Loạt Soạt - Saigoneer

Revisiting the Delicious Satirical Society of 'Số Đỏ' by Vũ Trọng Phụng

2024-12-10T10:00:00+07:00

Published in 1938, Dumb Luck, or Số Đỏ, remains one of Vietnam's most popular and controversial novels. Vũ Trọng Phụng was fined by the French colonial administration in Hanoi in 1932 for his stark portrayals of sexuality. Dumb Luck, along with most of his works, were banned in 1954 until the late 1980s. Today, Vietnamese who attended public high school are no stranger to Vũ Trọng Phụng as an excerpt from the book, titled “The Happiness of a Family in Mourning,” is included in the official literature curriculum.

Dumb Luck follows the life story of Xuân Tóc Đỏ (Red-Haired Xuân), an unscrupulous vagrant, as he rises from poverty to become the poster child of the country's Europeanization movement. The novel begins with Xuân being fired from his job as a ball boy in a newly built tennis court for peeping at a woman undressing. He then meets Mrs. Deputy Officer, a widow of a French officer, which helps him get a job as a salesman at the Âu Hóa tailor shop (Europeanization Tailor Shop in the English translation; the Vietnamese name sounds more fitting for a shop's name while the Europeanization ideology) owned by husband-and-wife duo Văn Minh (Mister and Mrs. Civilization in the translation).

Despite being uneducated, Xuân's luck and his knack for bullshitting helps him become a familiar face in the Vietnamese bourgeoisie crowd as he continues to dabble in medicine after unfortunately saving Văn Minh's grandpa, Hồng. He eventually becomes the champion of science, the hero of Buddhist reform, then a professional tennis player and a national hero. At every turn of Xuân's ascension to power and wealth, he encounters the caricatures of many archetypes in the world of the colonized glitterati: the elitist artist, the oh-so-progressive journalist, the free-market Buddhist monk, the liberated woman, the not-so-loyal widow, the modern poet; each portrayed with a bitter and mocking tone.

The novel's first print in 1936.

Phụng wrote Dumb Luck in 1936, the year when the Popular Front — an alliance of the French Communist Party, the French socialist party and the Radical-Socialist Republican Party — came to power in France. Despite being anti-colonial in their early years, the Popular Front gradually changed their view towards accepting the empire and wanted to preserve French colonies while instituting a more humane colony policy. Beginning in the 1920s, a new Vietnamese middle-class consciousness had also been forged as increased French investment in Indochina ushered in a capitalist economy in An Nam.

While Phụng's bitter attack of westernization among the bourgeoisie was issued during unique sociocultural conditions and retains some temporal meanings, many of Dumb Luck's critiques remain relevant against the backdrop of neo-imperialism and neoliberal discourse in Vietnam.

A compartmentalized world

One theme that runs throughout Dumb Luck is the distinction between modernity versus tradition and progressive versus conservative. Early on in the novel, it dawns on readers that these distinctions are used as synonyms for the differentiation between west versus east. Although Phụng shows cynicism towards the Europeanization project, he refrains from suggesting that “tradition” is morally superior, as exemplified by the ridiculing of the opportunistic Buddhist monk Tăng Phú in the story. Peter Zinoman, in his comprehensive introduction to the book, contends that this is Phụng's “self-reflexive cynicism that he adopts towards his society's obsession with historicism.” However, Phụng's recurring acknowledgment of this conflict also opens a door to directly question these binary constructions.

Trần Thiện Huy, in his analysis of Vũ Trọng Phụng's significance in postcolonial literature, notes that in order to better read Phụng's writing, one needs to go beyond the conservatism-versus-progressivism construct:

“Conservatism vs progressivism are concepts only found in the Western political system, a sacred distinction that almost duplicates the distinction between right-wing/left-wing. Imposing these labels onto another culture is to create confusion and unnecessary limitation for both observation and actions, which lessen the merits of independent and multidimensional thinking ability in conscious beings.”

The discourses surrounding modernity and civilization often pinpoint the roots of modernity in the western world, specifically the philosophical movement of the 17^th and 18^th centuries that spread to the rest of the non-western world. The colonial world portrayed in Dumb Luck is an environment in which these Eurocentric distinctions subjugate all aspects of life: from language, clothing, science, medicine to sport, and more.

The colonized Vietnamese in the novel, especially the middle-class, are characterized by a constant need to remake themselves in the image of their colonizers. Frantz Fanon, who investigated the psychological condition of colonialism in Black Skin White Masks, argues that colonialism produces a collective mental illness wherein the colonized subject is alienated from his identity and is subjugated to becoming more identical to his colonizers. Achieving whiteness, in Dumb Luck, is a middle-class aspiration as whiteness represents status and power. “The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards,” writes Fanon.

The cover of Dumb Luck, as translated by Peter Zinoman and Nguyễn Nguyệt Cầm.

Characters in Dumb Luck wear the “white masks” through different forms of performances: the occasional mispronounced French phrases, the westernization of women's clothing, the emphasis on sports that echoes the Popular Front's interest in sport and leisure. Another example is the exchange between the senior clerk and his wife's lover after the clerk caught his wife cheating on him red-handed.

The two men decided to converse in a “respectful tone,” on grounds that, as the senior clerk explained: “In spite of my horns, I am still a refined, upper-class intellectual.” In one instance, the lover, with the hope of getting out of the situation, tries to restore the senior clerk's ego by comparing him to Napoleon, which calms the clerk's down.

Commodity fetishism and spectacle

“How can one tell what is real these days? Everything is so artificial! Love is artificial! Modernity is artificial! Even conservatism is artificial!,” suggests Xuân in response to Tuyết's (Miss Snow in the translation) invitation to examine her authentic breast. While the remark was made by Xuân to take advantage of Tuyết's request, it holds a kernel of truth for Phụng's primary criticism of Vietnamese society.

Phụng shows, again and again, that the so-called modern people in his novel either fail to practice the Europeanization mission they preach or that their intentions are disingenuous, often motivated by a commercial interest to further their personal gains. The society is Europeanized by virtue of being represented as such. Phụng's turns of phrase and playful mishmash of juxtaposition, irony and incongruity constantly lay bare the absurd and topsy-turvy world Xuân is entering — one in which people's actions and the results fail to make any moral sense. Despite branding themselves as the spokespeople for rationality and reason, advocates for the advance of modernity and Europeanization always catch themselves in a network of illogicalities.

“Don't you know that there are different kinds of women? When we campaign for the reform of women, we mean other people's wives and sisters, not our own!”
— Mr. ILL on women's liberation.

In one example, the tailor Mr. ILL, who's famous for his advocacy for women's liberation and equal rights, reacted strongly to his wife wanting to own a modern outfit. In an effort to explain his hypocrisy, Mr. ILL said to his wife: “Don't you know that there are different kinds of women? When we campaign for the reform of women, we mean other people's wives and sisters, not our own!” The statement is then agreed with by the journalist, whose writing also touts support for women rights. It's also worth noting that Mr. ILL's name itself is fertile ground for satire. He's called Tuýp-Phờ-Nờ (TYPN) in Vietnamese, short for “I love women!”; the name is translated into I-Love-Ladies (ILL) in the English version.

In the above situation, the two men who appropriate and commodify the discourses surrounding women rights in the 1930s are for their own interests. Under this new “modern” shift, women, one can argue, appear “liberated” without any real liberation taking place; their agency is still constrained and their bodies are still defined and managed by men's imagination.

Vũ Trọng Phụng, dressed in a western-style suit.

It's worth noting that Phụng's own views on a woman's role don't stray too far from the ones he criticized. In one interview, he admitted to a more Confucian ideal of female behaviors, which is equally constrained and problematic. However, Phụng's critique remains relevant for a reflection on today's neoliberal discourse on gender equality. Feminist messages in advertising and media narrative that celebrate women — such as women in managerial roles, feel-good stories about women's empowerment and women gaining more capital and power — can often serve as a form of perception management to gloss over intersections of economic and social inequality, class, agency and corporate's practices that exploit female labor or objectify women.

