Saigon’s landscape looks dramatically different from how it did three or even two decades ago. As the country’s economic powerhouse, Saigon has seen rapid urban development: new highrises like Landmark 81 and the Bitexco Financial Tower that now define the city’s skyline, new urban infrastructure like the Ba Son Bridge and Saigon’s first metro line, as well as the city’s expansion into areas like District 7’s Phú Mỹ Hưng and District 2’s Thủ Thiêm. If the west has long viewed Saigon under the shadow of war, it is clear that such a rigid frame fails to contain the Saigon of today, whose entropic inner life seems to constantly overflow; with motorbikes onto sidewalks, loud honks through windows, and rainpour over Saigon’s riverbeds.
Tuan Phan’s newly published short story collection Gills: and Other Stories primarily takes place in the backdrop of this Saigon. A set of 10 short stories written in unassuming and measured prose, it is his second book following his memoir Remembering Water, where he, as an adult who returns to live in Saigon, reflects upon his childhood departure from Vietnam as a refugee and his family’s subsequent returns.
Tuan Phan. Image via author website.
In line with the themes of his first book, a significant chunk of Gills center the lives of Việt Kiều. Such stories dwell in the space of the in-between and serve to capture the brushing encounters between those who have left and stayed, between memory and reality, past and present, strangers and family.
In the opening story ‘At the Bánh Mì Stand,’ the owner of a bánh mì stall named Khanh converses with a hungry and jetlagged Việt Kiều who has just arrived in the hours before early dawn after a long flight. His second story, ‘The Việt Kiều Casanova,’ also features a Việt Kiều, though this time a vulgar womanizer who visits the same gift shop every week with a different girl. In ‘Short-Term Rental’ — the only story to take place outside of Vietnam — a Vietnamese American teenage boy visits his father in Houston over the holidays, where he navigates the fractures left by his parents’ separation, as well as the increasing disillusionment with the American dream. And in ‘Photographs,’ narrated in the second person, a Việt Kiều visits her aunt who repeats stories behind photographs she has kept of him and his father, who, in his last visit, told the same stories “almost word for word.”
As is perhaps clearest in this last story, there is a certain kind of nausea to many of these moments, where a spiraling abyss opens up between worlds that reveal their distance precisely via their proximity. Yet, in others, one feels surprisingly comforted by the fact that the misunderstood, wandering gaze across such seemingly irreparable gaps is, at the very least, returned.
It would be a mistake to define Gills as solely a meditation on the experience of the Vietnamese diaspora, for the focus of the greater part of the collection lies elsewhere: namely, the class-ridden social fabric of Saigon.
It would be a mistake, however, to define Gills as solely a meditation on the experience of the Vietnamese diaspora, for the focus of the greater part of the collection lies elsewhere: namely, the class-ridden social fabric of Saigon. The stories that depict this occur in the overlooked folds of Saigon’s socioeconomic order. In ‘A Clean Record,’ for instance, we see the struggles of an elderly man navigating a system of openly corrupt, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, seeking to acquire appropriate paperwork in order to begin driving for Grab. If the old man represents the economically precarious in Saigon — who live in informal, “illegal” homes, who make a living by working in a gig economy characterized by low pay, unstable income, and harsh working conditions — other stories offer glimpses into the other end of Saigon’s socioeconomic order. ‘Selling Sài Gòn,’ for instance, tells the story of Trang, a luxury apartment realtor dating a moneyed yet unambitious boyfriend, who has to navigate murky waters of having to close a deal with a famous celebrity client named Liêm who is clearly bent on using his leverage to get with her. In bringing together stories set in widely different settings across Saigon’s socioeconomic strata, Gills offers a damning portrait of Saigon’s class hierarchies in which multiple realities, each absurd in their own ways, co-exist with one another in unsettling and maddening ways.
