The Renovation (viii)
from Do Hoang Ngoc Anh and đổi mới
The story of the daughter ended with chapter 59, “The hurricane.” Her job selling plots in an oceanfront development blows away in a storm. She takes the bus back to Saigon and walks alone to her old place by “The river,” chapter 60.
The building and neighborhood has washed away. Her landlord fishes from the rubble. All he wants to catch, he tells her, is the smell.
“The shop,” chapter 61 of 75, page 231, returns to Ha Noi to follow her barking mad father the retired officer in tight focus through the last fifth of the novel to the final page. I have flipped ahead through those 15 chapters to check.
He appears in every one:
“The shop,” “The remembrance,” “The ride,” “The youth,” “Arrival,” “The walk,” “The base,” “Grilled fish,” “Observation,” “The tiger,” “The reinforcement,” “The war,” “The tunnel,” “The peace.”
I had thought to read these 50 pages through in a pleasant hour. I instead groped through not quite 30 pages of only 8 chapters. I had before drifted into the daughter’s story from the first chapter on as into my friends’ memories of her day, then followed her with interest to the new economy in Saigon.
This final adventure of her father back in Ha Noi is hard to grasp. “The shop” starts off in brisk purpose. The old soldier closes up the collective shop he has kept running despite the return of free trade. He retrieves his pistol, war booty, from the concrete sand table he had built around it at home.
So far, pleasantly sane. He heads out of Ha Noi. Whoops he is as mad as ever. People travel due north to the border with China to trade. They journey west into the frontier, the marches, towards Laos, for esoteric knowledge and powers.
The next 7 chapters I have read, “The remembrance,” “The ride,” “The youth,” “Arrival,” “The walk,” “The base,” and “Grilled fish”
are not chapters of a novel but stages in the journey of a romance, not a bodice-ripping romance novel but a dream vision like the long poem Roman de la Rose or a tale of transformation like the Journey to the West.
The mad father journeys west into his wars that have never stopped. Deep in a cave he meets merry companions still at it. As, who knows, they may well be.
These chapters sound to me like an allegory of life and after-life, to be read with a hidden key, but they also echo the hard-boiled physician Quang Van Nguyen’s factual remembrance of his 1960s childhood in the border region with Cambodia,
in a cave meditating with a monk at the very edges of attested longevity, about 140 years old, in retreat from other wars entirely. Yes, these chapters read to me very like the border world of Fourth Uncle in the Mountain.
None of it entirely impossible and all of it a fiction assembled from life just as in the daughter’s four fifths of The Renovation. I am going to back up and begin again to read the father’s tale to the end of the book and talk to you later.
What is Do Hoang Ngoc Nguyen’s romance all about? I have peeked ahead so I do know that daughter joins her father again in the final chapter, “The seed.” You know, what has sprouted on that cover.
This was the eighth of 10 Viet Nam letters so far about The Renovation by Do Ngoc Hoang Anh. The first appeared on February 16, 2022, the second on February 23, 2022, the third on March 12, 2022,
the fourth on April 2, 2022, the fifth on May 2, 2022, the sixth on June 4, 2022,
the seventh on July 16, 2022, then the ninth on September 14, 2022. The tenth, also first and only Viet Nam letter so far about Đổi Mới by Đô Hoàng Ngọc Ánh appeared May 29, 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..
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.