Literature - Saigoneer

English-Language Edition of 'Chinatown' by Thuận Wins US Translation Award

2023-11-15T11:00:00+07:00

The 2023 National Translation Award for fiction was given by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) to Nguyễn An Lý’s translation of Chinatown by Thuận.

The United States' only national award for translated fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction goes to one work of prose per year. Its selections involve a rigorous review of the work in English and its original language.

Originally written in Vietnamese and published in 2005, Chinatown was translated by Nguyễn An Lý and released by Tilted Axis Press in the UK and New Directions in the US. It is the second of nine novels released by the Vietnamese writer who grew up in Hanoi and Saigon before attending university in the Soviet Union and later settling in France.

Lý, a Hanoi native now based in Saigon, has translated numerous books from English to Vietnamese, but this is her first novel from Vietnamese to English. She co-founded and co-edits the independent online literary publication Zzz Review.

Of the translation, the judges noted: “Thuận's novel ... brought to us by Nguyễn An Lý’s sweeping, melodic phrasing, is anything but sedentary: who knew reverie could be this fast-moving, this suspenseful? Below the surface, waiting, feeling the uneasy gaze of her fellow Parisians, our narrator travels back through her memories—of her son, of Hanoi, of his absent, longed-for father—and, in so doing, gifts us constraint’s solace: that memories might bring one back to a sense of self, against all the odds.”

In an illuminating interview with diaCRITICS about the book and translation process, Lý said: “I had read Chinatown when it was first published and shed many a tear over it, that I thought (and still think!) it was the finest of the author’s repertoire so far.” She went on to note: “Translating Chinatown has been to me a study in compromises, like I said, between preserving (indeed protecting) the author’s idiosyncrasies and rehabilitating its Vietnamisms to a degree that sounds acceptable to my own ear with English mode on (not to mention my editors’!).”

The Nationational Translation was founded 25 years ago and separated prose and poetry nine years ago. It carries a US$4,000 prize and awards ceremony with the judges and winning translators at a conference in the US.

Read Saigoneer's review of the novel here.

'The Mountain in the Sea' Is a Meditation on Myths, Monsters, and the Mind

2023-11-14T15:59:10+07:00

“A myth,” said existentialist psychologist Rollo May, “is a way of making sense in a senseless world.” Humans need myths and legends to survive. And they need us to survive too; it’s how we’ve learned to escape ourselves so that we can live with ourselves.

Côn Đảo Archipelago is no stranger to legend. The ghost of Võ Thị Sáu reportedly continues to roam around Côn Sơn, the largest island within the group and home of the hellish “tiger cages” formerly constructed by French colonists in the early 20^th century. However, in Ray Nayler’s novel, The Mountain in the Sea, readers are lured into a labyrinth built out of a new myth. It’s not the ghosts of political prisoners seeking revenge, it’s the Con Dao Sea Monster lashing out because of overfishing, destruction of reefs, and other environmental pressures throwing the ocean’s natural order out of balance. It’s the tale of octopuses that walk, make tools and even write. And, above all, it’s a story about a species that does what humans all long for and fear: sees us.

Although he was born in Québec and raised in California, Nayler has spent nearly half his life working abroad in various countries for the Foreign Service and Peace Corps. In particular, he spent time in Vietnam working at the US Consulate in Hồ Chí Minh City as the Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer. Collaborating with scientists as well as solo adventuring around the islands left an indelible mark on the author. Nayler’s debut novel builds on his personal experiences working in Vietnam and around the world while combining research in biosemiotics, cybersemiotics, neuroscience, and more. Suffice to say, Nayler did his homework.

Ray Nayler. Photo © Anna Kuznetsova.

A fast-paced exploration of three storylines

The Mountain in the Sea is split into four parts. Inside the four parts are 48 chapters and in between chapters are excerpts from two other books written by two characters: Dr. Ha Nguyen and Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan. The single-page passages serve as a portal into the minds of the two starkly different, yet eerily similar, scientists. The line between good and evil appears clear at the beginning of the book, but as the story unravels across its 450-odd pages, that dividing line oscillates and constantly challenges readers' preconceived notions about the morality involved in exploring the limits of the mind and whether or not we should be building new minds at all.

The novel consists of three main storylines with a handful of characters to follow in each. The first and main storyline takes place on Côn Đảo where Ha; Altantsetseg, a one-woman army cyborg capable of taking out a fleet of ships; and Evrim, a genderless, “conscious” human android with a smile so perfect that it was the last of its kind ever made. All three must combine forces to decipher the octopus’s symbolic code. The second main storyline occurs in futurized Russia-Turkey where Rustem, one of the best hackers in the world, must find a way to break into one of the most complex minds there is. The third happens on an AI-run, human slave-powered fishing ship where Eiko and Son must overcome past mistakes and regain their freedom before they’re trapped at sea indefinitely.

All three plots contain a deeper, more complex layer that underscores the existential turmoil occurring throughout the book. Scrambling to crystalize your own identity, weighing the pros and cons of what is the right thing to do in the short and long term, contemplating your own indifference in an indifferent world — these are the struggles not only Nayler’s characters grapple with but are also the battles that readers can see themselves in.

The embodiment of a longing to escape

My only partial critique of the book is that the jumping from storyline to storyline interspersed with the scientists’ book excerpts can be difficult to follow at times. Nayler places a lot of trust in his readers to keep up. At times this makes the reading experience quite entertaining because of the speed at which the story progresses, but at other times I found myself reading back through my marginalia to regain a foothold on which country or mind I’m occupying.

That said, I wouldn’t be writing this review unless I believed this book was worth reading. Because there’s comfort found in inhabiting the minds of characters and learning about the internal wars each faces. That goes for humans, part-humans, and non-humans. It’s a reminder that struggles on the surface are just that and that each of us is trying to make sense of complex data like dreams, memories, and reflections. All of which are beneath the surface, changing shape and meaning all the time, just like an octopus.

The book showcases the multi-faceted nature of hope, violence, forgetfulness, indifference, self-deception, and curiosity. It’s beautiful and terrifying and makes you want to keep turning the pages for more.

There’s also a bit of discomfort to be experienced in The Mountain in the Sea through its contained philosophical discourses. Nayler makes you think. He asks simple questions that don’t have simple answers. He showcases the multi-faceted nature of hope, violence, forgetfulness, indifference, self-deception, and curiosity. It’s beautiful and terrifying and makes you want to keep turning the page for more.

Apart from experiencing comfort and discomfort, the reason I believe this book is worth investing the dozen hours or so of reading is that it embodies our longing to escape — physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually — and how such actions take shape narratively.

From a physical standpoint, there are characters trapped on islands, in ships, in minds, and elsewhere, all scheming for a way out. From a mental and emotional standpoint, some characters have been scarred in numerous ways and have worked tirelessly to fabricate an identity that protects them from that pain. And from a spiritual standpoint, a few from each storyline experience breaking points they cannot escape, forcing them to question their existence and the meaning of existence itself.

Scrambling to crystalize your own identity, weighing the pros and cons of what is the right thing to do in the short and long term, contemplating your own indifference in an indifferent world — these are the struggles not only Nayler’s characters grapple with but are also the battles that readers can see themselves in.

Perhaps then, the Con Dao Sea Monster is not a monster in the French sense but in the Latin sense as one of the characters suggests to Ha. Not monstrum, but monere. Not to scare us, but to warn us; a monstrous metaphor to make us think like Frankenstein’s monster, Godzilla or King Kong.

Perhaps, we really do need myths, legends, and stories to escape ourselves so that we can live with ourselves, but beyond that, Nayler shows us that although we may be able to escape ourselves, that doesn’t mean we can escape the consequences of doing so. Like it or not, there’s no escaping reality. There will be monsters waiting and watching us at every twist and turn.

And perhaps, deep down into the depths of our souls, that’s exactly what we want.

Khải Đơn's Poetry Debut Won't Shy Away From the Mekong Delta's Untold Complexities

2023-10-13T14:00:00+07:00

Environmental devastation, irresponsible development, economic imperilment, social ills, war legacies and the abandonment of cultural traditions and connections: these multifaceted, interconnected realities threaten Vietnam’s Mekong Delta region.

Domestic and international journalism investigates the fraught topics, occasionally focusing on personal and human experiences within stories told via facts, statistics, dollar signs and acronyms. Art, however, also has an essential role in sharing the delta’s narrative. The poems of witness and experience found in Drowning Dragon Slips by Burning Plain by Khải Đơn allow readers to feel the dire conditions; an essential element for understanding them.

Ruminating on a land of complexities

Born in Đồng Nai, for nearly 10 years, Phạm Lan Phương, best known under her pen name Khải Đơn, had covered issues related to Vietnam and the Mekong Delta for Vietnamese and international news publications, before embarking on a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing and starting a popular bilingual newsletter. She has published numerous books in Vietnamese, but Drowning Dragon Slips by Burning Plain is her first English-language poetry collection. She opens it with an invitation to “venture into my world: The Mekong Delta – The Land of abundance, The infinite horizon of rice, hiding a violent and faceless past.”

The book cover by Hung Viet Nguyen.

The Mekong Delta is not a land of clear divides. Much like the way its soil, shores and waterways blur together, people and nature blend and overlap in Khải Đơn’s poetry. In the book’s opening poem, for example, the speaker notes: “Mangroves tangle and grow out of my shins.” Elsewhere, a nursing baby is its mother's “little lotus” and simply, “One’s life was defined by the beloving air, the sound, the vegetables they grow, the spices and herbs they harvested, the land and mud touching their feet. Their lives were the land’s life itself.” By describing the delta’s residents via imagery of its geography and non-human inhabitants, Khải Đơn emphasizes their connectedness, which adds emotional resonance to the catastrophic degradations that abound.

By describing the delta’s residents via imagery of its geography and non-human inhabitants, Khải Đơn emphasizes their connectedness, which adds emotional resonance to the catastrophic degradations that abound.

The connections between people and earth flow the opposite direction as well via frequent personifications of the delta. Mountains “cover their eyes,” “slow rapids lick,” and a “dune heaves on the river chest.” In the poem ‘Origin of Dams,’ the Mekong River itself speaks, articulating how the construction of dams, introduced as a female entity, “spins a root into my ears, searching my beats and cells. My face sinks in the muddy field, listening to her pulses growing out of my brain sutures.” Such deft descriptions of the region’s natural environments underscore how the delta and humans are linked, each with the ability to determine the development and destroy the other. Moreover, the poems compel readers to extend the feelings of love, pain and sorrow regularly reserved for humans to the region’s nature.

Weaving truths and emotions, journalism and poetry

Books of contemporary poetry published in America frequently orbit singular themes or topics, approaching one or several specific subjects from different angles. Drowning Dragon fits within this trend and readers could list most major issues related to the delta and identify corresponding poems in the book concerned with them. There are poems that investigate the impacts of bridge construction, greedy land developers, a lack of educational opportunities for young women, unskilled labor migration, sand mining, domestic violence and alcohol abuse, floods and erosion, and exploitation of soil for rice cultivation as well as the previously mentioned poem about dams. Khải Đơn’s talent for captivating images and metaphors, in addition to mastery of untethered structures and perspectives, exemplifies how poetry can bring emotional immediacy to subjects typically reserved for academic or journalistic texts.

Khải Đơn via her website.

Another significant difference between the conventional rules of reportage and poetry is an allowance for uncertainty, contradiction and an implicit admission of the limitations of truth. Khải Đơn considers the later in the profound ‘Writing my Past into Your Present of Watching the Disgraced Truth.’ In it she admits:

I have trust issues with the present. It transforms like snakes, sneaking between facts and assumptions, between desire and capability, between imagination and reality, between newspapers and erased papers. It sheds the old skin, shrugging off and slipping into the present, like new, no trace back to the old shell. I struggle between the entanglements of snakes, with other thready snaky bodies, my journalist colleagues and me to weave a “truth” out for the daily manifestation of life, slipping and deforming. We tangle each other up like wool balls of snake in the hand of a cat-god, playful and untrustworthy, betraying its every moment.

This book confirms that the permission poetry gives to employ surrealism, spirituality and metaphysics, uncited declarations, unsupported claims, evidence-free emotions, and searchings without conclusions holds great power in the hands of a talented writer often constrained by stricter genres. Still, elements of Khải Đơn’s journalism background enter and inform her poetry. For example, several poems are constructed with language lifted from official government reports and news articles. Meanwhile, the stand-out long prose piece ‘Erosion,’ which documents the speaker’s grandmother’s passing, the fates of members of a multi-generational delta family living on at-risk land, a flower farmer in Sa Đéc, and a sand miner could easily be published as an essay that aims to spotlight the impact of larger political realities and decisions on individual lives.

Singular poems, let alone books of poems, can very rarely be summarized to any particular point. This holds true for Drowning Dragon Slips by Burning Plain, despite its focus on environment-related issues in the Mekong Delta. But while there is not one singular emotion the book leaves readers with, the final poem’s final image is apt for its over-reaching tone. In it, the speaker admits to her father that she cannot remember where her grandfather is buried. He responds by pointing at the rising tide. In the preceding poems, currents swallow homes and memories while lives are drowned thanks to greed and negligence. So, certainly, that rising tide portends only misery.

Drowning Dragon Slips by Burning Plain promises a rewarding reading experience for diverse audiences. Those approaching it from backgrounds of informed interest in the Mekong Delta will no doubt appreciate how it articulates feelings and experiences that cannot be expressed in peer-reviewed works. Meanwhile, poetry enthusiasts will admire its elegant crafting and the ways in which it expands the topics where poetry can claim relevancy. It is not an uplifting or hope-inspiring read, but it is a powerful means for gaining an intimate understanding of the Mekong Delta.

Viet Thanh Nguyen Memoir 'A Man of Two Faces' Releases Today

2023-10-02T11:00:00+07:00

A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial, the new book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Viet Thanh Nguyen arrives from Grove City Press on October 3.

Described by the Star Tribune as an "artfully intertwined medley of Nguyen's essays, lectures and interviews," the book has already been long-listed for the prestigious National Book Award for nonfiction.