Nowhere is this more viscerally rendered than in ‘Reusables,’ the most dramatic and gripping of Tuan’s stories. Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, it tells the story of Lâm, a recycler in need of money to treat his dog, who has accidentally swallowed something he shouldn't have from a pile of junk in District 7. Upon being persuaded by his friend Tèo, together they embark on “find[ing] new owners for” (Tèo’s euphemism for stealing) condenser units sitting idle by a BMW dealership in “Korea Town” — a plan that turns south upon being confronted by a celebrity named Liêm (presumably the same character from ‘Selling Sài Gòn’), who, it turns out, had previously been mired in controversy for ripping off flood victims. Indeed, there is something quite bizarre about the whole scene, where we find Lâm’s economic despair juxtaposed against the eerie tranquility of the neighborhood that is arguably Saigon’s most affluent. It is here that Tuan becomes most explicit with his critique of the class-stratified order of contemporary Vietnam:
The fact was, and the fact always was . . . in this long pandemic, it’ll be the already rich bosses, the ones that run dealerships, the ones that get kickbacks and bribe money for construction projects needing their signatures to begin, the ones that buy BMWs for their kids to wreck, that’ll not only survive this lockdown but get even richer. [...] And it’ll still be the little people like me and Tèo, the grandmothers selling grilled corncobs on the street or the homeless kids hawking lottery tickets, that get fucked. Every fucking year. Forever into infinity.
In a well-known passage from his Theses on the Philosophy of History, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin critiques the ugly underbelly of what we call progress. In offering a reading of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, a monoprint of an eccentric angel figure, Benjamin reimagines Klee’s angel to be “the angel of history,” who, though desperate to gather and restore history’s wreckage piling before him, is helplessly swept forward by the ceaseless “storm of progress.” The story of Lâm is the story of those who have been left behind by a vision for progress that is as idyllic as the picturesque scenery of Phú Mỹ Hưng — for Lâm too stands before history’s ever-piling wreckage — except that he, unlike Benjamin's angel of history, has to sift through it for reusable scraps.
The book cover
Tuan’s collection takes its title from one of its stories, ‘Gills,’ which stands out from the rest as the only magical realist piece. It tells the story of two siblings, Liên and Tú — children of a loving mother and a crass, abusive father — who one day discover gills just below their ankles after the water recedes from flooded streets. In this engrossing reimagination of Saigon's monsoon season, the two children revel in their ability to swim through the city during its submersion under rainwaters — that is, until their father finds out and eventually devises a way to exploit their peculiarity.
Reading ‘Gills,’ one cannot help but contextualize the story within the planet’s ever-worsening ecological crisis, especially given that with it, extreme flooding will only become more common. Yet, it is unclear what exactly is to be the takeaway from the story (which of course is not in and of itself a problem). In an interview with Texas Tech University Press, Tuan describes ‘Gills’ as a “hopeful story,” a yearning for the younger generations to “have the capacity to be resilient.” Here, however, I find it difficult to agree with the author, for hope and optimism seem naive in the face of the global capitalist economy’s unwaning consumption of fossil fuels. Resilience implies coping, and coping implies that we have no choice but to accept the ecological crisis — and that, we cannot accept.
What opens as a fleeting snippet of an interaction by a bánh mì stall at early dawn expands, story by story, and slowly crystallizes into an intricate and dynamic portrait of contemporary Saigon.
I thus find that the most compelling reading of ‘Gills’ is not as an allegory of the environment, but rather as a kind of literalization of the different and uneven ways that the residents of Saigon move and breathe through the city and its spaces. It is a theme that runs through the broader collection, which is perhaps why I find ‘Gills’ an oddly wonderful title for the book. ‘A Clean Record,’ for instance, ends with the elderly man stuck in traffic, suffocating in the heat and diesel exhaust. In ‘Reusables,’ Lâm walks his dog through a lusciously green golf course in District 7, which he is able to access only because of the lockdown. In ‘Selling Sài Gòn,’ Trang moves through a world of luxury apartments that literally exists in a different atmosphere, skyhigh above the rest of the city. In many ways, Gills makes obvious what we all intuitively understand: that what we singularly call “place” is in no way singular, but rather a pluralistic formation of different material and phenomenological spheres — a beautiful thing, no doubt, were its contours not drawn so brutally by class.
In many ways, Gills: and Other Stories reads like an exercise in world-building. What opens as a fleeting snippet of an interaction by a bánh mì stall at early dawn expands, story by story, and slowly crystallizes into an intricate and dynamic portrait of contemporary Saigon, within which different smaller worlds recursively overlap, collide, and coalesce. In this sense, there is something special about reading the collection in Saigon, where the reader may find themself subsumed into exactly such a confluence of worlds — specifically, of the text in front and the world around.
Against a backdrop of Vietnamese diasporic literature that often overlooks the complexities of modern-day Saigon, Gills feels like a breath of fresh air.
