"To the Vietnamese people themselves, The Tale of Kieu is much more than just a glorious heirloom from their literary past. It has become a kind of continuing emotional laboratory in which all the great and timeless issues of personal morality and political obligation are tested and resolved (or left unresolved) for each new generation. Western readers who are curious about Vietnam and the Vietnamese may well gain more real wisdom from cultivating a discriminating appreciation of this one poem than they will from reading the entire library of scholarly and journalistic writings upon modern Vietnam which has accumulated in the West in the past decade. As a vivid transcript of Vietnamese approaches to the dilemmas of the human condition, The Tale of Kieu has survived in, and gained new strength from, hundreds of different contexts."