1. FUN READS, 50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION: MEN OF WAR AND WOMEN OF PEACE IN PHAN NHẬT NAM’S STORIES ALONG THE ROAD (CHUYỆN DỌC ĐƯỜNG) – PART 1

Today is the 50^th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War on April 30, 1975. I wanted to mark the occasion with an irregular series that reflect on the war’s end and its aftermath. My very first post in the series is about Phan Nhật Nam’s Stories Along the Road, a book that reflects the long arc of recent Vietnamese history from war to troubled peace.

Phan Nhật Nam’s Stories Along the Road (Chuyện dọc đường, 2013) is a collection of vignettes about ordinary Vietnamese during and after the war. In the preface, the author explains that he heard these stories when he first arrived in America in 1993. He was a frequent passenger on the Little Saigon bus that ran between San Diego and Los Angeles, and he collected anecdotes from fellow passengers. But no more than half of the chapters explicitly reference the Little Saigon bus. The others recount experiences from the author’s own life. Phan Nhật Nam served in the airborne division of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam) and was the most famous military writer in the RVN. After 1975, the postwar government imprisoned him for fourteen years, including eight years in solitary confinement. Many vignettes are about his childhood friends, wartime comrades, and strangers that he met in and out of prison in Vietnam after the war. Thus, the book is an anthology of stories collected on the literal road traversed by the long-distance bus in southern California as well as the metaphorical road of Phan Nhật Nam’s life.

In collecting these stories, the author clearly meant to bear witness to the suffering of the Vietnamese people. Yet it should be stressed that these vignettes are not oral history interviews. Phan Nhật Nam narrativized, lightly fictionalized, and elaborated on the stories taken from his own experiences and that of others, and he aimed to capture emotional truth rather than historical fact. Most of the vignettes are about Vietnamese who were on the side of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam), though some are about Vietnamese who supported the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, or North Vietnam) or the National Liberation Front (colloquially known as the Vietcong), and Phan Nhật Nam depicts these Vietnamese quite sympathetically at times. The characters that populate the book include civilians, soldiers, widows, orphans, prisoners, and refugees, all of whom endure immense suffering. Indeed, it is suffering that often unites the characters even as politics divide them. For me, the most moving vignettes in the collection were the ones about soldiers’ wives, and I present two of my favorites below.

“Dark-Skinned Miss Hồng,” which can be alternately translated as “Black Miss Hồng” (“Cô ‘Hồng đen,’” 45-71), retells the touching story of an adoptive mother. The chapter begins with a chance encounter between two friends at the bus station in San José. The first woman tells the other one that she is visiting California to help their old classmate Hồng. She then launches into the story of Hồng’s family. Somewhat jarringly, the story starts with Hồng’s future husband, Huỳnh Đồng. Huỳnh Đồng had a crush on a girl when he was a schoolboy in Đà Nẵng and was surprised to meet an army ranger in an ice cream shop who resembled the pretty girl, but the army ranger beat up Đồng before he had a chance to introduce himself. Later, Đồng becomes an army ranger and decides to settle old scores with his commanding officer, who was the same ranger that had beaten him up earlier. After another fight, the commanding officer and Đồng reconcile. More importantly, the commanding officer introduces Đồng to his sister Hồng – the exact same girl whom Đồng had once admired. The story then jumps to the birth of Hồng and Đồng’s first child, and the tough army ranger is reduced to a nervous mess as he awaits the arrival of his son. It just so happens that Hồng shares the same hospital room with another mother, and this other woman abandons her baby immediately after giving birth. Hồng cannot help but feel great love for the other baby boy, and she convinces her husband that they should adopt the baby and raise him alongside their biological son. But here’s the kicker: the abandoned baby is a mixed race black Amerasian.

Hồng, her husband Đồng, and her brother joyfully welcome both boys into the family. The new parents insist on putting their names on the birth certificate of their adopted son, which would show that baby was born in wedlock despite not physically resembling his parents. The family also throws a party during which they instruct their friends and relatives to love the boys equally. But the neighbors gossip that Hồng cheated on her husband and gave birth to two sons with different fathers, and she becomes known as “dark-skinned Miss Hồng” or “black Miss Hồng” because she has a black child. After the war, the communist government imprisons and eventually executes Hồng’s husband and brother. Left alone, Hồng struggles to care for her toddler sons, especially as she is stigmatized as the mother of a black Amerasian. She eventually marries a North Vietnamese man and immigrates to the US with him and her two sons. But her new husband and the adopted son don’t get along and even get into an altercation, and the son is put on trial in the US. Hồng is now terrified regarding her son’s fate.

I found this vignette deeply touching. Hồng is presented as an ideal mother, and her maternal compassion dominates the chapter. She persuades her menfolk to accept a strange baby, and she is steadfast in her decision regardless of the damage it does to her reputation. The postwar government considered Amerasians to be children of the enemy, but Hồng never considers abandoning her adopted child. She then brings both children with her when she enters a new marriage and leaves the country. At the end of the story, we learn that she is worried sick for her adopted son but not whether she is concerned about her second husband.

“Dark-Skinned Miss Hồng” is the only work of Vietnamese literature I have ever encountered that features not only a mixed race character but also a transracial adoption. Mixed-race characters, if they appear in Vietnamese literature at all, are usually presented negatively or are minor characters without developed personalities. The adopted son in the vignette certainly falls into the second category, but what stands out is that he is depicted no differently than the biological son. They are both portrayed as adorable babies that are equally deserving of parental affection. Moreover, the transracial adoption is presented as an act of great love on the part of Hồng and her husband in defiance of social norms. In the hands of another author, the adopted son might have grown up to be a delinquent youth compared to the more respectable biological son. But Phan Nhật Nam depicts attributes the adopted son’s brush with the law to his love of family. The woman at the bus station tells her friend that the adopted son got into a fight with his stepfather because he loved his mother and brother so intensely. The implication is that the adopted son resorted to violence because he wanted to defend his family from the interloping stepfather. To be sure, the characters in the vignette are stock characters – the gentle, loving mother, the strong, protective father, and the sweet, innocent babies – but the piece is nonetheless powerful in its unconventional depiction of an adoptive family.