Le Minh Khue's recent collection of stories published by Curbstone Press
(_The Stars, The Earth, the River_) is a great place to start. Khue was
a sapper on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and a number of her stories are very
much about gender issues. "A Day on the Road" especially reverses gender
expectations in striking ways. Her stories are really fine in their own
right (i.e. as art, not as sociology). She and other Vietnamese women
writers can also be found in _The Other Side of Heaven: Post War Fiction
by Vietnamese and American Writers_ also published by Curbstone. Wayne
Karlin edited the first and co-edited the second along with Khue and
Truong Vu (a Viet Kieu who served with the ARVN navy). Finally, I would
recommend Lady Borton's _After Sorrow_ which treats of her return to
Vietnam in the late 80s and early 90s and her experience with the
Vietnamese, many (or most) of them women, and many of them former VC. I
think it's a great introduction to the war from the perspective of the
Vietnamese -- the POV which Lady Borton largely tries to adopt and/or
convey (a problematic thing to attempt but I think she's successful).
You can get info about Curbstone from Sandy Taylor at curbston@connix.com
No, I don't work for them, promise. But I attach my review of the second
mentioned book which perhaps will help your student get a sense of it.
It was published in the Times Picayune (a name that always makes me
wince!)
The Other Side of Heaven: Post-War Fiction by Vietnamese and American
Writers. Edited by Wayne Karlin, Le Minh Khue, and Truong Vu. Curbstone
Press, 1995. 411 pages. $17.95.
This volume was "born" Wayne Karlin tells us in his introduction, "out of
a meeting of two people who, if they had met two decades previously,
would have tried to kill each other." One, Karlin, was a former Marine;
the other, Le Minh Khue, joined the Peoples Army of Vietnam (NVA) at age
15, serving as a member of the Youth Volunteers Brigade on the Ho Chi
Minh (Son My) Trail. The volume's third editor, Truong Vu is an ARVN
veteran who fought at our side, immigrated to America, and now works as a
physicist at NASA. Their backgrounds thus exactly reflect the volume's
makeup, representing within its pages all the players in the Vietnam
War's long tragedy.
That they have come together at all suggests perhaps that we have reached
a point where healing can begin to take place. But how? Clinical
psychologist who study PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) tell us that
their patients most need is to reconnect. Trauma disjoins its victims
from their fellows, their community, even from themselves. Judith Lewis
Herman, the eminent Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, writes in Trauma
and Recovery, her highly readable introduction to the field, that the
challenge of recovery is threefold: to establish safety, to reconstruct
the trauma story, and to restore the connection between survivors and
their community. Though an anthology of short fiction and not a textbook,
these efforts are at work in The Other Side of Heaven which reconnects
the combatants from both sides of the Vietnam War as never before.
The volume alternates American and Vietnamese stories that relate to one
another in startling ways, here by theme or technique, there by image or
incident. Such connections suggest that at bottom the opposing sides have
much in common: each distrusts the government they fought for; each feels
alienated from those who did not serve; each has difficulties
reestablishing themselves in their communities and families. Here you
will hear American veterans seeming to echo Vietnamese veterans who
fought at our side, who seem to echo Vietnamese veterans who fought
against us. What is first and last most striking is that they all seem
tell the same story: a story of lost ideals, lost innocence, lost
wholeness.
This theme of reconnection, of healing and recovery, makes this volume a
milestone. So too does the quality and heft of the stories it gathers
together.
Among the Vietnamese voices collected are Bao Ninh's whose celebrated
novel The Sorrow of War is care-fully excerpted here, and Nguyen Huy
Thiep's superb "The General Retires," a short story whose publication
immediately established Thiep's reputation as a major writer. Both
writers have come under attack by the Vietnam-ese government for
portraying post war society in a less than favorable light.
Bao Ninh's most recent story, "Insane Wind," (available in the British
publication Granta) is a tale of love set in a village in former South
Vietnam before and after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Its French
publication, plus the praise Bao Ninh recently received in the United
States for his novel, The Sorrow of War, sparked a negative review in the
newspaper People's Army, which stopped just short of calling Bao Ninh a
traitor. Le Minh Khue's story collected here, "Tony D," also paints a
dark, seamy portrait of contemporary Vietnam.
Side by side with these dark portraits of our enemy are dark portraits of
ourselves: "The Pugilist at Rest," Thom Jones' minimalist masterpiece;
"Speaking of Courage," one of the finest stories from Tim O'Brien's award
winning collection, The Things They Carried; Karlin's own "Point
Lookout." Also noteworthy is the moving "Letters from My Father" from
Robert Olen Butler's Pulitzer Prize winning A Good Scent from a Strange
Moun-tain. Like all the stories in that volume, "Letters. . . " is
narrated by a Vietnamese who has immigrated to Louisiana. There is
excellent fiction here too from less well-known writers, like Judith
Ortiz Cofer and Breece D'J Pancake, a writer of great talent who took his
life in 1979 at age twenty-six.
But it is the renowned Robert Stone, whose Dog Soldiers is one of the
best novels ever written about the war's aftermath, who best captures in
a single luminous image the challenge veterans on both sides continue to
face. "Helping" recounts a recovering alcoholic's slide back into
addiction after months struggling to stay on the wagon. Fallen, he goes
through the motions of hiding from his spouse the evidence of his
failure: "By the time Grace had made her way up the icy back-porch steps,
he was able to hide the Scotch and rinse his glass clean in the kitchen
sink. The drinking life, he thought, was lived moment by moment."
--And suddenly you realize how easy it is to fall out of the jungles and
swamps of Vietnam into the jungles and swamps of addiction, whether to
adrenaline buzz or to alcoholic haze. For the soldiering life too is
"lived moment by moment." As Stone adds, again luminously: "there was no
way to get the stuff back in the bottle."
This volume explores and embodies this central paradox of trauma, that
you get the stuff back in the bottle--the memories, the horror, the
intensity--only by first letting it out. Letting it out, The Other Side
of Heaven offers us a way back, together.
Randy Fertel
Tulane University
6120 Perrier St.
New Orleans LA 70118
rfertel@aol.com
504-891-1759 (phone/fax)