Based in a diaspora mostly originating from the former Republic of Vietnam, Vietnamese self-representation in the Francophone and Anglophone worlds has often been mediated by a Western appetite for anti-communist narratives. Most of the works of contemporary Vietnamese literature translated into English are by North Vietnamese veterans who have turned critical of their new government: Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War (1990), Duong Thu Huong’s Novel Without a Name (1991), and Truong Nhu Tang’s A Vietcong Memoir (1986). Meanwhile, very few non-dissident works of Vietnamese literature have received English translations. In contrast, dissident texts within Vietnam rarely get published because of the country’s current censorship policies. The politics of the literary marketplace have thus produced a split between the Western readership’s ideas of Vietnamese literature and Vietnamese self-conceptions. This is particularly true if one includes diasporic literature and its polarized politics within the body of a national literature, as I do.
Within the context of this split, Quan Manh Ha and Joseph Babcock’s Other Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of the American War and Its Aftermath (Columbia University Press, 2020) is a momentous contribution. These twenty translated stories are about the North Vietnamese soldier, and a majority of them are authored by North Vietnamese veterans. Up until now, there had only been two anthologies of Vietnamese short fiction available in English: Wayne Karlin and Ho Anh Thai’s Love After War (2003) and Linh Dinh’s Night, Again (1996). With the exception of one story written in 1976, the stories in Other Moons range from the 1990s until the present, with most coming from the last ten years. In light of Vietnam’s rapid modernization and social transformations within the last two decades, this collection provides an invaluable update on the current Vietnamese literary scene. The editors’ selections attempt to highlight those works which have recently acquired an important place in Vietnamese literature: as they note in their introduction, “Many are frequently taught and critically discussed in Vietnam, and several are considered canonical. Yet none of these stories, despite being so popular and widely read in Vietnam, has ever appeared before in English.”
It is worth highlighting the remarkable foreword by Bao Ninh, perhaps the most internationally known Vietnamese novelist. Ninh provides his unique perspective on the progression of twentieth-century Vietnamese literature from the New Poetry period (1930–1945) to socialist realism (1945–1990) and finally to the post-1986 literature of the Doi Moi period, when Vietnam began to transition out of its command economy. Ninh praises New Poetry as “the golden period in Vietnamese literature,” denigrates socialist realism as propagandistic and fundamentally anti-realist, and concludes by welcoming (as Other Moons does) a newer generation of writers who reject the political constraints associated with socialist realism.
It is possible Ninh overstates the shift between socialist realism and post-Doi Moi literature. Although the stories in Other Moons do not glorify the war, they do not necessarily condemn it either. And with the exception of the final story, Lai Van Long’s “A Moral Murderer,” these works never explicitly denounce the postwar government. At most, these writers bemoan the poverty and unhappiness of their postwar lives. Their critiques are partially depoliticized through their indirectness: the blame falls less upon a disgraceful war or a corrupt government, and more upon the difficulties of dealing with destruction’s aftermath and returning to civilian life. While we should pay attention to how this writing negotiates government censorship, it is also necessary not to simply read these stories as always having been distorted by the pressures of censorship. For instance, Nguyen Thi Mai Phuong’s story “Storms” follows a veteran named Trung, who must endure the shame and misery of his postwar life:
During the war he had lived in the woods under constant bombardment and gunfire; his hair and beard had grown long, his body soaked in mud, and he’d survived on wild vegetables and creek water. But he had not felt as miserable as he did now . . . Trung’s unit had wanted to award him the title of hero officially, but he’d refused this recognition. Now he felt that he had only really acted honorably back then, during the war—his life since had been full of deception and nasty tricks.This sentiment is shared by many veterans in the accompanying stories: the promises of the revolution have been left unfulfilled.
Aside from appearing in “A Moral Murderer,” Vietnam’s disastrous Five-Year Plans and New Economic Zones are conspicuously absent. For these writers who might face punishment for their artistic expression, this absence creates enough interpretive space for the poverty and corruption of postwar life to reflect not the failures of the Communist government but rather the ironic and burdensome nature of existence in general. Indeed, some stories may simply concern the cruelty of life, without having this cruelty be about state debauchery. While most of the stories in Other Moons are characterized by tearful endings, “Storms” ends with a vague optimism: when Trung’s former comrades visit, they remind his village of how heroically he had fought during the war. Although this does not necessarily mean Trung will receive the government benefits granted to heroes, at least his spirits are lifted during this moment. It is this specter of progressive humanism, rendered ambiguous through the exigencies of censorship, that makes reading these stories both interesting and difficult.
Despite the collection’s subtitle, Other Moons does not include many war stories—or, at least, not what many readers would imagine war stories to be. Scenes of battle are rare, as are the typical themes of brotherhood, courage, hatred, and atrocity. Instead, these are war stories insofar as they are about how the war did not really end in 1975. In one story, for instance, a woman is out catching crabs when she steps on one of the many undetonated bombs in the Chau River. Other pieces examine the generational effects of Agent Orange, as in Luong Liem’s “The Sorrow Wasn’t Only Ours,” when Dai rebuffs his lover because he does not want their children to inherit the effects of dioxin poisoning: “We can’t have children. We don’t know what the future will be like for us. So let’s just end our relationship now.”
For many of these stories, the disaster of the war is displaced onto romantic relationships. Returning from the battlefront with PTSD and disabling injuries, veterans constantly sabotage their relationships because they feel unworthy of the lovers who had waited for them. In “Out of the Laughing Woods,” Thao registers her lover’s disappointment upon their reunion: “Thao felt his eyes glance over her skinny body in the old military uniform, her pale lips and thinning hair. She started to cry out of self-pity.” Thao eventually ends things to no longer burden her boyfriend, who soon after enters into a new relationship. In her new state of abandonment, she swallows a handful of pills while writing pitiful letters to herself.
