Inheriting the War Read online

  into raindrops ripe with guava perfume.

  —Translated from the Vietnamese by Bruce Weigl and the author

  MY MOTHER

  I cross the Lam River to return to my homeland

  where my mother embraces my grandmother’s tomb in the rain,

  the soil of Nghệ An so dry the rice plants cling to rocks.

  My mother chews dry corn; hungry, she tries to forget.

  I cross the sedge fields to return to Ninh Bình.

  Just after my birth, the war dropped bombs there.

  To protect me from those storms, my mother spread her wings,

  her faded shirt fragrant with the red gạo blossoms.

  I cross the Mekong River to return to Bạc Liêu,

  the skinny shadow of my mother

  imprinted against the afternoon light,

  each drop of sweat in exchange for a seed of rice;

  yet in spite of this hardship, she always smiles.

  I cross time to return to the past.

  My mother sends me away among raindrops.

  She lights the stove fire, sits there, waiting for me.

  I begin to walk, each step the distance of a vast sea.

  I cross the distance to return to Sài Gòn.

  Oh my mother, her hair is turning white.

  She is forever as she was before: gentle, loving, and kind.

  Now that I can finally see her love, time has passed away.

  I am always far away, and guilty not to be there.

  I don’t know if I can repay you, my dear mother.

  So young, you worked your life hard and were strong,

  the way you met so many storms alone.

  I overcome my shyness, to hug my mother for the first time

  I would love to stay by her side.

  Hesitantly, my feet walk the dusty road of life.

  I hear my heart cry. A sea of a thousand strings holds me back.

  —Translated from the Vietnamese by Bruce Weigl and the author

  QUẢNG TRỊ

  The mother runs toward us,

  the names of her children fill her eye sockets.

  She’s screaming “Where are my children?”

  The mother runs toward us,

  her husband’s name carves a hole in her chest.

  She is screaming “Return my husband to me.”

  Time fades her shoulders.

  Her ragged hair withers.

  Sky spreads sunlight, dragging me along the roads

  carpeted with bomb craters like the eyes of the dead,

  wide open, staring.

  The dry, cracked fields struggle to find their breath.

  Flamboyant flowers shed their blood along the road.

  Still so deep the wounds, Quảng Trị.

  —Translated from the Vietnamese by Bruce Weigl and the author

  NGUYỄN QUANG THỀU (1957) is a poet, working as editor, fiction writer, playwright, translator, and children’s author, living in Vietnam and holding high office in the Writers’ Unions there. Born in Hà Tây Province, Nguyễn Quang Thiˋêu entered Ha Noi University in 1975 and began to write poetry in 1982. He studied Spanish and English in Cuba from 1984 to 1989. He currently lives in Hà Đông. He has published many collections of poetry in Vietnamese as well as the bilingual collection The Women Carry River Water (UMass Press, 1997). His forthcoming collection is titled The Pulse of a New Delta.

  KEVIN BOWEN (Translator) served in Viet Nam in 1968 and 1969. His poetry collections include Playing Basketball with the Vietcong, Forms of Prayer at the Hotel Edison, Eight True Maps of the West, and Thai Binh/Great Peace. He has worked as editor and translator with Nguyen Ba Chung and Bruce Weigl on collections such as Six Vietnamese Poets, Distant Road: Selected Poems of Nguyen Duy, and Zen Poems from Early Vietnam. From 1985 to 2011 he was director of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at University of Massachusetts–Boston. In 2011 was awarded the Phan Chu Trinh Award for contributions to Vietnamese Culture. He is co-editor with Nora Paley of A Grace Paley Reader, published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux (2017).

  MARTHA COLLINS (Translator) is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Admit One: An American Scrapbook (2016), Day Unto Day (2014), White Papers (2012), and the book-length poem Blue Front (2006), which won an Anisfield-Wolf Award. A protestor during the Vietnam War, Collins has also co-translated four collections of poems from the Vietnamese, including The Women Carry River Water by Nguyen Quang Thieu (1997, with the author), Green Rice by Lam Thi My Da (2005, with Thuy Dinh), and Black Stars by Ngo Tu Lap (2013, with the author).

  THE EXAMPLES

  For the war widows of my village

  Time flows into a huge ancient vase. Like brown locusts, the widows of my village disappear, one by one, behind the grass. Red-flecked winds rush back from the distant horizon, their fingers scratching madly at the thorn grass. I stand on the village road, crying like a boy who’s lost his mother. I can’t look for widows behind every blade of grass in this vast place.

  With poles on their shoulders, the widows walk on roads worn like the curved spines of a thousand hard-working lives. Sleeping, they walk through wild winds that rise when the sun rolls into darkness. Sleeping, they walk into prehistoric rains that fall when dawn gets up from a feverish night. Like a lunatic, I stand and count them; example after example, I count them.

