Water: A Chronicle by Nguyễn Ngọc Tư, translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý, Major Books, 2024

Water might have been the first floating signifier, if the image is anything to go by. Depending on its form, quantity, and culture of reception, it can be an agent of ritual purity, a destroyer of crops, a source of life, a symbol of illegible emotion. For the Vietnamese, water has been an operative metaphor and a lived reality since time immemorial; the word nước indexes both ‘water’ and ‘country,’ the two elements inseparably wedded in the linguistic psyche. A ruler of the Nguyễn dynasty once compared his precarious position on the throne to being in a boat, with the hoi polloi as the waters around him, threatening to overturn him at the slightest discontent. The scholar-translator Huỳnh Sanh Thông pointed out that Lạc, the first recorded name for the Vietnamese people, has a sonic affinity with numerous words denoting water: lạch (creek), lạt (to taste bland like water), lan (to spread like water).

The newly translated Water: A Chronicle, by the Vietnamese writer Nguyễn Ngọc Tư, embeds itself in this serpentine tradition. Better known as a litterateur of short stories than a novelist, Nguyễn Ngọc Tư’s popularity is virtually unmatched in her native country, even being named by Forbes as one of Vietnam’s most influential women in 2018. Many of her other works are similarly obsessed with the liquid element—as evidenced by their titles: Nước chảy mây trôi (Flowing Water, Drifting Cloud), Đảo (Island), Không ai qua sông (No One Crosses the River).

Though she mobilises a distinct dialect that is difficult to translate, spotlighting rural inhabitants swept up in the caprices of fate, her oeuvre is not unknown to the outside world. Her short story collection Cánh đồng bất tận (Endless Field) snagged Germany’s LiBeraturPreis in 2018, but the Anglophone sphere has thus far only received her work in dribs and drabs. This is now set to change with the groundbreaking labour of Major Books—a brand-new UK-based indie publisher dedicated to Vietnamese literature in translation, and with the poetic flair of translator Nguyễn An Lý, who deservedly won two PEN Translates awards this year.

One of those awardees was Water: A Chronicle. A loosely linked collection of stories in the polyphonic vein of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, this crystalline text presents us with nine variations on a skeletal theme: a woman in search of a sacred heart that will cure her child’s malady. In every chapter, she wears a different mask; no one knows who she really is. A series of narrators, receiving reports of the woman’s quest through the grapevine, each assumes that they’ve figured out her identity—she must be the sister, the wife, the ex-classmate who vanished all those years ago. Many of these narrators pursue her, to no avail.

The thread that tethers these doubles together, then, runs along the axis of space rather than time, circling around a void of fantasy, disaffection, and mourning. We might conceive of Water’s chronicity as lateral rather than vertical, grazing the same wound through parallel iterations of equally plausible, bereft selves. As hinted by the Sino-Vietnamese words Biên sử (编史) in the original title, Water occupies a realm midway between fabrication and history.

Implausible as the premise first appears, it attests to the fantastical, often phantasmic lustre of Nguyễn Ngọc Tư’s imagination—and the coruscating intensities with which Nguyễn An Lý has rendered it in English. Each detail, though resolutely literal, is also burnished with a halo of myth; the heart being sought is as much a four-chambered organ as it is some ineffable panacea for worldly pain. The number nine, too, likely corresponds to the tributaries of the Mekong Delta—also known as “Nine Dragons”—from which Nguyễn Ngọc Tư hails.

The body to which the heart belongs is also of doubtful ontology, caught somewhere between the mortal and the divine. Amongst the nine pellucid tales that make up Water, some refer to the heart’s owner as ‘His Holiness,’ a quasi-deity to be jealously guarded from the depredations of natural disaster and human avarice. Elsewhere, he’s revealed as nothing but a fraud named Phủ, a member of nefarious gangs whose guile is so consummate that it even ‘fool[s] himself into believing his own tricks.’ Nguyễn Ngọc Tư displays, through these overlaid alternatives, a world stricken by cynicism and gullibility alike, desperate for a foothold.

From one story to the next, the particulars of the central plot are assembled over and over—not unlike new imprints tracking over what the tide has swept away. We don’t know for sure if the infantile ailment in need of treatment is an incessant case of liquid-oozing, or a constitutional inability to smile (though one seems easier to pathologise than the other). The mother herself is variously reincarnated as an absent-minded childhood acquaintance known for her facility with math, a reclusive sister who keeps cockroaches as pets, and a gaunt colleague whose paleness calls to mind the Chinese wuxia heroine, Xiaolongnü. Yet, beneath the protean restlessness of each version, there emerges an iconographic portrait of maternal (over-)solicitousness and exalted love, detailing the outlandish lengths to which she is willing to go to deliver her child from infirmity.

Like the rivers she traverses, fluidity is the point. Barely materialising in any of the interlocked stories, she is more a vaporous concoction of rumour and recollection than a creature of flesh and blood. As each narrator hears the second-hand news of a heart-hunting madwoman, they each summon—in their own fashion—a spectre of someone they once knew. Sometimes the relation is a distant one of neighbourly adjacency; sometimes it is as intimate as romance and siblinghood. None of the tellers, however, can avoid projecting their own desires and anxieties onto the aqueous surfaces of feminine mystery. The condition of womanhood, maybe, is to remain diaphanous and elusive:

She had a way of fading into the distant blur of girls, all with the same arching ponytails, the same brown sugar complexion from a native ancestor hundreds of years back, the same postures sitting behind market stands or sewing shops or disappearing in and out of inns. They are there and yet they are not.

