Loạt Soạt - Saigoneer

Within the Shocking Brutality of Queer Novel 'Parallels' Rests Poignant Poetry

2025-08-25T14:00:00+07:00

Parallels by Vũ Đình Giang shocked me. While I refrain from spoiling its plot, allow me to share my experience when reading this novel, as translated by Khải Q. Nguyễn, to better explain how the book jolted me from expectations and why the experience provides a unique and valuable addition to the array of Vietnamese novels translated into English.

Parallels, originally published in Vietnamese in 2007 under the name Song Song, follows the lives of three homosexual men in an unnamed Vietnamese city. As established from the onset, it shifts focus between H, a relatively stable design firm employee; and G.g, his artist boyfriend, who seems disturbed from the beginning. A third character, Kan, who works with H, eventually enters to create a love triangle. Told via alternating perspectives interspersed with epistolary moments, the story flirts with surrealism before establishing reality as more frightening than any hallucination.

Cover of the Vietnamese original Song Song. Photo via Tiki.

Each of Parallels’ numbered chapters begins without establishing whose perspective is being offered, causing initial challenges in orienting oneself, particularly early in the book when reader tries to become acquainted with the characters and settings. Upon adjusting to this style, I could focus on what I believed to be a novel content to dwell on stylized depictions of the men’s mundane lives, augmented by articulations of emotional and psychological upheaval. About one-third of the way through, I sensed the book had settled into its final form where, absent a plot, the described moods, feelings, and ideas about art and life would constitute its gravity. The experience, I expected, would be a bit like how chapter 26 opens, with G.g opining: “People often complain that a year goes by too quickly. But for me, it often feels too long. Throughout the past year, there were no significant incidents or events. After work, I didn’t say goodbye to my colleagues; I just got on my motorcycle and left. After leaving any group of people, I immediately reverted to my original position, the position of an individual object. That rapid qualitative change was the result of a metaphysical needle being inserted into my body, draining the blood, and then pumping air in. I’d become an empty shell, a lifeless corpse, a hollow carcass. I’d be nothing but an empty nylon bag dragged along by the wind.”

An acrid strangeness fills the space where a plot could fit early in the book. H and G.g fritter away their time with bizarre games, including filling a basin with a putrid mixture of household goods and ingredients so as to drown the sun via its reflection. They paint mushroom caps so H’s co-workers think he is consuming poisonous fungi. They even discuss plans to murder an adopted puppy upon its first birthday while G.g repeatedly fantasizes about murder: “I didn’t feel guilty when I thought about killing him. I thought it was a beautiful idea, very poetic. Fly. Fly. Fly. I wanted to see how humans fly. I was waiting for a chance, and I would do it.”

Initially, I took these bouts of imagined violence as the angsty ramblings of poetic young adults, intoxicated by their macabre posturing. When G.g calls H in the middle of the night to announce that he is surrounded by wild wolves, H’s rational response assured me that there was a clear line between fantastic derangement and reality, and at least one of the characters knew which side we stood upon: “Do you think you’re lost in some wild forest? Listen to me, this is the city, and wolves can only come out of the Discovery Channel.”

However, soon the violence ramps up, and along with it, enough clarity to remove any uncertainties that could have cloaked terrific carnage in the surreal daydreams as had been suggested by a quote attributed to the puppy that comes before the first chapter: “Don’t rush to trust anyone, don’t try to find meaning in actions; maybe they’re simply a game, maybe it’s all the product of madness.” While I will leave it vague enough so as not to ruin a reading of it, the actions are in line with a grisly Hollywood movie that would need scenes trimmed before it could be screened at the local CGV.

Along with the violence, the novel’s approach to sexuality undergoes a radical shift in the second half of the book. At first, I was struck by how commonplace the homosexual lifestyles were presented, and found myself reflecting on how this reveals a normalizing of gay relationships in society. Love between men was referenced with the casual respect paid to any routine aspect of life. For example, early on H remarks off-handedly when describing G.g’s home: “So many times I’ve had to discard used condoms that G.g left under the bed, and I always had to have a tube of lubricant available, for G.g didn’t care.”

Somewhat rapidly, this changes, and the novel becomes filled with lurid details and graphic descriptions of BDSM. This particularly occurs as the characters share stories of their pasts, including Kan who recounts a lover who enjoyed being beaten:

“Kneeling, arms bent forwards at the elbows, he tilted his head upwards at an angle of about fifteen degrees. His thighs were wide apart. With that posture and his white, naked body, he looked like a frog with its skin peeled, patiently waiting for its prey.
The bait was the lashing of the whip.
The frog’s face deformed with each convulsion. Its mouth opened wide; its tongue was filled with foam, it groaned incessantly, and it soon reached the climax of its orgasm, sending a strong stream of semen onto the bed.”

While not interested in discerning morality, these depictions, which include a predatory relationship between a young, possibly underage man and a much older man who becomes his "adoptive father,” seem to relish in their potential to unsettle polite society.

