Cõi Đem (ii)
from novelist Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn at publisher Làng Văn
Night Country? Realm of Night. The first sentence on the first page begins: over there. If you are reading here in daytime then you are reading about what goes on in the shady part of the world.
The second sentence starts with morning breaking through the tropical treetops. We will leave it over there for today.
We spend our afternoon here rather on the title page of the book. "Truyện dài," it says. Long story.
A truyện is a story. Once from the back of my motorcycle a woman dismissed two young men on theirs voicing opinions about the two of us.
"Không phải truyện của mày," she said, using a familiar form of address I don't use. This is not your story.
Truyện Kiều is one title of a national poem we also call Kim Vân Kiều, the names of the three friends whose story it is. Crafted of exquisite couplets - talent and fate fight and you see things that twist your guts - it tells a story.
You wouldn't call it a long story, though. A long story is not a short story. Both are creatures of the newspapers and publishing houses that imagine a community in a national language.
It would be eccentric to memorize either one as many still do a long poem. A long story is spelled nearly the same as a feature film, phim truyền.
That truyền, sporting a different diacritic, means to broadcast, to transmit. People have adapted the same root at two different times with different phonetics.
Maybe. It's a long story. That means in French toute une histoire.
People pronounce both truyens as if they start with ch, by the way. Ours sometimes we spell that way.
Chuyện. That oral spelling suggests the demotic. Our long story, with the literary spelling, rather is a print book. A novel, we would say, as if anyone knows that means.
Well in French it still means new, and the news. At the back of this long story the publisher, Literature Village, lists Night Country as 29th in their list of 84 titles in 1991,
not as a long story but as a tiểu thuyết xã-hội. A tiểu thuyết is a novel, straight up, unambiguously a novel as a romance is in French. Xã-hội is society.
Viet Nam, by the way, at home and overseas, is a language that has been standardized many times. No rules, as a linguist once explained to me, many exceptions.
So this long story is a novel in social realism. I notice that Literature Village publication number 33, just down at the bottom of that page, is a Truyện cười xã-hội chủ-nghĩa, a funny story of society taken as a body of thought.
Socialism.
The word for funny can mean either a quiet smile or falling-down gut-busting laughter. The word for body of thought is what we indicate by the suffix, -ism.
That is just exactly what I would call Night Country. It is a funny story, sad and gentle when not angry and savage, about a way of life. About two ways of life, actually,
night and day, meeting each other. You will see things that make you sick at heart, and you will laugh. Okay, next time I will finish the second sentence.
This is the second Viet Nam letter of 6 so far on Cõi Đem by Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn. The first posted on March 23 2022, then 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.
Promotional copy:
Nguyen Ngoc Ngan cast up on a beach as his family drowned. He began writing fiction on the spot.
Fleeing Viet Nam made him a writer. Writing in Vietnamese rather than English made him an author about life rather than about Viet Nam.
He hosted not only the nightclub show Paris By Night for decades but also the thousands of video hearths families have gathered around inside and out Viet Nam.
He lives, as I do, as many literary and scholarly and scientific people do, out of easy reach of any one Vietnamese community. Some communities have reached out at his books,
whose sale supported his publisher and all the Vietnamese-language booksellers among the dispersed. The haters said he was an antenna,
an informant to the Communists. That is what they say about anyone who succeeds. The Communists think that any of us who do intellectual work around Viet Nam
are with the Central Intelligence Agency, who threw a serious scare into them by almost winning the war by a campaign of extermination. Look, in our thing, if no one has called you some kind of spy you aren't doing your job.
Pay no attention to any of that bullshit. Please do watch as I read, slowly, many times, over months maybe years my favorite work of art sometimes,
one weird anti-Communist novel, about how a refugee goes back over there and raises havoc because he has so few morals he does not even grasp that he is wicked.
Don Quixote, you could say, as asshole. A Graham Greene novel in Vietnamese, Catholic like that one, funnier, more horrible and wise.
Please consider demonstrating your attention by signing up to these Viet Nam letters from free. About 20 people have since we launched in February.
I am thrilled. Think of it as 20 attending 3 lectures a week. Twice as many as I taught Vietnamese literature to at Yale when I didn't know a thing.
2 hundred, as I lectured to on general anthropology at Chapel Hill, would be as much as I need. Please consider patronizing the others at $50/year.
Please consider subsidizing the whole circus at $250/year. We now run at less than half of what the Internal Revenue Service of the United States considers a small non-profit.
All that now is the cost of employing me. I did this work 30 years without salary or budgets. That left a trail of wreckage and nearly killed me a few times.
So now I am making it pay, one step at a time. Once we have me covered we will give me a budget to contract other work. Why, you may wonder, don't I just start calling
my vast list of lifelong friends who could fund it all without noticing. Well, because for instance I don't know Ngan and think he might not think much of me,
as half his community thinks poorly of him. That's what Viet Nam is, a occasion of visceral disagreement. I am the one who can handle that.
Why I get the big bucks. Why I will not put any of my friends on the hook for supporting, say, my good friend and close colleague the Vietnamese poet who has become a vocal anti-Semite.
I want readers, who are no more responsible for the editor or the authors than they are for what is on the news. So, if you read, you are doing what is needful.
If you will also support all readers well then thank you very much. Please give it some thought. No hurry. The inner circle are bankrolling this one sharing my hopes to expand.
Since we give you nothing in exchange we are not already giving everyone, the American war machine supports your charity by encouraging you to deduct any gift from your income before tax.