That last line, with all its ambivalence, sets the stage for a later, virtuosic chapter named The Shadow Bride, in which the eponymous maiden is literally someone’s own shadow. To other observers, ‘she was there and yet she was not’—see how the leitmotif of vacillation recurs—’she did everything with a lightness they found unbearable.’ With a rich surreality reminiscent of Carmen Maria Machado and Angela Carter, Nguyễn Ngọc Tư fiddles with the overdetermined tropes of heterosexist gender dynamics. She explains the husband’s infatuation: he’s taken precisely by her barely-thereness and her reticence, ‘the way she could create doubles of herself, or shapeshift in the blink of an eye.’

In this swirling quasi-novel, saturated with insatiable quests of all varieties, everyone is engaged in endless seeking, as if to plug some unbridgeable lack. A sodden melancholy clings to even the peripheral characters, disclosed like so many cries for help. One driver recounts a heartbreaking memory of an adolescent love who turns out to be a trans woman, describing her as ‘every inch a work of art.’ Another subplot features a failed photographer, who one day sets out for the mountains and never returns. While alive, he refused to concede to the glib manipulations of Photoshop:

Those pictures, the fruits of his time-forsaking labour to freeze a drop of time, were then sold at a laughable price to magazines which splashed them next to articles singing the praise of our beautiful countryside, reminiscing about rivers replaced by urban spaces, wallowing in a sentimental, dated rusticism.

There’s bitterness here, and it is not a Luddite’s light scoff. Whether wrought on the scale of gender or geography, interiority—that most private, inarticulable of spaces—is ever poised to flee from an outsider’s intrusive gaze. We might think of that slipperiness, too, as the reward of Nguyễn Ngọc Tư’s often challenging writing. She refuses to be palatable for a global market, alloying opaque localisms with an almost florid literariness, in what feels like an up-yours to diasporic fetishism. She’s especially adroit with deployments of in medias res, cataloguing emotional abysses with extravagant rigour. Blink, and you might miss the sheer density inscribed into her characters’ destinies—how a mother perishes under the pulverising weight of baskets of mangoes, or how a narrator’s dream of sprouting wings presages the imminent demise of those around him.

And why should we be exempt? Dissolved into the maelstrom are us readers, looking on from our detached perch. Bearing us from one ceaseless current to another, the narrative makes mockery of our wish for stable ground, troubles our hope of wrenching sense from the surging eddies. Like the prisoners in ‘A Cry from the Sky’, subject to a dystopian erasure of selfhood and renamed as digits, we too must grasp for ‘miscellaneous stories to fill the void’ of our minds.

Or consider what might be the most bizarre and fascinating story in the book, ‘Fairy Ascending’. Against the post-apocalyptic backdrop of a deadly bloodsucking fly plague, a couple survives by sheer luck; they happen to be word-eaters, sustaining themselves on printed matter. Once thought of as savages and freaks, now they have the last laugh, sheltering in a library to exploit their evolutionary advantage. They curate word-feasts based on how language tastes, taking into account tone, genre, and referent. The saccharine slush of love poetry should be counterpoised by the more sensible ‘balance’ of an essay; the lyricism of a sunbeam might be ruined by excrement on the other side of the page. Words become flesh, embodying the things that they would otherwise merely emblematise.

I would be remiss not to mention an uncannily resonant conceit in another work of Vietnamese literature published this year: Nguyễn Thanh Hiện’s genre-bending Chronicles of a Village, in a fabulous translation by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng. There, a maximalist tale (embedded in the text as a quotation from a longer, fictionalised prose work) speaks of ‘letter-eaters’ and their post-prandial transmogrifications. After ingesting the letters, the eaters transform into ‘flowers and butterflies hovering above the skin and hair of exquisite maidens.’ Even ‘filthy coins,’ upon contact with these mystical glyphs, morph into ‘heavenly dwellings on earth.’

Is this not the secret dream of all literature: a utopia of language sufficient unto itself, the way a god enshrined in monumental gold lives a ‘life without breathing,’ emancipated from the frailties of the body? One disabled orphan in Water: A Chronicle is described as possessing a ‘semicolon pair of legs’; the shrine-keeper who cares for him evokes the semicolon as a mark that ‘neither proves nor puts an end to anything, it never takes sides, it holds in equal regard both what precedes and what follows it.’ Nguyễn Ngọc Tư might as well be enumerating the cavernous, rapturous pleasures of her own prose. A ‘lavish banquet of words’ to be caressed and savoured with desire, to be slowly digested against the flickering gratifications of ‘moving pictures and instant images.’ A semicolon holding the before and the after in equal relish.

Meanwhile, water encircles the text and the world, bringing them closer in a planetary, glassy continuum. It surpasses every partition, obliterates every boundary. It is ‘daring, pig-headed, hellbent to travel ever further,’ frothing to leave no stone unturned, no vacuum untouched. An inspirational saying in Vietnamese goes: còn nước, còn tát—as long as there’s water left, it can be scooped out—meaning, don’t give up. But what if there’s an over-abundance of liquid, leaking into waterlogged corners and pooling on abandoned rooftops? ‘Having conquered all surfaces, it reposed with supreme calm, holding whatever mysteries in its depths.’ Maybe, congealed within Water’s inhuman heart is an eschatology; a longing to be made whole again.

Alex Tan is a writer in New York. They’ve been assistant managing editor at Asymptote Journal for three years, where they frequently review Arabic literature in translation. Other essays have been published in Words Without Borders, The Markaz Review, ArabLit, and Full Stop Quarterly; some of these writings can be found at https://linktr.ee/alif.ta

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Read more on the Asymptote blog:

• Land / Water: A Chronicle of Vietnamese as a Diasporic Condition
• Open Secrets: An Interview with Phan Nhiên Hạo
• Translation Tuesday: “The Woman by the River” by Nguyễn Đức Tùng