diaCRITICS highlights art, literature, and stories from writers, artists, and culture-makers of the Vietnamese and Southeast Asian diaspora, on and from all shores.
diaCRITICS highlights art, literature, and stories from writers, artists, and culture-makers of the Vietnamese and Southeast Asian diaspora, on and from all shores.
Sonny Le reflects on the cultural practice of eating wildlife, emphasizing the need to implement conservation education to the Vietnamese cultural mindset to prevent endangered species from becoming extinct.
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(This post is also in Vietnamese: Sừng tê giác, răng cọp và tại sao người Châu Á ăn động vật hoang dã đến tuyệt chủng.)
My weeks-old youngest brother’s fever was not responding to conventional medicine. So my mother decided to use what she believed had worked for her four older children. She grounded the tiger tooth in a small stone mortar, added a couple of teaspoons of water, then spoon-fed my brother the milky-white liquid.
Tiger teeth and claws sold as amulets and charms to ward off evil spirits.
He died the next day. In a fit of rage, my father took the tiger tooth and threw it into the river a few meters from our back door.
The tiger tooth was a family heirloom, given to my parents by my relatively rich saw mill-owning maternal grandparents in the Mekong Delta town of Rạch Giá as a wedding present. I wore this very tiger tooth around my neck the first two years of my life. It was believed to not only possess medicinal properties but also the power to ward off ‘evil spirits,’ from which I needed protection as the first-born son.
According to legend, tigers once roamed the forested swamps of the Mekong Delta region, and the tooth came from one of those tigers whose spirits now lorded over the underworld. In reality, that ‘tiger’ tooth could have come from a water buffalo, a wild boar, or even a big dog. No one ever asked why or how those tigers were killed, or if they ever existed.
When we moved to a rural village outside Rạch Giá, we discovered that a few migrating white egrets had built nests in a cluster of melaleuca trees (cây tràm) on our land. Everyday my brother and I couldn’t wait to check the nests. We would snatch the eggs as soon as they were laid. We even managed to shoot down a few birds with a slingshot. After a few years we noticed the egrets no longer came back, but didn’t understand why.
Egrets in Tràm Chim National Park, Vietnam Mekong Delta
We were poor farmers whose diets consisted mostly of vegetables and fish. We raised chickens and pigs, but they were investments, our savings. The bird eggs and the occasional birds, snakes and turtles, even field rats, were a real treat. When we caught fish, we caught and ate everything, big and small. During the flooding season, the most-prized fish were the baby ones: no bones. The most sought-after baby fish were the snakehead.
Baby snakehead fish — these are raised for fish farms
To make a meal consisting of baby snakeheads, our family would essentially wipe out four or five broods of future snakeheads, the salmon of the Mekong Delta.
Adult snakeheads — salmon of the Mekong Delta
We also ate many things for novelty’s sake, for their rarity. Importantly, we didn’t understand how NOT taking the egrets’ eggs or NOT catching the baby snakeheads would be beneficial to us. We thought if we didn’t, someone else would.
The concept of wildlife protection or nature conservation was not part of the culture. The terms were not even common words.
After nearly 11 years in the U.S., I went back to Vietnam for the first time in 1992 to find my family much better off, no longer subsisting off the land. Not long after my arrival, my father put word out among the vendors at the local wet market that he was looking for exotic fare, e.g. turtles, snakes, birds and prized big fish.
He was quite disappointed when I told him all I wanted was steamed water spinach and cá rô kho tộ (anabas or climbing gourami cooked in a clay pot) for dinner. I wanted to taste the simplest meals that I remembered growing up with. My family didn’t quite understand why a man coming back from a rich country would want to eat nothing but peasant fare.
Cá rô kho tộ — anabas in clay pot: One of the humblest dishes of Vietnamese cuisines that defines our agrarian roots.
They eventually gave up trying to understand me when I told to them that comfort foods were not necessarily expensive or exotic.
Wherever I went on that first visit, everybody wanted to feed me the ‘best’ foods, which invariably included wild-caught snakes, turtles, and birds. The notion that wildlife is worth more in the wild than on the plate was not easily understood because many did not see themselves directly, or even indirectly, responsible for the catching or killing of such wildlife. They simply saw themselves as consumers, rationalizing that if they hadn’t purchased snakes, birds or turtles, others would.
