(see In Brief for description of the Pages)

(best viewed, and refreshed, in computer mode for correct layout)

Waiting for Aphrodite

When very young I didn’t know her, certainly not sure where she graced her existence. No one told me things. The first time I heard of her was in 1963 or 64, caused by a book by the pre-WWII author Khai Hung, a celebrated Viet novelist who believed in liberal values and wrote clear proses. The two concepts were alien to the country at the time. From that book, in my mind she started to manifest in colour, in texture. I was slowly falling for her. It’s a meandering way of falling in love but you would understand this simple axiom of human emotion: the longer and slower one falls the deeper one ends up in the abyss. I happen to know also of the immediate and passionate kind, and this too can last a long time, can be forever. But slowly falling is what I writing about here, these lines, these paragraphs.

I read more about her. Thanks to an introduction I was able to make contact with her, hesitantly introducing myself. She was a mature woman (it doesn’t mean she’s “old” in age, it simply means she was worldly), a lovely and considerate lady in every which way. I was growing up, wasn’t sure how I would behave if meeting her. Would my mind be decent and matter-of-fact, or would I pollute everything if the coarse feelings of a young chap’s body enter the brain, the conversations. If so, can I exert self-control so as not to make a fool of myself?

Things started smoothly and progressed well at a moderate pace. As I mentioned, my older friend Sa had written her and given a little bio of mine. He was rather snobbish to me at the start, having already achieved useful things since the time I was still a baby. But his snobbery was fine, the main thing was she and I started exchanging mails. Mine were long, carefully written. I wrote her name and address on the cream-white envelope in a style that, I thought, was both casual- yet flowing-looking (my hand writing wasn’t too bad when I tried). Her replies were usually short, somewhat inconsistent – that is, one letter was longish, affectionate, talking about herself in a gently alluring way, the next one could be abrupt, as if I was a salesman needed to be got rid of as quickly as possible. I wasn’t discouraged, not too much so at any rate. See, just to know her was enough for me. To receive mails, that’s half way to the heavens. Then I started to hope for a meeting.

Often when thinking of her, past and present, I hum the song “Tuoi Da Buon” (The Sad Age of Rock) of the anti-war Viet composer Trinh Cong Son. You’re not familiar with his work? Well you should if you happen to know Bob Dylan. Both wrote songs in the 1960s and 70s when the Viet Nam war was raging, killing millions of South Vietnamese civilians (ah yes, perished too were fifty thousand American servicemen, five thousand Koreans, five hundred Australians - all these chappies possessed guns and bombs when they died, unlike the civilians; but the US and ignorant allies brought the war to my old country, never the other way round. I happen to oppose strongly the North’s invasion of the South (like I do the blatant Russian invasion of Ukraine) - though history has a habit of always going back a long way - but there was no real economic or political justification for the Yanks to be involved in Viet Nam other than one or two feeble grandiose-sounding excuses, let alone destroying in earnest the country’s habitats and killing its inhabitants indiscriminately).

Anyway Bob Dylan wrote his nice songs when he lived peacefully in America and never having fought for his food. His skills and passion contributed greatly in bringing a powerful different dimension to the American self-absorbed consciousness. Things started to change then. On the other side of the world when battles were fought and lives were bloodily lost every minute, Trinh had to go to the end of the earth to escape being drafted into the South Viet Nam’s Army. It was evidenced later that he, Trinh, always favoured the North during the war, perhaps being a sort of a recruiting spy - accounts vary. The North, though, never cared about him after using him as a piece of lemon. He was rather broken-hearted after 1975, trying to be relevant but failed, composed very ordinary works since, died in 2001 aged 62. That served him quite right.

But despite all that, I feel empathy for him, a lost soul like many young Southern Viets during and after the war. I like many of his old songs. His politics is besides the point here. He was an artist and so am I (perhaps under more guises than one), thus I understand. His music was attractive, both love ballads and anti-war stanzas. The latter started a movement in the country. His works had the feel, the force, to show the despair, to carry with them the anguish the sufferings of a nation. The songs were real.

