Tấm and Cám

In a village in old Vietnam there lived a girl named Tấm. Her mother had died when she was small, and her father had married again and then died too, leaving Tấm in the house of her stepmother and her stepsister Cám. Cám was lazy and Tấm was hard-working. The stepmother loved her own daughter and made the orphan girl do every kind of labor: drawing water, planting rice, herding the buffalo, gathering firewood, and washing clothes in the river.

One day the stepmother sent both girls to the rice paddy to catch shrimp. Whoever came back with a full basket, she said, would be given a red silk sash. Tấm waded through the muddy water all afternoon and her basket was nearly full. Cám sat on the bank and did nothing. When evening came, Cám said: "Sister, your hair is full of mud. Go down to the deep water and wash it, or our mother will scold you." While Tấm was bathing, Cám tipped her sister's basket into her own and ran home. The stepmother gave Cám the red sash.

Tấm sat on the bank and wept. The Buddha appeared to her in the form of an old man and asked why she was crying. She told him. He said, "Look in your basket. Is there nothing left?" Tấm looked, and there was one small bống, a tiny carp, at the bottom. The old man told her to take it home and put it in the well behind the house, and to feed it her own rice every day, calling, "Bống, bống, come up and eat. Do not eat the rice of the wicked." Tấm did this. The fish grew, and it was the only friend she had.

The stepmother grew curious about why Tấm carried rice to the well. She sent Cám to spy. Cám hid and heard the words Tấm sang to call the fish. The next day the stepmother sent Tấm far away to herd the buffalo, and she went with Cám to the well and called: "Bống, bống, come up and eat. Do not eat the rice of the wicked." The fish, thinking it was Tấm, came up. They caught it, killed it, and ate it. When Tấm came home and called and called and the fish did not come, she found a clot of blood at the bottom of the well, and she sat down and wept.

The Buddha appeared again and said, "They have killed your fish. Look for its bones in the kitchen ashes, gather them, put them in four jars, and bury one under each leg of your bed." Tấm searched, and a hen showed her the bones at the back of the rice store. She did as she had been told.

When the time of the harvest festival came, the king proclaimed that all the people should come to the capital, and there would be feasting and music for many days. The stepmother dressed Cám in fine clothes and they went together, leaving Tấm at home. Before they left, the stepmother poured a basket of rice mixed with husks into a pile on the floor and said: "When you have separated the rice from the husks you may come to the festival."

Tấm sat on the floor and began to weep. A flock of sparrows came down from the eaves and sorted the rice into one heap and the husks into another in the time it took her to draw breath. Then she dug up the four jars from under her bed, and out of them came a brocade gown, a pair of embroidered slippers, a fine horse, and a saddle of gold. She dressed and rode to the capital.

On the way she had to cross a stream, and one of her slippers fell into the water. She did not see it. The king's procession came along the road soon after. The king's elephant refused to step over the stream, no matter how its driver urged it. Then they saw the slipper in the water. The king fished it out and was struck by its smallness and its workmanship, and he proclaimed that whoever could fit her foot inside this slipper would be his queen.

Every woman in the kingdom tried, and not one of them could fit it. The stepmother and Cám pushed and pulled, but Cám's foot was too large. Then Tấm came forward, and the slipper went on her foot like the second of two perfectly matched things. She drew its mate from her pocket and held it out beside the first. The king took her with him to the palace and made her his queen.

The stepmother and Cám pretended to rejoice. Some time later, the day of Tấm's father's death anniversary came, and Tấm went home to honor him. The stepmother said: "Daughter, climb the areca palm in the courtyard and bring down the best nuts for the offering. No one knows the tree like you." Tấm climbed. While she was at the top, the stepmother took an axe and chopped at the trunk. Tấm cried out, "Why is the tree shaking?" The stepmother answered, "I am driving away the ants." Then the tree fell, and Tấm fell with it, and was killed. They buried her quickly, and the stepmother dressed Cám in Tấm's clothes and brought her to the palace, telling the king Tấm had drowned and her sister had come to take her place.

Tấm did not stay dead. Her soul went into a small bird, a yellow oriole, who flew to the palace garden and sang, "Wash my husband's robes well, and dry them on the bamboo rod, not the bramble bush, that they may not be torn." The king was charmed by this bird and kept it in a golden cage and spoke to it as if it were his queen. Cám grew jealous. One day when the king was away she caught the bird, killed it and ate it, and threw the feathers into the garden.

Where the feathers fell, two persimmon trees grew, tall and splendid, with thick shade. The king liked to sit beneath them. Cám, in jealousy, had the trees cut down and made into a loom. But when she sat at the loom, the shuttle clattered: "Cluck, cluck, take care, take care, you have stolen your sister's husband. I will pluck out your eyes." Frightened, Cám burned the loom in the courtyard and threw the ashes far from the palace, by the side of the road.

Where the ashes fell, a market grew up, and at the edge of the market grew a beautiful market-fruit tree with one ripe golden fruit. An old woman who kept a small tea stall passed beneath it. The fruit said: "Old mother, take me home, but do not eat me. Only smell me." The old woman did so. From that day on, when she came home from the market she found her house swept, the rice cooked, and a meal waiting on the table. She wondered who could be doing it. One morning she pretended to leave for market and instead hid in the doorway. She saw a young woman step out of the golden fruit and begin to sweep. The old woman ran in and tore the fruit's skin so the young woman could not climb back into it. Then she took her hand and said, "Be my daughter, for I have no child." Tấm stayed with her, and they lived happily.

One day the king was traveling and stopped at the old woman's tea stall. The old woman served him tea and offered him betel leaves, folded in the way Tấm had learned to fold them in the palace. The king saw the fold and his hands began to tremble. He asked who had folded the betel leaves, and the old woman called her daughter. When Tấm came out and the king saw her, he could not speak. He brought her back to the palace.

Cám saw that Tấm was as beautiful as ever, and she asked her how she had become so. Tấm, who had grown wise in suffering, answered her gently: "I bathed in boiling water." Cám, who wanted only to please the king with her own beauty, ordered a great cauldron of boiling water and got into it, and so she died. The stepmother, when she heard, fell down from grief and died too.

This is what is told in the villages: that goodness will come back even after great wrong, and that the wicked, in the end, are undone by their own wishes.