Folklorist and anthropologist Nguyễn Đổng Chi dedicated decades to weaving a significant portion of Vietnam’s folklore tapestry. He collected, researched, and rewrote over 200 Vietnamese folktales from all corners of the country. His work, initially scattered across five volumes published individually and consecutively over 25 years, appeared as a complete anthology in 1982. Guided by a comprehensive treatise of Vietnamese folktale, Chi’s Kho tàng truyện cổ tích Việt Nam (Treasury of Vietnamese Folk Tales) might be daunting for readers drawn to Vietnamese folklore but disenchanted by rigorous academic discourse.

Major Books’ Treasury of Vietnamese Folk Tales: Volume 1, released in March 2026, offers a condensed and curated version of Chi’s seminal work in English. For the first time, international readers can indulge in his version of 11 classic Vietnamese tales. Readers might uncover a new appreciation for familiar tales, such as ‘The Battle Between Sơn Tinh and Thuỷ Tinh’ (Sơn Tinh Thủy Tinh), ‘The Tale of the Betel, Areca, and Slaked Lime’ (Sự Tích Trầu Cau), and the infamous ‘Tấm Cám,’ widely known as the Vietnamese equivalent of Cinderella; or discover new stories about ancient customs. This edition, focused on presenting the folktales to amuse and delight, is ornamented by Jeet ZDũng’s illustrations. Inspired by Vietnamese artisans, ZDũng’s visual interpretations are as playful, textured, and immersive as the tales they bring to life.

Fairy tales and the women in them

Treasury of Vietnamese Folk Tales: Volume 1 is an ambitious project. It promises multifaceted Vietnamese female characters, and to honor Vietnamese cultural heritage through Vietnamese storytelling traditions. Offering glimpses of our culture through short, punchy, and surprisingly funny tales, it appeals to readers with varying expectations. Love stories, rivalries, happy endings, tales of revenge, historical legends, animals, deities and Vietnamese customs: this compilation truly has something for everyone to enjoy. It fulfills its promises through whimsical visual elements, subtly thought-provoking stories, and skillfully translated folk rhymes that sound as catchy as the original Vietnamese versions of my childhood.

Inside front cover

Mother Liễu Hạnh watching corrupt male travelers from above

Initially, I struggled to reconcile the anthology’s bold claim to spotlight “the women of Vietnamese folklore—not damsels in distress, but as heroes, tricksters, warriors, and sometimes even villains,” with its opening title, ‘The Battle Between Sơn Tinh and Thuỷ Tinh.’ The tale is a classic: two men, in this case, the Mountain God (Sơn Tinh) and the Sea God (Thuỷ Tinh), battle for the hand of Mị Nương, the daughter of Hùng Vương. While the two gods wreak havoc on the villages, the princess disappears from the narrative. How can an absent female character be even remotely layered and complex? This contradiction perplexed me, but ultimately had a useful effect. Unable to find Mị Nương in her own love story, I diligently searched for women in subsequent tales and kept them at the forefront of my mind as I read. Perhaps this was the anthology’s goal all along: to make readers consider women in every story, making us focus on their presence or lack thereof.

Sơn Tinh and Thủy Tinh

As promised, the collection offers autonomous female characters with colorful personalities over its 10 remaining tales. ‘Mother Liễu Hạnh’ is a fun and empowering story that follows a woman who does what she wants — and gets away with it splendidly. The Jade Emperor banishes his unruly daughter Liễu Hạnh from Heaven. In the mortal realm, she becomes famous for her beauty and the merciless pranks she plays on corrupt male travelers. One such traveler, the Crown Prince, tempted by Liễu Hạnh’s mythical beauty, plans to visit the tavern and kidnap her. Acting mostly in self-defense and self-entertainment, Liễu Hạnh transforms into a peach tree. As he prepares to bite into the irresistibly “ripe, round peach sagged from a low branch,” she turns it into disgusting maggots before vanishing into thin air. I giggled at this seemingly random act of punishment all while acknowledging its creativity — turning oneself into a rotting peach sure is an unusual way of chasing away unwanted suitors. This supernatural fruit seasoned a tale of reversed gender and power dynamics with a healthy dose of whimsy.

Love stories, rivalries, happy endings, tales of revenge, historical legends, animals, deities and Vietnamese customs: this compilation truly has something for everyone to enjoy.

In ‘Tấm Cám,’ we follow Tấm through her death and subsequent reincarnations. Her final transformation into a magical golden fruit, quả thị, discreetly raises an interesting discussion on domesticity and female autonomy. One day, an elderly woman comes across the lonesome fruit; unaware of Tấm’s residence within it, she brings the fruit home. Every day, as soon as the woman leaves for work, a tiny Tấm emerges from the fruit, grows back to her default size, cooks, cleans, then climbs back into her refuge. But surely such mystical potential would inspire more adventurous quests than housework? The spilling of fantasy into daily domestic life is very characteristic of Vietnamese folk tales, as Nguyễn Đổng Chi observed. Though Tấm’s confinement to domestic duties can be read as an affirmation of traditional gender roles and gendered division of labor, I find that quả thị nonetheless symbolizes a renewal, or a new life for Tấm. She enters a domestic space that strictly excludes her abusive stepmother and sister.

Shimmering art direction

As readers navigate the multitude of worlds contained in Treasury of Vietnamese Folk Tales, Jeet ZDũng’s textured artworks transform each page into an immersive reading experience. Visually, the book opens into a universe of its own: shimmering gold fonts and deep, dark, jewel-toned illustrations in gold frames jumping out of crimson pages pull you into a regal world of ancient magic — flipping through the pages, I felt like a lost kid who had accidentally stumbled upon an old relic locked away and accumulating dust

Inspired by “Vietnamese sculpture, lacquerware, ceramics, and folk paintings,” Jeet ZDũng brings each folktale to life through diverse and textured illustrations. The illustrations are contained in geometrically irregular boxes and fun shapes that resemble fragments of crystal or puzzle pieces. For instance, his depictions of the Sea God and the Mountain God blend sharp and rounded shapes, as well as warm and cold colors, creating intense contrast that feels fitting for a mythical clash

Tấm and the giant, golden thị

ZDũng imagines many scenes in black and gold, occasionally adding muted colors. Such drawings add allure to tales that many already know, prompting readers to visualize old stories in new shapes and shades. In ‘Tấm Cám,’ the luminous quả thị glitters against a black background — the humble fruit looks more luxurious than I have ever imagined. This melancholic mood further mythologizes the fruit, corresponding nicely with the importance of this golden symbol.

Constrastingly, ZDũng’s illustrations can also be bright, bold, and colorful. His version of the betel leaf, areca nut and slaked lime stands out against the anthology’s generally somber visuals. The neon-green heart-shaped leaf against a bright red square with a gold frame is simple but effective in evoking that childish wonder so crucial to one’s enjoyment of fairy tales. 

The betel lead, areca nut and slaked lime

The fisherman in “The Water God’s Daughter Is In Love With The Fisherman”

Meanwhile, the drawing of tall turquoise scallions sprouting between and over two tiny dancing characters playfully introduces the tale ‘Who Will Buy My Scallions? Or The Magic Potion.’ A few pages later, one cannot help but smile at and let their attention linger on the sight of one tiny, compact man carrying these same giant scallions before two other tiny, compact characters.

Familiar stories, with a little something new

As a Vietnamese reader who primarily reads in English and is on a quest to refamiliarize herself with Vietnamese literature, I was delighted by this anthology’s ability to not only preserve, but add to, the wit and humor of the tales I grew up loving. An example is the humorously concise final sentences that condense entire legends in curiously straightforward terms in most of the tales. In ‘The Battle Between Sơn Tinh and Thuỷ Tinh,’ the final line casually unmasks the turbulent and tedious romantic rivalry as the origin of Vietnamese monsoon season: “This time of year, when the two gods clash, is known as the monsoon season.”

‘Who Will Buy My Scallions? Or The Magic Potion.’

This brief addition of crucial information abruptly de-dramatizes the genesis of monsoon season as common knowledge. ‘The Tale of the Betel, Areca, and Slaked Lime’ is summarized in a similar punchline that reads as an afterthought: “And that is why Vietnamese people have the custom of chewing betel.” In ‘Tale of the Sand Crab,’ readers are briefly told that the protagonist “turned into a sand crab which rolled sand into little balls to fill up the sea day in and day out” after his death. We are given only a brief second to make sense of this ending before the narrative concludes on oddly placed fun fact about an entirely different animal from the story — geese: 

“The lore goes that geese do not eat shrimp because they are grateful of the latter’s sacrifice on their ancestors’ behalf in the olden days. They also say that geese have a white crest on their heads as a sign of mourning for Dã Tràng and their gratitude for him having saved their lives.”

I was also amused by the straightforward translations of rhymes that make this edition’s ‘Tấm Cám’ particularly enjoyable. I expected lyrical verses that match the grandiose character of fairy tales, but the tea vendor’s sing-songy imploration, in simple monosyllabic English, is as catchy as I remembered it in Vietnamese. Tấm, reincarnated as various entities, delivers her fair share of rhymes to her stepsister who has replaced her as the Prince’s wife.