Much like the transition from daydreamed violence to horrific bloodshed, this move from blasé depictions of sex lives to graphic retellings upended what I had assumed Parallels was at its core. These surprising shifts, I realized, are rather unique to Vietnamese literature translated into English. Many translated novels offer familiar narrative arcs that at least follow the rules they set out for themselves at the onset. While some such as Nguyễn Ngọc Tư's Water: A Chronicle, deviate from conventional storytelling techniques, plot structures and movements, relishing in intentional mystery and lack of closure, and others, including Thuận's Chinatown, refuse to meet reader’s expectations for tension and meaning, I have yet to read one that so flagrently upends the expectations it establishes.

Having finished the novel, I will return to the beginning, re-reading with awareness of where it ends and suspicion that the slippage of angst into mayhem should have been obvious, and I merely glossed over the hints. Or maybe I misunderstood the reality of the ending. And if either of these is true, it’s of little importance, because while the plot and its consequences, which are both legally profound and emotionally wrought, provided the tension that carried me through the book’s final half, it’s the unique style, voices, and heart-wrenching anecdotes that will remain with me. These are present from the very beginning.

In juicy, metaphor-rich prose, readers are gifted access to the complex interiors of complete individuals. It’s unclear which moments within these minds frightened me most; those when I heard echoes of myself, or recognized that the full spectrum of humanity contains individuals with diametrically opposing experiences and philosophies: “People thought I was simple, and a bit unstable. I didn’t give a fuck. Caring about what people thought was a waste of time. I had my own goals and principles. I lived for myself and because of myself; I did what was needed to meet what I aspired, demanded, worshipped. I knew I was selfish, but I was happy that way. I only cared about what I wanted, and I took up all its ramifications. Norms belonged to another paradigm that had nothing to do with me. I had my own universe, my own satellites, and I revolved around my own orbit.”

A Story of Personal, Political Reckoning in a Singaporean Writer's Fictional Wartime Vietnam

2025-07-14T10:00:00+07:00

The Immolation first came to me as a bewildering surprise: at a now-relocated bookshop in Singapore, the book caught the eyes of the 17-year-old me. It was not so much the cover’s pale blue background, or the expression of ennui on the author’s post-impressionist portrait, but rather its dealing with the American War. After all, the title directly referenced the iconic protest by the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức, who set himself on fire on the street of Saigon.

Written by Chinese Singaporean writer Goh Poh Seng, The Immolation was first published in 1977, and republished in 2011 by Epigram Books. A note on the its setting: even though the country name is never mentioned once in the book, the proper nouns’ orthography, as well as mentionings of US presence amidst jungle battlefields and bars in the city-capital, etc. are ostensible nods to real-life Vietnam as the novel’s (unnamed) Southeast Asian country setting.

Francis Khoo (left), a lawyer, was among 150 people who staged a demonstration outside the US Embassy at Hill Street, Singapore in 1973. Together with Professor Daniel Green (hidden) from Nanyang University and Lap Choo Lin (center), a University of Singapore graduate, they presented individual petitions to US President Nixon. They were protesting against the bombing of North Vietnam by the US. Image via National Archive Singapore.

The Immolation centers around Thanh, a doctor-turned-wannabe-poet who returns to Saigon after having studied abroad in Paris. He joins the guerilla National Liberation Front (NLF) with his diverse cast of peers, while being haunted by the sight of a monk smiling as he sets himself ablaze, and his relationships with friends, particularly his love interest, My. Through the course of the story, Thanh questions what it means to live and die for a political cause. Henceforth, the novel is a bildungsroman — a literary work focusing on a character’s journey to maturity, and an ambitious one at that — as it demonstrates Goh’s attempt at tackling postcolonial issues set in a country different from his own, while also articulating existential concerns through the eyes of relatively young, idealistic people.

Sensitivity to Vietnamese culture and historical details

I am pleasantly surprised to see Goh approaching Vietnamese culture and historical details with much sensitivity, amidst the host of English-language media at the time centering the western perspectives towards the American War. One can’t help but wonder what specific research processes Goh has taken to write a novel with empathetic engagements with Vietnamese elements.

Through his characters, Goh waxes lyrical about tangerines in the Central Market evoking the festivities of an incoming Lunar New Year, “black, broad-backed” water buffaloes having a bath alongside squealing children in the countryside, or fish sauce: “its heavy, tangy taste was something so age-old, so familiar as to be part of the people of his country […] Without it, no local meal could be considered complete.” He focuses on the struggles of the Vietnamese in wartime, writing about simple spears and booby traps, but also the Vietnamese landscape. “We sometimes forget how beautiful our country is,” My comments. “[We] only remember the fighting; we only see the suffering, […] the beastliness and the evil. [Some] day, after the victory, our people will inherit peace and this beautiful country again.”

Thích Quảng Đức self-immolates in Saigon to protest religious discrimination in 1963. Photo by Malcolm Browne.

A number of historical details are thoughtfully inspired and embedded into the novel. History lovers might recognize Goh’s vivid references to the 1960s student demonstrations against the regime’s dictatorship and US interventions, the 1968 Tet Offensive that includes a brief attack on the Presidential Palace in Saigon, and of course the Buddhist crisis that peaks at Abbott Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation. Particularly memorable is a scene where the characters hide inside a bomb shelter: “Thanh huddled in the darkness, his body flexed, his chin resting on his knees, foetal in the womb of earth. The earth smelt of dampness. Even with all that noise, he thought he could hear water trickling, like lilliputian drumming.”

