Cõi Đem (i)

from novelist Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn at publisher Làng Văn

Country of Night, by Nguyen Ngoc Ngan. The author’s family, first name is that of the administration who unified Viet Nam over the same years as George Washington’s did the United States.

The middle name is a gem, maybe jade. The final, personal name suggests money.

So far as I know it is the name on his passport. He has emceed for years a musical revue on video, Paris by Night, under the same name.

As emcee he speaks with assurance, quietly, distinguishing in his northern speech all the tones of his written language as he introduces singers from every region. He speaks from the nation, purity, and prosperity.

Northerners were those in the Republic of Viet Nam who already had fled direct rule of the Communist Party. Those now overseas did it twice.

Làng Văn, the publisher, also publishes his show. The name means village of literature.

They assert copyright inside to this book, as American publishers usually do not. They are a publisher in Canada,

where the author lives, neither in Paris nor in Westminster, California, the actual villages of Vietnamese literature overseas.

The back cover advertises the Làng Văn monthly, “living in a different country you cannot not read the magazine of politics, literature, and the fine arts”

and also Society, “magazine of research, creation, and critique,” every other month, both at a post office box in Toronto.

Nguyen Ngoc Ngan wrote his first book after losing his family and washing up on shore I think in Malaysia. He wrote one book in English

in which language he had to write about Viet Nam. He has now written dozens in Vietnamese, where he can write about life.

Outside, this one begins, the sun was already shining. Outside a hotel room,

but the phrase meaning outside means literally on the other side. Idiomatically it means over there, as in back home in Viet Nam.

A man of no morals has returned, to a country where people are too poor for morals. More figuratively, something perhaps only a second language

learner would notice, the phrase used also refers to the mother’s side of the family. In the motherland, the sun has come up,

on the country of night. I will get to the second sentence next time.

This is the first Viet Nam letter of 6 so far on Cõi Đem by Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn. The second posted on April 23, 2022, the third on May 25, 2022, the fourth on July 2, 2022, the fifth on August 8, 2022, and the sixth on February 22, 2023

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.