Hot Damn Vietnam

In its own unfortunate way, the movie “Forrest Gump” provides the most realistic portrait of Vietnam from the American perspective: a place without Vietnamese. Gump and his fellow innocents play out their defining experiences and are transformed into the expected roles of vet-victims in a land blanked of inhabitants. The film, like much of the American films and literature inspired by the Vietnam War, reflects (rather than exposes) not only popular attitudes but the very policy that started the war in the first place and then allowed it to continue. As that belated prophet Robert McNamara--3 million Vietnamese and 59,000 American lives later--recently told us in his book “In Retrospect”: “Our misjudgments of friends and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture and politics of the people in the area.”

The murderous solipsism that sees Vietnam only as a place to test some vision of ourselves and the Vietnamese only as shadowy figures in a landscape of war is what provokes the scream at the heart of performance artist Le Thi Diem Thuy’s “Shrapnel Shards on Blue Water,” part of a one-woman show in which Thuy uses photographs, music, poetry and monologues to recapture her family’s life in Vietnam and in passage to America. Assuming the voice--as she has assumed the name of her sister, a boat person drowned off a Malaysian beach--Thuy cries: “Tell people / VIETNAM IS NOT A WAR . . . / VIETNAM IS NOT A WAR . . . / VIETNAM IS NOT A WAR.”

Le Thi Diem Thuy is one of the many writers from both Vietnam and the Vietnamese refugee community--that is, both sides of the war--who have started being published in this country over the last few years. They offer the rest of us the voices and stories we never heard--or never wanted to hear. “Stories save lives,” Tim O’Brien has written. “Not bodies but lives.” Good words and true. But perhaps one can be forgiven for hoping that imaginative fiction’s ability to help us enter the inner lives of those considered enemy, or alien, or not at all, might make the decision for the next war that much harder and save a few bodies as well. At the least, the work of writers such as Le Thuy finally lets us see Vietnam and America through Vietnamese eyes and understand the common wounds to our humanity wrought by the war and its aftermath.

Fiction and poetry still occupy a place in Vietnamese culture that might be envied by American writers. Or maybe not. A writer friend in Hanoi once laughed when I complained about the woes I had as an American midlist author, and said: “You’re cursed to come from a country where literature isn’t taken seriously; I’m cursed because I come from a country where it is.” In Communist Vietnam before 1986, the interest authorities paid to literature was a curse: The only writings that could be published were works of Socialist Realism. Art and literature were to be judged strictly in terms of their service to the party and the state. Characters were flat: good proletarian heroes, evil or weak counterrevolutionary villains, all equally asexual.

The boundaries of free expression in Vietnam are still, to say the least, fluid. But after 1986, when the policy of Doi Moi (Renovation) allowed broad economic reforms and the loosening of state controls, writers for the first time could publish socially critical works, peopled by complex characters who changed, developed and even had sex lives. And though (unlike American authors) none of the writers doubted the essential justice of their side’s cause of reunifying the country and freeing it from foreign control, they began to depict not only the heroism and glory of the war but its human cost as well.

First published in the United Kingdom in 1993, Bao Ninh’s “The Sorrow of War” is the best war novel to come out of Vietnam. The author was one of nine survivors of an North Vietnamese Army brigade that started with 500 men. His protagonist, Kien, becomes the voice of the generation that was decimated by the war in both body and soul. The narrative twists between Kien’s need to write about the war and his struggle with memories so terrible he doesn’t know if he can write about them or if he should depict them honestly. “Why must he write of the war? His life and the life of so many others were so horrible it could scarcely be called a life. How can one find artistic recognition in that sort of life?” The book was controversial in Vietnam for its depiction of the way combatants are brutalized by combat, the bitterness of neglected veterans, the nightmares of memory they suffer, all once forbidden subjects.

Another controversial (and now banned) war novel is Duong Thu Huong’s “Novel Without a Name.” Huong’s character, Platoon Leader Quan, in a scenario reminiscent of Tim O’Brien’s “Going After Cacciato,” is sent on a journey back to his village to find a fellow soldier who deserted. In the course of his torturous, solitary trip through the jungles of the Central Highlands, he recalls his 10 years of war and comes to question whether the struggle was worth the tremendous loss of life, spirit, sanity and truth. At one point, Quan rips up a Communist Party newspaper that reported the “glorious victories” of Tet, a time when he “had buried countless numbers of comrades.”