Viet Thanh Nguyen achieved international fame via his 2017 novel The Sympathizer which won the Pulitzer Prize and is currently being developed by HBO and A24 into a television series to be released in 2024. Since then, the University of Southern California professor has published two collections of non-fiction essays, a collection of short stories and 2021's The Committed, the second in the three-part Sympathizer series.

A Man of Two Faces is a non-linear personal memoir filled with political commentary, according to Kirkus Reviews. In addition to detailing his family's departure from Vietnam in 1975 when he was four years old, his childhood in California and his experiences in academia it includes text arranged like poetry, photographs and a portion of a bad Amazon review.

Fans of Nguyen's work will recognize some common themes in his memoir including discussions of race, identity, assimilation and violence in America. His interest in Hollywood's depictions of Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans loom with the publisher's description of the book noting: "As a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed?"

Amongst the most acclaimed contemporary American writers, the book's release has enjoyed significant coverage including a recent article examining the design process behind the cover. Curious readers can check out an adapted section of the book recently published by The New Yorker or secure a digital edition from major online retailers.

[Book cover via Grove Atlantic]

In Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai's New Novel, Saigon's Rhythms Hum in the Background

2023-07-22T10:00:00+07:00

“I’m always homesick for Vietnam. To write is to return home. That's why I had to bring Vietnam alive onto the pages. I had to hear the people speak, I had to listen to the music, to the language; I had to smell the food, see the landscape — that's my way of returning home. Whenever I’m homesick, I just return home via my writing.”

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai explained this motivation for writing her newest novel Dust Child after she had literally returned home. We were sitting together in the lobby of the Hotel Majestic, discussing her book in one of the places it was set.

I first met Quế Mai more than five years ago in a coffee shop on Pasteur Street to write a profile on her. While back then, her novels were certainly already in progress, she was known to me and most of the English-speaking world as a poet and translator. It was surreal to join her last month to explore some of the settings of Dust Child, the follow-up to her international bestselling The Mountains Sing. As we walked around District 1, visiting locations where some of the book’s pivotal and heartwrenching moments played out, we had a chance to chat about her inspiration, process and purpose in writing the book and also listen to her read the corresponding passages.

Saigon is home to Quế Mai. She studied and worked here for many years; her parents and brothers live here. Dust Child is an opportunity for her to reveal her love for the city as well as her appreciation of its complex past.

A poetic saga that deftly examines oft-marginalized elements of war, race, trauma and healing, Dust Child transports readers to Vietnam to witness the powerful role of compassion in the wake of humankind’s efforts to inflict great harm on itself. The novel contains three main storylines that leap back and forth in time, occasionally overlap and eventually intertwine: In search of confronting painful memories and regrets during the war, American veteran Dan returns to Vietnam in 2016 with his wife Linda as guided by a Saigon local, Thiên; Phong, a mixed-race, or trẻ lai, individual from Bạc Liêu struggles to find a way to lift his wife, Bình, and children out of poverty; and Quỳnh and Trang (Kim), two teenaged sisters who move to Saigon during the war with America to make money for their family.

Saigon Central Post Office

“That’s Sài Gòn Post Office, built in 1886,” Thiên answered.

“It looks French, very French,” said Linda.

“Yes. It was constructed when Việt Nam was part of French Indochina, originally designed by Gustave Eiffel, whose company built the Eiffel Tower. Later the building was reconstructed by other French architects.”

“Really?” gasped Linda.

“Gustave Eiffel had an office in Sài Gòn. He also designed Long Biên Bridge in Hà Nội.”

Dan studied the arched windows and the intricately decorated façade. He’d seen them during the war but hadn’t cared.

“I had no idea,” Linda said, taking off her sunglasses, admiring the building. “Gustave Eiffel also co-designed the Statue of Liberty, Mr. Thien.”

“I want to see the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower before I die. But I need a job that pay better.”

Dan almost laughed. How clever Thiên was, hinting about a big, fat tip at the end of the tour.

They crossed the road. Dan watched the people streaming in and out of the post office. If Kim was in Sài Gòn, she must come here from time to time.

As Linda approached the stairs leading up to the post office, Thiên signaled Dan to stop. He waited until Linda was out of earshot, then lowered his sunglasses, looking at Dan in the eye, his scar twitching. “I think you don’t need a guide. If you do, I don’t care. Today is my last day working for you.”

When American veterans ask Vietnamese about the war fifty years ago, a common sentiment shared is that it’s over, it’s the past. Such a comment seems aimed at reassuring the Americans that they are welcome in Vietnam, that blame will not be placed on their shoulders, and the focus should be on looking forward to a harmonious and fulfilling future together. I think that sentiment is truthful. But such a simplification of the past being gone and buried threatens to ignore lingering fears, hostilities or traumas that must be overcome for a mutual future to be pursued as healthily as possible.

This passage at the Saigon Central Post Office, which occurs about halfway through the novel, reveals Dan’s lingering mistrust as he assumes that their guide is scheming to profit from him. Quế Mai shared that via Dust Child she hopes to bring about “healing for people who were impacted by armed conflicts and separations.” She said: “My stories are human stories, aiming to bring people together by fostering empathy.”

But before they can come together, Dan and Thiên must admit lingering hostilities and address them. Quế Mai explained: “To write these books I had to overcome my own fears because these topics I’m writing about are difficult, not often written about. But I think someone needs to write about them. Unless we confront difficult issues, we cannot generate dialogues that foster healing.”

This scene is crucial in illustrating how Dan has unresolved issues when it comes to his expectations for how the Vietnamese will treat him. Likewise, Thiên, a former soldier who fought alongside the Americans, must examine how he understands the many American veterans that are returning to his country. Their differences come to a more dramatic head later, but this moment helps establish that everything isn’t as calm and happy as everyone may wish it to be, and healing is a difficult process.

April 30 Reunification Park

“The grass of the 30^th of April Reunification Park was wet from the evening rain. A cool wind cut into Phong’s face. He took off his shirt and brought it to his nose. Bình had ironed it before their departure to Sài Gòn. He inhaled her touch. He hoped she’d gotten home safely with the children and hadn’t run out of money along the way. He wished he had made up with her before saying goodbye, told her he was sorry. When Bình agreed to marry him, people whispered that she only did it for the chance to migrate to America. They were wrong. He knew she loved him.

He used to believe that he didn’t deserve love because his life was cursed. He used to believe that his parents had done something unspeakable and that he was being punished for it. The luck of his life had been meeting Bình. Her faith in him had enabled him to regain his confidence. Yet for years, he’d feared that she was just a beautiful illusion; that he would wake up to find her gone.”

Vietnamese voices are underrepresented in global literature and Amerasian characters are particularly absent. Many foreign readers of this novel will not even know that term, though the concept will make sense once they consider the frequency of American soldiers and Vietnamese women getting together during the long war years. Phong’s story brings to life the painful discriminations and hardships these mixed-race individuals faced after 1975 and the important issue that continues to affect the country today.

To write from the perspective of characters with different backgrounds, experiences, genders and races, Quế Mai performs a staggering amount of research including extensive interviews. For example, to give Dan, a white man, a compelling and realistic voice, she spent time with American veterans, accompanying them on their visits to Vietnam and to homes of former enemies. It’s a powerful inversion of the far-too-frequent instances of white men writing from the perspective of Vietnamese women. Similarly, for Phong, Quế Mai relied on numerous interviews with Amerasians and her many years assisting Amerasians in their search for their parents as well as research via published oral stories, memoirs, essays, documentaries, and films.

"The Amerasian character in my novel was abandoned at birth, is illiterate and needs to seek his parents and his identity. Inspired by real-life stories, I was determined to write Phong not as a victim, but as someone with agency: Phong does not let tragedy define him; he fights against racism and prejudices; he assists those who are being scammed; he earns his honest living by doing all types of job. He celebrates life by being a gardener and a musician. Phong’s love for his wife and children offers them hope for the future," she explains.

Quế Mai’s novels are exceedingly generous and hopeful, looking to the best possible outcome that we might achieve with effort and the right heart. Phong’s character, while far from perfect, exemplifies this quality. This passage expresses how hope, even during the most stressful and desperate times, is possible. The love and beauty inherent to the world can lift people out of the most dire states.

Bánh Mì Như Lan

“Bánh Mì Như Lan was similar to the eateries Kim used to take him to, only bigger and more crowded. Sitting on a corner of a busy crossroad, it was filled with noise and packed with people. Instead of doors, it had counters selling many types of dry and cooked food. Customers on motorbikes drove right up to the counters to buy food without even turning off their engines. Behind the counters were Formica tables and plastic chairs. Linda wrinkled her nose, eyeing the rubbish scattered on the floor. Thiên assured them that such a place sold authentic food. He ordered for them and soon the waiter placed the food in front of them: crunchy baguettes stuffed with thinly sliced roasted pork, pate, pickled vegetables, spring onions and coriander, plates of fresh and fried spring rolls, and bowls of steaming noodles.”

Quế Mai may be a world-famous novelist now, but she will always be a poet, first and foremost to me. This passage’s simple depiction of food served in an iconic Saigon bakery showcases her subtle ability to create an evocative scene with precise images and colorful descriptions. More startling metaphors and graceful descriptions exist elsewhere in Dust Child, but here she brings a novelist’s restraint to her poetry.

In a previous article written for Saigoneer, Quế Mai articulated how love and food are extremely intertwined in our memories. It is thus not surprising that a humble dinner of bánh mì transports Dan back 46 years to his time with Kim, the Vietnamese woman he was dating while stationed in Saigon. He returns to Vietnam to confront certain traumas, but he doesn’t seem prepared to confront recollections of happiness and the complexities such an emotion ushers in. This scene is one of the first times that theme emerges and it will remain one of the most powerful elements for the rest of the novel.

Hotel Majestic

Hotel Majestic looked as magnificent as ever, with its domed glass windows, its elaborate entrance where a guard stood. Painted a pale yellow, the building now has a bright red Communist flag flying above its name. He gazed at the rooftop, recalling that it had one of the best views of the city. He had to take Linda up there, tell her tales about the foreign journalists who used to hang out at the rooftop bar during the war.

To the right, Tự Do — the Street of Freedom —, now called Đồng Khởi—the Street of Uprising— stretched out before his eyes, lit up by colorful lights. Were some of the bars still there? During his final month here, he’d been a frequent customer. The girls had been younger than Kim, undemanding and not pregnant.

“This hotel was built by a Chinese Vietnamese businessman in 1925,” Thiên gestured toward the Majestic. “His Chinese name was Hui Bon Hoa, but we called them Uncle Hỏa. He was once Sài Gòn’s richest man. His family constructed thousands of buildings, including the current Fine Arts Museum.”

“That’s amazing,” Linda said. “And how interesting that this hotel looks just like some of the buildings I saw in Paris.” Linda tilted her head, looking up to the lit windows of the higher floors.

As Linda mentioned French architecture, Dan thought about the terrible things the French had done to the Vietnamese. They’d colonized the country for decades, divided its people, caused the First Indochina War, which killed hundreds of thousands of people. Then he noticed how Linda’s innocent words had instantly snapped his mind to the subject of French colonialism. That was the thing about being here. In America, he could pretend that world history had nothing to do with his life. But as soon as he stepped back into the hot air of Việt Nam, he knew that notion was bullshit.

Dust Child jumps back and forth in time, often by chapter, but occasionally within a single paragraph via the character’s memories. In this scene, Dan experiences both present-day Saigon in all its dynamic glory as well as the dangerous, alluring Saigon of his war years. Such time travel makes reading the novel while in Vietnam particularly satisfying as one sees their own reality and a former reality mirrored back to them.

Regardless of which time period a scene occurs within, Quế Mai fills it with historical asides and references, as she does here with the story of Hui Bon Hoa. Of her writing process she explained: “As a reader, I aim to write a book that I’d like to read. So, I wanted to write a book that is authentic to my perception of Vietnam, Vietnam’s history and Vietnam’s present day. I included messages which are important for me, my point of view, my experiences and also messages which are impactful for Vietnamese people that I know”

The personal experiences she alluded to in this quote are even more important to this scene than readers would know, however. While sitting in the Hotel Majestic, Quế Mai explained that she had gotten married next door to this very hotel in 1999: her wedding reception took place at the Maxim Restaurant, which is also featured in the novel. Friends she’d made while studying in Australia as well as her in-laws had flown in for the event and were staying at the Majestic together with her and her husband-to-be. It is thus a cherished place of love-filled memories and given the emotions her book exudes, it makes perfect sense to have included it.

Quế Mai also noted that she set the novel at the Hotel Majestic because it is where Graham Greene wrote his classic The Quiet American. I can imagine people being moved by Dust Child the same way they are by that book. However, it’s worth noting that while in The Quiet American, Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman, was largely silent and relied on Western men to rescue her, Dust Child places two strong and independent Vietnamese sisters at the center of the story where they attempt to rescue American soldiers from the horrors of war.

I hope readers, when visiting Saigon, can retrace the steps we took that afternoon, if for no other reason than to spend a little more time with Quế Mai's beautiful words and the characters she created.

'The Shard, the Tissue, an Affair': A Short Story by Andrew Lam

2023-06-19T12:00:00+07:00

This short story is featured in Volume 2 of In My Ear, Your Voice Still Flickering // Bên tai tôi, giọng người vẫn chờn vờn, a three-part, bilingual collection of works by more than 20 Vietnamese artists and writers, curated by Saigoneer in collaboration with Miami Book Fair.

The Shard, The Tissue, An Affair

by Andrew Lam

Art by Trà Nhữ.

Not that the glass shard had any business with the sole of his foot; nevertheless, it made itself familiar. And it was an unending story of how he teased and squeezed and how it refuted his negotiations. But finally, the shard—so small, smaller than the tiniest teardrop—was retrieved and he, pained still, examined it for a brief moment against the halogen lamp before flicking it to hurl like a comet out my window.

On my bed he sat, a teary-eyed Shiva, his wounded foot raised in the air, kicking, kicking.

I should have swept carefully. This was no way to welcome a poet. I should have mopped, waxed. Something. Now I watched as he wiped the wound with a tissue paper and felt awkward, like a caught voyeur. But then he looked up and smiled. Come here, he said.

We had seduced each other over the phone and via emails a year before we actually met. An essay of mine had found its way to his part of the world and he took the initiative of sending me an e-mail full of compliments. I replied, thanking him for his kind words, and discretely enclosed my number.

