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Book Review: Owner of a Lonely Heart by Beth Nguyen

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The uncomfortable feelings and experiences that we face as the children of Vietnamese refugees are encapsulated in Owner of a Lonely Heart, a memoir lodged in Beth Nguyen’s experience as a Vietnamese American. A sense of finality spans her book, accenting events like when our parents left Vietnam, after which some of us forgot our roots and those left behind in Vietnam. Nguyen understands that there is no need for and no benefit in romanticizing or exaggerating these conclusions. Her story is centered upon reality. She portrays the contradictions that surround living as a Vietnamese American, regardless of how painful, silent, and unbecoming these experiences are, in the pursuit of answering the question: “When does a refugee stop becoming a refugee?” Just how far does our parents’ refugeehood permeate into our lives, and how does that affect our identities as Vietnamese Americans?

Beth Nguyen was raised by a single father, who later remarried when he came to the US. He left her mother behind in Vietnam, so Nguyen would spend her childhood in the absence of her biological mother. In her early childhood, Beth Nguyen reached out to her mother in a natural attempt to learn more about her origins. To her surprise, her mother’s reaction was nonchalant, and their series of meetings over the years combined to under 24 hours. The book is structured loosely around these visits, drawing from them in order to explore other realms of the Vietnamese American experience. She recounts the three times that she’s been in the same room with both her mother and her sister. The conversation never progresses past formalities in all three meetings, and after the first meeting, she had learned not to expect much from her mother. During the third meeting, Nguyen’s sister comments resentfully about how their mother never bothered to contact them, while Nguyen urges her to remember how they never tried to contact their mother either. Action would prove Nguyen to be just like her mother, because she wouldn’t call her biological mother for years following that meeting. Some relationships fail to progress without effort, and when faced with mutual passiveness, all relationships start to crumble. The relationship between mother and daughter isn’t exempt from this rule.

One of the main themes of Owner of a Lonely Heart centers around the conscious effort that needs to be placed upon understanding one’s mother. The visits never seemed to foster a true connection between Nguyen and their mother. After another lackluster visit alongside her sister, Beth Nguyen says, “I expected my sister to make a comment… but all she said was, Well, now you can feel better about everything. But I didn’t. I never did. I felt what I had always felt: suspended, stuck.” While navigating the tumultuous relationships between her sets of parents, Beth Nguyen remains self-aware and reflective. She acknowledges faults and areas where blame can be somewhat filtered and more properly assigned, and explicitly makes it known where she’s grown. This is by no means a memoir that is regretful. Rather, Beth Nguyen has written about her difficulties with family, identity, and belonging in a way that conveys the irreplaceable significance of the mundane features of it all.

Nguyen artfully writes of how her childhood self gently prodded at her mother’s memory in order to slowly unravel the tale of her father and her biological mother’s separation from each other in Vietnam so many years ago. She writes, “She (her mother) resists the very idea of a narrative. Maybe this is a story that no one would want… We must contend. I am still trying to contend.” Beth Nguyen is also speaking about the letdown of certain promised relationships. Her relationship with her biological mother never developed, remaining placid through a lack of effort on both fronts in equal exchange. In her words, “what is unraveled stays unraveled because it’s easier”. Her experience as a Vietnamese American therefore developed in other ways, through her relationship with her father, her understanding of her name, the nurturing of her grandmother, the legacy she passes onto her children, and her personal experiences living as a Vietnamese American.

In Owner of a Lonely Heart, Beth Nguyen draws attention to the impermanent, nonlinear nature of memory. The slightest reminder leads to a memory, and years upon decades are brought back to mind as a result. For Nguyen, the details of memories do not hold as much meaning as the few sensory and emotional experiences that persist throughout time, as well as the events and feelings that she knows resulted from the event. Her writing is firmly seated in the simple acceptance of memory’s fractured nature, conveying that memories will live on in other ways without being explicitly expressed. Even if the memories aren’t kept in pristine condition, perhaps the fragmented nature recollection lends itself to more meaning as a result. A single memory has the capability to represent an entire era, and similarly has the potential to repeat itself in the future. As such, these experiences have the potential to transcend generations.


Owner of a Lonely Heart
by Beth Nguyen
Scribner, $27.00

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Nhi Truong is a Vietnamese American writer and recent UCLA graduate. In her free time, she enjoys writing stories and trying new creative pursuits.

Between the Mekong and Mississippi

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An-My Lê. Sailors on Liberty from USS Preble, Bamboo 2 Bar, Da Nang, Vietnam, from the series Events Ashore, 2011. © 2022 An-My Lê, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

In Vietnamese, the word for country is đất nướcđất, meaning soil or land, and nưóc, meaning water. Đất nước. Land and water. These are the subjects at the center of An-My Lê’s latest exhibition at the Modern Museum of Art in New York—Giữa Hai Giòng Sông/Between Two Rivers/Entre deux rivières— the first retrospective of the photographer’s three-decade career by a major American museum. The titular rivers are the Mekong and Mississippi deltas that flow through Vietnam and the United States respectively, a nod to the two countries Lê straddles.

Lê is a landscape photographer. Born in Saigon in 1960, Lê left Vietnam for the United States in 1975 when the war ended and did not return until 1994. The homecoming resulted in a series of black and white photos titled simply, Việt Nam, which captures the young country at a critical stage of its history as it grapples with rebuilding and regaining its identity after almost a century of foreign occupation and two devastating wars. There is a quiet serenity in these shots, but lurking underneath the deceptive idyllic surface is also an unmistakable eeriness that hints at the country’s not-so-distance tumultuous past: a column of black smoke furiously rising in the background; a watchful family semi-camouflaged by the surrounding trees; twin branches spiraling menacingly in the fog-dense jungle air, threatening to pull you into its grasps. The landscape is often expansive and empty. The houses are run-down or otherwise half-finished, or perhaps half-destroyed. The high-rises have yet to arrive but already looming in the distance are billboards for Nokia, Hitachi, and Xerox, a foreshadowing of the impending economic boom in the 21st century that will render the skies in Lê’s photos unrecognizable.

An-My Lê. Untitled, Ho Chi Minh City, from the series Viêt Nam, 1995. © 2022 An-My Lê, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

The only portrait in the series, which hangs alone and confronts the viewer at the very entrance of the exhibit, is a close-up of a young peasant girl. She is facing sideways, gazing at a target in the distance beyond the purview of the viewer. Her expression is gentle but dignified. Instead of wearing a nón lá that is quintessential to traditional Vietnamese attire, she sports a pith helmet that’s slightly too large for her. The only other accessory she adorns is a precious plastic bead necklace. Lê has referred to this photo as a self-portrait—is the subject meant to be a stand-in for the artist in a younger life or an alternate one?

