Every day, Vop gave his daughter almost all the money he made from selling louse crabs, clams, and anything else he’d managed to catch in the river, so she could take it back to her mother. He kept only a few thousand dong to buy food. The crab season this year had been good. Vop hoped that his children would have everything they needed for school. He started to feel that maybe life was worth living after all and that he wanted to see his children grow up.
One morning, as usual, Vang went to the pier very early. The night before, she’d seen a woman talking for a long time with her mother. After the woman left, Vang’s mother embraced her and said, “Tomorrow go tell your dad to come home. Do you love him?” “Yes, I do,” Vang replied. Then she asked, “Do you love him, Mom?” Her mother said nothing, but Vang saw tears in her eyes.
At the pier the next morning, Vang waited excitedly for over an hour but didn’t see her father. She wondered if maybe he was sick and ran to his hut near the mouth of the river. The hut was cold and contained only a bamboo bed and a neatly folded military blanket. Vop wasn’t there. Then Vang looked out toward the river. Across the river she saw two riu poles and hair floating on the surface of the gently undulating water. Someone had drowned. Vang shouted and started running. The entire village rushed to the mouth of the river.
Vop was dead. After many days of riuing he’d discovered a secret spot, farther back from the mouth of the river, where there were even more louse crabs. But he didn’t know that when the water rose the current became more aggressive. It pushed him into a churning whirlpool in the middle of the river where his feet couldn’t touch the bottom. The submerged riu net was like a giant python as the whirlpool wrapped it around Vop’s body. He drowned standing up, like someone who had been wrapped in a cocoon.
They brought Vop’s body to shore and removed the riu net from around him. Then they placed Vop in his small hut. Because he had died in the river, the funeral took place right there in the hut. They purchased a coffin, which was quickly made, the yellow varnish still wet. Before his body was placed in the coffin, they cut the riu net and used it to line the inside, so that when Vop’s body was eventually dug up on the anniversary of his death, as tradition dictated, all of his bones would be there.
The large riu net overflowed down the sides of the coffin, leaving marks in the wet varnish. The final closed coffin looked like it was covered with a dirty black net. The undertakers looked at the coffin with disappointment since they hadn’t been careful in their work.
“It’s not a problem,” one guy said. “The Veterans Association will come by soon to cover the coffin with the ceremonial red cloth. Don’t worry.”
But another sighed and said, “Unfortunately he wasn’t a member of the Veterans Association, so no red cloth for him.”
“But he used to be a soldier!” another said.
“I know that,” the other guy said. “But after that disgraceful incident, they took away his membership.”
In the golden sunset a line of people, heads bowed, walked quietly along the dike, carrying the coffin toward the village. It was as if Vop’s coffin were bobbing on the waters of a human river. The mournful sounds of funeral drums and trumpets mixed with the sound of crashing waves in the distance. The river water began to rise. It was cold outside. The year’s louse crab season would end very soon.
4 / BIRDS IN FORMATION
NGUYEN NGOC TU
Nguyen Ngoc Tu was born in 1976 in Ca Mau, the southernmost province of Vietnam. She is known as a prolific and popular southern writer who captures the typical lifestyle and colloquial language of southern Vietnam, particularly the Mekong Delta. Her characters are often sincere, hardworking rural people—fishermen and farmers—forced to deal with the often cruel and capricious vicissitudes of life. She is most famous for her 2006 collection of short fiction titled Endless Field (Canh dong bat tan), which has been translated into Korean, Swedish, English, and German and was adapted into a 2010 Vietnamese film called Floating Lives. The narrator in “Birds in Formation” speaks from a generational vantage point reflective of Nguyen Ngoc Tu’s own—that of someone born after the end of the war. The story highlights how the war remained present in Vietnamese domestic life for decades after 1975 and the emotional and psychological challenges of uniting a country that had seen its people, sometimes even within the same family, end up on opposing sides of the conflict.
It was a day in October, around noon, and we had both skipped our midday nap, like usual. Vinh was sitting on the branch of a tamarind tree in the front yard, chewing on an unripe mango and occasionally dropping the fruit’s skin on my head. His mouth was dripping with spit. This annoyed me, but I just smiled and didn’t say anything. If I retaliated, I would be falling directly into his trap. And besides, if we started fighting everybody would know that we had snuck outside instead of taking a nap, and we’d get yelled at.
Because I didn’t respond, Vinh eventually got bored and stopped trying to provoke me. We were both quiet. Sunlight pierced the leaves of the trees and created flecks of light around the yard. Every now and then, a breeze would blow some tamarind leaves to the ground, mixing them with the dog hair and the dirt and the flecks of light.
I was fourteen back then and had experienced countless boring early afternoons just like this one. We were at the age when we