Dylan’s songs, while moving and occasionally exquisite, were the sentiments of an outsider. The war was only in his mind, reflected in his songs. Yet interesting enough he won the 2016 Nobel prize for literature-poetry. When I heard that first I thought someone had played a huge practical joke on the internet system, the media …

Back to Trinh's Rock song. Does rock have age? You bet. Ever read the haunting “The Dream of Rock” (“Giac Mo Cua Da”) from 1967-8 on the literary journal “Van” by the wonderful Nguyen Manh Con, the short original version, not the rather tiresome expanded novel the author published later on. The Viet work itself was an adaptation of a science fiction story. In the work two earth astronauts wander on an empty landscape of decaying but still living rocks on an alien planet. The lovely woman is very learned and her companion is also the loving husband. They are somehow imprisoned by the king of the rocks, and this big rock tells her that he has to impregnate her in order to breed his baby rocks, because there has been no new rock for quite some aeons. I was quite distressed when reading the uppity rock's outrageous demand. I was only in my very early teens. You can search and read the book but I can say now that the end was supremely satisfying for me, then and now!

Anyway I stray plenty from the mark. The real question here, though, is not if rock has age. It is, instead: why Tuoi Da Buon of Trinh Cong Son, a love ballad.

The melody was unusual, albeit a little repetitive with the “chorus” following the same notes as the main body but at a higher cord. Nevertheless they are fairly sophisticated compared to Viet music at the time. A songstress in later year (2000s onwards) would try to make it into a jazzy performance, not too badly. Still, I always hum it whilst thinking of the haunting sounds from Thai Thanh performing this work, my favourite lady of Viet songs. The lyrics are really a poem, beautiful for a song even if a little affected (that is, overtly flowery and somewhat empty at times) if stand-alone, if not embedded in music. A sample:

It is raining
on and on, immense,
Each morose finger
On your hand your hand
Returning to the church
This melancholic Sunday
No one remains no one
A rose on your hair made from clouds
The street soaked in haunting sounds
A thousand years on
Rocking you with love
Rocking you with passion

Trời còn làm mưa
Mưa rơi mênh mang
Từng ngón tay buồn
Em mang em mang
Đi về giáo đường
Ngày chủ nhật buồn
Còn ai còn ai.
Đoá hoa hồng cài lên tóc mây
Ôi đường phố dài lời ru miệt mài
Ngàn năm ngàn năm
Ru em nồng nàn
Ru em nồng nàn

But instead of the melancholy of a Sunday afternoon in my mind when I arrived here it had to be a weekday evening. That was when I came to this street of my hotel. Darkness had come, daylight saving was over and it’s late October in central Europe. Berlin. It was grey but not rainy. It was rather cool but not freezing. A light wind brought the Celsius feel to the low single digits. Half the lemon-yellow remained on the black tree limbs and half on the ground. The weak street lights had turned on. The wide street was empty, empty of traffic except my taxi, empty of people except myself and the driver. Good heavens, even the hotel’s light at the entrance was dimmed, as if deliberate. It was a classically decorated five storied building.

The check-in quickly done, the light luggage quickly dropped at the corner of the room, a thicker jacket cursorily tagged along. Wallet. Phone. And off I went, must walk these streets, now. Must sit on the bench in the centre of the street. Otherwise the night, that particular night, might disappear from me.

I looked ahead, the four lines of trees looked back indifferently, the twinkling of street lights on the yellow leaves in the fog made fun of me. The quietude ignored me, no sign of affection.

This was a land belonging to strangers. Why did I have to latch on it my reminiscence of things that had gone by. I came here only to see her, as arranged. She might come, she might not. She didn’t come that first night despite everything was ready. And I am still waiting for her, yesterday, today …

When she comes, would she wear orange-yellow or deep red? Later on, before bed, would she wear a translucent silk night dress, showing off her upturn full breasts, her flat abdomen, her long long legs, her smooth smooth rich ladyhood, her swan neck, her long exquisite arms, her porcelain skin? She is so refined, so elegant, so learned, so beautiful that I would die before touching her.

My Lady, these crude passages are homage to you. They may not be worthy to be graced upon by your celadon eyes, I understand. I’m now older, the stanzas have lost their power. But my love for you, my first Aphrodite, is still with me – real, burning from here to infinity.

