During the 2000s, state-free online literary magazines prevailed in Vietnam.[i] From tiền vệ to talawas to da màu, these transgressive magazines became inter-relational sites, an anarchistic playground for the Viet diaspora, where literal and figurative immigrants transgressed beyond the physical borders to join in a polyphony of voices. Though never explicitly labeled as “Viet magazines,” it is important to consider this typology of literature in the chronicle of Vietnam’s literature. The writer community that forms the basis of these online magazines has manifested a practice of subversive topics that query the abuse of governmental discretion and interrogate the institutionalized discourses that rule Vietnamese public spheres.
Among unconventional themes, the expression of pain in Lynh Bacardi’s work—the greatest depth of despair in lives of the social margins manifested—sheds light on what otherwise can be invisible to Vietnamese society. I further argue that her depictions of power dynamics, as well as one’s battles against personal struggles illuminated through extremity in content and vulgarity in language, can be considered a refusal to conform with propagandist literature.. In this essay, I analyze “Tre Rừng/Bamboo Forest” (2006), a short story representing Lynh Bacardi’s discernment as Vietnam moves toward industrialization and modernization.
A prominent name in the early 2000s, Lynh Bacardi is a translator and writer who dropped out of school in grade five. She considers free expression in literature a way to connect with reality. For Bacardi, contemporary writers should be among people and nature instead of being isolated from the outside world.[ii] Influenced by her contemporaries, Lynh Bacardi crafts a vocabulary of obscene words. These phrases are part of daily conversation: “cu giả chạy bằng pin”/fake battery-considered taboo in powered cock”[iii] or “thủng lồn/the pussy drilled wide open.”[iv]
Indeed, she was a member of Ngựa Trời/Skyhorse—a group of five female writers targeted by the “cultural police.” The group’s poetry anthology was condemned as “one reek of disgusting words,” and banning their writing was considered “not only the responsibility of relevant ministries but also the shared requirement of our society.”[v] For surveillance practitioners (cultural administrators), any language other than propaganda—the so-called nation-state discourses that have long instructed the public sphere—would be too radical to circulate in the public sphere. For that, many critics saw Lynh Bacardi as “linguistically flawed” for her art’s vulgarity and shocking nature.[vi]
However, vulgar language is crucial to Bacardi’s unmediated investigations of struggles, pain, instability, and alienation—what is inseparable from life. In “Bamboo Forest,” by depicting the life of an orphaned woman trying to make a living in the big city, Bacardi reveals “blind spots” in society as people mass-migrated from rural to urban areas during the economic reformation. Addressing power dynamics between man and woman, the rich and the poor, “Bamboo Forest” introduces an unsettling, turmoiled state of the people, lost in the country’s translation of development.
Bacardi strikes her readers by opening the story with a sex scene, a taboo in Vietnamese literature. The descriptions begin with a man’s quick, rough search for any possible drops of blood from the orphaned woman, the story’s narrator, but he can’t find any. The man, Quang, wanted to break a girl’s hymen as his wife, a shaman, said it would bless him with an affluent business.
“- Where is the blood, why isn’t there a drop of blood?
-What are you talking about?
-Why are you so dumb, is your mother just as stupid as you? Does she not tell you anything about virginity?”
By employing descriptions of a sex scene, Bacardi questions how, in Vietnamese tradition, virginity symbolizes a woman’s virtue and how, without it, a woman loses her dignity. In the feudal period, a prominent idiom was “Tam tòng tứ đức, thủ tiết thờ chồng,”[vii] meaning a virtuous woman listens to men in the household and remains celibate when her husband dies. To this day, the valorization of virginity as “cái ngàn vàng/the gold-worth belonging” of women is indispensable when speaking of Vietnam’s machinations of power in discourses of sexuality. As such, Quang weaponizes the vagina and exercises power against the narrator. The narrator in the story confronts Quang because she finds whatever blood he is looking for incomprehensible. Unbeknownst to the vortices of such discourses, she regards the assumed knowledge of the body as an uncharted, distant concept,[viii] for the first time, confronting a social construction of hegemonic power maintained by the patriarchy.
At the same time, however, she depends on Quang’s urban background to survive in the city. As she moves from rural to urban, she is hit by the bludgeon of reality. She contemplates:
“I need him [Quang], for having him I would never get enmeshed with the pile of identification paperwork that when applying anywhere would be solicited. I have never seen what identification paper looks like, they said it is a paper with a picture of mine stuck up. They ask for the birth certificate most often, I answer how could I know what to certify. They […] then closed the notebook not writing anything more.”
Caring for her blind brother in the absence of a functional family, the narrator is invisible to society. In an interview,[ix] Bacardi implicitly stated that images of a “fair” modern Vietnam are but imagined, prompting me to think: how can a country assert itself to be on the ladder to development, culturally or economically, while turning a blind eye to the marginalized? Under the discretionary power of the authority, many have been cornered to blind spots of existence, fictionally or not. The narrator in “Bamboo Forest” is vulnerable; she has little to no grasp of society, is an orphan without a birth certificate, and is a non-citizen alien of the country.