I reminisced about our childhood with my brother. And when I explained to him my theory of why those birds didn’t come back to our melaleuca trees, he had a hard time believing it, but I could sense his feeling of guilt. I felt bad for telling him what we, as kids, may have unwittingly done.
Many of my relatives today, including those of the younger generation, relish the opportunity to lavish themselves with potions, elixirs and wild game that once only the rich could afford. They do have an inkling that the potions and elixirs may not possess anything magical, but believing in them wouldn’t hurt to try them anyway. However, my relatives would not feel nostalgic or be willing to break the law for exotic animals if and when they’re no longer sold in the market. For them, it has everything to do with the novelty, with a break from the everyday’s Vietnamese three-course meal now that they can afford it. No more no less.
Vietnamese working man’s lunch– cơm bình dân — soup, stew (salty) and stir-fried vegetable dishes.
It may take time for conservation education to take hold, to become part of the cultural mindset, and even longer for existing laws to be actually enforced without being corrupted. Sadly, time already ran out on Vietnam’s last Javan rhino and elephant, and many other species endemic to Vietnam and neighboring Southeast Asian countries are now on endangered list.
The insatiable appetite of Vietnam’s newly-rich for the exotic has not only put their natural heritage at risk, but also endangered animals a continent away, those in Africa. A shocking 587 South African rhinos, and another 35 in Kenya, have been killed to date in 2013 for their horns; most of which are believed to have been smuggled into Vietnam where a set of horns from a single rhino can fetch up to $1 million.
Just imagine: on the average, two rhinos are now killed each day because of a rumor that their horns, which are made of keratin just like your and my finger and toe nails, had cured cancer.
(Special thanks to Chris Galvin Nguyen for going through my writing with a scalpel like a heart surgeon.)
Sonny Le: A news junkie since the age of five – thanks to my father and the BBC and Voice of America shortwave radio – born and raised in the Mekong Delta of Viet Nam, but home has been Oakland, California, after a stop at 25 Hawkins Road, Singapore Refugee Camp. A communications strategist with over twenty years of experience, started out with half-tone and carbon copy that actually left stains, then moved on to fax and e-mail and now happily embracing microblogging.
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As one of the longest-running Broadway musical in musical theatre history, Miss Saigon has received plenty of praise but also a whole lot of criticism. Spoken word artist, poet, and activist Bao Phi gets real with Miss Saigon.
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Photo by Anna S. Min
(Italicized words are lyrics taken from the libretto of Miss Saigon)
Miss Saigon is a musical about Vietnamese women, who are all victims in need of rescue from the Third World. It is a musical about the inherent goodness of flawed white men. Vietnamese men are all abusive, sexist assholes who are so small they can’t even expand to fit into two dimensions. Also, mixed race orphans will have it better in America but that goes without saying. The play is also, supposedly, about the Vietnam War.
I’m born in Saigon, just inside the Year of the Tiger. My dad is half Vietnamese, half Chinese. My mom is mostly Vietnamese, she’s pretty sure. Both lovers of poetry, they name me Thien-bao: treasure from heaven.
Three months later, bombs are falling from the sky as they shell the airport, trying to kill us. My mom and dad take turns holding me in the bomb shelter, as the world around us shook and exploded all night. I don’t learn this until years later, and it’s an odd thing to hear from your own family: we were almost killed before you had the ability to form memory.
•••
“the heat is on in Saigon
the girls are hotter ‘n’ hell
one of these slits here will be Miss Saigon
God, the tension is high, not to mention the smell
the heat is on in Saigon
is there a war going on?
don’t ask, I ain’t gonna tell”
1975, my parents raise six kids and take care of my paternal grandfather in Phillips, South Minneapolis. Our house is two blocks from Little Earth housing projects. The neighborhood is densely populated with American Indians, a people who know about a great many things, including broken American promises. Many years later, as a teenager, I’ll march with American Indian activists in solidarity as they protest a visiting football team that, like Miss Saigon, claims to honor the people that they exploit. I’ll also read somewhere that Phillips is the largest, poorest, and most racially diverse neighborhood in the Twin Cities.
But when I was a little kid, I just knew it was rough. My earliest experience with multiculturalism is on the school bus: kids of all hues, from all over the world, call me chink.
•••
When I was a baby, I didn’t have to do much to escape death. Growing up in Phillips, I soon realized that a lot of people in the world wanted to hurt me. Because I was Vietnamese, because I was Asian, because I was not like them, because I was not a part of their crew, because I was around and they were bored, because I was not white and therefore suspicious, because they had been hurt and wanted to hurt someone else, because I could never be American. I learned to be fast on my feet. Rumor has it, one of my distant relatives was an activist who fled from China and took up an assumed surname: Phi, meaning swift, fast running or flying. In Phillips I live up to my namesake.