“Thanh huddled in the darkness, his body flexed, his chin resting on his knees, foetal in the womb of earth. The earth smelt of dampness. Even with all that noise, he thought he could hear water trickling, like lilliputian drumming.”

Some historical facts and names of certain characters and locations are, however, imperfect. For instance, it can’t be fully verified if NLF fighters ever conducted espionage in bars, nor the extent to which some of them would elope from their missions. One also wonders whether the spellings are changed in service of Singaporean readers more familiar with the Latin orthography of English and Malay; some names are spelled “Kao” and “Thing Hoai Pagoda,” words that don't exist in Vietnamese. These inaccuracies nevertheless, should not be interpreted as defects in and of themselves. Instead, taken as a whole, I recognize Goh’s respect for and desire to understand more about Vietnamese people and happenings. It seems that his characters, especially Thanh, act as vessels for Goh himself, or any non-Vietnamese readers, to acculturate into the Vietnamese setting — observing first-hand, being amazed by the Vietnamese scenes, while empathizing with Vietnamese guerilla fighters’ experiences.

Nuanced characterizations and the irony of ideological wars

Literature professor Dr. Ismail S. Talib, who wrote the preface to the edition, discusses Vietnam’s geo-political importance as an iconic battleground for post-colonial ideologies and its relative distance from Singapore, and how they are possible reasons why Goh decided to implicitly set his novel there, while exploring themes concerning post-colonial Southeast Asia at large. His cast of Vietnamese characters is diverse and nuanced, exemplifying the different kinds of people with their own reactions and rationalizations to wartime political causes.

Goh Poh Seng was a Singaporean novelist and physician. Photo via Wordpress.

In contrast to Thanh’s brooding uncertainty, his best friend Quang Tuyen is a pragmatic and optimistic journalist with a c’est la vie attitude towards wars and their dilemmas. Meanwhile, his love interest My is a fellow student whose personal sufferings become the catalyst for her idealistic and dogged support for the guerilla’s efforts — she even often chastises Thanh for his constant doubts. It is lovely to read about the cheeky and sincere dynamic between the two friends, and, likewise, the lovers’ earnest yet tricky relationship from Goh’s beautifully crafted dialogues. There are also those like Kao, a peer whose words twisted ideologies in his selfish favors against Thanh himself; Thanh’s father Monsieur Vo, who wanted to shelter his son from joining the guerrilla despite being aware of the government’s corruption; or fellow sympathizer Xuan, who's facing doubts on whether to support the cause fully or protect his family. By constructing characters as diverse individuals across backgrounds, characteristics, and degrees of involvement in a political cause, he rebukes views of revolutionaries as one fanatical monolith blindly devoted to a movement, or those harboring doubts towards it as cowards. Ultimately, perhaps Quang Tuyen says it best: “Just because I am joining the Cause, doesn't mean that I agree with everything […] One reason I'm fighting is that I want the right afterwards for more of our people to be human beings.”

Students march to decry US involvement in Vietnam in 1965. Photo by AP.

It then might be difficult to classify the book as either in support of or against communist guerrilla warfare in Vietnam. Vietnamese readers should not be expected to find a concrete unwavering message of devotion, from frustratingly transient character arcs to an ending that leaves them at an ambiguous cliffhanger with none of the senses of triumph, and a reflective yet indecisive main character with arguably bourgeois and defeatist tendencies: “After the bloodshed, would anything be written on that page?” Thanh ponders. “No, there will be nothing. […] This battle would not even make it to the footnotes of any future history written about their time. No one would know. Probably no one would care either…”

Nonetheless, a great number of examples of Vietnam’s war literature, notably those produced post-reunification, are not too different. From Lê Lựu’s satirical A Time Far Past to the famous The Sorrow of War by Bảo Ninh, these works, while different in their tonalities, strip away the need to reinforce reunification’s feelings of triumph, and instead focus on war traumas and systemic post-war struggles. The Immolation exemplifies Goh’s sensitive foresight to the human condition, acknowledging the desolation of war, but also larger existential themes, such as the ironic freewill that might liberate us from one suffering… to another, yet remains the part and parcel of life.

The Immolation exemplifies Goh’s sensitive foresight to the human condition, acknowledging the desolation of war, but also larger existential themes, such as the ironic freewill that might liberate us from one suffering… to another.

All in all, with such ambivalence and bittersweetness, The Immolation will not attempt to offer readers a definite view of the American War nor a solution through a tumultuous socio-political landscape. “Words. They do not expiate. Nothing can do that,” Goh wrote self-insertingly. “But they make you a little healed, whatever you’re suffering from, or rather the real thing you’re suffering from: man disease.” At this point, it has been my second time reading the novel. Compared to his previous debut novel, If We Dream Too Long, The Immolation has unfortunately not garnered much attention in Singapore or Vietnam.

Maybe I’ve been waxing poetic over this book. I am aware that I might have put the book on a pedestal as a Vietnamese person residing in Singapore, a country already without much overt historical or cultural relations with where I originally come from, compared to its more immediate neighbors. The Immolation, as a novel dealing with political strifes that come with nation-building in Southeast Asia at the time, now becomes, to this reader, a sentimental emblem of shared regional concerns, characterized by empathetic appreciation, and a vision towards an interconnected and, even if idealistic, universal human experience. Perhaps by writing with each other, and reading for each other, a book is no longer a Singaporean novel, nor a Vietnamese one, but a novel we can call ours.