  My widows, my examples, don’t wear shoes or sandals; they avoid roads that lead to moonlit nights. Their breasts are tired and hard of hearing; they cannot hear the calls of men, who smell of tobacco and muddy rice fields on nights when winds roll in the panting garden. Only the mice eating rice in wooden coffins can wake them up; they lie in fear of the sound of termites feasting on those coffins.

  Time rushes silently, silently into the ancient vase. Like locusts, the widows disappear, one by one, they disappear behind the grass. I am a lunatic standing here crying, crying for the examples, who’ve gone forever.

  And when I have no one left to count, the widows come back from behind the grass, walking on moonlit roads strewn with October straw. Their hair, smelling of grapefruit leaves, spills into the moonlight; their breasts lean toward just-kindled fires. First their footsteps, then the sound of opening doors, and then a song rises up through the heads of sleepless lunatics who look at the moon.

  The lunatics open their doors and leave their houses. They walk with the song, on and on, until they find a place with no examples.

  —Translated from the Vietnamese by Martha Collins and the author

  MY FATHER’S LAUGHTER

  Not at all like a drunk

  My father leaves home at midnight.

  Fireflies surround him

  Like red-hot wires

  Winding around him and snapping.

  The noise of barking dogs runs

  From our neighborhood to the end of our village

  And stops at a wharf with a lonely boat

  My father boarded with twenty years

  In his hands. He didn’t look back.

  My mother covered her feet in the sand;

  Her tears flowed into the river basin.

  Years later my father came back,

  His hair no longer black.

  Now at night he sits and smokes,

  His pipe hissing as if it were trying

  To bore a hole through his sadness.

  My father’s children are not his final goal;

  They are only four milestones along his sadness.

  He carries his seventy years

  To the old wharf and steps on the boat.

  Does it rock because his feet are unsteady,

  Or because it trembles with fear?

  The noise of barking dogs runs

  From the end of our village back to our gate

  While the white hair of my father looks up and laughs.

  —Translated from the Vietnamese by Martha Collins and the author

  July

  In the dream, ou
r bodies lie laid out across the bed.

  We look like two trees felled in a storm.

  Above us, woodsmen wearing masks

  Run a plumb line down our torsos.

  They rip us up into bloody red pieces.

  Their blades cut through us. Flashes of light,

  Bright as fireworks, send our lifeblood

  Flying like dust through the sparks.

  Our bed has turned into a workshop, our lives cut up,

  Turned into tables, wardrobes, coffins.

  We are everywhere, but the trees don’t know us.

  We are only a mute memory to them now.

  The woodsmen think we’ll never come back.

  Not from a few bits of sawdust and shavings.

  They toss the last few scraps of us into the fire;

  Watch our lives burn out through the blaze.

  But today the woodsmen are being led from the workshop.

  They march out under the trees.

  The trees are kind and grant them their last request.

  Their faces hooded in masks.

  —Translated from the Vietnamese by Kevin Bowen and the author

  AUGUST

  In August the persimmon fruit is yellow.

  It has the look of a person who’s been sick a long time,

  Who has little hope of recovering.

  I stared up at the persimmon at dusk.

  I had courage neither to leave nor to step closer.

  Bats were shrieking, climbing up into the trees.

  They caught the scent of the persimmon on their cries.

  They glided and circled and huddled in dark bunches.

  A sickness seemed to settle over the garden.

  Only an old image, a persimmon’s five pointed star

  Splashed against a stucco wall, called me back.

  Who knows what illness stepped past me that night in the garden,

  As I stood trapped under the persimmon’s yellow glow?

  —Translated from the Vietnamese by Kevin Bowen and the author

  VAAN NGUYEN was born in Israel to Vietnamese refugees and raised in Jaffa, near Tel Aviv. Duki Dror’s 2005 documentary The Journey of Vaan Nguyen documents her family’s efforts to reclaim ancestral land in Vietnam. The film also introduced Nguyen’s poetry to the Israeli public. The Truffle Eye (Ein ha-kemehin), a chapbook of poems, appeared in 2008. An expanded edition, published by Ma’ayan Press, appeared in 2013 in both print and digital editions. Nguyen is affiliated with Gerila Tarbut (Cultural Guerrilla), a collective of Israeli and Palestinian poets, artists and cultural activists, and is at work on her second book.

  ADRIANA X. JACOBS (Translator) is Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at the University of Oxford and author of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry (forthcoming). Her translations of modern Hebrew and contemporary Israeli poetry have appeared in various print and online publications, including Gulf Coast, Poetry International, Zeek, The Ilanot Review, Metamorphoses, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. She is the recipient of a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Grant for her translation of The Truffle Eye by Vaan Nguyen.

  MEKONG RIVER

  Tonight I moved between three beds

  like I was sailing on the Mekong

  and whispered the beauty of the Tigris and Euphrates.

