Translated by Thuy Dinh
Nguyễn Quí Đức, who died on November 22, 2023 in Hanoi, Vietnam, was a steadfast supporter of Vietnamese writing. To talk about Đức, multilingual writer and artist, is to place him in the confluence of Vietnamese and American perspectives. In this context, translation is also an integral part of Đức’s literary legacy.
I first met Đức in November of 1995 when he came to pick me up at SFO after my flight from Washington D.C. A few weeks earlier, he had sent me an exquisite handwritten invitation, sealed with vermillion wax, to the launch of Once Upon A Dream: The Vietnamese-American Experience (Andrews & McMeel, 1995), edited by De Tran, Andrew Lam, and Hai Dai Nguyen. My memoir essay, “Luggage and Shoes,” was featured in the anthology along with works by other writers and visual artists. As the first publication that showcased a broad spectrum of Vietnamese-American voices, the anthology received significant support from San Jose Mercury News, Ink & Blood (the predecessor of DVAN), the Vietnamese Students Associations at UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and Stanford University, among others.
During the nearly hour-long drive to Villa Montalvo, where the launch was to be held that evening, we talked about a few of the writers featured in the anthology. Đức was gentle and charming, but also direct and restless. As the anthology’s associate editor, he was proud of Once Upon A Dream, but felt as a group we must strive toward some sort of “paradigm shift” to make the mainstream publishing industry pay attention—something that actually became an exciting reality two decades later. (Incidentally, Viet Thanh Nguyen, who was a graduate student at UC Berkeley at the time, had a poem in Once Upon A Dream, “Untitled,” with the opening lines, “I scurry through books with the/avidity of an alley cat ….)
During 1999 – early 2000, I submitted a handful of essays to Ômêly, Đức’s short-lived, bilingual website envisioned as a lively forum for diasporic Vietnamese, Vietnamese-Americans, as well as artists and writers living in Vietnam. Ômêly also paid contributors. Idealistic, ambitious, and ahead of its time, Ômêly didn’t last.
I communicated sporadically with Đức after his return to Vietnam. In November 2008, I collaborated with him on the Vietnamese translation of a short piece that he broadcasted from Hanoi after Obama’s election; it was published in Da Màu Magazine—an online literary publication of which I have been an editor since 2007.
Phùng Nguyễn was founder and editor-in-chief of Da Màu, as well as my anh cả and esteemed colleague until his death in November 2015. He and Đức became good friends in the early 1990s, when Phùng lived in Bakersfield and Đức in San Francisco. Originally published in Vietnamese as “Đêm Oakland. Câu Hỏi” (from Đêm Oakland và Những Truyện Khác, Văn: California, 2001), the below story is framed as a literary conversation between Phùng and Đức via the former’s childhood memories and his reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist in the Floating World. Dedicated “to Đ…” and narrated in a deceptively naïve tone by an equally elusive speaker, “Oakland Night Question” seems to shift-shape with each new reading.
Born in 1950 in Quảng Nam, Central Vietnam, Phùng served in the South Vietnamese Army and was honorably discharged due to injuries prior to April 1975. Đức, born in Đà Lạt, Vietnam’s Central Highlands, was Phùng’s junior by eight years. As recounted in his memoir Where the Ashes Are (Addison-Wesley, 1994), Đức’s childhood ended in 1968, when Communist troops, in violation of the cease-fire observance during the Lunar New Year, stormed Huế in the early morning hours and arrested his father, then the civilian deputy to the military governor of South Vietnam’s Central Province. Father and son would not be reunited until sixteen years later.
In “Oakland Night Question,” Phùng’s narrator thinks he belongs to the past, but his anxious ruminations about future generations seem to align with Đức’s literary legacy—one that timelessly embraces a dynamic dialogue between remembering and forgetting.