He called.

We talked.

Mostly of home, of our tropical Vietnamese childhood. He named for me seasons half-forgotten, our childhood fruits, fruits eaten in stealth and ecstasy. Remember the green mango? Sweet and sour and crunchy, eaten with salt and red chilly pepper or even fish sauce, hidden under the student desks while an old geezer of a teacher droned on. And the durian, loaves of yellow brain eaten with glee by the entire family after dinner, fingers digging through a split thorny shell the size of a skull, family brain surgery, that's what it was, a ceremony of shared flesh. And what a smell! Rotten flesh fragrance, its pungent aroma remaining for days in your hair, your nostrils, your breath. And the milk apple, green and purple outside, milky white inside, to be eaten after siesta, its cool and smooth texture sliding against your throat like sweet ice. Afterwards, washing the milky sap off your lips, scrubbing real hard, and seeing how raw they looked in the mirror, as if from too much kissing.

I, in turn, recounted for him the flame trees that blossomed in the courtyard of my elementary school, red and green, glowing to the point of blindness under an unforgiving sun, its black fruits, hard shells that fit perfectly in a child's palm, turned into swords for the boys to duel with. I recalled a summer villa veiled in a cloud of red bougainvillea by the ocean in Nha-Trang. The way I slept in the afternoon on the second floor, soundly, insulated in my parents' rhapsodic laughter, which echoed like shattered crystals from room to room (and how I loved the roaring sound of waves out the tall French windows that made me dream of tigers). My favorite childhood smells: the sea, of course, with faint suggestions of kelps and dead fish, ripened rice field at dusk, my grandmother's eucalyptus ointment to ward against evil winds, the sweetness of sandalwood incense burnt by my pious mother nightly.

On the phone late one autumn evening, I whispered, Read me a poem. Out on the bay the foghorn wailed mournfully. A poem, please.

I don't know, said he. You were supposed to send a photo, remember?

I'm sorry. I'll send one tomorrow. I swear. Poem, please.

Hmm...

Read, please.

Leaving

Mother burns pages of albums

wedding day, first child, father's

funeral, Tet

quick, she says, hurry, pack,

prepare

we'll sail away

down river

to sea ...

Saigon in April

A season of smoke

His poetry went on to speak of a perilous journey, one full of wonders and griefs.

So I took my chance: Will you come for a visit?

To your city? He asked.

Of course, I said. By the sea. You can see sailboats every morning out my window. Hear the cable cars go rumbling-clanging by. Feel the sea breeze on your skin, taste its salt ...

To fall in love is to have one's sense of geography grafted onto another's, no matter how tenuous, so as to form a new country. I saw Houston in my mind, a city of strip malls, grand old homes and gleaming glass-and-steel skyscrapers that coexist cheek by jowl. He, in turn, imagined San Francisco with its Transamerica Pyramid poking the blue sky, windblown hills the color of ember at twilight, sailboats gliding on the bay like playful white butterflies; he imagined—and I could tell this from his voice—that there was freedom somewhere in the next valley.

Alright, he said, I'll come. In December, at the beginning of Winter.

Then he stepped on the shard. And had trouble walking the next day, his new boots, bought a week before, unyielding, his dye-stained socks kept sliding downward inside. He walked the city, my city, with a slightest of a limp.

We were otherwise chirpy as songbirds that first day. At lunch, we held hands under the table at Cafe Claude while I introduced him to friends, and afterward walking home, we broke into an old folk song about rice harvesting, a song learned so long ago and so meaningless now that neither one of us knows its lyric entirely.

Day two: To Carmel. I drove, my hand resting sporadically in his, Cesoria Evora cooing nostalgic ballads of love. The night before, under a flapping red awning of a stucco apartment building somewhere on Russian Hill, we kissed and I, impulsively, beckoned him to move in with me. He stared out to the dark water and contemplated the offer. Then before I could speak he kissed me again and shut me up.

He contemplated the sea now, a glittering sheet of silver lamé that stretches back to the past. It must be strange for him to see the Pacific once more, so long hidden from him in Texas, the ocean a reminder of that terrible flight on that crowded boat full of refugees from Saigon. He relives it all once more. He sees the small of his mother's back as she huddles her children in the corner of a dark and crowded and stinking hull. He wanted to take her place so that she could rise to the upper deck and smell the fresh air, even if only just once. But she never did. The journey she kept her lioness vigilance over a sickly brood. It was him who begged for water, who gathered bad news. It was him who told them how blue the sky, how vast the sea.

His siblings are grown now, his mother well-past middle age and half-crazed, and he, like a benevolent spirit, still needs to watch over her, over them, lest he would somehow lose all purposes and meanings, though how he yearns for freedom, god only knows, a nightly defeat.

He turns to me then, the wind in his hair, the sea a blur in the corner of his eye: I want to. I really do.

Day three: Something has changed. A shadow has flown across my window, a movement in the stars. The initial delight of recognition shifts to the fact of too many details; we fall into routine. He sleeps on my favorite side of the bed, my left arm hurts from the weight of his handsome head. The way he throws the scarf over his shoulder vaguely bothers me and I can't say why. Sometimes he has this sad look, a poet's melancholy, I suppose, and is unreachable. He wears it too often, like a geisha, its his powder. I look at him now insulated in sadness and wonder how his books could possibly fit in my apartment when my shelves have no more space for V.S. Naipaul's collected works?

Day four: He discovers an unfinished poem on my desk, an ode to his beauty. He says nothing but I can tell he doesn't really like it. It's not jealousy, it's the fact that I have moved into his "territory," even if to woo him. Something in his sigh I recognize too well: it's claustrophobia.

Day five: Or rather night. Rain. A chorus of remembrances. Fifteen years and he is tonight as he was then, a moist-eyed boy standing in the refugee camp watching his mother hugging her sickly brother, her youngest pup dying of pneumonia before her eyes. He is drunk, not from the alcohol, but from trusting, and grief. He stares out the window and speaks of leaving, of wanting to leave, leaving his mother, which is impossible, leaving his siblings, who have already left him, leaving Texas which he didn't care for, leaving everything, his memory, his sadness, what owns him.

We buried Little Binh in Guam. Around the grave we stood and sang his favorite song then left his plastic dog on the mound until the rain washed it away. My sister went back to look for the grave last year but she couldn't find it. Some morning my mother stares out the window and cries as if it had just happened last night.

Listening to him I suddenly am also overwhelmed by a particular memory. It was in the summer of 1973, a year after the ARVN and Americans recaptured the city of Quang-Tri near the DMZ. I had visited it with my father via helicopter, a rather strange excursion. The city was destroyed in the recapturing, reduced to piles of rubble by B-52 bombs that left deep holes that, after the monsoon, turned into swimming pools for the children who survived. I walked about. Behind a broken window of a house sat an old woman. She sat as she must have as always, with an ease of years, but she stared out to nothing now, the old neighborhood is gone, and the wall that held her window was the only thing left standing of the old house. I remember waving to her. She did not wave back.

Day six: I want to tell him, the angel sleeping on my shoulder, that it's strange how love between two exiles can be thwarted by the hunger of memories, that Vietnam remains, in many ways, an unfinished country between us—even now, body to body, lips to lips.

Day seven: She needs me, he says. You're lucky. You're free.

And, therefore, I thought, utterly alone.

On the way back from the airport it suddenly occurs to me how the tiny shard came to be there on my floor. A thin crystal vase that held a dozen white tulips toppled over one windy evening last spring. I remember holding the flowers upside down, drunk and out of breath, a lake of sharp crystals lapping at my feet, water dripping from the grieving bulbs like melted snow.

A month, and still no news. His phone is disconnected. This morning I found the wrinkled tissue dotted with dry blood under my bed, my own shroud of Turin. He is so far away now, hidden across time zones, cocooned in requiems; I walk barefoot in my apartment, hoping another shard would pierce me too. But I'm not made for such a thing, alas, and must resort to keeping under my cool blue satin pillow the blood-stained tissue, remnant of an uneasy dream of communion whose yearning is long.

All three volumes of In My Ear, Your Voice Still Flickering // Bên tai tôi, giọng người vẫn chờn vờn are available for free download here. For more information on the zine, read our feature.

'The Chosen and the Beautiful,' a Queer, Magical, Asian American Gatsby Remix

2023-06-15T10:00:00+07:00

“The Great Gatsby, but with an Asian American narrator and some of the characters are queer and there’s magic.” This is a fine elevator explanation for The Chosen and the Beautiful.

The way one approaches Nghi Vo’s 2021 novel, The Chosen and the Beautiful, will depend largely on one’s relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. That famous 1925 novel occupies a prominent place in the American literary canon with generations of Americans reading it during high school, while the 2013 film adaptation starring Leonardo DiCaprio brought it beyond English class curricula to a more global audience. The Chosen and the Beautiful keeps the core plot, scenes and characters intact, but selects Jordan Baker, a minor character in the original, to serve as the narrator, while giving her a new identity as an adopted/kidnapped Vietnamese queer woman. Vo has also filled their world with powerful magic as well.

“I am deeply in love with The Great Gatsby as a novel, for all of its problems,” Vo explained in an online discussion. It was her great appreciation for the book that led her to pen her re-mix, noting that doing so “allows me to not only comment on the world of the novel itself, it allows me to comment on the world that Fitzgerald himself is living in and the assumptions he makes.”

Vo goes on to joke that one should read The Great Gatsby before The Chosen and the Beautiful so they can identify the ways she is being “mean” to the original. But I am not certain one needs to know the original to enjoy her version. I haven’t read it for nearly two decades, and thus only remember its broad strokes, though allusions to the green light at the end of the dock and “Gatsby” as shorthand for a mysterious devil-may-care individual have helped keep its memory alive. Recognizing how scenes, motivations or details have been shifted or embellished by Vo’s hand certainly adds an extra joy to the experience, but it's not the only one.

The beau monde with a queer touch

When reading The Chosen and the Beautiful, what first astounds, beyond alterations to the original, is the glamor and extravagance of the time period, or as Vo explained in the interview: “The whole appeal is how big it is.” This grandeur can be seen in the opulence stuffed into each scene’s details. The absurdity of wealth enjoyed by the characters is on display in something as simple as undergarment storage: “The white drawers built into the far wall opened to reveal layers and layers of underwear, camisoles, stockings, jeweled garters, French knickers with real lace insets, all stacked neatly between pale sheets of perfumed tissue paper, all as tempting as marzipan on Christmas.”

In addition to retaining the core story of The Great Gatsby, Vo mimics some of Fitzgerald’s writing style, particularly his use of complex, compound sentences that hinge on metaphors and similes to provide descriptions. This book’s very first sentence reveals this technique, offering a glimpse of the content to follow: “The wind came into the house from the Sound, and it blew Daisy and me around her East Egg mansion like puffs of dandelion seeds, like foam, like a pair of young women in white dresses who had no cares to weigh them down.”

While The Greats Gatsby approaches sex with a coy nod and a wink, The Chosen and the Beautiful relishes in offering full, orgasm-filled details.

Vo’s descriptions do deviate from Fitzgerald’s in significant ways, however. Specifically, while The Greats Gatsby approaches sex with a coy nod and a wink, The Chosen and the Beautiful relishes in offering full, orgasm-filled details. And most significantly, she doesn’t restrict the characters to heterosexual encounters. Depicting or alluding to Jordan, Gatsby, Daisy and others engaging in graphic homosexual sex scenes and entanglements is not as outlandish as it may sound, however. There have long been interpretations that Nick was romantically in love with Gatsby in the original. Rumors of Fitzgerald’s own life have been cited as evidence, especially considering his frequent reliance on biographical details to build his fiction around. But Vo, who self-identifies as queer, forefronts it and removes all ambiguity. None of the characters seem to grapple with the concepts of gender identity or norms, however, as they adhere to the more strict conventions of the day, with sexual and emotional intimacy seemingly untethered from traditional gender roles. If same-sex marriage were legal and accepted in their world, one wonders how differently the story might go.

The sexual freedom that the characters experience does force one back to the original novel’s overarching theme of privilege. The aspect of queerness adds another facet of freedom and indulgence afforded to the wealthy of the 1920s. In the same way the characters can savor foods, fabrics and travel without having to worry about money or judgment, they can pursue whatever sexual or romantic relationships they would like without concern for the social stigmas or discriminations that certainly existed for average Americans 100 years ago. Powerful parallels can certainly be made to the way modern LGBTQ experiences are not equal across race, class, religion and nationality.

The girl from Tonkin

In the novel’s very white, upper-class New York world, Jordan’s race, more than her sexuality, makes her an outsider and some of her experiences mirror those of contemporary Asian Americans. Early in the book, she recounts the familiar situation of being asked where she is from; no really from. And while not dwelling on it, Vo does give readers enough details about her “adoption” by a wealthy white woman from “Tonkin” to infer she may not have been as much adopted as kidnapped, a nod to some dark truths about the legacies of America’s white-savior complex when it comes to raising babies of color from abroad. Jordan is able to adjust to this situation well, however, and use it to her advantage as much as possible, admitting “I was clever enough to know that it was my exotic looks and faintly tragic history that made me such an attractive curiosity, and I was not yet clever enough to mind when they prodded at my differences for a conversation piece at dinner.”

Jordan’s wealth again makes her an anomaly, however, when it comes to race. Even in the 1920s, New York was diverse and Chinatown, in particular, was home to others whom Jordan physically resembles. She avoids going there and associating with the individuals who call it home because “In truth, I felt less special in Chinatown, and that made me dislike it.” Still, Jordan does have several interactions with other Asians, particularly a group of Vietnamese circus performers who are brought in to entertain at Gatsby’s extravagant parties. The differences between them are revealed via Vo’s invention of the Manchester Act. Passing at the book’s conclusion, it will force those not born in America to leave. This, however, does not pose as great a problem for Jordan as it does for the circus performers, she is from a different class, after all. As her aunt emphasizes: “You’re safe, you know. … You’re a Baker. No one would question that.”

The book invites many interesting conversations about the need to decolonize literature, the roles of canons in (re)writing history, feminism, sexuality, race, class, adoption — and the ways in which these complex subjects intersect.