•••
I’m not more than ten when my dad brings me to an Oriental – excuse me, Asian – grocery store in Saint Paul. While he shops, I go to the front of the store to watch a young white boy play a video game. Other small Asian boys flock there too, quietly watching him play. His older sister glares at us, and says to her brother, “these gooks are surrounding us.” As if we were the ones who torched her people’s hamlets.
•••
“the meat is cheap in Saigon
I used to love getting stoned, waking up with some whore
I don’t know why I went dead, it’s not fun anymore.”
Around the same time, my mom takes me to Frank’s Nursery and Crafts. She loves to garden, and they’re having a sale. When the salesclerk finishes ringing us up, my mom looks at the final price and says, I think it’s too much. The clerk checks and says, no, this is what you owe. My mom asks her to check it again, so she goes over the receipt. There is a long line of customers behind us; they start to shuffle uncomfortably. The cashier says she checked – there’s nothing wrong, pay up. My mom hesitates, then says, “no, you are wrong, it’s too much.” The people behind us groan, and the look they give my mom is unmistakable. They don’t have to say it. The way my mom’s shoulders get stiff, shows all of us she can feel their glares. The manager comes over. He checks the receipt, and finds that the cashier hit 22 instead of 2, and tried to overcharge my mom by $40 dollars. The people in line behind us murmur, embarrassed at their assumption, and chuckle uncomfortably. But my mom doesn’t wait for an apology from any of them – she sets her lips, holds my hand, and we leave without looking back.
•••
“the Cong is tight’ning the noose
is it a week or a day or an hour that we got?
tonight could be our last shot got to put it to use.”
I’m a teenager, shopping with my mom for groceries at Cub Foods. In the parking lot, a Vietnam Vet starts shouting at a Hmong family, two parents and two kids. “I fought for your people, you owe me!” he screams at them. They don’t look at him, they keep walking, their shoulders turn in towards each other as if they’re trying to make themselves as small a target as possible. I see this and I want to say something, but I don’t. I feel like an unlit match.
•••
The first Persian Gulf War, and I have two brothers in the military overseas. I fancy myself a teenage activist. I go to all the rallies and say my family has already been torn apart by war once, I don’t want to see it happen again, don’t want to see it happen to another country and culture and people. Even though I am still living in Phillips, I am only attracted to white women, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. In my high school, the Vietnamese students in the Asian club ask me why I get involved in all of these political causes but never participate in Asian club. I have no answer for them.
•••
“you must see how it is when you’re my wife
having that child of his brands us for life
no alternative! This child cannot live!”
Miss Saigon is a play about a Vietnamese prostitute in desperate need of rescue from evil Vietnamese men and the war-torn Third World. It may be a nice place to visit but it sure doesn’t seem like a good place to raise kids. Shut your mouth – there’s a helicopter in it! On stage! The production values! Well there were helicopters in Vietnam, and prostitutes, and white soldiers, and bad Vietnamese men, and mixed race orphans, so the play must be historically accurate and shit. The Vietnamese woman shoots herself in the stomach so she can sing one last song while dying in the arms of the white man. When I was much, much younger, I ask my mom if she wants to go see this play, because it’s about Vietnam. She shakes her head and says, in Vietnamese, “that is not about us.” She says it like she’s explaining to me that Santa Claus doesn’t really exist.
•••
I have no problem with stories about prostitutes, if they are written by prostitutes wanting to tell their story.
•••
A couple of years later, and it’s the first Miss Saigon protest. It’s freezing, we stamp our feet on the streets of downtown Minneapolis. Many white people walk by us in fur coats, but many of them smile apologetically. Some of them even turn away in solidarity, and decide not to go see Miss Saigon. An elderly woman, Esther Torii Suzuki, is protesting with us. Over the years I grow to admire her and see her as my mentor, treasuring her plucky stories about internment camp and wearing pantsuits. David Mura is there, with his young daughter. The Ordway creates Community Cultural Committees, including an Asian American one. When they bring the play back in 1999, they don’t even mention it to the Asian American Cultural Committee.