Catching Cám doing the Prince’s laundry, Tấm, as a golden bird, sings “You dry his dresses, dry with poles; don’t dry on hedges, you’ll rip holes.” This uncomplicated translation, which does not over-poeticize rhymes with which many Vietnamese children grew up, does a nice job at emulating the original Vietnamese verses. My favorite rhyme of the anthology must be Tấm’s final threat to Cám, which she utters as a loom: “Crock-a-crock-et, / You take my husband, / I’ll gouge your socket.’” The effective use of onomatopoeia sent shivers down my spine; it's as frightening in English as it was in Vietnamese when I heard my mom say it to me at bedtime over a decade ago. 

Unlike Nguyễn Đổng Chi’s original anthology, which meticulously records, analyzes and categorizes Vietnamese folklore as a genre, Major Books’ Treasury of Vietnamese Folk Tales: Volume 1 builds a whimsical and beautifully illustrated world that is accessible to various kinds of readers who, like me, might find their expectations met in surprising ways. These 11 short stories might not provide elaborate explanations of Vietnamese customs, or underscore the historical significance of certain legends and myths, but they make for a perfectly delightful introduction to the intricate tapestry of Vietnamese folklore. Subtly informative, this collection blends knowledge of Vietnamese culture into an entertaining mix of mundane and epic moments, whilst making sure that rhymes and essences are not lost in translation.

Illustrations by Jeet ZDũng, courtesy of Major Books.

One may be surprised to learn that Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Sympathizer was rejected by 13 out of 14 publishers before its eventual publication. He describes in an interview why he believes his novel was rejected by all but one publisher he submitted to: “I knew in writing the novel that I was deliberately not doing what I was supposed to do as an Asian American writer, which is [...that] you have to end on a note of Americanization. You have to end on an embrace of the American dream, explicitly or implicitly. And the novel does not do that.” He comments elsewhere along similar lines, “I refuse[d] to subscribe to dominant American narratives and mythologies that allow someone like me a very narrow space to speak.” 

Such a “narrow space” is precisely what Vietnamese-Australian writer Nam Le, known for his widely received short story collection The Boat, seeks to question and subvert in 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. The book — witty and experimental, each poem numbered and themed, meant to be read as constitutive of a larger whole — engages with a question that he has long grappled with, namely, “what it means to write as a writer that will always be described as a Vietnamese writer, or a hyphenated-Vietnamese writer – whatever you want to call that.” Early on in the collection, he writes:

Whatever I write is
Vietnamese. I can never not —

The statement, at once a liberatory realization and a curse, neatly encapsulates the book’s premise. There is nothing that makes his poems “Vietnamese” other than the fact that he is himself Vietnamese — ultimately, “Vietnameseness” does not lie in some kind of essence. Yet at the same time, this does not prevent the fact that whatever he writes will inevitably be branded as “Vietnamese,” a label that carries with it certain expectations and baggage — that is, at least in English.

Nam Le. Photo via Simon & Schuster.

The collection’s first poem, titled [1. Diasporic], opens with the following lines. 

In English, mind You. 
You dink I writee Yiknamee?
Shame on You.
It was Your violence dumbed me.

In these opening lines, Le centers the disabling violence of the English language, accompanied by its racist caricature of a Vietnamese (or some Asian) accent. Such violence of English recurs throughout the book. In [10. Reclamatory: 1], we find similar racist language, 

Me chink but not so fast with
console or condemn, me chinked,
self-chinked in pidgyhole & niche,
notch cranny-hole creft crack —

And in the next poem, [11. Violence: Anglo-linguistic], Le more explicitly details the abhorrent nature of English.

Appetitive, omnivorous, expansionary.
Atonal, with smashed-together consonants,
It wants it all.

Empire and industry. Science, technology, narratology.
Transaction. One language to rule them all.
Billions strong.

Later, he juxtaposes the violence of English against the liberatory potential of Vietnamese.

[...]
English with its mind of closed grids
Demands

Answers — data, declension, denomination.
But Vietnamese answers: ‘I am all these things.
Or any.

‘I am openness, manyness at once, entelechy.
Your grammar is violence. Your way is narrow
Exaction.

English demands, while Vietnamese opens space for refusal, freedom. It is along such lines that Nirmala Devi titles her review in ArtReview of Le’s book as “Rage Against the English Language.” She writes, “this collection is driven by rage and violence. Anger against the violence of the English language with its rules that, in effect, force users to make categorisations.” 

Yet, if Devi’s characterization of Le’s collection is correct, why, then, in a different essay of his does Le write the following? “English is my second language, my better language. It’s the language better suited to my way of thinking — which was conditioned by it to think so. (It takes a mongrel, maybe, to know a mongrel…) I’ve never felt unwelcomed in it. Which is more than I can say for every place it’s spoken.” Safe to say that this does not sound like a man “raging against the English language.” What went amiss?

The problem is that to read 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem as a polemic against English is reductive, and overlooks the ways in which many of Le’s poems are not meant to be read at face value — though it is not at all clear, as we will see, which ones exactly. For me, it was only by the 20^th poem in the collection that I began to fully suspect this was the case. Titled [20. Titrative], the poem consists of three lines.

Unself-consciously?
Ha ha!
Too late.

And too late indeed. In raising the question of unself-consciousness, the poem forecloses its possibility. Clearly, the poem possesses a kind of self-consciousness both performative and playful. But if that is the case, might the same be true of other poems in the collection?

In this respect, poem [26. Evasive] is most interesting. The poem consists of two erasure poems (one of which only semi-blacks out the underlying text), accompanied by a subtitle in capital letters, “ERASURE RHYMES WITH ASIA.” With regards to the subtitle, Le makes a peculiar comment in The Guardian.

What I would hope readers would get from the ludicrous rhyme of ‘Asia rhymes with erasure’ as a subtitle for a poem is that there is a tongue firmly in cheek in these moments. [...] I wanted to be able to say: ‘Look at this, this is ridiculous! Look in the mirror!’ to both writer and reader and myself. And at the same time sort of recalibrate, retune that way of writing, that way of reading: to hopefully see it again, anew.

It is easy to see the “ludicrousity” of the line upon reading Le’s own thoughts about it. Of course, Asia does not rhyme with erasure! But at the same time, without his help, how are we supposed to tell? After all, if poetry consists of, well, poetic language, the reader might as well take “rhyme” to mean something non-literal — I, for one, certainly did. “ERASURE RHYMES WITH ASIA” is fascinating because to take the line seriously itself constitutes an enactment of the violence described in the very line itself. In other words, the conflation of Asia with erasure itself perpetrates a kind of orientalist discourse that renders “Asia” inaccessible, obscure, mystic. If Asia is indeed under erasure, for/to whom is it rendered invisible? Certainly not Asians living in Asia?

All of this, in an odd way, reminds me of a story the South African comedian Trevor Noah once told about a friend who was “accidentally racist.” As he tells it, while he was walking on the street with a group of white friends, a stranger yelled in their direction, “hey, you monkey!” Immediately, one of his friends turned to Trevor Noah and apologized. To commit the sin of over-explaining a joke — the crux of the story is of course that, in apologizing to Trevor Noah, his friend already assumed that the term “monkey” was directed at him. One might note that something similar is at play in “ERASURE RHYMES WITH ASIA,” in that the line invites “accidentally” orientalist readings. Such capacity to produce (mis-)readings is arguably one of the most distinctive features of Le’s poems.

In a much-circulated essay titled “Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility” from Astra Magazine, Som-Mai Nguyen critiques a kind of linguistic fetishization commonly found amongst Vietnamese diasporic writers.

There’s a jazz-hands half-nelson device I dislike in diasporic literature and criticism. Writers extrapolate from orthographic coincidence and sprinkle in non-English words to assert unearned authority. I tire of variants on: in Vietnamese, a tonal language, ma can mean many things. The author rattles off ghost, mother, tomb, horse, code, accompanied by the suggestion that this phrenologically means something. These claims are in-group sleights of hand, smugly announcing, without real evidence, that the author has exotic cultural knowledge the outsider cannot fathom. If you know, you know.

Som-Mai Nguyen’s point is that diasporic writers’ invocations of Vietnamese tonality and diacritics often function as a mechanism for producing “blunt-force ethnic credibility,” a kind of automatic authority granted to ethnic authors on the basis of identity alone. Funnily enough, in [15. Dire critical], Le appears guilty of exactly the thing that Som-Mai Nguyen critiques above.

Here, we find Le too invoking the hackneyed example of the tonal variations of ma to imbue Vietnamese with a kind of mystic quality inaccessible to English. Though perhaps not. Is it that the poem is simply another instantiation of the object of Som-Mai Nguyen’s critique — or is it self-consciously parodying it? Earlier in the same poem, Le writes, 

All in the tone.
Give us each day our diacritics — our low and high, fall and rise, our horns and holds:
Flat we are without.
(You like that, no doubt.)

