Mai An Tiem

Legend has it

The old text opens with a retainer named Mai Thiem, a foreigner by origin, whom the king bought from a merchant ship as a slave at seven or eight years old. He grew up well-featured and quick to remember things, and the king gave him a new name, Mai Yen, with the style An Thiem, gave him a concubine, trusted him with business, and he gradually became rich. Then gifts began arriving at his door and he grew proud, saying often that all this was property from his former life and he had never had any favour from a lord. The king heard, and in anger banished him to a sandbank outside the sea mouth, leaving him food enough for four or five months, meaning him to eat it and die.¹

His wife wept; he laughed: heaven gave me life and will surely keep me; life and death rest with heaven, so why should I worry. Then a white bird came flying from the west, settled on the corner of the hill, called three or four times, and spat out six or seven melon seeds onto the sand. The seeds sprouted and grew thickly and bore fruit; he cut one open and ate it, and the taste was sweet and cooling, the spirit light, so he kept the seeds, planted more the next year, and traded what he could not eat for rice to feed his wife and children. Nobody knew the name of the fruit; because the bird had carried the seeds from the west it was called tay qua, the western melon.¹

Later the king thought of him and sent someone to see whether he was alive; the man came back with his report, and the king sighed that he had said it was property from a former life and truly did not speak idly, then recalled him, restored his office and gave him slaves and maidservants. The sandbank where he had lived was named An Thiem, and the village Mai. That ending is not the king forgiving a man who has learned his lesson; it is the king conceding that the arrogant remark was no idle boast. In its very last clause the book adds an account that the bank was where his parents and forebears had lived all along — if so, he was no foreigner brought in from outside; the book sets down both and chooses neither.¹

How later ages remembered

Today the tale is usually read as a story of self-reliance. The man who edited the book in the fifteenth century read it quite otherwise: in his preface of 1492, Vu Quynh writes that setting the tale out exposes the habit of trusting in what one owns and giving no thought to a lord's favour — a moral lesson about gratitude, not about grit. There is one more thing later ages quietly altered: today's telling calls him the adopted son of a Hung king, while the old text calls him a foreign slave bought from a merchant ship. That softening loses exactly what is most interesting in the story.⁴¹