal heroines who fearlessly battled invaders against overwhelming odds has informed Vietnamese identity and has fueled Vietnamese nationalism for two thousand years, most recently in the wars against the French and the Americans in the second half of the twentieth century. The Communist leader Ho Chi Minh, for example, readily acknowledged that women were equal partners in the battle against foreign oppressors, and advanced rights for women were part of the Communist Party appeal, just as references to the Trung sisters and similar female figures of resistance were grist for the Communist propaganda machine. It would be going too far, however, to suggest that such references did not tap into a deep and legitimate wellspring of Vietnamese lore and identity; indeed, even contemporary Vietnamese American endeavors embrace the legacy of the Trung sisters. A case in point would be the Hai Bà Trưng School for Organizing, an institution dedicated to training young Vietnamese Americans to be effective grassroots organizers.
C. Fee
“Boat People” and Vietnamese American Identity
“Boat people” has become shorthand in the United States for refugees from conflict who flee by way of watercraft, most of which seem to be overcrowded and unfit for any extensive sea voyage. Although the term has come to be used for numerous groups, including Haitians and Cubans attempting to cross to Florida, and could be used to describe some Syrian refugees in the Mediterranean today, the term originally denoted Vietnamese fleeing the fall of Saigon and South Vietnam in the tumultuous years following the final pullout of American forces in 1975. Many of these Vietnamese boat people were eventually evacuated to the United States, where their narratives have become an important facet in the contemporary Vietnamese consciousness. The harrowing experiences of these boat people have become part of Vietnamese American identity and folklore, and offer a recurring theme in stories, movies, and academic studies.
C. Fee
See also Fa Mu Lan, or Mulan; Women in Folklore
Further Reading
Bergman, Arlene Eisen. 1975. Women of Viet Nam. San Francisco: Peoples Press.
Jones, David E. 2005. Women Warriors: A History. Dulles, VA: Potomac Books.
Salmonson, Jessica. 1991. The Encyclopedia of Amazons: Women Warriors from Aniquity to the Modern Era. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House.
Taylor, Keith Weller. 1983. The Birth of Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Thang, Vo Van, and Jim Lawson. 1996. Vietnamese Folktales. Danang: Danang Publishing.