Beyond their appearances, Jordan shares with the Vietnamese characters an ability to cut paper into perfectly real and complete humans and animals. The ability to do so constitutes the most significant way in which the book’s magical elements impact the plot. Coming without explanation, readers are expected to accept enchantments, imps, spells and transfigurations as part of the world in the same way that the characters do. Thus, magic appears in mundane ways, such as characters drinking “demoniac,” an intoxicating beverage made with demon blood; party attendees transforming into fish-like creatures when swimming in Gatsby’s pool and ghosts that share gossip and judgemental comments. Much of the magic functions as glitter tossed over the already gaudy landscape without advancing the plot or adding to the characterizations. With the exception of an important reveal at the end, one may conclude that by introducing magic and thus untethering the tale from the real world, Vo has removed some of the book’s power to comment on its important themes.

Even with fantasy creeping across its margins, this book invites many interesting conversations about the need to decolonize literature, the roles of canons in (re)writing history, feminism, sexuality, race, class, adoption — and the ways in which these complex subjects intersect. But it can also be a fun book filled with extravagant excess and unnecessary embellishment best savored with a pull of demoniac straight from the bottle.

A Memoir Ruminates on Saigon in the Now and via Childhood Memories

2023-05-04T10:00:00+07:00

Born in Saigon in 1977, Tuan Phan and his parents left for America via boat in 1986. Remembering Water includes depictions of the voyage including lengthy stops in refugee camps followed by acclimation to a new country and culture. It articulates struggles of exile and assimilation similar to many other diaspora experiences, but his story is unique because Tuan returns to live in Saigon as an adult and encounters a place significantly different from his childhood recollections. The memoir concerns itself not just with the changing city and his relationship with it, but also with more illusive ideas regarding the fallibility of memory and if one can feel more at home in the past than the present.

“Like an Instagram filter, my mind had turned segments of my childhood Saigon into prettier, more flawless versions, glossing over all imperfections,” Tuan notes after he realizes the tennis courts he had pictured as pristine, near-Olympic venues were in fact rundown and ramshackle. Most can relate to people, places and objects seeming more impressive when they were young, but growing up alongside them allows for a gradual easing into an adult understanding of them, compared to Tuan who has them thrust at him abruptly decades later. Rather than grow angry at the imprecise elements or abandon them for their inexactitudes, Tuan settles on an admirable approach: “But if the memory was imprecise, it still held some truth, for if the details I remembered were false, the bliss I felt had been preserved undiluted over the years.” In its juxtaposing of memory and reality, the book suggests the veracity of one’s memories is less important than the emotions ushered in by their conjuring.

Tuan Phan. Photo via Hidden River Arts.

To write the book, Tuan interviewed his mother and realizes that their memories differ; not just in what particular details she held onto and which she discarded, but in overarching feelings about entire experiences. He admits that his “memory seems hazy when it comes to the harsher details,” while his mother is haunted by the hunger that gnawed at them after leaving Vietnam and the patriarchal system that impeded her professional development. “Does memory work its muddled, incoherent way with my past, flecking it with happiness, with imagined joys, when all experiences on that boat for my mother were ones of horror, of dark anguish? I recall the beautiful moments of our escape with clarity, but I’ve locked away the fear she felt, the spectre of death that loomed throughout each day on that boat within her memory,” he writes. In acknowledging this, he underscores the sacrifices and bravery of his mother and reminds readers that trauma experienced is often greater than trauma passed down.

The fallibility of memory

While Remembering Water does devote careful attention to the catastrophic moments in Tuan and his family’s life, it gives equal space to smaller, more common experiences, whether it's the simple joys of teaching a childhood crush how to ride a bicycle or the visceral thrills of riding a motorbike during the city’s monsoon season. These deviations from a core narrative may be the book’s most enjoyable elements because of Tuan’s descriptive gifts. Because of them, one doesn’t need to be familiar with Thanh Đa to picture the crowded apartment blocks and the waters curling around them “like the tail of a resting cat.” Similarly, when the seeds of District 1’s cherished dipterocarp trees are “dropped in quiet whirls of leaf-winged descent, as soft as meditation,” the descriptions paint pleasantly familiar images in my mind as I picture scenes I have seen with my own eyes. For readers who have never been here, I predict the city comes across as chaotically charismatic as it truly is.

If the memory was imprecise, it still held some truth, for if the details I remembered were false, the bliss I felt had been preserved undiluted over the years.

Much prose of diaspora writers fit in the murky territory between fiction and nonfiction while adhering to the conventional structures and pacing of novel. Remembering Water is self-assuredly a memoir that embraces the genre’s room to drift across topics. In this, it resembles how one’s memory works. We all hold onto trivial scenes and anecdotes for no apparent reason. While this can be infuriating when considered against all the things we wish we could remember but do not, the errant recollections add a fascinating texture to the story of our lives we can tell ourselves. A few moments in Tuan’s book function this way, such as a brief aside about 1990s video game soundtracks or an extended tangent on the romcom Em Chưa 18. They may initially seem out of place against discussions more centrally important to the memoir, but ultimately tether the entire work to a true and singular human voice.

Past vs. now

“I hope you’re not writing about a nostalgic, lost Saigon… Are you? There’s enough of that in print already,” Tuan’s roommate says at one point regarding the then-in progress memoir. One assumes Tuan included the detail as an acknowledgment that he penned such a work knowing others exist. The book does indeed focus on a disappeared Saigon. But similar to how memories are impacted by decades of absence, he encounters the loss all at once, abruptly realizing that “the Saigon of my past had already disappeared, existing only in the loose tendrils of my memory that sever and drop upon the slightest tug.”

Tuan seems to channel his parents’ and Aunt’s bitterness towards cityscapes and lifestyles that no longer exist when he reflects on the changes to Saigon, even when confronted by young inhabitants of the city who question: “Would you want to go back to the years before đổi mới, when there were daily blackouts in every neighborhood? When there was a rice shortage and people were hungry? Why would we want to relive those years? Why would anybody?” But Tuan remains unconvinced, coming to the realization that ties together the book’s themes: “The Saigon I knew then was beautiful because it was the riverine city of my sheltered, protected childhood, and if I can partially live in it again through language, through sentence and reminiscence, then that serves as a salve and balm to my weary sojourning soul.”

The Saigon I knew then was beautiful because it was the riverine city of my sheltered, protected childhood, and if I can partially live in it again through language, through sentence and reminiscence, then that serves as a salve and balm to my weary sojourning soul.

Hopefully, in several decades Tuan will pen a follow-up memoir, perhaps exploring the city’s continued changes and his place within it. Absent a child’s innocent sheen will his memories of recent years be as lovingly recalled? As Saigon no doubt continues to change what emotions will he attach to the current and soon-to-be-disappeared cityscape? To what rises in its place? Regardless of what such a book might contain, if it is written with the same thoughtful examinations and skilled descriptions, it will be worth picking up.

Remembering Water is available for purchase here in paperback and Kindle format here.

Bảo Ninh's English-Language Return and the Magic of Mundane Moments

2023-03-30T13:00:00+07:00

Of all 20^th-century Vietnamese authors whose works were translated into English, none have received more high-profile attention than Bảo Ninh for his wartime novel Nỗi buồn chiến tranh (The Sorrow of War). Commonly billed as an essential book to better understand the American war from the Vietnamese perspective, it has won numerous prestigious awards worldwide and been translated into twenty different languages.

Bảo Ninh’s domestic fame may not match his practically singular canonization abroad, but he remains an important literary figure whose minimal output attracts great interest. Despite having published several works in Vietnamese since the once-banned Nỗi buồn chiến tranh (The Sorrows of War), he has only again appeared in English translation via several stories in various anthologies. This month, the release of Hà Nội at Midnight, a collection of short fiction translated by Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran, is thus a noteworthy occasion.

Bảo Ninh. Photo by Linh Pham via Mekong Review.

The succinct collection of 13 stories does not stray far from what readers will expect from Bảo Ninh. War and the miseries that linger lurk in each of the works with snapshot-like glimpses into various lives upended by conflict, adding up to a textured whole concerned with the capricious nature of happiness, the inevitability of loss and the central place seemingly inconsequential moments play in one’s memories.

The direct and indirect ripples of war

In 1954, we were happy about you and your siblings’ futures. We thought that we had traded all the hardships we’d experienced in this country for a better life for all of you. But now, with our country at war again, it’s your turn to…” a father trails off while having a rare heart-to-heart with his son who had enlisted in the army against his wishes in the story ‘Reminiscence.’

The bitter recognition that everyone knew what sacrifices awaited as the war intensified gives way elsewhere to the understanding that internecine battles would repeat themselves unceasingly, such as in ‘Letters from the Year of the Water Buffalo,’ which describes the back-and-forth struggle to occupy a single hill that felt like “a mass suicide.” Howitzers, dark smoke, bombs, bodies, graves, napalm, tanks, and a sky filled with plane formations “like a Ferris wheel”; the horrific days repeat one after another except for the rare Tết holiday break that sees soldiers from opposing sides share goods and exchange letters to be transported to loved ones.

Had the story ended at the conclusion of that pause the narrator describes as having “only goodwill and a sense of fellowship, and we had a curious sympathy and understanding for each other. Before we said our goodbyes, we sang some songs together, and some of the men even cried. Hatred should be resolved, not intensified,” the story would have perhaps been an inspiring depiction of humanity’s potential to progress beyond war. Alas, the book’s stories, while not autobiographical, are bound by historical truths, and ‘Letters from 1973’ continues on to trace the lives of the men who fought for the useless hill once the holiday concludes.

Not all horrors of the age occurred on a battlefield, however. ‘The Camp of the Seven Dwarfs’ is set in a remote forest that experiences no fighting but still batters the lives of its inhabitants: men, women, and children. It articulates how no civilian was spared from the dangers war cast upon the nation, and how entire tragedies — the likes of which would consume one’s existence today — can be summed up in a single phrase:

That was the same night another tiger took our prized sow. Huy and I were so angry that we wanted to hunt and kill it. Hinh came down with a fever, so he stayed behind in the cottage. We killed the tiger the next morning and carried it back to the farm. On our return from the mountain, we were shocked to see our farm engulfed in flames. We fought off a second tiger, then took a shortcut through the bamboo forest and, without stopping, crossed a swamp to get home. Our house, kitchen, forge, bee garden—all located on the far side of the creek—were still intact. But our food storage, seeds, and pigsty had burnt to ashes. That night, the fire grew to over thirty hectares along the west bank of the Sa Thầy River. Dry leaves on the ground fed the fire. Unfortunately, it was a very windy night. For three days we searched through the debris to find Hinh’s remains. He wanted to save the storehouse and the livestock, and despite his illness, he gave his life fighting the encroaching fire. After that, only Huy and I were left. At the end of 1968, during the wet season, after six years of living together, Huy, also contracted a fever and died.

The magic of mundane moments

If all jumbled together, Hà Nội at Midnight could read like a conversation catching up on the fates of friends with whom one lost touch on account of the war: Tân and his two siblings move to Saigon after the war, are fortunate during the subsidy period and prosper afterwards; Quang’s wife left him while he was deployed and he vows to track her down and take her back home; the artist Năm leaves behind some paintings and drifts towards his hometown somewhere in the south, never to be seen again; the father of an unnamed girl in a small seaside village leaves the country by boat in 1975 while she takes over his photography studio, later turning it into a coffee shop that she grows old operating. And of course, many, many died. Taken all at once, it is impossible to not come away from the stories with a feeling of immense sadness for the rich and full lives impacted by war. Bảo Ninh’s ability to conjure entire personalities with a few descriptions means readers will forget that these are works of fiction and find themselves mourning the people lost, and, occasionally, breathing a sigh of relief at their happiness.

Perhaps, because of the surrounding desperation and likelihood of death, small moments take on immense importance for many of the characters. Singular interactions or relationships built upon a few conversations leave indelible impressions for the rest of their lives. The memories can prove immensely powerful, such as the narrator of the book’s titular story who says: “I was foolish and naive, but in that imaginary first love, which I had buried deep in my heart, I was encouraged by its uplifting promise. It was why, I believe, I had survived the war and returned from it safely. Even more so, that illusory first love became a source of hope that helped me in conducting my life after I returned from the war, to live courageously, happily, and overcome those long years of struggle in the postwar period.”

Bảo Ninh’s ability to conjure entire personalities with a few descriptions means readers will forget that these are works of fiction and find themselves mourning the people lost, and occasionally breathing a sigh of relief at their happiness.

But not all of the insignificant memories justify why the characters hold onto them so tightly. In ‘Giang,’ for example, the narrator meets a woman for a single night while en route to his camp and thirty years later, “I will never forget her even if nothing really that significant happened between us. I miss her, even if time has a way of erasing those memories.” The juxtaposition between cataclysmic moments of literal life and death and mundane experiences — such as a stranger helping a man carry water buckets or recognizing the perfume worn by a classmate living next door — offer perhaps the collection’s most profound statements on humanity and why it is worth agonizing over.

When surveying Vietnamese literature translated into English, one could justifiably complain that too much focus remains on war and its direct aftermath. If not written well, they threaten to blur together, adding nothing new to what has already been said. Myriad, complex political, commercial and academic reasons explain why certain books are translated, and there is no doubt more will be translated on the subject. But the richly drawn characters with dramatic arcs deftly presented in Bảo Ninh’s Hà Nội at Midnight should comfort audiences as they offer not only satisfying reading experiences but the unique twists, however minor, add important emotional and intellectual facets to the collective understanding of the sorrows of war.

From Architecture to Folklore: 5 Indie Book Projects for Vietnamese Culture Buffs

2023-01-12T17:00:00+07:00

In our years of writing about Vietnam, Saigoneer has had the pleasure to meet many passionate, inquisitive individuals whose creative and academic projects inspired us to appreciate the many facets of Vietnamese culture. Sometimes, we are lucky enough to see this labor of love being turned into physical books for us to cradle in our hands, delicately turn the pages, and heave in that heady aroma of freshly minted tomes.

Here are five independent book projects that showcase their author’s depth of knowledge and dedication to the quest of promoting Vietnamese culture.

1. Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture by Mel Schenck with photos by Alexandre Garel

Image via Phương Nam Books.

