Duong Thu Huong. No Man's Land.
Allen, Esther
Duong Thu Huong. No Man's Land. Nina McPherson & Phan Huy Duong, trs. New York. Hyperion East. 2005. 402 pages. $24.95 ($14.95 paper). ISBN 1-4013-6664-3 (0-7868-8857-1 paper)
THE SHELVES of any Barnes & Noble Bookstore are lined with novels about love triangles and marital conflicts, books that spend page after page describing beautiful homes, state-of-the-art kitchens, and the sumptuous meals cooked in them. There's no mystery to the marketing strategy: like Emma Bovary, many people turn to fiction in order to imagine a better life, and such novels offer up a vision of houses that are more artfully decorated and light-flooded than the ones we poor readers live in, meals more inventive, more flavorful, and more adoringly prepared than the ones we eat. Usually these books are little more than the fictional equivalent of a glossy magazine ad. But behind the facile consumerism lies a real challenge: not just to buy all the right brands, keep the clutter off the tabletops, and cook something different and delicious for dinner but to make a serious attempt at living a better life.
Impossible to imagine that the most recent novel by Vietnam's greatest living novelist might have anything to do with such standard U.S. beach-reading fare. Here's Duong Thu Huong's life story so far: In 2967, at the age of twenty, she enrolled in a Communist Youth Brigade that was sent to the front in the war with the invaders from the United States (they don't call it "the Vietnam War" in Vietnam). Of the forty people in her brigade, three survived. The newly triumphant communist government celebrated all three as heroes. Utterly honest and entirely without fear, as a soldier, a writer, and an activist, Duong soon began using her hero status as a platform from which to call for respect for human rights and democratic reforms. Finally, in 1990, she was expelled from the Communist Party and denounced; she spent seven months in prison. Later her passport was revoked, and she spent twelve years in internal exile, two guards posted around the clock at the door of her house in Hanoi. Though her work is read and revered across the planet, in Vietnamese and many other languages (this is the sixth of her books to appear in English), most of her books are banned in Vietnam. Earlier this year, through the intervention of the Italian government, she finally acquired a passport, and she is now in Paris, hard at work on a new book.
As one might expect, Duong's novels are often about the war in Vietnam, and No Man's Land is no exception. Its evocation of horror is as visceral as anything else she's written, including the searing Novel Without a Name, to my mind one of the greatest war novels of the twentieth century. But No Man's Land is not as much about war itself as about the memory of war and its ongoing impact: the guilt, terror, and destruction it wreaks among those who live their lives in its wake. It is, finally, about the importance of forgetting. For some reason, the original Vietnamese title does not appear on either the French or the English translation, but the very suggestive title of the French translation is Terre des oublis. Oubli is one of those very basic words that doesn't quite exist in English; un oubli is the opposite of un souvenir, a memory--it is a forgetting. Not a memory lapse, but an act of forgetting; Terre des oublis means, literally, "land of forgettings." The triumph No Man's Land seeks for its main characters and for Vietnam itself is the triumph of forgetting.
The story begins as elementally and ineluctably as a Greek tragedy. Mien lives happily with her handsome husband Hoan and their small son in a village in the mountains. One day she returns with the other village women from an unsuccessful honey-gathering expedition to discover that her first husband, Bon, who went off to fight in the war shortly after they were married and was thought to have died, has come back. She hardly recognizes him; he's become a querulous, foul-breathed old man, a ghoulish stranger. But he wants her back and Mien's duty is so clear that there's no need for anyone to say a word: Bon was a soldier, a hero who sacrificed everything in the country's noble war: "The veteran returns to the special gratitude of the community and when he speaks out to claim his share of happiness in this world, no one dares dispute or refuse him."
People in the United States often express a longing for a greater feeling of community. Our rosy-eyed nostalgia for the warmth of friends and neighbors is not wholly alien to the lives of these villagers, who sustain one another in all sorts of generous and loving ways, but it has little to do with the implacable duty to the collectivity that dominates the life of every character in the novel. Mien's own desires, her personal happiness, and that of Hoan and their child are entirely irrelevant. She must fulfill the community's debt to Bon, and she must do so without complaint. Moreover, Hoan is rich, while Bon has come back from the war empty-handed with only a filthy, wretched shack in which to live. People are jealous of the beautiful new house Hoan has built for Mien; they're not used to homes with luxurious kitchens and gleaming bathrooms in this mountain hamlet. In some way, to some eyes, the fact that Mien is now forced to leave her splendid house and go live in squalor seems fitting punishment for the hubris of having constructed such a symbol of personal pleasure and gratification in the first place.