He continues:

Give us our dấu sắc, huyền, ngã, hỏi, nặng:
For ours is not your flat euphony
Your squeezed, frictioned speech
But full mouth music.

Here, again, assimilation to English is presented as a kind of violence that flattens, that which deadens the fullness of Vietnamese and its tonality. But what follows after prompts us to question such a reading, for in the “full mouth music” of Vietnamese we find: “Tripping of water over stone-carved lingas // Rising tang of early season mango in the mouth // Trill of moonlight and wind on silk curtains / or reflected sunlight, prismatic, on rice paddies along the Baie d’Along.” Mangoes, moonlight, silk curtains, and rice paddies. Are these objects not almost too clichéd, too perfectly oriental, to be read as “unself-conscious”?

Perhaps. But in [35. Reclamatory: 2], Le complicates our reading once more. 

As the poem points out, “moon and jade and silk” have been deployed millennia before the advent of French colonialism, and thus cannot be merely reduced to "orientalist" tropes. Perhaps, then, what was actually orientalist (accidentally so) was none other than to have read “Rising tang of early season mango in the mouth / Trill of moonlight and wind on silk curtains” as a parody of orientalism in the first place.

Though, yet again, perhaps not. After all, that the images now associated with orientalism have existed “millennia before” does not annul the fact that, well, those images have indeed been appropriated into orientalist imaginaries. In the end, it remains impossible to tell with full certainty what is meant to be taken as tongue-in-cheek and what is not — and that appears to be precisely the point. 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is arguably best understood as a staging of the seeming inescapability of clichés, stereotypes, and tropes, in which parody and the parodied become indiscernible. As writer and translator Lina Mounzer writes of clichés that seem to ever-lurk “at the edge of one’s awareness”: “[Y]ou write towards them, or against them; you write to subvert them or mock them or indulge them or skirt around them altogether, but they are always there.”

Surprisingly, the collection contains 37, rather than 36 poems, contrary to what the title suggests. In the last stanza of the final poem of the book, titled [37. Post-racial / -glacial], Le writes. 

In this ecopoetic imagining of a post-racial world, words do not “need mean more than itself”: things just simply are — and there, perhaps, “Vietnamese” too need not signify anything more than “Vietnamese,” whatever that may mean. Yet, in utter contradiction with the poem, for me at least, Le’s use of the word “escape” already signifies more than it need mean: namely, Le’s own background of having come to Australia after having “escaped” Vietnam. Is it I who, in this last instance, collapsed the poem’s utopic vision for a post-racial world? Perhaps. But if the word “escape” has already escaped, it is also because the landscape of racist, orientalist, ethnic clichés and tropes has already escaped me — us — too, its edges always just in sight, just out of reach.

Saigon’s landscape looks dramatically different from how it did three or even two decades ago. As the country’s economic powerhouse, Saigon has seen rapid urban development: new highrises like Landmark 81 and the Bitexco Financial Tower that now define the city’s skyline, new urban infrastructure like the Ba Son Bridge and Saigon’s first metro line, as well as the city’s expansion into areas like District 7’s Phú Mỹ Hưng and District 2’s Thủ Thiêm. If the west has long viewed Saigon under the shadow of war, it is clear that such a rigid frame fails to contain the Saigon of today, whose entropic inner life seems to constantly overflow; with motorbikes onto sidewalks, loud honks through windows, and rainpour over Saigon’s riverbeds.

Tuan Phan’s newly published short story collection Gills: and Other Stories primarily takes place in the backdrop of this Saigon. A set of 10 short stories written in unassuming and measured prose, it is his second book following his memoir Remembering Water, where he, as an adult who returns to live in Saigon, reflects upon his childhood departure from Vietnam as a refugee and his family’s subsequent returns.

Tuan Phan. Image via author website.

In line with the themes of his first book, a significant chunk of Gills center the lives of Việt Kiều. Such stories dwell in the space of the in-between and serve to capture the brushing encounters between those who have left and stayed, between memory and reality, past and present, strangers and family.

In the opening story ‘At the Bánh Mì Stand,’ the owner of a bánh mì stall named Khanh converses with a hungry and jetlagged Việt Kiều who has just arrived in the hours before early dawn after a long flight. His second story, ‘The Việt Kiều Casanova,’ also features a Việt Kiều, though this time a vulgar womanizer who visits the same gift shop every week with a different girl. ​​In ‘Short-Term Rental’ — the only story to take place outside of Vietnam — a Vietnamese American teenage boy visits his father in Houston over the holidays, where he navigates the fractures left by his parents’ separation, as well as the increasing disillusionment with the American dream. And in ‘Photographs,’ narrated in the second person, a Việt Kiều visits her aunt who repeats stories behind photographs she has kept of him and his father, who, in his last visit, told the same stories “almost word for word.”

As is perhaps clearest in this last story, there is a certain kind of nausea to many of these moments, where a spiraling abyss opens up between worlds that reveal their distance precisely via their proximity. Yet, in others, one feels surprisingly comforted by the fact that the misunderstood, wandering gaze across such seemingly irreparable gaps is, at the very least, returned.

It would be a mistake to define Gills as solely a meditation on the experience of the Vietnamese diaspora, for the focus of the greater part of the collection lies elsewhere: namely, the class-ridden social fabric of Saigon.

It would be a mistake, however, to define Gills as solely a meditation on the experience of the Vietnamese diaspora, for the focus of the greater part of the collection lies elsewhere: namely, the class-ridden social fabric of Saigon. The stories that depict this occur in the overlooked folds of Saigon’s socioeconomic order. In ‘A Clean Record,’ for instance, we see the struggles of an elderly man navigating a system of openly corrupt, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, seeking to acquire appropriate paperwork in order to begin driving for Grab. If the old man represents the economically precarious in Saigon — who live in informal, “illegal” homes, who make a living by working in a gig economy characterized by low pay, unstable income, and harsh working conditions — other stories offer glimpses into the other end of Saigon’s socioeconomic order. ‘Selling Sài Gòn,’ for instance, tells the story of Trang, a luxury apartment realtor dating a moneyed yet unambitious boyfriend, who has to navigate the murky waters of having to close a deal with a famous celebrity client named Liêm, who is clearly bent on using his leverage to get with her. In bringing together stories set in widely different settings across Saigon’s socioeconomic strata, Gills offers a damning portrait of Saigon’s class hierarchies in which multiple realities, each absurd in their own ways, co-exist with one another in unsettling and maddening ways.

Nowhere is this more viscerally rendered than in ‘Reusables,’ the most dramatic and gripping of Tuan’s stories. Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, it tells the story of Lâm, a recycler in need of money to treat his dog, who has accidentally swallowed something he shouldn't have from a pile of junk in District 7. Upon being persuaded by his friend Tèo, together they embark on “find[ing] new owners for” (Tèo’s euphemism for stealing) condenser units sitting idle by a BMW dealership in “Korea Town” — a plan that turns south upon being confronted by a celebrity named Liêm (presumably the same character from ‘Selling Sài Gòn’), who, it turns out, had previously been mired in controversy for ripping off flood victims. Indeed, there is something quite bizarre about the whole scene, where we find Lâm’s economic despair juxtaposed against the eerie tranquility of the neighborhood that is arguably Saigon’s most affluent. It is here that Tuan becomes most explicit with his critique of the class-stratified order of contemporary Vietnam:

The fact was, and the fact always was . . . in this long pandemic, it’ll be the already rich bosses, the ones that run dealerships, the ones that get kickbacks and bribe money for construction projects needing their signatures to begin, the ones that buy BMWs for their kids to wreck, that’ll not only survive this lockdown but get even richer. [...] And it’ll still be the little people like me and Tèo, the grandmothers selling grilled corncobs on the street or the homeless kids hawking lottery tickets, that get fucked. Every fucking year. Forever into infinity.

In a well-known passage from his Theses on the Philosophy of History, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin critiques the ugly underbelly of what we call progress. In offering a reading of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, a monoprint of an eccentric angel figure, Benjamin reimagines Klee’s angel to be “the angel of history,” who, though desperate to gather and restore history’s wreckage piling before him, is helplessly swept forward by the ceaseless “storm of progress.” The story of Lâm is the story of those who have been left behind by a vision for progress that is as idyllic as the picturesque scenery of Phú Mỹ Hưng — for Lâm too stands before history’s ever-piling wreckage — except that he, unlike Benjamin's angel of history, has to sift through it for reusable scraps. 

The book cover

Tuan’s collection takes its title from one of its stories, ‘Gills,’ which stands out from the rest as the only magical realist piece. It tells the story of two siblings, Liên and Tú — children of a loving mother and a crass, abusive father — who one day discover gills just below their ankles after the water recedes from flooded streets. In this engrossing reimagination of Saigon's monsoon season, the two children revel in their ability to swim through the city during its submersion under rainwaters — that is, until their father finds out and eventually devises a way to exploit their peculiarity.

