I am arguing here that the literary reform since 1986 and the topic of war and its aftermath are a return to the theme of humanism that has always existed in Vietnamese culture and literature for thousands of years. Because Vietnam’s history is associated with war, most Vietnamese magnum opuses, like Nguyen Du’s The Tale of Kieu, Dang Tran Con’s The Song of a Soldier’s Wife, or Nguyen Dinh Chieu’s Luc Van Tien, are related to war. Although the wars depicted in these texts are not real battles—no winning or losing, no swords or guns—the stories are about people and their sorrows, tragedies, and suffering caused by war. Similarly, most contemporary works about the war are not directly about the conflict itself but about how people lived and suffered during and after the war.
And this holds true for many of the stories in this anthology. The characters in the stories collected here are common people—soldiers, civilians, peasants, men, women, and children; they are neither generals, nor high-ranking military officers, nor heroes. The reality of the country and the war are seen through these characters, their lives and their fates.
Unlike writers of socialist realism, contemporary Vietnamese authors write about the war to oppose war rather than to promote or advocate for it. In other words, they write to express their love for peace and promote cross-cultural understanding and global love.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Collaborative projects like this one always depend on the gracious help, participation, and support of dozens of people. We would like to thank, first and foremost, the twenty authors whose work appears in this anthology. We realize that placing one’s writing in the hands of others is an act of trust, and we feel honored and privileged to have had the opportunity to translate and share your art with a wider audience.
We had trouble initially contacting some of the authors represented here and relied on the generous help of friends and colleagues, including Le Van Han, Le Trung Binh, Vo Thi Le Thuy, Ta Duy Anh, Suong Nguyet Minh, Quoc Phuong, Truong Hanh Ly, Do Han, and Truong Thi Thanh Binh. Without your diligence—and, in some cases, amateur detective work—this project never would have become a reality. A big thank you also to our friend Nguyen Thi Minh Hanh, who was always willing to help wrangle copies of Vietnamese-language books.
We are deeply indebted to Bao Ninh for committing his writing time and energy to composing the foreword to this anthology, and for his generosity in welcoming us into his home in Hanoi last summer.
A special thank you to Wayne Karlin, who was generous enough to read an early draft of our proposal and manuscript. We were buoyed throughout the final stages of this project by your continued support, encouragement, and advice.
Thank you to everyone at Columbia University Press, especially Christine Dunbar, Christian Winting, and James R. Purcell, for their work on and commitment to the project. It is thanks to editors like you that often-overlooked short fiction in translation like this has a chance to reach a wider audience.
We would like to acknowledge the generosity of the Humanities Institute at the University of Montana and the Unit 18 Professional Development Fund at the University of California at San Diego for funding our project-related trips to Vietnam.
And finally, a big thank you to our parents, Dinh Thi Hai, Noel Harold Kaylor, Richard Babcock, and Gioia Diliberto for their support and encouragement. We love you and can’t thank you enough for everything.
INTRODUCTION
A Note on the Selection and Translation of Stories
QUAN MANH HA AND JOSEPH BABCOCK
The American War in Vietnam was an extremely controversial and complicated event in the context of both Vietnamese and U.S. history. In our selection of the stories collected in this anthology, we have tried to be as inclusive and diverse as possible in terms of both the author’s background and the content, style, and themes present in his or her work. Still, some readers may notice that only one perspective on the conflict is represented here—that of the war’s victors, the Vietnamese communists based in the northern capital city of Hanoi.
Since the end of the war in 1975, the Communist Party of Vietnam has maintained tight political control over the country. Today, Vietnam remains a single-party state, with tight controls and limits on freedom of expression, the media, and the arts. These extend, of course, to the publishing industry, where all literature, including works of fiction, is subject to censorship and the demand—sometimes unspoken, but always firmly understood—that all published work adhere to the tenets of Party orthodoxy. This includes narratives concerning the war against the Americans, a war seen by the ruling Communist Party as a struggle to reunite the two Vietnams, North and South, and shake off foreign control. Virtually all literature about the American War published in Vietnam adheres to this narrative.
We believe that it is important for