– Thuy Dinh
***
To Đ…
Night is about to end when Đức and I get inside his decrepit car. Thiện stands underneath the arch of his apartment complex, waving goodbye. Yesterday afternoon, Thiện and Đức came to fetch me at my hotel. Thiện’s hair, which goes past his shoulders, at first made me wary, but in truth Thiện is courteous, easygoing, and prone to daydreaming. Resting on a sofa in Thiện’s apartment during the predawn hours, I let my mind wander along with his singing and guitar music. By and by, certain thoughts came to me, thoughts at first seemed fragmented, random, but in fact were related to Đức’s question, posed to me hours earlier as if it were a natural part of the conversation, exchanged above foaming beers and plates of blood pudding at a restaurant in the town where we three congregated last night.
Đức and I would often get together in a city toward the southern part of the state, where neither of us lives. I have the sense Đức never lives long enough in any city to be considered a resident. He lives alone, has no real responsibility to anyone, travels often and anytime he pleases. That fact alone makes me extremely envious. On the other hand, I am older than Đức, old enough to kill and be killed legally before Đức had the chance to participate in the grown-up game we call war. The fact I was born and grew up in a poor village in the countryside, marked by omnipresent traces of bombs and bullets, has been enough to rattle him. Behind the high walls of an elegant mansion, sheltered from the dangers outside, people naturally have the luxury to ruminate. Đức told me about his complex, precocious thoughts about the war in a composition written in fifth grade.
Despite the great disparity in our childhoods and war experiences, I believe that Đức and I belong to the same group of people standing precariously on two planks floating in opposite directions, trying to keep our balance so we don’t fall into the abyss of confusion below. It seems the piece of wood that keeps dragging me back into the past has more chances of success.
There are things in my past that will haunt me for the rest of my life. For several years now, I have gone backward rather than forward. Đức’s friends, who are his age or younger, used to surprise me with their ability to speak, in Vietnamese, about other things besides phở, Huế beef noodle soup, and rice bits. Much later, after my surprise has faded, I wonder if this reaction might have come from the fear of losing my last lifeline of self-respect, namely my Vietnamese proficiency. When a person can no longer depend on certain things in life, the fluency with which he speaks his mother’s tongue where such skill is not highly valued can mean a number of things, including the coy if desperate desire to profess both ownership of, and allegiance to, his dreary past.
But lately, when encountering Đức’s young friends, I have come to expect from them the ability to express abstract thoughts not only fluently but also cogently in multiple languages. So I wasn’t surprised when, earlier, I heard Thiện and Đức argue passionately about fresh assertions in a historian’s recently published book. In Vietnamese, of course. And I wasn’t the least bit surprised later when Thiện, hugging his guitar, sang his latest song in accent-free English until the early morning hours, in his clean and orderly apartment.
When the war ended, Đức was old enough to carry with him the ashes of the past, but also too young to cherish them as the only possession a person could own. It seems as if this bit of ashes occasionally gets stirred up by something or someone, creating a dust cloud that would choke Đức and make him cough. It wasn’t a coincidence that he gave me Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World when we visited his favorite bookstore near the heart of San Francisco.
After painstakingly pondering the novel’s contents with my poor English, I conclude there are at least a few things that are troubling and will continue to trouble Đức for many years to come. I also believe that those worries, if my thoughts are not unfounded, have long since ceased to bother me. If I have to describe myself and my relationship to the war, I would often think of a man who has just lost a game of chess, embarrassed and unsure of what to do. The winner is determined not to erase the board and start over; it is thus useless to stand there and complain. So I take my leave with the consolation that I have at least finished the game, albeit badly played. Over time, the thought of having finished the game becomes a very effective antidote to many awkward situations. But not this time. When Đức’s question came up, or rather, floated toward my direction above a table full of empty beer bottles and cigarette butts, I imagined catching something sincere and beseeching in his gaze. But I still ignored the question. I did not want to answer such a question. Perhaps because it has also been, for a long time, my own question. At any rate, I do feel I owe him an answer.
When his car turns into a road leading toward the freeway, Đức lights his first cigarette of the journey. He will smoke nonstop throughout this trip, and at times will be seized with hacking coughs. San Francisco is thirty minutes away. If I want my story to end before morning, I’d better start now.