Long Vo-Phuoc, mid-late northern autumn, 2024

Waiting for Aphrodite

Alice Munro

In Memoriam, Alice Munro, 1931-2024

Thank you for every one of your more than hundred stories - every one of which, during the forty years that this simple soul had known of you, remains without fail luminous yet penetrating, as hard as ever, and always, always, a pleasure to read again and again. More than a pleasure, really a way of life.

Tết

It is overcast today, the first day of Tết. In fact it’s sprinkling – is that phùn, the raindrops that floated in the air in Ha Noi from what I read since sixty years ago. See, the rain in the lunar January of Hue was always heavy, same with Sai Gon. Nha Trang? Dry and sunny – as it usually was.

According to memory, at any rate. For a little amusement I don a tie, giving a nod to fifty years not seeing a real Tet. The polar-bear tie is nowhere to be seen, but we are not whacking the Nasdaq on the head today, are we (are we not?)? So a sepia-striped Georgio Armani will suffice. Let's leave the whacking job on the USD 1.8T Nvidia, the 3T Microsoft and Apple, the pushing and shoving Facebook (good heavens, at 1.2T green dollars), et cetera, for the younger polar bears of this world. May they stay tough and their analytical skills and financial resources last for longer, despite what Keynes said, than the idiocy of boys clamouring for new tech fads in the face of sputtering economies of China and Europe, of populist or authoritarian governments’ tendency to impose laws against upstarts, of world simmering tensions between the big boys, of competition and the dilution of new technologies …

But oh look, it’s pouring now out there. Phùn, what phùn? What phùn, dear Khai Hung and Nguyen Tuan?

I will treat the passages above as a hello to a habit on days like this, long ago.

February 2024

The Silk of Hà Đông (1973-1976 & Rho)

May 1973, bãi Dương

He received her letter, her essay, of the poem in the afternoon, the mail coming late in the area. He hurriedly opened it, made a little mess with the envelope (never forgives himself for that in the years to come). He read the first line, “My dear …” , then the second: “I never got over these two lines of Nguyên Sa”.

.....

The Silk of Hà Đông

Sài-Gòn, 1957 ... Sydney, 2024

The celebrated Áo Lụa Hà Đông of Nguyên Sa was written in 1957 in Sài Gòn, three years after the country was divided into North and South. There was peace – if only for a few more years. It is the most loved and most famous Việt poem after 1955. It is about two lovers and the silk of Hà Đông that was the áo-dài the girl wore.

Hà Đông was a province a little south of Hà Nội, capital of the North. Before 1954 it was famous for producing the finest silk for the country. After mid-1955 there was no longer commerce between North and South, so any Hà Đông silk of an áo-dài that a woman wore in the South would be a thing from the past, a lovely memory thing to be treasured almost above all else. It’s sentimental for me to imagine of such an áo-dài, made by such silk, that was worn by a bride on her wedding day prior to 1955.

This is the setting of the poem: two lovers, the girl extraordinarily beautiful, the boy a poet, sitting in a park in the October of Sài Gòn’s 1957. The calendar said it was October but it’s still tropically hot and humid you understand. So the boy pulled out an autumn from his Paris memory, because he lived there a few years back, to the Sài Gòn park and fervently believed that it, the autumn, chased itself around them, around his beloved who wore an áo-dài made from the Hà Đông silk, made on an autumnal day in Ha Noi some years before. He believed in such things, and told her that he loved her. He did all that, you see, because there was, as I had said, peace in Sai Gon, in 1957. I feel for the pair of lovers, I feel for her Hà Đông silk, the poet's too of course, but above all, without saying out loud, I feel for that peace of the Sài Gòn of 1957.

I first read the poem long ago, and thought off and on about translating it into English since 1973. Not seriously for the nearly half a century. Not only because poetry translating is a gross act of betrayal, but also because the poem itself is fiendishly difficult to be brought into another language. I had translated another poem of Nguyên Sa, Paris, one of Linh Phuong, one of Trinh Cong Son, and one or two of my own the last decade or two since retiring officially from the market, and I like those attempts of mine in a moderate way. But The Silk of Hà Đông is particularly defiant. Not simply because it’s the finest of verses or because it’s beautiful in images and lovely-beyond-lovely wordings. Not simply as such. It is also exceptionally romantic, like no others. The line “Mà mùa thu dài lắm ở chung quanh” must have dropped on the poet’s lap from the heavens one day in the Sài Gòn of mid-1950s.