•••
My mom and I go to Vietnam. It’s the first time she’s been back since the war, it’s the second time I’ve been back. I finally get to meet my uncles, crazy Northerners, hardcore nationalists who stayed North after Dien Bien Phu while my parents, seeking an education, went South. Vietnamese people, you know what this means. My mom had not seen her brothers in over 40 years due to war. They miss their little sister, they joke with her and they lecture each other, they are kind to me, her youngest son. But something is underneath. Whether or not they feel my dad fought for the wrong side. The inter-village beef, the resentment that their little sister can afford to lend them American dollars – we’re poor in America, but what few dollars we have are gigantic in Vietnam. We can even save those big dollars, and if we get enough, we have the privilege to buy tickets to Broadway musicals that insist that they’re historically accurate depictions of what happened to our family, our people.
•••
“with these two little diamonds to bait my hooks
I’ll book us on a cruise “boat-people” deluxe
don’t worry ’bout the sharks out in the Mekong bay
the pirates taking us are more scary any day.”
The play Miss Saigon is here in Minnesota for the second time. The actress who plays Kim, the female lead, is in a nearby park for a meet and greet. I stand patiently in line as men and women walk up to her, shake her hand, and tell her what an inspiration she is. Her smile is bright but she looks tired. When it’s my turn, I smile, and I tell her I’m one of the principal organizers of the protests of Miss Saigon here in Minnesota, but that I want to make sure she knows we’re not protesting her or any of the other Asian American actors in the play. I’ve never seen a smile disappear so quickly. She tells me I shouldn’t be protesting the play because her character is a strong Asian woman. She also says the play “tells the truth” about Vietnam.
I tell her I was born in that country during the war. My mom and dad survived, made sure I and my siblings survived. My mom held me when the bombs fell. My parents raised six kids in an economically poor neighborhood in a country that didn’t want them. My parent’s story tells a truth about Vietnam too. Why isn’t anyone interested in their truth? I ask her.
The woman who plays Kim says nothing – she turns away from me, reaches for the next hand to shake, and smiles.
•••
SPOILER ALERT: the brown person dies, and the white people, though saddened, live to learn a valuable lesson.
•••
I am standing on the sidewalk at the Ordway, handing out informational leaflets with information about the stereotypes, the racism and the sexism, of Miss Saigon. I have been instructed to be polite, not to argue with anyone no matter how rude they are to me, to always take the high ground in all encounters. An Asian woman drives her car slowly by me, and her daughter, a mixed race girl no more than ten, glares at me from the passenger side window. “You’re stupid!” she yells while looking directly at me. “How can you protest love?” You really should be wearing a seat belt, I think to myself. The Asian woman turns her car around in a slow loop, so that her daughter can yell insults at me again. “You’re stupid,” she yells at me, again and again. Her mother loops the car around about three times, glares at me wordlessly as she drives by at a crawl each time, a cruel smile on her face, as her young daughter harangues me from the passenger seat. It’s like groundhog’s day for their venom. “How can you protest love?” the little girl yells at me. You don’t even understand your own hate, I want to tell her, how can you understand what love is?
•••
“In a strong G.I.’s embrace/flee this life/flee this place!”
My dad was a soldier who fought on the battlefields of his own country for 10 years for South Vietnam, he lost his brother and sister-in-law to a bomb. Nobody ever asks about his truth.
•••
In 2003, Vietnamese American undercover police officer Duy Ngo is shot by a fellow police officer. Even though the officer who shot him opened fire with an MP5, a non-regulation sub machine gun he was not authorized to use while on duty, nearly killing Ngo, the Minneapolis police department attempted to blame Ngo for the incident. Duy Ngo committed suicide in 2010.
Vietnamese men, they can’t tell when we’re friend or foe, and pretty soon we can’t either.
•••
Is the white man’s truth always bigger than ours?
KIM:
go on!
and shoot!
I will not change my mind!
THUY:
you are still mine!
KIM:
not anymore!
THUY:
you’re mine until we die!
Saigon
is doomed
and so is your GI
CHRIS:
get the hell out!
•••
Many years later, I’m reading a book by Anthony Bourdain, a white man whom I admire. He compares Vietnam to meeting a woman and immediately falling in love. “You sense that given the opportunity, this is the woman you want to spend the rest of your life-“
Stop it.