Similar to women's issues, other aspects showcasing modern life in Phụng's society — including science, medicine and sports — echoes Guy Debord's concept of society of the spectacle: they are no longer experienced but simply represented. Xuân's nonexistent knowledge of medicine and science doesn't prevent him from being a helpful doctor and a champion of science as long as he appears knowledgeable about these subjects. One of the crucial reasons for Xuân's rise to power is his ability to reproduce the language of modernity and progressivism and imitate the manner of the bourgeoisie. At times, words coming out of Xuân's mouth feels like a broken record, repeating in a never-ending loop with an effect akin to gaslighting.

“Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is an affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance,” writes Debord in his tenth thesis. Phụng expresses similar observations about how many of Tự Lực Văn Đoàn group have pushed for tiến hóa về hình thức (progress in appearance) that precedes tiến hóa về tinh thần (spiritual progress). Dumb Luck's society is progressive by virtue of appearing progressive.

The novel in and of itself is also a spectacle as it features caricatures of whom Phụng came across in different sectors of his society and the representation of the spectacular society they were entangled in. What Dumb Luck does, however, is poke holes, pull absurdities and defamiliarize to the point that the society almost resembles a circus in which the performers are their own audiences.

This article was originally published in 2019.

Examining the Role of Shame in Building a National Identity via Vietnam's Thinkers

2024-11-11T10:00:00+07:00

“Shame, rather than pride, can be the basis for national identity… individuals may be motivated to move their country in a desirable direction when national shame outweighs pride.”

This theory provides a lens for understanding how some Vietnamese during and in the direct aftermath of colonialism believed they could unite and strengthen themselves and their country. The Architects of Dignity, a recently published book by Kevin D. Pham, examines this idea via six pivotal Vietnamese thinkers active in the early to mid 20^th century.

In a recent episode of Kenneth Nguyen’s excellent The Vietnamese Podcast discussing the book, Pham shared that he wrote The Architects of Dignity with an assumed audience of “political theorists who know nothing of Vietnam.” Such a readership is expected considering the general market and reach for academic political theory texts. No doubt Pham, an assistant professor of political theory at the University of Amsterdam and co-host of the highly recommended Nam Phong Dialogues, will contribute much to discussions within political theory circles with the book. However, it is also an excellent read for those outside academia who perhaps shy away from serious nonfiction texts but want to learn more about foundational figures, thinking, and movements in recent Vietnamese history.

Photo via Kevin Pham's personal website.

Architects of Dignity opens with a broad discussion of how shame and dignity form and function in the context of national identity. Drawing on the experiences of numerous countries as interpreted and articulated by political theorists, Pham claims that conventional understanding posits that national identity comes from pride while shame results from actions a nation takes against weaker ones and thus involves a sense of responsibility to the wronged parties. Pham argues that this way of looking at national identity doesn’t apply to Vietnam. As he succinctly puts it: “From the perspective of the Vietnamese and other weaker, historically dominated and colonized nations, these concepts can mean something very different. The six Vietnamese thinkers we will engage show us that national identity can come from shame (rather than pride), that national shame derives from perceived inadequacies (rather than bad actions toward others), and that national responsibility means the duty to create national identity anew (rather than righting the wrongs of bad actions against others).”

Shame as a national force for growth?

In chronological order, the book devotes a chapter each to Phan Bội Châu, Phan Châu Trinh, Nguyễn An Ninh, Phạm Quỳnh, Hồ Chí Minh and Nguyễn Mạnh Tường. General biographical information including summaries of their lives, work, and beliefs allows the book to function as something of a super Wikipedia article. But it’s much more than that. The well-researched and extremely approachable text compares and contrasts their ideas in ways that allow readers to understand the richness and rigor of political thought occurring in early 20^th-century Vietnam.

Phan Bội Châu. Image via Nhân Lực Nhân Tài.

By juxtaposing the six men’s theories, often supported by direct quotes, readers have a better understanding of the problems Vietnam faced at the time and potential remedies being debated. The men are united by a desire to see a strong, independent nation its citizens can be proud of, but disagree on the specific causes and solutions for the contemporary weaknesses. Nguyễn An Ninh, for example, believed Vietnam lacked a cultural tradition of rigorous thought and degraded itself by overreliance on foreign ideas. He wrote: “If we pile up all that we have produced in our country in terms of purely literary and artistic achievements, the intellectual lot that was left to us by our ancestors would certainly be weak compared to the heritages of other peoples... The literary lot that was transmitted to us is thin and, what’s more, exhales a strong breath of decadence, of sickness, lassitude, the taste of an impending agony. This is not the kind of heritage that will help give us more vigor and life to our race in the fight for a place in the world.” His solution, the author explains, was “for the Vietnamese to aim for a kind of originality generated through an energetic, personal, spiritual struggle. Their aim should be to become ‘great men.’” In contrast, Phạm Quỳnh took a more moderate approach, arguing that the Vietnamese should not reject all western ideas but slowly incorporate them under the guidance of Vietnamese elites like himself to strengthen themselves within the context of reforming French structures.

“If we pile up all that we have produced in our country in terms of purely literary and artistic achievements, the intellectual lot that was left to us by our ancestors would certainly be weak compared to the heritages of other peoples... The literary lot that was transmitted to us is thin and, what’s more, exhales a strong breath of decadence, of sickness, lassitude, the taste of an impending agony. This is not the kind of heritage that will help give us more vigor and life to our race in the fight for a place in the world.”
— Nguyễn An Ninh.

Before them, both Phan Bội Châu and Phan Châu Trinh wanted desperately to rid the nation of France’s cruel oppression, but Phan Bội Châu argued for a restoration of the monarchy while the more radical Phan Châu Trinh preferred popular rights supported by a reinvigoration of Confucius teachings. “For Confucius, as for Trinh, the most worthwhile activity one could engage in was to improve one’s own character because doing so would automatically improve one’s family, community, nation, and the world,” the author notes. Meanwhile, the most recent thinker of the book, Nguyễn Mạnh Tường, wrote extensively after Vietnam won its independence and thus commented in the context of how the nation should proceed forward including critiquing what he saw as mistakes and dangers. Specifically, he warned against “the anti-intellectualism, paranoia, logomachy (argument over words), and conformity he considered ‘self-imposed obstacles to their own goal of socialist revolution.’”

Phạm Quỳnh was the editor-in-chief of Nam Phong, a magazine established in the 1910s, leading the quốc ngữ desk. Image via Người Đô Thị.

But for all their differences, the six men are united by the book's core thesis that shame has a role in establishing national dignity. Kevin Pham explained on the podcast that he was surprised in his initial exploration of their work that “all of these thinkers, in their own ways, shamed the Vietnamese” by comparing them to other nations and culture’s achievements, traditions and behavior. “I didn’t expect it… but it was really prominent and what I realized is that they were using shame in a productive way; they were trying to channel this emotion of shame into productive purposes.”

Balancing theory with contemporary contexts

The author’s prose is clear and inviting, avoiding the dense jargon and assumed familiarity with outside work one has good reason to fear from academic works. Thus, if the six thinkers and their theories sound remotely interesting, the book is worth picking up. And beyond its main arguments, it offers countless small morsels and moments to spark ruminations on tangential topics. For example, its inclusion of a broader examination of dignity and shame as concepts will likely lead readers to think about those emotions’ roles in the familial, social and occupational situations around them today. Similarly, the century-old debates about the merging of indigenous and foreign cultures and habits remain relevant in modern discussions about art and society. One wonders, for example, how Nguyễn An Ninh and Phạm Quỳnh would approach the recent rise of hip-hop in Vietnam or what productive shaming Nguyễn Mạnh Tường might offer to TikTok users.

“The book also delivers a number of illuminating allusions and analogs, both historical and contemporary, to situations beyond Vietnam that expand the reader’s greater understanding of national identity, in general.”

The book also delivers a number of illuminating allusions and analogs, both historical and contemporary, to situations beyond Vietnam that expand the reader’s greater understanding of national identity, in general. For example, the author draws numerous comparisons to India’s historic plight as well as the unfolding genocide in Palestine. Having grown up in America and received his PhD from the University of California, Riverside, he has ample knowledge of America to include in his discourse as well. By referencing George Floyd, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the feelings of perceived shame and indignation amongst a segment of Donald Trump voters, the author not only connects with those “political theorists who know nothing of Vietnam,” but also places the discussion of Vietnamese dignity in larger global conversations, cementing his rhetorical positioning.

Nguyễn An Ninh (left) in France in 1927. Photo via Tuổi Trẻ.

