Tấm Cám, or The Story of Tam and Cam in English, is a Vietnamese Fairy Tale and take on the "Cinderella" motif. It bears a great resemblance to Yeh-Shen, due to China's cultural proximity and historical influence upon Vietnam. However, the traditional Vietnamese version is much Darker and Edgier.
Our protagonist Tấm lives with her stepmother and half-sister Cám, her parents having died. The stepmother turns Tấm into her housemaid, whereas Cám doesn't have to do anything. One day, the stepmother tells Tấm and Cám to go to the field to catch some shrimp, promising to give them a new red yếm (a Vietnamese traditional bodice). The diligent Tấm soon fills up her basket, while Cám plays around. At the end of the day, Cám tricks Tấm into washing her hair carefully, proceeds to steal her half-sister's shrimps in order to get the bodice, and goes her merry way home. Hearing Tấm's helpless sobbing when she finds out, a Buddha appears. He tells her to stop crying and look in the basket: only a small goby remains. Then he instructs her to raise the fish in a well with her rice and teach her the exact words to call the fish up. Tấm follows his counsel, and the goby grows noticeably. Spying on her, the stepmother and the half-sister discover the fish and the poem. They butcher and eat the goby after luring Tấm away from the house. The Buddha again comes to her aid, and informed her that she should bury the bones of the fish under the legs of her bed.
Soon after, the king hosts a festival. To stop Tấm from joining, the stepmother mixes up rice and bran and orders her to separate the mixture before going to the festival. The Buddha appears and sends a flock of birds to help her. He also shows her where she could find new clothes for the festival instead of her rags: the jars that she had buried the goby's bones in now contain silk clothes, a scarf, and a beautiful red bodice, as well as a horse and saddle. On her way to the festival, Tấm accidentally drops a slipper off a bridge in her rush. Later, when the King and his retinue try to cross the bridge, the king's elephant refuses to move. The King, believing in an omen, orders his men to search underwater, and found Tấm's slipper. The Girl Who Fits This Slipper ensues, and Tấm marries the king to the jealousy of Cám and her mother.
Here's where things go off the rails.
In Vietnamese culture, death day celebrations are of particular importance. Even as queen, Tấm does not neglect her duties, and returns home to help her stepmother prepare for the ceremony to her ancestors on her father's death day. The stepmother asks Tấm to climb an areca tree to get some betel nuts for the family altar, then chops down the tree, causing Tấm to fall and drown in the pond. Cám is brought to the palace as Tấm's replacement. The king mourns his wife, but cannot defy tradition, and accepts Cám as his new queen.
Tấm reincarnates into an oriole, flying to the palace. The king, in a glimmer of hope, tells the bird to fly into his sleeve should it be his beloved wife's spirit. It did so, and the king was overjoyed. He spends all his free time with the bird and ignores Cám entirely. Furious, Cám tells her mother, and does as she was told: she kills the oriole, eats it, and buries its feathers in the royal gardens. From that spot grows two cedar trees, which bend their branches to provide shade for the king when he approaches. The king has a hammock hung there so he can relax under the trees. Cám has the trees chopped down ostensibly to make a loom to weave new clothes for the king. While weaving, she hears the creaking of the loom, and then Tấm's voice accusing her of stealing her husband and threatening to gouge her eyes out. A frightened Cám orders the loom burned and its ashes dumped far away from the palace.
From the ashes, a golden apple tree grew, but it only has one fruit. One day, a kindly old tea-vendor who lives alone happens to pass by. Upon her promise to keep it for its wonderful scent instead of eating it, the apple fell into her bag. Then, the vendor notices something strange: she would come back from the market every day to find her house spotlessly clean and a hot meal set out. She decides to investigate, and sees a beautiful young woman - Tấm herself - stepping out from the fruit to do her chores. Overjoyed, she runs into the house, rips the peels apart, and tells Tấm that they can live together as adoptive mother and daughter. On a trip to the countryside, the king stops for a tea break. The vendor offers him some betel leaves. To his surprise, they were folded in the same shape of the phoenix wings that his departed wife used to make. The vendor informs him that her daughter prepared the leaves, reuniting the king and queen.
