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. Extramarital affairs and divorces carry certain stigmas in contemporary Vietnam, to say nothing of half a century ago. 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. 

Making matters worse, 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.

Literature, more than any other art form, allows people an intimate vantage point from which to witness the experiences, emotions, and thoughts of individuals drastically different from themselves. Books thus hold the unparalleled power to inspire, foster empathy, and expand one’s understanding of the human condition. 

Generational, racial, socio-economic, and political chasms can be reduced when one is granted access to a character's inner monologue and they “see” the world through different eyes. Strong female protagonists are essential as they allow men to better understand the challenges and strengths of all-too-often marginalized women, and present role models and comforting companionship for female readers.

In honor of Vietnamese Women’s Day, Saigoneer has selected five books written by Vietnamese authors that feature strong female protagonists. Each is a carefully crafted and entertaining work in its own right, but the brave and often-endearing women at their centers make compelling arguments for the value of female characters for readers from all backgrounds and demographics. 

1. Pearls of the Far East | Nguyễn Thị Minh Ngọc

Photo via Tiki. 

A young woman pretends to be the girlfriend of a soldier she knows to be dead while visiting his mother; a young woman seeks to re-establish her family’s successful fish sauce company as a way to connect with their legacy after they all flee the country; a young woman grows up in a roadside hourly hotel her mother runs while her teacher courts her; a young woman befriends a disabled boy who abruptly leaves only to reappear five years later: the scenarios presented in Pearls of the Far East force characters into difficult situations. Happenstances beyond their control, however, do not remove the their agency and their choices reveal the power women can have over their fates. 

Adapted into a feature film staring Trương Ngọc Ánh and a young Ngô Thanh Vân, this collection of stories provides a mosaic of unique experiences highlighting the diverse trajectories lives follow. Often bittersweet, the endings eschew fairy-tale resolutions and invite readers to ruminate on unresolved questions. Far from escapism, the emotionally wrought narratives reflect the challenges of elevating beyond one’s material conditions. 

2. An Insignificant Family | Dạ Ngân

Photo via Northwest University Press.

Compared to fighting a war, how difficult could love, motherhood and professional success be? An Insignificant Family by Dạ Ngân explores how women must cultivate self-reliance and fight for their personal happiness and the health and safety of their families. 

After serving in the Southern Liberation Army, Tiệp, a fictionalized version of the author, is left with two children, a loveless marriage, uncertain prospects in a sexist profession and the abject poverty plaguing the nation. While her crafty ability to cobble together a livelihood with the scraps and tatters of a re-building nation is admirable, the most powerful moments of the novel come when she boldly pursues a relationship that society shuns, politics condemns and material conditions consistently thwart. The love story between her and a married writer from the north that plays out across the length of the nation via years of letters, train rides, and clandestine meetings, is a raw portrayal of the sacrifices one must make to maximize the circumstances life has handed them. If you want proof that happiness can be won via gritty determination, cunning independence and unceasing adherence to one’s internal compass, An Insignificant Family is for you.

Read Saigoneer’s profile of Dạ Ngân here

3. Chinatown | Thuận

Photo via Tilted Axis Press.

When we think of heroism, we typically imagine war or moments of extreme physical danger, but what about the heroics needed to endure the mundane? Thuận’s Chinatown investigates the resilience required to navigate the commonplace challenges of single motherhood, loneliness, migration, occupational drudgery and boredom. 

In uncompromisingly repetitive prose, the unnamed narrator invites readers to experience her self-professed boring life filled with train rides to bureaucratic visa offices through shabby rural Parisian districts, bland sandwiches, cramped Hanoi apartments and petty office politics. By the time the novel circles back on itself, inching toward the very moment it began, readers will feel as if they have traveled a full route from 1980s Vietnam to present-day France with an individual who admits “I now knew enough to make people bored, and to understand that when people are bored they leave me alone.”  

Chinatown is a testament to the resilience needed to simply make it through another hour, day, week, year, life. Far from grand or glamorous, the life offered might mirror that of the reader, or someone the reader knows, or perhaps a random stranger sitting nearby on public transportation. Regardless, it should cause one to look with a bit more sympathy and admiration at the small struggles women constantly face and overcome. 

Read Saigoneer’s full review of Chinatown here 

4. Green Papayas | Nhung N. Tran-Davies

Long stories don’t always require a lot of words. This picture book by Nhung N. Tran-Davies contains only a few sparse, evocative scenes and memories to bring its main character, Oma, to life as she lives out her final days in the hospital experiencing dementia. The narrator recounts her mother’s life for her own children, stressing how much Oma endured, including foregoing an education or food for the sake of a family she no longer remembers.

Photos via Amazon.