Reading ‘Gills,’ one cannot help but contextualize the story within the planet’s ever-worsening ecological crisis, especially given that with it, extreme flooding will only become more common. Yet, it is unclear what exactly is to be the takeaway from the story (which of course is not in and of itself a problem). In an interview with Texas Tech University Press, Tuan describes ‘Gills’ as a “hopeful story,” a yearning for the younger generations to “have the capacity to be resilient.” Here, however, I find it difficult to agree with the author, for hope and optimism seem naive in the face of the global capitalist economy’s unwaning consumption of fossil fuels. Resilience implies coping, and coping implies that we have no choice but to accept the ecological crisis — and that, we cannot accept.

What opens as a fleeting snippet of an interaction by a bánh mì stall at early dawn expands, story by story, and slowly crystallizes into an intricate and dynamic portrait of contemporary Saigon.

I thus find that the most compelling reading of ‘Gills’ is not as an allegory of the environment, but rather as a kind of literalization of the different and uneven ways that the residents of Saigon move and breathe through the city and its spaces. It is a theme that runs through the broader collection, which is perhaps why I find ‘Gills’ an oddly wonderful title for the book. ‘A Clean Record,’ for instance, ends with the elderly man stuck in traffic, suffocating in the heat and diesel exhaust. In ‘Reusables,’ Lâm walks his dog through a lusciously green golf course in District 7, which he is able to access only because of the lockdown. In ‘Selling Sài Gòn,’ Trang moves through a world of luxury apartments that literally exists in a different atmosphere, skyhigh above the rest of the city. In many ways, Gills makes obvious what we all intuitively understand: that what we singularly call “place” is in no way singular, but rather a pluralistic formation of different material and phenomenological spheres — a beautiful thing, no doubt, were its contours not drawn so brutally by class. 

In many ways, Gills: and Other Stories reads like an exercise in world-building. What opens as a fleeting snippet of an interaction by a bánh mì stall at early dawn expands, story by story, and slowly crystallizes into an intricate and dynamic portrait of contemporary Saigon, within which different smaller worlds recursively overlap, collide, and coalesce. In this sense, there is something special about reading the collection in Saigon, where the reader may find themself subsumed into exactly such a confluence of worlds — specifically, of the text in front and the world around. 

Against a backdrop of Vietnamese diasporic literature that often overlooks the complexities of modern-day Saigon, Gills feels like a breath of fresh air.

Copies of Gills will arrive in Vietnam eventually, while people outside of Vietnam can order from Texas Tech Press directly as well as find the audiobook version on Amazon and Bookshop.

For the first time, Vũ Trọng Phụng’s novel Làm đĩ is available in English. Originally published in 1936, the novel has been translated by Đinh Ngọc Mai under the title Making a Whore and was released last year by Major Books, an independent publishing house dedicated to making Vietnamese literature more available for the English-speaking world.

The highly prolific writer Vũ Trọng Phụng is perhaps best known for his satirical novel Số đỏ, or Dumb Luck — a scathing critique of westernization, or “Europeanization,” and the rise of the bourgeoisie class in colonial Vietnam. Many Vietnamese are no doubt familiar with Dumb Luck, as an excerpt of it is featured in the official literature curriculum for Vietnamese high schools. He was praised by the historian Peter Zinoman in the introduction to Making a Whore as “widely considered twentieth-century Vietnam’s greatest writer,” and his literary influences on future generations have far outlived his own short-lived life, which tragically ended at the young age of 26 due to tuberculosis.

At the time of its publication, Making a Whore was highly controversial amongst critics and intellectuals, the debate having been whether Phụng’s novel “should be denounced as pornography or praised as a bold contribution to science and sex education.” For readers today, nine decades after the novel’s original publication, the debate may strike as a bit silly. Making a Whore is neither as sexually explicit nor raunchy as some popular novels of today, nor is the novel really that informative when it comes to offering practical sex education. Nonetheless, the novel offers us acute perspectives into the fascinating discourses on gender and sexuality of late colonial Vietnam.

Image via Facebook page Mộng Tình Lâu.

In his own introduction to the novel, Phụng explains that the purpose of his novel is “to urge moralists and parents to care for their children’s happiness and to pay attention to what corrupt prejudices still consider dirty: that is, sexuality.” As one of his more widely acclaimed novels, the new translation marks a major step forward in expanding the horizon of English-language readership and scholarship on Phụng and his complex views on sex, gender, and colonial modernity.

The story

Making a Whore begins with two friends — the narrator and his longtime friend Quý, who has come to visit — embarking on a night out in town and eventually ending up at a licensed brothel. There, the hostess asks them to wait in a room for their prostitute to arrive. To their surprise, the prostitute who arrives is none other than Huyền, a girl that Quý had obsessed over in high school, who was adored by everyone for her beauty, her seemingly innocent yet sophisticated mannerisms, and her noble family background. 

The two friends thus abandon their original purpose for coming to the brothel entirely and begin inquiring into Huyền’s life, their central curiosity being how a girl like Huyền, “well-groomed, well-behaved, well-raised, the daughter of a judge, the niece of a doctor,” could end up in such a place. “How come the Creator let such a marvel of nature fall from grace without batting an eye? How did society let someone go off the rails without a shred of regret?” asks the narrator.

What follows is Huyền’s story told in the form of a novel manuscript within a novel, structured into four chapters: “Puberty,” “Into the World,” “Married Life,” and “Debauchery.” As Huyền’s life progresses through the respective stages, her “sexual crisis” increasingly spirals out of control. Despite the fact that, by the very structure of the novel, readers follow Huyền’s story already well aware of its ending, the sequence in which Huyền’s life unravels is alluring at every turn. The novel is highly accessible, relatively short for its genre, and its tone and style rather straightforward and blunt. On some level, the novel’s plot — as well as its characters — at times feels a bit absurd, but that is part of the novel’s charm. For it is through such absurdity that Phụng satirizes the “sexual chaos” of late colonial Vietnamese society.

Repression and westernization

Who or what is to be blamed of Huyền’s corruption? For Phụng, the answer is two-pronged: the lack of proper sex education for adolescents and the influences of westernization.

Reflecting back on her life journey, Huyền remarks, “puberty, a rotten environment, and unsavoury company, all fused into a flawed education system that eventually threw me to the wolves.” Seemingly drawing on Freud’s notion of the “return of the repressed” — whose psychoanalytic theory greatly influenced Phụng’s novel — Phụng urges readers to understand Huyền’s sexual “perversions” later in life as the direct effects of her repression conditioned by her improper sex education and adults’ stigmatization of the topic of sex. As a child, deeply curious about her mother’s pregnancy, Huyền asks how babies are born, to which her aunt answers “through the armpits,” only before her father aggressively disapproves of her question and orders her to go away. Without proper sex education, and fueled by the burning lust typical of adolescence, she is left to explore her sexuality via other means: physically, through masturbation; and theoretically, through a book on the “science” of sex. The irony is that the adults themselves — responsible for the intense shaming and stigmatization that conditions such repression — freely indulge in bodily and material pleasures, often in plain sight in front of their children, and often in morally corrupt ways, as in the case of Huyền’s own father, who engages in adultery.

But it is not just the lack of sex education that is to blame. For Phụng, it is also westernization and its culture of materialism. In one telling moment, Huyền remarks that, in some sense, her “corruption” began with “a pair of white trousers” — which at the time, was considered the hallmark of a “modern” woman’s look. According to Huyền, what began as an insignificant pair of white trousers opened the way for a slippery slope of increasingly western and liberal ways of socializing, all of which eventually resulted in debauchery, corruption, and prostitution. As Phụng summarizes his views succinctly:

The meeting of East and West on this strip of land has strongly influenced our material lives. What could be more absurd than having accepted the new lifestyle, which includes theatres, cinemas, modern clothes, dancing houses, perfumes, and waxes, which are conditions that make humanity more and more SEXUAL, but at the same time not recognising the need to propagate the issue of education about SEXUALITY, in order to teach future generations how to sex ethically, to sex honestly, and to sex in a way that will not cause harm to your race?

Here, it is worth noting that the title Making a Whore is a significant departure from the title that English-language scholarship had traditionally used, To Be a Whore. In Vietnamese, the verb làm can mean both making and to be. The change in the verb is significant in that it reflects Phụng’s general attitude towards the sexual corruption of late colonial society, as demonstrated above. For Phụng, a “whore” is not something that someone simply chooses to be, but rather “made” by factors larger than any one single individual.

Analytical failings

While Making a Whore certainly contains elements that were ahead of its time — such as, importantly, its refusal to depict prostitutes as simply flat-charactered victims, as many others during his time had — his novel also contains key analytical flaws that are worth highlighting.

The Vietnamese-language cover of a previous edition of Làm đĩ.

The first centers around “corruption,” a concept that organizes and structures the entire novel. But what does that word really entail? What specifically makes an act “corrupt”? Part of what is so difficult in trying to determine what Phụng means by “corruption,” or his theory of sexual morality, is that he seems to draw from a hodgepodge of various disparate influences. As Peter Zinoman notes, “Ideas drawn from Freud, modern sexology, and traditional and neo-traditional Sino-Vietnamese discourses about sex commingled in his thinking, making it difficult to attach a meaningful label to his approach to this issue.”

