Aimee Phan's debut collection of stories centers around the aftermath of Operation Babylift - the airlift of Vietnamese orphans during the Vietnam WarAimee Phan's debut collection of stories centers around the aftermath of Operation Babylift - the airlift of Vietnamese orphans during the Vietnam War, after the fall of Saigon. The operation evacuated about approximately 4,000 children, of whom more than 2,000 were transported to America.
We Should Never Meet consists of eight interlinked stories, moving swiftly between the U.S. and Vietnam, and lives and fates of their protagonists intertwine and are linked: a major character in one story will be appear or be mentioned in the other, often in a very different position and circumstances. This is an interesting approach and one which I quite enjoy, and which made the stories more memorable and effective.
The collection begins with a powerful combination - a birth preceded by violence;, in Miss Lien, the eponymous young mother makes the difficult choice of leaving her baby at the local convent, hoping that it'll give her child a better life; the following stories are centered around a group of Vietnamese youths in America and people both in the U.S and Vietnam whose lives crossed with theirs. The young Vietnamese characters grew up in foster homes or adoptive families and are just entering adulthood, struggling with the feelings of rejection and alienation, being torn between a country they don't know and a country they don't feel they belong in, which leaves them full of rage and a sense of hopeless injustice which might never be set right. The eponymous story introduces the two protagonists, Kim and Vinh. They were both raised in foster homes and grew up together, and form an uneasy relationship. Although outwardly tough, Kim long for familiarity and acceptance, which is why she stays with Vinh despite not wanting to owe him anything; everything changes when she sees an older Vietnamese woman at a small, local store, and thorough a small act of kindness becomes convinced that she could be her birth mother. After observing the woman for a while Kim tries to become closer to her, which leads her to hopes which set up in motion a chain of events which she might not be able to stop. Vinh is a protagonist in another story, though we discover him via the eyes of another character, we gain a better understanding of his personality and the anger which drives him, which leads to a shocking conclusion. Emancipation is the story of Mai, who has just turned 18 years old; contrary to Vinh and Kim, Mai has been raised by a foster family, which leaves her with a sense of guilt about being privileged over her best friends. At the same time Mai can't help but feel dissatisfied with the experience of a foster family, longing to be a real daughter to real parents.
Not every character is Vietnamese, and not every story takes place in America. In Gates of Saigon, Hoa has to make a choice: evacuate her two sons from falling Saigon to uncertain future in a distant country, or wait for even more uncertain return of her husband from war? Bound is the story of Bridget, an American volunteer who helps take care of children in Vietnam at the cost of her deteriorating marriage and relationship with her own daughter. In Motherland, Huan, adopted son of an American GI travels to Vietnam on a trip with his adoptive family and Mai, his friend, where they try to reconcile their experiences and form a sense of closure by visiting the old orphanages where they grew up.
We Should Never Meet is a well written collection and an impressive debut for its author, who was just 26 at the time of publication. If the subject matter interest you, I would also like to recommend Robert Olen Butler's A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which is a collection of stories about Vietnamese immigrants and refugees and their experiences of post-war life in America, for which the author has been justly awarded a Pulitzer Prize....more
Kim Thúy's Ru was originally published in French in Canada in 2010, where it won the Governor's General award for fiction among others, and secured puKim Thúy's Ru was originally published in French in Canada in 2010, where it won the Governor's General award for fiction among others, and secured publication rights in 15 additional countries. The English translation by Sheila Fischman (a specialist in translating French-Canadian literature) was published in 2012, and was shortlisted for Canada's prestigious Giller Prize. It's quite a feat - considering that Ru is Kim Thúy's debut novel, which she published at the age of 41.