The English-language version of Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture was officially released in Vietnam in 2020, but its making was a lifelong project that started five decades ago when the author, American architect Mel Schenck, first arrived in Vietnam as a construction manager for the US Navy. The visit sparked his interests in Vietnam’s unique brand of modernist architecture and eventually he spent five years doing research to produce the book. While it wasn’t intended to be an encyclopedia of modernist buildings (many structures were left out due to book length concerns), the work by Schenck and his companion, photographer Alexandre Garel, is the most comprehensive compilation to date of southern Vietnam’s modernist architecture heritage. Most recently, it was translated into Vietnamese as Kiến Trúc Hiện Đại Miền Nam Việt Nam, with a hard-cover and a paperback version.

Saigoneer has the pleasure to call Mel Schenck a friend of our publication, who has lent his voice and expertise to many of our features on architecture in Vietnam. Read our interview with him three years ago on the occasion of the book’s release here.

Both versions of Kiến Trúc Hiện Đại Miền Nam Việt Nam and the black-and-white English version are available for purchase at bookstores nationwide.

2. Ma Quỷ Dân Gian Ký by Duy Văn

Images via Facebook page Ma Quỷ Dân Gian Ký.

Only Vietnam’s wealth of culinary inventions can rival that of its mythological and horror stories, which were the subject of illustration artist Duy Văn’s personal project Ma Quỷ Dân Gian Ký (The Chronicle of Folk Spirits). His interest in local ghost stories compelled him to start illustrating some of his favorite ghouls from local folklore and upload the artwork, alongside detailed information on their characteristics and origins. When we interviewed Duy Văn for our feature on the project last June, he shared a plan to one day publish a book with all the ghostly characters he has depicted — a promise that was recently fulfilled. At the time of writing, Ma Quỷ Dân Gian Ký the book is available for pre-ordering, with an estimated receiving date on January 15.

Read our feature here. Preorder the book here.

3. Việt Sử Diễn Họa by Comet Withouse

Image via Comicola.

Comet Withouse is the pen name of artist Thanh Huyên, who spent a year producing Việt Sử Diễn Họa, an illustrated art book that aims to provide a thorough overview of local history to young readers. Huyên is a member of the Facebook forum Đại Việt Cổ Phong, where Vietnamese history buffs discuss and share interesting nuggets of Vietnam’s past eras. Energized by the knowledge she learned and inspired by international children’s book projects, Huyên decided to merge her interests into Việt Sử Diễn Họa. The book, aimed at child readers, doesn’t strive to include every historical episode in depth, but hopes to get young Vietnamese interested in their national history by putting historical facts next to beautifully illustrated graphics. The project was successfully crowdfunded by online platform Comicola.

Việt Sử Diễn Họa is available at bookstores nationwide.

4. Weaving a Realm by Vietnam Centre

Image via Comicola.

Weaving a Realm (Dệt Nên Triều Đại) is also a history-centric project, but it zooms into the sartorial history of Vietnam in the 15^th century during the Later Lê Dynasty. With every entry, Vietnam Centre will provide a few historical tidbits about the costume, from materials, sewing techniques, structure and other specifications. Established in March 2017, Vietnam Centre is a non-profit organization comprising a team of young Vietnamese working and studying overseas. Weaving a Realm was also the result of a crowdfunding effort on Comicola back in 2018.

Read our feature on Weaving a Realm here.

The book is available at bookstores nationwide.

5. Tản Mạn Kiến Trúc Nam Bộ by Tản Mạn Kiến Trúc

Photo via Người Đô Thị.

Architecture Excursions - Tản Mạn Kiến Trúc is a grassroots media project founded by a group of young Vietnamese who share a simple goal: to shed light on Vietnam’s vast and often undiscussed architectural scene. Through their digital archive, the group has given followers glimpses into not only some of the country’s most iconic buildings but also the rich histories behind them. Consisting of you Vietnamese from a range of different academic disciplines, the team shares a passion for indigenous local housing. Some of their past works have also been published on Saigoneer to warm reception from our readers. Late last year, Tản Mạn Kiến Trúc pooled their resources and collection of works to date and published their first book, Tản Mạn Kiến Trúc Nam Bộ.

Read our feature on Tản Mạn Kiến Trúc here.

Tản Mạn Kiến Trúc Nam Bộ is available at bookstores nationwide.

The Fraught Human-Earth Dynamics in 'Revenge of Gaia,' a Collection of Vietnamese Eco-Fiction

2022-11-21T13:00:00+07:00

Stories focusing on the natural world and humanity’s relationships with the environment existed before the term eco-literature became popular in the west in the 1970s, but since its coinage, writers and scholars have passionately debated different definitions for it along with arguments for its importance in various literary cannons.

As environmental awareness and concerns attracted increased global attention in recent decades, the genre has become more popular. Thus, Revenge of Gaia, the first English anthology of contemporary Vietnamese eco-fiction, edited and translated by Chi P. Pham and Chitra Sankaran, comes at an opportune time.

Homo sapiens is simultaneously a species like all others and also unique in certain ways, namely the complex intellects that have allowed mankind unprecedented domination of the planet. We struggle to rectify the needs of societies constructed via rules and customs with the evolutionary instincts and desires we share with other creatures. Religions and philosophies have sought to create strict boundaries between mankind and the rest of the natural world wherein humans are not just different, but were made or can strive to be morally superior to other animals. In this framework, a person must fight instincts and temptations to regress for the sake of society at large. This broad theme is explored in 'Facing Up' by Nguyễn Minh Châu.

Nature from the viewpoints of its residents

The story focuses on domestic cats torn between a savage world of sex and violence and the home settings their owners desire to confine them within. It juxtaposes human notions of morality and goodness with the natural inclinations of wild animals via a narrator who anthropomorphizes the felines. Thus, her cat, “a romantic queen,” sneaks out to be impregnated by a feral tomcat likened to a “devil or a ghostly spirit” despite the care and pampering she provides it at home. The narrator’s absurd application of ethical frameworks to non-human animals effectively illuminates the challenges humans face in separating themselves from their biological urges, even if the story doesn’t engage in a more difficult examination of the value of striving for such a separation, or positing what alternatives may exist.

Revenge of Gaia, the first English anthology of contemporary Vietnamese eco-fiction, edited and translated by Chi P. Pham and Chitra Sankaran, comes at an opportune time.

The first two stories in the collection, both by Trần Duy Phiên, concede even more power to nature. In both 'Ants and Humans' and 'Termites and Humans,' insects overpower efforts to bend nature to human desires in the pursuit of comfortable existences. Both were written in 1989, and their depictions of human attempts to extract value from the earth reflect the Marxist belief that nature exists solely for the benefit of mankind. But the stories also caution that industrious perseverance and technological progress do not guarantee success in such endeavors. In their man-versus-nature conflicts, nature emerges as the unquestioned victor. However, both stories can be understood as detailing battles lost in a greater, inevitable war wherein humans will ultimately triumph over nature without any ethical implications.

Literature frequently fails to understand the natural world without relating it to human emotions or experiences. One merely has to look at the plentitude of poems comparing flowers to beautiful women or the novels that depict rainstorms as metaphors for sorrow as proof. So it is with the blind protagonist in 'Black Carp' whose sense of direction is said to be like “herbs, which instinctually but surely put out leaves, blossom and patiently seek the light, regarding the changing seasons and harsh weather conditions.” He struggles to acknowledge his aging body and the loss of his wife, as Trần Trung Chính’s technically astute story leaps from the image of two carp on opposite sides of a serving bowl that the elderly man’s wife purchased before her death to his attempts to land a fish despite his withered strength. With his line cast, he reflects on the beauty of their relationship and the regrets he harbors about it. To come to terms with his own mortality he seeks to prove his value to his late wife in an ancient way: to make nature submit to him. In doing so, he reminds readers that as much as humans like to see themselves apart from nature, the facade crumbles and we make the natural world an ally or adversary as death arrives for people no differently than it does all animals.

'Hoya' by Y Ban presents the conflicts between man and the environment in more visceral contrast. Focusing on the dire living conditions of people in the postwar period, it details the hardships endured to satisfy the most basic of human needs including food and shelter. Obsessed with latrines, the meandering story, made up by anecdotes, presents vivid descriptions of daily life including the use of human excrement to fertilize vegetable gardens and people shitting their pants due to public toilet door-lock vandalism. Seen outside of this collection, one may interpret the tale as a condemnation of collective living or a political commentary on the embargoes and economic policies that followed reunification. But in the anthology’s context of eco-literature, it reveals the ever-looming role of natural forces in one’s life including their exacerbation of poverty. Readers realize that people pay so much attention to bathrooms and clean water because of the threats of disease including dengue which infects the narrator and many other children in the community. It reminds us that even today, homes, schools and factories are built not out of aesthetic traditions or cultural values but in response to the wild environments we are forever seeking protection from.

Nature as a reflection of human society

“Humans punish nature by humiliating and destroying it. And do you know how nature has avenged humans? By disappearing,” the vice-director of a heritage center says in Nguyễn Ngọc Tư’s 'The Glorious Unsullied Smoke.' A stand-out story in the anthology, it provides the most overt focus on environmental degradation by following a young woman’s childhood abandonment and failures in love against the backdrop of vanishing forests, lost species and modernizing communities that are turning away from traditional lifestyles. Wounded by her own losses and emotional torments, she retreats to a remote island and attempts to preserve a young child’s sense of innocence in the same way she does the “the forlorn, helpless and despairing signs of a lost civilization” at the cultural museum.

The field agents she works with hold differing opinions about what artifacts have the most importance with staff from the department of nature claiming “humans were the greatest predators on the planet and that they were the cause of all planetary destruction,” while those from the department of humanities “declared that nothing on this planet held pre-eminence in beauty as much as the human species.” Despite these seemingly different views, the protagonist’s own happiness, human society and the natural world weave together and the pessimism that binds them provides the book’s most compelling, if bleak, statement on the fate of the environment as influenced by humanity.

Humans punish nature by humiliating and destroying it. And do you know how nature has avenged humans? By disappearing.

Despite the cataclysmic power of nature that the anthology repeatedly showcases, it also argues that nature may not be enough to distract us for long from the wholly human world of politics, careers and romantic yearnings. The story 'A Strange Letter' for example, depicts a fragrant flower grove as a magical, transitory escape from unrequited love that is followed by decades of domestic familiarity. Trees wither and orchards get uprooted, but the societies we build continue trudging ahead unchanged. In the story, a blossom tucked into a letter is the only reminder of a naive childhood belief that nature has the potential to bring seismically blissful changes to one’s life. It’s a short, bittersweet story that holds a poignant truth about the peripheral role many give to the natural world in our lives.

Revenge of Gaia’s brief length should not be a significant surprise given the minimal emphasis on ecological awareness in Vietnam when understood via a western perspective, even though one could make a case for countless other Vietnamese stories fitting within the broad definition of eco-fiction due to the natural world’s role in human lives. But I would caution against drawing too many conclusions about Vietnam’s views on the environment from the book. Rather, it is a valuable means through which to consider the complex relationships between humanity as a whole and the rest of the Earth and how the environment factors into all human stories, at least tangentially. After all, we have no plots to develop, no characters to complicate, no metaphors to extend and no settings to explore without the planet we inhabit.

'Bronze Drum,' an Entertaining, TV-Ready Reimagining of the Legend of Hai Bà Trưng

2022-09-12T10:00:00+07:00

Turning a beloved but brief legend based on scant historical evidence into a page-turning novel is no easy task. But Phong Nguyen’s book Bronze Drum succeeds in depicting the upbringing and rebellious triumphs of Hai Bà Trưng as a gripping epic that hits conventional storytelling beats.

From youths spent sparring with each other in their palace’s courtyard under the tutelage of their father, Lord Trưng, to amassing an army to expel the Hán to plummeting to death in defeat, the novel imagines the Trưng sisters' lives in vivid detail with aims of introducing the myth to a wider audience.

The fictionalized life of Hai Bà Trưng

Writing the book was frustrating at first because he "thrive[s] on information, the more the better," Nguyen shared on The Vietnamese podcast, and there simply isn’t much known about the Trưng sisters and the world they inhabited. From available medicines to styles of speech to bureaucratic routines, many aspects of Vietnamese daily life 2,000 years ago were not contemporaneously recorded. And most of what we know about the sisters — Trưng Trắc and Trưng Nhị — as historical figures comes from a few brief sections in an official Chinese history book written more than 400 years after their deaths and very short references in Vietnamese texts, so Nguyen had to invent various elements of their personalities and experiences with the guidance of anthropologist Nam C. Kim. As the novel's acknowledgment stresses, it is a work of fiction with imagination filling in gaps in the historical records and at times consciously including anachronisms.

The Trưng sisters are amongst the most prominent historical figures in Vietnamese popular culture, being featured in countless works of art, literature, music and even video games, along with temples, street names and frequent evocations for a variety of nationalistic purposes. Truths and likelihoods are frequently sacrificed when societies collaborate to craft meaningful myths and the Trưng sisters are no exception. For example, despite often being depicted in áo dài atop ferocious war elephants, that attire is a much more recent invention and elephants are not thought to have been used in warfare in the region at that time.

Despite often being depicted in áo dài atop ferocious war elephants, that attire is a much more recent invention and elephants are not thought to have been used in warfare in the region at that time.

“Where I was choosing between history and myth, I chose myth because it was more interesting and most of the times between myth and invention… I chose invention because it couldn’t work dramatically the other way,” Nguyen explains regarding the task of blending important cultural elements with historical records and factual uncertainties to produce a book that meets expectations for American novels in the 21^st century.

One important deviation from the agreed-upon tale, for example, involves the violent attack on Mê Linh that proves to be the catalyst for the rebellion against the Hán. The sisters are not believed to actually have been present to witness the murder of Thi Sách and their father. Sách was Trưng Trắc’s husband, who has been demoted from his status as the son of a powerful lord in most tellings to a humble teacher in this work. But the novel makes a compromise for the sake of the theatrical and allows them to witness the murders to underscore the effect they had on them. New characters are also added to fill out the story. And while there is no wise-cracking animal sidekick as in many Disney films, there are supporting characters that fit familiar archetypes, adding balance, humor and contrast to the leading women.