For instance, the “educational book” that Phụng reads in lieu of proper sex education relies on the theory of yin and yang to denounce masturbation as obstructing harmonious equilibrium. “Those who perform the act will think it is identical to copulation, but in fact, copulation between men and women requires the harmony of yin and yang to facilitate blood flow and prevent hygienic mishaps. In the case of masturbation, only yin or yang energy is present; therefore, blood flow remains obstructed.” What we thus have is a concept of “corruption” that seemingly resists a coherent framework. Is masturbation corrupt in the same way that debauchery is corrupt, or even in the way that prostitution is deemed corrupt?

But on some level, the amorphous quality of what is meant by “corruption” may be precisely the point. “Corruption” is perhaps best understood not as any analytically well-defined, objective category, but rather as an expression or reflection of Phụng’s own ideals for Vietnamese society. Ultimately, it is more useful to grasp the term not for what it means, but rather for its ideological function — that of policing sex and gender specifically under a kind of civilizational anxiety.

If prostitution is “wrong,” it is not because it is somehow sexually “corrupt,” but because of its exploitative conditions under gendered capitalism. It is worth asking if Huyền would have still ended up a prostitute had she lived under a different socioeconomic system.

The other major way in which Making a Whore is analytically confused is in its treatment of materialism. As discussed, Phụng directs much of the blame of Huyền’s said “corruption” — epitomized by her prostitution — to materialism, as a force of westernization. But here, Phụng fails to differentiate between the two distinct concepts of “materialism” and capitalism — the former of which should be understood as the cultural and ideological manifestation of the latter. Without revealing too much of the novel, while materialism does indeed lead Huyền to act in increasingly “corrupt” ways, what ultimately pushes Huyền into prostitution is not corruption via materialism per se, but rather economic necessity. In other words, what ultimately pushes Huyền into prostitution is the economic system of capitalism — which, through the brutal violence of colonialism, expropriated and dispossessed the population at large, foreclosing conditions for relatively self-sufficient subsistence.  Or more specifically, what is responsible is capitalism paired with an existing structure of patriarchy that severely curtailed women’s socioeconomic freedoms. If prostitution is “wrong,” it is not because it is somehow sexually “corrupt,” but because of its exploitative conditions under gendered capitalism. It is worth asking if Huyền would have still ended up a prostitute had she lived under a different socioeconomic system.

Making a Whore is analytically messy and full of tensions and contradictions. I outline this, however, not to dissuade readers from picking up the book, but because I think that what makes a book like Making a Whore such an engaging and fascinating read is precisely its multitude of tensions and contradictions, and the ways in which they reveal much about its own time. In this sense, the analytical flaws in the book are the direct product — which is to say, a critical perspective into — an extremely dynamic and formative time in Vietnam’s national history when deeply difficult and important questions were being debated and unfurled in real time: a time when gender norms were clashing intensely against notions of modernity, a time when the independence movement was fractured across nationalists and communists who disagreed on the subject of capitalism. If there is a reason to read Making a Whore, it is not for the answers it offers to the questions it raises, but rather for what it reveals about the very terrain or horizon in which such questions were being raised and debated.

Last year, acclaimed Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen published To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, a collection of six essays adapted from the prestigious Norton Lectures that he delivered at Harvard in 2023–2024.

Writing and otherness are the central themes of the book. What does it mean to write as an other? To read as an other? What is, or should be, the relationship between self and otherness? Such are the questions that Nguyen is invested in in his latest book. And while his reflections upon these questions center around his own experiences as an Asian American and refugee, he demonstrates, importantly, that such questions are pertinent to all of us, whoever we are and wherever we live, ethically, socially, and in some sense, existentially.

The insights that Nguyen offers in To Save and to Destroy are simultaneously theoretically sharp and intimately tender, a result of his seamless blending of autobiography and theory. Maneuvering between artful storytelling drawn from his own life and readings of critical and literary texts, he lets each shed light on the other. The result is a deft hybrid between art and criticism, combining the best strengths of both — a quality that great lectures most often have. That said, Nguyen’s book does not read like a lecture, and nor does it attempt to lecture at us. Rather, it simply asks to be heard, asks for its readers to think, feel, and reflect alongside its author. 

For those who have read Nguyen’s previous works, the particular hybrid genre of To Save and to Destroy may strike as new, but it may oddly feel familiar as well — after all, Nguyen’s fiction has arguably always been theoretical, and his non-fiction, as his latest memoir A Man of Two Faces can attest, literary. Anyone who finds pleasure in reading theory as literature and literature as theory, To Save and to Destroy will be a delight to read, intellectually rich without being burdensome.

As it may already be apparent, the subtitle of Nguyen’s book, “writing as an other,” contains within it a multitude of meanings that he weaves through and together. To start, Nguyen is interested in two forms of otherness: one that is experienced via marginalization and domination, a form of otherness deeply personal to Nguyen as someone who came to the US as a young refugee from Vietnam, and a second form of otherness, perhaps more universal, that resides in the deepest parts of all of us. Nguyen explains:

By others, I mean those who are outcast from or exploited by the powerful norm of their societies, or those who have moved voluntarily or have been moved forcefully from one place to another, or those who have been dominated in their own homes by outsiders whom they would consider to be others. By others, I also mean ourselves, for as Toni Morrison points out in her Norton Lectures, The Origin of Others, otherness emerges from within the mysterious and unknown, or at best partly known, territory inside us all, a nexus of fears and desires we project onto those whom we label strangers, foreigners, enemies, invaders, threats.

For Nguyen, as the last part of the quote above makes clear, the two forms of otherness, while distinct, often intertwine in troubling ways. A central question of the book then, is how one should relate to the other, both within and outside the self. In the book’s preface, Nguyen explains that his lectures are an “attempt to think through what it means to write and read from the position of an other, which is for me the starting point of an ethical and political art.” If ethics and politics concern the question of how one should relate to others, the task of thinking through “writing as an other” is the starting point for ethical and political art precisely because it is in otherness that self and other meet, struggle, and relate.

In this respect, the chapter “Palestine and Asia” stands out, the corresponding lecture of which he delivered not long after the October 7 attacks in 2023. In raising the question of the significance of Israel-Palestine for Asian Americans, Nguyen comes to the following forceful conclusion.

Being Asian American is not the only dimension of myself. I cease being an Asian American if and when Asian Americans cannot emerge from self-defense, inclusion, and a limited solidarity bound by race and nation in order to embrace an expansive, global solidarity. My Asian Americanness matters less than my ethics, politics, and art. Together they constitute a repository of a stubborn otherness that resists the lure of a domesticated otherness satiated by belonging. For Asian Americans, inclusion is crucial but complicated when it means belonging to a settler and imperial country that promotes the colonization and occupation of other lands. What is the worth of defending our lives if we do not seek to protect the lives of others? As for whom we should feel solidarity with, the answer is simple, albeit difficult: whoever is the cockroach. Whoever is the monster.

Nguyen’s point is that belonging cannot, and should not, come at all costs, taking precedence over one’s ethics, politics, and art, nor over the pursuit of “radical solidarity” that cannot be bound by race or nation, but must extend to those who are most oppressed and dehumanized beyond our immediate communities. Importantly, Nguyen is not calling for a rejection of belonging or Asian American identity, but rather a transformation in how such belonging is understood in the first place — the values it should entail and the forms of solidarities it should call for. And such reworking of what Asian Americanness ought to mean is precisely what Nguyen seeks to engage in in deliberating upon, and performing, writing as an ethical and political act.

If, on the one hand, Nguyen is interested in “writing as an other” as an act, he is also interested in “writing as an other” as a noun, an object that “is itself an other to the writer.” This is, in fact, literally the case in the chapter “On Speaking for an Other,” in which he recounts rediscovering essays that he wrote long ago as a freshman in Berkeley for Maxine Hong Kingston’s writing seminar, specifically about his mother’s breakdown and her eventual commitment to a psychiatric ward. In rereading his own essays decades later, Nguyen realizes that his memories of the event were wrong, with crucial parts distorted or even entirely blacked out. He realizes that his mother had been committed to the psychiatric ward when he was a college freshman, not as a child as he thought for decades. He also learns about a hole in his bathroom door that he fails to recollect even after rereading his writing. His father had knocked it through in order to reach his mother who had locked herself in the bathroom out of a paranoiac fear that someone, or everyone, was trying to kill her.

If writing is other, it is in part because language itself is always already other, foreign, even in the form of one’s mother tongue, a point that the French philosopher Jacques Derrida elucidates in “Monolingualism of the Other,” a text Nguyen explicitly invokes. But writing is other also because it reflects the otherness that is an inherent and irreducible condition of existence itself. As Nguyen reflects upon the aforementioned episode, he writes, “if the experience was so unsettling that I had to write about it, it was also so unnerving that I had to forget about it until my mother died two days before Christmas Eve in 2018.” In some sense, Nguyen’s trauma was itself an other within himself that he could not bear nor confront — which is why he “had to” write about it, “had to” in order to externalize it into words on a page so that it could be stored away and forgotten.

