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