While the writing is simple and effective, the illustrations by Gillian Newland elevate the emotion contained in each description and scene, from shelter constructed in the wilderness to cramped post-war factories. Dedicated to her children in honor of their bà ngoại, Nhung’s powerful work takes on a metaphysical double meaning about the necessity of passing along stories while memories of them remain.

5. Dust Child | Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

Photo via Goodreads.

One of the three braided narratives featured in best-selling author Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s second novel Dust Child tells the story of Trang, a young woman from the countryside who moves to Saigon to work as a bargirl during the war with America. When she becomes pregnant with her American serviceman boyfriend’s child she must grapple with the choice of having a child not only during war, but also against the desire of her family and in defiance of societal norms. 

In beautifully poetic descriptions and moments of earnest self-reflection, Trang lays bare the consequences and opportunities of choosing motherhood. In some ways a coming-of-age tale, Trang's journey articulates the excruciating tightrope women must often walk between independence and filial responsibility while balancing their own desires and the expectations society thrusts upon them. Paradoxically, Trang's tenderness and innocence guide her through the process of replacing what is lost in the process of becoming an adult. It shouldn’t surprise readers that in addition to Trang's story, women in the book act as catalysts for forgiveness, healing and growth for not just individuals but nations. 

Read Saigoneer’s exploration of Dust Child’s locations with the author here

Bonus: Longings: Contemporary Fiction by Vietnamese Women Writers

Photo via Texas Tech University Press.

As a bonus entry, Saigoneer recommends Longings: Contemporary Fiction by Vietnamese Women Writers. This recently published collection of 22 stories by female authors traverses a wide range of topics, perspectives, and styles. The women at the center of the stories confront natural disasters, domestic abuse, disappointing love, war, patriarchy and dire economic conditions. Providing conflicting interpretations and philosophies about the world, the narrators combine to underscore how women constitute a diverse, non-homogeneous group that can hardly be reduced to a single day of celebration.

Read Saigoneer’s review of Longings here.

If one day, the grains of rice that you frequently put in your mouth suddenly start to move, talk, and give you a rundown on how they were created on the field, would you believe it? This seemingly absurd scenario is exactly what happened to Minh, a little boy who's the main character of Con ăn hết rồi!, a children's book by author Đỗ Nguyệt Hà and illustrator Lê Phương Quỳnh, also known as Buffy.

The book, released both in Vietnamese as Con ăn hết rồi! (I've finished my food!) and in English as Minh and the Magic Grains of Rice, discusses a topic that stays close to Hà's heart. She was born and raised in Thái Bình, a province in northern Vietnam, and has always wanted to write a story based on her background and interests in rural Vietnam and the environment. A workshop supported by Room to Read, a non-profit organization that distributes children’s storybooks in Hồ Chí Minh City, allowed her and Buffy to do realize that dream. The result was Magic Grains, a charming children's storybook using inspirations from Vietnamese folklore to deliver a meaningful story and educate kids on the issues surrounding food waste.

The English-language book cover.

The Vietnamese-language book cover.

In the story, Minh, the protagonist, refuses to finish his rice bowl and thus deeply offends the magic rice grains, prompting them to take him on an adventure to learn about how rice is made and how it should be appreciated. Some details in the book are connected to Vietnam's folk belief that rice was given to humans by the gods in heaven. In addition, this book makes an effort to maintain cultural authenticity by including many Vietnamese elements, such as proverbs that play a crucial role in detailing the process of making rice. According to Quỳnh, the creators fought to keep them in the book’s English edition: “Readers from American culture don’t know and understand much about Vietnamese proverbs. It took us a whole year to convince the publishing house to keep them, because they are the core of our story.”

The magical grains of rice lead Minh on a journey to discover the values of rice. Image via Chronicle Books.

During the process of creating Con ăn hết rồi!, Buffy worked side-by-side with Hà to develop the storyline as well as its illustrations. Receiving support and feedback from other artists in the workshop, they went through rounds of adjustments to fine-tune the character designs. For example, the concept behind the “Ông Trời” (King of Heaven) character went from human-like to being portrayed through natural elements like trees and clouds.

Still, Buffy's creative journey with this book wasn’t one without struggles. Minh’s transformation scene from his world to the magic rice grains’ dream world was one of the most challenging to draw: “Unlike in movies, where the transition between worlds can be easily portrayed through character movements, only a few frames in the book can be used to illustrate it.” It took her several attempts to finalize this scene because she needed to make the transition as straightforward as possible, while still fully depicting the main character's journey to the dream world and back to the main world. Fortunately, it all paid off in the end, as many drawings in the book turned out beautiful, conveying the exact message Buffy wanted to tell: positivity and happiness for the audience through her fun, whimsical, and colorful art style.

The concept behind the Minh character.

The concept art of the magical rice grains.