As Nguyen explains, the experience of being a refugee is often one that must inevitably face the question, “will they live or die, be saved or destroyed?” But what about in writing? As the title of Nguyen’s book indicates, in “writing as an other,” salvation and destruction do not necessarily exist in binary opposition but rather in odd cohesion. In writing about his mother, and in rereading his writing, what has he saved? destroyed? The memories of his mother, both, no doubt, but perhaps also himself — a contradiction only if we cling onto a notion of self that excludes from itself otherness.

But even as the encounter with otherness — both of one’s own as well as of loved ones — can be deeply unsettling, traumatic even, Nguyen insists that such an encounter can also possess unexpected joys. In the last paragraph of the book, Nguyen describes his sister Tuyết, whom his family abandoned in fleeing Vietnam (and who, as was unknown at the time, was adopted), visiting San José to see their sick father, whom she had last seen three decades ago.

Love was what brought my sister to the United States, to see her brothers but most especially, I think, our father. After Los Angeles, my sister flew to San José to visit him, whom she had not seen since his last visit to Việt Nam thirty years before. Our father spends his days in quiet contemplation, and when I return, he either does not recognize me or pretends to recognize me, his other, as he is other to me. I warned my sister that our father would probably not know who she was, but this did not appear to deter her. When she walked into his room, she told me later, she asked him if he recognized her. In a moment of reunion and recognition that I think of as manifesting the joy of otherness, he murmured an assent. Then our father said, “Vui lắm.” And my sister was content that our father said he was very happy.

The otherness of Nguyen’s sister, the otherness of his father, the otherness of their encounter with each other — in this extraordinary scene, a multitude of layers of otherness overlap and collide, each bearing its own painful history. Yet in this encounter, we witness the emergence of a plurality of joys too, each felt differently by his sister, his father, and Nguyen himself. The “joy of otherness” resounds here, but it also remains opaque, not least of all because it remains unclear what their father exactly meant by “Vui lắm.” Perhaps he recognized Tuyết. Perhaps he was happy to see her regardless of who she was. Perhaps he was joyous for a different reason altogether.

But perhaps the question of why does not matter so much. If the joy of otherness, and the multitude of joys that reverberate from it, cannot but be opaque, it is because the joy of otherness is itself also, ultimately, deeply other.

When the wind strafes Dạ Ngân’s window, seedpods shake and rattle like spent bullet casings in the tamarind tree that Americans planted decades ago. They also built the large apartment complex where she now lives. It’s an ironic place to call home, considering Dạ Ngân was a resistance fighter in the south during the American War.

It’s one of the countless incredible details in the esteemed writer and journalist’s life. Born in 1952, Dạ Ngân has spent years in extreme hardship, tragedy, perseverance and rebellion that may have been common for Vietnamese of her generation, but are rarely articulated. The experiences serve as inspiration for her acclaimed short stories and books, including her career-defining novel, Gia đình bé mọn (An Insignificant Family).

The walls of Dạ Ngân’s Saigon apartment are covered with large photographs of family members. She points to each face and explains to me who their fictionalized counterparts are in An Insignificant Family. There is Aunt Ràng, the powerful matriarch that could “split a hair into quarters”; young Thu Thi, the daughter who collects and splits spent coconut shells from the trash piles in front of the market’s drink stands to use for fire material; Đính, the author of “sorrowful, trembling, and yet extraordinarily romantic” stories who becomes Tiệp’s soulmate; and of course Tiệp, the book’s main character and stand-in for Dạ Ngân herself.

A photograph of Dạ Ngân's father and her husband's family. Photo by Kevin Lee.

After showing me the photographs, Dạ Ngân brings out several large notebooks filled with delicate handwriting: the original manuscript for An Insignificant Family. It took her more than five years to complete the novel, and she finished and abandoned numerous full drafts before sitting down for one month on the banks of the Đại Lải Lake near Hanoi to pen it in its entirety. As the silt-rich waters slithered past mountains silk-screened with fog, she wrote for 20 days straight — a full chapter each day.

Photo by Paul Christiansen.

Dạ Ngân explains to me through her grandson’s translations that the book is at least 80% true. Understanding that makes the novel all the more remarkable. First published in 2005 in Vietnamese and translated into English in 2009, it focuses on Tiệp, a woman from Điệp Vàng — a small hamlet in southern Vietnam —  who joins the war as a teenager after her father dies in Côn Đảo's infamous prison.

The book jumps forwards and backwards in time, chronicling her candlelit discovery of literature while stationed in guerrilla camps; her miserable first marriage to a callous bureaucrat; raising two children on the pittance salary afforded a writer; falling in love with a married man living in the north and the struggles of maintaining their relationship while separated by the full length of the country; the familial and societal ostracism associated with extramarital affairs and divorce; and rectifying the disparities between post-war hopes and the realities of poverty and corruption. As Wayne Karlin notes in the book’s introduction, after the war Vietnam transitioned through three distinct periods, and “Tiệp’s story occurs within and can represent these three epochs - liberation, deprivation, and renovation.”

The most popular books focusing on Vietnam that are available to English readers are almost exclusively written by white men. While many of them do tell important stories, they are nearly always from an outsider’s perspective, which reduces Vietnamese to supporting characters at best, or racist caricatures at worst. Even if one includes the handful of books by Vietnamese writers that are translated and widely distributed, their emphasis is typically on men and battlefields. Rarely do readers get glimpses into the post-war period that don't involve fleeing the country, nor do they see the role and experiences of women during the country's painful reconciliation.

Having these underrepresented topics at the heart of An Insignificant Family makes its limited distribution in the West all the more depressing. Rosemary Nguyen’s translation came out on Northwestern University Press, a small but respected publisher that releases, among other things, a “Voices from Vietnam” series. Dạ Ngân was scheduled for a promotional tour across the United States when it first came out, which would have brought the book greater attention, but her editor passed away before it could begin, effectively canceling the trip. While it is still available through online booksellers in America and elsewhere, and a few professors have taken note of it, adding it to reading lists, it has largely gone unnoticed. Dạ Ngân herself even has difficulty getting her hands on the translated copies, especially because she so frequently gives them away as gifts.

Photo by Kevin Lee.

Thankfully, Dạ Ngân has achieved considerably more recognition in Vietnam for her work. Step into any chain bookstore in the city and you might find something with her name on it. An Insignificant Family won numerous awards, including the best fiction prize from the Union of Writers in Hanoi and the Vietnamese Writers Association, and has been covered numerous times by Vietnamese news outlets.

Even with these successes and accolades, many Vietnamese people remain unaware of the novel’s existence. Putting aside the dismal statistics for how many books the average Vietnamese reads a year, many native literature enthusiasts I spoke with haven’t heard of Dạ Ngân or her pinnacle novel. It isn’t anthologized in the national curriculum, and the last copy of the Vietnamese edition was printed in 2010, though it can be read in its entirety on her site.

Even if many family elders have stories that resemble Dạ Ngân’s, for cultural or personal reasons, they rarely share them with the amount of depth and honesty as her book does. Reading it can, therefore, connect Vietnamese more closely with their country’s history and foster understanding and empathy for their fellow citizens.

Dạ Ngân between her two children, with her mother and aunt seated in front. Photo via Dạ Ngân's personal site.

Put simply, Tiệp is a feminist badass — and by extension, so is Dạ Ngân, but even though her own biography closely matches that of her fictionalized counterpart, for the sake of this discussion, I’ll reference only the character. She consistently upends concepts of the submissive female. Even surrounded by strong women, many of them widows who must raise children, take care of parents and earn money, Tiệp stands out as a singularly bold and independent female.

While Tiệp pursues a career in literature and journalism that removes her from the “traditional feminine attributes of industry, appearance, speech and behavior, and... peace and comfort,” it’s in her personal life where she most fully displays her rebellious form of femininity. Tiệp’s family fails in pressuring her into reconciling with her first husband and shuns her for unabashedly having a relationship with a married man, yet she does so anyway for the sake of true love. 

The couple's partners understood the situation behind closed doors, but public perception was a different matter. Moreover, at the time, adultery was an offense that could lead to jail, and mere suspicion of her committing the crime could cost her her job. Tiệp doesn’t wilt under the risk, however, or genuflect and beg for forgiveness. At one point, called in by her superiors to confess her behavior, she speaks with reckless abandon, exposing the moral bankruptcy of her accusers, consequences be damned.

Strength, however, is not simply confronting adversaries and scoffing at norms, but also swallowing one’s pride. Tiệp’s decisions mean she has to see her daughter clad in rags eating “pig-grade greens and slightly spoiled fish.” For much of the novel, Tiệp is miserable. To meet Đính, for example, she suffers a 60-hour hard-seat train ride to Hanoi beset by men attempting to sexually assault her, curled up on newspapers on the ground next to the bathrooms, “feeling like an animal trussed up and thrown on the floor of a truck for the trip to the butcher.” When she finally arrives, their honeymoon moments must be cloaked in secrecy and reliant on friends willing to lend a spare room and alibi. None of it is easy, and Tiệp’s ultimate vindication becomes an argument for female empowerment.

