The Pig Laureate

There was once a country boy who could barely keep a written word in his head and had never read a book through, and yet for a time the whole land called him Trạng. Trạng is short for Trạng nguyên, the title of the top graduate of the royal examinations. People lined up to have him tell their fortunes. High officials invited him to their mansions. The emperor even sent him abroad as an envoy. His true talent was luck. He was lucky from start to finish, so lucky that everyone who hears the tale ends up laughing.

He belongs to the old comic folk tales about Trạng figures, told and retold from one generation to the next to bring laughter into the home. It is not history. There are no clear dates and no clear months. There is only a gentle, slightly simple young man and a run of lucky breaks that nobody could have foreseen.

The story goes that long ago, in the village of Mạnh Chư, there lived a family of pig butchers and pig traders. The village was commonly called Dừa village. It lay in Bình Lục district, in Hà Nam province. The father was named Dương Đình Lương. He was a kind, simple man who spent the whole year at the market with his knife and his chopping block. The family had a son, and they named him Chung Nhi. His full name was Dương Đình Chung.

Young Chung grew up strong. He ate well, slept well and was honest by nature. But he was very slow at his lessons. Whatever word the teacher taught him, he soon forgot. What he read at the top of a page was gone by the bottom. The villagers saw that his family lived by pigs. So they teased him with the name little Lợn, since lợn is the everyday word for pig. Later, when he became famous, the name Trạng Lợn simply stuck, and people still call him that today.

Sadly, the lessons never went in, and staying at home was getting him nowhere. So Chung Nhi packed a small bundle and went up to the capital to earn a living, taking whatever work came along. Then, by some odd turn of fate, he opened a small fortune-telling stall. He knew nothing at all about telling fortunes. He hung up a sign just for show. When someone came to ask, he shut his eyes, guessed at random and hoped for the best.

And yet fate arranged for him to be lucky.

One day he was sitting idle in his stall when some officials walked past, talking among themselves. The coming examination, they said, might have to be postponed. He overheard them and gave it no deep thought. He simply let it slip to a few customers who stopped by. This year's examination, he told them, would probably be moved. A little while later, the examination really was postponed. That was how the rumor began. People whispered that there was a fortune teller in the capital so gifted that every guess hit the mark. Each day more customers crowded into his stall.

Then came an affair that spread his name even further. People still know it as the tale of Trạng Lợn the fortune teller.

It happened that a great official in the city lost a prized horse one day. It was a wonderful horse, so swift it could cover an enormous distance in a single day. The official was so upset that he could not sit still. He heard of the marvelous fortune teller in the capital, and he sent for Chung Nhi to come to his mansion and cast lots to find the horse.

Chung Nhi arrived with his stomach in knots. He had no idea where to look for a horse. He had no magic to find one. That night he was given a room in the mansion. He tossed and turned without sleep, sick with worry about what he would tell the official in the morning. At last, too restless to lie still, he began to murmur a few lines he had half learned long ago, just to pass the time. One of them listed the animals kept around a house: the horse, the buffalo and the goat. Mixed in among them was a word that sounded like a person's name.

He never suspected that a thief was hiding right under his bed. This was the very man who had taken the horse. He was a servant in that same mansion. The thief's name was Tự. He was lying still, holding his breath, when he heard the man on the bed mutter a word that sounded exactly like his own name. He nearly jumped out of his skin. He was certain the all-knowing fortune teller had seen everything and had just called him out by name.

Terrified and shaking all over, the thief crawled out from under the bed and threw himself down, bowing again and again. He begged the fortune teller to spare his life. He pleaded with him not to tell the official his name. At first Chung Nhi was badly startled too. But he quickly pulled himself together and put on a thoughtful air, as if he had known everything all along. He pressed the man with questions, and the thief confessed it all. He told him where the horse was hidden, when he had taken it and how the whole thing had gone.

The next morning, Chung Nhi calmly set out a table to cast lots in front of the official. He murmured prayers, shook the tube of fortune sticks and made a show of long calculation, looking every inch a master of the art. Then, taking his time, he named the place where the horse was hidden, just as the thief had confessed. The official sent his men there, and sure enough, they found the prized horse unharmed. Overjoyed, the official rewarded him generously. Wherever he went, he praised the marvelous fortune teller.

Of course, the young man had not told any fortune at all. It was all a happy coincidence, one word spoken at just the right moment and one timid thief who gave himself away. Even so, the name Trạng Bói, the fortune-telling Trạng, spread far and wide, and everyone took him for a rare genius.

In this way, one lucky break after another, the fame of Chung Nhi kept growing. People called him Trạng and invited him into the royal court. Then one day the court sent him as an envoy to China, all the way to a foreign land to uphold the honor of his country. Here was a young man whose learning was patchy at best, now carrying the weight of great affairs between two nations. No wonder he trembled.

At the Nam Quan pass, on the border, the Ming officials wanted to test what the Vietnamese envoy was made of. The Ming were the dynasty then ruling China. They set out a tricky puzzle to sound him out. They hung up a cross woven from wood. It hinted that their great country stretched across heaven and earth in every direction, with all four quarters and all eight directions in their hands. Everyone in the embassy was anxious. Nobody knew how to answer without losing face.

Trạng Lợn studied the cross for a while. Then, quite unhurried, he had someone bring a round ring of silk, and he slipped it over the cross so that it circled the whole thing. His meaning was this. If they believed their country stretched across all of heaven, then this circle, standing for his own country, wrapped around heaven and earth together and held all their four quarters inside it. The Ming officials looked at one another. They could find nothing to argue with, so they had to concede the move. Inside, they quietly admired the envoy from the south as a true master.

Each time Trạng Lợn landed in a tight spot, some stroke of luck or some innocent flash of quick wit came along to rescue him. He was simple and honest, and yet somehow everything turned out smoothly in the end.

People say that Trạng Lợn kept his good name this way. The emperor trusted him, the people were fond of him, and he lived an easy life into old age. He owed it not to deep learning or great talent but to an upright heart and a kind of luck rarely seen in this world.

Even now, when someone talks big and then happens to get lucky, Vietnamese people laugh it off and bring up the name Trạng Lợn. They mean the pig seller from Dừa village long ago, who had hardly any learning and yet went through life without a care, lucky time after time. He left later generations a string of gentle, warm laughter, a tale people never tire of telling.