MEMORABLE MUSIC: HUY THANH’S “A GIRL’S DESTINY” (“DUYÊN PHẬN CON GÁI”), TRACK 16 ON SAIGON ROCK & SOUL

Huy Thanh’s “A Girl’s Destiny” (“Duyên phận con gái,” year unknown) is yet another song in which love trumps wealth, similar to Nguyễn Trung Cang’s “Our Treasure” (“Kho tàng của chúng ta”). “A Girl’s Destiny” is the thirteenth track on Saigon Rock & Soul, and this post is a continuation of my mini-series translating the lyrics from that CD.

Huy Thanh composed “A Girl’s Destiny” probably sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam). The song’s narrator is a woman who married for love rather than money, and she reflects on the path that led her to a long, happy marriage. Her parents had advised her to think seriously about her prospects and hoped she would marry a wealthy man. But she decided that she should not marry for money and treated the matter with lightheartedness rather than scheming to make the best match. Eventually, she fell for a poor artist, and her parents readily accepted their future son-in-law when they saw how much the couple loved each other.

The historical background to this song is the changing but still contradictory attitudes towards women in the RVN. By the 1960s and early 1970s, middle- and upper-class young women enjoyed far greater educational and career opportunities than their mothers and grandmothers. More women were entering secondary school and university, and more were entering white-collar work. Marriage customs had changed too. Arranged marriage was no longer the default among economically better-off Vietnamese in the cities. Young people often enjoyed the freedom to date whomever they wanted, though parents continued to influence the choice of spouses. Note that “A Girl’s Destiny” never mentions the parents ever trying to arrange a match for their daughter. The narrator seems to suggest that her mother and father simply reminded her of the stakes but did not actually interfere. (For more on courtship and gender, see also my posts on the novels of Bình Nguyên Lộc, Nhã Ca, and Nguyễn Thanh Trịnh).

However, attitudes in the RVN sometimes remained stubbornly patriarchal and were likely reinforced by economic and demographic pressure. As the parental advice in the song suggests, young women were still expected to secure their economic future through marriage even though doing so became harder as the Vietnam War wore on. Because so many men died in the war, there were more young women looking for husbands than there were men looking for wives, and women were thus at a disadvantage on the marriage market. At the same time, the runaway inflation and growing social inequalities fueled economic anxieties, which made it more imperative than ever for young women to find husbands that could provide for them. Failure to marry could have serious consequences. Unless an unmarried young woman stood to inherit wealth or had the professional skills to earn a solid income, she could easily become destitute once her parents died.

I think it’s worth pointing out that the object of the young woman’s affection in “A Girl’s Destiny” is a musician. I’ve long noticed that in the literature and music of the RVN, young women are disproportionately attracted to writers, artists, and musicians. You’d think that mid-century Vietnam was awash in handsome young creative types trailed by throngs of girls! What explains this romantic preoccupation with artistically-inclined men? Does it reflect the conceit of Vietnamese artists, who were generally men? That is, did male creative types portray themselves as exceptionally attractive in their creative work? Or did it reflect a general cultural assumption of the period that considered writers and musicians to be inherently more romantic than men in other professions? The song’s narrator certainly believes that a poor artist would love her more than a wealthy man. Whatever the case, it is a rather self-flattering portrait of artistic men.

This rendition “A Girl’s Destiny” is performed by Mai Lệ Huyền. The software I am using does not allow for footnotes on some posts, so they appear below my translation but are not linked.