Third anniversary (i)

from the janitor

This Viet Nam letter is the 248th across the 38 months since February 9 in 2022. That first post has attracted 108 readers across 4 Gregorian years.

Gia Long established a nation at Hue, including Ha Noi by the Red River and Saigon by the Mekong, at the beginning of the century when my grandparents were born, over the same years as the republic of France and the United States of America.

The post of January 4, 2025 found 296 readers before the next launch on February 5.

The Regents of the University of California have published at the website of their Press with a capital P this introduction by Peter B. Zinoman to his interview 12 years ago with Huy Đức now in the current issue of their Journal of Vietnamese Studies.

By February 17 that new, second letter on Huy Đức had reached 213 sets of eyeballs.

My copy of the first volume of Huy Đức’s history of Viet Nam over our common lifetime has arrived. The title jumped up at me.

47 Viet Nam letters remain singletons, solitaires, the only 1 yet on their book. This 1 explains our fair use policy once and for all:

We publish under the protections of the first amendment to the federal constitution of the USA.

52 Viet Nam letters, 26 pairs, have addressed their book or topic twice only. The 2 letters so far on the anthology Campfires of the Resistance read 2 poems, 1 spoken from a white man in the capital of the United States of America and the other from a black American in a paddy in Democratic Republic of Viet Nam.

“I learned,” he replied, with a Kermit the frog roll of his head between low shoulders, “I learned to ride at the back of the bus and be happy.”

52 Viet Nam letters have addressed a total of 14 topics 3 times only. Here is 1 of the triplets which explain the Lower-case Roman numerals in parentheses:

(i) flags the first post about a book or topic. For example, Lower-case Roman numerals in parentheses (i) addresses these numerals for the first time.

12 Viet Nam letters have considered 1 of 3 books 4 times only. This sentence below begins the first of 4 so far on the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Vietnam:

Knowing anything about that country and people is a royal pain in the ass. Everyone thinks they own the place.

25 Viet Nam letters have addressed their topic 5 times only. Here is the fifth of 5 considering the project itself.

“Sooner or later you get tired of apologizing for those assholes.” A moment's conversation early this century at a summer colony of a socialist party of the 1930s, where their grandchildren the Students for a Democratic Society had met to strategize the 1960s.

30 Viet Nam letters have addressed 1 book 6 times only. This sixth 1 reviews the previous 5 letters on its book then spells out my reason for writing them:

This sixth time I write here about The Decorations and Medals of the Republic of Viet Nam to repeat my assertion

that our ally was a nation. If you say rather that they were marionettes well that fits my facts too but who pulls your strings?

28 Viet Nam letters have addressed 1 of 4 works 7 times only. Here is the seventh on a work of history I read as an anthology of poems.

In “Dutiful Wives, Nurturing Mothers, and Filial Children: Marriage as Affairs of State, Village, and Family,” historian Nhung Tuyet Tran continues to mine story and verse from documents of the 17C. Her first vein of ore in this second chapter is the Chi Nam Dictionary, a thesaurus of ideal conduct translated from ancient Chinese to early modern Vietnamese in 1641.

16 Viet Nam letters have addressed 1 of 2 books 8 times only. 1 book is the first anthology of short stories from men of the armed forces of the United States of America returned from the Republic of Viet Nam, Free Fire Zone, and the other is 1 of their most recent novels:

“It is the smartest novel I have read from the war between Ha Noi and Saigon, surely a personal judgement. An objective way to say it is that if you too read that literature in English, French, and Vietnamese with a sense of the national history of the region and its empires and their subject peoples and offshore allies you also may find that the new book does not contradict anything you know to be the case, and teaches you something.”

No topic has occasioned a Viet Nam letter 9 times only. 1 book only has attracted 10 letters, the most so far.

It was first the topic of the fourth Viet Nam letter,

Hi Do Anh, the novel just arrived. My initial reactions are that it is beautifully designed and produced, and that, from looking at the first chapter, I will enjoy reading it very slowly.

second, the sixth

In 1975 the People’s Army of Viet Nam took Saigon. The Democratic Republic of Viet Nam unified the nation in 1976 as the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam.

third, the thirteenth

“That night, she wrote a letter to her husband but could not finish it.”

Well, she has just betrayed him.

fourth, the twenty-second

When her father arrives home for the new year she shows off the piglet mom plans to feed and sell next year. Dad summons the chair of the housing project and forces him to report his wife and take the pig away.

fifth, the thirty-fifth

Yesterday I lay down and read a dozen and more chapters as I have longed to do, to read this novel like a dream. It is a dream I have had before, told by an older friend of mine, the novelist Duong Thu Huong,

in her Paradise of the Blind, translated into French by my friend Phan Huy Duong and English by my college contemporary Nina McPherson,

about the memory an entire nation has of a year, 1986, that also was rough for me on another continent, the one when my father died stricken by a wasting disease.

sixth, the forty-ninth

Her mother has died, starved of affection and food by her father’s devotion to one war after another, the one with Saigon, the one with China, and the one with the Khmer Rouge. The novel doesn’t specify but those are the dates.

seventh, the sixty-seventh

When the franchise promotes a sale she preps chicken before the customers line out the door so she may then serve them without delay. Her boss warns her then fires her because she is multiplying the loss leader.

eighth, the ninety-first

The story of the daughter ended with chapter 59, “The hurricane.” Her job selling plots in an oceanfront development blows away in a storm.

ninth, the ninety-third

See that “Book 2” on the left-hand page? Look between “Chapter 33. Gold” and “Chapter 34. At work.”

tenth, the 1 hundred and eighty-fourth, and the first on The Renovation’s version in Vietnamese language, Đổi Mới

I have written more often about the novel The Renovation than any other single work. I started in our first month, the second work covered, the third author.

and the second 1 on Đổi Mới, the 1 hundred and ninety-second Viet Nam letter:

Judge a book by its cover. What it’s for.

Đổi Mới

Last Wednesday, April 9 was 2 months since our third anniversary. I had swotted away across those 8 weeks at this review of 247 previous Viet Nam letters.

I have got a sense of what I have written about, and what I have yet to introduce to you. Over those months I also have begun republishing the letters in order, at the Viet Nam Literature Project page at Facebook, my own Daniel Edward Duffy page there, and at Bluesky.

We have picked up a reader or 2 at every posting or 2, as we have picked up 1 or 2 with every new letter. We are drawing attention to a literature in the sense of things to read occasioned by the nation of Viet Nam.

Nobody else has put it that way. But that literature is there and so are we all, in a world with Viet Nam.

Back to my letters from the home country.

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.