The answer is likely both. Lê is not so much interested in capturing the Truth as she is in interrogating the slippery essence of memory and probing the veil between fiction and documentary. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Small Wars, a series of photographs centered on a group of Vietnam War reenactors in Virginia, which Lê gained access to by agreeing to participate in as a Viet Cong (in one photo, she is seen aiming a rifle at an actor playing an American G.I.). Even without knowing the context of these photos, it becomes quite apparent that Lê did not take these on any real battlefield. The topography is all wrong; the uniforms are too pristine; the gear is too neatly placed. The sleeping men in Lê’s photos resemble more like boys taking a siesta at camp than they do soldiers flung halfway across the world into the depths of guerilla warfare. Small Wars isn’t meant to deceive as much as it is meant to examine how the Vietnam War exists in American collective consciousness, as a game that can be replayed, a movie that can be re-enacted. For the vast majority of Americans, this is what war has always meant: something that you can choose to partake in, not something that comes to you.

An-My Lê. Sniper II, from the series Small Wars, 1999-2002. © 2022 An-My Lê, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

Like Small Wars, 29 Palms—a series on U.S. marines preparing for combat in the Mojave Desert (the terrain mimics that of Iraq and Afghanistan, where they will be deployed) — Lê’s lens is trained not on the theatre of war but rather the theatrics of war. The stage here is bigger, the props better, and the stakes undoubtedly higher. Whereas Small Wars depicts a crude reproduction of modern warfare, 29 Palms captures its dress rehearsals. Although there is still an artificial and staged-like quality to these photos, it does not undermine the palpable strength of the U.S. military that also comes through. If Small Wars is a reflection of how Americans understand and experience war, 29 Palms is a reflection of how America understands itself in relation to war—as a global military superpower, capable of immobilizing its enemies through technical expertise and meticulous preparation.

Lê further explores the role the U.S. military sees itself playing on the world stage in Events Ashore, the culmination of the nine years she spent following the U.S. Navy on its missions abroad. Like the bulk of her body of work, the photos here are taken in large format, although, unlike her previous photos, they are taken in color, giving them a glossy sheen and immaculate sharpness. The photos span all seven continents, from Asia to Antarctica, from Senegal to Hawaii, a testament to the ubiquitous nature of America’s presence in all corners of the world. Lê is still loyally drawn to the formidable landscape, but the vastness of the Pacific Ocean and the sublime icescapes of Antarctica are interrupted by the staggering weight of the American naval force, sometimes looming in the distance, sometimes front and center. While these photos were taken “on the ground,” they are devoid of any conflict or threat of violence. Instead, they depict the mundane routines of those onboard: cleaning, taking a smoke break, waiting for a check-up with the doctor. The lack of action is intentional;  Lê is purposefully subverting the expectation and ethos of war photography, which has traditionally focused on capturing combat. The result is a quietly faithful rendering of modern military activity—a lot of waiting around, that is until you’re not.

An-My Lê. Mexican Customs and Border Protection Officer, Presidio-Ojinaga International Bridge, Ojinaga, Mexico, from the series Silent General, 2019. © 2022 An-My Lê, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

In the last few years, Lê has turned her attention inward. Her ongoing project, Silent General, which she began in 2015, a pivotal year in U.S. politics and culture, is an attempt at sketching the contours of contemporary American milieu. There is no discernable thematic throughline across the photos in this series, and one gets the sense that Lê herself is searching for meaning in what her eye instinctively is drawn to. Most of these photos were taken in the South and Southwest, places where the American landscape is at its most supreme, where questions of property, border, immigration, and race have always been discernable but also where faith, patience, and resiliency have also been most potent.  Lê doesn’t know where we are heading – no one does—but if there is one thing she’s certain of it’s that history doesn’t move linearly; it moves in a spiral and, one can only hope, gradually upwards.

Installation view of An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 5, 2023–March 9, 2024. Photo: Jonathan Dorado

Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières shows at the Museum of Modern Art through March 09, 2024.


Born in Hanoi, Vietnam, Thu Nguyen currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. A lawyer by trade, she spends her free time reading (often) and writing (occasionally).

 

 

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Your Mother and Your Mother’s Mother

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Thuan Le Elston in red with maternal grandmother Ty Vu, mother Duc Le and daughter Thai-Binh Elston in Southern California in 2001.

Fifteen years ago, over a long Tết weekend, Thuan Le Elston and her husband flew from Northern Virginia with their kids to Phoenix for her maternal grandmother’s funeral. After seeing her half Vietnamese children experience for the first time being around her huge extended family, Elston decided it was time to write a historical novel she had been planning, inspired by the stories of her grandmothers and her husband’s grandmothers.

A dozen years later, Rendezvous at the Altar: From Vietnam to Virginia was published. The novel traces the lives of four women: Anne’s upbringing in Virginia to her Mad Men-like married life outside Manhattan; Kim’s family as they survive French colonialism and the Vietnam War; Mary’s transformations through the Great Depression in the Midwest and two marriages; and Ty’s migration from Hanoi businesswoman to Arizona matriarch. Through a mother’s journal to her children and the four grandmothers’ narrations, Elston compares gender roles, parenting, aging, and dying in a multicultural family.

Elston, an opinion editor for USA Today, recently sat down for an intimate interview with her daughter Thai-Binh Elston, a research associate at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, about Rendezvous, her inspiration, and writing process.

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Thai-Binh Elston: A core memory of my childhood is you working all day for USA Today, coming home, getting us ready for bed, and then heading back to your laptop to work on this book all night. What about writing this book made all those sleepless nights worth it?

Thuan Le Elston: Bà ngoại was the last of my and your dad’s grandparents to pass away. You and your three brothers were still young in 2009, just ages two to 11. But I thought, this is it – one generation has gone silent and my kids are never going to know all the stories of their ancestors if I don’t put it down. That’s what drove me.

It took more than a decade of writing, researching, rewriting and rewriting, but now it’s all there in black and white. I wrote it for you guys, but all the work also taught me a lot. As I wrote in the book, what strikes me about these four women is that the two Vietnamese shared a culture but lived very differently, and that the two Americans might as well have come from different planets.

Thai-Binh Elston: Why write a book about my great-grandmothers rather than my great-grandfathers?

Thuan Le Elston: My ông ngoại died when my mom was 22, so I never knew her father. My ông nội died when I was not even five. I have a memory of my dad’s father on his deathbed and smiling as I fed him steamed peanuts. That’s it. But I remember growing up in Saigon with Bà ngoại and Bà nội. I remember listening to their stories, how they talked, how they moved. In Phoenix, I watched how Bà ngoại’s relationships with her 15 children and multitudes of grandkids and great-grandkids change as she aged. We took you kids back to Saigon to visit my bà nội before she died. They were both so dominant and so important to me for so long, but I only knew my grandfathers through stories. Through your female ancestors, though, you still learn about the men in their lives. I gave our male ancestors their own voice, too.