A photo of Dạ Ngân from her personal collection.

In addition to its portrayal of determined womanhood, An Insignificant Family’s representation of post-war poverty adds important descriptions to the public discourse. Many books on Vietnam stop at the 1975 American withdrawal, and even those that continue past that date avoid some of the greater hardships endured on a national level. Dạ Ngân, however, includes them in precise, heart-wrenching detail. She reports that apartments in Hanoi were “monotonous, haphazardly assembled conglomerations of floors rising out of the earth, dotted with unsightly, untidy caged balconies and strung together with clothes lines that completely ignored any concern of aesthetics or propriety… odors of burning charcoal, of rats and cockroaches, of mold and mildew, and of course the ubiquitous stench of public toilets that were evidently very short of water.” 

Similarly, at a state-run enterprise phở shop, “a small, round hole had been punched” in every spoon so as to safeguard them from theft, while all shops kept strict count of silverware because patrons too poor to afford their own at home would often pocket them. Of course, such a measure means that the broth slips through, rendering the dish wholly impossible to eat. But it is just as well, because the meager broth strewn with beef scraps was “the worst we ever had.” Such hardships should be internalized by any current resident slapping down a few bills for an overflowing bowl of bún chả or scarfing down a Domino's pizza topped with plump shrimp.

Rampant crime also ravaged the country after unification. In the novel, abortion clinic nurses abscond with jars of urine so they can sell the liquid to vegetable farmers for use as fertilizer, and the vessels to bootleg liquor distillers. Moreover, the illegal diamond and cigarette smuggling efforts of an official’s wife are an open secret. The book doesn’t shy away from these realities; rather it articulates the way their prevalence impacts citizenry — effects of which can be felt in contemporary culture.

Tiệp was never naive about the ability of authorities to deliver prosperity, but she also didn’t foresee the depraved depths of internal fighting and discrimination that befell the country post-unification. Healing was eschewed for the sake of retribution and personal gain. Those that were aligned with the “right side” in the war clutch their trivial positions of power and use them to lash out at their former adversaries. For example, in the novel, the daughter of a former colonel is forced to occupy a lean-to shoddily erected in the back courtyard of the villa she once lived in. Here she makes her money by doing the nails of local prostitutes.

Dạ Ngân doesn’t hold back on grim details or taboo subject matters. For example, she describes the graphic physical and emotional experience of having abortions and expresses opinions about post-war class and society with particular emphasis on gender that would have been impossible to publicly vocalize at the time. Similarly, the book reveals the inner thoughts that accompany adultery, romance and hardship in a raw and immediate way that has no place in polite conversation. While such honesty may have been left out by a less fierce author, Dạ Ngân’s portrayal brings to Vietnamese the necessary details that will be forgotten by future generations if not recorded.

Examining Dạ Ngân’s own life provides insight into what might have happened next for the fictionalized characters. Like Tiệp, when she was finally freed from her first marriage, and after 11 years of long-distance romance, she moved to Hanoi in 1993. There she married her husband, the similarly successful and famous writer, Nguyễn Quang Thân, who is portrayed in An Insignificant Family as Đính. Despite working in frequent poverty, occupying a 25-square-meter apartment that shared its bathroom with a neighbor, the two established prolific careers and became cornerstones of the country’s writing community. Dạ Ngân fondly recalls the number of writers she sat with, drinking, chatting and debating. By promoting and critiquing each other's work, the group of writers, in many ways, defined what constituted post-war literature and journalism.

Photos of Dạ Ngân and her husband, Nguyễn Quang Thân, as observed on their wall. Photo via Kevin Lee.

In 2017, at the age of 82, Nguyễn Quang Thân passed away. Still in mourning, Dạ Ngân keeps his altar freshly adorned. Next to flowers, mangoes and bananas, several of his books, including one that came out this year, are on prominent display. Her grandson explains to me that he grew up reading these books, preferring them even to his grandmother’s, and is confident people will continue reading them in the future.

Losing her husband, being evicted from the Vietnam Writers Association, and living far removed from her group of aging writer friends in Hanoi, one could forgive Dạ Ngân for retreating into a quiet retirement. She, however, seems to be doing no such thing. Invigorated by her family, she continues to invite friends and writers to visit her home, promote her husband’s work and travel throughout the country. She hasn’t lost her rebellious spirit, either. After discussing some rather sensitive viewpoints with me, I assured her I wouldn’t include anything troublesome in this article. “Oh go ahead, print whatever you’d like,” she said, before adding with a laugh, “It’s not my magazine that’ll get shut down.”

I asked Dạ Ngân if she ever considered moving out of Vietnam, like Dương Thu Hương or Phạm Thị Hoài, to benefit from a more conducive publishing environment and easier access to international audiences. She immediately brushed aside the suggestion. “Writers must live among their people,” she said. Vietnam is what she writes about, and who she writes for. As important as her work is for foreigners, its articulation of past and present conditions are crucial for her fellow citizens. As she explains in an unpublished essay, “always and no matter where in this world, writers are the pioneers who work silently, but their position is absolutely essential, [it] is able to touch deeply into one’s soul and intimately express one’s emotion.”

The truth of that quote makes it all the more lamentable that not every person, be they Vietnamese or foreigner, has read An Insignificant Family. It preserves important stories and details that might be lost, and with them opportunities for empathy and understanding.

This article was originally published in 2018.

Dương Hướng’s No Man River (Bến không chồng) was first published in 1991 and won the Vietnam Writers' Association Prize for Fiction. Translated into English by Quan Manh Ha and Charles Waugh, it captures the brutal reality of conflict in Vietnam from 1945 to 1979.

War’s communal impact is portrayed through various individual stories in the novel, ranging from the fictional Đông Village’s first war hero's suppressed love for his comrade’s widow to a family patriarch’s descent into insanity. Throughout No Man River, Dương is deeply concerned with the realities of northern village life in the context of a fierce international conflict bathed in socialist propaganda that demands personal sacrifice for collective revolution. These concerns radiate throughout the narrative as the author shifts the focus to the trials and tribulations of those left behind — the elderly men, and more notably, the women.

The novel prominently delineates Nhân’s struggle to mourn her husband’s death on the battlefield, while watching her twin sons enlist in the army. It complements this story with her daughter, Hạnh, who faces difficulties being accepted by the village after falling in love with a rival family’s son. The female villagers grapple with traditional Vietnamese views of womanhood bound to motherhood. For example, the village elders often regard single women in Đông Village as failures due to their inability to become mothers and raise the next generation. The villagers know that all the young men had gone to war and that there was no one left to marry, but this doesn't relieve societal pressures to become a “proper” woman.

No Man River is simultaneously about the presence of the emotional and psychological war in women’s lives and their collective fight to define themselves without men. This focus on women is all the more notable because they have been largely ignored in Vietnam’s war fiction prior to 1990. The trauma of war is bloody and persistent as its impacts linger far beyond the final battle and take root in those left behind, as the women’s stories underscore.

Author Dương Hướng. Photo via Quảng Nhin Online.

No Man River is also a story of one rural community’s resilience in the face of persistent violence. Traditional Vietnamese views clash with the new socialist dream as the author highlights the villagers’ struggle to build a new, progressive society. The novel concerns itself with a vast scope, from the French War, the American War, to the Sino-Vietnamese border war, without straying from its primary purpose as a realistic testament to the reverberating impacts of war in the northern countryside. Vạn fought in the battle at Điện Biên Phủ, while Nghĩa, a soldier in the novel’s present-day, had fought in the American War and its aftermath. Both soldiers are thematically united in No Man River by the collective trauma their families experience during their absence and the men’s inability to return unchanged by combat.

No Man River seamlessly introduces the river as metaphor and important setting. The pier is a key gathering place that serves as an example of Vietnam’s communal nature and collective consciousness, while the river’s depiction shows the author’s reverence for Vietnam’s land and people as it becomes a character of its own, personifying love and loss alongside calamity and comfort. The Đông villagers began to call the area the “River of Love,” known for its “gentle breeze and slowly flowing water [that] caressed their bodies like invisible hands, helping them forget their sorrows and hardships.” Hướng pairs this image with the local legend of a woman’s suicide, recalling that the women, “to this day will bathe there when they hope to wash away misfortune.” Both scenes illustrate the women’s hope and resilience caught in the river’s violent undercurrent.

“No Man River is simultaneously about the presence of the emotional and psychological war in women’s lives and their collective fight to define themselves without men.”