And it, too, reminds me always of my Nha-Trang of 1973, and Café Tín-Mỹ, and the lovely person sitting in front of me on so many occasions, a person a little younger than I was …

So, could I make it into English lines that might appeal somewhat to my half-dying romantic self - the self somewhere from a pocket of the mind?

Fifty years on, in 2023 in Karlsruhe, Germany, I had just completed a personal literary task. I then had a go at the poem on the last day of October. This was when autumn swirled outside my hotel room, swirled above my head when I walked the city and the large famous park, attacked me with its red its gold its yellow when I wandered through the university (the KIT, Southern Campus) in the dark, at night, the pathway yellow lights among a little drizzling rain, swirled when I sat in cafes and restaurants looking outside. It was mid-late autumn, you see. Writing Nguyen Sa into an English poem those days I was drunk from words and alcohol, struggled with the lines and the memories.

But I completed a draft or two. By the time I left Zurich a week later it became the fifth draft, and I was 20% happy with my translation. A 20% probability is pretty low – you couldn’t make a living with that going to the battlefields of the marketplace. But at least it’s not 10%.

In Sydney over the Christmas break just past I finished the twentieth draft, and now my personal level of satisfaction rises to 75%. Not bad. By the time I truly stop editing this digital page it would probably become the fiftieth time. Well, what can one do with certain matters in life …

By the way I found seven English versions of the poem from the net, spanning the last seventy years. From the web-site https://viethocjournal.com/. Some of the attempts were from a Việt author or two but somehow I'm not sure if any of them was a poet. Anyway I put them in the images below. Reading this article on a computer would help the reader see it in an orderly perspective – never mind a little phone with its restricted frame, restricted space …

By the way, also, the poem was adapted into a well-known song by Ngô Thuỵ Miên although sadly the composer missed three stanzas in it – could have composed more notes to suit the extra lyrics. Duy Trác felt the sentiments well when singing it before and after 1975, Khánh Ly was soulful in 1976 in Sài Gòn, and Ngọc Lan did a nice gentle interpretation later in America.

For M and 1973, with love

Long Vo-Phuoc, 2023-24

Seeing in The Mind ...

Seeing in The Mind ... (Notes on Viet Lit)

In the late 1960s I read many of Võ Phiến's short stories, memoirs, novels, including Giã Từ (Farewell) published in Sai Gon in 1962. Reading Farewell I was quite amazed by the author’s unusual turn of phrases as the story unfolded, many parts rip-roaringly funny, many parts heartbreaking. His was a unique and refreshing style of narrative for the period, 1950s, 1960s, leaning strongly on realism – the prose clear and immensely rich with details. There was a strong underlying irony throughout the book - irony, sarcasm, but always under control, never malicious, never ugly, never lacking humour, never lacking depth or perception. I liked the book very much but thought, at the time, it wasn’t as attractive to me as a later work, Một Mình (Self). I was 14, 15, able to perceive the townscape of Hue, Nha Trang, Sai Gon of the mid 1960s but not yet imaginative enough to truly feel for a Qui Nhơn of 1945, 1950, 1953, 1955 …. At the time I didn’t fully fathom the intricacy of my country’s history during 1945-55. A few years later, and continuing for many afterwards, I delved further into that eventful period of the nation. In literature one feels, then one learns. The feel always overwhelms the learn. In history, the learn would first take centre stage.

Time passed, somehow I didn’t revisit Farewell in Viet Nam. But it so happened I came across the book not so long ago, here in Sydney, after well more than half a century. I closed my eyes and saw in the mind the setting of Viet Nam in the 1940s, 50s, the province Bình Định in particular. The propaganda fifty years ago, from the South, the North, from France, from the US, China, the Soviet Union … from self-serving Christian priests and Buddhist monks, gangster politicians, gangster bureaucrats, on and on to the nasty street gangsters, well, had now all scattered away in the wind, insignificant, odious.

Long Vo-Phuoc, 2023.

Cố-Quận (Old Home)

Cố - Quận (1973-76 & Rho)

Bởi vì cô bạn đã hỏi

Nên những giòng đơn-giản này

… viết ra.