Thai-Binh Elston: This book contains a lot of dialogue on behalf of people you last spoke to decades ago or never spoke to at all. How did you put yourself in their shoes and find their voices?

Thuan Le Elston: It was tricky. That’s why it’s a novel, because of the recreated conversations. But I felt it was necessary to convey the whole arc of each person, the context of how public history affected their personal histories. Your dad’s maternal grandparents I never met, but I knew his paternal grandparents and watched them interact with you kids years before they died. So, I remember their speech, their cadences. I interviewed my parents-in-law about their parents for the backstories, and they were so generous and honest about both the good and the bad. What was even trickier was remembering my grandmothers’ speech and cadences and translating their Vietnamese into English. My writing desk was surrounded by multiple Vietnamese-English dictionaries and Vietnamese books of old sayings. Luckily, we also have old letters and photographs from both sides of the family to help me with anecdotes. Fitting together all the puzzle pieces, I hope I’ve recreated their past lives for not only you kids but also for future generations.

Thuan’s parents, Duc and Nghia Le, in Phoenix in the late 1970s.

Thai-Binh Elston: What does your mother (my grandmother) think about your book?

Thuan Le Elston: She’s very proud. And as a child, I never thought I’d be able to make my mom proud. I was a dreamer and not a good student. She was always tough on me and blamed my dad for being too soft on me, because I was more like him. He was a poet and a musician; he was fluent in English, French, and Mandarin. He was an editor of an English-language weekly when Saigon fell in 1975 and we fled to America. But after he died in 1991 and I was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, she and I have had a totally different relationship. We both realized I was more like her. She retired early in 1998 and moved from Phoenix to Northern Virginia to live with us once I started having kids. She helped raise all four of you guys. This book is also a tribute to my mom, your bà ngoại. As I wrote the novel and had questions, I’d call her for answers and she’d remind me of stories I had forgotten. I’ve learned so much from her. She has taught me how to live, and now that she’s 84, she’s also teaching us how to gradually say goodbye. She’s very Zen about life and death.

Thai-Binh Elston: I never met your dad (my grandfather), but I’ve always wished I had the opportunity to. What do you think he would say about your book if he were around to read it? 

Thuan Le Elston: I’m so grateful for all the stories he told me over the years before he died the weekend I turned 25. As the oldest of five and the one who knew the most Vietnamese, I always took advantage of being the fly on the wall when adults were talking. But because I shared his love for literature and history, I learned a lot about his childhood, his parents and his favorite grandfather. I think he’d be amazed I actually not only wrote a novel but also got it published, no matter that it took a dozen years. I prayed to him quite a bit at our ancestral altar in the living room while I was writing this novel. I’m pretty sure he’s proud at how much he guided me from beginning to end.

The family in Northern Virginia before the book launch party in September 2021.


Thai-Binh Elston works as a Research Associate at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and earned her BA in Public Policy at the College of William & Mary. She grew up in Virginia with her grandparents, parents, and three brothers, and currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts.

 

 

Thuan Le Elston, a USA TODAY Opinion editor, is the author of Rendezvous at the Altar: From Vietnam to Virginia.

 

 

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Book Review: Anam by André Dao

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As an autofictional work that is part memoir, novel, and essay collection, Anam is a curious product of academic research, philosophical inquiry, oral history, and imagination, and the debut project of Vietnamese Australian writer André Dao. Dao weaves meditations on tenderness and love, phenomenology, and phúc đức between scenes of his grandparents’ life in Hanoi, Saigon, and France. In addition to being an artist and lawyer, Dao—and the narrator of his novel—is the cháu đích tôn of his family, the firstborn son of the eldest son. In Vietnamese tradition, it is the cháu đích tôn’s privilege and duty to carry on the patrilineal lineage by stewarding the family’s estate and maintaining the ancestral altar. But when one’s grandfather is imprisoned for ten years for being on the wrong side of the Vietnam War, and his family is displaced as immigrants in France and Australia, how does the cháu đích tôn fulfill his duties to his family and his ancestors? With no physical, ancestral homeland to inherit, Dao turns to theorizing about Anam, an abstract time-place that his family, as a diasporic people, reside in. The pacing of Anam is both driven and stalled by the narrator’s commitment to telling an accurate and ethical version of his grandparents’ story—a challenge that comes at the expense of committing to no version at all.

A continuous thread throughout Dao’s non-linear narrative is how institutions, whether academic, legal, or literary, shape the narrator’s understanding of self in relation to his family history and to society. From entering university to applying to jobs after graduating law school, the narrator believes that his acceptances into prestigious spaces had something to do with his refugee family story that institutions, committed to diversity and white saviorship, wanted to hear:

I was the son of refugees, the grandson of a political prisoner. There was an authoritative weight to that way of thinking and talking about myself that most of my classmates lacked. Especially the ones competing with me for internships and editorships, all of them as middle-class and well educated as me, but without that aura of authentic suffering.

Once inside the institution, one quickly learns that the value of the refugee, of people of color, is conditional, and complicity enables the ongoing repression of their voices. But no one else seems to insist on telling their family story as much as Dao needs to, and his partner Lauren thinks it’s “awfully conceited” to fixate on genealogy. Whether or not that’s a fair assessment, Dao internalizes his task as self-serving and egotistical. Setting out to officially write his family story, even if to fulfill his family duty as the cháu đích tôn, feels like another version of doing what got him into his current privileged place—establishing a self-mythos built on his family’s backstory of pain.

Dao’s narrator thus attempts to dissociate from any particular feeling about his family’s story—it was not his loss, so any emotional investment on his part would be like falsely laying claim to their pain. Professor Simons, his thesis advisor, observes this coldness in his drafts, and asks Dao what his grandmother’s predicament really means for him on a personal level—as in not intellectually, but what it feels like. Dao answers him:

Isn’t that the point though…Unlike Phan Boi Chau or my grandmother, I did not lose my country. I simply didn’t have one to begin with. How can you miss what you never had?…It’s not even that it’s vicarious. It’s confected. I have to work myself up to it. I have to do all this listening and reading and writing, to try to make this loss real for myself.

