The Little Lizard's Sorrow: A Study Of Vietnamese Culture

I am a 13 year-old student at Old Donation School, and during class, I have been studying Vietnamese culture and different short stories from that culture. I am writing this letter to you so that you would consider my original composition. The original composition, which is called Sự công bằng or The Fair, is a fable that is based on the archetypal concepts of the Vietnamese culture. It is about a young boy named Dinh, who really wants to get this dragon lantern from the fair, but there are some trials before he could get to it. Eventually, he ends up getting the lantern, because of the good deed he did earlier.

The Vietnamese culture mainly include morals that talk about honesty and respect. Thus, the people of Vietnam are being taught

For example, many times there in old stories there is a wise man. Either giving advice to the protagonist, or defeating the antagonist, there a usually a older figure, knowing more than the characters. In one of the Vietnamese stories, The Little Lizard’s Sorrow, there is a rich and naive man, who played a game to see who had the most amount of objects, whether it be 400 horses or a bigger house, it always mattered on how much. But, one day a poor person came by the rich man’s house to play his game. Although the man looked very poor, the rich man still let him play the game. But, if the poor man won, he got all of the rich man’s belongings, and vice versa. The poor man presented a broken coconut cup, and of course, the rich man did not have it. The story goes that the poor man got all of the rich man’s belongings, and gave them away to poor people. The rich many died of sorrow and turned into a lizard that you could supposedly find in Vietnam today. In my story, there is the standowner who would not give Dinh his prize, but his mother had power over him, and made him give the prize to Dinh. This is and example of the “beautiful enchantress” archetype, of which a usually a beautiful women had power over people, instead of the man. Fairs and games are also a way to portray fun and joy in stories, and this is shown in my own story as there is a fair going on, obviously