The nightmare of war has turned Bon into a hollow shell, weak, broken, incompetent, and impotent, clinging only to a deluded notion of love for Mien that is not love at all, simply a dictatorial will to own her and thereby reclaim the life that was his before the war destroyed him. Still, Bon is not an unsympathetic character--the experience of war was so harrowing, the memories that torment him so unspeakable, that no one could blame him for what he has become. Bon's own flesh was torn by vultures after he loyally dug up the dead body of a beloved fellow soldier and dragged it behind him through the jungle day after day, sleeping on top of it at night. He knows what it is to be food for rapacious carrion eaters. The torrid, steamy air of the khop jungle mixed with the stench of the corpse to create a thick, gluey, terrifying atmosphere. The glassy eyes of the vultures gazed at him calmly, patiently, from their perch atop the corpse. They preened their feathers and wiped their beaks, straining their necks to observe him. These were the looks of torturers waiting to execute a condemned man. Bon knew that from now on, he was no longer an adversary to them but a prey-in-waiting; he was just a mass of flesh ... a potential corpse that would inevitably decompose.
Mien's life with Bon is scarcely less terrible than his memories of the war; she must live apart from the family she loves and allow this reeking carapace of a man to try to rape her night after night as he attempts in vain to impregnate her, believing that if she bears his child, he will finally have his life back.
Hoan, meanwhile, has gone back to live in the city, taking great care to continue to provide for Mien even while she's living as the wife of another man; it is his money that feeds not only Mien and Bon but Bon's slatternly sister and her urchin children as well. Hoan struggles to make sense of what has happened to his marriage and find some way to go on with his life, but though his genius for business makes him richer every day, there is no replacement for the deep connection he shared with Mien, and the regular visits he begins making to a brothel with a business acquaintance don't succeed in easing his pain.
And then, gratefully, mercifully, the resemblance to Greek tragedy ends. There's no bloodbath at the conclusion of the novel, no tragic grand finale littered with dead bodies. Instead, Mien is finally impregnated by Bon and gives birth to a headless, lifeless monster. Terribly weakened, she returns to the beautiful house that Hoan built for her because she cannot stay on in Bon's shack and then quietly resolves to liberate herself and her true love and son from this cruel and pointless ordeal. And the implacable collectivity whose harsh opinion she so feared when she went back to Bon does not punish her. In fact, everyone but Bon accepts that she and Hoan deserve to live well, that this is better for them and better for the community; Bon's pathetic attempt to take everything away one last time is foiled by Mien.
Duong Thu Huong visited New York for the first time in her life this April when she was invited by PEN American Center to be part of the PEN World Voices Festival. To my joy and astonishment, I was able to meet her in person on her first evening in the United States, a country she had imagined as monotonous and monolithic, but which at first sight she said she found "charming." That week, in a conversation with Robert Stone and Antoine Audouard at the New York Public Library, she spoke out vehemently against both the Vietnam War, which she called a "cruel joke of history," and the current regime's manipulation of war to keep itself in power: "The government wants to dig up the corpses and make people sniff them all over again," she said. "The Vietnamese people had the courage to die for the country in war, but they do not have the courage to live. I tell the people of my country to open their eyes to life and live a life fit for human beings." The former Vietcong soldier has concluded that living well is not the best revenge but the most radical revolution.
Food has always been central to Duong's work and to her vision of human individuals and societies. I will never forget the orangutan soup that the troop of North Vietnamese soldiers concocts out of desperation in Novel Without a Name; the traditional Vietnamese pudding made of congealed blood that glistens on the table during the conflict between uncle and niece in Paradise of the Blind; the aphrodisiac concoction of coffee with salt that temporarily restores Bon's potency in No Man's Land. But in No Man's Land, finally, food is no longer mere survival or the assertion of power over others; it is the possibility of living "a life fit for human beings." When the beautiful house they built in Mountain Hamlet was first completed, Mien and Hoan prepared a traditional banquet of celebration. They had begun the preparations several days in advance. Hoan ordered a nice fatted calf to make grilled veal, which was the first course. Mien was in charge of the second course: steamed chicken with lemon leaves. She had been to the best chicken coops in the hamlet to reserve thirty young hens, and had asked her friends to prepare them for her. The third course, tuna stewed in ginger and pork fat, she had made herself. The villagers of Mountain Hamlet dreamed all year of eating fish. At every ceremony or ritual meal, their chopsticks always darted first toward the fish platter, passing up other meat dishes. Mien had also bought all kinds of herbs and meats to make a few sauteed dishes and two special soups. For dessert, there would be dumplings filled with a sweet paste of beans, coconut, and crushed, grilled black sesame seeds.
The better life Duong Thu Hong imagines for the Vietnamese people is one in which people are not continually fed images of war and horror as an unending pretext for further sacrifice, a life in which many things are best forgotten--and are forgotten--so that people can be free to enjoy the present moment. In the United States, marketers used to talk about "cocooning': a tendency for people with money to isolate themselves and pursue a pleasurable lifestyle as a haven from any kind of political engagement. In No Man's Land's Vietnam, the simple acceptance of an entitlement to comfort and material pleasure is a radical political stance. Great literature makes us reexperience the most basic elements of our lives in a new way. Read No Man's Land; then cook a good meal for some friends.
Esther Allen
Seton Hall University