How Dao explains his loss recalls literary scholar Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory. While Hirsch suggests that the creative processes of imaginative investment is an inevitable response to inheriting the past generation’s overwhelming, traumatic experiences, Dao sees his actions as a choice. He is “free to claim” and even “appropriate” his family’s loss of country. He harshly exerts judgment on himself for telling his family’s story in the way that he does—so sentimentally that it risks erasure of their suffering, and becomes palatable to a Western audience. He is experienced, after all, in favorably presenting himself and his clients as a human rights lawyer before those in power. And what Dao feels as a shameful confession, to admit that he is “someone who cannot feel his own loss,” Hirsch describes as a natural, albeit unfortunate consequence of inheriting postmemory, where our ancestors’ stories displace and evacuate our own life stories.

Author André Dao (Photo by Leah Jing Mcintosh).

Professor Simons seems to follow Hirsch’s line of thinking. “Or,” Simons suggests to the narrator, “can you not feel your loss because it is so total? So total that your feelings are conditioned by that original loss—the primordial loss gives you your language and therefore sets the limit of your world?”

The extent of Dao’s meta discourse on writing his family story suggests that being a child of refugees in academic spaces produces a hyper-awareness about how powerful institutions view the “Other,” which disrupts Anam from otherwise being a straightforward family memoir. His level of concern with doing justice to his grandparents’ story even involves ethically considering whether to include the diacritical marks in Vietnamese names he discusses. “Fidelity to diacritics cannot recuperate or articulate all that history,” Dao admits, “If anything, it will only make it seem as if I know more than I do.” Interestingly, Dao’s overthinking never spills over into a neurotic tone or syntax. His prose remains effortlessly clear, calm, and engaging, even as he conveys a futility to do justice in his storytelling.

If anything, Dao’s meta discourse stalls the reader from enjoying Anam’s more poetic, literary elements—that is, when the narrator “I” and his endless reservations recede, having briefly committed to telling the readers a version of his grandparents’ epic story of love, phúc đức, and waiting. Tender scenes of his grandparents’ love story, from their first encounter, to the five years before their marriage, to their reunions, are held together by the symbolic veil of frangipanis. In one chapter, Dao immerses the reader in the September day in 1945 when Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam’s independence from France, and its significance for his Catholic grandfather who had been separated from his Communist brother Minh-now-Son. Dao structures the second half of the chapter as a series of questions, like an oral history interview, but the answers are brief and mystically poetic, as if accepting the role of fate in history:

Do the brothers’ paths converge?
No, never.
So was the pact between them broken?
It was.
Did the grandfather have names for what was thus lost?
He did.
Recite them.
Blood brother, bosom brother, first brother, playmate, idol, bully, friend, rival, lodestar.
Did the grandfather have names for what was thus gained?
Yes.
Recite them.
Brother-in-law, brother-in-Christ, mentor, master, Monsieur le Gouverneur, life’s purpose, morality’s measure, her brother, love’s brother.

In the second section of the novel, Aunt Phuong wonders how the narrator will write about the years that his grandmother and her children spent in the French town of Laon as refugees, waiting for news of his grandfather’s return. “Nothing happened” during this period, but “[Nephew] can’t redeem the waiting simply by showing that the event we were waiting for came to pass.” Dao rises to the challenge by writing what he calls “useful” fragments of the Great Anamite Novel, even if they cannot redeem the past. These fragments turn the section’s concluding chapter into a form similar to a play, where each relative gives a monologue that testifies to their waiting. Their words are dispirited by the Anam they lost, yet still hold power in their poetics.

In his review of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Committed, Dao writes that a novel is “a good technology for shaping the self.” Dao’s own novel succeeds in demonstrating this. The writing in Anam is no bold manifesto about inheritance, the effects of war, the refugee condition, or duty. Rather, Anam’s narrator is a writing companion, a guide by example, for the fellow child of the diaspora who is figuring out who they are, beginning with their family story. It was stunning to read my innermost concerns about writing about the past, so distilled in Dao’s prose. Dao’s concept of Anam is also a helpful thought experiment that does not tie the diaspora’s memoryscape of Vietnam to the present-day country of Vietnam. It recognizes that the country of Vietnam and its people have progressed in ways unrecognizable to South Vietnamese refugees, whose “Vietnam” is a nostalgic, unchanging Anam, of which different versions exist for each family, each generation. Dao’s depictions of his grandparents’ Anams are compelling across time and place, making Anam feel rich for adaptation as a play or as a historical novel. I’m incredibly excited to encounter more of Dao’s Anams through a multitude of genres in his future work.

Anam
by André Dao
Penguin Books Australia

Read an excerpt from Anam by André Dao.


Cathy Duong is a current Masters student at UW Seattle Genetic Counseling program. In her free time, she enjoys traveling to Little Saigons, playing V-pop on her ukulele, and analyzing diasporic Viet literature.

 

 

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Live it / On Haunting

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This poem was written by the cohort for the DVAN-Luce Global Collective Residency for Women & Nonbinary Writers, funded by the Luce Foundation. The cohort convened at Millay Arts in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York for a two-week stay from November 27th to December 12th, 2023. The secluded location, bordering the beautiful Harvey Mountain State Forest and the home of visionary early 20th-century activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, offered solitude in a wintry landscape that provided reflection and inspiration.

The residency’s cohort were: Thanh Bùi, Si-Min Chong (Min), Lan Duong, Carolyn Huynh, Susan Lieu, Kathy Nguyễn, and Mai Tran.

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Oakland Night Question

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Image by 12019 from Pixabay.

Translated by Thuy Dinh

Nguyễn Quí Đức, who died on November 22, 2023 in Hanoi, Vietnam, was a steadfast supporter of Vietnamese writing. To talk about Đức, multilingual writer and artist, is to place him in the confluence of Vietnamese and American perspectives. In this context, translation is also an integral part of Đức’s literary legacy.

I first met Đức in November of 1995 when he came to pick me up at SFO after my flight from Washington D.C. A few weeks earlier, he had sent me an exquisite handwritten invitation, sealed with vermillion wax, to the launch of Once Upon A Dream: The Vietnamese-American Experience (Andrews & McMeel, 1995), edited by De Tran, Andrew Lam, and Hai Dai Nguyen. My memoir essay, “Luggage and Shoes,” was featured in the anthology along with works by other writers and visual artists. As the first publication that showcased a broad spectrum of Vietnamese-American voices, the anthology received significant support from San Jose Mercury News, Ink & Blood (the predecessor of DVAN), the Vietnamese Students Associations at UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and Stanford University, among others.

During the nearly hour-long drive to Villa Montalvo, where the launch was to be held that evening, we talked about a few of the writers featured in the anthology. Đức was gentle and charming, but also direct and restless. As the anthology’s associate editor, he was proud of Once Upon A Dream, but felt as a group we must strive toward some sort of “paradigm shift” to make the mainstream publishing industry pay attention—something that actually became an exciting reality two decades later. (Incidentally, Viet Thanh Nguyen, who was a graduate student at UC Berkeley at the time, had a poem in Once Upon A Dream, “Untitled,” with the opening lines, “I scurry through books with the/avidity of an alley cat ….)

