Distant Stars (ii)
From authors Le Minh Khue, Xuan Trinh, Nguyen Minh Chau, and the Foreign Languages Publishing House
The present collection includes stories written after 1965, when US war escalation started against the North of our country.
3 stories speak of the road. Not 1 word in them or the other 8 about a Ho Chi Minh trail.
There were trails, where women pushed bicycles of cargo and young men stumbled along in malaria and malnutrition looking old as Ho. None of them run through this collection.
These stories speak of the road through the forest where materiéle and personnel rolled to a war, albeit protracted war, the poor man’s war of attrition, without armor or artillery to speak of, but still proper war with campaigns and an order of battle,
not a doomed rebellion of farmers driven to improvisation by poverty but a government’s logistics of potlatch, of wealth. Who can break and burn stuff and kill people the longest. Who can get there firstest with the mostest day after month after year?
Why then no stories from the coastal supply route, I wonder. Boats carried freight as essential to the war as trucks.
Maybe none of the hands could write? Maybe nobody literate wanted to read about sailors doing what we always do, war and peace alike.
These 3 stories on the road are about reading and writers as much as about drivers and fixing the road. Each 1 is also a love story.
There are three of us - three girls living in a cave at the bottom of a hill.
The translator chose the present tense in English for that sentence. That was a choice unless it already had been the author’s decision to use the crude but emphatic present tense marker in Vietnamese. There are three of us - three girls living in a cave at the bottom of a hill.
They are Distant Stars, lights shining in the historical present though they could all have been dead already when the story reached its first readers when I was 10 years old. The author, one of the stars, is still shining on this planet, this side of the grass, writing in Ha Noi.
Khue is the personal name in English of author Lê Minh Khuê. It means nothing in my Vietnamese dictionary. In my life and now yours too it means Khue, who when I was a child is a teen digging up and exploding bombs that fall on the road and don’t blow up right away.
Our work? - staying here. When the bombs fall, we have to scramble up the hill, count the craters to fill, locate the bombs that didn’t go off and detonate them.
Big damn bombs. Even the little ones pack almost 2 hundred pounds of higher explosive in a package totaling 5 hundred pounds. The girls find and destroy them in daylight, with no air cover and one anti-aircraft gun on overwatch. They set and blow charges with all deliberate speed
before the road gang comes at dusk to fill in the holes then the trucks roll all night all weathers dropping love letters and carrying them away. Khue is in love with her girls in the cave, with the gun crew and the road crew and the truckers from Ha Noi who in turn gaze at their Ha Noi girls in the dirt, distant stars.
When you read the story there they still are in love with each other doing the work of the war. Distant Stars shining long ago and far away.
Neither of us has a watch.
Again with the present tense. Here I disagree with the translation into English from Vietnamese where tense is a matter of context. On the Long Road was reportage by an author who devoted himself to current events both as an artist and a reporter, (Nguyễn) Xuân Trình.
The driver turns to me and asks, “Light me a cigarette will you, comrade?”
Even if I had the Vietnamese text that “comrade” would demand interpretation. Did the translator choose the English word for some Vietnamese one meaning buddy, as in hey buddy got a light?
Or did Xuan Trinh mean to show the driver calling the author Comrade, a made man of the Vietnamese Communist Party? Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. Nguyễn Xuân Trình fought the French as a child but the VCP don’t open the books to every revolutionary.
The driver, a demobilized soldier, now a worker, might be promoting his passenger in fun as a black worker has addressed me before dawn on the street here, greeting me as captain, the boss of a crew, which means keep your distance and we will have no trouble.
Comrade does mean that, even if the driver knows Xuan Trinh to be a Comrade, a cadre of the apparat above the people. Trần Văn Thủy’s film Story of Kindness begins just 10 years after this book with contemptuous workers bitterly hailing comrade artists in the street. What have you done for us lately?
I hurry to do so, glad to be able to do something for him.
A crush. The reporter has got a crush on the driver. The socialist has got a crush on the worker.
We’re rolling toward the Fourth Zone.
First date is a hot one. Zone 4 was the middle of the road to the war, approaching the Republic of Viet Nam.
He keeps looking silently ahead, smiling sometimes to himself or frowning without paying any attention to me.
Driver is playing hard to get.
Dai - his name - is married and has a child.
Đại means big, in a classy way, from the Chinese register of Vietnamese. Đại học are higher studies, a college.
Đại Việt is the name of a previous Viet Nam, and for a party ferociously against French and VC alike. The last emperor of the dynasty before the Hồ was Bảo Đại.