Despite its short length, Ru must have taken a long time to be composed and written down - years, possibly even decades. Although the novel is a work of fiction, it obviously draws heavily from Thúy;s own experiences. Like her narrator, An Tinh, she was born to prosperity in Vietnam during the year of the monkey, but also the year of the Tet Offensive, which tore the country apart. Thúy and her family fled South Vietnam in boats with thousand other refugees, taking shelter in refugee camps in Malaysia before arriving thousands of miles away, in Quebec, and settling in the suburbs of Montreal. Because they spoke French, many Vietnamese refugees chose to settle in Quebec - which became one of the most populous destinations for Vietnamese immigrants coming to Canada during that time, second only to Ontario.
In Vietnamese, Ru means 'lullaby'; in French, it represents a small stream, but also signifies a flow. The duality of the title represents the novel very well - The flow of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees across the oceans to many various destinations, a flow of the stream of life towards the new world. This story - repeated so many times, but unique with each single one - can be a lullaby of sorts for their descendants, who grew up in the safety and prosperity that most of their parents never had.
Thúy's book is particularly interesting since she and her family came to Canada, instead of the United States - which, despite the close proximity of and the long relatiosnhip between the two countries made her life entirely different. Although separated by half of the globr and having completely different identities, in a way both Vietnam and Canada share the same conflict. Like Vietnam, divided into North and South, Canada is also a divided society - in a large part of it people speak French instead of English, and many view themselves as an entirely different society, and twice tried to transform their province into a new, sovereign country. This divide - linguistic, cultural, historical and ideological - combined with the experience of a young immigrant from a completely different society to both Canada and Quebec - could prove for fascinating reading.
Sadly, Ru never reaches that potential. The book is composed of vignettes, most no longer than a couple sentence - and can be easily read in one sitting. The whole book has a deeply personal feel to it - as if it was a personal journal kept by the author without any intention for publication (which I guess might just be the case). These vignettes are not arranged chronologically, and touch on the subjects important to Thúy - her upbringing in Vietnam, the escape on a boat and arrival in the refugee camp in Malaysia, later arrival in Quebec and the effort at assimilation there - and the unavoidable feeling of lost identity, hanging neither there or there. There is a scene in which An Tinh returns to Vietnam as an adult, and the waiter at a restuarant does not recognize her as a Vietnamese person - he says that she has adopted "American" sensibilities and lost the Vietnamese ones. How does that must feel - return to the place which was your home and find that it is no longer there? Or maybe even worse - it is there and always has been, but you can no longer enter it as a person that used to live there?
Each of the vignettes contains a nugget of an idea, a sliver of a theme and a touch of depth, but on the whole the novel feels unfinished - still very much a work in progress. It has the intimacy of a memoir, but the unmistakable look of being framed like a work of fiction. This is another divide present in the book - and just as in her life, I believe that it is an ongoing process which perhaps might never be finsihed, but which is one with which she will deal on her own terms and in her own time.
You can watch Kim Thúy speak about Ru and her immigrant experience in a video interview (in English) by clicking here....more
"Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States d"Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" -Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations, April 23, 1971
Full Metal Jacket. Apocalypse Now. Platoon. The Deer Hunter. First Blood. These are just some of the American movies which depict the war in Vietnam, which has served as inspiration for dozens of other films, novels and video games. The conflict in Vietnam has been written about extensively, and Michael Herr's Dispatches is one of the first books to present an intimate, closeup picture of the war to the wider public. The first two movies owe a lot to Dispatches - Michael Herr co-wrote the narration for Apocalypse Now, which is partially inspired by this book, and wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket together with Stanley Kubrick.
Herr was a correspondent for the Esquire magazine, who arrived in Vietnam in 1967, when he was just 27 years old - just before the Tet Offensive, one of the largest assault campaigns of the North Vietnamese army against targets in the South. Herr mingled freely with the soldiers, journeying with them, talking with them, observing them; he left Vietnam and returned to his home in New York in 1969, and spent the next 18 months working on Dispatches, his memoir from the war. However, the war caught up with him: he experienced a breakdown and could not write anything between 1971 and 1975. Herr eventually recovered and finished the book, which was published in 1977 - two years after the fall of Saigon, long after the United States army and personel withdrew from the country.