Fun is a word I’ve never used to describe academic texts. And while reading Architects of Dignity probably doesn’t match most people’s definition of fun, one cannot help but feel that the author had fun writing it, and some of that transfers to the reader. And even if it's not fun exactly, it's important for people outside academia. At one point during the Vietnamese Podcast, the host, who has interviewed everyone from Ocean Vuong to Kiều Chinh to Nguyễn Ngọc Giao exclaimed: “This is my fifth year doing this podcast, and in all of the work that I’ve done, I’ve been looking for this conversation; this pinpoint conversation about shame.”

In 'Water: A Chronicle,' Nguyễn Ngọc Tư Wades Into the Mekong via Vignettes

2024-10-17T16:00:00+07:00

“When you’ve lived to a certain age, you don’t ask whether or not something is true, you ask which truth it is.”

This sentence comes towards the end of Water: A Chronicle, the recently translated novel by Nguyễn Ngọc Tư, and can help readers navigate the disorienting, sometimes difficult but ultimately rewarding work by one of contemporary Vietnam’s most beloved writers. If one approaches the work unconcerned by how events and characters impact one another or connect, but simply let the underlying narrative currents pull the reading experience forward to an uncertain destination one will arrive at a satisfying experience.

Nguyễn Ngọc Tư. Photo via VNTre News.

Nguyễn Ngọc Tư is impressively prolific, having penned more than 20 collections of short stories and essays, but Water: A Chronicle is only her second novel, first published in Vietnamese under the name Biên sử nước in 2020. Her expertise with the short story genre is abundantly clear as Water could be interpreted as a set of nine loosely connected stories, rather than a novel with a central plot and cohesive structure that includes rising tension and resolution. Different chapters introduce and discard idiosyncratic characters facing disparate situations. A journalist returns to her hometown to cover a mystery that may involve a former classmate; a literature teacher who raises cockroaches vanishes, her last image captured by a convenience store security camera; a transgender youth is heinously abused by their mother; a water tap no one can turn off floods a town, forcing an entire community to evacuate; a group of prisoners inadvertently escape into the forest where they hide out in a shack with a mother whose baby will not cease crying; and a privileged teenager delights in anarchic destruction knowing her family name will absolve her of all responsibility. These characters and their circumstances arrive with little to no exposition and readers may struggle to orient themselves before the chapter ends and the narrative changes focus.

Those anticipating a familiar reading experience will likely spend the first several chapters wondering when and how the characters and places will meet. But this never happens, and the sooner the reader realizes this, the more they will enjoy the slim novel. While characters frequently disappear and predicaments are abandoned to focus on the next set of misery-stricken people, the chapters are connected via the environment. Dangerous rivers, unrelenting storms and precarious economies fill stories set in an unspecified region of the Mekong Delta. It’s familiar terrain for Nguyễn Ngọc Tư that makes great use of her talents for terse but emotionally resonant descriptions.

Nature as both a setting and an adversary

The book’s events take place in fictional towns and small cities that are not places “favoured by avid travelers, boasting neither tourist traps nor national heritage sites.” Almost certainly placed somewhere in miền Tây, they are all impacted by the surrounding “watery expanse, like a blister on the horizon.” As in much of her other work, Tư presents the landscape with a certain reserved admiration for its propensity to dish out hostility. It’s far from idyllic, but she is able to bring out its unrelenting beauty in lines like: “There were but a few families on the whole isle, it was so forlorn even a rooster’s crow could startle you, and at night the laments of waterfowl hacking deep cuts at your gut.”

Consisting of powerful rivers, volatile floodplains and dusty towns, nature is often one of the main adversaries in the chapters. Characters contend with its brutality, such as when a swarm of locusts causes a breakdown in the social order. The chapter that focuses on a group of escaped convicts observes the supremacy of nature as the men’s suffering at the hands of the terrain is presented as more exacting than their fear of the police chasing them. “Without a look back, we mad men ran raging on the reeds near the edge of the swamp forest, wading across canals of water as red as blood, crawling over patches of water spinach that pulled at our legs, until the guards' whistles could be heard no more. I couldn’t remember how many forest miles how many canals how many red swamps I crossed before collapsing on my abused legs, exhausted lungs heaving. There was a hint of blood in the smell of mud; those green blades had probably had a field day on my flesh.”

Dangerous rivers, unrelenting storms and precarious economies fill stories set in an unspecified region of the Mekong Delta. It’s familiar terrain for Nguyễn Ngọc Tư that makes great use of her talents for terse but emotionally resonant descriptions.

In addition to the Mekong Delta, many stories connect via a gruesome legend. The single-paragraph first chapter explains: “The Lord has nothing left but his heart. The woman who is to take it has arrived at the river, her babe in her arms,” and throughout the book women with sick children venture to Vạn Thủy Island; readers are never certain which is the woman. Meanwhile, the foundations of the Lord’s legend are laid out in the story of three young gangsters who establish a cruel regime on an island after finding buried gold. “Following the scent of gold, all kinds of toughs and ruffians arrived at the isle, in response to which Báo orchestrated a succession of sensational assassinations whose outcome left the hitmen themselves awed, so awed they went around spreading the news that Phủ was a real deal deity made flesh, said they chopped him to pieces the previous night only to witness him back on his throne in the morning, accepting bows.” Readers are not privy to precisely what might have happened to preserve this Lord’s heart, but enough of the legend is given to suggest that Water’s world is one in which the mystical heart can heal a baby if only her mother can reach it.

Modernity with a sprinkle of magical realism

Striped of extensive exposition, many of the narratives have a certain timeless quality that untethers them from any specific decade or era. Occasional specific details, however, announce the book to be very much set in the modern day. Convenience store hotdogs have gone wrinkly after hours spinning on the grill; teenage friendships are formed via message boards and Kung Fu Hustle is screened on a laptop. Such moments of modernity allow readers to grasp hold of the slippery storylines, creating a sense of familiar immediacy.

Juxtaposing these very modern and realistic storylines are vignettes that delve into the surreal. A couple takes shelter in an abandoned library during the cataclysmic plague of locusts and survives by literally eating words, something they did before the insects arrived. The absurd behavior is described in lush and convincing specifics: “At seventeen, when I first discovered I could eat printed things for food, I did wonder if it was the paper pulp my body needed. Or the mineral oil in the printing ink. But the blank sheets I tried were all too bland and tasteless, and the ink too gross to be palatable. I’d even tried paper and ink mixed together before coming to the conviction that words on paper are what satiate my appetite. But such nuances were lost on my wife, who found them all to be savagery.” Meanwhile, a man marries a vaguely supernatural woman who “transformed with the landscape, and the sun and the light around her, the way she could create doubles of herself, or shapeshift in the blink of an eye.”

The novel feels like taking a bus ride through the region and overhearing the conversations of people who get on and off. Some of their experiences may overlap, a few might mingle with your dreams as you drift in and out of sleep, and others will get interrupted when a person reaches their stop, but they all combine to speak of what it means to be human.

The collision of this magical realism with the myth of the heart on Vạn Thủy and the stories that are established in our tangibly mundane world adds further difficulty to the reading. The looming element of the fantastic hinders attempts to connect the disjointed timelines and individuals. Such a realization thus returns us to the question of how one should read Water: A Chronicle. Several reviews of the original Vietnamese use a metaphor from the narrative of the couple that eats words. While the man eats words indiscriminately, the woman selects carefully, “a few words here, a few there,” and this is how readers can approach the chapters; deciding which chapters they enjoy and skipping the others at no loss.

I, however, disagree with such an approach and push back against claims that Water is simply a mashing together of stories and undeveloped sketches. Rather, reading it as a whole forefronts the universality of certain themes. The recurrence of isolation, departure, the power of community, babies as burdens, love that is insufficient and marriage that is worse, the fragility of connections, the unfairness of life, and the allure of placing hope in legend underscore their centrality to human experience, perhaps particularly so in the delta. In this way, the novel feels like taking a bus ride through the region and overhearing the conversations of people who get on and off. Some of their experiences may overlap, a few might mingle with your dreams as you drift in and out of sleep, and others will get interrupted when a person reaches their stop, but they all combine to speak of what it means to be human. And at the end, you will feel as if they have slipped into the watery landscape flowing past: truths you could never fully hold but will always carry with you.