During 1999 – early 2000, I submitted a handful of essays to Ômêly, Đức’s short-lived, bilingual website envisioned as a lively forum for diasporic Vietnamese, Vietnamese-Americans, as well as artists and writers living in Vietnam. Ômêly also paid contributors. Idealistic, ambitious, and ahead of its time, Ômêly didn’t last.

I communicated sporadically with Đức after his return to Vietnam. In November 2008, I collaborated with him on the Vietnamese translation of a short piece that he broadcasted from Hanoi after Obama’s election; it was published in Da Màu Magazine—an online literary publication of which I have been an editor since 2007.

Phùng Nguyễn was founder and editor-in-chief of Da Màu, as well as my anh cả and esteemed colleague until his death in November 2015. He and Đức became good friends in the early 1990s, when Phùng lived in Bakersfield and Đức in San Francisco. Originally published in Vietnamese as “Đêm Oakland. Câu Hỏi” (from Đêm Oakland và Những Truyện Khác, Văn: California, 2001), the below story is framed as a literary conversation between Phùng and Đức via the former’s childhood memories and his reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist in the Floating World. Dedicated “to Đ…” and narrated in a deceptively naïve tone by an equally elusive speaker, “Oakland Night Question” seems to shift-shape with each new reading.

Born in 1950 in Quảng Nam, Central Vietnam, Phùng served in the South Vietnamese Army and was honorably discharged due to injuries prior to April 1975. Đức, born in Đà Lạt, Vietnam’s Central Highlands, was Phùng’s junior by eight years. As recounted in his memoir Where the Ashes Are (Addison-Wesley, 1994), Đức’s childhood ended in 1968, when Communist troops, in violation of the cease-fire observance during the Lunar New Year, stormed Huế in the early morning hours and arrested his father, then the civilian deputy to the military governor of South Vietnam’s Central Province. Father and son would not be reunited until sixteen years later.

In “Oakland Night Question,” Phùng’s narrator thinks he belongs to the past, but his anxious ruminations about future generations seem to align with Đức’s literary legacy—one that timelessly embraces a dynamic dialogue between remembering and forgetting.

Thuy Dinh

***

To Đ…

Night is about to end when Đức and I get inside his decrepit car. Thiện stands underneath the arch of his apartment complex, waving goodbye. Yesterday afternoon, Thiện and Đức came to fetch me at my hotel. Thiện’s hair, which goes past his shoulders, at first made me wary, but in truth Thiện is courteous, easygoing, and prone to daydreaming. Resting on a sofa in Thiện’s apartment during the predawn hours, I let my mind wander along with his singing and guitar music. By and by, certain thoughts came to me, thoughts at first seemed fragmented, random, but in fact were related to Đức’s question, posed to me hours earlier as if it were a natural part of the conversation, exchanged above foaming beers and plates of blood pudding at a restaurant in the town where we three congregated last night.

Đức and I would often get together in a city toward the southern part of the state, where neither of us lives. I have the sense Đức never lives long enough in any city to be considered a resident. He lives alone, has no real responsibility to anyone, travels often and anytime he pleases. That fact alone makes me extremely envious. On the other hand, I am older than Đức, old enough to kill and be killed legally before Đức had the chance to participate in the grown-up game we call war. The fact I was born and grew up in a poor village in the countryside, marked by omnipresent traces of bombs and bullets, has been enough to rattle him. Behind the high walls of an elegant mansion, sheltered from the dangers outside, people naturally have the luxury to ruminate. Đức told me about his complex, precocious thoughts about the war in a composition written in fifth grade.

Despite the great disparity in our childhoods and war experiences, I believe that Đức and I belong to the same group of people standing precariously on two planks floating in opposite directions, trying to keep our balance so we don’t fall into the abyss of confusion below. It seems the piece of wood that keeps dragging me back into the past has more chances of success.

There are things in my past that will haunt me for the rest of my life. For several years now, I have gone backward rather than forward. Đức’s friends, who are his age or younger, used to surprise me with their ability to speak, in Vietnamese, about other things besides phở, Huế beef noodle soup, and rice bits. Much later, after my surprise has faded, I wonder if this reaction might have come from the fear of losing my last lifeline of self-respect, namely my Vietnamese proficiency. When a person can no longer depend on certain things in life, the fluency with which he speaks his mother’s tongue where such skill is not highly valued can mean a number of things, including the coy if desperate desire to profess both ownership of, and allegiance to, his dreary past.

But lately, when encountering Đức’s young friends, I have come to expect from them the ability to express abstract thoughts not only fluently but also cogently in multiple languages. So I wasn’t surprised when, earlier, I heard Thiện and Đức argue passionately about fresh assertions in a historian’s recently published book. In Vietnamese, of course. And I wasn’t the least bit surprised later when Thiện, hugging his guitar, sang his latest song in accent-free English until the early morning hours, in his clean and orderly apartment.

When the war ended, Đức was old enough to carry with him the ashes of the past, but also too young to cherish them as the only possession a person could own. It seems as if this bit of ashes occasionally gets stirred up by something or someone, creating a dust cloud that would choke Đức and make him cough. It wasn’t a coincidence that he gave me Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World when we visited his favorite bookstore near the heart of San Francisco.

After painstakingly pondering the novel’s contents with my poor English, I conclude there are at least a few things that are troubling and will continue to trouble Đức for many years to come. I also believe that those worries, if my thoughts are not unfounded, have long since ceased to bother me. If I have to describe myself and my relationship to the war, I would often think of a man who has just lost a game of chess, embarrassed and unsure of what to do. The winner is determined not to erase the board and start over; it is thus useless to stand there and complain. So I take my leave with the consolation that I have at least finished the game, albeit badly played. Over time, the thought of having finished the game becomes a very effective antidote to many awkward situations. But not this time. When Đức’s question came up, or rather, floated toward my direction above a table full of empty beer bottles and cigarette butts, I imagined catching something sincere and beseeching in his gaze. But I still ignored the question. I did not want to answer such a question. Perhaps because it has also been, for a long time, my own question. At any rate, I do feel I owe him an answer.

When his car turns into a road leading toward the freeway, Đức lights his first cigarette of the journey. He will smoke nonstop throughout this trip, and at times will be seized with hacking coughs. San Francisco is thirty minutes away. If I want my story to end before morning, I’d better start now.

