The counterpart to the soldiers’ experience is the drama that unfolds on the home front while they are away. In “War” by Thai Ba Tan, “Ms. Thoai” by Hanh Le, and “The Most Beautiful Girl in the Village” by Ta Duy Anh, the setting is the domestic front, where wives are expected to wait patiently and faithfully for their husbands to return from the battlefield. When things do not go exactly as hoped—in the case of “Ms. Thoai” a rape, in “War” an unexpected pregnancy that may have been immaculate, and in “The Most Beautiful Girl in the Village” a marriage that never materializes—the characters’ lives are changed forever. These stories present a compelling moral landscape in which the suffering of the women is treated as both tragic and heroic, while the men are portrayed as stubborn and cruel. For these characters, it is not the horrors of actual combat that linger years after the fighting has ended but the obsession, resentment, doubt, jealousy, and pain of perceived betrayal that end up defining the rest of their lives.
In our selection of the stories, we have made a concerted effort to include authors from a variety of personal and professional backgrounds. The group of writers represented here are a mix of both well-known, full-time authors (Bao Ninh, Nguyen Van Tho, Suong Nguyet Minh) and writers who carve out time to create their fiction around the demands of their day jobs. Mai Tien Nghi is a middle school math teacher. Nguyen Thi Am works for a company that sells agricultural products. Luong Liem is the full-time director of a local association for victims of Agent Orange. Lai Van Long is a beat reporter for the Ho Chi Minh City Police News. Most of these writers are veterans of the war with the Americans, though several are from the later generation, born in the mid- or late 1970s, such as Nguyen Ngoc Thuan, Nguyen Thi Mai Phuong, and Truong Van Ngoc. Some of them are members of the prestigious national Vietnamese Writers’ Association—the Party-sanctioned organization that decides who is “officially” considered to qualify as a nha van, a writer—while others are relatively unknown outside their local province, far removed from the official publishing apparatuses in Hanoi. The majority still live and write in Vietnam. The exceptions are Nguyen Minh Chau and Hanh Le, neither of whom is alive today, and Vo Thi Hao, who now lives in asylum in Germany.
Readers may notice that out of twenty authors included in this anthology, only five are women. This gender disparity reflects the fact that the vast majority of Vietnamese fiction about the war is written by men. Although women did serve in the army in various capacities during the war, the rate of conscription was much higher among men. Therefore, most authors who are veterans of the conflict and are concerned with exploring war-related themes in their short fiction are male. However, several female Vietnamese authors have had considerable international critical and commercial success writing about the war: two of the most internationally popular works of Vietnamese nonfiction about the conflict were written by women—Le Ly Hayslip’s memoir, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, and Last Night I Dreamed of Peace, the diary of National Liberation Front doctor Dang Thuy Tram, who was killed in an American attack in 1970—and the most internationally popular war novel after Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War is female author Duong Thu Huong’s Novel Without a Name.
Some readers might also note that the anthology does not include voices from “the losing side,” the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), or those who supported the former South Vietnamese government and American intervention in the conflict. There are several reasons for this. First, these narratives are already widely available to English-speaking audiences in the form of exile or diasporic literature published outside of Vietnam. Diasporic Vietnamese literature often favors the ARVN/South Vietnamese perspective. Those who fled the country as refugees in the postwar years tended to be people who had supported the South Vietnamese regime or worked with the Americans and their ARVN allies. There is also the practical reality of the tightly regulated publishing landscape in Vietnam. Still today, over forty years after the end of the conflict, stories sympathetic to the ARVN side are not published in Vietnam, let alone widely read or anthologized. Some short fiction by former ARVN soldiers has been self-published online, though usually under a pseudonym, making it difficult to even find the author for the purposes of securing a “right to translate” agreement. Despite the logistical hurdles, this might be an opportunity for a future translation project: an anthology of online dissident writing about the