***
The whole village, including me—who was then a child—knew the story of how Mr. Thiệp hanged himself from his ceiling beam one summer afternoon. But why he did it only a handful among the grown-ups would know. I was certain Little Kình did not know. Little Kình did not know a lot of things, including how to talk in full sentences. Little Kình was Mr. Thiệp’s son, older than me by seven, eight years. If I called anyone else of Kình’s age “little,” my mother wouldn’t have hesitated to whip my ass nice and good with her mulberry stick. But from childhood I had heard everyone in the village, including my mother, call him “Little Kình” or “crazy Little Kình.” They said madness ran in his gene pool; Mr. Thiệp himself was far from being sane.
At the funeral, I stared at Little Kình. Wearing funeral clothes made of white linen gauze, on his head a white funeral band, his hands around a pot of incense, Little Kình walked behind the hearse, his face vacant. I was disgusted in seeing his thick, sheath-like upper lip fold over his lower, slobbering rim. My disgust was telling, since most village children, including my ten-year old self, were already shabby and filthy. While a poor village funeral was often a desolate, sleepy affair with nothing to stir anyone’s interest, Little Kình at least made it bearable.
Little Kình did not go to school. He worked as hired help in the village, same as his mother—a weaver for Mr. Cửu Nhì’s family.
The soil in my village was alluvial soil, mostly sand and gravel, not ideal for growing rice. People grew melons, peanuts, green and red beans, corn, tobacco, and mulberry, from which the leaves were harvested to feed silkworms. Alluvial soil was dry; to plant anything one had to water the soil constantly. Little Kình had the strength of a full-grown man, so he was hired to water the fertile patches. Both owner and hired help would collect water from a small pond using two large bamboo-woven buckets caulked with tree sap, then, carrying these buckets suspended from a wooden pole, would walk over the entire field. The pole, dipping and rising rhythmically from the worker’s bent shoulders as he walked, would cause droplets of water to slosh around the rims of the buckets before spilling over the earth. And so it went, from morning to noon, from noon to dusk.
About two years after Mr. Thiệp hanged himself, my village became a bustling place. One day, the National Liberation Front showed up near dusk, rounding up the entire village council—representative, legal delegate, village registrar, secretary—and herding them like cattle toward the village’s flagpole. The Front also ushered people from five surrounding hamlets to my village for a meeting. Each member of our village council was then singled out to be criticized, then released at the end of the meeting after each had sworn allegiance to the Front by not becoming collaborators for Ngô Đình Diệm or the Americans. It was a close call for these council members. Three days later, South Vietnamese soldiers came up from the district, in a confused hubbub of dogs barking and Garand rifles going off in staccato refrains. Then these soldiers retreated to Vĩnh Điện. The Front again rounded everyone up for a meeting. In spite of all these goings-on, from day to day the villagers continued to take up their hoes and carry their buckets to weed and water the field.
At this time Little Kình worked mainly for Uncle Tám Thơm’s family. No one knew what had befallen Uncle Tám; he was always pale and sickly, all curled up on his wooden bed for at least twenty eight days each month. Every morning Auntie Tám would head to the field carrying two hoes, followed by Sister Hạnh carrying two buckets, one containing an areca-sheathed lunch of rice mixed with reddish corn and the other a pot of steamed greens. Sister Hạnh turned eighteen that year. She had completed elementary school, and now lived at home to help her mother plant mulberry bushes and feed silkworms.
Each morning, Auntie Tám would slow down a bit in front of Mrs. Thiệp’s house, call out “Little Kình, let’s go,” then continue on. Kình would quietly emerge, on his shoulders a pole tied to two old buckets and a large hoe. He would make loud, gurgling sounds to greet Sister Hạnh, his face bright and happy.
Three months after the Front had taken over the village council, the district sent out their people to take care of administrative matters. They came from either Phú Bông or Phú Bài. During the day they worked at the village headquarters, with guards standing at the gate outside. At night they retreated to their homes near the district for security reasons. From time to time the Front would show up for meetings, chiding the villagers, “Why do you let those good-for-nothings come by and boss you around?” Then the Front would vanish, sometimes for an entire month. Meanwhile the village registrar, Mr. Hồ Luyện, would make frequent visits to Auntie Tám’s house “to be in touch with the people.” No one knew the real reason for his visits, whether it had to do with Uncle Tám or Auntie Tám. When Uncle Tám fell dead after having a coughing fit that lasted for three days, the people weren’t sure if the registrar’s visits had to do with Auntie Tám or Sister Hạnh.
