NO MAN’S LAND. By Duong Thu Huong.

Translated from Vietnamese by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong

ISBN I-40I3-6664-3, U.S.: Hyperion East. 402 pp. $24.95.

By NGUYEN-KHOA THAI ANH

How many people living in America or elsewhere have actually removed themselves from this war-weary time, when just or unjust its outcome has afflicted the human race in more ways than one?

So is it a reader’s blessing to dwell into Huong’s No Man’s Land without getting bogged down in human’s abyss of deep despair and forlornness? Because without prior knowledge or preconceived notion of the Viet-Nam conflict: he or she maybe able to escape the author’s unmerciful portrait of life and subtle but inexorable allegories to today’s Viet-Nam.

While it is more refreshing that first time readers may not discern the political undertone in Duong Thu Huong’s latest novel and enjoy its tranche de vie, a love-after-war novel that revolves around some half dozen principal characters, there is no escaping the larger picture for readers familiar with Viet-Nam and the author’s background as a dissident writer, that her works have been banned and her prose considered underground literature in Viet-Nam. (1)

However, it’s misleading to even group this novel under the underground literature genre. Her evocative and poetic style is as rich and sanguine as any bourgeois writer competing and aspiring (on equal footing) to uplift the human spirit despite its bleak human condition. There is hardly a trace of bitterness in her prose. In fact one can detect Huong’s incorrigible capitalist ‘dolce vita’ oozing out of her characters’ thoughts and actions, so much that it causes an embarrassment of riches and makes one wonder: is the original sin in socialism is to curb human tendency to live the good life?

If it weren’t for the fact that No Man’s Land is a translated work, one would readily esteem it as a beautiful literary piece. Yet as it is, readers can only surmise and be amazed at how well the Vietnamese syntax and style are rendered (or embellished) in English, the exquisite prose flows so expressively and naturalizes it as quite as mainstream as any English writer would with his/her original literary de-rigueur tour-de-force, thank you.

Albeit fluent and well-versed in Vietnamese, one would be hard-pressed to detect – especially at the skillful hand of translators – even at book-length work such as this, the cramped style of translation, except in a few minor instances, (where mung bean is translated as green bean, ‘chim lon’ as pig bird instead as owl, bamboo shoots as bamboo, certain misrepresented ca dao or maxims etc.) which are too trivial to detract from such great work.

Under Duong Thu Huong’s vast panoramic landscapes (no doubt derive from her many first-hand tours of duty in the Annamite Cordillera) as well as the descriptive up-close and personal scenes, one gets the feeling of watching a director’s masterpiece movie unfolds before one’s eyes. The advantage of No Man’s Land of course rests on the fact that readers could understand Huong’s ‘stream of consciousness’ narratives, which help us get in the minds of her characters much better than that of a film which may not be deciphered, however good the acting is.

It is Northern Central Viet-Nam, after 1975 at war’s end when Mien comes back to her village of Mountain Hamlet from a honey-gathering outing and finds her happy life upturned henceforth; a quick teenage happening which seems buried deep in a forgotten past has come back to haunt her days and torture her nights. Bon, her husband from a short-lived marriage that took place before his going off to war 14 years ago, is now resurrected from the death and conspires with socialist mores and tradition to claim her.

While this triangular affair seems to singularly cry out for the stolen love of Mien and Hoan -- her beloved husband of 12 years (and peripherally, Hanh, their five years-old son) – it did not give the victorious Bon comfort nor spare him the agony of a loser’s inferiority complex.

Unlike most of his army unit who gave their ultimate sacrifices, Bon came back whole but a broken man, only to discover that all the years of war’s tolls and deprivation have taken what left of his lot and now even claimed his manhood. Afflicted with a battered psyche and chronic impotence, Bon stubbornly clings to Mien and his desperate hope at recuperation. Obsessed with regaining his virility and delusionary love, he went to great length (with Hoan’s money) to make a mockery out of his trials and rehabilitation. While the long-suffering Hoan stoically suffers the hand that fate has dealt him, his travails would only begin when he learned of Mien’s resistance to her miserable life with Bon, and provides impetus for him to start the protracted battle to win hearts and minds of the people of Mountain Hamlet.