Making over history into a pop sensation

I continue to make the comparison to Disney films because, like them, Bronze Drum grafts a story rooted in some historical realities onto a familiar plot arc and heroic journey structure that revolves around clear themes and lessons. Readers will be able to predict the roles characters will play and what outcomes await. Especially because the broadest elements of the narrative remain true to facts, reading the book is not a matter of anticipating what will happen, but rather how it will happen. In that context, Nhị, Trắc and the other characters are occasionally flat characters who declare beliefs and feelings, rather than act in ways that reveal the messy and ugly contradictions of the human condition and muddy the morals.

In no way does Bronze Drum seek to rewrite history, however, one can observe some contemporary values in it. The Trưng sisters have rightfully been praised as female warriors fighting against the patriarchy and in defense of women and the nation. The novel doubles down on this theme, perhaps inflating its prominence. For example, the sisters adopt a strict rule that no men were allowed to join their ranks, despite the unlikelihood of such a position, as reflected in Vietnamese artworks that include men on the battlefields (along with the dubious elephants, for what it's worth) and accounts of male generals who contributed to the rebellion. And because it is a fairly light-hearted read, while promoting the virtues of a matriarchal society, it largely glosses over grim realities of class hierarchies and exploitations. But these are of course compromises we make for entertainment and neat, uncomplicated messaging which is a primary goal for stories since before written languages.

I continue to make the comparison to Disney films because, like them, Bronze Drum grafts a story rooted in some historical realities onto a familiar plot arc and heroic journey structure that revolves around clear themes and lessons.

While Nguyen says there have been some discussions about a translation into Vietnamese, nothing is certain and as it stands, Bronze Drum is very much aimed at western readers who are likely encountering the legend for the first time and in doing so, learning about Vietnam beyond the very narrow context it typically occupies. As Nguyen explains in an interview published with the novel: “I myself was born in Boston and grew up in central New Jersey… Growing up in the 1980s, screen media offered few if any positive portrayals of Asian, Asian American, or especially, Vietnamese characters. Hearing stories that featured Vietnamese heroes likely saved me from the self-loathing that I might have felt if my only exposure to Vietnamese characters was through depictions of the Vietnam War.”

It’s nearly impossible for a book to become popular today without people questioning its potential for adaptation for large or screen screens. And whether a gritty prestige series or a family-friendly cartoon, given its misty source material, Bronze Drum would work very well filmed. But in its current form, the fast-paced book helps bring an important Vietnamese legend further beyond its borders while providing an easy, entertaining read.

Guilt, Mortality, and Hope in 'Khát Vọng Cho Con' by Poet Du Tử Lê

2022-08-31T11:00:00+07:00

“We are like fruits forcefully ripened, a generation of premature adults, a generation of misery.”
— Du Tử Lê.

Du Tử Lê started writing at the age of 21. His poems, despite his youth, read like words from a mature soul entrapped in an interstice between life and death during the American War. Moreover, as a military officer, for most of Lê’s youth, he was closer to death than life.

“In the military, I worked as an officer. In my personal life, I was against the war… I was against the war in the name of our human rights to live.” Tử Lê confesses that he lived through years of internal turmoil as a military officer and a civilian who opposed the war. His identity as a young soldier with an old soul writing from an antiwar perspective is what made Du Tử Lê one of the most popular poets in southern Vietnam in 1954–1975.

Du Tử Lê’s poems are characterized by two consistent themes: love and death. ‘Khát vọng cho con’ (My hope for you) epitomizes Du Tử Lê’s loving spirit most vividly. It depicts Tử Lê’s projection of the present and the future from the perspective of a soul that grows quickly and perhaps, perishes just as fast.

'Khát Vọng Cho Con' by Du Tử Lê. Click on the image for the English translation.

Tử Lê’s views on life and death are as chaotic as the tumultuous, unprecedented time during which he wrote. In that wartorn era, death became familiar. Tử Lê presents this matter-of-fact reality plainly:

every time I see the obituaries – I was indifferent as if they were the weather forecast
or even more unperturbed than that

these days, death can no longer surprise us
as it is always here by our side like a shadow

The war made the fragility of life and the mounting deaths commonplace and unsurprising, and obituaries became as mundane as daily news segments. He then moves from how death affects the country to how it impacts him personally:

if I ever die, I have no regret
once I take death as the inevitable escape,
a miraculous escape
death is the prize, the last and the only one, for those who are here today

To Tử Lê, to live side by side with death was not a matter of choice or prediction, but a reality. With that attitude towards death, Tử Lê bluntly reconstructs the vivid realities of war. He portrays himself as a financially strapped person who could “barely make ends meet” in his domestic life and on the battlefield.

in this era there’s time for checking lottery tickets
dreaming of winning (even it’s the participation prize of 2,000 đồng)
my son, 2,000 is quite a big deal
enough to craft a detailed plan for careful spending
although 2,000 is just enough for a pair of pants

Tử Lê portrays the amount as a dream, but at the same time, it is such a small amount that one can spend it all the market on a single item. His use of contrast and exaggeration here underscores the harsh reality of the time when even dreams had to be austere.

As an officer, Tử Lê also recalled the situation on the battlefield. In the poem, Tử Lê floods readers with numerous images: an army helmet pierced with bullet holes, a rifle, barbed wire, underground mines, etc. All of these images, in addition to their representation of the war, are also a channel for Tử Lê to express his gratitude towards life.

He repeats the phrase “I appreciate it/them” to emphasize that these objects were not only weapons but also life-saving means. That said, it does not mean Tử Lê was a soldier who fully devoted his heart and mind to the war. His attitude is firmly against the violence, as in the way he recalls abhorrent images such as “barbed wire stained with human blood” or “every morsel of fresh human flesh” and calls himself “an irresponsible killer.” Despite the cruel realities, Tử Lê remains in love with life.

Poring over the lines in the poem, one may see Tử Lê as a wild individual trying to simply make it through his military and personal lives. In addition to this reckless, firm attitude, Tử Lê expresses his strong emotions via a sense of somber pessimism:

I start to feel anguished thinking about your future in this square box house
I do not know what to say to you
oh my son, the one whom I have not named and whose face I have not seen
I think I could die anytime

The conversation with his imagined child hints towards Du Tử Lê’s obsession with death, as he agonizes over the loss of a father that is as unprecedented as the birth of the child. Such feelings are elevated as the night changes and Tử Lê confesses that he still firmly holds this irritation inside.

I am still anguished not knowing what to leave behind for you when I die
why is there nothing for you? at least I have lived half a life
without building any legacy
what a misfortune for you and humiliation on me.

The emotions are now getting clearer, as Tử Lê questions himself and the harsh truth that he had nothing to leave behind. Notably, Tử Lê writes, “I have lived half a life.” This further reiterates Tử Lê’s perceptions of death; death has always been so close to him that he felt he had lived “half a life” despite being at the peak of his youth.

The outburst of rage is gradually eased as the poem transitions into hope — a hope for peace during a time of war. It is interesting to see how he uses the word “hope,” as the poem progresses. It is present first in reference to “a treasure” for the grandfather’s generation and then as “a fantasy” for Tử Lê’s, and lastly, as a “wish” for the future. This can be explained when putting the poem back in its historical context, recognizing it was written in the middle of the war.

Tử Lê’s poem first notes that “hope for peace” was “a rare treasure” for previous generations. Tử Lê visualizes how his own father had always desired peace even after passing away. In Vietnamese common beliefs, ancestors or family members who pass on will "look after" living members. The way Tử Lê expresses regrets for the past generation implicitly hints at his disappointment. At the end, “hope for peace” transforms into “a wish.” Tử Lê did not know if or when the war would come to an end. Therefore, in the context of when it was written, there could be two different interpretations of the ending. The positive possibility is that the son’s generation could end the so-called “eternal misery,” and the pessimistic one is that Tử Lê, like his father, might again be disappointed as the wish would not come true.

Towards the conclusion of the poem, the disappointment lingering on top of his mind slowly leads him back to the abyss of despair. There is, for a moment, a glimpse of hope in Du Tử Lê’s poem and himself. However, that hope, which is as fragile and thin as the night mist, soon extinguishes at the end:

the night is as soft and viscous as our hope for the future
oh our hope for the future, when could it come true?
and you – will you exist when the truth manifests itself?

To read Tử Lê’s poem is to read history, a non-fiction narrative retold poetically. The straightforward but multi-layered story filled with diverse emotions can have different interpretations based on who reads it and in what context. The signature style of Tử Lê in this writing is the way he visualizes his feelings and their evolutions. In every part of the poem, there is a notable detail that is worth discussing. One could very well read into the poem the perplexing history of the American War into an analysis. But Du Tử Lê has provided enough of his own raw story to consume this examination.

Thuận’s Novel 'Chinatown' Targets the Tedium of Migration

2022-08-20T08:00:00+07:00

Vĩnh, born in Hanoi to a Vietnamese mother who studied in the Soviet Union and teaches English in France, and an ethnically Chinese father raised in Hanoi but now working in Chợ Lớn, dreams of the day when China dominates the world and he can parachute into America-occupied Iraq with the Chinese army to create another Chinatown in Baghdad. Such culture and continent-spanning details suggest extravagant thrills and intrigues, but Thuận’s Chinatown reveals the monotony endured by the diasporic individuals.

Chinatown begins during an unexpected delay in a routine public transportation commute, and the 158-page, single-paragraph book then leaps around in time with Vĩnh’s mother, the unnamed protagonist, narrating her Hanoi upbringing with degree- and title-obsessed parents in an affectionless marriage; her awkward courtship and brief cohabitation with Vĩnh’s father, Thụy; and her move to Soviet Russia and later France for higher education.

Cheese sandwiches eaten beneath ever-updated office bulletins between classes for dispassionate students in France’s outskirts, bikes lugged up tight stairwells in Hanoi apartment blocks, malnourished ducks sold off to make meager porridge during the scarcity era, and immigration department procedures for processing temporary residency paperwork appear ad nauseum as Chinatown provides a catalog of the cramped monotony that constitutes the life of the narrator.

Purposeful tedium

Underscoring the dreary repetitiveness of the characters’ lives is Thuận’s circuitous writing style. She revisits phrases, replicates scenes and repeats blasé images and phrases like the layering of off-white paint on an empty wall to reinforce the narrator’s boredom with a world others would express a fascination for. Thuận described the repetition of lines in an interview as “small waves that come in every now and again, disappearing into the rock and sand” as part of her overall style’s efforts to “challenge and encourage the reader’s patience.”

If one aim of literature is to transport readers into the minds of realistic, multi-faceted characters, one should be prepared to inhabit the thoughts of a disaffected, dour and alienated individual. In that way, the at-times-exhausting prose is congruent with the narrator’s confession: “I now knew enough to make people bored, and to understand that when people are bored they leave me alone.” But perhaps it's often the ones shying away from attention who have the most interesting stories to tell.

Perhaps it's often the ones shying away from attention who have the most interesting stories to tell.

For all its purposeful tedium, Chinatown contains interesting depictions of various historical and geographical particulars, especially Chinese-Vietnamese relations in the 1980s, the interplay between individuals and states in post-war Hanoi, and daily life during Vietnam’s most economically fraught period. Growing up, Thụy suffers great discrimination from teachers, peers, school administrators and, later, occupational opportunities as his heritage before, during and after the Sino-Vietnamese war makes him a “problem” and “being a problem is not only useless but actively harmful. Being a problem closes all the doors leading to that brilliant future.” Readers can conjecture about the impact of this discrimination on the couple’s ability to remain together in the same way they can wonder if the economic perils that encouraged migration lie at the core of the protagonist’s isolation and unhappiness.

The "brilliant future," defined by a clear career trajectory from top school marks to foreign degrees to a position in a ministry or university, is an obsession for the narrator’s parents. It gives their suffering an easy purpose and allows them to ignore their own unhappiness. Their dream shifts effortlessly between Russia and France in tune with political realities as her parents “don’t give a toss about politics, about how to tell capitalism from socialism, or if Putin and Chirac are even the same guy. The only toss they give is about the word ‘future’.” Yet the protagonist’s misery and far-from-glamorous life reveal the flaws in this vision far sooner than readers encounter characters who emphasize that government connections and overseas capitalist pursuits, rather than brightly colored degrees, are pathways to prosperity.

A novel within a novel

In the time-worn tradition of writers writing about writers who write, Chinatown contains two large sections of I’m Yellow, the novel the protagonist is working on. Its plot contains reflections of the narrator’s own insecurities and obsessions regarding relationships as contractual forms of confinement, accessible art as industry, and migration as insufficient means of psychological escape. The painter at the center of the story within a story earns his living by producing clichéd images of exoticized Vietnam for tourists and Việt Kiều which seems to comment on Thuận’s own literary efforts to avoid catering to international readers’ preferred tropes of “Vietnamese landscape is beautiful, Vietnamese cuisine is delicious, Vietnamese women are gentle, Vietnamese men are brave.”

The historic elements Thuận does provide do not function as a “crash course in Vietnamese history and culture, the way most literary works seeking to present themselves to an international audience as ‘the Vietnamese novel’ do — fulfilling a checklist of war and re-education camps, communist iron grips and prosecuted intellectuals” — as translator Nguyễn An Lý explains in her Translator's Note. Familiar aspects of diasporic lives indeed appear, such as the propensity for all Asians to be lumped together as a singular mass, but the satirical, overly analytical narrator provides a refreshingly singular set of cultural touchpoints, allusions and sly jokes that readers will either grasp or not.

Chinatown avoids catering to international readers’ preferred tropes of “Vietnamese landscape is beautiful, Vietnamese cuisine is delicious, Vietnamese women are gentle, Vietnamese men are brave.”

It’s interesting that none of the book actually takes place in Chợ Lớn, one of the Chinatowns alluded to in the title. Perhaps it's fitting that the protagonist can only imagine it based on a single photo of Thụy beneath red lanterns as a juxtaposition to the very real, specific and unromantic depictions of Paris and Hanoi; places that often are presented in books and film as romantic sites of adventure and fulfillment. Moreover, for many western readers, the concept of Chinatowns act as exotic morsels sealed inside already strange places. Their significance, however, means something very different coming from an author who so thoroughly deglamorizes travel and foreign locales and we don’t need the narrator to travel there to predict what her experiences would be.