The average age of American soldiers fighting in Vietnam was 22. These were young men, millions of miles away from home, stuck in a scorching and unforgiving climate, surrounded by jungles full of people they could not see. And for what? "I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by 17 years of war movies before coming to Vietnam and getting wiped out for good", he writes in one chapter, while quoting one of the soldier he talks to in another: "All that’s just a load, man. We’re here to kill gooks. Period". Most of these soldiers - these who survive - will be forever robbed of their youth: the book is full of physical descriptions of young men looking incredibly old and tired, being incredibly old and tired at the age of 23. This is not something that you can leave behind you when you leave the battlefield; like old age it seeps into you and refuses to go, reflecting your old skin and the thousand-yard stare from the bathroom mirror. 58,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam; thousand veterans suffering from PTSD took their own lives after returning home.
This is a book written in retrospection, though it loses none of its intensity; while reading it we see a man who acts as if he has just emerged from the war, like it was yesterday. "I went to cover the war and the war covered me", Herr writes near the end and admits that it is "an old story", though in his case very true. This explains the tone of his book - very chaotic and disorganized, full of personal interjections; Herr writes as much about himself as he does about the soldiers and the war. He rejects the role of an impartial observer, and is an active participant in the events that he writes about, focusing on personal emotions and moods - his own and that of the soldiers - rather than tactical and military aspects of the war. What is most prominent is the absolute lack of safety and certainty for anyone, in a country where the invisible enemy hid in the hostile, unwelcoming climate, and despite being completely outnumbered and outgunned and killed always ready to attack and strike back again and again and again:
"You could be in the most protected space in Vietnam and still know that your safety was provisional, that early death, blindness, loss of legs, arms or balls, major and lasting disfigurement—the whole rotten deal—could come in on the freakyfluky as easily as in the so-called expected ways, you heard so many of those stories it was a wonder anyone was left alive to die in firefights and mortar-rocket attacks."
"Sean Flynn, photographer and connoisseur of the Vietnam War, told me that he once stood on the vantage of a firebase up there with a battalion commander. It was at dusk, those ghastly mists were fuming out of the valley floor, ingesting light. The colonel squinted at the distance for a long time. Then he swept his hand very slowly along the line of jungle, across the hills and ridges running into Cambodia (the Sanctuary!). “Flynn,” he said. “Somewhere out there … is the entire First NVA Division.”
How do you defeat an enemy whom you can't see and sometimes even recognize, and whom you keep shooting and killing, and who keeps coming back to kill you from underground tunnels, from bushes, from caves? You don't. Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, Herr writes near the end of his memoir; he was repeatedly asked by the press for interviews about Vietnam, and to write another book about it; aside from his work on two films he never returned to it, and published only a few other books throughout the years, none of which had the impact of Dispatches. He died last year, after a lengthy illness, in Upstate New York. According to his daughter, Claudia, he came to resent his celebrity and no longer wrote; converting to Buddhism in his last years. I hope that he finally found peace....more
Robert Olen Butler served in Vietnam 1969 to 1971 - first as a counter-intelligence agent, and then as a translator. In an interview he remembers the Robert Olen Butler served in Vietnam 1969 to 1971 - first as a counter-intelligence agent, and then as a translator. In an interview he remembers the time he spent in the country:
The army got me coming out of the University of Iowa, but they sent me to language school for a year before I went over. I spoke fluently from my first day there. And then I did work in intelligence for five months out in the countryside. I loved Vietnam and I loved the culture and I loved the people, I mean instantly. And had access to all of that in most ways other outsiders didn’t. I had contacts with woodcutters and farmers and fishermen and provincial police chiefs and so forth and then, this was in 1971, the unit stood down. Some units were starting to go home at that point. I got transferred to Saigon where I worked as a translator and administrative assistant for an American Foreign Service officer who was an advisor to the mayor of Saigon. So it was a civilian-clothes job. I lived in an old French hotel and I worked at Saigon city hall. But every night I would go out after midnight and wander alone into the steamy back alleys of Saigon where nobody ever seemed to sleep. I’d crouch in the doorways with people and talk to them. The Vietnamese people are perhaps the warmest, most generous spirit-people in the world, and they invited me into their houses, and into their culture, and into their lives. And of course, that shaped me as an artist.
