Dalat 1998-2002
Returning to Dalat in 2002 on the fourth day of the Lunar New Year
I no longer recognized Dalat.
I saw a beetle trying to flip itself over its legs
tiny pines waving at the sky.
I ran up to Cu Hill but it had turned into a breast
for Taiwanese businessmen to climb on top and squeeze every day.
I went down to the lake,
its right side had dried up, its left side was trashed,
the lakeshore lousy with snack vendors and souvenir photographers.
I stopped by Café Tung, now a hotspot filled with customers of all species.
Here was the place, in 1987, in my corduroys, in shoes borrowed
from my pal Bang
that were too big I had to stuff them with paper,
where I sat smoking cigarettes while waiting for the mediocre coffee
to drip drop into my cup.
When you are 20 years old without a future but very sharp teeth,
you can chew with pleasure your life in Dalat,
you can stand with serenity under the waterfalls of your suffering
as if standing in the middle of a strawberry field looking at the little temple
on a hill on the other side where a guard dog is being raised
to protect the faith, where the old monk died after refusing his last meal
so that the novice monk could have a bit of rice.
When the novice monk grew up he became a desperate lover.
Dalat now has gotten fat,
with streets stretched way out, houses recklessly thrown up.
Motor scooters have all stolen the peace of morning.
Days are full of rough and tumble men from the crap provinces
who maraud the soft bodies of young women,
mug the gentle language, maim the land.
The world is full of pawns being pushed by slogans and guns to cross rivers.
I drank my bottled water, and I retreated to the Global Trek Hotel
next to the Palace of King Bao Dai. Through the foggy window I saw a woman
shouldering two bamboo baskets balanced on a pole.
I don’t know what she was carrying—
but I know the weight of life stuck in a valley.
llinois, April 25, 2007
The up elevator opens onto a floor full of books
gutter water from a tame rainy season
is just enough to drown grass
growing nostalgically after winter
pine cones roll off the roof
dropping onto the yard caked with unraked leaves
and a bewildered dog watches passing cars in this small town
Clouds sprout
on the smooth face
of a young man carving a wooden figure
a half-naked god
whose stomach is filled
with mistakes and pleasures
like a box full of love letters and coins
Glory to those who live in solitude
and die like eagles on snowy mountaintops
far from senseless people
with clay heads, concrete legs, and tin tongues
who pray nervously
from church benches casting fearful shadows
From the library you can see the lake
a house and a tomb of fish
see the carefree roads
cutting through the harmony of the Plains
sixty-five miles west of Chicago
the day smells like peanut butter
on the fields of glory tractors are busy drawing
the austere face of freedom.
A Travel Guide for Hue
Thua Hien Province, as often noted in history books, has many sea mouths.
There is Thuan An, which boasts a temple for worshipping whales,
a royal travel station, and affluent villages,
once called the City of Thuan An by the French.
There is also the sea mouth at Tu Hien,
whose deadly waves devoured countless boats.
Angry King Ly Than Tong ordered his soldiers
to fire two cannon balls into the waves:
one wave was fatally wounded, turning water into blood;
one wave, desperate, fled to the high seas.
From then on the village boats traveled in peace.
Later King Tu Duc also ordered
to fire the canons directly upon French’s war ships:
one wave was fatally wounded, turning water into blood;
one wave, desperate, fled to the high seas.
From then on French ships came and went freely.
Please note, dear tourists, King Tu Duc was a poet.
This Country
This country never had any dinosaurs,
a long-standing problem.
Is this sea of vegetables really necessary
to resurrect non-existent fossils?
This country is being watched by a naked army,
revolutionary leftovers
led by a great monkey
who trained an entire nation to perform circus tricks.
This country is a rainy night
protecting those who stay put but flooding the way
home for those out on patrol
returning wounded and disarmed.
This country was not sufficiently saved,
salty and mushy served on a cracked platter,
owner and chef counting money
in the middle of a backyard filled with empties.