One morning, Auntie Tám was the one carrying the bamboo buckets containing an areca-sheathed lunch filled with thin slices of yam and a pot of steamed yam leaves. She stopped in front of Mrs. Thiệp’s house, called out, “Little Kình, let’s go,” and walked on. Kình emerged from the yard, dragging his feet, his shoulders laden with buckets and hoes. He pursed his lips but stayed silent. Sister Hạnh was nowhere in sight to make him open his mouth and babble happily. Sister Hạnh was sick with no one knew what. But maybe Auntie Tám or Mr. Hồ Luyện would know. The village registrar had been coming to Auntie Tám’s house for six, seven months at that point.
The next day, Auntie Tám repeated her routine, calling out to Little Kình then continuing on her way. After a while, she stopped and retraced her steps. Little Kình wasn’t behind her. Little Kình wasn’t in his yard. Little Kình wasn’t in his house. She went back and forth. Then sitting on the sidewalk, dusty and covered with dry bamboo leaves, she cried.
Little Kình had gone away. Sister Hạnh’s illness did not abate. She cocooned inside the house, seeing no one. Every morning Auntie Tám would carry her buckets and her hoes toward the field, all alone. In the summer I did not have to go to school, so during the day I would wander through the field, catching coal and fire crickets from under damp patches of grass and putting them in an empty milk can that I hid in a corner of the garden. If my mother found out, she would’ve surely whipped me. She often worried about me stepping on landmines or falling into some bamboo spike trap.
One day I followed a friend and walked all the way across the river to Thanh Châu to catch fire crickets. I didn’t return home until dusk. I was worried about being whipped nice and good, but to my relief I found out the Front had returned that evening. My mother would need to attend the village meeting and wouldn’t be around to whip me. The echoing loudspeakers were rallying the people to attend the trial of Hồ Luyện, evil collaborator of Diệm and the Americans. I nearly jumped with joy. I hated Hồ Luyện. My mother hated him, too. She often complained to my grandmother, wondering why there were men of his ilk who often preyed on orphaned, defenseless women.
That evening I pushed and shoved my way close the row of chairs where men of the Front were sitting. A guerrilla soldier, rifle in hand, was walking back and forth while yelling, to no avail, at a group of children fighting for seats. The trial began. The group of children, following the adults’ lead, stood and saluted the red and blue flag next to a picture of the chairman of the Front. We were familiar with the ritual of saluting the flags. Blue, red, yellow—all flags were equally bright and cheerful. And those bigwigs in their portraits, compared with the dark-skinned village peasants, always looked so handsome and dignified, not unlike Vietnam’s ancient emperors.
One man from the Front came up and said something that went on endlessly. I started to feel sleepy and nodded off against someone’s dark, suntanned back in front of me. I didn’t come to until Mr. Hồ Luyện’s name was called. The man who talked for a long time was the prosecutor of the people’s court. He cited a litany of Hồ Luyện’s sins, any of which could have easily done him in. Finally the prosecutor concluded that even killing Hồ Luyện three times over would not offset the blood debt he had incurred against the people.
But the evil Hồ Luyện was nowhere to be seen. Usually you would see the defendant, hands tied behind his back, sitting in a corner with a resigned and morose face waiting for his sentence to be read aloud. The younger kids started to whisper about Hồ Luyện’s no- show, as did the grown-ups. Then the judge, who was also a member of the Front, stood up and told everyone why Hồ Luyện didn’t show. It turned out the traitor was too cowardly to face the people. He had been shot dead at dusk by a member of the Front while trying to flee. The prosecutor said the warrior who punished Hồ Luyện was a blood relative of the people. He turned around and called, “Comrade Kình, please come and greet the people.” Comrade Kình?!