Con ăn hết rồi! was Buffy’s first book illustration project, and to her, it was vastly different from drawing one or two standalone pictures, which involves drawing whatever she has in mind without having to create a first sketch. Producing an entire illustrated book, however, required her to go through various steps, such as creating first sketches, designing characters, visualizing the world and the background, identifying how a certain amount of content in the book can be illustrated, creating a storyboard for the books’ illustrations, and so on.

The creators make a point to include Vietnamese proverbs in the book.

Buffy shared that this book helped her learn a great deal about the creation of picture storybooks and their diversity in terms of themes, approaches, and content across different nations, in addition to enabling her to publish her own book. The process also strengthened her love for making picture books. Many scenes in Con ăn hết rồi! hold special meanings for her as well. One of which is the scenes where the rice field transforms through different season: “I love depicting something through various perspectives, different times like that. I think it was an enjoyable experience.”

Lucky envelops by Buffy.

As the book materialized, so did Buffy’s realization that illustration could be more than just a profession — it's the thread that has interwoven with her life since childhood. Growing up, she found making friends difficult, so drawing became her way of entertaining herself when the world felt too distant, and this hobby later grew into a burning passion. “I felt like I had a certain sense of peace whenever I drew,” she recalls. “So I thought ‘oh, maybe I should pursue this career path.’” Through many ups and downs, she realized that talent alone wouldn't be enough to succeed in this industry; persistence and hard work are crucial, as one cannot expect to produce beautiful artworks on the first try. It takes many attempts and much effort to achieve it. Her true joy, however, lies in the process of creation itself. “It was that journey of creating, that emotion when you get to make something with your hands by yourself…I feel like those are the happiness of making art.”

Book cover artwork by Buffy.

Everything Buffy learned throughout her journey with art was distilled into Con ăn hết rồi!. It's a story about appreciating small things in life, which perfectly reflects the way Buffy sees drawing and creativity. For her, they have always been both a refuge and a revelation, flourishing quietly and consistently with passion, patience, and care. “It’s like the universe saying that I can only do this, I can only draw for the rest of my life,” she said. Perhaps that, too, is its own kind of magic: the joy of creating, line by line, grain by grain.

Illustrations courtesy of Buffy. To see more of her works, visit her Instagram account @f.buffy.

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. 

“We are like fruits forcefully ripened, a generation of premature adults, a generation of misery.”
— Du Tử Lê.

Du Tử Lê started writing at the age of 21. His poems, despite his youth, read like words from a mature soul entrapped in an interstice between life and death during the American War. Moreover, as a military officer, for most of Lê’s youth, he was closer to death than life.

“In the military, I worked as an officer. In my personal life, I was against the war… I was against the war in the name of our human rights to live.” Tử Lê confesses that he lived through years of internal turmoil as a military officer and a civilian who opposed the war. His identity as a young soldier with an old soul writing from an antiwar perspective is what made Du Tử Lê one of the most popular poets in southern Vietnam in 1954–1975.

Du Tử Lê’s poems are characterized by two consistent themes: love and death. ‘Khát vọng cho con’ (My hope for you) epitomizes Du Tử Lê’s loving spirit most vividly. It depicts Tử Lê’s projection of the present and the future from the perspective of a soul that grows quickly and perhaps, perishes just as fast.

'Khát Vọng Cho Con' by Du Tử Lê. Click on the image for the English translation.

Tử Lê’s views on life and death are as chaotic as the tumultuous, unprecedented time during which he wrote. In that wartorn era, death became familiar. Tử Lê presents this matter-of-fact reality plainly:

The war made the fragility of life and the mounting deaths commonplace and unsurprising, and obituaries became as mundane as daily news segments. He then moves from how death affects the country to how it impacts him personally: 

To Tử Lê, to live side by side with death was not a matter of choice or prediction, but a reality. With that attitude towards death, Tử Lê bluntly reconstructs the vivid realities of war. He portrays himself as a financially strapped person who could “barely make ends meet” in his domestic life and on the battlefield.  

Tử Lê portrays the amount as a dream, but at the same time, it is such a small amount that one can spend it all the market on a single item. His use of contrast and exaggeration here underscores the harsh reality of the time when even dreams had to be austere.

As an officer, Tử Lê also recalled the situation on the battlefield. In the poem, Tử Lê floods readers with numerous images: an army helmet pierced with bullet holes, a rifle, barbed wire, underground mines, etc. All of these images, in addition to their representation of the war, are also a channel for Tử Lê to express his gratitude towards life.

He repeats the phrase “I appreciate it/them” to emphasize that these objects were not only weapons but also life-saving means. That said, it does not mean Tử Lê was a soldier who fully devoted his heart and mind to the war. His attitude is firmly against the violence, as in the way he recalls abhorrent images such as “barbed wire stained with human blood” or “every morsel of fresh human flesh” and calls himself “an irresponsible killer.” Despite the cruel realities, Tử Lê remains in love with life.