•••
It’s now. The United States is on the brink of bombing Syria. The Ordway is bringing Miss Saigon back to Minnesota for the third time. This play, that romanticizes war, marches back to us on musical heels. My parents are still in Phillips, me and my family are not too far away – literally and figuratively. At daycare, our daughter’s surroundings are much like mine were when I was her age – her cohort are Native American, Black, Chicano/a, white. No one has made fun of her race or gender. Please, I beg the world, let that last as long as possible.
I hire a babysitter so that I can go to a community debate with the Ordway at MPR. I don’t even want to go – why waste money and time when we know the discussion will do no good. They’ll claim that they’re using art to provoke discussion. They will find Asians who agree with them, then reward them. They will magnify the voices of the Asians who take their side. They will find people who say it’s not so bad, or that there are more important things to protest.
But I go. I am encouraged to see quite a few Asian American community members there, and also some allies of color, indigenous allies, female allies, white allies, queer allies, and of course, some whose identities are intersections of all of these. Some of us in attendance – Rose, Janet, Ed, myself, and a few others – have been a part of some or all of the three protests against the Ordway over the last twenty years. I’ve spent the two weeks beforehand reading and re-reading materials about Miss Saigon, reading the text of the shitty songs, staging debates in my head. I’m like a boxer ready to get in the ring. I want to be ready to debate anyone, handle any argument they throw my way. I tell myself, over and over again: don’t lose it. Be rational, no matter how stupid they are, no matter how dismissive.
The President and CEO of the Ordway, a white woman, suggests that we all see the show so that it can provoke feelings in us. Though several of us have in fact seen the play, I can’t help it. “My entire family was almost wiped out in that war,” I blurt out. “You think I need to go see your play in order to have my emotions provoked?” There goes my resolve to avoid losing my cool.
I feel raw. Can barely sit still. I want to vent, to rage, to add my perspective as a Vietnamese person, but I also don’t want to dominate the conversation. I listen to several Asian American women talk about how men assume they or their mothers are prostitutes, or see them as submissive sex objects who will do anything for a white man – a behavior that Miss Saigon reinforces. David Mura is there. His daughter has graduated college. My daughter, not yet four years old, is at home. Her middle name is the Japanese name of Esther Suzuki, who died shortly after the second protest of Miss Saigon at the Ordway.
“my child has no future, like the dust of life.”
Our daughter has a greater chance of someone assuming she is a submissive sex object without agency or a voice, than the Ordway promising that they won’t bring this colonialist, racist, sexist play back. People will look at her and assume she has it better in America than whatever country she is from, though she was born in Saint Paul. The coproducers of the play can’t even manage a simple apology. “We’re sorry you’re hurt,” the CEO says. That’s like punching us in the face three times and instead of apologizing for causing us violence, they say: sorry that you happened to get hurt by our fist.
Miss Saigon, which has been called “the greatest love story of our time,” is an expensive production. It has raked in a ton of money, and it will continue to do so. Human beings seem to have an endless appetite for racism, sexism, and colonialism. Most of the people paying hundreds of dollars to see Miss Saigon would hate to be called racists, I’m sure, or would deny that they are supporting something that reinforces Orientalism, sexism, and human trafficking. But they’ll open up their wallets all the same.
At home, our daughter asks me to cut out heart shapes from paper. She tapes them onto a large round circle from another piece of paper. “What is this?” I ask her. “It’s a Valentine’s Day card for everyone in the whole wide world!” she exclaims, and she means it. Her gesture of love is inexpensive, but not cheap.
_
I would like to thank the many movement organizers and friends who helped me edit and fact-check this essay, and provided me with links and informational resources to strengthen it, especially Juliana Hu Pegues.. I’d like to give a special thanks to Cara Van Le whose essay “Part of Memory is Forgetting” strongly influenced the aesthetics and voice of my essay, and also the members of the Twin Cities Don’t Buy Miss Saigon Organizing Committees, presently and through the years.
Bao Phihas been a performance poet since 1991. A two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist, he has appeared on HBO Presents Russell Simmons Def Poetry, and a poem of his appeared in the 2006 Best American Poetry anthology. His poems and essays are widely published in numerous publications including Screaming Monkeys and Spoken Word Revolution Redux. He has also released several CDs of his poetry, such as the recently sold-out Refugeography to his newest CD, The Nguyens EP.
This piece was originally published at 18millionrising.org, on September 16, 2013.
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Khanh Ho writes a fictional story inspired by Nguyen Chi Thien, a dissident poet who died last year. After editing his obituary for Diacritics and then learning that Thuy Vo Dang, head of the Oral History Project, also processed part of his life narrative, Ho was inspired to write this entirely fictional piece that is not so much about Nguyen Chi Thien but the role of archives in our life. Visit Nguyen Chi Thien’s oral history and find out the facts of this man’s life.