Little Kình appeared, dressed in black pajamas like other members of the Front, over which he draped a brown oilcloth, and on his head a hat made of woven bamboo was also covered with oilcloth of the same brown. Carrying a long Indochinese rifle with an attached bayonet, he walked like a zombie with eyes staring straight ahead, stopping only when reaching the three-tiered steps leading to the forum. The light from a gas mantle shone on his blubbery, tightly-sealed lips, which looked as if he was trying to contain a large frog within. Suddenly Little Kình raised his left fist, shouting, “Down with the evil collaborators and traitors who work for Diệm and the Americans.” Good heavens! Little Kình not only joined the Front but knew how to shout slogans. Perhaps the grown-ups were as shocked as I was, since no one repeated after Little Kình except for members of the Front.
Little Kình then shouted, “Hurrah for the National Liberation Front!” This time we all joined in. He shouted several other slogans, with hurrahs or denunciations, before abruptly falling silent. The prosecutor from the people’s court then stood up and escorted Little Kình toward the back. Out in the village’s yard, we children were in a commotion. It was like market day. Everyone wanted to let everyone else know we were friends with Little Kình. I was truly impressed. Even a crazy one like Kình could learn to shout slogans after only a few months of joining the Front.
That night, I slept soundly and did not wake until noon the next day. As soon as I appeared on the threshold of the kitchen, my head freshly doused with water from the outdoor cistern, I saw my mother’s angry face. She was holding her mulberry stick in one hand, and with the other hand the milk can that contained my crickets. Surely these crickets had made so much noise they caused her to lose her temper. I turned and ran out into the backyard, ignoring her scolding.
After climbing through an opening in a fence, I was inside Auntie Tám’s garden. I was safe—for now. Walking along the side of Auntie Tám’s house, I thought about seeking refuge at my uncle’s house in the neighboring village of Định An until the evening. The sounds of people talking behind the bamboo walls of Auntie Tám’s house unnerved me. Auntie Tám was still in the field, and Hồ Luyện had been shot dead—was Sister Hạnh talking to ghosts?
I looked through an opening in the wall and saw Little Kình’s raft-like back. Little Kình was completely naked, his back and buttocks marked with lesions and pimples, going up and down on top of Sister Hạnh, chanting something nonstop as if in prayer. Sister Hạnh was lying face up, with eyes tightly shut. Her slightly tumescent belly rose and descended every time Little Kình’s heavy, awkward frame pushed and pulled above her. They were doing husband-and-wife business. It was disgusting, Little Kình’s voice was muffled by his labored breathing, so I had to listen closely before I could make out the words. He kept repeating slogans that had nothing to do with what he was doing. Sister Hạnh kept her eyes shut and never said anything. I grew bored, now aware that my empty belly was protesting loudly. I quietly backed away to the front gate, then ran at full speed to my uncle’s house.
Sister Sáu, my uncle’s daughter, took me home when it got dark. The Front was preparing to retreat, with Little Kình among the group, looking a bit lost, his confidence from the night before had disappeared. The next day my village would change leadership again.
This time South Vietnamese soldiers arrived from the province. There was also Mrs. Hồ Luyện, coming with the soldiers to retrieve her husband’s body. When she arrived at Auntie Tám’s house, Mrs. Hồ Luyện charged right into the yard, crying, cursing the slutty bitch who had killed her husband. Auntie Tám and Sister Hạnh must have been inside, but they kept mum. We children congregated around the house, watching the spectacle as if it were a circus.
The soldiers stayed in our village and nearby locations for a whole month, long enough for me to know almost everyone by sight. The summer went by peacefully. As long as the soldiers stayed, the cannons from the district would aim mainly at the mountainous area on the other side of Cái River. In the afternoon I would often visit the soldiers at their watchtower, listening to their rambling gossips. Not to be outdone, I told them about the shocking things that had happened in my village. Like how Mr. Thiệp had hanged himself from the ceiling beam. And his crazy son who followed the Front and was cured of his craziness. The soldiers laughed so hard, and asked why I didn’t join the Front as well. I got mad, saying, “So you think I am crazy, too?”