The 1838 Map

The 1838 Map of Viet Nam

In 1838 the Oriental Lithograph Press in Calcutta, India, printed about 100 or so copies of the map of the Kingdom of Viet Nam. The map was comprised by the Jesuit scholar and missionary Jean Louis Taberd (a French Lycée in Sai Gon would bear his name after the French ate up the country in 1884) in, surprisingly, the brand-new Viet writing language using Latin alphabets. Don't forget that in 1838 Viet Nam was sovereign with King Minh Mang at the apex and Chinese Mandarin the official writing language.

The rare map is the earliest and most detailed one of the country: there was a 1764 map of the South-East Asia region, in French - nothing compared to this. There are a lot more details in it of the Southern (“Đàng Trong”, under the control of the Nguyễn Lords) than the Northern, simply because the Nguyễns were more open to foreigners, to commerce. Note also that towns such as “Sai-Gon” or “Nha-Trang” weren’t known to Taberd at the time, if existed formally as such at all.

Most of the original prints were lost through neglect and war. I’m sure what remain now are mostly in libraries, some in Viet Nam, some in France, some in Russia and China, maybe one or two in London or the US, and maybe, but unlikely, one exists in Australia. Probably not more than a dozen all up in the world. One or two perhaps in private hands, those eccentric private hands. One came up for sale a few years ago in Canada via Abbey Books, in "very good condition".

Map-making is a supreme art of humankind. It is a combination of art and science, of poetry and adventure accomplished via a sea of calculations, drawings, errors and trials, of the losses of lives, and of the pollution from the nasty smell of colonialism’s gun smoke (must every difficult achievement in life be a result of good and evil together?). See an example made in 1875 of India, Tibet and Sinkiang (my Page “Maps”, link above). Even those recent ones made in the 1960s by the US Army of Hue, Nha-Trang and Sai Gon are quite evocative, to me at any rate. In early 1974 I happened to draw a map, exhibited in my residential college and discussed it with a wonderful person who I had just met only a few minutes earlier. She told me maps might as well be memory in its furthest reach. For the countless times when we were with each other the next eighteen months, any time she said anything to me I saw immediately in her voice in her eyes on her lovely face the deep poetic wisdom of maps and of her mind.

Back to this, some of the best modern map-makers were Dutch. I wonder if any of my readers has a copy of Atlas Maior of Joan Blaeu of the Netherlands, published in 1665. That was the greatest achievement of maps at the time, and probably for a hundred years afterward. The immense atlas was republished by Taschen of Germany in 2005 under the direction of von Peter van de Krogt. It has been out of print many years now but I was fortunate to have bought one, pristine, from Amazon US for a hundred US dollars at the time. The huge book, hard cover, is still pristine in my hand after all the years of perusing!

At any rate I include the beautiful Taberd map here for the reader's enjoyment, to mark my fifty years away from the old country. The digital file in my hand is 9.3M jpg, lots of details. This attachment is just less than 1M. My Valentine printed it out for me in A2 size, and it looks good on the wall. It was downloaded from the "MapPorn" page of Reddit.

Long Vo-Phuoc, November 2023

Chapter 3 - Nga

Chapter 3 Nga (North-East)

When she was in mid-teens her mother used to say Nga lived in the clouds. Perhaps that was right. Her mind then never seemed to connect with her feet. She walked, and saw the treetops of Hàng Bạc. She sat, and inhaled the humidity of rain on the Opera. She closed her eyes, and in the mind touched the tip of Mount Việt Trì with her fingers.

A dreamer, night and day.

Hà Nội in the days of the mid-1930s was a place exuded with energy, even if that energy had no outlet to anything really worthwhile. People were romantic, full of new ideas learnt from the Western world (the French world, if one wants to be precise). People enjoyed a little more freedom from their “protectors”, five years on from the dark days of the Nationalists’ ill-fated uprisings. The white men’s economy in far-off lands, it was said, had come off the bottom. The colony here, it was said with further details, was becoming more productive. And privately the masters of the land pretended to see more docility from the subjects. After all one could put only so many in prison, could execute so many by hired machete hands.