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He was an acclaimed artist, a master of words and he wrote in spare, rich prose on the transience of small things—a teacup, a leaf, a skillet—all in a style that was long-gone. It was the height of the war and there was a market for this kind of material, because ladies of breeding, of culture—those women who could claim they had been to Paris or at least as far as Hong Kong–these ladies, they wanted to forget. So beside the usual catalog of patriotic mumbo jumbo and discussions of shipping news, the wild guesses about the latest turn in American policy and advertisements for housekeepers of high moral character, his verses appeared as phantoms.
Short. Small. Polished.
I write this for my wife of seventeen years—and nobody knew if she was just seventeen or if they had been together for that length of time. He wrote anonymously and nobody could really know what he looked like, what his true age could be. Some said that he was really a woman in man-disguise, someone who wrote under what folks so inelegantly call in the West, a “pen name.”
“Nobody understands the smallness, the transience of the world lived inside a postage stamp like a woman.” So my mother told me. She kept a yellowed clipping of his story and showed it to me, sounding out the words in an elegant way that I could never emulate. It was only many years later that I realized this was a language lesson of sorts.
That clipping must have traveled far and wide and long for it to finally find a home inside that plastic Liz Claiborne purse. My mother was always afraid of thieves. She believed that a plastic purse kept you safe from robbery. This paranoia stayed with her, always.
Towards the end of her life, I was the one who nursed her. She was almost crazy then. They call it “dementia” in this country and nobody among my siblings wanted much to care for her. That is the way in the West. She would walk from room to room and mutter that cryptic phrase at paintings, photographs, vases. I was finishing up a pharmacy degree at a school close enough so that I was persuaded to eventually move in and support both of us on my stipend.
Oh, how she raved about things, then. It was all unpleasant to hear. Past affairs. The way she looked, ripe in a long white dress, at the tender age of fifteen when she took her first outing to Phnom Penh. The estate in the highlands where the indigenous people are as much a part of the landscape as the trees themselves.
Did I believe her? Not really. I had read about this disease in a medical textbook and knew that her mind was unreliable. And then she told me that this man, this poet, was her lover–her lover when she was but seventeen years old—that she met him one day, many years later, in a gleaming mall in the United States and that he was exactly as she remembered him, dignified with that great mop of poet’s hair. And he did not acknowledge her even though she knew he recognized her, just as if it were yesterday.
Khanh Ho is a writer, scholar, activist. Formerly a professor of Creative Writing, he now dedicates himself full time to his craft. Currently, he is writing the first Vietnamese American Detective novel ever to be written by a Vietnamese American. Follow him on twitter at @LosAngelesMysteryWriter. To learn more about his novel-in-progress, follow the link: http://www.losangelesmystery.com/
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What happened in October 2013: news and events relating to Vietnamese at home and in the diaspora.
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• The Vietnamese Community Association in Perth, Australia, unveiled a monument commemorating refugees who died after the end of the Vietnam (American) War.
• The demand for foreign-grown marijuana in Vietnam involves the Vietnamese diaspora in North America.
Audrey Chin reviews niehtn’s Village Teacher, a novel that offers a refreshing look at the French colonization of Vietnam. Although this narrative follows a love story, it is one that is beautifully embedded within the larger story of Vietnam.
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Nguyen Trong Hien, writing as neihtn, has crafted a uniquely Vietnamese story that’s not about the war, nor the diaspora. His novel Village Teacher offers a refreshing look at a Vietnam rarely featured in English language fiction.
Village Teacher, set in the early years of French colonization is on its surface a love story about a virtuous village scholar, Tam, and Giang, a spirited half-French daughter of the Hue elite. But, the book has many layers. Under the skin of the love story is a recounting of the Vietnamese people’s first grappling with the West. And at heart, the whole work is a quiet tribute to Vietnamese men of letters and the prevailing spirit of the Vietnamese language (whether in Chinese ideograms or French invented alphabets). Although probably unintended, there is also a larger moral lesson about how countries, not just Vietnam, can be won or lost if change is not embraced appropriately.
Despite being self-published, Village Teacher is not a poorly paced amateur effort filled with typographical errors.
