“Clip-clop, clip-clop.” So goes the sound of the water buffalo hooves pulling a wagon through the highlands against the magenta sky of an unending sunset. The wagon is guided by a nameless driver, and onboard are three travelers: a veteran referred to as “the Man” and two other younger men.
A train coasts by in the distance but its sound is mute. On the wagon, the Man reminisces his memories. He recalls having been on what seems to be the same wagon years ago with his father and sister. He recalls his time as a soldier during the war and the death of his comrade. He recalls other strange occurrences too, like the story of a young woman who would give birth to babies born old and the banyan tree in his village, where bodies of the dead that had died far away would magically return. Yet, other moments simply emerge to the surface, adrift, untethered to any one person’s consciousness in particular. “Clip-clop, clip-clop.” The Man wonders where he is, and where he is headed towards. But like the march of time, the wagon continues to voyage onward without care — except that they almost appear to be out of time altogether, timeless.
Elsewhere, in a world more akin to our own, a blind man with hypersensitive ears named Bào hears the sounds of a wagon growing louder each day. There, in Phan Village, in the mountainous province of Thái Nguyên in Northeastern Vietnam, we find the unravelling of a grand generational family feud over secret buried treasure in the hills behind the village. The patriarchs of the two rival families, Old Trường and Trình, both possess knowledge of strange instructions for what must occur for the treasure vault to open: a second comet must appear; a third grave must be dug and with it, the death of a member of either family; as well as the final appearance of the mythical half-dog, half-lion Nghê that must ultimately be beheaded.
Nguyễn Bình Phương
Nguyễn Bình Phương’s The Young Die Old is an eerie, fantastical novel whose chapters alternate between these two ontologically distinct yet entwined worlds. Originally published in 1994, the novel was translated by Khải Q. Nguyễn, available in English recently this year. The book, as with Phương’s other novels, has often been labelled as magical realist — magical realism being a novelistic tradition which fuses the surreal into the quotidian, most closely associated with Gabriel García Márquez and other Latin American writers. It is a term, however, that the author is careful to qualify, as he does in an interview with Mekong Review that was re-published with the English translation of the novel.
“The atmosphere and the supernatural haze in The Young Die Old don’t come from Latin America. Those temples and the Nghê are oriental, with their history that spans thousands of years; they didn’t come about a few decades ago, when Latin American literature was introduced into Vietnam,” Phương remarks. “The magical features in my novel are all Vietnamese.” A prominent novelist and poet, Nguyễn Bình Phương is the recipient of numerous major literary awards such as the Vietnam Writers' Association Award in 2021 and the Southeast Asian Writers Award in 2022.
The Young Die Old is a novel that is greatly opaque. Despite its centrality to the plot, the feud over the buried treasure is not explicated until well into the novel, an affair that most members of either rival family too remain unaware of. It is also not clear how exactly the two worlds of the Phan Village and the buffalo wagon and its characters are related (and that they are to begin with is also unclear until well into the book). The novel is at once chaotic and meticulously crafted. Seemingly strange and arbitrary details and accounts, often having to do with the complicated tangling of relationships between the novel’s numerously sprawling characters, fall into place only retrospectively. But even then, the piecing together of fragments does not automatically crystallize but rather takes much effort, at times both tantalizing and dizzying, on the part of the reader. Readers may likely find themselves searching for a moralistic takeaway, perhaps because of how much the story of Phan village has the feel of a folktale (“Some time ago…” begins the story), yet the novel does not at all easily lend itself to allegorical readings. Perhaps in this sense, I feel that the novel’s opacity exists not as a mystery to be solved but rather to be felt. For despite the intricate inner logical workings of the novel and its almost rhizomatic plot, what is perhaps most distinctive about the novel is its quite odd, unique affective texture, one whose architecture is built and sustained by the uneasy overlay of its two para-ontological worlds.
Some titles in Nguyễn Bình Phương's bibliography
To start, it needs saying that the world of Phan Village is absurd, despite it being the world that is at least seemingly more aligned to our intuitions of time and space. Much of this absurdity, to be specific, has to do with the notable lack of psychological interiority exhibited by its characters. If interiority requires friction, the wrestling with depths of the self and the world that resist easy comprehension, there seems to be none of that in Phan Village. Rather, its characters are much too easily moved by greed, fear, anger, love, lust — their desires much too fickle. Old Trường marries his cousin after he is told to do so. A man transmits gonorrhea in order to take revenge. Old Trường’s granddaughter Loan moves on from one lover to the next with remarkable casualness. And in a particularly striking scene, a woman comes to the house of the blind man Bào with plans to murder him but instead falls in love and stays the night. The next day, Bào, who throughout his life had sulked over his inability to sleep with women, is asked by Liêm whether he had “shagged” the woman and realizes he “forgot” to do so. At no point are any of the characters particularly puzzled by their feelings and actions or the eccentric development of events — and if they are, they quickly move on. The men and women of Phan Village simply feel what they feel, think what they think, do what they do. And the result is a kind of absurdity that goes beyond merely the surrealism of magical realism.
Such absurdity, I find, is actually quite comical — though only from a step or two back. For despite all the moments of amusement and even humor of watching events unfold in bizarre ways, they all quickly dissipate under none other than the weight of the Man’s grief sorrow on the buffalo wagon. It is a sorrow that, in many ways, looms timeless: the sorrow of others, of the dead, of the land and the bruised sky witness to the madness of mankind. As arguably the sole character in the novel that exhibits much interiority at all — for he ponders, sits with the past — the sorrow that engulfs the Man is superimposed above all, including the ludicrous drama of Phan village. The result is a deeply unsettling alloy of dissonant affective registers that is perhaps best described as bordering on tragicomic.
The book's Vietnamese cover
In the afterword, translator Khải Q. Nguyễn suggests the “Soundless” chapters be read as demonstrating “scepticism of violence, and, perhaps to another level, scepticism of the past where the collective past conflicts with the individual’s experience and memory.” He suggests that such modes of scepticism offer a “glimpse into the Vietnamese mentality in the years before and after Đổi Mới.” And indeed, there is good reason to read Phương’s work as a postwar novel: it is after all, at least in part, a novel about war written in the aftermath of four wars over the course of a century. Yet, at the same time, the themes that the novel engages with could be said to be much more existential. In The Young Die Old, we find the ever-absurd predicament of human life, perpetually propelled and hijacked by reckless forces of greed, love, lust, hatred and more that in turn give rise to events at times head-scratching and at others outright stomach-dropping. The stuff of farce, one might even say, were it not for the timelessness of it all.