***

The whole village, including me—who was then a child—knew the story of how Mr. Thiệp hanged himself from his ceiling beam one summer afternoon. But why he did it only a handful among the grown-ups would know. I was certain Little Kình did not know. Little Kình did not know a lot of things, including how to talk in full sentences. Little Kình was Mr. Thiệp’s son, older than me by seven, eight years. If I called anyone else of Kình’s age “little,” my mother wouldn’t have hesitated to whip my ass nice and good with her mulberry stick. But from childhood I had heard everyone in the village, including my mother, call him “Little Kình” or “crazy Little Kình.” They said madness ran in his gene pool; Mr. Thiệp himself was far from being sane.

At the funeral, I stared at Little Kình. Wearing funeral clothes made of white linen gauze, on his head a white funeral band, his hands around a pot of incense, Little Kình walked behind the hearse, his face vacant. I was disgusted in seeing his thick, sheath-like upper lip fold over his lower, slobbering rim. My disgust was telling, since most village children, including my ten-year old self, were already shabby and filthy. While a poor village funeral was often a desolate, sleepy affair with nothing to stir anyone’s interest, Little Kình at least made it bearable.

Little Kình did not go to school. He worked as hired help in the village, same as his mother—a weaver for Mr. Cửu Nhì’s family.

The soil in my village was alluvial soil, mostly sand and gravel, not ideal for growing rice. People grew melons, peanuts, green and red beans, corn, tobacco, and mulberry, from which the leaves were harvested to feed silkworms. Alluvial soil was dry; to plant anything one had to water the soil constantly. Little Kình had the strength of a full-grown man, so he was hired to water the fertile patches. Both owner and hired help would collect water from a small pond using two large bamboo-woven buckets caulked with tree sap, then, carrying these buckets suspended from a wooden pole, would walk over the entire field. The pole, dipping and rising rhythmically from the worker’s bent shoulders as he walked, would cause droplets of water to slosh around the rims of the buckets before spilling over the earth. And so it went, from morning to noon, from noon to dusk.

About two years after Mr. Thiệp hanged himself, my village became a bustling place. One day, the National Liberation Front showed up near dusk, rounding up the entire village council—representative, legal delegate, village registrar, secretary—and herding them like cattle toward the village’s flagpole. The Front also ushered people from five surrounding hamlets to my village for a meeting. Each member of our village council was then singled out to be criticized, then released at the end of the meeting after each had sworn allegiance to the Front by not becoming collaborators for Ngô Đình Diệm or the Americans. It was a close call for these council members. Three days later, South Vietnamese soldiers came up from the district, in a confused hubbub of dogs barking and Garand rifles going off in staccato refrains. Then these soldiers retreated to Vĩnh Điện. The Front again rounded everyone up for a meeting. In spite of all these goings-on, from day to day the villagers continued to take up their hoes and carry their buckets to weed and water the field.

At this time Little Kình worked mainly for Uncle Tám Thơm’s family. No one knew what had befallen Uncle Tám; he was always pale and sickly, all curled up on his wooden bed for at least twenty eight days each month. Every morning Auntie Tám would head to the field carrying two hoes, followed by Sister Hạnh carrying two buckets, one containing an areca-sheathed lunch of rice mixed with reddish corn and the other a pot of steamed greens. Sister Hạnh turned eighteen that year. She had completed elementary school, and now lived at home to help her mother plant mulberry bushes and feed silkworms.

Each morning, Auntie Tám would slow down a bit in front of Mrs. Thiệp’s house, call out “Little Kình, let’s go,” then continue on. Kình would quietly emerge, on his shoulders a pole tied to two old buckets and a large hoe. He would make loud, gurgling sounds to greet Sister Hạnh, his face bright and happy.

Three months after the Front had taken over the village council, the district sent out their people to take care of administrative matters. They came from either Phú Bông or Phú Bài. During the day they worked at the village headquarters, with guards standing at the gate outside. At night they retreated to their homes near the district for security reasons. From time to time the Front would show up for meetings, chiding the villagers, “Why do you let those good-for-nothings come by and boss you around?” Then the Front would vanish, sometimes for an entire month. Meanwhile the village registrar, Mr. Hồ Luyện, would make frequent visits to Auntie Tám’s house “to be in touch with the people.” No one knew the real reason for his visits, whether it had to do with Uncle Tám or Auntie Tám. When Uncle Tám fell dead after having a coughing fit that lasted for three days, the people weren’t sure if the registrar’s visits had to do with Auntie Tám or Sister Hạnh.

One morning, Auntie Tám was the one carrying the bamboo buckets containing an areca-sheathed lunch filled with thin slices of yam and a pot of steamed yam leaves. She stopped in front of Mrs. Thiệp’s house, called out, “Little Kình, let’s go,” and walked on. Kình emerged from the yard, dragging his feet, his shoulders laden with buckets and hoes. He pursed his lips but stayed silent. Sister Hạnh was nowhere in sight to make him open his mouth and babble happily. Sister Hạnh was sick with no one knew what. But maybe Auntie Tám or Mr. Hồ Luyện would know. The village registrar had been coming to Auntie Tám’s house for six, seven months at that point.

The next day, Auntie Tám repeated her routine, calling out to Little Kình then continuing on her way. After a while, she stopped and retraced her steps. Little Kình wasn’t behind her. Little Kình wasn’t in his yard. Little Kình wasn’t in his house. She went back and forth. Then sitting on the sidewalk, dusty and covered with dry bamboo leaves, she cried.

Little Kình had gone away. Sister Hạnh’s illness did not abate. She cocooned inside the house, seeing no one. Every morning Auntie Tám would carry her buckets and her hoes toward the field, all alone. In the summer I did not have to go to school, so during the day I would wander through the field, catching coal and fire crickets from under damp patches of grass and putting them in an empty milk can that I hid in a corner of the garden. If my mother found out, she would’ve surely whipped me. She often worried about me stepping on landmines or falling into some bamboo spike trap.

One day I followed a friend and walked all the way across the river to Thanh Châu to catch fire crickets. I didn’t return home until dusk. I was worried about being whipped nice and good, but to my relief I found out the Front had returned that evening. My mother would need to attend the village meeting and wouldn’t be around to whip me. The echoing loudspeakers were rallying the people to attend the trial of Hồ Luyện, evil collaborator of Diệm and the Americans. I nearly jumped with joy. I hated Hồ Luyện. My mother hated him, too. She often complained to my grandmother, wondering why there were men of his ilk who often preyed on orphaned, defenseless women.

That evening I pushed and shoved my way close the row of chairs where men of the Front were sitting. A guerrilla soldier, rifle in hand, was walking back and forth while yelling, to no avail, at a group of children fighting for seats. The trial began. The group of children, following the adults’ lead, stood and saluted the red and blue flag next to a picture of the chairman of the Front. We were familiar with the ritual of saluting the flags. Blue, red, yellow—all flags were equally bright and cheerful. And those bigwigs in their portraits, compared with the dark-skinned village peasants, always looked so handsome and dignified, not unlike Vietnam’s ancient emperors.