Poring over the lines in the poem, one may see Tử Lê as a wild individual trying to simply make it through his military and personal lives. In addition to this reckless, firm attitude, Tử Lê expresses his strong emotions via a sense of somber pessimism:

The conversation with his imagined child hints towards Du Tử Lê’s obsession with death, as he agonizes over the loss of a father that is as unprecedented as the birth of the child. Such feelings are elevated as the night changes and Tử Lê confesses that he still firmly holds this irritation inside.   

The emotions are now getting clearer, as Tử Lê questions himself and the harsh truth that he had nothing to leave behind. Notably, Tử Lê writes, “I have lived half a life.” This further reiterates Tử Lê’s perceptions of death; death has always been so close to him that he felt he had lived “half a life” despite being at the peak of his youth. 

The outburst of rage is gradually eased as the poem transitions into hope — a hope for peace during a time of war. It is interesting to see how he uses the word “hope,” as the poem progresses. It is present first in reference to “a treasure” for the grandfather’s generation and then as “a fantasy” for Tử Lê’s, and lastly, as a “wish” for the future. This can be explained when putting the poem back in its historical context, recognizing it was written in the middle of the war.

Tử Lê’s poem first notes that “hope for peace” was “a rare treasure” for previous generations. Tử Lê visualizes how his own father had always desired peace even after passing away. In Vietnamese common beliefs, ancestors or family members who pass on will "look after" living members. The way Tử Lê expresses regrets for the past generation implicitly hints at his disappointment. At the end, “hope for peace” transforms into “a wish.” Tử Lê did not know if or when the war would come to an end. Therefore, in the context of when it was written, there could be two different interpretations of the ending. The positive possibility is that the son’s generation could end the so-called “eternal misery,” and the pessimistic one is that Tử Lê, like his father, might again be disappointed as the wish would not come true.

Towards the conclusion of the poem, the disappointment lingering on top of his mind slowly leads him back to the abyss of despair. There is, for a moment, a glimpse of hope in Du Tử Lê’s poem and himself. However, that hope, which is as fragile and thin as the night mist, soon extinguishes at the end: 

To read Tử Lê’s poem is to read history, a non-fiction narrative retold poetically. The straightforward but multi-layered story filled with diverse emotions can have different interpretations based on who reads it and in what context. The signature style of Tử Lê in this writing is the way he visualizes his feelings and their evolutions. In every part of the poem, there is a notable detail that is worth discussing. One could very well read into the poem the perplexing history of the American War into an analysis. But Du Tử Lê has provided enough of his own raw story to consume this examination.

This article was originally published in 2022.

If you were a book publisher and saw a sudden spike in sales for a book published years ago, how would you explain it?

If an influencer or famous person, such as a singer or actor, mentions a work in an interview, it may create enough interest amongst their fanbase to drive purchases. This is exactly what occasionally happens for presses here in Vietnam, including for translated works. If they witness a surge in popularity for one of their Korean translations, for example, it's likely that Vietnamese K-pop fans heard a favorite singer mention it an interview.

유령의 시간  (Ghost Time / Thời gian của ma).

Because I do not speak Korean, my familiarity with Korean literature is very limited, which made me curious what the climate is like for Vietnamese readers. Last year I enjoyed a chance meeting in Saigon with the lovely Korean writer, Kim Yi-jeong, during which she described the positive experience of having her novel, 유령의 시간  (Ghost Time / Thời gian của ma), translated into Vietnamese. To learn more, I got in touch with her publisher, Nhã Nam. They connected me with Vương Thúy Quỳnh Anh, an in-house editor and translator at the time, who was able to give a behind-the-scenes look into the path a book takes from Korean into Vietnamese.

“There are not a lot of [Vietnamese] people that read Korean books because of their origin; they look at the content and the title and they decide to buy it… not because they want to know more about Korean culture,” Quỳnh Anh explained, countering my assumption that Vietnamese interest in Korean music, fashion and film would result in novels from South Korea becoming popular. It turns out, people pick up Korean translations simply because the story sounds appealing.

While Korea may be the setting of many Korean novels published in Vietnamese, it’s not the most appealing aspect for Vietnamese readers. Quỳnh Anh said that the readers are drawn to “best-seller books that focus on the journey of the main character [...] they find something difficult in their life so they go back to their past, or travel to a new place or do something different to find a new way to accept their current life.” These familiar plot arcs focus on the universal elements of the human condition and the idea that each journey has its own appeal and merits. She has also observed that in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, readers gravitate towards calming, stress-reducing narratives with happy endings.

Vương Thúy Quỳnh Anh is currently a freelance Korean-language translator.

