tribute to my mother's heritage of literature passed on to me. I read this at Hue's Phu Cam complex.

https://nhavannhattien.wordpress.com/truyen-dai-chim-hot-trong-long/

Chim Hot Trong Long is not a truyen dai. it is a novella. 
it's perfect in every sense from my recollection of it (almost six decades).  It trained my Vietnamese prose and gave me the emotional base for story telling. Drama and tragedies.  A very adult story, it was prescribed for children, at least per my mother.  My mother gave me everything and apparently she could care less whether I truly understood. What's important is that I perceived and inherited beauty.  In prose and in the human soul.  Later, when I moved on to "Truyen Be Phuong," it was a totally different tone and landscape...