It would be a mistake, though, to assume that such frankness exists only in dissident writing. Aeschylus’ adage that “in war truth is the first casualty” is a theme also touched on by such “establishment” non-dissident writers as Vu Bao, a Communist Party member and veteran of the French and American wars. His title story in “The Man Who Stained His Soul” (see Page 14) tells how a coward, who wet his pants and refused to advance during a battle, is made into a hero by a documentary filmmaker, celebrated at home and abroad, his image placed on stamps, calendars and posters. Yet when the soldiers who fought bravely in the same action complain, they are told to be quiet and not disturb people’s perceptions.

Ho Anh Thai, a writer of the postwar generation, also addresses the myths of war imaginatively in “Behind the Red Mist,” a fantasy in which a modern Hanoi teenager accidentally falls back into time, to wartime Hanoi, where he witnesses both his parents’ courtship and the truth about the war generation always held up as a model of courage and self-sacrifice to his generation. He finds that not all the stories are true, but he also finds the humanity behind the myths and a strength of purpose in his parents’ generation that he feels is sadly missing in his own. “His generation had come to understand the price of war from the memories and stories of older people; they knew how many had died and they had come to hate war in general and did not want to think about it or be connected to it. Never would they spontaneously decide to enlist and join the fighting.”

Thai’s novel “The Women on the Island” concerns another painful postwar issue: The mental and physical traumas women suffered because of the long separations they experienced during the war. He also explores the effect the loss of a generation of young men had on the institution of marriage and family in Vietnam. For many Vietnamese women, having a child is an important self-defining experience. Yet a childless future loomed for many women, both because of the death of so many men in the war and because of the women’s own military service, from which they were demobilized past marriageable age and often with severe health problems. In such circumstances, many tried to get pregnant by any man they could find, something that occurred to such a degree that the Women’s Union, a government-sponsored organization that serves as a watchdog and advocate for women’s rights in Vietnam, lobbied to have a law passed to legitimize the offspring of such unions.

Thai’s funny but poignant novel tells of a group of women veterans who were sent after the war as a labor battalion to an isolated island and what occurs when a young male artist gets in trouble and is exiled to the same area. One by one, night after night, the women come to his bed. They hope to become pregnant, though their sexuality also becomes a symbol of all the messy human needs that can’t be controlled or subordinated to the social order.

In a similar vein, Ngo Ngoc Boi’s “The Blanket of Scraps” describes the life of a woman veteran, middle-aged and childless, who initiates sex with a stranger, finds her body too damaged by war to become impregnated but still creates a surrogate family for herself.

The plight of widows is dramatized in Ma Van Khang’s story “Mother and Daughter,” which tells of one woman, now a physician, whose daughter tries to keep the memory of her hero, her father, alive by preventing her mother from remarrying. In Nguyen Quang Lap’s “The Sound of Harness Bells,” a couple reunites after 20 years--but the child they conceive, symbolic of their triumph over death, is deformed because of Agent Orange.

Le Luu’s “A Time Far Past” is one of the most popular war novels in Vietnam. Its war-seared protagonist, Sai, endures the alienation that has plagued many American veterans. Demobilized, Sai marries in haste, for the wrong reasons and with disastrous results. His wife considers him “arrogant about having won on the battlefield, facing up to the Americans,” but incompetent to function in the competitive postwar society--and Sai agrees. The war has changed him; he no longer fits in the country he fought for. Addressing a dead friend whose body he carried from the battlefield, he thinks, “There is no place for me here--this is not my place.”

That turn, which Luu so expertly reflects, from war-time idealism to the chaotic, dog-eat-dog values of a subsistence society, then a consumer society, has wreaked havoc in a culture where socialist idealism and the Confucian ideal of strong family were the foundations of identity.

In the title story of “The General Retires,” Vietnam’s best-known author, Nguyen Huy Thiep, tells of a retired officer who, dependent on his son and daughter-in-law, finds that he no longer has a place in a society that has turned to status-seeking and money-making. This theme also permeates the work of Le Minh Khue. When she was 19 and a “Youth Volunteer” in the brigades of teenagers the North Vietnamese Army used to keep the Ho Chi Minh trails open by filling in craters and defusing unexploded bombs, Khue wrote what became one of the most famous stories to come out of the war, “The Distant Stars.” The story describes three teenage girls in a Youth Volunteer bomb-disposal team. The girls are brave and infused with belief that the sacrifices they and their generation are making will result in a better world. “All three of us understood this. We understood and believed it with a fierce faith,” says the narrator, who also describes the feeling of wartime solidarity: “I loved everyone, with a passionate love, a love that only someone who had stood on that hill, in those moments, as I did, could fully understand.” In contrast, Khue’s postwar, post-Doi Moi stories often reveal the erosion of those dreams and hopes as the collective purpose and solidarity of the war years became passe in the postwar competition for survival, status and money.