Chinatown is a rich addition to conversations about migration, isolation, identity, drudgery and emotional endurance. It provides an important addition to Vietnamese works translated into English, particularly for its uncompromising structure and style. The fact that its last sentence returns readers to its very first and the train the narrator sits in remains unmoving belies the journey readers are taken on. The book also reminds readers that not all journeys are thrilling, some are simply the necessary three-hour commutes people all around the world must endure every day.

Once Derided, 'Lục Xì' Is a Trail-Blazing Lesson in Nuanced Sympathy

2022-08-04T14:00:00+07:00

Lục Xì is a reportage written by Vũ Trọng Phụng in the first volume of Tương Lai newspaper in 1937. In the series, Phụng describes his experiences visiting the dispensary (nhà lục xì) where prostitutes with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) were being treated. During a week of visits, he noted his interactions and conducted interviews with responsible officers and specialists.

Vũ Trọng Phụng.

Vũ Trọng Phụng was a Hanoian journalist who lived from 1912 until 1939, during the French colonial period. Phụng, one of the most popular writers of the age, published works that spanned genres including short stories, drama, novels and reportages. His reportage Kỹ Nghệ Lấy Tây (The Art of Marrying Europeans) and his novels Số Đỏ (Dumb Luck) and Làm Đĩ are amongst his most influential works, receiving praise in Vietnam and abroad via translations.

Prostitution was legalized in 1929 during the French colonial period. Poor administrative management of the trade resulted in widespread STDs while traditional Vietnamese society took issue with the morality of sex work. It, therefore, became a popular topic in national newspapers at the time. Dispensaries only opened their doors to those in need of STD treatment, which led them to be considered taboo. However, after several attempts, Phụng managed to get permission to enter and thus pen his reportage, Lục Xì.

A scandalous reportage that grew on us

Despite the controversies it aroused at the time of its publication, Lục Xì became a timeless piece of writing thanks to its unique approach to prostitution and STDs. It contains surprisingly humane and progressive views on the subject nearly 100 years ago. The perspectives and theories on prostitutes it offers and the policies it suggested remain relevant to readers today.

A nurse in the municipal dispensary of Hanoi, Tonkin gives a lesson on sexual hygiene to sex workers, circa 1937. Original publication: Le Dispensaire Antivénérien Municipal et la Ligue Prophylactique de la Ville de Hanoi.

The literary community at the time expressed mixed feelings about the work. In a 1937 Ngày Nay newspaper article Nhất Chi Mai, a pen name of Thế Lữ, harshly attacked Vũ Trọng Phụng and Lục Xì for it being overly erotic and offensive: “Reading Vũ Trọng Phụng’s literature, to be honest, I could never see any glimpse of hope or a positive attitude. After reading it, we only see this world as hell and everywhere around us, there are killers, prostitutes, vulgarity — a wretched world.” He added that Vũ Trọng Phụng is “a writer who looks at the world via 'black' glasses, with a dark mind and also a dark writing style.”

While some shared Thế Lữ's censure in condemning Phụng’s writings as “filthy,” “dark” and “sexually arousing,” others sided with Phụng’s blunt view on bitter truths. The debates did not seem to end with Vũ Trọng Phụng’s death in 1939.

Even though Lục Xì was severely criticized by both contemporary writers and the public at large when it was first published, a century later, it is seen as a benchmark for its genre and Vũ Trọng Phụng is regarded as the “king of reportage writing of the northern land.” Perhaps, a changing perspective as our society makes progress has contributed to such a difference in reception.

Covers of recent editions of Lục Xì.

Hoàng Thiếu Sơn, in his introduction to the first book edition of Lục Xì published in 1997, praised the work as a standard for the genre: “This reportage should be read as a scientific text rather than a literary one. This, however, doesn't mean that we should completely exclude it from our literary heritage, but rather be appropriately proud to have a creative non-fiction work and not just purely novels. Vũ Trọng Phụng provided us with a paragon of a literary work that serves societal and scientific purposes via the writing of Lục Xì.”

One can approach via various angles to examine Lục Xì and I aim to explore, via Phụng’s recorded experiences, his philosophies and historical theories, how the work debunks social taboos regarding prostitutes in general and prostitutes who contracted STDs.

A nuanced perspective on the typically pitied

Vũ Trọng Phụng was not the only writer to examine prostitution and STDs at the time. "Hà Nội về đêm" along with "Hà Nội lầm than" were widely read newspaper features by respected journalists of the era. But both works failed to change people's attitudes about prostitution because their authors viewed prostitutes as low-class victims deserving nothing but sympathy. Such thinking reflected the commonly held opinions of wider society.

"Hà Nội ban đêm" and "Phóng sự về mãi dâm Hà Nội" written by Tràng Khang and Việt Sinh in Phong Hóa newspaper in 1933, for example, aimed to shed light on “the misery and grief of those [prostitutes] who are disdained by the whole society, but they, in fact, deserve our sympathy.” The authors expressed great compassion towards these “night girls” because they were commodified by men and disregarded by society.

"Phóng sự về mãi dâm Hà Nội," written by Tràng Khanh and Việt Sinh, as published on Phong Hóa in 1933..

Trọng Lang’s "Hà Nội lầm than," released the following year, provided the same perspectives and emphasis on sympathy. However, different from the dreary portrait in "Hà nội ban đêm," it offers readers an image of broken beauty. Trọng Lang described a prostitute who served him one night as having “ruined” beauty. All the writings share a repetition of the words "sympathy," "pity," "shame," "disregard," "misery" and "grief" when describing the prostitutes. While the authors had positive intentions, they merely approached the subject from the same mindset as the society they were attempting to change.

Phụng, meanwhile, offered a new way of talking about these women that separated them from their occupation and treated them as humans. In addition to sympathy, he approached the subject with a mix of abhorrence and empathy. He did not just present prostitutes as pitiable victims, but as individual people deserving not only commiseration and sympathy but also respect and understanding.

"Those depraved women all have various facets to them: a carefreeness, a hunger to live, an overconfidence. [Looking at them] you'll feel what I felt, you'll feel uneasy, not knowing that these mixed feelings are sympathy or abhorrence," Phụng writes early on in the work. This expression of honesty is unique because many journalists of the time only claimed to feel comfortable around prostitutes. In sharing this controversial feeling when attempting to debunk taboos regarding prostitutes and prostitution, the entire work becomes more nuanced and honest and thus powerful.

As one reads on, one understands that Phụng is not repulsed by the prostitutes themselves, however, but by the society that victimized the women and put them in their current situations. Unlike other journalists, he refuses to relegate the prostitutes to a low social standing. In fact, he puts them above a society that, according to Phụng, was plagued by incompetent colonial governance and moral degradation. Phụng claims that these women, who were considered to be at the bottom of the social order, actually occupied a higher position above society after “sacrificing” themselves.

The cover of the 1937 Ngày Nay issue where "Hà Nội lầm than" was originally published.

He laments: “A chaotic, unruly society that deserves both contempt and mercy. People who are driven by sexuality and starvation, to a point that social structure is messed up and social order no longer makes sense. A type of people [prostitutes] who sacrifice their lives for mores, to help reduce the amount of sexual abuse and infidelity; a heroic sacrifice that no one knows! The women who are disadvantaged in these social experiments, bearing the consequences of a gradually changing society.” Phụng thus succeeds in not only bringing prostitutes out of the abyss of antipathy but also elevating them beyond a rotten society.

He goes on to emphasize that it is not only women with STDs that should be understood as having performed heroic sacrifices: “No, not only women in the Dispensary work as prostitutes. And yet, those two hundred women in this Dispensary had to bear the consequences for the whole population… Women of misery! No, the Dispensary is not a place that torments the prostitutes, the real suffocation is in those humid, stinky and filthy houses out there…” With this claim, he argues that the problem is one of society at large. Phụng achieves his explicit purpose of shifting the blame from the typically condemned prostitutes to other guilty elements of society.

Other authors did not discuss the women’s senses of pride, believing that as soon as they became a part of the brothel, they gave it up. But for Phụng, the prostitutes were humans with pride at all times and only occasionally relinquished it as part of their occupation. In Lục Xì, he explains: “The women in the brothel still had their pride, although every night, they might have to sacrifice that pride around ten times or so.”

"Hà Nội lầm than" by Trọng Lang.

One interesting aspect of this reportage is that although Phụng managed to get into the dispensaries and interviewed a range of officials and employees, he never actually had a chance to talk with the prostitutes. One supervisor explained to him that the women refused to talk to him because his magazine referred to them as gái đĩ (whores). This angered them as they would have preferred another term. He sarcastically responded: “Maybe I should have referred to them as ‘a muse’ or something like that.”

Nevertheless, from that moment onwards, never in the writing does Phụng refer to the women as gái đĩ. Instead, they are “women of the brothel,” “women of the Dispensary” or “disciples of Bạch My” (Bạch My is the patron saint of prostitutes). This act proves how Phụng may have joked when chastised for his word use, but was sincere in his resolution to show them respect. “I took my hat off and said goodbye to the teacher. Those women of the Dispensary sit still, as I respectfully said goodbye to them and left,” he writes.

A call to action

Phụng’s concern for the women went beyond sympathetic descriptions of their experiences, Lục Xì called for the implementation of legal policies to improve their situations. This is what perhaps no writing before Lục Xì had been willing to do. At the end of the reportage, he addresses journalists and responsible officers directly: “If you truly want to liberate women of your country from prostitution, prepare to fight for the Sellier Law, as actively as you have always been fighting for ‘Freedom.’”

The Sellier Law was a policy designed to reform prostitution as a legal occupation. It supported providing sex education at school and to sex laborers and to change the current process of detecting, capturing, isolating, and treating prostitutes with STDs at the Dispensary to reduce the associated terror and shame.

“If you truly want to liberate women of your country from prostitution, prepare to fight for the Sellier law, as actively as you have always been fighting for ‘Freedom.’”

To further push for the idea, Phụng criticized the current trend of evading the issues. “When would we have true ‘women’ liberators’?” he asks. “Or in this a-thousand-time-of-misfortune society, there are only opportunists who view social reforms and the flattery of female eroticism — no matter if it is truthful or not — as a betrayal of civilization and morality; and instead of saving the inferior kind from sexual maniacs, they fail to realize that they have pushed these poor women, first into ‘romanticism’ and then into the pit of prostitution.”

Who is to blame? Is it a chaotic society that left those women no other choice but to sell their defiled bodies just to barely survive while exposing themselves to high risks of contracting life-long diseases and discrimination for purported impurity? Is it the journalists and officers who never stood up for real progress by properly addressing prostitution and STDs? Or is it the fault of corrupt and inept prostitutes who did not know how to do their jobs correctly? I believe Vũ Trọng Phụng had an answer to his question but what mattered more was the future of the country, in particular its women.

In his impressively brief work, Phụng manages to dismantle the socially constructed negativity surrounding prostitutes and women in the Dispensary. What helped Phụng successfully change the discourse around these topics was not only his sharp logic and clear agenda of identifying and suggesting solutions for the problem, but also his raw emotions and the blunt expression of his feelings. What makes Lục Xì stand out is not merely its well-conducted interviews or real experiences but also its layered analysis rooted in philosophy, politics and historicism. Thus, the legacy of Lục Xì can continue to exist for more than 85 years after its publication.

Editor's note: The exerpts from Lục Xì discussed in this review were translated from Vietnamese by the writer and don't reflect the content of the English text translated by Shaun Kingsley Malarney.

'Chronicles of a Village' Is an Avant-Garde Deconstruction of the Familiar Rural Vietnam

2022-07-15T14:00:00+07:00

How would you tell the story of your birth soil?

If asked to recount the history of your hometown, you might share an elliptical assemblage of anecdotes, memories, myths, quotes and half-remembered truths. In your attempts to provide a full description, you’d likely leap back and forth in time, tether together the personal and the political to construct meaning, and finally offer up a handful of fragments that you hope constitute a coherent whole while openly questioning if such a thing were even possible.

A montage of rural Vietnam

“It is true that the village where I was born remains an ever thick and impenetrable land inside my heart,” writes the unnamed narrator in Chronicles of a Village as he trudges along with his efforts to record the history of his anonymous village. The recently translated work of fiction by writer Nguyễn Thanh Hiện is a collection of brief scenes, descriptions, conversations and stories focused on the people and environment of a rural Vietnamese village during the 20^th century. By the end of the book, the village may remain unpenetrated, but readers will understand why it has lodged itself so deeply in the narrator’s chest.

To explore his life in the village, the narrator offers snapshot experiences from his childhood. He gathers mountain fronds to weave raincoats, listens to tokay geckos at night, watches a neighbor construct a traditional rice-mortar binder, learns how to plow the fields and recounts the season when his father tried to replace him as guardian of the crops with a statue made of sticks. Juxtaposed with cataclysmic violence and struggles during the same time period, the selection of anecdotes does justice to the baffling ability of the human brain to store momentous or traumatic events alongside mundane, potentially meaningless ones. In vivid prose, the narrator thus depicts a humble life reliant on and in close commune with the natural world that would be typical of many people of his age without the assumption that anything holds specific significance that can be articulated.

"In my village, sorrows are like the late afternoon winds, rain or shine, they are always blowing…I have lived alone with the sorrows that haunt the land of ancestral worry."

The book is not a loving homage to a simple, bucolic lifestyle, however. “In my village, sorrows are like the late afternoon winds, rain or shine, they are always blowing…I have lived alone with the sorrows that haunt the land of ancestral worry,” the narrator admits. Indeed, the world’s cruel caprices arrive frequently. The narrator’s mother is killed in a bombing raid, villagers are murdered during frequent purges, and an 18^th-century scholar arrives in a dream to tell an occasion of a senseless and seemingly random murder for which the perpetrator receives no punishment. Buttressing the simple daily life of the narrator and his family, these frequent miseries and their matter-of-fact framing cast a depressing tone across the book underscoring the futility of the human condition.