This country crawls left and right
to trenches and underground shelters
no longer a secret but choked and full of eels
escaping from the past.
This country is a rusty bomb
in a recycling plant owned by China
a deaf explosive
taken apart and sold for scrap.
This country is getting old,
its fields tattered patches, its rivers faded threads—
I’ve taken them off and left for another country
where I keep searching flea markets for something similar.
Vietnamese Horoscopes
Vietnamese are forever young,
until the day they become a spasm
of coughing.
The period in between
we reserve
for bragging.
Are either children
or ready to give up the ghost.
For us there is no so-called “adulthood.”
We live ready to be reincarnated
into anybody
not Vietnamese.
Though each day we proudly retell
our origin story—
hatched from one hundred eggs…
The truth is we like omelets
for breakfast
and we’ve been eating each other
through civil wars.
from Paper Bells
Phan Nhiên Hạo
translated from the Vietnamese by Hai-Dang Phan
Read the original in Vietnamese
Listen to the original read by the poet:
The Vietnamese poet Phan Nhiên Hạo was twenty-four when he immigrated to the United States in 1991, young enough to start over in some important ways, but old enough to carry in himself the cargo of his Vietnamese identity, history, and language. Even many years after his initial shock of moving to the United States, Phan continues to document in his poems the aftershocks of displacement and the bewilderment of living in an adopted homeland. His poems capture the everyday surreality of being an immigrant metabolized into poetic strategies of estrangement. No single poem of his looks or sounds the same, made as they are by whatever is at hand and responsive to diverse realities, from the humdrum to the cataclysmic. Yet the defining features of his poetry can be recognized: a homespun resourcefulness; swerves of the surreal within the real; a telescoping of multiple planes of existence; a deceptively simple language and plain-spoken voice; an uncompromising commitment to South Vietnamese refugee memory. For years now, Phan Nhiên Hạo has been creating a distinct body of poetry that transmits a vital signal from the diaspora—sorrowful, humorous, resilient, and unforgettable—though that signal has been carried and received by far too few. The signal has something to do with exile, not only what it means to be a poet writing under new forms of banishment and regimes of censorship but also exile as a critical and creative act of resistance and freedom—it has something to do with not being at home at home. The disenchanted music in Hạo’s poetry somehow evokes for me the experience of driving through an American city for the first time and listening to an uncommon voice singing at a lower frequency, like songs that go past telling, altogether elsewhere.
Phan Nhiên Hạo was born in Kontum, Vietnam in 1967 and immigrated to the United States in 1991. He is the author of three collections of poetry in Vietnamese, Thiên Đường Chuông Giấy (Paradise of Paper Bells, 1998) Chế Tạo Thơ Ca 99-04 (Manufacturing Poetry 99-04, 2004), and Radio Mùa Hè (Summer Radio, 2019). He holds a B.A. in American Literature and a Masters in Library Science from UCLA, as well as a Masters in Anthropology from Northern Illinois University. His poetry has been translated into English and featured in Of Vietnam Identities in Dialogue (2001), Three Vietnamese Poets (2001), Language for a New Century (2008), and The Deluge: New Vietnamese Poetry (2013). In 2006, Tupelo Press published a bilingual collection of his poetry, Night, Fish, and Charlie Parker, translated by Linh Dinh. He currently lives and works as an academic librarian in Illinois. In 2006, Tupelo Press published a bilingual collection of his poetry, Night, Fish, and Charlie Parker, translated by Linh Dinh. Paper Bells, a volume of new and selected poems translated by Hai-Dang Phan, was published this April by Brooklyn-based press, The Song Cave. He currently lives and works as an academic librarian in Illinois.
Hai-Dang Phan is the author of Reenactments (Sarabande, 2019). His poems and translations have been published in Mekong Review, New England Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, Sink, Two Lines, and Waxwing, among other places. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
