The Other Side of Heaven: Post-War Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers.

Nguyen, Dinh-Hoa

The two prose collections The Other Side of Heaven and Vietnam represent laudable efforts to lead us away from the "old" Vietnam conflict and help us focus on the postwar period, which itself still has its own trials and tribulations - well recounted in candid writings by American and Vietnamese authors. The latter particularly deserve attention to their witness accounts of the killings and maimings, which are being considered in the new context of wound healings and reconciliation across the Pacific Ocean.

The first collection is contributed to by several American authors who wrote about the Vietnam war and their Vietnamese counterparts who wrote about the American war. The hefty anthology is the fruit of three years of planning at the conclusion of a workshop that brought together several U.S. veterans who wished to get to know their former enemies, represented by three Vietnamese writers invited to the Willam Joiner Center for the Study for War and Social Consequences in Boston. The American coeditor Wayne Karlin followed up the idea with a 1994 visit, enlisting the help of the woman writer Le Minh Khue in Hanoi and the writer Tran Vu in America.

Following an introduction outlining the genesis of the collection, five chapters introduce consecutively the five focal points surrounding the volume's underlying theme, expressed in George Evans's poem "A Walk in the Garden of Heaven": first the need to tell the story; then the grief of loss and the ways the dead continue to haunt the living; then the psychologically, morally, and physically wounded; then the tragedy of exile; then the displaced, the lonely, the haunted, the trapped; and finally the children of the war.

As witnesses and victims of the carnage, the writers in both volumes felt they got "to tell the stories that show the complexities of the human heart, its capacity for both love and brutality," lest they feel guilty of "moral death and physical murder." Upon returning to their former war theater, the American writers, some of them now journalists and fiction writers, discovered "a country and a people rather than a war." The reader is grateful to the editors and contributors for the stark realities lying behind statistics on the plight of U.S. veterans, up to 65 percent of whom suffered from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). But next to these dreadful occurrences of broken marriages, broken homes, alienation, and suicide on this side of the Pacific Ocean, we are also confronted by equally stunning figures of human and material losses on the Vietnamese side.

The stories are amazingly intertwined by the common thread of human suffering. The well-known journalist Ward Just and the guerrilla fighter Bao Ninh both write about how writers feel incapable of letting the war go. The woman in "Nada," Judith Ortiz Cofer's story of grief, loses a son named Tony in the war; in Le Minh Khue's story "Tony D," two Hanoi hustlers find the bones of a dead American, whom they identify as Tony from his dogtags. Ngo Tu Lap's "Waiting for a Friend" is told by the ghost of a dead North Vietnamese soldier who, with his other squad mates, observes the life of the lone surviving member of their unit, just as the ghosts in Larry Heinemann's "Paco's Dreams" comment on the life of Paco, the only survivor of the unit. In Nguyen Mong Giac's story "The Slope of Life" two veterans from the same village - one an amputee, the other blind - meet in a Saigon cafe, just as two U.S. veterans - one black, one white - meet in a VA hospital in Larry Brown's "Waiting for the Dark." In Richard Bausch's "Heat" a son tells the story of how he and his mother lost his father to the war, even though his father came home, and of his mother's fear of losing him as she had her husband, and how this has affected his need first to get married, and then to stay with his wife out of pity rather than love.

Among the American contributors, several have had short stories or war memories published in magazines and later gathered in book form. One interesting event is that Robert Olen Butler's novel A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain - an excerpt from which is featured in this volume ("Letters from My Father") - has been translated into Vietnamese. As for the Vietnamese contributors, it is highly significant that the editors of the first volume have decided to include several refugee writers, all of whom are bona fide authors who had attained fame prior to 1975: Vo Phien, the novelist, short-story writer, and essayist; and Nguyen Xuan Hoang and Hoang Khoi Phong.

Of those Vietnamese writers associated with the state-run Writers Association in Hanoi, Duong Thu Huong, the controversial novelist (see WLT 66:2, p. 410, and 66:3, p. 588), and Pham Thi Hoai are notoriously absent from this collection. On the other hand, Bao Ninh's novel The Sorrow of War has been translated into English, French, and several other languages (see WLT 69:4, p. 880); and Nguyen Huy Thiep, Le Luu, Ma Van Khang, Le Minh Khue, and others represent the ranks of promising writers about whom the outside world has started to hear and read. One striking example is coeditor Truong Vu (real name: Truong Ngoc Son), a former member of the South Vietnamese armed forces who, after settling in California, has managed to study and become a NASA aerospace engineer while serving as the editor of a literary magazine whose tide Doi-thoai (Dialogue) is self-explanatory.

The second volume under review takes a new approach: it allows the literary traveler, sitting on a Vietnam-bound commercial airplane, to sample not war stories but rather accounts by Vietnamese speaking of "their deepest concerns and pleasures" through charming stories set in the peasant society, in the "floating world of Saigon's commercialism," or in the memories of older refugees in their new haven in California. Coeditor John Balaban shows better discrimination and less bias here than in his earlier selection of limericks by draft-dodgers. Indeed, this collection of seventeen stories, although much smaller, is, qualitatively speaking, a little more representative of modern Vietnamese fiction.

In the first section - on jungles - Nguyen Huy Thiep's "Salt of the Jungle" lets the reader appreciate the power of love, particularly conjugal love, as displayed by the female monkey whose mate has been shot down. "The Shelter" by Duong Thu Huong shows the self-control of a North Vietnamese soldier who could not submit to the sexual desire of a disfigured, frustrated woman cadre in the jungle.

Two excellent stories in the section on Hanoi deserve comment: "The Saigon Tailor Shop," in which Pham Thi Hoai depicts the life of young women who aspire for happiness and a better future but has one of them choose a tragic death; and "A Small Tragedy," in which Le Minh Khue recounts the horror of a young couple who learn just prior to their wedding that they are brother and sister, children of the same retired official who had climbed to the pinnacle of party power through misconduct and abuse of authority within the communist hierarchy.

The translations of the Vietnamese pieces sometimes leave much to be desired, particularly when incongruities are caused by a translator's or editor's unfamiliarity with cultural matters or events. Several examples will suffice. In The Other Side of Heaven the "shop called Dao" (Pho Hang Dao), is actually Silk Street, and the "district of Buom" (Pho Hang Buom) is only a street, Sail Street, street names in today's downtown Hanoi being reminiscent of the handicraft guilds whose members used to live and work on the same street, where they displayed their specialized merchandise. Since no language textbook fails to mention those "thirty-six" guilds, slightly more careful editing of the English versions would have easily helped correct those infelicities.

The second book too has errors of interpretation: for example, the muom tree is no other than a mango tree, the trimmings ("boiled egg, sausage, ground shrimp" [sic]) used for the bun thang dish are not correct, and an old picture of Quang's mother that he keeps in his wallet can only measure 6 x 9 centimeters, not inches. Despite such minor flaws, the two collections stand as respectable anthologies containing powerful writings and, above all, as good examples of Vietnamese-American cooperation, even though some of the American contributors to the first collection could more easily be identified as rabid antiwar elements of the 1960s than as prominent representatives of American belles lettres.

Dinh-Hoa Nguyen Southern Illinois University, Carbondale