While the work mostly focuses on the narrator’s experiences, other characters arrive to share slivers of their larger experiences via real or imagined conversations as well as quoted texts and notes. For example, Mr. Quì, the village headman, loses his position when the dynasty he served is dethroned. He doesn’t rage or hold grudges but rather “collapsed in peace,” ignoring inquires from humans and bulbuls alike. Elsewhere, a man named Mr. Hoành, an accomplished scholar, retreats from the world and develops a way of life dedicated to wine as celebrated with a great festival once a year. But Mr. Hoàn disappears, like all the secondary characters, before explaining or expanding upon the significance of their tales. “I wouldn’t know the answer,” the narrator laments regarding what impact any of their efforts in the world had.

Blending the real and the ethereal

A murky layer of partial truth separates history from legend that Nguyễn Thanh Hiện dives into headfirst. Women turned to stone; tigers, elephants and bears consciously offer land for human development; and ancestors who were once able to capture ghosts are acknowledged beside French colonialists, automobiles and lucid memories of children gathering to weave bolts of fabric in flickering lamplight. The author seems to argue that it isn’t a matter of whether a dream-vision, historical text, or a first-hand memory is the most trustworthy source, but rather what does it matter? In other words, when the narrator finally learns that the lullaby “look up at the Chóp Vung Mountain, watch how the cats lie round the two lone hares” refers to clouds and not literal animals, has he really learned anything of value about the world? And what happens once he realizes that on cloudless days he can just as easily make the cats and rabbits appear in his imagination?

The author seems to argue that it isn’t a matter of whether a dream-vision, historical text, or a first-hand memory is the most trustworthy source, but rather what does it matter?

Chronicles explores the sometimes contradictory effects of the intersections of tradition and modernity, progress and commodification. For example, the village’s first transistor radio arrives and the enchanting “speaking device” causes mayhem when the locals mishear a report and brace for an invasion that was occurring elsewhere. Meanwhile, mechanical plows usher in “a vision of democracy where the cows and the humans were friends in their daily struggles,” and pull unwitting villagers into the unavoidable world of “petty and miserable politics.” The negative effects of modernization on individuals, such as when the narrator wonders how his family will make ends meet when rubber raincoats replace the woven-reed versions they create, however, simply replace other hardships: “quiet worries about rice, clothes and the weather’s disastrous fickleness.”

In addition to its fragmented, non-linear narrative, Chronicles resembles oral storytelling in its punctuation. Absent periods, the comma-laden lines race ahead like a one-way conversation. Pauses that would invite audience feedback in another context return to the subject at hand. And like an impromptu recitation, the narrator occasionally corrects or modifies previous statements, ends anecdotes abruptly and questions the point he was even trying to make.

Deconstructing the conventional novel

In addition to the somewhat challenging style, the work does not meet any conventional expectations for what constitutes a novel regarding plot, conflict, or resolution. While the chapters layer atop one another to create textured impressions greater than their elements, most of them could be enjoyed independently as prose poems and indeed, several of the contained chapters have been published as short pieces of fiction. One should expect to find a conclusion to the book the way one expects a conclusion to a music album; there is no story arc to complete but it ends on the right note. In this case, it is the surreal return of his father who says “history is only a draft copy, son, nothing is certain, nothing is true.”

Ultimately Chronicles of a Village is a strange, difficult book that is unique amongst much of the Vietnamese literature translated into English. Reading it requires a certain faith in the text and the author’s ability to offer a satisfying experience that gathers around one like clouds snagged on a mountain peak. At one point the narrator remarks. “There is a profound philosophy of existence concealed within the deepest sentiments of human beings, something even now I haven’t fully understood.” If you agree with such a sentiment, this book demands your reading.

How to Navigate Coming Out to Your Parents With the Help of 3 Fairy Tales

2022-06-10T15:17:24+07:00

Sometimes stories can articulate what we cannot put into our own words. Fairy tales can function as long-form proverbs that allow people to identify and pass on important values, expectations and experiences regarding love, loss, longing, fate and hardships. Children often learn about the adult world through these stories, but they retain their value throughout one’s entire life.

A story of family dynamics, interwoven with fairy tales

Magic Fish, a graphic novel by Trung Le Nguyen, explores these truths. At its very core, the book tells the story of a young teen struggling with how to come out to his parents. Tiến worries that his mom won’t understand or accept him because of his sexuality while America’s puritan strain of institutional intolerance causes further dismay. His difficult situation is compounded by the fact that his parents immigrated to America as refugees and the language they share is limited. Tiến navigates this while his mother, Helen, is grappling with her separation from her home country, family and culture.

To tackle these themes, Trung Le looks to three fairy tales: a loose amalgamation of Allerleirauh and Tattercoats; Tấm Cám; and the Little Mermaid. While Tiến and his mom read the stories together, we immediately notice parallels between their lives and those of the characters: Allerlerirau feels the need to hide her true self from one she loves; Tấm suffers cruelties when the loss of her mother upends her life while the young mermaid Ondine sacrifices greatly to find a new life beyond the water’s edge.

The folk story Tấm Cám is a major influence in the plot.

Trung Le wisely refuses to let the fairy tales serve as parables that perfectly match Helen and Tiến’s stories. Rather, they act as graceful accompaniments that add layers of emotional complexity through frequent similarities that compel readers to recognize nuances in the protagonists’ experiences. Even small details gain gravity when juxtaposed with elements in the fantasies, such as Helen’s job as a seamstress and Tiến’s patchwork jacket, as seen beside the importance of ball gowns in each tale. In the graphic novel’s stunning conclusion, the wall between the fairy tales and the central narrative crumbles in a masterful twist that is worth experiencing without spoilers.

Magic Fish relies entirely on dialogue and recitation of the fairy tales to advance the plot. While this approach makes it a fast-paced, suspense-filled read, it does pose a problem: how to differentiate the three fairy tales from each other and the main narrative? Each segment is rendered in a simple single color so flicking through the red, yellow and blue pages is like swiping through photo filters.

Magic Fish color-codes the pages to distinguish between the three fairy tales.

The monochrome panels highlight the deceptively complex illustrations. Trung Le created the majority of the illustrations by hand before switching to digital design for the ending to meet deadlines. While the faces and scenery are sparse and cartoon-like, closer inspection of details such as people’s hair and dress fabrics reveal a significant amount of intricacy.

“I set out to write a very small story. One of the odd challenges of writing a story about characters living within any social margins is the gravity of the marginalization itself. It is such a dense thing, seemingly to insist that all the pieces of the story should orbit around it. Immigrant stories are all like this,” Trung Le writes in the author’s note, adding that he wanted to expand beyond the familiar arc and “tell a story about one of the little pieces that orbit around it.” This focus on the characters’ attempts to discuss love in the absence of a shared vernacular makes the book more original and simultaneously more universal. The theme, while relevant for immigrant families and members of the queer community, will resonate with many readers in the same way that fairy tales transcend generations, geographies and backgrounds.

One of the odd challenges of writing a story about characters living within any social margins is the gravity of the marginalization itself.

The short time it takes to read Magic Fish obscures the careful attention Trung Le paid to each element. In a “Between Words and Pictures” section that follows the narrative, he provides insight into his process of unifying the story and the accompanying illustrations. For example, the setting of each story springs from the imagination of the character narrating it, and thus is informed by their experiences. This means that Helen’s sister’s version of Tấm Cám is set in 1950s Vietnam with colonial architecture and dress. Meanwhile, the story Tiến tells is influenced by mid- to late-1990s pop-culture western sensibilities. Trung Le did significant research into the details, going so far as to base each of the ball gowns on specific dresses that he lists.

Fairy tales are notorious for being revised, re-contextualized, and re-packaged time and time again for new audiences. Stories about the coming out experience and immigrant dislocation, alienation and marginalization have been told countless times, but Magic Fish, like the best fairy tales, provides a novel experience thanks to its inventive format and specific, affable voice.

'My Father’s Bàng Tree': A Poem by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

2022-05-26T14:00:00+07:00

This poem is featured in Volume 1 of In My Ear, Your Voice Still Flickering // Bên tai tôi, giọng người vẫn chờn vờn, a three-part, bilingual collection of works by more than 20 Vietnamese artists and writers, curated by Saigoneer in collaboration with Miami Book Fair.

My Father's Bàng Tree

by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

When he built our house
my father spared a patch of earth
on which he planted a sapling

The bàng tree occupied my father’s entire garden
and lifted me into my playful childhood
as it grew into the dome of sky – vast and cool
Flocks of city birds came to sing
for only my father and me

I grew up
Dust and smoke filled our city
The buildings jostled and pushed against each other
Greed jostled and shoved against itself

Birds with broken wings
left the tree’s limbs empty
My father is small amongst the rising concrete towers
The bàng tree is lonely amongst the rising concrete towers

The bàng tree is my father’s entire garden
His hands, dotted by freckles, sweep its fallen leaves
He waters it with his songs
The tree turned into his life

I travel far from home
Between the layers of clouds
I look down to see a dot of green fire
My father’s bàng tree is burning itself through the city
Reaching high up, reaching high up

Art by Mình là Đỗ.

Read Saigoneer's Literary Zine, Featuring 20 Works by Vietnamese Writers and Artists

2022-05-17T10:03:00+07:00

In My Ear, Your Voice Still Flickering // Bên tai tôi, giọng người vẫn chờn vờn is a collection of work from twenty Vietnamese writers and artists released as part of the Miami Book Fair, one of America's largest literature festivals.

On Friday, April 29, The Miami Book Fair hosted "From Saigon to Miami: An Evening of Contemporary Vietnamese Literature and Art" to celebrate the release of the three-volume, fully bilingual zine. Curated by Saigoneer, the collection aims to provide readers in America and around the world with a glimpse into Vietnam's diverse contemporary poetry, fiction and visual art scenes. The launch event included a video introducing the project with clips provided by several of the included authors. The zine is available for free download at the event page as well as at dozens of physical locations throughout Miami.

Illustration by Brian Hoang to accompany a story by Dạ Ngân in Volume 1 of In My Ear, Your Voice Still Flickering // Bên tai tôi, giọng người vẫn chờn vờn.

In My Ear, Your Voice Still Flickering // Bên tai tôi, giọng người vẫn chờn vờn includes work by authors Phan Nhiên Hạo, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Andrew Lam, Trần Thị NgH, Nhã Thuyên, Khải Đơn, Dao Strom, Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, Thu Uyên, Linh San and Dạ Ngân and artists Phương Thảo, Mình là Đỗ, Brian Hoang, Linh Dương, Trà Nhữ, Tri Ròm, Bu, Minh Phương and An Hồ.

In an effort to offer a broad view of contemporary Vietnamese literature, authors from different generations, backgrounds, styles and interests were selected. Some pieces were originally written in Vietnamese while others were penned in English. Represented writers come from all across Vietnam and some have moved outside of the country. For the visual pieces, the selected artists created original paintings, illustrations, designs and photographs inspired by one of the stories or poems.

Founded in 1984, the Miami Book Fair brings authors that span genres and backgrounds to Miami every fall for a week of readings, discussions and events. Throughout the rest of the year, the Miami Book Fair hosts reading, writing and literacy programs with an emphasis on embracing the city's ethnically diverse audiences. One such initiative is The Big Read, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, which recommends books that community organizations can plan conversations and programs around. This year, one of the Big Read selections was Thi Bui's graphic novel, The Best We Could Do, which inspired the Miami Book Fair to collaborate with Saigoneer for In My Ear, Your Voice Still Flickering // Bên tai tôi, giọng người vẫn chờn vờn.

Check out a poem by Phan Nhiên Hạo, translated by Hai-Dang Phan, with an accompanying painting by Tri Ròm from the zine below.

Painting by Tri Ròm from Volume 1 of In My Ear, Your Voice Still Flickering // Bên tai tôi, giọng người vẫn chờn vờn.

A Guitarist in Exile

This guitarist stretches his strings
from one time zone to another,
from the silt beds of the Mekong River
to the fields of the Midwest.
The sky where he now lives is often cloudy,
the cows slaughter-ready.

His songs are about love,
the smell of a road after a tropical storm.
He sings of exile, blizzards,
and empty parking lots.
His past is like a street musician
faking blindness. His present
is like a hot air balloon
aloft and waiting to fall back to the earth.
His future is just a TV
in a nursing home losing its signal.

He has nothing but music
in this hard-of-hearing world.
And this makes him feel as useless
as those times during Sunday blackouts
he would lie in a tiny room
on Nguyen Tri Phuong Street naked
and fanning himself
in Saigon during the 1980s.

Download the full zine project here.

[Top image uses illustrations (from left to right) by Minh Phương, An Hồ, and Phương Thảo]

Đà Lạt-Born French Writer Linda Lê Passes Away at 58

2022-05-10T12:00:00+07:00

Born in Đà Lạt in 1963, Linda Lê moved to France as an adolescent and went on to write numerous award-winning works of fiction in French.

Linda Lê was born to an upper-class Vietnamese family with French citizenship, and her education at a lycée introduced her to the French language and literature from a young age.

Upon moving to France, she embarked on a writing career which began with the novel Un si tendre vampire (Such a Tender Vampire), published in 1987 when she was only 23 years old. She rose to fame in 1992 with Les Évangiles du crime (The Gospels of Crime) and ultimately released over 15 novels, short story collections and essays in her career.

In 2009, Lê was awarded the prestigious Prince Pierre of Monaco Prize which recognizes an author's complete body of work. She also received the Fénéon Prize, the Prix Wepler, and the Prix Renaudot over the years, earning her a place among the most successful overseas writers of Vietnamese descent.

Many of Lê's books were translated into Vietnamese and published in Vietnam, including the popular Lame de fond (Vượt Sóng). Several of her works were also translated into other languages, including English.

Common themes in her novels include exile, immigrant and diaspora communities, mother-daughter relationships, and the impact of childhood trauma on adult lives. After leaving Vietnam in 1977, she never again saw her father, the effect of which she explored in several works.

The Los Angeles Times praised her writing acumen: "Linda Lê is an extraordinary writer of scintillating French prose...[she] is Vietnamese in the same way that Nabokov was Russian, writing in her adopted language with a kind of desolate grace."

Lê's most recent novel, De personne je ne fus le contemporain, was released in France earlier this year. No specific cause of death has been announced, but she was suffering from an illness for a long time.

[Photo by Renaud Monfourny via Livres Hebdo]