Water: A Chronicle will be released worldwide on October 30. It is the first release by Major Books, a recently launched UK-based publisher committed to translating important Vietnamese works.

'Longings' Brings 22 Stories by Vietnamese Female Writers to the World

2024-05-11T13:00:00+07:00

Where are all the female writers?

Foreign editors asked this about an upcoming book I co-translated with Quan Ha that features a novella and 18 Vietnamese stories written between 1930 and 1954. The collection consists entirely of male voices. We wished it wasn’t that way, but literature was an exclusively male domain during that period, in part because more than 90% of the Vietnamese population was illiterate at that time.

Thankfully, literacy rates rose rapidly after colonial rule, and women experienced greater opportunities across society, including in literary communities. Today, any anthology providing an overview of contemporary Vietnamese literature would have no excuse for sidelining the many talented female writers who offer a breadth of styles, subject matters and perspectives as wide as their male counterparts. Within this context, there is a considerable need for a collection consisting exclusively of female voices. Even accounting for the recent success of writers such as Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai and Nguyễn Ngọc Tư, here and abroad, the cannon remains overwhelmingly male; the pendulum must be swung vigorously in the opposite direction.

Moreover, gender balance has improved in Vietnam, but women remain tragically underrepresented in positions of power and reverence while being often reduced to narrow archetypes. What society-wide recognition offered to them seems steeped in patriarchal concepts of women as martyrs or objects of beauty. A recent field trip I took with novelist Dạ Ngân to the Southern Women’s Museum exemplifies the situation. The museum contains little more than an áo dài fashion exhibit and the stories, photographs and artifacts of women involved in the nation’s 20^th-century struggles for peace and freedom. There was no mention of writers, teachers, scientists, mothers, chefs, business leaders, athletes, or artists. “Propaganda,” Dạ Ngân concluded. Promoting beauty queens and representatives of the heroic mother figure is fine, but it should be joined by the celebration of women valued for what they accomplish with their minds. Literature is a valuable means to showcase these individuals via stories’ authors and characters.

Finally, while female writers are capable of producing many of the stories that male authors can, they can also offer up experiences and perspectives unique to their gender, particularly those related to motherhood, patriarchy and traditional societal roles. These stories are invaluable for both female readers who benefit from seeing themselves represented in literature as well as male readers who may otherwise have little access to the innermost thoughts, feelings and lived experiences of women.

All that is to say that Longings: Contemporary Fiction by Vietnamese Women Writers is an important book. It collects 22 stories by female authors originally written in Vietnamese and translated by Quan Manh Ha and Quynh H. Vo. The stories from emerging and established authors were originally published within the last 30 years in various Vietnamese newspapers, literary magazines and short-story collections.

A broad exploration of the minds, desires, and hopes of Vietnamese women

While born and raised in Vietnam, both Quan and Quynh now teach at universities in the United States. Admitting that they do not read enough new Vietnamese literature each year to do this collection justice, they connected with literature professors and authors in Vietnam for recommendations. While the stories are all written by women, they do not explicitly focus on the concepts of femininity or feminism. In so much that they do come together to offer a singular comment regarding women, it’s merely that women contribute immensely to the nation’s literary landscape and are not a monolith in thought or action. There are certain themes and topics that do emerge numerous times within the book, particularly romantic love, prostitution, Confucian notions of filial piety, and one’s search for meaning in the world. Yet, the conclusions or impressions one can glean about these subjects occasionally contradict or oppose one another, which makes for a particularly rich reading experience.

The most repeated source of tension in Longings involves romantic love. Women search for husbands, mourn the loss of lost husbands, fight with poorly behaved husbands, suffer at the hands of abusive husbands and reflect on the joys that husbands bring. Notably, one cannot separate romantic love from the institution of marriage in the works. While the collection as a whole can be seen as progressive in its aims of elevating female voices and touching on taboo subjects, many of the individual pieces reflect Vietnam’s conservative or older values that include virtue being a result of choices and marriage as a foregone conclusion along with having children. For instance, the elderly protagonist in ‘Under the Blooming Silk Cotton Tree’ by Tịnh Bảo is described as: “All she had ever wished for was a happy family, a humble life, a kind and hardworking husband, and a simple house.”

As works of realism, the stories hold a mirror to modern society and, in doing so, can question and criticize traditional values, particularly marriages, and make arguments for improvements. In ‘Selecting a Husband,’ by Kiều Bích Hậu for example, a protagonist entertains the idea of marrying a rich man, a masculine man, a man who satisfies her sexual needs, or one who provides her with children, before reaching “the epiphany that the perfect man is one she must make for herself.” Similarly, after experiencing an abusive, morally defunct husband, the protagonist in ‘Under the Blooming Silk Cotton Tree’ advises her daughter: “Women always have stood below men. But your generation is more educated. You’ll need to live for yourself. You’ll have to live for yourself. Marriage is not the only path to happiness.”

“Women always have stood below men. But your generation is more educated. You’ll need to live for yourself. You’ll have to live for yourself. Marriage is not the only path to happiness.”

Views on marriage that deviate from norms often coincide with radical lifestyle choices in the stories. ‘Late Moon’ by Nguyễn Thị Châu Giang, for example, offers a character who flaunts notions of traditional behavior and runs off to lead a bohemian lifestyle before having a child she intends to raise as a single mother. As with much good literature, there is no simple, singular point being made or expressed through this woman’s trajectory. Rather, “her life resembled an abstract painting characterized by large, barely visible black strokes among which thin red strokes slithered in no particular order. These strokes were like the smoldering remains of a fire that could burst back into a blaze and burn everything into ashes.”

If marriage is an expected joy, then prostitution seems to be a regrettable inevitability in society. One of the most repeated topics in Longings is women depicted at their most commodified and in doing so, they give a voice to the often silent objects of desire in men’s stories. The act of selling one’s body for sex, however, is presented via different lenses. While never glamorized nor condemned as a moral failure, some stories, such as ‘Green Plum’ by Trần Thùy Mai examine root causes and explain how prostitution is the result of poverty, patriarchy and a lack of education that victimizes women. Some stories emphasize the violence and dehumanization of the job, while others stress the resilience and strength of the women forced to endure it.

Most of the authors featured in Longings were born in or after the 1960s and thus the nation’s 20^th-century wars do not overwhelm the collection, appearing in only a few stories. And except ‘The Smoke Cloud,’ by Nguyễn Thị Kim Hoà, they are set long after peace has arrived, when characters must tend to the lingering wounds. This allows for interesting variations on the familiar theme of women carrying the greatest burdens of war. Dạ Ngân’s stunning ‘White Pillows’ for example, explores the challenges a wife must face when her husband returns physically and psychologically devastated by combat. She must find somewhere, literally and metaphorically, to stuff “half a century of emotions and suffering.”

While domestic relationships provide the most common sources of tension in the stories, there are a few exciting deviations. ‘After the Storm’ by Trần Thị Thắng, for example, follows the life of a domestic caregiver who must work in Saigon after her family lost everything in a devastating storm in Cà Mau in 1997. The classic “human vs. nature” conflict carries a strong environmentalist message with Buddhist underpinnings when showing what happens to human lives when societies do live in sustainable partnership with the planet. Human trafficking, another important contemporary problem, is shown not via familiar journalistic numbers and statistics but by individual women and involved actors in ‘At the Border’ by Võ Thị Xuân Hà. Religion makes few appearances, but when it does, it arrives as a bold force with the potential to disrupt the societal conventions laid out elsewhere.

Contemporary and even online Vietnam as a setting

Vietnam serves as the setting for most of the stories, with several exceptions incorporating non-Vietnamese societies as sources of tension and hinting at Vietnamese peoples’ legacies of migration. The 1980s conflict between Vietnam and Cambodia and the culturally, ethnically and politically porous border between the two nations serves as the backdrop of ‘Boozing with a Khmer Rouge’ by Võ Diệu Thanh. Elsewhere, the world abroad is not a source of danger, but one of opportunity. In both Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s ‘Buds’ and ‘Selecting a Husband,’ the main characters question whether they can find greater happiness outside of Vietnam. Similarly, the caregiver in “After the Storm” is offered the opportunity to move abroad. The decisions each of the characters make regarding life overseas underscores the collection’s commitment to diverse opinions and observations that reinforce the diversity of Vietnamese experiences.