A Touch of Magical Realism in ‘The Cemetery of Chua Village’ by Đoàn Lê

2025-05-12T14:00:00+07:00

Vietnam transitioned to a market economy like an old train lurching to life: momentous shakes and shudders, steam bursting out busted gaskets, disheveled cargo tumbling from luggage racks, sparks shooting off wheels screeching across warped rails and a whistle ripping into the placid sky.

As the government enacted new policies, tossing aside the institutions to which people had adapted deeper cultural values and traditions, communities succumbed to the machinations of the worst amongst themselves. This theme lies at the center of several of the ten fictional stories in The Cemetery of Chua Village by Đoàn Lê and lurks in the background of others alongside ruminations on the inadequacies of love as portrayed with a surreal, dark humor.

In one story, ‘Real Estate of Chua Village,’ rampant land speculation motivated by rumored road construction compels neighbors to scheme, cheat and steal to grab at the cash capitalism that was dangling above the impoverished village. The hysteria even draws in local producer of joss money, sending him off to print higher denominations of ceremonial currency on the prediction that in the afterlife, “hungry ghosts — heck, thirsty ones too — can fight over the street-front properties so they can set up joint ventures or joint whatevers to their heart’s content. And everything will be pressed into service for profit. The King of the afterlife will turn his cauldron of boiling oil into a sauna business, and rent out hell itself as a source of combustible fuel.”

Similarly, the surreal titular story focuses on a cemetery whose deceased inhabitants become sentient at night, carrying on as they had when alive. When a common laborer is accidentally buried in the uniform of a general, the dead first rush to grovel at their assumed superior’s feet and then, discovering the error, turn on him and one another seeking to blame and punish, and in doing so, reveal that even death cannot shake humans of their pettiness and penchant for hierarchy. The story closes with the narrator bemoaning that new zoning laws will throw the flawed but harmonious community into chaos when the cemetery land is reclaimed for development as if to say that the afterlife may not be perfect but capitalism is not going to make it any better.

“Short story authors must create fully realized, interesting characters in a single paragraph, build worlds in a few details, and establish pivotal points of tension with one sentence. Đoàn Lê does this masterfully while lacing many of the tales with elements of magical realism.”

The book, however, does not attribute people’s moral bankruptcy to any political decision or economic system. Rather, it reveals that humans by nature act small and selfishly. In the Kafka-esque tale, ‘Achieving Flyhood,’ which takes place directly before the market reforms, the protagonist's transformation into an insect exposes institutional corruption associated with urban housing markets. Unable to secure one of the state-allocated homes because so many were siphoned off for the families of government employees or those able to offer bribes, he is turned into a literal housefly by the ministry.

Unfortunately, the same abuses the narrator hopes he had escaped exist amongst his fellow humans-turned-bugs. Instead of banding together to fight the powers that be or at least escape into a new reality, individuals jostle for arbitrary titles and positions of power from which to exploit their peers. By portraying the depravity both pre- and post-Đổi Mới, Đoàn suggests that it’s no single system, but rather, societal tumult that brings out humanity’s worst tendencies.

Reading the book in the context of the massive developments breaking ground in Saigon and almost everywhere else in Vietnam while technology further connects the country with global lifestyles forces one to consider that however drastic the changes to society were in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we may now be witnessing even more extreme and rapid ones. In such a reality, and as Vietnam moves further from centuries-old conventions, what moral principles will drive the creation and implementation of new laws and norms? As people become more transitory and neighborhoods break down, what are the principles that will govern how we interact with one another?

Đoàn Lê at age 75.

Đoàn Lê led an incredible life which makes it all the more surprising that she isn’t more well known. Born in Hải Phòng in 1943 to a traditional Confucian family, she ran away from her restrictive home at age 19 to study film in Hanoi. She starred in one of the nation’s first motion pictures, Book to Page. A true artistic talent, she later turned to directing, screenwriting, songwriting, painting and finally novels, short stories and poetry. Her death in 2017 was covered in the Vietnamese press, but the fact that many of the articles, as well as memorials, served as introductions to her underscores not only her overlooked status but the ease with which the public abandons past figures thanks to pervasive forward-looking attitudes.

Đoàn Lê in the film Book to Page.

Reading too closely into the biography of an artist can invite dangerous assumptions and simplifications about their work, but Đoàn’s life may add context to several of the themes prevalent in The Cemetery of Chua Village. Much like fellow writer Dạ Ngân, Đoàn divorced and remarried during a time when such an act was not only legally precarious but culturally taboo. The remarriage, which also fell apart, had serious impacts on her career, possibly limiting her acting opportunities. One shouldn’t, therefore, be surprised to discover that many of the stories portray love and especially marriage in a negative light. In ‘The Clone,’ for example, incredible modern-day technology ushers in a failed writer’s exact copy to finish his life’s work: an epic poem. The clone’s original lays down only two rules for the copy in his will, one of which is to not get involved with women, as such an act will surely doom his writing, as had happened to him. Without giving anything away, readers can guess what happens.