Thus Hà Nội had many newspapers and tabloids, a few with literary and cultural pretensions. New books were published, fictions and poetry about love, playboys, modern girls, rebellion against the family tradition, memoirs of trips to Marseilles and Paris. Serious science materials were printed, the mathematics, the geography, and yes, the human biology with concentration on subjects such as sex and so on. It’s a new world.

And sometimes, it was true, there appeared passages on an entirely new brand of philosophy awkwardly labeled socialism, Marxism, communism. Yes, poverty was discussed in heart-breaking details and remedies argued earnestly, on occasions belligerently. Yes, France and her riches and exploitative ways were not necessarily the only wondrous model for humanity in the universe.

Hà Nội in the thirties, gay, free to enjoy harmless things, be they love, opium or gambling. Full of idealistic young men and women, all eager to learn new ideas. Most were French-educated in their twenties, some a little younger, and just a few very young like Nga.

Nga loved authors like Khái Hưng and Nhất Linh. Nga was much taken with poets like Xuân Diệu and Huy Cận. Later on Nga loved Nguyễn Tuân, especially, for his magical ways of conjuring colours and sentiments from the time just past, for his hard sharp strokes on poverty and the oppressed of the present (whenever turning a page of his books, Nga paused and wondered, another page, paused and wondered ...).

Nga was high-spirited. Nga was clever, pretty, liberal, well-read. Nga was everything Nga could wish to be.

Whenever got home her feet started to dance on their own accords. She could not wait to toss aside her school sandals and turn a few times in the little foyer doubled as living room and study for the whole family. She wanted to shout to her sisters, if they’re home already, on what had happened to her today even if it was nothing really. She wanted to ask if Thái learnt anything new from her high-browed history lectures, if she still talked to that toad of a wannabe lawyer cum activist, or if Thi struggled at all with physics in her baccalaureate. What about her Cậu, wasn’t he also home from the office, and if not, why not? What about Mẹ, why did it take her so long to walk home from the school? Couldn’t she hurry on because Nga was now waiting for her at home, wanting to tell her that human existence was truly meaningless, because at the end dust would become dust, because poets East and West had all said so – using the same precise words or not, what did it matter? We all will become dust and thus life is truly meaningless, isn’t it?

The meaning of life aside, one minor inconvenience in her life at the time was that Nga could not bring herself to rebel against her parents (or her sisters for that matter). It would have been perfect if Nga could identify herself with a tragic character in a modern popular fiction, Đoạn Tuyệt for example. Like Loan in it, Nga, or more likely her eldest sister Thái, would soon be forced to marry a traditional toad and would terribly miss an imaginary lover running around the country carrying on illegal but noble activities – like, starting a revolution against the French.

But no, Nga (or Thái, or Thi) could never even try to force her parents to arrange marriage for them and such like. The fact of the matter was that, instead of frowning on the three daughters for being day-dreamers and romantic high-browed nonsense, instead of that, they themselves engaged in something far more idealistic, far more nonsensical, far more deadly.

They were socialists, Marxists, on paper.

And before long, that sort of new-age romanticism trickled down to their daughters.

Was that how it began, she asks herself that every day. That my parents were two hopeless romantics, not happy enough in their love for each other, not happy enough in their bourgeois existence as minor public servants to the French, one a document translator and the other a high school teacher, not enough with a quiet life (would it be possible to be otherwise, regardless?) in lenient wonder at their daughters’ growth into womanhood. Not happy enough. They had gone further. They insisted on being revolutionaries in the mind. Marx and Engel and Lenin and all those more-than-foreign foreigners.

Thus Thái got to know this young toad marking time at the law school in her university. Liking him. Bringing him home. And shared his radical ideas around the home. He was downright dangerous in speech, in his conflicting Leninist and nationalist ideas – himself far from being au fait with the philosophy itself. He was confusing but always gamely bluffed his way out of tricky corners in arguments. He was confident, passionate. He was animated when talking to Thái and Mẹ about battles, the Great War, Napoleonic War ... the other two barely able to put a word in. Cậu, Thi and Nga looked on with frank amazement. He was full of emotions against anything that was not Việt Nam, his own definition of Việt Nam. He was an early member, a senior one, of a secret communist party. He hated the French yet loved to brandish his necktie, his ridiculous white suit bought when first came to Hà Nội a few years back. He was vain and not particularly brilliant. His stature was average, no taller than Thái, shorter than Thi and Nga who was fifteen. But he was infinitely ambitious, infinitely passionate ...