This breadth of subject matter in Longings is impressive, but the variety of represented regions within Vietnam might be even more significant. The editors have done an excellent job finding representation from all areas, including rural and urban settings. Whether it’s a southern island, a northwest farming village, or a Central Highlands forest, the rural settings all suggest a certain timelessness. The often miserable experiences of the characters are not dependent on where or even when they live. Endurance, suffering and acceptance are thus presented as Vietnam-wide qualities.

The editors have done an excellent job finding representation from all areas, including rural and urban settings. Whether it’s a southern island, a northwest farming village, or a Central Highlands forest, the rural settings all suggest a certain timelessness.

But other stories, particularly those set in the cities, are very much of the modern world, with references to social media, business trends and cultural changes. Those placed in the overt present allow for interesting commentary on the pursuit of happiness relevant to younger generations. In ‘The Eternal Forest,’ by Trịnh Bích Ngân, the narrator is representative of an educated, urban-dwelling class that many readers will relate to: “Like everyone else, she had experienced the vicissitudes of life. She reflected on herself and her life and dared not abandon the online masses to be alone. In addition to her few close friends, many people whom she had never met in person ‘liked’ her photos. That was sufficient for her — the ‘likes’ she received filled the days’ emptiness. An emptiness that consumed her heart even when she and her husband made love.” This particular story and several others help the collection to not only look at Vietnamese society of the recent past but also the present with the assumption that both are needed to understand where it may be headed.

Because several stories take place in the nation’s mountainous western regions, Dao, H'Mông and Ê-đê ethnic minority communities are represented. Particular customs, such as Dao women using a separate entrance to their homes for a full month after giving birth as depicted in ‘Raindrops on his Shoulders,’ by Tống Ngọc Hân, remind readers that Vietnamese is not synonymous with the Kinh ethnic majority. Indeed, Kinh Vietnamese only make up 85% of the population and it's incorrect to conflate the two when attempting to provide a panoramic view of society via literature. Some, particularly western readers, may perhaps raise issues with the fact that two of the three ethnic minority stories were written by Kinh authors, raising questions of appropriation and questioning who has the right to tell which stories. Saigoneer spoke with Đỗ Bích Thúy about her story in this collection, ‘The Sound of Lip Lute Behind the Stone Fence’ for a longer feature detailing how it became the basis for the popular film Chuyện của Pao (The Story of Pao) wherein we discussed this issue. The situation in some ways mirrors the reasons why there were no female writers during the colonial period while also leaving space to debate how matters of representation may differ in American versus Vietnamese contexts.

An unburdening rooted in realism

Much of this review of Longings has involved noticing similarities between the stories and recognizing powerful deviations. This can be done for the writing styles as well. They all fit within the larger category of realism with no wild experimentations. However, differing points of view, voices, tenses, timelines and descriptive interests keep each story feeling wholly distinct while allowing readers to grasp the variety of influences and styles that exist in modern Vietnamese literature, reflective of a vibrant and evolving scene.

When I first read, ‘On the Rạng Riverbank’ by Trịnh Thị Phương Trà, it struck me as a familiar story. It opens with a journalist from the city working on a newspaper’s annual Tết issue, who travels to a remote, rural area to interview a widow about her experience meeting and falling in love with a local man, and her decades of isolation after he dies not long after their wedding night. Their bond is strengthened throughout the brief personal moments afforded them during the war with America. This tale of sacrifice and longing will not seem unique to anyone who has read much Vietnamese literature.

And yet, if one looks at it from a slightly different angle, it offers powerful commentary on literature generally and this book specifically. As Quan recently explained to me, the woman is only able to share her story because the newspaper wants to publish it. And she seems to have been waiting for such a moment, the narrator noting that she tells it “like she had been practicing this soliloquy before some invisible audience for years.” By unburdening her life’s narrative, she brings it to others who may have family or friends with similar stories who have never had the opportunity or confidence to share them. Literature is thus a crucial element in the dissemination of experiences. The stories in this book function the same way, and in doing Longings allows readers to engage in the construction of collective knowledge, understanding and, ultimately, empathy.

Social Commentary, Empathy in Nguyễn Quang Thân's Short Story Collection

2024-04-11T12:00:00+07:00

Nguyễn Quang Thân passed away on March 4, 2017, several weeks before I moved to Saigon. So of course I never met him, but I feel like I know him. My first introduction was via An Insignificant Family, the fictionalized memoir written by his wife, writer Dạ Ngân, which includes a description of the 10 years they spent apart, writing letters to one another from opposite ends of the nation, followed by their life together. In the years since I first interviewed her about that novel, I’ve been blessed to be adopted as her son; one of the greatest gifts of my life. No visit with her goes past without him being mentioned. For years, Nguyễn Quang Thân has simply been Ba Thân.

Photos of Nguyễn Quang Thân from Dạ Ngân's personal collection.

How to review a close one's creative work?

Since first speaking with Dạ Ngân at the living room table where she shared so many meals with Thân, I’ve met his sons, brother, and sisters; and visited his former homes in Hải Phòng and Hanoi. I saw the balcony where he raised pigs during the nation’s poorest times, gazed across the park near his office he would walk through every afternoon while taking a break from writing articles, and of course, traveled to the sites most important to him and Dạ Ngân: the Vũng Tàu veranda where they first met at a writer’s conference in 1983; the pagoda where they first kissed; the bridge in Cần Thơ where he cycled back and forth looking to recognize her clothes on a drying rack (and later memorialized in a poem I helped translate). I’ve been told his many jokes and wordplays; anecdotes about how he traded those pigs he raised for a motorcycle and confounded train staff in Europe; and the many views, mannerisms, memories, habits and preferences one collects about the people close to them. Learning the simple, intimate details of a person, such as knowing he likes to put fresh durian in his coffee or observing the humble ingenuity of the fabric hanger he made from twine and a PVC pipe can feel like reading pages from their diary

I offer this personal preamble to explain why writing this review of Chân Dung, a bilingual collection of his stories released last month, has been so difficult. How could I possibly separate the man from his work? How could I present an unbiased appraisal of the book that fits within the appropriate parameters of a review? Then I began reading, and all became effortless. The stories are works of their own vitality and power because of Thân’s prodigious imagination and keen desire to understand and describe the world around him without relying solely on his own experiences. This trait matches the way he was first introduced in An Insignificant Family; as having “the avid interest of a small boy who has just arrived in his promised land.”

Novels and short story collections written by Nguyễn Quang Thân from Dạ Ngân's personal collection.

Each of the five stories in Chân Dung was written and set in the mid-1980s and early 1990s and offers glimpses into the culture, daily life, concerns and preoccupations of the time via the experiences of ordinary individuals. A talented painter, a poverty-stricken widow, a rural nun, a disillusioned divorcee, the son of a high-ranking party member, the daughter of a hired driver and the lecherous wife of a wealthy businessman are among the characters readers will meet. The stories find many of them at important but not necessarily climactic moments in their lives, when they learn something about the world and, by extension, themselves. When reading the stories more than 30 years after they were written, some of the scenarios and details seem strange and distant but the themes of lust, loneliness, morality, and greed remain fresh, particularly when presented by a voice wise enough to know when to make a sly joke and slip laughter in amongst the tears.

Biting social commentary from a keen observer

Chân Dung offers numerous criticisms, mainly of society’s emphasis on wealth and official position over actions and character. This judgment is most overtly witnessed in the contrasting behavior of a chauffeur and his boss in ‘Thanh Minh.’ The chauffeur’s career is limited by his previous employment by the French, while the local official enjoys a series of promotions despite a dearth of intellectual curiosity and thus relies on his chauffeur’s knowledge of art and history to get ahead. The chauffeur’s daughter is denied books and movie screenings because her father is not ranked high enough in the party, while the official’s son fails upwards to a college degree and a comfortable job despite never studying. There is no justice or comeuppance in the story, and the struggle for position continues after death, via the corrupt and politically motivated squabbles over burial sites determined by cadre ranking. Still, the narrator offers the resigned hope that in the afterlife “our individual lives will dissolve into one another, to be re-formed into new and different entities which will be more suitable to that eternal world. Hatred and debt will be erased, leaving only love.”

Thân earns the right to criticize society because he expresses a sincere love for it and his fellow citizens in the stories.