Amidst hope, there is pessimism and disappointment as witnessed from multiple perspectives: a young soldier who never returns to meet his son as well as the Nguyễn family’s lack of care for Great Uncle Xeng as he descends into madness. Tradition and cultural revolution continually clash in the village as the rich flaunt their electricity into the night and Vạn’s socialist ideals butt heads with an ancestral family curse. Similarly, the novel’s prominent theme of suppressed emotion strongly resonates throughout war hero Vạn’s internal battle over his unspoken love for Nhân, his fallen comrade’s widow. Vạn repeatedly confesses that “he knew in his heart he was in love with Nhân, but in his mind he considered those feelings a weakness” and a betrayal of the oath he swore to the Việt Minh Party.

In a world consistently defined by war and conflict, No Man River exists as a necessary contradiction to the propaganda-fueled narrative of the honorable soldier and loyal wife. The author doesn’t shy away from depicting soldiers coming home disfigured and encourages empathy for everyone living through wartime, regardless of whether they wear a uniform. There is no place for “American heroes or saviors” or pure, innocent victims in the novel. Instead, most of the characters are portrayed with agency to accept or reject their fates. The novel also debunks the myth of passive women left at home and the joyful soldiers returning with medals on their chests. At its core, No Man River emphasizes that suffering occurs regardless of one’s position in armed conflict. It appears in empty beds and children born out of wedlock. It’s unapologetically visible in the scars that cover the soldiers’ bodies and the roar of airplanes overhead. It’s undeniable in the rare letters home and sprawling war martyr cemeteries. The novel serves as a constant reminder that, in war, there are no heroes but only survivors.

Light Out and Modern Vietnamese Stories, 1930–1954 offers the contemporary reader an honest glimpse of a period in Vietnam history characterized by corruption, exploitation, dehumanization, poverty, and starvation. The Vietnamese texts, both a novella and accompanying short stories, not only delineate the immediate influence of French colonization on the sociopolitical functions of Vietnam, an enterprise solely designed for its economic potential, but also expose the extending impact on the quotidian lives of proletarians, particularly the peasantry.

The 18 complementary short stories in Light Out and Modern Vietnamese Stories, 1930–1954, carefully selected by the translators Quan Manh Ha and Paul Christiansen, do not highlight a single common theme addressed in the novella Light Out by Ngô Tất Tố; rather, each story explores its own social issue, and, as a whole, the collection paints a complete picture of the historical period with a variety of perspectives. However educational the book may be, by no means is it a pleasant read, as the dominating pessimism, gloomy picture, and blunt and unembellished language reinvigorate a tragic and tumultuous period in Vietnamese history.

A brutal look into the misery of the peasantry under French colonization

As the centerpiece of the book, ‘Light Out’ (Tắt đèn) serves as the predominant text, extensively outlining the Vietnamese experience during colonial Vietnam under the French. Though beginning with a glimpse of farm workers’ quotidian life, the pastoral scene is suddenly disrupted by a conflict instigated by their masters’ unpaid poll taxes. Immediately, the novella addresses an issue permeating colonial Vietnam: the exorbitant taxes levied on the Vietnamese peasantry by the French, while denouncing the economic and local political corruption and labor exploitation experienced by titled workers.

In Light Out, this is evident when the aforementioned plowmen receive undue punishments on behalf of their masters’ negligence with tax payments, or when the village mayor who, in the midst of a vehement argument, admits to fraud implemented through tax collection. Such corruption is extended in Nguyễn Công Hoan’s included ‘Carrion Eaters’ (Thịt người chết) by the coroner, who abuses his position to seek a disproportionate bribe from Mr. Cứu. Through their uncensored depictions of the foundational corruption in the system governing villages, many stories expose the systematic poverty imposed on the peasantry and delineate the oppression that impedes any means of escape or social advancement: simply, one is born a peasant and dies as a miserable peasant.

“Famine and hunger are so prevalent in both the novella and the short stories that starvation becomes the norm — and even banal. Perhaps even more terrifying is the thought that these scenes reflect the actual social situation during colonial Vietnam; they are but a glimpse of historical reality.”

With a cycle of poverty, the peasantry are inevitably thrust into destitution, where hunger becomes a regularly endured hardship. This state is a salient issue sustained throughout the book, from Dần’s tantrums and Mrs. Dậu’s struggle to produce milk for Tỉu in Light Out to the beggar’s resolve to eat from a dog’s bowl in Nguyễn Công Hoan’s ‘The Teeth of an Upper-Class Family’s Dog’ (Răng con chó nhà tư sản) or Mai’s immodest sacrifice impelled by desperation in Thạch Lam’s ‘Hunger’ (Đói). The living conditions of peasantry are aptly characterized as a state of constant privation, and the writers deliver the brutal reality directly without euphemistic expressions nor beautifying the situation. One can only shudder at the gut-wrenching scene of starved villagers littering the street market that Kim Lân so matter-of-factly depicts in ‘Common-Law Wife’ (Vợ nhặt). In fact, famine and hunger are so prevalent in both the novella and the short stories that starvation becomes the norm — and even banal. Perhaps even more terrifying is the thought that these scenes reflect the actual social situation during colonial Vietnam; they are but a glimpse of historical reality. 

Ironically, the only suffering depicted in all stories is strictly that of humans, particularly the proletarians, and especially the peasantry. Never is the reader’s sympathy invoked through the hardship of an animal on the brink of starvation. In fact, the death of any animal, for that matter, is simply absent from all stories in the book, except for the brief mention of the death of Mr. Hoàng’s German shepherd in Nam Cao’s ‘The Eyes’ (Đôi mắt), which is ascribed to the consumption of hazardous waste rather than starvation. The living conditions of animals are presented in a manner that generally supersede those of the peasantry.

In ‘Light Out,’ while the Dậu family endures punitive consequences for unpaid taxes, the mother dog earns no whipping for she has no monetary responsibility, and when Mrs. Dậu visits Deputy Quế’s house, she observes in the courtyard pigeons, sows, and chickens living an undisturbed and luxurious lifestyle, one that drastically contrasts the penury conditions of the Dậu family. In ‘The Teeth of an Upper-Class Family’s Dog,’ while Lu, the Braque d’Auvergne, is regularly fed by its owner, the beggar is in critical condition due to hunger. Such intentional juxtaposition addresses the demeaning aspect of the severity of the peasantry’s living condition, for it presents savage creatures as objects of envy. The severity is only intensified by the recurring presence of the rooster in ‘Light Out,’ who is neither worried of financial burdens nor interrupted amidst the submission of his glorious crow. The symbolic presence of the rooster denotes that even the rooster leads a better life than any peasant.   

Portrait of Ngô Tất Tố as featured in the early 1940s in Nhà Văn Hiện Đại. Image via Wikimedia.

The perils of forced westernization

As delineated, many of the stories explore the implications of French colonialism and its immediate impact on the general functions of local villages and the lives of villagers, though they prompt a rather simple question: where are the French? Rather than directly addressing or portraying a French figure, many stories portray the overbearing presence of the French through depictions of foreign influence on the daily operations of business and life, such as the use of the western counting method, calendar, and clock, or the western clothes among the colonial landowners and other bourgeoisie. Such prevalence of western influence forms a dichotomy between the old ways (i.e., folk customs and traditional methods upheld by Vietnam before French colonization) and the new ways (i.e., imported western traditions and methods), a division which advances the debate of what old ways to maintain and what new ways to adopt.

Yet, with the rapid westernization imposed on Vietnam by its dominating French colonizer, the Vietnamese public was forced to adopt the unfamiliar new ways with no compromise. This manner of westernization and its immediate consequences are heavily criticized in Light Out, as any implementation of the new way is always accompanied with errors and confusion: for instance, the western counting method, rather than the traditional oriental method, leads to numerous recalculations for the mayor or the sestern calendar, as opposed to the lunar calendar, which results in an additional financial burden that confuses Mrs. Dậu and even the Mandarin.

“In essence, the narratives call for a progressive re-examination of the state of cultural representation, both for the old and new, rather than an outright rejection of westernization.”

Vũ Trọng Phụng also plays on this absurdity in his ‘From Theory to Practice’ (Từ lý thuyết đến thực hành) by bluntly beginning the short story with “He was Westernized,” only to then satirically proceed with refutations of the fact that expose the hypocrisy practiced by the man. In each case, however, it is not the new way per se that is directly criticized but the underlying issue of user error caused by unfamiliarity with the new ways or the inability to completely abandon preference for certain old ways. Thus, in essence, the narratives call for a progressive re-examination of the state of cultural representation, both for the old and new, rather than an outright rejection of westernization.

With such saturation of suffering, this book becomes the voice on behalf of an illiterate population subject to anti-humanitarian actions and policies, invoking not only sentiments of sympathy and justice but also a spirit of revolution and reform. Further enlarging the literary significance of the book is the copious representation of early 20^th-century Vietnamese authors paired with a nuanced translation that delivers to the reader the Vietnamese writers’ perspectives on the colonial period of Vietnam in an accessible form. This book is a substantial contribution to the limited selection of translated Vietnamese literature that may only be described as a triumph in literary history.

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.”

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.

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]

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.”

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. 

“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.

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.

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.  

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.

“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.”

“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.

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.

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.

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.