Writings

In Vietnamese history and literature, the story of Mỵ Châu is a familiar one. Daughter of King An Dương Vương of Âu Lạc, she married Trọng Thủy, a prince sent by Triệu Đà, the ruler in China that her father once defeated. Their marriage was framed as reconciliation, but it carried a tragedy: Trọng Thủy eventually uncovered the secret of Âu Lạc's enchanted crossbow (nỏ thần), stole it, and enabled another invasion that brought the kingdom to collapse. Mỵ Châu, knowingly or not, made it possible.

She has been then called a betrayer. And yet she is still ritually commemorated, still appears in school textbooks, and still ignites boiling debate on Vietnamese social media. The question is not simply whether she deserves forgiveness. The more interesting question is: Why hasn't Vietnamese society - or its government - simply erased her?

One prevailing explanation perhaps appeals to collective Vietnamese benevolence: a cultural tendency towards compassion, especially toward women caught in force majeure situations. This is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The persistence of Mỵ Châu in public memory is not just subjective or sentimental. It is, I would argue, deeply rational.

I want to propose a concept here: tragic memory. This is a mode of remembrance that does not teach us to choose between right and wrong. It keeps the question open. The Đại Việt Sử Ký Toàn Thư, compiled by historian Ngô Sĩ Liên, tells the story of An Dương Vương as a 'cautionary' story about statecraft and political vigilance,  not a moral verdict on Mỵ Châu herself. The well-known legend collection Lĩnh Nam Chích Quái also adds emotional and symbolic aspects, posting a collision between marital loyalty and patriotic duty that cannot be cleanly resolved. And one of the most popular motifs in oral tradition holds that, pearls (believed to be formed from Mỵ Châu's blood), shine more brightly when washed in the water of the well (where Trọng Thủy suicided himself). These narratives are now part of the heritage preservation at Cổ Loa Ancient Citadel, officially recognised and preserved.

What lies behind here a single logic: illumination without cleansing. Society actively contemplates the tragedy, but never resolves it. As cultural memory scholar Jan Assmann has argued, cultural memory does not merely store the past, it actively ignites moral imagination across generations. Tragic memory does exactly this, but with a twist: it stabilises not through certainty, but through ambiguity.

Once this kind of reasoning becomes conventional: once a society internalises the idea that politics does not always offer clean choices, something quietly shifts in how people relate to political authority. Society no longer demands that the state justify every difficult decision. Legitimacy, in this sense, does not come from above. It is produced from below, through the habits of moral reasoning that tragic memory trains into us. Sociologist Jeffrey Olick, writing on memory and political responsibility, has shown how collective remembrance shapes the moral languages available for political justification. Tragic memory, I would add, does this work quietly and durably, without anyone declaring it.

Mỵ Châu is not the only figure who operates this way. Empress Dowager Dương Vân Nga, who was involved in a controversial transfer of dynastic power, and Princess Huyền Trân, whose marriage to a Cham king secured territory for Đại Việt at huge cost, follow the same pattern. They are remembered but not resolved. Commemorated but not verdicted. This is not a coincidence - it is a repertoire. Vietnamese historical memory has produced, across centuries, a recurring cast of tragic female figures who carry the moral costs of political order, so that order itself does not have to be questioned.

This infrastructure of tragic memory, I would suggest, is one of the quieter mechanisms through which political legitimacy is sustained in Vietnamese society, not through propaganda or declaration, but through the stories we keep returning to.

So we do not need to decide whether Mỵ Châu was right or wrong. What matters is recognising what society has chosen to remember, and how. Because, I believe, if you studied Vietnamese literature or history in grade 10, you have already been learning, without quite realising it,  how to live with the ambiguity of power.