  Under an endless moment

  looking

  below the left tit

  I have a hole

  and you fill it

  with other men.

  Notes of Tiger beer

  on your body.

  Alone,

  crickets drone south of Laos.

  Showers of cold air from Hanoi

  the back gasps

  the tight ass, an ink stain on the belly.

  Draw me a monochrome

  flow chart

  on fresh

  potted flowers.

  I’ll release roots at your feet,

  I want to come to puke specks

  of dust

  in my crotch. Rest your hand

  in my pants. Make it personal

  Who abandons an illness in open sea?

  —Translated from the Hebrew by Adriana X. Jacobs

  PACKING POEM

  In the rice bowl green bananas,

  and peels, dry castor beans in a jar,

  feathers and mulch outside the window

  this is how they still gather evidence.

  The chopsticks rest diagonally

  matching the movement of birds along a waterfall.

  How do they stall the transmission and keep eating rice

  before the night migration?

  Under the cover of delusions,

  all I wanted was to warn everyone “there’s Armageddon”

  and ask whether foreigners have

  inflatable boats.

  And those paranoid, paranoid women, have nothing

  but these gallows

  for overloading muscles

  for stretching the body

  in the gym

  a woman lying naked in the sauna gossips under her breath

  and the thoughts escape her

  all at once

  either the meds work or the mind is numb

  but sometimes, if you concentrate, you can hear an airplane landing.

  —Translated from the Hebrew by Adriana X. Jacobs

  VIET THANH NGUYEN is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford University Press, 2002) and the novel The Sympathizer, from Grove/Atlantic (2015). The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize, Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Fiction from the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association. His book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press, 2016) was short-listed for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. His next book is The Refugees, a short story collection (Grove Press, 2017).

  APRIL 30

  Today is what many Vietnamese in the diaspora call “Black April.” For them it is the anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. I understand their feelings. I grew up in a Vietnamese community in San Jose, and I absorbed their memories and their unspoken trauma. My own family was marked by separation and division, by people and property left behind. And yet, I could never wholeheartedly endorse this sense of loss and grievance, could never bring myself to say “Black April” (not least of all because if we were to speak of mourning, we should say “White April,” but that would not go over so well in a white America). Like my narrator in The Sympathizer, I see every issue from both sides, and so I see that for some Vietnamese people this is not a day of mourning but one of celebration. The Fall is for some the Liberation.

  And yet, it is important to mark this day because it is the symbolic moment when so many Vietnamese people became refugees. Many people have described me as an immigrant, and my novel as an immigrant story. No. I am a refugee, and my novel is a war story. I came to the United States because of a war that the United States fought in Vietnam, a war that the Vietnamese fought with each other, a war that China and the Soviet Union were involved in, a war that the Vietnamese brought to Laos and Cambodia, a war that did not end in 1975, a war that is not over for so many people of so many nationalities and cultures. For Americans to call me an immigrant and my novel an immigrant novel is to deny a basic fact of American history: that many immigrants to this country came because of American wars fought in the Philippines, Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam. Immigrants are the story of the American Dream, of American exceptionalism. Refugees are the reminder of the American nightmare, which is how so many who are caught under American bombardment experience the United
States.

  As much as Americans fear refugees and seek to transform refugees into immigrants who fulfill the American Dream, the Vietnamese who stayed in Vietnam have a hard time understanding their refugee brethren. I had breakfast with a former Vietnamese ambassador in Hanoi and she said that the “boat people” were economic refugees, not political refugees. Probably every single Vietnamese refugee would disagree with her, and the ethnic Chinese who were persecuted, robbed, and blackmailed would say that the line between being an economic refugee and a political refugee is a very thin one.

  One of my Vietnamese language teachers said that the re-education camps were necessary to prevent postwar rebellion. Perhaps rebellion was in the making, but reaching out a hand in peace and reconciliation would have done so much more to heal the country. The Vietnamese people overseas remember the re-education camps as the ultimate hypocrisy of the Vietnamese revolution, the failure of Vietnamese brotherhood and sisterhood. This, too, is one reason why so many Vietnamese people became refugees and why so many find it hard to reconcile with a Vietnam that will not acknowledge its crimes against its own people, even as it is so ready to talk about the crimes of the South Vietnamese, the Americans, the French, and the Chinese. Nothing is more difficult than to look in the mirror and hold oneself to account. The victorious Vietnamese are guilty of that. So are the defeated Vietnamese.

  I’ve heard more than once from Vietnamese foreign students in the United States that the past is over, that the Vietnamese at home understand the pain of the Vietnamese overseas, and that we should reconcile and move on. These students do not understand what the overseas Vietnamese feel—that they lost a country. It is easier to be magnanimous when one has won. But at least these Vietnamese students want to be magnanimous. At least they reach out a hand in friendship, unlike many of an older generation.