The book was well plotted, from the scholar’s initial meeting with his beloved all the way through the obstacles the two must encounter — a reactionary mandarin, a protective mother and a bullying village headman among others — until the bitter-sweet finale.
This book is thoroughly imbued with the ethos and mindset of the period, even to its crafting. The story unfolds almost operatically, with all the elements of a traditional cai-luong, including revelations about past indiscretions and newly discovered illegitimate children. For good measure, some of Vietnam’s best love poetic lines, like the opening stanzas of Nguyen Du’s epic Kieu, and Doan Thi Diem’s Song of a Soldier’s Wife, are featured. It is apparent that the author is someone who appreciates the legacy of the Vietnamese language.
What charmed me most about the narrative were the details about late 19th century Vietnamese life – the snack of taro cooked by the teacher Tam’s student, the innuendo fraught conversation about the misplaced imperial corpses in the Nguyen tombs, the machinations of the matchmaker Madam Pumpkin.
Readers may find the author’s voice unnaturally stilted due to his adoption of late 19th century linguistic and narrative conventions creates an but I thought the device appropriate to the subject matter. The result is a well-rendered English-language version of a typical Vietnamese classical tale, which I believe is the author’s intention.
The problem with Village Teacher was that when I emerged from the book, I did not regret leaving the characters behind.
Typical of a 19th century Confucian moral tale, most of the characters were too patently white or black, including the scholar and his beloved. The motivations of the two villains, the bullying village headman Xa Long and the MIinister of Rites Toan, were never “shown” sufficiently. The novel would have been more satisfying with more conflicted grey characters like Ba Trang, the heroine’s mother, and Teacher Xinh, the dismissed scholar. Indeed, the question that has been haunting me since I put the book down is how the “forbidden” pseudo-romantic relationship between two minor characters – the brigand chief and his half sister – would have played out realistically.
I was also a little irritated with the English translations of the Kieu opening lines, which did not do any justice to the beauty of the Vietnamese.
These small glitches aside, I emerged from Village Teacher as if from a different Vietnam, one not yet tainted by the war we’re all still haunted by, yet already foreshadowing it. It was a worthwhile journey back in time.
I would recommend the book to anyone with an interest in late 19th century Vietnamese society. Although a work of fiction, the setting, norms and mores are so realistically described, the book could be a work of cultural anthropology. It offers a valuable look at a rarely discussed part of Vietnam’s history.
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Photo Credit: Nguyen Trong Hien
Nguyen Trong Hien, writing as neihtn, is a Vietnamese-American living in Princeton. NJ. Born in North Vietnam and the great-grandson of a village teacher, he followed his family South in 1954 and went to college in the United States to study Engineering and Industrial Administration. In Vietnam, Hien was a professor, a writer of textbooks, a soldier and a technocrat. He has lived in the US since 1975 and worked mostly in IT. Village Teacher took Hien over four years of weekends and evenings to complete. Find out more about this multi-talented writer from this e-interview by Audrey Chin.
Audrey Chin is a South East Asian writer who has been a daughter-in-law of the Vietnamese diaspora for over thirty years. Her latest novel As the Heart Bones Break, about 60 years in the life a Vietnamese man, will be released by Marshall Cavendish at the Singapore Writers.
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What if you had the opportunity to make your own box-office film? By envisioning a film about contemporary Vietnamese filmmakers that is directed, produced, written, and played by the filmmakers themselves, Thuy Linh comments on how increased self-awareness is needed for these filmmakers to improve in their craft.
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Victor Vu (third, from left) and the main actors of “Scandal.” Vietnamese filmmakers need to re-evaluate themselves and what they are doing to make good movies now.
One day, when I have enough money, I will hire Victor Vu to write a script about Nguyen Quang Dung, who I think epitomizes the home-grown Vietnamese commercial filmmaker.
Dung is an honest, successful filmmaker who enjoys his own movies, which are trashy but simple, honest, unpretentious, and utterly without cynicism. His latest 3D flick “My nhan ke” (The Lady Assassin) has become the biggest box office hit in recent times.
“The Lady Assassin” is almost too shallow to describe. It is like a musical clip with its catchy songs, superficial story, and preoccupation with the actresses’ beauty. It is about five unfortunate, beautiful girls in times past who hold a vendetta against men. They band together on an isolated island, robbing and killing the men who come to their brothel.
My movie would be directed by Charlie Nguyen, whose directing skills seem to be wasted in silly romantic comedies. Nguyen Quang Dung will be played by his close friend and a successful commercial filmmaker with artistic ambitions, Vu Ngoc Dang.