If Vietnamese readers aren’t overly concerned with the books including Korea-unique elements, neither are they on the lookout for mentions of Vietnam. Quỳnh Anh said that she has not encountered much mention of her home nation in the novels she has worked on. Vietnam does, however, appear at times amongst the thousands of books released in Korea each year. South Korea’s involvement in the Second Indochina War, particularly, has resulted in an older generation of writers exploring their experiences in or impacted by Vietnam. Kim Yi-jeong’s novel, for example, examines the wartime experience of her father. Comparing Vietnamese and Korean literature focused on conflicts of the second half of the 20^th century would no doubt reveal intriguing parallels and contrasts while offering fascinating insights on each culture as well as the universalities of war, death and endured hardships.

The people behind the books

Literary translators come from a variety of backgrounds and end up in their positions for different reasons, but most share a personal interest in learning foreign languages. Quỳnh Anh said she first wanted to learn Korean to better follow her K-pop idols. A psychology major in university, she taught herself Korean via Facebook, a website called Talk to Me in Korean and song lyrics. As she became more fluent, she began to wonder if she could work as a translator. In 2018, Nhã Nam put out a call for translators. After earning a spot as a freelance translator for some time, Quỳnh Anh graduated to a full-time editor. She has since moved on and now works as a freelance translator.

While Quỳnh Anh and her peers can make a living as full-time literature translators and editors, money remains an issue within the industry. Corporate and business interpreting and translating will always pay better, to say nothing of working abroad in Korea. This makes finding skilled literary translators a challenge. Alas, this situation is not unique. A dearth of talented and passionate translators unconcerned with income is one of the largest barriers keeping more Vietnamese works from being brought to English readers, for example.

Some titles that Quỳnh Anh worked on.

Anytime someone can turn a hobby into a career, there is a risk that the original fun is lost. Indeed, Quỳnh Anh said that once she began spending five days a week, 8-to-5, in an office, tinkering with the Korean language, she engaged with Korean less in her free time. But she attributes some of her waning interest to her favorite K-pop idols growing older and transitioning to new career stages. It’s worth reflecting on the fact that a virtue of literature is that it falls victim to fewer fads than other art forms and generally does rely on the giddy energy of youthful discovery and identity construction. This means its appeal transcends and even unites age groups.

From Hangul to tiếng Việt: The translation process

Considering the thousands upon thousands of books released every year, I’m always fascinated by the selection process for the minuscule percentage chosen for translation. Whenever I stroll through bookstreet and stop beside a shelf to exclaim “How in the world is this in Vietnamese?” I was thus quite eager to learn how it works for Quỳnh Anh.

In 2015, Vietnamese translator Kim Ngân was among four winners at the Korean Literature Translation Awards for her translation of Jeong Yu-jeong's 7 năm bóng tối (Seven Years of Darkness).

Deciding what to translate is really not that complicated or mysterious. Quỳnh Anh said that editors and translators look for books based on what has won international or Korean awards, been widely translated into other languages; topped best-seller lists abroad; and any new releases from writers they admire or have been well-received in the past. After reading the description and some sample pages, they submit a formal pitch to their publisher’s leadership. If approved, a specific division works with the Korean publisher or author agent to acquire the translation rites. International literary events such as the Bejing Book Fair and the annual Seoul Book Fair help connect with authors, publishers, and agents while keeping attendees up to date with trends and developments in the Korean literary landscape.

Once a project has been assigned to an in-house or freelance translator, depending on schedules, it typically takes about three months for it to be ready for internal review and copy-editing. Occasionally graphic scenes, particularly those involving the human body and sexual activity, need to be trimmed. Then it goes to the in-house book design and marketing departments before it hits shelves at all the familiar Vietnamese retailers and online shops, accompanied by social media promotion.

In addition to passionate translators and editors, the viability of translations depends on institutional support, with various events, seminars, author visits and conferences supported by governments, foundations and publishers. Last year, for example, Saigon played host for the Meeting Vietnamese-Korean Literature at HCMC. Such opportunities help create excitement for translations and foster connections that ensure quality works are selected and whatever meager funds available can be allocated responsibly.

Poet Nguyễn Quang Thiều, Chairman of the Vietnam Writers' Association, presents a gift to Bang Jai-suk, Co-Chairman of the Vietnam-Korea Peace Literature Club during a seminar at the Vietnam Writers' Association. Photo via Công An Nhân Dân.

The Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTIK) has been particularly active in promoting Korean literature globally by supporting publishers and authors, and offering grants and training for translators. They also sponsor the annual Korean Literature Translation Awards, which selects winners from amongst a staggering number of languages. In 2015, Vietnamese translator Kim Ngân was among four winners for her translation of Jeong Yu-jeong's 7 năm bóng tối (Seven Years of Darkness) into Vietnamese for which she received US$10,000. In 2021, the book Tam Quốc Sử Ký - Tập 1 (Samguk Sagi - Chapter 1), written by Lee Kang-iae and translated by Nguyễn Ngọc Quế, was honored. In 2021, Vietnam's Women Publishing House coordinated with the LTIK to launch an online Korean literature book review. The organization recognizes and promotes 106 unique titles translated into Vietnamese since 2001.