Not only that, her poor brother Thành gets into trouble. Having to work night shifts, she has a scrap dealer put her brother to sleep. One night, she figures out the “babysitter” lured him into a gangbang. A teenager going through puberty, the blind Thành may not have an image of the situation he was in, but the sexual excitement is deeply ingrained in his growing body. Immediately, the narrator moves away from the city to somewhere secluded. There, her torn life becomes even more twisted.
Coming home from work early one day, she realizes her lodging is empty, and Thành is nowhere to be found. After hours of searching, she finds Thành on a treetop, picking fruit in an animal-like manner. Another time, Thành chews the rope that ties him to a corner of the bed when his sister leaves for work. Soon, it becomes clear that the sexual intercourse with his so-called babysitter has made him more dysfunctional than ever; he acts frantic at night, and his erection keeps him up. The only way for the narrator to calm her brother down is to pretend she is Thành’s “babysitter” by faking their local accent and satisfying him at night:
“I will look at the moon and describe it to Thành, we then embrace when night falls, when the rows of forest bamboo rise high and the sun will shed itself behind the trees. Their shadows will bring down a net so tender that it feels safe, hence life will no longer be of such wear and tear.”
Each night after sex with her blood brother breathes into their life a sense of calmness, unruptured. Critic Thụy Khuê analyzes this image: “The two orphaned siblings, like the branches of the forest bamboo, grow in whatsoever axis.” The sun, like a scanning, voyeuristic, surveilling device, is halted by the high-rising forest of bamboo trees. The forest bamboo trees transform into a shield for these figurative exiles at the margins, away from the violence of life as they bodily cross the boundaries of the normative and the acceptable. As Thành’s body cannot ease down because of the erection, his sister operates the distorted roles of a sexual object and caretaker. She offers an extension of her seemingly broken body as a way to protect herself and her sibling from a society fraught with the manipulation of the vulnerable. From a sister, she has become a mother, then a sexual caretaker, engaged in triple-punch layers of identity.
To shatter discourses, a rejection of any social construction must come into play.[x] Bacardi makes the young woman in “Bamboo Forest” a peculiar subject as she undergoes an entirely definite-structure negation: infinite hymen blood each time she has sex with Thành. This description refutes all the claims and critiques accusing Lynh Bacardi of an overt gloominess in writing. Her uncanny storytelling leaves spaces for a rather optimistic interpretation. While society has gradually lost sympathy for one another and been imprisoned by social codes, the hymen of a woman at the periphery of society remains an infinite reservoir, full of freedom like her bottomless love for her brother.
There is a complex, beautifully poignant manifestation within this relationship that moves beyond incestual sex. These margins have found a way to exist, utterly immune to the normativity disorder and corruptions of our world through taboo love. Critics often call Bacardi’s works pornographic, exploiting sex scenes for attention. But her description of sex transcends such a gaze, informing us of unseen human possibility—Bacardi crafts visions of the marginalized, elucidating a life story so eerie that it seems make-believe. By now, Lynh Bacardi has instructed us an underworld of the marginalized, localizing the very identities caught in the net of invisibility.
Lynh Bacardi and her narrator are symbols of intermittent sounds, full of instability. They may be lost adrift, away from the attention of the public sphere. Still, as they toddle little by little, they are walking on despair that dares to dream and to live, even in the worst times, in an abyss where a flicker of hope is enough to be a religion to move forward, nonchalantly.
peer-reviewed by Nguyễn Quỳnh Chi
Nguyễn Thanh-Tâm (b.2006) works with translations, poetry and performance art. Her poetry has been featured or will be featured on The Offing and The Arkansas International. What she translates can be found at documenta fifteen, Miami Book Fair, Karachi Biennale.
[i] Hieu, T. The Rise and Fall of Avant-Garde Vietnamese Poetry in Online Literary Magazines during the Early Twenty-First Century.
[ii] Tác Giả và Tác Phẩm Lynh Bacardi. (n.d.).
[iii] Skyhorse (2005). Dự báo phi thời tiết |Weather-Free Forecast.
[iv] Lynh-Bacardi (2006). Tre Rừng | Forest Bamboo. Talawas.
[v] C. (2006, July 2). The abnormative anthology of the collective “Skyhorse”. The Electronic People’s Police Newspaper |Tập thơ quái đản của nhóm “Ngựa trời.” Báo Công an Nhân Dân Điện Tử.
[vi] Lynh-Bacardi. (2006, January). Chúa luôn cứu xét cho kẻ biết sám hối |God always absolves those who repent. Tiền Vệ.
[vii] Tam: three, tòng: deeds/principles, Tam Tòng: three principles a woman must uphold (as a child, she obeys her father; as a wife, she must obey her husband; as a widow, she must remain loyal to the deceased husband by being celibate). Tứ đức denotes the four key attributes of a woman in the Feudal Period: care-taking, beautiful, well-spoken, well-mannered.
[viii] Kristeva, J. (1986, November 19). The Kristeva Reader (T. Moi, Ed.).
[ix] Thụy-Khuê. (2008, November 12). Talking to Lynh Bacardi | Nói Chuyện Với Lynh Bacardi.
[x] Kristeva, J. (1981) “Oscillation between power and denial.”