The searing depictions of the upper class continue in ‘The Waltz of the Chamber Pot.’ The narrator, an unlucky intellectual, escapes poverty by working as a servant in the home of a rich woman. His position allows him to observe her engage in a series of extramarital affairs with men representing different archetypes of society including an old, lecture-prone professor who pontificates on the concept of “New Women” and publicly denounces Hanoi fashion as being too revealing while requesting his mistress wear a two-piece bikini from Thailand. When he is unable to satisfy her in bed, he blames everything but himself, including her western lingerie that “confused” him with its two openings — “nothing but a luxury product typical of the whole blasted system of democratic capitalism.” She replaces him with a young “bourgeoisie capitalist cad,” whose bawdy jokes, British liquor and masculine vitality quickly lose their appeal; he is revealed to be a boring, hollow example of nouveau-riche vapidity that would go so far as to manipulate the entire city’s hột vịt lộn market just to show off. Even her husband, a powerful merchant, is a cruel and vindictive man who views his wife as a commodity to be acquired via shows of power; the power he was given by a society that includes the underemployed intellectual.

Thân earns the right to criticize society because he expresses a sincere love for it and his fellow citizens in the stories. Often, natural settings serve as stand-ins for the objects of his affections. Readers grasp his sentiments for his nation via descriptions such as: “Under Mother’s direction, the whole family pitched in to break new ground for a garden along the banks of the stream; there was the sound of washing the uncooked rice in the morning, the sight of the runoff from the hard kernels flowing down the riverbanks like milk. Laughing thrushes warbled their song from behind the guava trees that Mother had planted.” It’s images like this and declarations such as “the truth of the cloud was really the rain,” that assure readers that a thoughtful and caring individual is observing the world in which he occasionally points out flaws.

Original publications of two of the stories compiled in Chân Dung from Dạ Ngân's personal collection.

Words from an empath

The satirizing of the rich and powerful is effective in part because Thân offers an alternative. The stories take a tender, forgiving approach to the poor with particular praise reserved for artists and scholars. In ‘The Portrait,’ a painter has the unique gift of depicting an individual in a way that reveals their soul. His life lacks extravagances and he expresses no desire for fame or high position, instead taking delight in the simplicity of an old water kettle and the doting presence of his niece. The serenity he enjoys as well as the love of family and friends suggests to readers that this is an example one should follow, for not only personal happiness but to achieve a just and harmonious society. This story, in particular, is one where I had difficulty separating the work from the writer. It reminded me of how Thân lived humbly and was happiest when his home was filled with the laughter of his family and friends who were writers, artists, scholars and musicians.

Despite the moments of scathing ridicule, the stories are not overly moralizing. Love and lust, in particular, are complex human realities presented plainly, not so readers can deem actions right or wrong. For example, In ‘An Autumn Wind,’ the protagonist has a sexual encounter with a rice wine maker as a way to thank him for supplying her abusive, alcoholic husband with the liquor he desperately demands, but refuses to work for. Her action is not seen as a matter of moral failure but rather an example of the unenviable realities that come with poverty and bad luck. Readers will come away from the book with an unwavering belief that unfortunate people should be viewed with empathy and we must remind ourselves that we cannot know what private miseries and hardships a stranger is shouldering. This applies to the characters in ‘The Woman at the Bus Stop’ as well. In this short tale, a man and a woman — who have both been treated badly by lovers and left with nothing but a distrust of the opposite sex — meet and forge a bond out of desperation. The ending, which I will not spoil, offers a powerful comment on the extent to which human generosity may offer solace and solution.

Further securing Thân’s rhetorical position as a qualified commentator on the state of the world is his frequent allusions to works of literature and history.

Further securing Thân’s rhetorical position as a qualified commentator on the state of the world is his frequent allusions to works of literature and history. Naturally gifted with languages, Thân knew French, taught himself Russian and English and was well-read across cultures and genres, as evident in his sprinkling in a variety of allusions such as Konstantin Simonov’s poem ‘Wait for Me,’ and Alphonse Daudet’s ‘The Stars.’ These are helpfully noted in the footnotes along with other necessary and interesting references such as Văn Mười Hai, the operator of a notorious pyramid scheme in the 1980s. Elegantly translated by Rosemary Nguyễn and Mạnh Chương, the book reads naturally in English and presents no difficulties in contextual understanding for those with moderate knowledge of Vietnamese history and culture.

By the time this review is published, I will have asked Dạ Ngân about some of the “behind-the-scenes” details for Chân Dung, probing for the inspirations for the stories and characters as well as inquiring about what she remembers from that time — Did he send her drafts? What did he say about each? Did his editors demand he change any details? But like you reader, at this moment, I don’t have or need any of those details to fully admire and appreciate the wit and generosity of each story. And you are like me in the fact that I’ll never get to sit down and have a conversation with Nguyễn Quang Thân as I’d wish. But through his writing, he will live forever and can continue to share his imaginative understanding of the world.

A World of Riveting Medically Inspired Magic in Vanessa Le's YA Debut

2024-03-15T09:00:00+07:00

Captured by Butchers, the “blackmarket bogey men who deal in rare goods,” Nhika Suonyasan is caged and auctioned off to the city’s elite. A figure in a fox mask attempting to purchase her is outbid by a rich family that carts her off to a mansion that boasts luxury beyond anything Nhika has ever seen. The family immediately commands her to heal a witness to the wealthy patriarch’s death.

Nhika, the protagonist in Vanessa Le’s debut young adult novel The Last Bloodcarver, is a heartsooth. Before being abducted and sold, she survives the streets of Theumas by her wits and audacity, hawking eucalyptus and ginseng as cures. She believes she may be the last of the Yarongese, an island people wiped out by war, genocide, human vivisection, and grotesque methods of torture. The Yarongese are, as Nhika’s grandmother would have said, the recipients of a blessing and a duty to heal. Heartsooths possess the talent to lay their hands on a body to cure it of diseases and wounds.

The devastations of war also bring dehumanization and disinformation to the fiction realm. What remains in the aftermath of the island’s genocide is a distorted mythology of Nhika's people — witches, necromancers, liver eaters. Nhika and her kind are maliciously referred to as “bloodcarvers, a breed that fell with her island.” Meanwhile, the bloodcarvers' ability to rend flesh from bone and grind bones to dust has been lost through the ransacking of medical texts as well as the massacre of elders. Nhika exists as a pariah, hunted by people who intend to kill her. Yet she is simultaneously coveted by those who hope to exploit her gift to heal.

A graduate of Brown University in Health and Human Biology, Vanessa Le breathes new life into the genre via her inclusion of science.

A graduate of Brown University in Health and Human Biology, Le breathes new life into the genre via her inclusion of science. In this YA fantasy, hearthsooths can turn off or on someone’s pain receptors, can “mute the buzz of adrenaline and stress hormones,” to heal herself or others. Le’s intimate familiarity with human biology allows her to establish elements of horror in the book as well. Bodies are exhumed. Photos of vivisections pass as medical inquiry. Mad science tips the sci-fi scales in favor of gruesome horror. And yet, Le does not hit the reader over the head with the grotesque. Its serpentine inclusion gives the reader just enough to grapple with the meaning of terror. While the inclusion of the horror genre does not overwhelm the text, it certainly is enough to let the readers know how high the stakes are for Nhika. Meanwhile, Le’s command of her craft means we need no suspension of disbelief to believe magic exists in the world.

The society Le creates fits neatly into the speculative fiction genre. In the steampunk world, automatons exist side-by-side with typewriters, while auto carriages and horse-drawn carriages populate the chapters. Sci-fi medical marvels abound in the novel’s segregated blue and silver city-state that includes sumptuous gardens residing far from Nhika’s squalor. A river that runs through the vibrant city allows junk sails to float into the harbor beside pagoda-styled roofs and domes with finials. Horror, mystery, and folklore blend as seamlessly as the real and imagined architectural styles.

The book author Vanessa Le.

One of The Last Bloodcarver’s most satisfying elements is its ability to weave folklore into the plot via small details that are rich in cultural subtext. In accordance with depictions of fox characters around the world, the mysterious man who wears the fox mask is clever and frequently takes what does not belong to him. The carp mask, however, references a more specific Asian belief. In Vietnam and nearby nations, the carp can transform into a dragon and it is thus not a surprise that during Nhika’s quest for peace, freedom and love she dons the carp mask.