Whether 106 books sounds like a great success or a travesty is a matter of perspective. It’s impossible to define what success for Korean literature in Vietnam would mean. It’s enough of a challenge to determine if any one book has exceeded expectations, as the only metrics available are sales numbers, scattered reviews online and the potential for prizes or grants awarded post-publication. The most important criteria for a reader rests within him or herself.

“You told me not to look at you, it’s silly / Yet I want to gnaw you the way I gnaw bread ... the pack of ravenous dogs looked at me with night sea eyes / I wish they could gnaw me piece by piece.”

The stories and novels of Nguyễn Quang Thân, a journalist by trade, have won numerous awards. He wrote screenplays and poetry and was married to the novelist Dạ Ngân. Ngân shared with Saigoneer that during their courtship, which was fictionalized in her novel An Insignificant Family, Thân wrote her nearly 100 letters. These letters often contained original poems addressed to her that were later published amongst his other writing. Born in 1936, he passed away in March 2017.

With the permission of Dạ Ngân, we are proud to share two of those poems, translated into English for the first time. They were both written in 1982, a time when the couple was separated: he lived in the north while she resided in the south. Read the English version below.

English translations by Thi Nguyễn and Paul Christiansen. The Vietnamese versions of the poems can be found in Người Khát Sống, published in 2018.

This article was originally published in 2019.

“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.

Fruit and poetry: the two things I love most.

Growing older can be an infinite series of disillusionments; the childhood thrill of potential and novelty perpetually slipping from the facades around us to reveal worn and tawdry familiarity. Disappointments abound. Remaining curious, one of our most vital states of being, becomes increasingly difficult. 

The two best antidotes I know to this spiritual malaise are poetry and fruit. In the same way a great poem elicits a response of “huh, I’ve never thought about that” or “wow, I’ve never thought about it that way,” a new fruit carries with it the promise of a new texture, flavor or smell; something that can call into question everything I know about my senses, and by extension, the world and my place within it. A new poem, like a new fruit, cannot be imagined, it can only be experienced.

Saigoneer introduced our monthly chapter schedule for a variety of reasons, including challenging our writers to explore seemingly common topics in new ways. When #FruitChapter arrived on the calendar, I decided it was a good opportunity to examine it through the lens of poetry. How have Vietnamese poets encountered, described and interacted with fruit?

What follows are five poems written by Vietnamese poets, most in Vietnamese first and then translated into English, with fruit as a central theme, image or subject. It is not a definitive list of the best fruit poems, but I selected them because they made me think or feel, the primary purpose of poetry. Poems rarely have any singular meaning, and their joy rests in discovering what emotions and ruminations they can coax out of the reader. I hope reading the poems below and encountering my comments delineating what I was thinking about when reading them helps you appreciate poetry or fruit or both in a slightly altered way.

1. ‘The Custard Apple’s Eyes’ by Nguyễn Duy | Translated by Kevin Bowen and Nguyễn Bá Chung

We call on each other to visit the grasslands in the high hills,
A harsh wind shakes a sea of custard apple leaves.

Custard apples, please open your eyes,
See how the moon casts down its empty shadows.

With the trees in the garden, drink deep the moon’s hollow wine,
They too share the night’s sadness.

Let’s close our eyes, love, the custard apple’s eyes,
Our only witness.

To be human in the modern world means to be separate from nature. We’ve constructed lifestyles that insulate us from the natural world. We sit in air-conditioned rooms, surrounded by fabricated materials that resemble nothing that grows from the soil, falls from the sky or sways in the current. What we eat is increasingly the same: lunch is a bag of processed chips, cup of flash-fried noodles, and a carbonated soda filled with caffeine and artificial sweeteners. Fruit remains an exception. When we eat fruit we are returned to our ancient heritages, the distant ancestors who dwelled in trees and migrated in tune with seasonal ripenings. Nguyễn Duy’s poem invites us back into that experience with the first line: “We call on each other to visit the grasslands in the high hills.” 

We often think that our emotions are uniquely human. This poem questions that. Nguyễn Duy is a master of metaphor as evidenced by the shadows cast by the moon that he understands as “hollow wine.” Custard apples, once they’ve opened their eyes, can share in this “sadness.” In his dreamy world, humans and plants share physical traits (eyes) as well as emotions (sadness). One could interpret this as fruits becoming human in the poem, but maybe it is humans that become fruit and the sadness we feel is one belonging originally to custard apples. Perhaps we do not spend enough time in our day reflecting on how our experiences, trivial and grand, are akin to those of fruit.