In Khue’s “An Evening Away From the City,” a woman veteran who married into Hanoi’s “elite” is uncomfortable around an old wartime friend, who is now impoverished and living in a squalid, cramped hovel, filled with screaming filthy children. When she returns to the relative luxury of her home, the main character tries to put her former comrade out of her mind. She feels a sense of distance both from her friend and from her own past. “Who could have imagined . . . that her whole body, because of the miserable conditions in the jungle, had once been covered with scabies and tortured by bouts of malaria?” Like the rest of her country, the woman wants to forget not only the war’s hardships but also its obligations. It is a sentiment that will resonate with many American veterans.

*

There was of course another Vietnamese side in the war, and though little, if any, of postwar literature by former citizens or soldiers of the Republic of Vietnam is published in Vietnam, a great deal is being published in the United States and in Europe, where a diaspora of millions of overseas Vietnamese (Viet Kieu) are living. Its writers are producing wonderful work, some of it translated and some written in English.

Beyond language, there are other generational divides in Viet Kieu literature. Authors who were adults when they left Vietnam often write about combat and nostalgia for the past and depict the cruelty of the winning side. Minh Duc Hoai Trinh’s “This Side, The Other Side” was written in English and is the story of a poor village woman, forced to become a bar girl, who has an affair with an American soldier. Also set during the war, Tran Van Dinh’s “Blue Dragon, White Tiger: A Tet Story,” is about an National Liberation Front fighter who grows disillusioned after victory and escapes to the United States. “The Autobiography of a Useless Person” by Nguyen Xuan Hoang describes a family whose loyalties are divided during the war; it reads like a story from the American Civil War. Nhat Tien in “A Pot of Gruel” and “The Khaki Coat” writes about the desperate poverty after 1975, and Duyen Anh in “The Thien Ly Flower” is about villagers forced to flee south when the Communists take over. Nguyen Mong Giac’s “A Day Like Any Other Day” limns the pressures on a writer in a repressive state.

But it is the echoes of loss that ring most poignantly and powerfully in the work of the older generation. In Giac’s “The Slope of Life,” two wounded soldiers from the same village meet at a cafe. One has been blinded, the other lost a leg; one had been a Viet Cong and one had been a Saigon soldier: Their reconciliation is an acknowledgment of what both sides lost. The bond of mutual loss is captured also in Hong Khoi Phong’s “Twilight”: A friendship grows in a California trailer park between two refugees of different generations and conflicts, between a Vietnamese man and an Armenian whose son was killed in Vietnam. And the particularly terrible loss for a Vietnamese severed from ancestry and history is evoked by Vo Phien in “The Key,” which tells of a refugee who had to abandon his father in Saigon.

A new wave of fiction is also being written in the language of the adopted country by the younger Viet Kieu writers. The semi-autobiographical “The Coral Reef” in Tran Vu’s collection “The Dragon Hunt” is a harrowing example of what the author calls “the indelible proof of a reality erased, discarded by history.” In diary form, Vu presents an account of the horrors that befall a group of refugees escaping Vietnam in an overloaded boat. Also a fictionalized account of his real life, Christian Langworthy’s upcoming “War Child” is the story of a Da Nang street kid whose father was an unknown American G.I., his mother a prostitute. The most polished novel of the refugee experience to date, Lan Cao’s “Monkey Bridge” describes a young woman refugee and her relationship with her mother. The latter survives in a new world by defining it through the filter of Vietnamese myth and legend, the ancient and tested defenses of her culture, even as her daughter tries to adapt to a place where people re-create themselves as they wish. “Out of the ruins came a clatter of new personalities. A bar girl who once worked at Saigon’s Queen Bee . . . acquired a past as a virtuous Confucian teacher. . . . [D]raft dodgers and ordinary foot soldiers come become decorated veterans. . . . [I]t was the Vietnamese version of the American Dream. . . . [N]ot only could we become anything we wanted in America, we could change what we had once been in Vietnam. Rebirthing the past we called it, claiming what had once been a power reserved only for gods and other immortal beings.”