‘The Double Bed of Chua Village’ concerns a woman deciding to leave her husband of 28 years when he openly takes a mistress. Echoing and in conversation with Vietnamese traditions of men having numerous wives, it simultaneously presents the empowered status of women in post-war Vietnam while rebuking patriarchal notions of one-sided polygamy and questioning modern society’s ability to embrace monogamy.

The story ends with an anecdote of monkeys being separated on two neighboring islands and split couples leaping into the sea to meet halfway between the two landmasses, willing to die in each other arms if it means reuniting. The detail serves as a stark contrast to the failures of the story’s protagonists and, regardless of scientific grounding, questions if infidelity and/or the pain it causes is uniquely human, and if so, can this be attributed to historical or contemporary habits? The story poses the question of if, as relationship expectations and the role of marriage evolves in Vietnam, are we moving further from or closer to the types of relationships evolution prepared us for?

While presented in a lighter tone and often wrapped in whimsy, it’s impossible to ignore a theme in Đoàn’s work that is also present in the works of contemporary female writers such as Dương Thu Hương: in Vietnam women experience a disproportionate amount of hardship. Throughout the stories, female characters are the ones who often suffer the effects of men’s poor, sometimes sex-driven decisions. Nothing encapsulates this more than the protagonist in ‘Achieving Flyhood,’ who ultimately concludes “every tragedy, large or small that plagues humanity can be attributed to” men’s penises. His response, vowing celibacy under the guise of homosexuality, is a damning remark on the impact of patriarchy in the modernizing nation.

‘Xúy Vân,’ Đoàn Lê (1993).

The book is undoubtedly important for fostering discussions about various cultural topics and providing glimpses into rapidly disappearing ways of life that are frequently ignored by much of the Vietnamese literature translated into English. It's also a valuable work on a craft level. If a novel is a marathon in which the occasional misstep can be forgiven and allowances afforded for catching one’s stride, a short story is a sprint and, for it to succeed, each footfall must be exact. Short story authors must create fully realized, interesting characters in a single paragraph, build worlds in a few details, and establish pivotal points of tension with one sentence. Đoàn does this masterfully while lacing many of the tales with elements of magical realism. As should happen with the genre, the fantastic twists such as characters turning into flies or the dead forming elaborate societies serve to highlight and investigate elements of our very real world.

Without being exposed to the original text in Vietnamese, and considering the gulfs between the tongues, reading this work proves impossible to adequately comment on the specific language used in the original; but, Đoàn gifted translators Rosemary Nguyen, Duong Tuong and Wayne Karlin with metaphors like a “face hatched with an intricate maze of random furrows, like the work of a drunken ploughman” and a piece of valuable land “stretched along the national highway like a girl in the bloom of youth stretched out for an afternoon nap,” that not only carry clear, transferable meanings but delight in their originality.

In a trend that predates Đổi Mới reforms, as Vietnam modernizes alongside the rest of the world, an area one can most drastically observe change is in how people spend their free time. Social media platforms, movies and video games have almost completely replaced books to the point that the average citizen read fewer than 1.2 works of literature a year. Arguments regarding the trade-offs of development are undoubtedly vast and complicated, but few can deny that we should mourn the loss of attention to literature like The Cemetery of Chua Village.

Literature's ability to intimately articulate elements of bygone eras while fostering empathy and inviting contemplation on diverse societal subjects — such as how economic stability interacts with ideas of man’s innate goodness, and whether society supports or impedes healthy romantic relationships — cannot be wholly replicated. And even if statistics, news reports, films and stories of family members can give valuable insight into some of those subjects, it's impossible for them to do so with the same joyously fresh metaphors, evocative language and expert plotting. One can only hope that amidst all the changes, there are enough people to not only pay attention to authors like Đoàn Lê, but share her work and find enough inspiration to carry on her legacy in whatever strange world emerges in the coming years.

This article was originally published in 2018.

[Photos via An Ninh]

Sao La, Self, Hmong Identity: The Many Layers of Poetry Collection 'Primordial'

2025-04-08T11:00:00+07:00

A book of poetry all about sao la?

Yes, but also no. When introducing celebrated Hmong American poet Mai Der Vang’s latest poetry collection, Primordial, to peers here in Vietnam, the collection’s forefronting of the beloved and mysterious animal is a captivating entry point to a book that is also a beautifully lyrical investigation of self, Hmong history and diasporic identity, and motherhood.

“For a human / to call out to a creature, part of / the human must be creature, too,” Vang ends an early poem in the collection as part of her early intertwining of the speaker and the sao la. Her poetic focus on the sao la involves referenced reportage as well as plain-spoken details to introduce the basics of a creature “as alchemical as moonrise.”

Primordial will likely be the first time most readers learn of sao la. Seemingly aware of this, several early poems contain details of the animal’s biology and various facets of the modern world’s relationship with it including when and how western scientists first encountered it, its appearance on camera traps, and the death of a pregnant individual in captivity, as well as related subjects such as indiscriminate snare hunting, the use of endangered animals in traditional medicine and the larger ecosystem of dipterocarp, red-shanked douc langur, Capparis macrantha and Ammanite striped rabbit.

