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During the 2000s, state-free online literary magazines prevailed in Vietnam.[i] From ti\u1ec1n v\u1ec7 to talawas to da m\u00e0u, 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 \u201cViet magazines,\u201d it is important to consider this typology of literature in the chronicle of Vietnam\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Among unconventional themes, the expression of pain in Lynh Bacardi\u2019s<\/a> work\u2014the greatest depth of despair in lives of the social margins manifested\u2014sheds light on what otherwise can be invisible to Vietnamese society. I further argue that her depictions of power dynamics, as well as one\u2019s 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 \u201cTre R\u1eebng\/Bamboo Forest\u201d (2006), a short story representing Lynh Bacardi\u2019s discernment as Vietnam moves toward industrialization and modernization.<\/p>\n 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]<\/a> Influenced by her contemporaries, Lynh Bacardi crafts a vocabulary of obscene words. These phrases are part of daily conversation: \u201ccu gi\u1ea3 ch\u1ea1y b\u1eb1ng pin\u201d\/fake battery-considered taboo in powered cock\u201d[iii]<\/a> or \u201cth\u1ee7ng l\u1ed3n\/the pussy drilled wide open.\u201d[iv]<\/a><\/p>\n Indeed, she was a member of Ng\u1ef1a Tr\u1eddi\/Skyhorse\u2014a group of five female writers targeted by the \u201ccultural police.\u201d The group\u2019s poetry anthology was condemned as \u201cone reek of disgusting words,\u201d and banning their writing was considered \u201cnot only the responsibility of relevant ministries but also the shared requirement of our society.\u201d[v]<\/a> For surveillance practitioners (cultural administrators), any language other than propaganda\u2014the so-called nation-state discourses that have long instructed the public sphere\u2014would be too radical to circulate in the public sphere. For that, many critics saw Lynh Bacardi as \u201clinguistically flawed\u201d for her art\u2019s vulgarity and shocking nature.[vi]<\/a><\/p>\n However, vulgar language is crucial to Bacardi\u2019s unmediated investigations of struggles, pain, instability, and alienation\u2014what is inseparable from life. In \u201cBamboo Forest,\u201d by depicting the life of an orphaned woman trying to make a living in the big city, Bacardi reveals \u201cblind spots\u201d 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, \u201cBamboo Forest\u201d introduces an unsettling, turmoiled state of the people, lost in the country’s translation of development.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s narrator, but he can\u2019t find any. The man, Quang, wanted to break a girl\u2019s hymen as his wife, a shaman, said it would bless him with an affluent business.<\/p>\n \u201c- Where is the blood, why isn\u2019t there a drop of blood? By employing descriptions of a sex scene, Bacardi questions how, in Vietnamese tradition, virginity symbolizes a woman\u2019s virtue and how, without it, a woman loses her dignity. In the feudal period, a prominent idiom was \u201cTam t\u00f2ng t\u1ee9 \u0111\u1ee9c, th\u1ee7 ti\u1ebft th\u1edd ch\u1ed3ng,\u201d[vii]<\/a> 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 \u201cc\u00e1i ng\u00e0n v\u00e0ng\/the gold-worth belonging\u201d of women is indispensable when speaking of Vietnam\u2019s 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]<\/a> for the first time, confronting a social construction of hegemonic power maintained by the patriarchy.<\/p>\n At the same time, however, she depends on Quang\u2019s urban background to survive in the city. As she moves from rural to urban, she is hit by the bludgeon of reality. She contemplates:<\/p>\n \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Caring for her blind brother in the absence of a functional family, the narrator is invisible to society. In an interview,[ix]<\/a> Bacardi implicitly stated that images of a \u201cfair\u201d 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 \u201cBamboo Forest\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Not only that, her poor brother Th\u00e0nh gets into trouble. Having to work night shifts, she has a scrap dealer put her brother to sleep. One night, she figures out the \u201cbabysitter\u201d lured him into a gangbang. A teenager going through puberty, the blind Th\u00e0nh 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.<\/p>\n Coming home from work early one day, she realizes her lodging is empty, and Th\u00e0nh is nowhere to be found. After hours of searching, she finds Th\u00e0nh on a treetop, picking fruit in an animal-like manner. Another time, Th\u00e0nh 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 Th\u00e0nh\u2019s \u201cbabysitter\u201d by faking their local accent and satisfying him at night:<\/p>\n \u201cI will look at the moon and describe it to Th\u00e0nh, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Each night after sex with her blood brother breathes into their life a sense of calmness, unruptured. Critic Th\u1ee5y Khu\u00ea analyzes this image: \u201cThe two orphaned siblings, like the branches of the forest bamboo, grow in whatsoever axis.\u201d 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 Th\u00e0nh\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n To shatter discourses, a rejection of any social construction must come into play.[x]<\/a> Bacardi makes the young woman in \u201cBamboo Forest\u201d a peculiar subject as she undergoes an entirely definite-structure negation: infinite hymen blood each time she has sex with Th\u00e0nh. 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s works pornographic, exploiting sex scenes for attention. But her description of sex transcends such a gaze, informing us of unseen human possibility\u2014Bacardi 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n peer-reviewed by Nguy\u1ec5n Qu\u1ef3nh Chi<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n [i]<\/a> Hieu, T. The Rise and Fall of Avant-Garde Vietnamese Poetry in Online Literary Magazines during the Early Twenty-First Century.<\/p>\n [ii]<\/a> T\u00e1c Gi\u1ea3 v\u00e0 T\u00e1c Ph\u1ea9m Lynh Bacardi. (n.d.).<\/p>\n [iii]<\/a> Skyhorse (2005). D\u1ef1 b\u00e1o phi th\u1eddi ti\u1ebft |Weather-Free Forecast.<\/p>\n [iv]<\/a> Lynh-Bacardi (2006). Tre R\u1eebng | Forest Bamboo. Talawas.<\/p>\n [v]<\/a> C. (2006, July 2). The abnormative anthology of the collective \u201cSkyhorse\u201d. The Electronic People\u2019s Police Newspaper |T\u1eadp th\u01a1 qu\u00e1i \u0111\u1ea3n c\u1ee7a nh\u00f3m \u201cNg\u1ef1a tr\u1eddi.\u201d B\u00e1o C\u00f4ng an Nh\u00e2n D\u00e2n \u0110i\u1ec7n T\u1eed.<\/p>\n [vi]<\/a> Lynh-Bacardi. (2006, January). Ch\u00faa lu\u00f4n c\u1ee9u x\u00e9t cho k\u1ebb bi\u1ebft s\u00e1m h\u1ed1i |God always absolves those who repent. Ti\u1ec1n V\u1ec7.<\/p>\n [vii]<\/a> Tam: three, t\u00f2ng: deeds\/principles, Tam T\u00f2ng: 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). T\u1ee9 \u0111\u1ee9c denotes the four key attributes of a woman in the Feudal Period: care-taking, beautiful, well-spoken, well-mannered.<\/p>\n [viii]<\/a> Kristeva, J. (1986, November 19). The Kristeva Reader (T. Moi, Ed.).<\/p>\n
\n-What are you talking about?
\n-Why are you so dumb, is your mother just as stupid as you? Does she not tell you anything about virginity?\u201d<\/p>\n
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Nguy\u1ec5n Thanh-T\u00e2m<\/strong> (b.2006) works with translations, poetry and performance art. Her poetry has been featured or will be featured on The Offing<\/em> and The Arkansas International<\/em>. What she translates can be found at documenta fifteen, Miami Book Fair, Karachi Biennale.<\/p>\n