One man from the Front came up and said something that went on endlessly. I started to feel sleepy and nodded off against someone’s dark, suntanned back in front of me. I didn’t come to until Mr. Hồ Luyện’s name was called. The man who talked for a long time was the prosecutor of the people’s court. He cited a litany of Hồ Luyện’s sins, any of which could have easily done him in. Finally the prosecutor concluded that even killing Hồ Luyện three times over would not offset the blood debt he had incurred against the people.

But the evil Hồ Luyện was nowhere to be seen. Usually you would see the defendant, hands tied behind his back, sitting in a corner with a resigned and morose face waiting for his sentence to be read aloud. The younger kids started to whisper about Hồ Luyện’s no- show, as did the grown-ups. Then the judge, who was also a member of the Front, stood up and told everyone why Hồ Luyện didn’t show. It turned out the traitor was too cowardly to face the people. He had been shot dead at dusk by a member of the Front while trying to flee. The prosecutor said the warrior who punished Hồ Luyện was a blood relative of the people. He turned around and called, “Comrade Kình, please come and greet the people.” Comrade Kình?!

Little Kình appeared, dressed in black pajamas like other members of the Front, over which he draped a brown oilcloth, and on his head a hat made of woven bamboo was also covered with oilcloth of the same brown. Carrying a long Indochinese rifle with an attached bayonet, he walked like a zombie with eyes staring straight ahead, stopping only when reaching the three-tiered steps leading to the forum. The light from a gas mantle shone on his blubbery, tightly-sealed lips, which looked as if he was trying to contain a large frog within. Suddenly Little Kình raised his left fist, shouting, “Down with the evil collaborators and traitors who work for Diệm and the Americans.” Good heavens! Little Kình not only joined the Front but knew how to shout slogans. Perhaps the grown-ups were as shocked as I was, since no one repeated after Little Kình except for members of the Front.

Little Kình then shouted, “Hurrah for the National Liberation Front!” This time we all joined in. He shouted several other slogans, with hurrahs or denunciations, before abruptly falling silent. The prosecutor from the people’s court then stood up and escorted Little Kình toward the back. Out in the village’s yard, we children were in a commotion. It was like market day. Everyone wanted to let everyone else know we were friends with Little Kình. I was truly impressed. Even a crazy one like Kình could learn to shout slogans after only a few months of joining the Front.

That night, I slept soundly and did not wake until noon the next day. As soon as I appeared on the threshold of the kitchen, my head freshly doused with water from the outdoor cistern, I saw my mother’s angry face. She was holding her mulberry stick in one hand, and with the other hand the milk can that contained my crickets. Surely these crickets had made so much noise they caused her to lose her temper. I turned and ran out into the backyard, ignoring her scolding.

After climbing through an opening in a fence, I was inside Auntie Tám’s garden. I was safe—for now. Walking along the side of Auntie Tám’s house, I thought about seeking refuge at my uncle’s house in the neighboring village of Định An until the evening. The sounds of people talking behind the bamboo walls of Auntie Tám’s house unnerved me. Auntie Tám was still in the field, and Hồ Luyện had been shot dead—was Sister Hạnh talking to ghosts?

I looked through an opening in the wall and saw Little Kình’s raft-like back. Little Kình was completely naked, his back and buttocks marked with lesions and pimples, going up and down on top of Sister Hạnh, chanting something nonstop as if in prayer. Sister Hạnh was lying face up, with eyes tightly shut. Her slightly tumescent belly rose and descended every time Little Kình’s heavy, awkward frame pushed and pulled above her. They were doing husband-and-wife business. It was disgusting, Little Kình’s voice was muffled by his labored breathing, so I had to listen closely before I could make out the words. He kept repeating slogans that had nothing to do with what he was doing. Sister Hạnh kept her eyes shut and never said anything. I grew bored, now aware that my empty belly was protesting loudly. I quietly backed away to the front gate, then ran at full speed to my uncle’s house.

Sister Sáu, my uncle’s daughter, took me home when it got dark. The Front was preparing to retreat, with Little Kình among the group, looking a bit lost, his confidence from the night before had disappeared. The next day my village would change leadership again.

This time South Vietnamese soldiers arrived from the province. There was also Mrs. Hồ Luyện, coming with the soldiers to retrieve her husband’s body. When she arrived at Auntie Tám’s house, Mrs. Hồ Luyện charged right into the yard, crying, cursing the slutty bitch who had killed her husband. Auntie Tám and Sister Hạnh must have been inside, but they kept mum. We children congregated around the house, watching the spectacle as if it were a circus.

The soldiers stayed in our village and nearby locations for a whole month, long enough for me to know almost everyone by sight. The summer went by peacefully. As long as the soldiers stayed, the cannons from the district would aim mainly at the mountainous area on the other side of Cái River. In the afternoon I would often visit the soldiers at their watchtower, listening to their rambling gossips. Not to be outdone, I told them about the shocking things that had happened in my village. Like how Mr. Thiệp had hanged himself from the ceiling beam. And his crazy son who followed the Front and was cured of his craziness. The soldiers laughed so hard, and asked why I didn’t join the Front as well. I got mad, saying, “So you think I am crazy, too?”

The last days of summer were long and sad. Gone were my coal, fire, and iron crickets. Even the koi with their bright, showy tails had vanished beneath the irrigation canals. In a few days I would go back to school in town, sharing meals with my unruly posse at a boarding house.

One night, a pale, new moon appeared on the horizon. Without telling my mother, I ran to the watchtower at the edge of the village to sit dejectedly next to a soldier who didn’t look much happier. Maybe he missed his family. From the direction of the wooden bridge, I heard the wind rustling among the bamboo hedges. I leaned back on the thin, filthy wall of the watchtower and drifted off to sleep. At midnight a loud series of rat tat tat jolted me awake. The soldier standing guard had shot at something beyond the fence of the strategic hamlet. From the village, other sounds came forth: the urgent, rhythmic knock-knock of fish drums; the lower-pitch rattling from tin barrels; and the loud, echoing woof-woof of barking dogs. At first, these sounds seemed discordant, but gradually merged into a deep hum resembling the sound of locusts. By the district’s order, we had to alert the surrounding areas with bells and drums when we sensed danger. I followed the soldier through the fence made of sharp bamboo spikes and came to a large, writhing form on the ground.