While Vang cites numerous academic texts and conversations in the notes and acknowledgment sections, Primordial is not a scientific work primarily concerned with informing readers of a little-known mammal. Rather, it's a work of art in which Vang converses with herself, the sao la, and us: “here is a basket / in which to gather snowlight, here is a blanket made of prayer. / Say to the saola: here is an echo / of the human you’ve left behind.” These conversations touch on safety, homeland, the fragility of biospheres, death, and the magic of life itself.

Mai Der Vang. Photo via Poetry Foundation.

As the collection continues, new themes and subjects emerge to add texture to the centrality of the sao la. About a third of the way through, the poem ‘Hmong, an Ethnographic Study of the Other’ arrives. Borrowing language from a 1923 scholarly article, it describes the Hmong skull as “Abnormal. Remarkably disfigured as to be defective. / Mind of barbarian, they say. / Mind of Hmong.” Slowly, and indirectly, metaphorical connections are made between the Hmong people and the sao la via their relationships to nature, survival, and outside gaze. Most overtly, both are described as rare, secretive, and at risk of extinction in the poem ‘Evolution, Absence’ which begins: “I question my existence” and ends: “Saola exist.”

The book drifts toward historical elements related to the Hmong, particularly their role in America’s secret operations during the war with Vietnam. Juxtaposing military jargon and slogans (“Repeated Assymetrial Interrogation Access ... Extradition Health Eradication”) are moments of profound and clever images (“wear the night at daylight, where the night at night, / wear the night to human, wear the night to bide”) which pull together elements of Vang’s first book, the Walt Whitman award-winning Afterland, a deeply lyrical meditation, and her Pulitzer Prize finalist follow-up, Yellow Rain, which collaged and assembled reportage materials about yellow rain following the war with America.

Vang’s gifts for evocative descriptions and tactile metaphors engender even the most informative early poems with a sense of intimacy. The second half of Primordial, however, contains the most personal passages as the speaker turns her attention towards the individual self, pregnancy, motherhood and childhood memories. And yet, even amidst recollections of her family’s visit to the laundromat or performing Hmong rituals in a home beside suspicious neighbors, the sao la is never far. It is used as a stand-in for the “I” in the section titles of the poem ‘Saola Grows up in California: Daughter of Hmong Refugees.’ Elsewhere, in poems where it is not directly mentioned, the sao la seems to lurk. For example, when the speaker claims to be “ever inundated by a world so ample / in its need to be emptied / so abundant in all its absence,” we cannot help but picture the sao la and its precarious future.

Primordial uses poetic form and format to further connect its themes and unite personal, mystical, historical, and scientific worlds. A series of reoccurring node poems appear like flow charts or family trees at first glance. Meanwhile, sections of visual poetry are embedded in the long poem ‘I Understand This Light to Be My Home’ with the words “language” and “light” stacked and fading so as to relate to the surrounding ruminations on self, perceptions, speech, and the universe. Finally, ‘Origin,’ is a long prosaic poem about the speaker’s pregnancy that employs unconventional use of brackets: “Once upon a time when all I had was [no] more, [nothing] could no longer be.” The resulting ambiguity forces the reader to slow down and repeat sections to consider how the punctuations impact meaning.

Portion of ‘Node: When in the end’ featured in full in Agni.

These departures from straightforward poetry will represent a challenge for many readers, particularly those who do not regularly seek out poetry. Undoubtedly, the entire genre can be daunting, and I worry that a sense of “not being smart enough” to understand these choices may turn people away from the entire book. Yet, I would recommend they be seen as indiscernible elements essential for approaching topics that utilitarian language alone can never fully fathom. A creature as obscure as the sao la, like the concept of a culture, let alone how the two are connected, cannot be summed up in a few stanzas, and these maneuvers speak to the mysteries required for them to take shape.

Primordial’s many layers, complexities, and ambiguities, to say nothing of its moments of pure beauty and profundity, invite numerous readings. Different days and moods will result in different takeaways depending on what each reader brings to the collection. One reoccurring feeling it leaves me with, though, is labored optimism. For now, the sao la survives, the Hmong survive, the reader survives and Mai Der Vang survives, reminding us all “you are not lost, you won’t be lost.”

In Latest Short Story Collection, Andrew Lam Explores Diaspora Drama via Literary Fiction

2025-03-23T10:00:00+07:00

If you opened an American magazine, literary or otherwise, in the early 2000s and found any Vietnamese American byline, there’s a good chance it was Andrew Lam. The long-time journalist’s essays and short stories were amongst the first widely circulated in the US.

Since then, authors like Viet Thanh Nguyen, Ocean Vuong, Thi Bui, and Monique Truong have all found great success and contributed to the Vietnamese demographic’s prominence in the international publishing scene. During a recent lunch, Lam said that their ascension allows him a certain freedom; no longer do readers expect him to be speaking for the diaspora as a whole. Rather, now retired from his journalism day job, he can simply explore his art. This opportunity to indulge his creative impulses alongside his love for short fiction is evident throughout his latest collection, Stories from the Edge of the Sea. The book sees him shifting tones, subjects, and styles with an often sly wit and energetic desire to push the genre to its full potential.

Lam says that he never thinks about his audience when sitting down to write; he is first and foremost interested in entertaining himself. This focus on catering to his inner literature nerd collides with the common adage to write what you know. Thus, many of the stories focus on desire, generational and cultural expectations, and aging individuals within the Vietnamese diaspora reflecting on their lives, often at pivotal moments of change or realization.