Named to become Grand, Major, now Đại has fought in the war, founded a family, and returned to the front as a worker. He is not one of the lads Khue moons over as they drive by together.
The truck runs alone.
Its operator is on a mission rather than a run. He is special. The author is stricken.
My driver always keeps a good distance between us and the convoy ahead of us.
Because he doesn’t want the happy kids up ahead to get him killed.
Such cool care sometimes irritates me.
Happens when you are in love. Also makes me wonder why the Communist author rode with this individualist old-timer rather than among the mob of youth volunteers.
Having lighted his cigarette, I try to get him to speak, “Comrade Dai, I’ve got some perfumed tea in my canteen if you want some.”
Not an approach I would make to John Wayne.
He deigns to smile.
A break in the ice.
He looks at me a long time and, as though to sound me out, says, “Sleepy?”
You really want to be with me?
“I prefer to stay awake with you.”
It’s a date.
Dai presses down on the accelerator.
They become comrades in the sense of buddies On the Long Road.
In the bottom of the old box, the wick, near the end, suddenly crackled and flared up.
Moonlight in the Forest is a work of fiction. This movie you watch in your mind begins with light in shadow, stage business, where Khue instead launched directly into testimony and Xuan Trinh started his interview.
Oh, note that forest in the title. When you live and work under the trees, you speak of forest. Not jungle.
Jungle is a forest you may kill with herbicide, burn down with napalm, as a hut is a house you may set alight and a village is a town you may destroy in order to save because you don’t live there.
All the authors and characters of these three stories live and work in the forest. It’s what they know rather than what they don’t know. Ursula LeGuin, born to anthropologists, put it this way in her war story over the same years that Nguyễn Minh Châu, twelve months younger, wrote his:
The Word for the World is Forest.
The night advanced, but the men, lying or sitting all around in a delapidated (sic) bamboo hut of the gasoline storage service were far from thinking of sleep.
Only spelling error I have spotted. 1 typographical error would be a low number for a book made by all native speakers educated only in our language. The mistake of de- for di-lapidated suggests to me someone confident from listening to standard English, duh-lapidated, or even Southern: dee-lapidated.
Note that although the drivers are industrial workers they are relaxing through the night in the traditional manner rather than retiring for 8 hours modern sleep. Note that they are in a hut, not a house, under bamboo camouflage for a modern depot serving the road.
This rainy night, the group of drivers found almost all of them together.
Normally they drive through the dark but this night they all are rained out together. It’s a reunion. They entertain each other. They have fun.
Cute as a box of puppies, a California lady remarked on visiting with me a birthday party without cake or presents on the concrete floor of a Ha Noi apartment the size of my study here.
“Are you through? It’s my turn now.”
One had not finished his story when another was asking to speak.
They will become the fathers and uncles of my friends of the 1990s, college students in the peace these drivers won for them, whether the boys Khue adores or hard guys like Xuan Trinh’s guy.
“So, you’re finished? Now I’ll tell you mine,” said a voice coming out of a dark corner.
Back against two walls. Out of sight. Hard guy.
One night in March my truck took the road starting from Reserve K3.
If Reserve K3 is the same category and numeration as Zone 4 in Xuan Trinh’s story, it was the supply area around the port of Hai Phong and the jumping-off point at Vinh. I haven’t found any ford of Da Xanh on a map, but the driver and his author mean a hard right turn west into Laos,
where the Hmong fought on both sides. His fictional boy assistant Vang Chay bears the same name as a true-crime Hmong man, Chai Vang with the family name last. That Chai/y is now doing life in Wisconsin after shooting up a hunting party in the forest there.
Night had started to fall.
Night within night. Artful. Author and driver in the dark then tell a story of lovers who spend years devoted to each other from afar and 1 night together in the cab of his truck but who never meet.
It’s a more refined version of Khue and her brothers and sisters joyously serving together. It’s a more imagined version of Xuan Trinh and his driver. All 3 stories speak of connection and heart’s blood at work.
Moonlight in the Forest ends with the night, when the moon stays out and the driver tells his brothers to sleep through the day before returning to the road.
This is the second Viet Nam letter of 2 so far addressed to Distant Stars from the Foreign Languages Publishing House. The first posted on September 17, 2022.
See as well Phạm Tiến Duật’s trucker poem Poème des chauffeurs de camion sans pare-brise, in English and Vietnamese as well as the French of Mireille Gansel and Xuân Diệu at the letter of January 8, 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.