Under the pale moonlight, I recognized Little Kình. Blood glistened on his chest and belly. I screamed, “Oh, Kình!” and fell next to him. His thick upper lip was drawn back, drool mixed with blood giving his mouth an oily sheen. With glazed eyes toward the waxing moon, Little Kình babbled words and phrases that had nothing to do with what was happening to him. This was the third time I heard him utter these phrases. The last time was when I’d seen him naked with Sister Hạnh. He kept twitching, then finally became still. I looked up at the soldier. Little Kình was crazy, why did you shoot him? The soldier did not respond but turned away from me, the rifle on his shoulders hard and stiff like a dry log. That night, long, slow sobs could be heard from Mrs. Thiệp’s house, and a baby’s cries from Auntie Tám’s. Sister Hạnh had given birth to her firstborn. A son, with a large, flat nose like Mr. Hồ Luyện’s.

***

At twelve, I was too easily distracted to learn anything from these events. Little Kình’s death slipped through the sieve of my memory barely two weeks into the new school year. And after I reached twenty, I became saddled with too many worries to become concerned with things that now seemed so far in the past. Especially when these worries seem to be a lot worse than what had come before. Only much later, after the war had long been over and the wounds had become more bearable, did I begin to think, now and then, of Little Kình. Especially when I would hear, on this or the other side of the world, the shouting slogans similar to those I’d heard from his lips long ago. When Đức asked me what had caused people to stand on this or the other side of the battle line, I would think of Little Kình. So I thought I would share with Đức this story, full of holes and false starts, to see if he could find an answer that perhaps I’d also like to have. I am not an eloquent storyteller, and my story is clearly messy and erratic. Besides, my recollection, at best, could reveal only a tiny part of the whole, like drips or smudges bleeding into other shades in an abstract painting.

At one point, I thought I had found an explanation for Little Kình’s tragic fate after learning the likely reason for his father’s suicide. Several years before slipping his head through the noose made of coconut fiber, Mr. Thiệp had led at least two other men to their deaths. His uncle and this uncle’s firstborn son were taken by the Việt Minh from their hiding place, brought to a camp in Châu Mưu on the other side of Cái River, and executed along with their comrades in the Vietnamese Nationalist Party. Their deaths were payment for Mr. Thiệp’s safety.

My awareness of this history might have explained the reason for Mr. Thiệp’s suicide, but it still has not, to this day, explained the strange relationship between Little Kình and Sister Hạnh or Little Kình’s compulsive slogans. I have reasons to believe Little Kình never understood the true meaning behind those hurrahs and denunciations uttered by his misshapen lips.

In the car now filled with cigarette smoke, Đức remains stone quiet. I have no idea what he is thinking, but I know he has listened to the whole story. I begin to doubt myself. I have tried to answer Đức’s question by telling him a story whose true meaning I’m not even sure I have grasped, at the same time hoping he would understand.

I know I’m not at peace with myself. It wasn’t a coincidence that Đức suggested An Artist of the Floating World when we stopped by his favorite bookstore. Perhaps the detail I added to explain Mr. Thiệp’s death—something I knew didn’t make the story any clearer—has somehow bothered him. Is the finale Mr. Thiệp chose for himself—thirteen years after his relatives’ executions at Châu Mưu—too brutal, too harsh, compared to the peace that awaits Masuji Ono at the end of Ishiguro’s novel? Peace that represents a redemptive arc found in the bright smiles of young Japanese greeting each other in front of sleek skyscrapers erected upon the ashes and ruins of yesteryear? Was Ono’s artistic dream—a floating vision, buoyed by an earnest but violent fervor to help the emperor create a New, Great Asia—less reprehensible or more forgivable than the savage ideology of my brethren?

What has kept Đức and his cosmopolitan friends from disavowing the cheerless past that my generation, for lack of choice, has held on like an unalienable part of our lives? Why have I never asked myself this question when seeing young people holding hands, going to restaurants in bustling Vietnamese conclaves in Western cities, where they order phở or Huế beef noodle soup and greet each other with words and phrases from languages other than their (and my) mother’s tongue? Is it because the younger generation has been exposed to movies about the Vietnam War made by foreign directors, with actors speaking Chinese, and scenery shot in Burma or Malaysia? Is it because they have read history books written by famous historians ten thousand miles away from the battlefronts where my friends and I shed our blood and bones? Is it the fear—my own fear of having to confront the younger generation’s views of the war, constructed from these revisionist or alienating lens—that has made me avoid them?

I think about the loneliness that Đức and his friends must endure in their search for meaning from the exorbitant price that not only my generation, but also his generation, have had to pay for events that occurred long ago. Perhaps I owe him more than an answer to the question that hovered above the foaming beers and plates of blackish blood pudding in the restaurant in the city where we congregated last night.

***

Đức leans over to light his last cigarette of the journey. I open the passenger’s window halfway down. Threads of smoke fly past me and dissipate into the damp cool San Francisco air. The car is heading toward Bay Bridge. Night and Oakland are behind us, now.

Phùng Nguyễn
February 2000

Thuy Dinh
November 2023


Phùng Nguyễn was born in 1950 in Quảng Nam Province, Central Vietnam and resettled in Central California in May 1984. He graduated from California State University in Bakersfield, California with a Bachelor of Science degree and a Master of Business Administration degree in information management, and was a Director of Information System at Jaco Oil Company in California before his retirement in 2013. He was editor-in-chief of Hợp Lưu Magazine (California, USA) from 2002 to April 2003.  In July 2006, he co-founded the online literary magazine Da Màu with Đặng Thơ Thơ and Do Le Anhdao, and functioned as the magazine’s web manager and nonfiction co-editor.  During his lifetime, he created and maintained an extensive online database to preserve the legacy of several well-known diasporic Vietnamese literary magazines, such as Văn Học, Văn, Hợp Lưu, and Việt. As founder, designer and guardian of kesach.org, he also initiated the publication and free circulation of over 150 Vietnamese literary works in ebook format, via Scribd and Smashwords from May 2008 until his death in November 2015. Besides his technological expertise which played a crucial role in the development and sustenance of online Vietnamese literary presence during the internet age, Phùng Nguyễn was also a noted essayist and fiction writer who made his name with two short story collections, Memory Tower (Tháp Ký Ức) (Văn, CA: 1988), and Oakland Night and Other Stories (Đêm Oakland Và Những Truyện Khác (Văn, CA: 2001). He passed away at age 65 in College Park, Maryland.

Thuy Dinh is a bilingual critic, literary translator, coeditor of the Vietnamese webzine Da Màu, and editor-at-large for the Vietnamese Diaspora at Asymptote Journal. Her essays and poetry translations have appeared in AsymptoteManoa, Michigan Quarterly Review, NBC ThinkNPR BooksPrairie Schooner, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Amerasia, among others. Green Rice, her co-translation of the selected poetry of Lâm Thị Mỹ Dạ, was published by Curbstone Press in 2005, and nominated for the Kiriyama Prize in 2006.

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