The final stanza in the poem takes a thrilling turn. By addressing a beloved, Nguyễn Duy is explaining that the surreal embrace of an existence that blurs the interior psychology of humans with custard apples is to be shared with another human. We all want to experience pleasure with other people; it is partly why we go to concerts and enjoy visiting galleries with loved ones. Such moments bring people closer together in the same way a shared secret tightens bonds between friends, family and lovers. The pleasures derived by recognizing kinship with fruit are no different. In the final line the custard apples become “witness” and an achingly beautiful moment is savored together.

2. ‘Durian Flesh’ by Khải Đơn

Threads of durian scent tangle my hair
a void fills in where it used to be the fruit garden I slept
my years of infancy. I was not drawn
to the hallucination of fluorescent
light; suicidal moths, but here
I am, getting lost in a square
box sweatshop, wishing
to grow mayfly wings, seeking high
moments beaming flash into my chest –
That braveness [or] desperation carves meaning
out of the starving water; I carve myself
off the groves of hungered soil, dragging
to the surface of wealthiness, almost non-
existent in my father’s durian garden
He dug and planted seedlings until we
had the first durian young soft skin
we sunk our teeth in the sweetest bite
of Mekong heaven. O, Heaven
dried up and peeled its skin on the scorched
field blistering my palms. Now I stand
under the excruciating lights; flapping
my exhausted moth wings
Memories of
home flutters
flutt-flut-er- er
-er -e

‘Durian Flesh’ is included in Khải Đơn’s magnificent debut book of English-language poetry, Drowning Dragon Slips by Burning Plain, and in the blog post accompanying this particular piece she notes: “The poem is my longing for the scent of durian on the land that is losing its spirit for extreme climate conditions.” This note, along with the surrounding context of a book concerned with the many socio-economic and environmental problems facing the Mekong Delta helps inform one’s reading of it. 

The fluorescent “excruciating lights” are pitted against the speaker and her “exhausted moth wings,” as she longs for “the sweetest bite / of Mekong heaven.” The durian is both her carefree youth and also a contributor to the “starving water” and “hungered soil” that fills the region as we rush to grow more crops and plant the most commercially viable trees. I appreciate this poem for the complexity such a realization ushers in: fruit can simultaneously be a cause of joy via its place in bucolic memories and its proximity to nature (see: Nguyễn Duy’s poem) and also its undoing via the rush to transform the land into farms and orchards which upsets river systems and flood plains, to say nothing of the carbon-spewing energy required by greenhouses and expansive distribution networks. 

Perhaps, the most powerful part of reading ‘Durian Flesh’ is recognizing that the changes we are witnessing in regards to unsustainable farming and land development were set in motion centuries ago. The durian we enjoy today has already undergone significant human manipulation. While not as extreme as fruits such as apples or strawberries, durian have been selectively bred to meet our human desires. We may long for the days when fruit was not produced with poisonous chemicals and in greenhouses that ruin the planet, but we do not long for their original, wild ancestors that were bland, seed-filled and temperamental. So in a way we are complicit. And yet, it’s all beyond our control. As the poem notes: “I was not drawn /  to the hallucination of fluorescent / light; suicidal moths, but here / I am, getting lost in a square / box sweatshop, wishing.”

3. ‘Jackfruit’ by Hồ Xuân Hương | Translated by Marilyn Chin

My body is like a jackfruit swinging on a tree
My skin is rough, my pulp is thick
Dear prince, if you want me pierce me upon your stick
Don't squeeze, I'll ooze and stain your hands

One of the most famous poems from Vietnam, these four lines remind me of the sheer power and necessity of poetry. Most readers will know of Hồ Xuân Hương. Debates exist as to who she actually was and if she even was a singular person and not simply a name given credit for a variety of poems shared orally in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. But the agreed upon myth is that she was an educated concubine who subverted conservative Confucian society with witty poems that put forth feminist ideas and ridiculed patriarchy via metaphors and bawdy similies. 

This poem that not so subtly compares the female body to a ripe fruit, boldly relishing in carnal desire, is amongst Hồ Xuân Hương’s most well-known. Written during an era of chastity when female sexual pleasure was not discussed openly, the strength drawn from such lustful feelings was a subversive, liberating call for women to take agency. And therein lies the power of poetry: to do and say what is unacceptable in other realms. A poet needs no tools or collaborators to craft their messages and, in part, because of verse’s propensity for compactness, they can share them with greater freedom than just about any other genre. Were it not for poetry, how could Hồ Xuân Hương have shared this idea?