Tấm reassumes her rightful place, though for some time she did not take any action on avenging her multiple deaths. Cám was stewing in constant jealousy and fear, for Tấm is even more beautiful than before. When she finally gets the courage to ask her half-sister about the beauty secret, Tấm offers to help by having Cám sit in a hole dug in the ground and ordering soldiers to pour boiling water down the hole. Cám dies instantly. As for the stepmother, she receives a jar of preserved meat paste from Tấm. She enjoys "Cám's gift" very much, eating from the jar every day. Then, a crow flies by the stepmother's house. Perching on her roof, it cries out, "Delicious! The mother is eating her own daughter's flesh! Is there any left? Give me some." The stepmother angrily chases the crow away, but then checks inside the jar... and find her daughter's skull. She promptly dies of shock.
The Bowdlerized ending simply has Cám and her mother dying on the spot either from envy or being struck with lightning after Tấm's return to the palace.
"Tấm Cám" features these tropes:
- Alpha Bitch: Cám and her mother.
- An Aesop:
- Crying is not necessarily bad - if you are in a bad situation and are able to cry out, help can come unexpectedly.
- Evil will always be punished in the end, and the punishment fits the crime.
- On that theme: No matter how many times evil tries to destroy good, good will always return.
- If pushed to breaking point, even the kindest people can snap and do the unspeakable.
- Don't be too trusting of everyone.
- Beauty Equals Goodness: Tấm - though her Roaring Rampage of Revenge at the end would be a case of Good Is Not Nice.
- Cheaters Never Prosper: Oh boy, do the villains get their comeuppance in this one.
- Death by Origin Story: Tấm's parents.
- Some versions keep the father alive; he allows Tam's abuse because the stepmother lies about her behavior. Likewise, instead of his death anniversary, Tam simply returns home to visit him.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Everyone but Tấm and Cám. The Buddha here isn't the Gautama Buddha, the ultimate figure of Buddhism, but simply someone who has attained nirvana/Buddhahood. Pretty much equivalent to a saint answering prayers with miracles.
- Fairy Godmother: Traditionally, Buddha helps Tam; modern versions usually replace him with "Ông Bụt;" calling him Tam's "fairy godfather" wouldn't be much of an exaggeration.
- The Girl Who Fits This Slipper: With bonus divine intervention.
- Horrible Judge of Character: Oh, Tấm. She fell for Cám’s “wash your hair carefully or Mother will scold you” way too easily, given how vindictive her half-sister has been to her up to that point.
- Karmic Death:
- Cám and her mother ate the oriole and the goby in the quest to give Cám the best life and take happiness away from Tấm. Tấm's revenge for this is tricking her stepmother into eating Cám, and the discovery of the truth killed the stepmother instantly.
- Even the Bowdlerized ending fits this: Tấm's first death was a shocking betrayal, after she was treated civilly by the stepmother at her father's death day celebration. Cám and her mother thought they had gotten off scot-free because the returned Tấm treated them nicely, only to die themselves in a lightning strike (literally shocking).
- Meaningful Name: Tấm means broken rice and Cám means rice bran. Broken rice, as the name implies, is merely rice that has been broken through the manufacturing process. It's still as nutritious as normal rice. note Rice bran is traditionally fed to fish. Cám also means pig slop - a mess of leftovers fed to, you've guessed it, pigs - which is a metaphor for worthlessness, filth, and chaos in Vietnamese.
- Keep in mind, in some early versions, Cam was the Cinderella figure and Tam was the stepmother's spoiled daughter.
- The rice metaphor is hammered in further in the poem for the goby: O goby, rise and have my golden and silver rice, do not eat others' spoiled rice and plain porridge.
- Murder Into Malevolence: Most people get killed once. Tấm gets killed four times, all violently: drowned, burned twice, and chopped/axed. Small wonder the girl snapped.
- Spirit Advisor: The Buddha, until Tấm takes matters into her own hands.
- Sanity Slippage: Poor Tấm. After her Trauma Conga Line, the naïve maiden turns into a ruthless avenger.
- Rags to Royalty: Peasant girl to queen.
- Rule of Three:
- Tấm goes through three non-human reincarnations.
- The Buddha appears to her three times.
- Wicked Stepmother: And is she ever. The story specifically refers to her as dì ghẻ (literally, hated aunt, a less-than-heartwarming term for wives from remarriage), rather than the neutral mẹ kế (next-mother, or stepmother).
- Averted in the older versions where Tam and Cam are twin sisters.
- Youngest Child Wins: Averted; normally Tam is the younger daughter. The fact that she is the older daughter, the one who should be prepared for marriage, is probably the reason the stepmother hates her.
