BOOKS-REVIEW: Voices from Vietnam

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Gosling

AMSTERDAM, Mar 30 1999 (IPS) - To most citizens of the United States the word “Vietnam” brings to mind, not a country, but a war, a years long saga of futility and loss.

The costs of that war are still being tallied in the deluge of books that have been written about it, ever since the last Americans were airlifted out of Saigon in 1975.

“Reporting Vietnam,” recently published by the Library of America, compiles, in two volumes the pivotal reportage on the war written by US journalists from 1959-1975.

While undoubtedly a comprehensive account of a stretch of history that is permanently branded into the American psyche, what “Reporting Vietnam” lacks, as do so many of the narratives from a U.S. perspective, is the view from the other side: the havoc and devastation that the war inflicted on the Vietnamese.

The image of an entire generation – and its children – left to cope with the psychological and physical wounds from the American fire-bombing of Vietnam (and before that, the rebellion against the French) is beautifully conveyed by Ho Anh Thai in his book of short fiction “Behind the Red Mist.”

Published by Curbstone Press (U.S.A.) as the second volume in a series titled “Voices from Vietnam,” Thai’s stories help redress the imbalance of the American narrative experience of Vietnam by giving a voice to the Vietnamese people.

In the title novella, 17-year-old Tan is electrocuted by a cable and falls unconscious. In this dream state, he is transported back twenty years to 1967.

Helped by Trinh, a young girl who lives in a neighboring building, he finds his way to his old apartment. His grandmother and father are startled to see this strange young man who looks like his father and seems to know so much about the future.

Tan is at first bewildered by his predicament, and then moved, as he sees his mother and father in a way he has never imagined: young and in love, trying to carry out their courtship under the dark cloud of war.

In Hanoi at that time there is a heightened sense of imminent loss–one may wave good-bye to family members in the morning and never see them again.

Tan’s grandmother knows this experience well: “During the war she had seen firestorms of bombs. She’d seen young soldiers singing in the morning as she walked past them who were gone in the afternoon, disappeared completely into craters left by five thousand pound bombs. She had seen tall buildings reduced to rubble by those same American bombs.”

Tan is able to witness events he had previously only heard about: his parents’ shy, determined love for each other and the devastation to Hanoi’s inhabitants caused by the American bombing.

When he next sees Trinh, he learns that her mother is dying and that Trinh has moved them both from their apartment to the relative safety of a bunker. In the dim light, she nurses her dying mother, while American planes strafe the city.

“Outside the bombs were still exploding, and the noise drowned out her sobs. The earth shook and the entrance to the bunker revealed a fiery storm.”

During her mother’s long illness, Trinh has been waiting for her father to return from the war. When a relative comes to Hanoi to tell Trinh her father is dead, he is unable to break the news and, thinking her father is still alive, Trinh encourages Tan to join her in the fighting.

This fanciful tale, which inverts our notion of time, where memory hides behind a curtain of red mist, enables the narrator to return to a past of which he himself has no memory, to make sense of what his parents had to endure and overcome, to witness first hand the horror of killing and the grief of family members as they waited for fathers and husbands and sons who never returned.

Only in this way is Tan able to bridge past and present and incorporate the legacy of war into his own evolving identity.

In its theme and tone, a companion story to the novella is “The Fragment of a Man,” which narrates the grief of a woman who lost her husband, a pilot, during the war, and who tries to reconstruct their life together by the pieces of junk she collects in their garden.

But not all the stories in this collection make reference to the war. Five are set in India, while others, such as “The Man who Still Believed in Fairy Tales” is a satirical comment on those Vietnamese who idealize Western ways. Others, such as “The Barter” and “The Indian,” deride the way westerners romanticize Asian spiritual life.

Born in 1960 in Hanoi and evacuated to a refuge in the countryside between 1966 and 1973, Thai is of the generation that was too young to fight in the war, but witnessed, as a child, its devastating effects. Whether he refers directly to it or not, the legacy of war is the thread that runs through these stories.

As Vietnam struggles to find its place in the changing global order, desire for Western luxuries is pitted against Communist ideals, an ideology long crumbling at the edges.

How does a country and its people resolve these very different desires as well as carve an identity out of the ashes of the past?

Ho Anh Thai’s fiction illuminates this strugglev and, while body counts of North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers were being announced on the nightly news programs in the United States, the people of whom Thai writes were going about their daily lives: living, loving and dying in the shadow of war.