Huong’s artful portrayal of her characters is at once psychological and realistic. She does not so much make us hate the villain (Bon and his sister Ta) as much as pity and empathize him for his tribulation, neither does she elevate the hero (Hoan) above his human failings or weaknesses. She does not force us to take side between Bon and Hoan, between the reasonable and unreasonable, between openness and machination, selfish and undeserving or forgiving and deserving, but rather presents the stark and almost incurable social condition of Mountain Hamlet as a microcosm of Viet-Nam and see how we would chose to go along on her glimmer-of-hope plot.

While Bon represents the small and craftiness of men and Hoan, the basic of human goodness, the real parallel here is Bon as the sham, emasculated Viet-Nam Communist Party (VCP) and Hoan -- the benign and potential democratic force outside the country and what it can do to keep Viet-Nam hope alive. Naturally, the beautiful Mien symbolizes the passive land and people under the de facto rule of the Party, who due to its glorious but Pyrrhic victory gives it a shadowy legitimacy to hang on to the prize (land). But even as dutiful, voiceless and docile as Mien was at the beginning, she would begin to take charge of her own happiness when realizing she has forfeited it for an empty cause. Even as voyeurs, the readers would still recoil at the author merciless depiction of Bon and Mien’s unholy union, a deformed offspring as an omen to a climactic resolution.

Eventually the reader’s actualization of Duong Thu Huong’s message and denouement would be:

There comes a time in Viet-Nam when the VCP will have to accept multi parties to survive as a viable force [the living arrangement under Hoan’s roof where Bon, Mien and Mr. Lu, Hoan’s trusted servant (U.N. supervision?) live together]. But this temporary arrangement could not last when the communist party’s irremediable nature of one-man’s (plutocracy/one party) rule decides to bite the hand that feeds it.

In the end readers would hope for Bon to redeem himself and coexist peacefully with people who try to nurture and rehabilitate him, but when Bon borrowed Xa’s rifle to kill his benefactor, Hoan (in the pretext of hunting), even Xa, Bon’s best friend and comrade-in-arm, could not condone this despicable act.

We realize when Xa slap Bon --  and the president of the commune becomes exasperated with Mien cover-up -- that Bon no longer has the backing of the social convention he once had. When Bon could not count on the people Mountain Hamlet as the VCP could not rely on to its own rank and file to do its bidding, the Party will have reached the end of its rope. Conversely, when Bon could finally communicate with his Sergeant in the nether world, that is when the VCP could no longer count on its glorious but ghostly past to justify its grip on the present.

And as a rightful heir to that past, Huong is entitled to her earnest hope and dream. Of course one can read and enjoy No Man’s Land for its literal sense rather than read into its figurative allusion where one can be embittered with real life’s peaceful evolution.

(1) With the exception of several screenplays, half of Duong Thu Huong’s books have not been published in her own country (Paradise of the Blind were pulled of the shelves after the first run and the author jailed following her speech and its publication in the West): (“Beyond Illusions,” 1985; “Paradise of the Blind,” 1987; “Fragments of a Life,” published in Viet Nam,1989; “Novel Without a Name,” 1995; “Memories of a Pure Spring,” 2000; and “No Man’s Land,” 2005).

Of late, Duong Thu Huong has garnered a faithful following in the United States and Europe. This is a double-edge sword dilemma for an author who is still speaking out against the “irremediably corrupt and abusive” Hà Noi regime. While her success with the last three novels may have earned her fame and economic rewards from overseas, the targeted readership inside the country has largely been untapped and the indirect impact of her work is not felt where it may do the most good.

Thai A. Nguyen-Khoa

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