One of The Last Bloodcarver’s most satisfying elements is its ability to weave folklore into the plot via small details that are rich in cultural subtext.

As an international school librarian in Vietnam, I find curating a collection that reflects the host language and foreign students to be a fun challenge. Paired with that challenge is the duty to have a balanced collection and not limit the options to narratives of war, or boat refugees, or immigration. Le does not include any of these already oft-told narratives in her book. For Le’s young adult audience, speculative fiction rules the page.

The Last Bloodcarver can fill important gaps in library collections that seek to provide “windows, sliding glass doors, and mirrors” to representation. Young readers get to see and read characters with their names, customs, and folklore, all while getting adventure, sci-fi, and let’s face it, a smidge of romance. Have you ever met a teenage reader who doesn’t like a smidge of it? Can a librarian curate a collection without it? Librarians that seek to diversify their collections with authentic voices must surely include The Last Bloodcarver on their shelves.

'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.

'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.

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.

A Study of the Mekong Through Stories Told on the River

2022-08-23T10:00:00+07:00

Much like humanity, great systems of the natural world rely on connectivity to thrive.

This is the thesis of Last Days of the Mighty Mekong, a 2019 book by Southeast Asia expert Brian Eyler. This highly readable book takes you on a deeply researched 10-chapter journey down the incredible Mekong River, from its headwaters high in China's Yunnan Province to its confluence with the East Sea in the Mekong Delta 4,350 kilometers later.

Unlike academic papers or dense research tomes, Eyler writes in the first person, describing his many visits to points along the great river over the years, all while sharing insight and anecdotes from farmers, fishermen, experts and officials living and working near the waterway. Impressively, he has created a very important book that is part-travelogue, part-anthropological study.

The most relevant chapter to Vietnam-watchers is the final one, which covers the serious challenges facing the Mekong Delta. I wrote about these issues earlier in the year, and spoke to Eyler during my research. His deep knowledge of the river system all the way up through China is very impressive.

As a result, the entire book should be required reading for anyone living somewhere impacted by what is happening to the Mekong, and that includes everyone in Saigon.

Children fish in a canal in the Mekong Delta. Photo by Michael Tatarski.

I consider myself relatively well-versed on the Mekong and the debates over the construction of more dams to the impact of climate change and agricultural practices along its banks, but Eyler's wide-ranging curiosity and expertise takes his book in a number of fascinating, unexpected directions.

For example, he introduced me to the concept of Zomia, described by Yale anthropologist James C. Scott in his 2009 book The Art of Not Being Governed as the lands above 300 meters of altitude ranging from Vietnam's Central Highlands to northeastern India, encompassing parts of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and southern China along the way.

While not an official feature on any map, Eyler (and Scott) argues that the dozens of highland ethnic minority groups that live in these areas often transcend national boundaries and live outside the culture of each nation's dominant group.

They are also more adept at utilizing the Mekong and the land along it more sustainably than people coming from major coastal cities, as they have called these remote regions home for generations.

Chapter four of Last Days of the Mighty Mekong looks at the Akha minority group in Yunnan, where the Mekong slices through dramatic valleys that make agriculture difficult. The Akha, however, have made farming work, but their livelihoods have been disrupted by dam reservoirs which flooded their land, and misguided environmental regulations from officials in lowland cities.

A flower harvest outside Sa Đéc. Photo by Michael Tatarski.

Eyler also takes valuable digressions into the concept of mandala states, the French colonial construction of a Laos nation-state, Hun Sen's rise to political domination in Cambodia, American engineering projects that transformed the Mekong Delta, and much more. I found these sections, which are deftly woven into the narrative of the current state of the river and its ecosystem, enjoyable and necessary, as they allow readers to understand the full range of political, historical, social and environmental inputs that have led to today.

It is ultimately the people who rely on the Mekong to live who will pay the biggest price of environmental damage.

While each chapter deals with serious problems, from overtourism around Erhai Lake in Yunnan to Laos' ambition to become the “Battery of Southeast Asia” and much more, Eyler includes ample levity as well, largely thanks to the characters he meets along the way.

For example, in a Thai town called Chiang Khong in the Golden Triangle, he describes the owner of the Bamboo Mexican House Restaurant as such: “In his late sixties, Jib dresses like he is a 1970s Grateful Dead groupie. He is always wearing a knitted Rasta cap, and a blown glass medallion hands around his neck fastened to an old knotted hemp rope.”

Such encounters turn this into a memorable book, as it is ultimately the people who rely on the Mekong to live who will pay the biggest price of environmental damage.

Of course, Eyler does not ignore the beating that nature is taking along the river's immense length. For example, the chapter devoted to the gigantic Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia, which is one of the most unique ecosystems in the world, notes how lax fishing policies and impacts from upstream dams are wiping out the top of the lake's food chain. Incredibly, the Tonle Sap produces more fish catch than all of North America's rivers and lakes combined, feeding millions of Cambodians every day, but people living along, and on, it are noticing irregular water levels and fewer fish species than in the past.

The Mekong Delta is just one part of the Mekong's vast ecosystem.

Eyler's theme of connectivity really comes together in the final chapter, on the Mekong Delta, as the region feels the cumulative effects of every policy and action taken along the river's journey down from the Himalayas.

He notes, for example, that in the past, the delta grew by 16 square kilometers — or roughly 3,000 football fields — every year, whereas it is now shrinking by 430 football fields annually, a trend that will be difficult, though not impossible, to break: “As the delta sinks from groundwater extraction, naturally more seawater will penetrate deeper into the delta's inland. This, in turn, will increase the need for groundwater extraction.”

The title is a warning, not a guarantee: If people in the Mekong's riparian countries don't take a holistic view of the great river, they will kill it.

Sadly, much of the damage to the delta is coming from within Vietnam. This is not to discount the twin threats of climate change and upstream dams, but Eyler describes ruinous agricultural policies such as a relentless drive for more rice production and an over-reliance on dikes at great length.

He quotes Nguyễn Hữu Thiện, a delta expert who lives in Cần Thơ: “Now the whole delta is compartmentalized by dikes, and the rivers act merely as gutters. With the exception of the Hậu and Tiền channels, most other rivers are entirely imprisoned by their banks for much of their course to the sea. The water and the floodplains are not connected anymore so they are robbed of sediment deposits.”

This is not to say that the book is fully pessimistic. The title is a warning, not a guarantee: if people in the Mekong's riparian countries don't take a holistic view of the great river, they will kill it. But by understanding that each step by any of these nations impacts its neighbors, we can help return the Mekong to its glory. That is a vital call to action, and this is a vital read.

This article was originally published in 2020.

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.

Saigoneer Bookshelf: Ocean Vuong Asks Questions in 'Time Is a Mother'

2022-04-20T09:00:00+07:00

Fame and poetry rarely go together.

The average person has trouble naming five contemporary poets, and most will admit to not having read a single book of poetry in the past year. But I suspect if one were to poll readers in Vietnam as to the author of the last book of poetry written in English that they read, the most common answer would be Ocean Vuong.

The reasons for this are numerous. Vuong, whose accolades include a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and a T.S. Eliot prize, is as close to a rockstar as exists in America’s poetry landscape right now. While highly acclaimed in that insular world for nearly a decade, his 2019 novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous catapulted him to a level of fame few poets ever reach and included a stop on late night television, while his novel is now being made into a Hollywood film. His second poetry collection, Time Is a Mother, is thus, unsurprisingly, one of the most anticipated poetry books in recent years, receiving attention from major publications that normally devote little space to American poetry.

Ocean Vuong at home with his dog, Tofu. Photo by Aram Boghosian via LA Times.

Vuong’s prominence is magnified in Vietnam. Born in Saigon, his work is sprinkled with allusions to Vietnamese history and culture. The recent translation of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, titled Một thoáng ta rực rỡ ở nhân gian and published by Hội nhà văn, further cemented his connection with his home country. Meanwhile, although the past few decades have seen great acclaim for diasporic writers including Việt Thanh Nguyễn, Thi Bui, Kim Thúy and others, Vietnamese voices remain under-represented in global literature, making Vuong an important, aspirational story for readers around the world.