I would invest in this project with the hope that the movie would hit several things simultaneously: local and international box offices, local and international art-houses and film festivals, and most importantly, the mindset of these and other Vietnamese filmmakers who are somehow unable to take their movies up to a new level.
As far as this last objective is concerned, my movie would challenge local filmmakers to get out of themselves to introspect and, hopefully, learn something that would enable them to make better movies.
Dung, for instance, has not been able to improve in terms of scriptwriting (the technical aspects of Vietnamese cinema, on the other hand, have been improving steadily). I do not ask for much, just a little more substance, but all he has to offer is fluff.
Because I assume that we are not usually able to look at ourselves from a proper perspective, I would ask Dung to let another filmmaker analyze him – say Victor Vu.
Why Victor Vu? Because this filmmaker, who has more talent, would also benefit by writing about another filmmaker rather than himself, the filmmaker Nguyen Quang Dung, a mediocre filmmaker despite his successes.
In Victor Vu’s latest movie “Scandal,” a horror movie about the godless world of vengeful actresses, greedy producers, and cynical filmmakers, we already have a filmmaker character. But this character and the movie itself are fake, cynical, and, thus, bad.
“Scandal” decries showbiz and commercial filmmaking, comparing it unfavorably with the world of the theater. Are theater people really more virtuous than cinema people? I wonder.
Anyway, it is as if Victor Vu is saying that like his filmmaker character he has to make trashy commercial movies because audiences want them. If so, then what does it mean for the audiences? Does it mean they are simply stupid, or that they have to watch trashy movies though they do not want to?
It would be a good mental exercise for Victor Vu to get out of himself and write about the Vietnamese filmmaker who sincerely enjoys his bad commercial movies. I would be eager to know the solutions he offers Dung.
I hope this movie would also satisfy Victor Vu’s ambition to make a movie that has both artistic and commercial values – a smart, entertaining movie without cynicism.
Making a movie about a real-life figure, a filmmaker, your colleague no less, is a subject material that deserves the most serious treatment. At the same time, Dung is a well-known figure and Victor Vu has a good sense of humor, so the script may end up being truly entertaining and drawing audiences.
Dang, who would play Dung, is another talented and artistically ambitious director. I do not have anything against him or his movies, but, on the contrary, believe he and Victor Vu are the most promising directors of the younger lot.
Những nụ hôn rực rỡ by Nguyễn Quang Dũng
It bothers me that Dang often plays minor characters in Dung’s movies, seemingly just for the fun of it or for some particular joke that the duo hope audiences will enjoy. Whatever it is, I do not like this cavalier attitude towards acting. If Dang wants to try his hand at serious acting, I would offer him the role of Dung in my movie. Dang did play Dung briefly in the latter’s musical “Nhung nu hon ruc ro” (The Brilliant Kisses) but again it was more jokey than anything else.
As for the director, though Victor Vu is good in his own right, I would prefer Charlie Nguyen to direct my movie though he may turn down my offer because he prefers shooting martial arts and other action films.
Director Charlie Nguyen
At any rate, I do not want my scriptwriter and director to be the same person. This seems to be common in Vietnamese cinema now, which I think is not healthy. Directors writing their own scripts is understandable if there is a shortage of scripts. Otherwise, they should scour for scripts written by others and stick to what they do best, directing.
Vietnamese filmmakers need to re-evaluate themselves and what they are doing seriously to make good movies now.
Thuy Linh lives and works in Hanoi. She graduated from UMass Boston with a BA in English and has a Certificate in Screenwriting from the Film Studies Program, a 10-month program of the Hanoi University of Social Sciences and Humanities (in partnership with the Ford Foundation).
She is a translator/reporter/editor for various English newspapers in Hanoi and HCMC such as VietNamNet, Saigon Times, Sai Gon Giai Phong, and Tuoi Tre. At present, she works as a translator/editor for the “fiction” section (translates and edits contemporary Vietnamese short stories) and a film critic for Thanh Nien. This article originally appeared in Thanh Nien.
Please take the time to rate this post (above) and share it (below). Ratings for top posts are listed on the sidebar. Sharing (on email, Facebook, etc.) helps spread the word about diaCRITICS. And join the conversation and leave a comment! Do you agree with Thuy Lin’s commentary on these filmmakers? What are other ways in which Vietnamese filmmakers can improve?