As these stories suggest, there is no place for the returning soldier in postwar society. In “The Chau River Pier,” May, presumed to have died during the war, is seen as a vengeful spirit when she returns to her village. But even after proving otherwise, she retains a ghostly presence and cannot develop normal relationships with other people: “Her face looked soulless. She sat like a statue in front of the flickering fire.” Her family also worries whether their war pensions will be suspended now that May is alive. Once May resigns herself to her invisibility and retires to a hut on the outskirts of the village, her presence is only remembered by the lullabies she sings each night. Forced into this social death, she is once again regarded as a legend, just as she had been before returning from the war.
This piece reveals another recurring theme in the collection: the distribution of government benefits. While the veterans of these stories resent the impoverishment that has made them so reliant on these pensions, they are even more bitter about the banality of their bureaucratic struggles to secure them, which contrasts strikingly with their memories of their noble wartime efforts. The war’s legacy is ironically reduced to materialistic squabbles. In some cases, the war effort begins to feel absurd because of how little had changed. In Lai’s “A Moral Murderer,” the narrator realizes, “A change in history didn’t make a huge difference for poor people, who eventually still had to worry about putting food on the table.” This dissatisfaction with government benefits is the closest that most stories come to explicitly critiquing the government’s corruption and ineffectuality.
Of course, we should be aware of our position as Western readers before faulting these stories for their sometimes hesitant political critique, and the same holds true when taking up their ambivalent attitude towards gender. As the editors acknowledge, only five of the collection’s twenty stories are written by women, pointing out that, “This gender disparity reflects the fact that the vast majority of Vietnamese fiction about the war is written by men . . . [and] the rate of conscription was much higher among men.” There is, however, some compensation in the fact that the female soldier is often acknowledged in a number of male-authored stories, such as Nguyen Minh Chau’s “A Crescent Moon in the Woods,” Nguyen Trong Luan’s “The Corporal,” Vuong Tam’s “Red Apples,” and once again, Suong’s “The Chau River Pier.” In all of these stories, the repudiation of the soldier’s sacrifice is only compounded for the female veteran, whose social worth is still primarily founded upon her roles as wife and mother. Thus, the titular corporal of Nguyen’s story, in spite of her military rank, remains an outcast because of how she had become masculinized by the war. She desperately promises her mother: “I will get married, Mom. I’ll even marry a crazy man with cracked lips and a belly button that sticks out.”
Yet an opposite logic also holds true: women who do not lose their sexuality as a result of the war cannot escape their sexualization in spite of their military prowess. In Pham Ngoc Tien’s “They Became Men,” a female soldier contributes to the war effort by taking the virginity of her young male comrades. While doing so, she thinks to herself, “Please accept this small gesture so that you can become a man and will never have to regret such a simple, unfulfilled desire if you happen to lose your life in this cruel war.” Although the editors praise this story as one that “challenges the traditional Confucian values that had dominated Vietnamese society for thousands of years and dictated how a ‘virtuous’ woman should act,” it may also be true that the heroine internalizes her socially assigned role as a sex object. She tells each of the men she sleeps with, “You don’t have to remember me . . . I’m very happy just like this.” Later, when she is raped by a soldier she had refused, the belief in her agency over her own sexuality is proven to be an illusion. The unsettling frequency of sexual assault in these stories—notwithstanding aesthetic defenses on the ground of war fiction’s necessary realism—confine female characters to the femininized ideals of submission and self-sacrifice that stretch back to Lady Kieu in the Vietnamese literary tradition. Tellingly, the female characters of Other Moons are raped only in the stories written by men. Nguyen Thi Thu Tran, in contrast, offers her “An American Service Hamlet” as the rare story with a happy ending, which celebrates a wartime sex worker who marries a sympathetic American G.I. and moves abroad with him.
If the South Vietnamese soldier has often been forgotten, Other Moons reveals that perhaps the same can be said of North Vietnamese soldiers, many of whom led shameful and degraded lives in the postwar period. Just as the South Vietnamese soldier, as Viet Thanh Nguyen writes, can be a reminder of loss and failure, the North Vietnamese soldier is also pitied as a reminder of the costs of victory. These soldiers who have eluded death return to home to realize that honor is only granted to the dead. When, in “The Chau River Pier,” May’s return causes her sister to worry about their family’s reputation, this worry stems not from May’s lack of courage during the war but from how utterly war-worn she appears. Her sister’s husband is forced to chastise his wife: “Will you just shut up, please? She’s lucky enough to have come home alive. What else do you want?” But his retort is indirectly addressed to May as well: instead of expressing gratitude for her sacrifice, it is May who should be grateful for still being alive—if only barely so.
The returning soldier is burdened with a grief and shame that are almost impossible to articulate. Accordingly, many rely on a narrative frame in which a civilian gradually learns about a veteran’s tragic past. Nguyen Minh Chau’s “A Crescent Moon in the Woods” is one of the few in which a soldier tells his own story. But even this story remains incomplete: “The storyteller stopped suddenly, as if something had crept into his throat from the bottom of his heart. The other soldiers didn’t say a word. Nobody asked him to finish his story.” A tribute to the war’s afterlives, Ha and Babcock’s Other Moons similarly shares stories that remain unfinished, unborn, and untold.