Such a high profile expands the audience who will pick up Time Is a Mother and what they will be looking for inside. Some will focus on Vuong’s identity as a Vietnamese American; some will key in on what his work means for the LGBTQ+ community; his exploration of addiction will draw some in; while his examinations of loss and grief will speak to others and his mastery of language will entice devoted poetry readers of all backgrounds.

… stop writing

about your mother they said

but I can never take out

the rose at it blooms back as my own

Vuong proclaims in the stand-out long poem, 'Dear Rose.' Vuong’s previous books have indeed spent considerable attention on the mother character named Rose, and Time Is a Mother continues to explore the speaker’s relationship with her, though now in the context of her passing, recalled as “a face / at the window / a thumbprint left over / from whose god?”

But beyond that penultimate poem and scattered references elsewhere, grief, loss and mourning manifest themselves not through ruminations on his mother, but via friends and family members, as well as his own mortality. His depictions range from beautiful (“I felt things that made death so large it was indistinguishable from air—and I went on destroying inside it like wind in a storm”) to graphic (“I let a man spit in my mouth / because my eyes wouldn’t water / after Evan shot himself”). While anguish lingers throughout the book, it serves as a shadow cast by and across exuberance for living and supports the understanding that:

Maybe,

like you, I was one of those people

whose loves the world most

when I’m rock-bottom in my fast car

going nowhere.

Vuong rarely discusses death without violence, but violence leads a double life wherein wounds are not always fatal. It is inexorably connected to sex, love, nature, history and culture. Vuong frequently examines its relationship to concepts of America, as exemplified by 'Old Glory,' which showcases how central the language of assault and savagery is to American slang.

He references Tamir Rice, a victim of police brutality, and people of color who were lynched in 19^th- and early-20^th-century California. Poetry finds itself, perhaps moreso than anywhere else in America right now, grappling with the nation’s legacies of, and continued commitment to, violence, and Vuong adds his own perspective. In 'American Legend,' a poem filled with classic Americana images including large lawns and an old poodle, he details how it took crashing their big Ford car for him to be close enough to embrace his father for the first time in decades.

Death is an implicit potential outcome for drug addiction, but Vuong approaches the subject through a perspective of recovery. How much readers want to connect the author’s real experiences abusing pills and those of the speaker in the book is, of course, up to them, but the poems do present chemical dependency in a past tense that matches Vuong’s biography. In several instances, the speaker describes the physical and mental changes experienced during time in rehab, noting:

I’ll learn to swim

when I’m out once

& for all

the body floats

for a reason maybe

we can swim right up

to it grab on

kick us back

to shore Peter I think

I’m doing it right

now finally maybe

I’m winning even

if it just looks like

my fingers are shaking

Vuong may visit these themes that will be familiar to those that have read his other works, but his writing has gotten sharper and somewhat more direct, with an increase in dark humor. He remains a master of enjambed lines that can be read with several simultaneous meanings and has a preference for images that do the heavy emotional lifting, which make his poems daunting for those who do not frequently read poetry.

But while not conversational, many of the poems are easier to parse compared to Night Sky With Exit Wounds, especially because of stand-alone phrases that read like aphorisms. “I’ll show you the beautiful thing we can do to mirrors just by standing still,” “imagine being born in a hospice in flames,” and “Is the memory of a song the shadow of a sound or is that too much?” are witty and accessible enough that I expect to soon see them grace the Instagram captions of people who are not commonly into poetry.

Unlike more narrative poets, one cannot approach Time Is a Mother the way one does other types of literature, and this relative difficulty, coupled with his fame, creates an interesting situation. The book will certainly find its way into the hands of people that profess to not like poetry, not understand it, or worst of all, not feel smart enough for it. To them, I would relay the advice of National Public Radio’s Book of the Day host, Andrew Limbong, who suggests forgetting everything one learned in school about poetry and arrive at it personally, because “it's not like you have to know a thing about cinematography to appreciate a movie — right?”

I first encountered Vuong’s poetry back in 2013, before I’d moved to Vietnam and without any personal connection to the subjects in his work. I was simply in awe of how he combined power and beauty in his metaphors, and the way his near-whisper of a voice consumed all the attention in a room. It’s been thrilling to see him rise to the levels of fame he has in the ensuing decade, and a little strange to hear his name mentioned casually by friends and strangers who have little more than a passing interest in poetry.

On the heels of being named a Ruth Lilly/Sargent Rosenberg Fellow in 2014, Vuong flew down for a reading and events in Miami, where I was in graduate school studying poetry. I wished I had asked him at the time what he would say about his future success, or what he would offer to the diverse group of readers he would one day have regarding how to approach his work. But for all his obvious virtuosity, even then, who could have possibly predicted where he was headed?

Rather, I asked him about how he separates the art from the artist. He responded with a paraphrase from the poet Merwin: “Writing is the weaving of one’s thread through a fabric, so that when the needle threads the fabric, all of yourself goes through to color that fabric; you can’t separate those threads.” Vuong added that when a writer pushes beyond those threads without transcending them, it allows him or her to “discover something else…the next question. And the best questions are always better than their answers.”

Time Is a Mother isn’t a book of answers, but rather one of questions. It matters little if they are questions that a reader is already asking, hadn’t yet thought to ask, or has no interest in asking, as Vuong weaves them into a fabric worth ensconcing oneself in.

Saigoneer Bookshelf: The Instruction Manual of Phillips H92X Offers Something for Everyone

2022-04-01T13:00:00+07:00

Engaging plot or strong characters? Fantastic escapism or insightful depictions of the real world? A sweeping epic across generations and nations, or a deep examination of a brief moment in time? What do you look for in a book? Well, this work has a little something for everyone.

“Congratulations and welcome to Phillips!” it begins. This warm and celebratory opening may go down with “Call me Ishmael” and “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” as one of the greatest first lines in literary history, and it only gets better from there.

The Instruction Manual of Phillips H92X plunges the reader into peril and intrigue immediately with a list of more than 40 dangers, warnings and cautions, including “Do not fill the pan with oil as this may cause a fire hazard,” and “Do not fry fresh potatoes at a temperature above 180°C (to minimize the production of acrylamide).”

Its early claim that: “This Phillips appliance complies with all applicable standards and regulations regarding electromagnetic fields” does not reassure readers, but instead reminds them of the existence of electromagnetics and, by extension, the chilling truth that all humanity is a single solar flare or errant space-pulse away from annihilation. Only an author who has endured great pain and suffering would be so bold as to douse the reader with the full and unfiltered savagery of the world and in doing so, swiftly remind them of their comical fragility from the onset.

Thankfully, the uncredited author (such modesty!) takes pity on us and shifts the focus to more positive matters. Intricate steps for cooking food follow the horrors, which seems to remind us that in the face of guaranteed agony, humanity’s only transitory escape rests in relishing the earthly pleasures of the body. One guesses the author would have included carnal acts if he or she were not aiming for an all-age audience.

But rather than just list the procedures for heating food to an edible temperature, The Instruction Manual of Phillips H92X shows them via illustration. The shift from bullet points of dangers to hand-drawn images is a genre-decimating stroke of creativity that is likely to revolutionize written works for decades to come. In fact, once we have seen the appliances plug secured in the socket, the author never returns to a written language, as if it has been transcended. Fittingly, the work ends on a simple hand pressing the power button. It is a striking image which suggests that after revealing so much harsh truth, the author still had the generosity to lift his ink-stained hand one last time and show us “off.” After all, an unlit power button awaits us all.

The Instruction Manual of Phillips H92X features no publication date, as if aiming for relevancy in any time period. Yet, it is undoubtedly a work of our current age. Beyond the advanced understanding of technical innovations so succinctly displayed, it embraces inclusivity in a way that would be unfathomable mere decades ago. For example, it is written in eight languages including Vietnamese, Arabic, Thai and Russian. Moreover, the hand shown in the illustrations contains no color at all and no gender indicators. Certainly, it is relevant for everyone regardless of race, religion, sex or background. It thus gives us hope that the world can evolve beyond our cruel discriminations.

Don’t be put off that this brilliant text is technically an instruction manual, or that one must purchase a Phillips HD92X air-fryer to get it; once you unfold the page, the pleasures are unmatched by anything you’ve read before.

Saigoneer is not affiliated with Phillips and this review was written without the company's influence.

Editor's note: Happy April Fools' Day! This article is part of Saigoneer's 2022 April Fools' Day celebration. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the writer’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.