The last days of summer were long and sad. Gone were my coal, fire, and iron crickets. Even the koi with their bright, showy tails had vanished beneath the irrigation canals. In a few days I would go back to school in town, sharing meals with my unruly posse at a boarding house.
One night, a pale, new moon appeared on the horizon. Without telling my mother, I ran to the watchtower at the edge of the village to sit dejectedly next to a soldier who didn’t look much happier. Maybe he missed his family. From the direction of the wooden bridge, I heard the wind rustling among the bamboo hedges. I leaned back on the thin, filthy wall of the watchtower and drifted off to sleep. At midnight a loud series of rat tat tat jolted me awake. The soldier standing guard had shot at something beyond the fence of the strategic hamlet. From the village, other sounds came forth: the urgent, rhythmic knock-knock of fish drums; the lower-pitch rattling from tin barrels; and the loud, echoing woof-woof of barking dogs. At first, these sounds seemed discordant, but gradually merged into a deep hum resembling the sound of locusts. By the district’s order, we had to alert the surrounding areas with bells and drums when we sensed danger. I followed the soldier through the fence made of sharp bamboo spikes and came to a large, writhing form on the ground.
Under the pale moonlight, I recognized Little Kình. Blood glistened on his chest and belly. I screamed, “Oh, Kình!” and fell next to him. His thick upper lip was drawn back, drool mixed with blood giving his mouth an oily sheen. With glazed eyes toward the waxing moon, Little Kình babbled words and phrases that had nothing to do with what was happening to him. This was the third time I heard him utter these phrases. The last time was when I’d seen him naked with Sister Hạnh. He kept twitching, then finally became still. I looked up at the soldier. Little Kình was crazy, why did you shoot him? The soldier did not respond but turned away from me, the rifle on his shoulders hard and stiff like a dry log. That night, long, slow sobs could be heard from Mrs. Thiệp’s house, and a baby’s cries from Auntie Tám’s. Sister Hạnh had given birth to her firstborn. A son, with a large, flat nose like Mr. Hồ Luyện’s.
***
At twelve, I was too easily distracted to learn anything from these events. Little Kình’s death slipped through the sieve of my memory barely two weeks into the new school year. And after I reached twenty, I became saddled with too many worries to become concerned with things that now seemed so far in the past. Especially when these worries seem to be a lot worse than what had come before. Only much later, after the war had long been over and the wounds had become more bearable, did I begin to think, now and then, of Little Kình. Especially when I would hear, on this or the other side of the world, the shouting slogans similar to those I’d heard from his lips long ago. When Đức asked me what had caused people to stand on this or the other side of the battle line, I would think of Little Kình. So I thought I would share with Đức this story, full of holes and false starts, to see if he could find an answer that perhaps I’d also like to have. I am not an eloquent storyteller, and my story is clearly messy and erratic. Besides, my recollection, at best, could reveal only a tiny part of the whole, like drips or smudges bleeding into other shades in an abstract painting.
At one point, I thought I had found an explanation for Little Kình’s tragic fate after learning the likely reason for his father’s suicide. Several years before slipping his head through the noose made of coconut fiber, Mr. Thiệp had led at least two other men to their deaths. His uncle and this uncle’s firstborn son were taken by the Việt Minh from their hiding place, brought to a camp in Châu Mưu on the other side of Cái River, and executed along with their comrades in the Vietnamese Nationalist Party. Their deaths were payment for Mr. Thiệp’s safety.
My awareness of this history might have explained the reason for Mr. Thiệp’s suicide, but it still has not, to this day, explained the strange relationship between Little Kình and Sister Hạnh or Little Kình’s compulsive slogans. I have reasons to believe Little Kình never understood the true meaning behind those hurrahs and denunciations uttered by his misshapen lips.
In the car now filled with cigarette smoke, Đức remains stone quiet. I have no idea what he is thinking, but I know he has listened to the whole story. I begin to doubt myself. I have tried to answer Đức’s question by telling him a story whose true meaning I’m not even sure I have grasped, at the same time hoping he would understand.