Andrew Lam at a reading with his first three books. Photo via Andrew Lam.

Romantic love in Lam’s stories is often wild, passionate, and doomed. Whether it's an instantaneous crush on a stranger who perpetually gets lost in the crowd at a Guggenheim art exhibition; a once-inseparable homosexual couple that reunites after one of the men has married a woman and had a child; or a couple that is separated by geography and circumstance — torrid emotional and physical yearning is unfulfilled or tragically impermanent. A certain sadness hangs over the book as numerous plotlines settle on an understanding that happiness is frequently brief or bittersweet. One should savor those moments, the stories suggest, because soon they will just be memories to look back on.

Stories from the Edge of the Sea is far from a depressing read, however. Lam offers welcome levity via several outright comedic pieces. Positioned as a pure, rapid-fire stand-up comedy routine with one-liners and riffs, ‘Swimming to the Mekong,’ is a companion to ‘Yacht People’ from his previous collection, Birds of Paradise Lost. At one point, for example, the comedian narrator quips: “So hey, here’s a cool idea for a new genre in porn: lazy porn! ‘Dallas does Lazy Susan.’ Why? Cuz Susan’s too lazy to do Dallas. It’ll be surreal. Lazy Susan’s so lazy she’s just gonna lie there and every cowboy spins and screws her while she eats her dim sum. Lazy Susan’s so lazy that after a giving few blow jobs, she’d be applying for unemployment benefits. Lazy Susan’s so lazy that she’d outsource all her hand jobs to India.” Encountering such crass passages juxtaposed with earnest stories of people pained by an inability to connect can be jarring at first, but ultimately underscores Lam’s artistic range and the multitude of voices the short story genre can contain.

Lam also understands that comedy is an effective way to speak truths. Thus, ‘Swimming in the Mekong,’ and the similar ‘Love in the Time of the Beer Bug’ contain caustic social critique and observations aimed at his own communities. “Now you would think that a country that defeated the French and then the US, would find western features fugly after seeing John Wayne shoot our people. But you’d be, like, WRONG,” the narrator says to the crowd. “Vietnamese put down those Amerasian kids right, cuz they say ‘these kids are all children of whores, fathered by American GIs.’ The kids were treated like dirt back in Nam. But don’t tell anybody, ok, it’s between us: Many of us want to look exactly like them. You know, light hair, blue or hazel eyes, straight nose, double eyelids, split chins, the works.” Such topics could be approached, possibly with less success and certainly less entertainment, via a conventionally restrained format, but where is the fun or creativity in that?

Photo via Andrew Lam.

Alongside these comedic outbursts and other inversions of familiar structures, such as ‘October Lament’ which tells the story of a deceased husband via archived social media posts and text messages, are tightly written and more straightforward works. A devotee of the short story genre, eager to discuss its merits, and how it's worth the challenges of brevity and limited readership, Lam is a master of placing fully unique and realized characters in moments of heightened consequences. ‘To Keep from Drowning’ is a standout example. In it, a single mother and her three teenage children walk to the ocean to celebrate a death anniversary. One child is secretly pregnant; one is embarking on a dangerous criminal life; and the third is developing a worrisome drug habit, all of which is being kept from the mother who is attempting to hide a terminal illness. The immensity of the family’s tragic past and fraught futures are revealed in the short distance from the metro station to the coast, with their uncertain futures drifting somewhere in the surf for the reader to discover. This story, as well as ‘The Isle is Full of Noises’ and ‘What We Talk about When We Can’t Talk about Love’ allow Lam to flex his full command of literary fiction. Not only are they powerful, engaging stories, but when he shows he can so expertly follow the so-called rules of fiction, readers will approach his less-conventional works with full trust and excitement.

After making his readers laugh, empathize, and reflect on the logic governing the human condition, Lam punches them in the heart. Stories from the Edge of the Sea ends with the devastating ‘Tree of Life,’ a eulogy for his mother. She was a 1954 migrant to the south who experienced severe sorrow and hardship during the wars, but he remembers her as a woman eager “To feed, to nurture, to protect. To react to harsh reality with kindness and generosity—this is the very essence of my mother.” Recounting small and large acts of personal and public kindness in Vietnam and America, he makes clear how she was the pillar of their family. Such a role would not be obvious to outsiders because Lam’s father was a famous general. But Lam writes: “I used to think of my father in a heroic light as a child. He who flew in helicopters and who called bombs to fall from the sky, and he who jumped down to earth in a parachute—he was like a thunder god, like James Bond, but my mother? Well, she was a true lioness. And when it comes to her family she was fearless.” Heroics, he suggests, has less to do with battlefield exploits and much more to an intrinsic generosity that means, even when Alzheimer's left her unable to remember where she lived or her own name, she couldn’t forget where the hungry, stray cats in the neighborhood lived so she could feed them. Without any of the sly asides or intricate plotting of the previous stories, the message of love and adoration he has for his mother blooms into a rumination on family, motherhood, and memory; it is a testament to kindness Lam passes on from his mother to the readers.

'The Colors of April' Invites Numerous Generations of Vietnamese to Reflect on War

2025-02-05T05:26:00+07:00

“If the rain could wash away everything, maybe we could all find peace. For the third generation after the war, what was left behind wasn’t anger or bitterness, but an enduring sorrow that echoed from the heart.”

