Wayne Karlin
Het voorwoord van Wayne Karlin
Why use the word `war' at all?" the Vietnamese-American Nguyen Qui Duc
complained to me when I told him my idea for the title of this collection. "Viet
Nam is not a war," he said, quoting a well-known line from a poem by another
Vietnamese-American writer, le thi diem thuy, though the quote would be VIET
NAM IS NOT A WAR, all caps, a scream at the rest of America not to define and
reduce an ancient and complex culture, nationality, history and language to
that decade of death and violence that marked its main intercourse with America,
and that most Americans think of when they hear the word "Viet Nam."
Yet an editor brings his or her own biases and preferences to a work, and my own connection to Viet Nam, like thousands of other Americans, was born in war, and has evolved into love. The war was the childhood, to paraphrase Michael Herr, which formed my character and self-definition, as in many ways it did the character and self-definition of my generation and my country, and one of the most lasting lessons of that childhood was the simple and terrible knowledge that killing, maiming, degradation, and destruction are made possible by an inability and an unwillingness to see outside the convenience of our own definition of others. "One is blind inside one's own wisdom," a character in the story "Insulin" says, a sentence which might incapsulate the entire American experience in the Viet Nam War, a lesson which still begs to be remembered.
War, in other words, is the antithesis of love, a banal idea perhaps, but perhaps also a simple wisdom that can't be repeated enough, and the title of this anthology grew from both the basic symbiosis and the basic opposition of those words. When Ho Anh Thai and I began this project, and I started to read the representative, post-war stories he sent to me, all of them, in one way or another, seemed marked by a yearning for love; they presented their characters through the ways they needed love or lost love, not by the ways they killed or were killed. I was going to write here that the Vietnamese are a passionate people, but it's a silly thing to say: all people are passionate, all are concerned with and fascinated by matters of the heart and matters below the waist. But love in much of contemporary and classical Vietnamese literature has become emblematic of a need for a contrast and antidote to the dehumanization of violence, deprivation, greed, corruption, indifference – all universal tragedies... and yet all particularly intense in a country which has known a millennium of war and revolution and the aftermaths of both. "What should we do so that our grandchildren wouldn't think we're living with ghosts and devils and must continue to dwell with them each day of our lives?" a character in Nguyen Manh Tuan's aptly titled "Living by the Tombs" asks: Love! uttered as a verb, an almost desperate imperative, is the answer to that question in many of the stories in this book, it allows the exorcism of those ghosts and devils, whether they be from the war or from scarcity, or from the clinging hatreds of the past, or from the shallowness and purposelessness of modern life: it is the ideal forever eroded by the reality of the world, its necessity often acknowledged by its very failure to be fulfilled.
When I first began to meet writers from Viet Nam in the early nineties, I found a common humanity and rapport with them, and when I began to read their stories, I discovered that they both reflected our own heartbreaks and concerns and at the same time offered glimpses of a world formed by its own unique experiences and perceptions. Neither of these revelations – the commonality of humanity or the differentiations of culture – should have been startling; they shouldn't even have been revelations. But given the killing we had all come out of, the gut-truth we all knew that if we'd met decades earlier we would have tried to murder each other, the simplicity of what we should have known and didn't, those realizations evoked in me a deep sense of grief and waste and, in the end, a renewed faith in the ability of imaginative fiction to create that basic shift of consciousness that allows us to live for a time inside the perception of others, and so enriches us, and, at its best, makes us hesitate to kill and open to love. "We have to struggle against disinterest in the face of other’s suffering, against the greed and the baseness that corrode heart and mind. We must teach each other to love so that war will never happen again." Those words from Le Minh Khue, herself a veteran of the war, a member of the Youth Brigades on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a writer, and one of my co-editors, were included in our introduction to the 1995 anthology The Other Side of Heaven, which contains stories written by Vietnamese and Americans from all three sides of the war, stories that focus on the aftermath of that war. They seem fitting words to include again in this anthology, for they define love as many of these stories do: the desired and needed opposite to that which brutalizes, refuses to see, reduces, wounds and kills, body and spirit.
As this collection also attests, the short story in VietNam is a varied, rich, and read art form (although first editions of collections run only a few thousand or less copies, a flood of short fiction is published daily, weekly, and monthly, in popular newspapers and magazines); that is, literature still play a vital role in the way Vietnamese society examines itself. Modern Vietnamese literature (1) and its authors can be clustered into several time periods: writers of the pre-independence period, writers of the French War generations, writers from the American War generation, post-war writers, and writers of the doi moi, renovation generation: the period from 1986 to the present. The writers in this collection span all these periods: the oldest To Hoai, was born in 1920, the youngest, Nguyen Ngoc Tu, in 1976. Although new writers are and will be constantly emerging, and we have not been able to include all the authors we would have liked, our wish has been to present readers with writers of literary fiction who have published enough work or received enough attention to have determined directions in modern Vietnamese literature.