I know I’m not at peace with myself. It wasn’t a coincidence that Đức suggested An Artist of the Floating World when we stopped by his favorite bookstore. Perhaps the detail I added to explain Mr. Thiệp’s death—something I knew didn’t make the story any clearer—has somehow bothered him. Is the finale Mr. Thiệp chose for himself—thirteen years after his relatives’ executions at Châu Mưu—too brutal, too harsh, compared to the peace that awaits Masuji Ono at the end of Ishiguro’s novel? Peace that represents a redemptive arc found in the bright smiles of young Japanese greeting each other in front of sleek skyscrapers erected upon the ashes and ruins of yesteryear? Was Ono’s artistic dream—a floating vision, buoyed by an earnest but violent fervor to help the emperor create a New, Great Asia—less reprehensible or more forgivable than the savage ideology of my brethren?
What has kept Đức and his cosmopolitan friends from disavowing the cheerless past that my generation, for lack of choice, has held on like an unalienable part of our lives? Why have I never asked myself this question when seeing young people holding hands, going to restaurants in bustling Vietnamese conclaves in Western cities, where they order phở or Huế beef noodle soup and greet each other with words and phrases from languages other than their (and my) mother’s tongue? Is it because the younger generation has been exposed to movies about the Vietnam War made by foreign directors, with actors speaking Chinese, and scenery shot in Burma or Malaysia? Is it because they have read history books written by famous historians ten thousand miles away from the battlefronts where my friends and I shed our blood and bones? Is it the fear—my own fear of having to confront the younger generation’s views of the war, constructed from these revisionist or alienating lens—that has made me avoid them?
I think about the loneliness that Đức and his friends must endure in their search for meaning from the exorbitant price that not only my generation, but also his generation, have had to pay for events that occurred long ago. Perhaps I owe him more than an answer to the question that hovered above the foaming beers and plates of blackish blood pudding in the restaurant in the city where we congregated last night.
***
Đức leans over to light his last cigarette of the journey. I open the passenger’s window halfway down. Threads of smoke fly past me and dissipate into the damp cool San Francisco air. The car is heading toward Bay Bridge. Night and Oakland are behind us, now.
Phùng Nguyễn
February 2000
Thuy Dinh
November 2023
Phùng Nguyễn was born in 1950 in Quảng Nam Province, Central Vietnam and resettled in Central California in May 1984. He graduated from California State University in Bakersfield, California with a Bachelor of Science degree and a Master of Business Administration degree in information management, and was a Director of Information System at Jaco Oil Company in California before his retirement in 2013. He was editor-in-chief of Hợp Lưu Magazine (California, USA) from 2002 to April 2003. In July 2006, he co-founded the online literary magazine Da Màu with Đặng Thơ Thơ and Do Le Anhdao, and functioned as the magazine’s web manager and nonfiction co-editor. During his lifetime, he created and maintained an extensive online database to preserve the legacy of several well-known diasporic Vietnamese literary magazines, such as Văn Học, Văn, Hợp Lưu, and Việt. As founder, designer and guardian of kesach.org, he also initiated the publication and free circulation of over 150 Vietnamese literary works in ebook format, via Scribd and Smashwords from May 2008 until his death in November 2015. Besides his technological expertise which played a crucial role in the development and sustenance of online Vietnamese literary presence during the internet age, Phùng Nguyễn was also a noted essayist and fiction writer who made his name with two short story collections, Memory Tower (Tháp Ký Ức) (Văn, CA: 1988), and Oakland Night and Other Stories (Đêm Oakland Và Những Truyện Khác (Văn, CA: 2001). He passed away at age 65 in College Park, Maryland.
Thuy Dinh is a bilingual critic, literary translator, coeditor of the Vietnamese webzine Da Màu, and editor-at-large for the Vietnamese Diaspora at Asymptote Journal. Her essays and poetry translations have appeared in Asymptote, Manoa, Michigan Quarterly Review, NBC Think, NPR Books, Prairie Schooner, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Amerasia, among others. Green Rice, her co-translation of the selected poetry of Lâm Thị Mỹ Dạ, was published by Curbstone Press in 2005, and nominated for the Kiriyama Prize in 2006.
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