As much as we like to talk about works of writing, music and painting as enduring classics, very little remains relevant and appreciated for long after the generation that popularized it. But here we are in 2024, thinking about a 200-year-old poem. And in the years since I first read this poem, nearly every time I see a jackfruit, I think of it, and by extension, feminine strength and independence. To assign an enduring, completely alternate meaning to an object in the minds of people living two centuries later is utterly remarkable. That’s poetry.

4. ‘Chôm Chôm’ by Teresa Mei Chuc

Rambutan.
A striking similarity
between certain landmines
and this reddish-yellow-green fruit.

Its name meaning “messy hair.”
Its spikes so long, they curl like fingernails.

If only everything this shape could be
as sweet inside as this chôm chôm.

Its white flesh reminiscent of longan
and lychee. The taste of rivers perfuming

the mouth as jasmine flowers perfume the air.
Its heavenly nectar. If a fruit could speak

of love, it would be the chôm chôm.

Few elements of poetry thrill me like a good metaphor and fruits provide some of the best fodder for them, as seen in this poem by Teresa Mei Chuc. We can imagine their hairs and immediately picture the curling of fingernails kept long to denote class. But my favorite metaphor is more subtle, skilled and playful. When Teresa describes the “taste of rivers perfuming,” we witness what may be a sly allusion to the Perfume River before the stunning simile that explains how flavors diffuse across our taste buds the way that scents drift in the air. It’s true! Rambutans fill our mouths with their sweet essence the very same way that flower aromas fill our noses. 

What elevates this poem from a simply pleasant look at a fruit is the way that Teresa doubles down on this juxtaposition of the wondrous and the grotesque via the comparison of rambutan and “certain landmines.” From the very first stanza, the poem is laden with war, death, and misery while simultaneously examining the buoyant charms of rambutan. She presents a world that contains both great sorrow and small pleasures, ultimately settling on a hope for love, as exemplified by the chôm chôm, suggesting we can cling to fruits in the darkest hours to provide comfort. 

Another reason for selecting this poem is that it allows me to comment on the theme of fruit in poetry written by members of the diaspora. I’ve noticed Vietnam’s fruits appear often in the works of diaspora individuals like Teresa as well as Hoa Nguyen, Bao-Long Chu, and many others. This makes sense: even in our hyper-connected world, tropical fruits remain difficult to transport and few things conjure memory as effectively as smell and taste. So, if literature tells us anything, it's that fruit plays an essential role in keeping Vietnamese abroad connected to their heritage and concepts of identity as well as representing feelings of foreignness when in lands never seen by their ancestors, which understandably enters the text.

5. ‘An Apple’ by Huy Hùng | Translated by Trần Vũ Liên Tâm

He finishes his breakfast and
immediately washes his hands
holds the small knife peeling the apple’s
skin in circling rotation, circling
rotation around around which
he feels like peeling each skin of
the earth in circular rotation,
around, cirrcular rotation,
around, then suddenly from
outside emerges a wind storm
[which] beats the whole window … while
he’s still in the progress of peeling
a long skin …

One might consider this a trivial poem on first read that does little besides describe a common domestic act. Sure, its sonic rhythms built upon repetition, particularly in the Vietnamese version, are satisfying and the images are constructed with admirably spartan precision, but so what? I like it because the simple scene allows one to come to numerous conclusions. For me, it touches on how the private lives we lead and the joys we savor exist unaffected by the cruel and unrelenting world beyond us. Terrible wind storms beat the windows, but we can remain safe and comfortable within ourselves, consumed by the small bliss of peeling fruit. In a time of barbaric wars (when was there a time without war?), each and everyone of us must seek occasional pleasure. 

The previous poems focus on fruits understood as quintessentially Vietnamese, or at least strongly associated with Vietnam, while this poem by little-known poet Huy Hùng concerns itself with the apple, perhaps the most global of fruits. Originating in Central Asia and heavily developed in North America and China, they are available almost everywhere; just walk into your closest Co.op Mart or 7-Eleven. I appreciate what thinking about the universality of fruit can remind us about poetry. While we can take delight in identifying subjects and themes unique to Vietnamese poetry, we must not lose sight of the truth that many poems could have been written by anyone, anywhere. Just as it can reveal our uniquenesses, art can reveal our commonalities. There are no restrictions on who can write and read poems just as there are no requirements for who can enjoy fruit. I find this theme mirrored in the poem in which the character “feels like peeling each skin of / the earth in circular rotation, / around, circular rotation.” 

‘An Apple’ allows me to reflect once more on the similarities between fruit and poems. Encountering them shares many similarities: they require some work to get at the flesh; they represent a small blessing dependent on a degree of luck and fortune, and they are best savored slowly and earnestly. I think this poem’s description of peeling an apple would fit just as well for preparing to read a poem. So, I invite you to wash your hands, pick up a poem and, with a small knife, approach it:  “in circling rotation, circling / rotation around around.”

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.