The film A Phu's Wife is adapted from the original short story by male writer To Hoai, and the film Pao's Story is adapted from the novel The Jew's Harp Behind the Stone Fence written by female writer Do Bich Thuy. Both films were directed by male directors; all of them were Kinh people, not Mong people. Therefore, there are everyday details but contain their own cultural meanings that the film crew may not have realized, unintentionally distorting the position of women and men in Mong culture.
In the short story "A Phu's Wife", writer To Hoai translated a folk song about throwing pao at the Tet festival like this:“You throw the ball, I don't catch it.…I don't love you, the egg has fallen..."
As in the previous article about the Mong cultural context, the pao belongs to the girls, sewn by the girls themselves or sewn by their mothers from scraps of fabric from the sewing and embroidery season for the traditional costumes before the Tet festival. At the festival, the girls hold their pao in their hands and actively throw it towards the boys they want to get to know. Whether the boys love them or not, they are responsible for throwing the pao back. Of course, it is rare for a girl not to catch her own pao, which she actively threw. As for the boys, if they want to play pao throwing at the Tet festival, they need to show off how to catch the eye of any girl, or take the initiative to come and ask the girl to throw pao with them. Even in the case where the guy proactively invites the girl to play pao, the girl is the owner of the pao, has the right to refuse and not throw the pao towards him, so it will be difficult for him to have the pao thrown back when she does not love him, so it will be difficult to continue the part "I did not catch the pao so it fell". The pao, through that, shows meticulousness, carefulness, diligence, dexterity and above all, shows the girl's initiative in the relationship.
Thus, to show the initiative in throwing pao at Tet festival, the folk song should be translated as:"I throw the ball, you don't catch it"…You don't love me, the fruit has fallen..."
This misunderstanding of the male and female roles in neng pao, perhaps comes from the translation of the pronoun from Mong to Vietnamese when the original Mong poem would be something like:
“Kuv laim pov tuaj, koj tsi txais
Koj tsis nyiam, pov rog lawm.”
It should be noted that the Mong people mainly use two personal pronouns in addressing each other. That is kuv (cu) refers to the person who actively speaks and koj (co) refers to the other person regardless of the position and social status of the people participating in the communication. The way of addressing kuv - koj is quite different from the multi-pronoun addressing of the Kinh people, when in Kinh language, depending on the social status, the appropriate pair of personal pronouns must be used, such as father-son, brother-sister, uncle/aunt/grandfather/grandmother/aunt/aunt/grandchild, etc.
Kuv-koj in the context of the Tet festival will be between men and women and in the context of the pao fruit, of the Tet festival, should kuv be translated as em, koj as anh instead of vice versa as writer To Hoai did?
In the original story The Jew's Harp Behind the Stone Fence, the choice of female writer Do Bich Thuy to tell the story of Pao and Pao's mother through the image of the Jew's Harp behind the stone fence is a very good sensitivity to local culture. In Mong culture, the Jew's Harp is a musical instrument often associated with women, while the flute is often associated with men. When a boy and a girl have feelings for each other, the boy will express his feelings through the flute and the girl will express her thoughts through the Jew's Harp. It is a relationship with initiative from both sides, giving and receiving, not completely one-sided. The Jew's Harp in this work is also like a self-narration of the female protagonist in the story. The image of the stone fence has its own subtlety, as it immediately reminds the audience of the Mong people on the Ha Giang stone plateau in general and also shows the obstacles of reality and society for the characters in the story.
Unfortunately, when it was made into the film Pao's Story (2006), the film completely omitted the detail of the female protagonist Pao being associated with the sound of the jew's harp and was often attracted by the sound of the flute of the male character Chu. There may have been logistical problems for the film crew when they could not find a way to use and highlight the sound of the jew's harp, so they had to use the flute instead. However, just changing this small image may have completely affected the quality of the story when the original story of the female protagonist Pao through the sound of the jew's harp was changed to the sound of the male flute. When letting the characters Chu - Pao's lover and Chu's father - Pao's old mother's lover play the flute, the music is changed to only belong to men, while Pao is completely attracted to Chu's flute, or Pao's old mother is attracted to Chu's father's flute, thus showing the image of women who are dependent on men and have no initiative even when enjoying, playing music and expressing personal feelings - a very private act of each person.
The film Pao's Story (2006) built female characters trying to escape the masculine domination of society, by letting all the main female characters, Pao, Pao's old mother, Pao's biological mother, find the true love of their lives, demonstrating the film crew's feminist ideology. However, a detail of changing the sound of the mouth harp to the sound of a flute, in terms of culture, weakened this spirit of promoting feminism.
In conclusion, the misunderstanding of cultural context has led to the representation of culture through a biased lens of gender power in both films, turning a culture that has certain implications for female initiative in love into a completely recreated culture dominated by men.