Coming in the second story of the new anthology The Colors of April, this quote identifies some of the emotions frequently expressed by Vietnamese writers, of all generations, when reflecting on the war with America.

In an attempt to push back against the foreign reduction of Vietnam to only a country that underwent a devastating war five decades ago, I write very little about anything related to war, literature included. Doing so, however, risks dismissing or downplaying its importance in the literary canon and Vietnamese lives around the world. The 50^th anniversary of the war’s end is ushering in a great number of books addressing it and, while I will continue to explore and champion works beyond war, it’s a good opportunity to acknowledge and reflect upon the significant impact the war has had on literature.

Colors of April, co-edited by Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran, provides a well-rounded view of the war and its aftermath via writers from a multitude of backgrounds, generations, circumstances, and perspectives as well as styles and interests. After noting the failures of the politically motivated, one-dimensional, white American-centric media that came in the postwar period, the editors acknowledge “a whole generation of Vietnamese Americans who have grown up knowing little about the circumstances of their citizenship, why their grandparents left Vietnam … now reconnecting with their roots and the country.” For them, the collection offers examples of the stories their families did not share; the experiences of a country and people they were separated from; and members of their own generation who are navigating what it means to be Vietnamese American in America or as one of the many Việt Kiều moving to Vietnam to find a country quite different from what they may have imagined.

The nuances and range of the collection make it valuable beyond this specifically defined group of Vietnamese Americans, however. Readers who remember daily war reports issued from Saigon may be surprised to read about a nation now filled with trendy trinket shops whose interiors are designed to entice youths eager for social media photo backdrops, as one story depicts it. Young Americans, of all backgrounds, who may not have read anything about the war other than three paragraphs in a textbook, will benefit immensely from being transported to mountainous hamlets that sent their young off to war, and the orphanages that took in the mixed-race offspring of foreign soldiers and local women. The stories also transcend the period and explore love, motherhood, youthful ennui, and wanderlust.

Amongst the book’s 28 stories are several that contain expected themes: war is miserable; grief eclipses winners and losers; physical and emotional traumas get passed down, and reconciliation is not just possible but essential for healing. As long as the world continues to hurtle blindly into barbaric conflicts, these lessons need repeating. The translated stories by Vietnamese writers including Nguyễn Minh Chuyên, Trần Thị Tú Ngọc, and Nguyễn Thị Kim Hòa, are particularly suited for readers who only know war from news links and entertainment media and have yet to encounter it via a singular, intimate literary vantage point. These stories allow the reader to imagine what they would do in such conditions, and by extension, discover the shared humanity of all those caught up in war.

Other stories upend familiar narratives or add less common voices to the discussion. Nguyễn Đức Tùng’s dreamy ‘A Jarai Tribesman and His Wife’ underscores how Vietnam and its diaspora consist of more than just Kinh people and challenging times compound the inequities ethnic minorities endure. Similarly, a Mexican American deserter is at the center of Lưu Vĩ Lân’s ‘M.I.A, M.O.W; P.O.W, P.O.P,’ which further complicates Hollywood-esque re-enactments of the American battlefield experience. In the collection's most exuberant story, ‘Bad Things Didn’t Happen,’ by Gin To, readers are taken behind the facade of Vietnam's migratory mega-wealthy and exposed to the outlandish dysfunction of beauty queens, shopping sprees, and extramarital affairs.

Dismantling the American dream is a recurring theme in The Colors of April that holds revelatory potential for readers outside the Vietnamese diaspora even more than for those within it. ‘A Mother’s Story,’ is a heartbreaking look at a downtrodden first-generation Vietnamese American who suffers botched surgery, poverty, and abusive relationships in pursuit of uniquely American concepts of success as defined by Paris by Night stardom. Meanwhile, the sharp, smart prose that helped Viet Thanh Nguyen win a Pulitzer Prize is on full display in ‘The Immolation.’ The story brings to life the poor, angry California youths who struggled to come of age in a new country while their parents were occupied tending to their own wounds and fighting their own demons. Several other works investigate the motivations of young Việt Kiều moving to Vietnam to find themselves, their histories or perhaps just an easier way after growing exhausted by America.

The 50^th anniversary of the war’s end is ushering in a great number of books addressing it and, while I will continue to explore and champion works beyond war, it’s a good opportunity to acknowledge and reflect upon the significant impact the war has had on literature.

“I am not an eloquent storyteller and my story is clearly messy and erratic. Besides, my story could, at best, reveal only a tiny part of the whole, like drips or smudges bleeding into other shades in an abstract painting,” the narrator reports in Phùng Nguyễn’s ‘Oakland Night Question.’ He was speaking about his own experiences in a small village in southern Vietnam, but the same could be said about Vietnam’s war legacy 50 years later, as is referenced in the anthology’s subtitle. No amount of books, collections, movies or plays could ever add up to complete the entire abstract painting. But the more one sees, the more one understands, which, in addition to having value in and of itself, helps lead one to peace and acceptance. The Colors of April adds some beautiful hues to the artwork.

The Colors of April will be released by Three Rooms Press on March 25, 2025. Pre-order information is available here.

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.