The sense of displacement in “Monkey Bridge” is a common theme of the Viet Kieu authors who were born in Vietnam but grew up in America with English as their primary outside-the-home language. Two of the most seminal and influential, Nguyen Qui Duc and Andrew Lam, often wrestle in their fiction and essays with the eternal questions of exile: What is lost, what is kept and what is gained? Duc’s “The Color of Sorrow” describes a Vietnamese refugee who returns to Vietnam but finds the colors of his world have been irrevocably altered: He sees America through Vietnamese eyes and Vietnam through American eyes and in turn is seen as a foreigner in both countries. Neither place--and yet both--is home. Lam, in “Show and Tell,” uses the voice of a young white American Southerner who befriends a classmate, a Vietnamese refugee who speaks little English. He is finally accepted in his new world when he is able to tell his story of war and exile to his classmates by drawing it on the blackboard, as his new friend, making it up as he goes along, provides a commentary in English for the pictures.

It is in their shared seeing, listening and telling that the native-born American and the refugee become a new story together. And it is in this way that all the stories these writers give us entwine with our stories: threads in the long Vietnamese story, which has now and forever become part of the American story as well. *

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

THE SORROW OF WAR

A Novel of North Vietnam

By Bao Ninh

Riverhead Books: 240 pp.,

$12.95

NOVEL WITHOUT A NAME

By Duong Thu Huong

William Morrow: 292 pp., $23

BEHIND THE RED MIST

Voices from Vietnam, No. 2

By Ho Anh Thai

Translated by Nguyen Qui Duc

Curbside Press:

236 pp., $14.95 paper

THE WOMEN ON THE ISLAND

By Ho Anh Thai

University of Washington Press:

forthcoming, April 2001

A TIME FAR PAST

By Le Luu

Edited by David Hunt

Translated by Ngo Vinh Hai and Nguyen Ba Chung

University of Massachusetts Press:

296 pp., $24.95

WAR CHILD

By Christian Langworthy

Riverhead Books:

Forthcoming, Spring 2001

MONKEY BRIDGE

By Lan Cao

Penguin: 260 pp., $12.95 paper

THIS SIDE, THE OTHER SIDE

By Minh Duc Hoai Trinh

Occidental Press: 208 pp., $10

BLUE DRAGON, WHITE TIGER

A Tet Story

By Minh Van Dinh

TriAm Press: 334 pp., $14.95

THE OTHER SIDE OF HEAVEN

Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers

Edited by Wayne Karlin, Le Minh Khue, Truong Vu

Curbstone Press: 412 pp.,

$17.95 paper

THE GENERAL RETIRES AND OTHER STORIES

By Nguyen Huy Thiep

Translated from the Vietnamese

By Greg Lockhart

Oxford University Press:

out of print

THE STARS, THE EARTH, THE RIVER

Voices from Vietnam, No. 1

By Le Minh Khue

Translated from the Vietnamese by Bac Hoai Tran and Dana Sachs

Curbstone Press: 256 pp.,

$12.95 paper

VIETNAM

A Traveler’s Literary Companion

Edited by John Balaban, Nguyen Qui Duc

Whereabouts Press: 256 pp.,

$12.95 paper

LITERATURE NEWS

Nine Stories from the Viet Nam Writers Union Newspaper

Bao Van Nghe

Edited by Dan Duffy

Translated by Rosemary Nguyen

Yale University Council on Southeast Asia Studies

Lac Viet 16, 1997

NOT A WAR

American Vietnamese Fiction, Poetry and Essays

Edited by Dan Duffy

Yale University Council on Southeast Asia Studies

Viet Nam Forum 16, 1997

TO BE MADE OVER

Tales of Socialist Reeducation in Vietnam

Yale University Council on Southeast Asia Studies

Viet Nam Forum 16, 1997

VIETNAMESE SHORT STORIES

An Introduction

Edited by James Bancrian

Sphinx Publishing: out of print

WAR AND EXILE

A Vietnamese Anthology

Edited by Nguyen Ngoc Bich

Vietnamese PEN Abroad, 1989

ONCE UPON A DREAM

The Vietnamese-American Experience

Edited by De Tran, Andrew Lam, Hai Dai Nguyen

Andrews & McMeel:

160 pp., $19.95 paper

THE DRAGON HUNT

By Tran Vu

Translated by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong

Hyperion: 146 pp., $21.95