On the back of a buffalo-drawn wagon, guided by a silent driver, travel three strangers, one of whom is the unnamed protagonist known as the Man. The wagon bumps its way through the mountainous forest as a train chugs along in the distance, releasing white smoke into the air. The Man remembers having been on such a wagon when he was younger with his father and sister. He remembers his sister who left to study in the city; he remembers the wives he has had but never slept with. The Man’s hand returns often to an old spoon in his pocket to sooth him through the memories while the wagon keeps travelling, the driver looking like the very same one that once drove his family—he is not even a day older—and the train perpetually in the distance but never out of sight.
Such is the “Soundless” half of The Young Die Old, an eerie novel set in the mountainous Thái Nguyên province in the north of Vietnam. Intertwined with this series of “Soundless” reflections on the wagon are chapters recounting the lives of characters in and around Phan village—characters from two rival families, both of whom carried an intergenerational mission to uncover the treasured hidden beneath a hill on the edge of the village.
On one side, there is Old Trường, his son Liêm, and grandson Hải: Trường moves into the village in his youth, comes into a pool of mysterious wealth, and builds a grand home with a fishing pond for his family by the Linh Nham river. On the other side is Trình, a skilled martial artist, who inherited the quest to return glory to his family of fallen mandarins and keeps his identity hidden as he teaches martial arts to children on the outskirts of Phan village. Both families keep their missions close to their hearts to avoid others catching a whiff of this buried treasure. But through tangled threads of extended family members and village relations, they come ever closer to one another: Hải, reckless and violent, is kept from knowing about his father and grandfather’s mission until his help becomes necessary, leading him to unwittingly become one of Trình’s best students; Loan, Hải’s sister, who moves to the city to study, finds herself a string of lovers that brings her into competition with Trình’s own daughter.
The complicated network of familial and romantic relationships is disorientating—and many of the latter relationships defy conventions about age, chastity, and fidelity in a way that signals a collapse of morality in the search for wealth. The disorientation is further intensified by the magical realist elements that weave through the novel: the eerie duplication of story lines and characters, the premature aging of children born in the story, the disappearance of family members and neighbours in the night—accompanied by their return to the village’s banyan tree in the dreams of those who survived them.
Shrouded in the mist of the rainforest, reality takes on new forms in The Young Die Old. The supernatural is not any more unexpected than the twisted relationships between the characters, and neither is the nonlinearity of time. As the narrative shifts between the stagnant “Soundless” sections which seem to unravel in a realm without any perception of time (where the Man has grown old but the wagon driver has not, where current conversations blur into memories from different parts of the past, where the driver speaks of things that are due to happen as if he has already seen them) and the chronology in the chapters set in Phan village, the concept of linear time collapses. There is little indication as to whether the two narratives are happening concurrently, and similarities between characters such as the Man and Hải are quickly overshadowed by glaring differences, such as the fact that the Man came from a different village. Even in the chapters based in Phan village, time does not follow any meter or rhythm: in the first chapter alone the story speeds through the settling down of Old Trường, the mysterious birth of his son, and the birth of his grandson; meanwhile the third chapter spends a significant amount of time detailing the many lovers that come through the young Loan’s life as she settles down in the city.
The epitome of this nonlinearity appears in a “Soundless” section where the Man remembers his old teacher’s children, born with grey hair and wrinkled faces, only to die shortly after; and then again when the Man thinks of his aunt, Lãm, and how she watched her husband follow a woman who kept growing younger and younger into the forest, until Lãm found them both as babies in a cot in the middle of an empty house in the forest. Here are the eponymous young who die old, the children born literally old, who seem to mirror the children burdened with the responsibilities, traumas, poverty, dreams from generations previous—such as Trường, Liêm, Hải, and Trình on their quests to uncover this treasure.
But just as time is bent in the novel so that the start and the end do not stand on two ends of a spectrum, the title itself seems to be nonlinear when seen through the case of the Man—a grey old character who has lived a whole life and lost most of his family, who in this timeless realm continuously relives his younger days. While it is unclear whether the Man has died or is dying, it is clear that as he approaches his final living days, memories of his past become ever more present.
Nguyễn Bình Phương’s The Young Die Old is a feat in experimental storytelling—and the reading experience is like a walk through the dense fog in a forest, where sounds beyond the rustles of the leaves and tweeting of birds can be heard. It is an uncanny novel that disrupts the conventional understanding of what is real, what is rational, and what captures the experience of inheriting a legacy.
The Young Die Old
by Nguyễn Bình Phương
translated by Khải Q. Nguyễn
Major Books
Thảo Tô is a writer from Vietnam. Her short story, “Love in the Time of Migration”, is the winner of the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for fiction, and her other stories have been published in Sine Theta Magazine and diaCRITICS.