The stories are clustered around the concerns of each of the periods mentioned above, as well as the various shapes love or its depiction may take during those times: revolutionary, marital, extra-marital, sexual, platonic, parental, and spiritual (2). The first section, "The Legend: Love After War," contains stories that deal directly with the aftermath of the war, stories both of damage and hope – of women left widowed, of men left alone, of fathers and mothers, in one case an American mother, left childless; of loss directly from the war itself. The title story, by Chu Van, begins the book and we might look at it as a kind of invocation for this collection: it is a story, whimsical and raunchy at times, of love during war, of love under the bombs-but ultimately it is a story of the hope for the transformational power of art.
The lives of the "Couples" in the next section weave together or unravel as men and women, husbands and wives, lovers and predators, parents and children, attempt, successfully or not, to find and form islands of security and meaning within the sudden social fluidity and complex pressures of postwar Viet Nam. It is a backdrop keenly represented in Le Minh Khue's "The Last Rain of the Monsoon," which begins the section. This tale of a doomed extramarital affair between two engineers on a construction site, like many stories set in the renovation period, contrasts the human perfection and happiness the cost of the war seemed to demand against the realities of a life which could "even break stones," in which "tears only flow when people play the wrong number."
The third section, "Love in A Time of Renovation," continues what is a major theme of stories written from the eighties to today: the failures and corruptions of the socialist system, and, conversely, the failures and corruptions of the free-market, consumer society, with its subsequent erosion of social and wartime solidarity, and the close family ties, balanced harmony, and simple humanity that are the ideals of Vietnamese culture. Trang The Hy's, a writer born in 1924, comments in his "Crying and Singing" on the duty of art: "the writer... should never lose his most reliable fulcrum: the ordeals of the silent," and so epitomizes the call many writers heard after 1986, when Viet Nam adopted the doi moi, renovation policies which opened a free market economy and periodically encouraged writers, artists and film makers to write stories that would bring attention to social problems and tensions, and the realities of modern life.
The title of the fourth grouping, "Lost Love," names a theme often seen in classical Vietnamese literature (epitomized in Nguyen Du's 19th century epic poem The Tale of Kieu), which has continued into modern fiction: a continuity represented in Nguyen Phan Hach's fairy tale-like erotic fable, "The Girl in the Lotus Pond," about a man who finds a magical lover who lives beneath the waters of a lotus pond, and loses her, loses love, but "For the rest of his life... will have the dream of it." The stories in this group tie into classical Vietnamese literature in another way as well: there is little if anything of our war with the Vietnamese in them, from Ho Anh Thai's diplomat who falls in love with a local woman in the fictional Malastan, in "Letter of Credence" to the conflict of carnal love and spirituality depicted in Tran Thuy Mai's "The Ylang-Ylang Tree."
The final section, "Last Love," contains sometimes triumphant, sometimes heartbreaking tales of love coming or finally lost at the twilight of life, in rural villages, urban housing developments, among aged parents who become servants in the homes of their children, in a group home for aged actors – the latter a story about the last days of life written by the author who is the youngest in this book.
To end the collection, we chose Ta Duy Anh's "The Broken Curse," in which children are made to pay brutally for the crimes of their parents, in which history is remembered not as a source of strength but as an excuse for brutish revenge. It is a story of reconciliation that speaks powerfully of love as a necessary way to liberate people from the destructive cycles of the past – and so which, we hope, may loop the reader back to the first section and to Le Minh Khue's words of the necessity for love after war, and against war, against all that twists and kills the bodies and the spirits of human beings.
Wayne Karlin 2003
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(1) In this term of this anthology, "modern Vietnamese literature" refers to literature being published in Vietnamese, in Vietnam, following the end of the Vietnamese–American War, though some of the writers began publishing long before then. It is a definition that unfortunately doesn't include the literature produced by writers who were connected to the Vietnamese side that lost the war, nor from the Vietnamese community in exile. That rich and growing body of literature deserves an anthology by itself, and I look forward to the day when the war is truly over and all Vietnamese literature can be included in a collection such as this one.
(2) Every kind of love, that is, with the exception of same-sex
love, which is still largely a forbidden subject in Vietnam. I was able to locate
only one story, Vu Bao's "Your Father Is a Woman," which deals, and
deals sympathetically, with a homosexual love affair.
Click here to read the translation into Vietnamese