Giua hai chan troi: Tha-huong Tuy but.

Nguyen, Dinh-Hoa

The collection of "expatriate essays" bearing the title "Between Two Horizons" is authored by a Vietnamese refugee septuagenarian who has published a memoir and a collection of poems (soon after his arrival in the United States in 1984). Hoang Lien (real name: Nguyen Van Dai) was South Vietnam's highest-ranking civil servant in the central region at the time of the 1968 Tet offensive. Taken prisoner in Hue and marched up the Ho Chi Minh trail, he witnessed secret Viet Cong hideouts, B-52 bombing raids, and the death of an American POW. While his wife (a former school principal) and children gave him up for dead, he spent twelve years in captivity, always forced to move from one prison camp to another in North Vietnam: in order to keep himself sane, during much of his time in solitary confinement he composed in his head delightful poems that were later published, with English translations, as Tinh-toa (Sitting Still) in San Diego in 1991. Poignant lines from that collection and from his memoir Anh sang va bong toi (Light and Darkness), published in southern California in 1990, appear as flickering lights of lyricism in these new essays covering his less-arduous and more relaxing days in northern California.

"Con duong so 9" (Ninth Street) is about the downtown area of San Francisco, where, upon his resettlement on the West Coast, Hoang worked in various social-service agencies, for ten years helping fellow refugees get settled in the Bay Area and find viable jobs. As he attended staff meetings, while cogitating about habits, practices, and ofrice procedures, he observed his co-workers from different racial backgrounds. On the way to or home from work, he noticed each street corner with its buildings, stores, fast-food shops, and homeless vagrants, but he was always obsessed with memories of his homeland across the Pacific.

From his writing desk in the apartment within the verdant Park Merced housing complex, he has a nice view of homes and lawns, of young people running to catch their bus, and of elderly couples taking their daily constitutional. Whether he expresses appreciation for opportunities to observe his co-residents and to visit other areas of California, or discusses flowers, paintings, and books (in connection with previous visits to the United States earlier in his administrative career, and satisfying friendships with his artist-illustrator Vo Dinh or with favorite authors he only knows indirectly through their works), Hoang reveals his background in Sino-Vietnamese humanities and his vast knowledge of Western literatures.

Each entry, never too long, recounts a simple anecdote; one involves a friend who sent him a biographical account, another centers on a serene painting of a lotus flower, a third concerns a young woman who resembles someone he had known years ago in Vietnam. Other pieces deal with street scenes, either in springtime or toward the end of the Lunar New Year, or with old friends, or with twilight on the Pacific Ocean. Just as in his haunting memoir, astoundingly objective and devoid of any bitterness toward "the enemy," and in his exquisite poems, Hoang Lien once more shows in these essays that he is an optimist at heart, always full of hope, always resourceful, enjoying his family life in the adopted country and continuing his creativity both in prose and in poetry. His remarkable capacity for adjustment to his new environment truly offers a quiet picture of Taoist otium par excellence.

Dinh-Hoa Nguyen Southern Illinois University, Carbondale