After the return to the U.S. he wrote stories, which were accepted and published by various literary journals, such as The Southern Review, The Hudson Review and New England Review. The reviews were good, too - some of the stories got reprinted in a volume of The Best American Short Stories, and in 1987 Butler received the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award from the Vietnam Veterans of America for outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran. he received broad recognition in 1993, when a collection of these stories - published a year before and titled A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain - was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Many novels have been written about the Vietnam War - both by American and Vietnamese authors - but here the concept is new: Butler gives voice to the Vietnamese refugees to America, who have settled in southern Louisiana - near New Orleans. These stories explore the immigrant experience - the contrast between the immigrants and Americans, and the two countries - Vietnam and the United States - with their vastly different cultures and customs; the distant Far East is contrasted the definition of the West. Each of the stories is narrated in the first person by a different Vietnamese immigrant, and all are filled with a sense of longing and nostalgia for their past lives - their country with its natural beauty and way of life, specific places and moments, the friends and relatives they had to leave behind. The Grove reissue contains two additional stories - Salem and Missing - which are set in post-war Vietnam, and form a neat narrative coda.
The Vietnam War ended in 1975, after the fall of Saigon, forcing more than three million Vietnamese to flee for safety - hundreds of thousands dying in the process of often dangerous crossing. The majority - around 1,4 million - settled in the United States. These refugees found themselves in a peculiar situation - their old country was taken away from them and transformed into something different, and the new country proved to be completely different, too. Like Tom Hank's character in The Terminal, they can't go home - and struggle to live in the new environment. Some stay together in hopes of preserving their heritage and culture, while others openly want to shed it. There are other Vietnamese here in Lake Charles, Louisiana - the protagonist of Snow remarks - but we are not a community. We are all too sad, perhaps, or too tired. But maybe not. Maybe that's just me saying that. Maybe the others are real Americans already. In Crickets, the Vietnamese man and his wife had a hard time adapting to American culture and life. Their American-born son adapted easily and shows little interest in Vietnamese language and culture, making his father think of a childhood game as a way of becoming closer to the boy. In Relic, a Vietnamese man sees America as a land of opportunity. He wishes to break away from the Vietnamese community but his business depends on it. He feels that the other Vietnamese are preventing him from becoming fully American and more succesful. The relic of the title is a shoe that was supposedly worn by John Lennon when he was shot to death. The man sees the shoe as a symbol of America, and longs to own the other shoe so his collection can be complete, and he can be complete as a person, an American person. But even he lives in the past: he remembes the wife he left in Vietnam, who did not want to abandon her country and chose to stay there with their children, but expresses no desire to return to them; he wishes to get away from the Vietnamese community as he feels that it drags him back to Vietnam, and become a part of the American community, pursue his own American Dream and estabilish his own identity in his new country.
Butler's Vietnamese characters are unique, with their own quirks and distinctive characteristics. In Love a jealous husband used to bring doom on his wife's suitors in Vietnam, and struggles to do the same in the U.S.; he journeys to New Orleans to search for a voodoo master who will put a curse on the man whom he suspects she is having an affair. Letters from my Father is narrated by a Vietnamese girl, who has grown up without her American father, and with whom she is having a difficult and distant relationship. She discovers a stack of his old letters to the U.S. government, where he writes with fury and longing, demanding his daughter be allowed entrance to the U.S. and accusing the government of deliberately keeping them separate for years, arguing that if she was white they would welcome her with open arms. In The Trip Back a Vietnamese woman eagerly awaits to be reunited with her grandfather, and has been arranging for him to live in the U.S. for years. He is finally allowed to immigrate to America and her husband drives to pick him up from the airport. There he discovers that the elderly man has gone senile, and lives so deeply in the past that he is able to remember the color and smell of the South China Sea, but has no recollection of his granddaughter, who loves him deeply. Her husband fears that he too will become like the old man, unable to remember both his homeland and his wife. Mr. Green is narrated by a Vietnamese woman, who remembers her grandfather. The story touches on the theme of subjugation of women in Vietnamese society before and during the war, with the grandfather telling her that she can't pray for the souls of her ancestors because she is a female. She came to the U.S. with his parrot, Mr.Green, whose favorite saying is "not possible", and tries to find her identity in a society experiencing the sexual revolution and second-wave feminism, coping wit the feelings of love and obligation, resentment and death. Fairy Tale is an all-American tale of succes, and seems to be written to spite critics accusing the author of putting on a yellowface and exploiting Asian characters - it's an unbearably cliched story of a Miss Noi (as in Hanoi without the Ha), a Vietnamese prostitute who works as a stripper in a New Orleans bar and meets a G.I. who asks her out. It's almost ridiculously stereotypical and predictable, but very consciously so - it's very self-aware of all its flaws, and by this it turns them into its advantages. It's also full of humor, employing the peculiar feature of the Vietnamese language where the meaning of the word depends on how it is said - one man wants to woo Miss Noi by trying to say "May Vietnam live for ten thousand years" in Vietnamese, but what he says - very clearly - is "The sunburnt duck is lying down".
These stories also employ elements of mysticism and Vietnamese folklore, such as the beautiful Mid-Autumn, where an expectant mother tells a fairy tale to her unborn child, about the emperor who went to the moon and found happiness there, remembering her lover who died in Vietnam. In the title story a dying man is visited by the ghost of Ho Chi Minh, with whom he has worked as a youth; Ho confessess to his friend that he is not at peace, and political tensions between the Vietnamese Americans play in the background. A Ghost Story is a story which the narrator claims to be true, about the ghost of a beautiful Vietnamese woman, Miss Linh, who saved his acquaintance from a disaster. When he found her again to thank her, she devoured him alive. The man telling the story also has seen the woman two times, and although she spared his life he is also devoured - by a ghost of a whole country, which continues to torment him in his new American life. In America he is a ghost, riding the Greyhound in an attempt to escape his demons. The last two stories Salem and Missing are narrated by two soldiers, Vietnamese and American, who stay in the country. Salem comes from the pack of cigarettes that the Vietnamese soldier finds on a body of an American GI that he has killed - along with the picture of his girlfriend, and Missing is the only story in the collection narrated by an American. It's a reversal of the theme of Vietnamese immigrants trying to live in American society - here an American is trying to live among the Vietnamese in their country and culture The narrator is a U.S. soldier who has stayed in Vietnam after the war and married a Vietnamese girl, and together they raise their daughter. He has been living in a village with his family in peace for a long time, until one day someone brings an American newspaper which has a photo of him taken from a distance, recognizing him as one of the soldiers who went MIA and implying that he needs help to be brought back from Vietnam to America. But the narrator thinks differently - "I'm not missing. I'm here", he says, and he feels it - he is in his village, with his people and family.
The stories in this collection are written with care and compassion, giving voice to those who are largely unheard in this particular branch of fiction. It is remarkable that such a deeply felt and personal book about Vietnamese immigrants would be written by a white American - which is only a testament to the author's respect and admiration for the people he met in Vietnam, and who moved him to write these stories. They are beautifully written, full of honesty and compassion, without pretension. Different voices of these stories come together in this remarkable collection - a worthy winner of the Pulitzer, which I am very happy to have discovered and will gladly return in the future....more