He declared, rather pompously, his love for Thái to her family. And Nga, loving each of her sisters far more than he would ever love Thái (different kinds of love, sure, but weren’t care and sacrifice the same denominators?), somehow had doubt even in her tender age. She very much wanted to know if he loved Thái, her own affectionate Thái, more than he loved his Việt Nam? But she held her peace, because what could one do about matters of causes and effects, matters of fate, non-existent or otherwise, and because Thái had deeply fallen for him. Thái thought of him as more worthy than anyone in Hà Nội, in the country, on the planet. Thái was besotted with him, willing to marry him in the middle of her university year, and Nga was shocked by the intensity of her sister’s emotion.

On Hàng Bạc, this last day of October, Nga looks up at the grey sky, dry eyes. Soon the misty rain will bring tiny droplets to her hair, forehead. She closes her eyes and breathes in her despair intermingled with the cool humidity. Did I have many days of this phùn weather when I was fifteen? Did I see grey, or did my mind seduce nature and bring blue always to the top of the money trees, the maples, the rare poplars the French planted when they had a break from imprisoning and murdering my people?

Dear loving Mẹ, I haven’t day-dreamed for many years.

She holds the two lapels of her threadbare jacket together, steering the bicycle with one hand. Must keep warm, and must hurry on to the meeting, or I will soon shake. In so doing make sure the eyes stay dry.

An apology to Khái Hưng, 1896-1947 (Notes on Viet Literature)

In 1975 I wrote a series of articles on Vietnamese literature and published them on the bi-monthly of Viet students in Sydney. I was the editor and manager of the journal, ran it as if in a delirium. The time was just after the change of regime in South Việt Nam, the forces from the communist North had won the war.

I missed the country that I had left nearly two years before, I missed the books I read there and would never see them again (communist cadres would burn them all within a year or two, as they had always threatened) – books belonging to writers I thought well of, many in first and only edition. The need to write something almost chocked me day in day out in April, May, in June, July … When you’re not even twenty, and the line in the sand had been drawn, clear, deep.

.......

(June 1975, Sydney)

Sơ-Lược Về

VĂN-CHƯƠNG MÌNH BỐN MƯƠI LĂM NĂM NAY

Văn-chương tiền chiến: dạy-dỗ hay không dạy-dỗ
Văn-chương miền Nam: tìm kiếm đường về

Mấy tháng trước, tình cờ tôi đọc lại một truyện ngắn của Vo-Phiến. Một truyện ngắn cũ. Tác giả viết về những dao động tâm hồn người Việt sau hiệp định Genève. Cái dao động ấy như thế nào, tôi đã cảm dược nhiều năm trước. Mới vừa đây, nằm trong căn phòng xứ lạ, tôi vẫn còn cảm được. Ai ngờ đâu, bao nhiêu năm xa Việt-Nam, tôi vẫn hình dung được sự đa diện văn chương nước mình.

......

Long Vo-Phuoc, late spring 2023 (and deep autumn in Hà Nội).

Văn-chương Mình ... Part 1

The Ogress's Reply

The Ogress's Reply (North-East)

(1955)

So, dearest Nga darling, you really want to know who I am?

You asked me that last night, remember? So this is the confession: I am an ogress, a mean and very hungry ogress, my diet consists solely of one substance, and that substance is you. I eat you up anytime, whatever your protest whatever your state of being. Eat you up, dearest darling, simply eat you up.

(how one contemplates one's object of desire ...)

Gustav Klimt - Lady With A Muff, circa 1916, private collection

February no longer

Early the Sunday morning just past I crossed the part-intersection at Grattan Street. Part-intersection, because one half was well boarded up, under construction for a tunnel. It was a little after eight. Elizabeth became Royal Parade.

A modern monstrosity was behind on the left, a big car park hidden inside dark glass and steel cage, really not a such bad sight compared to many of its cousins built in large cities. It was certainly brand-new. I started to brave myself for similar changes ahead. What did the line of an old poem say – blue sea turns into rice fields? And immediately, rather distressfully, I saw two large tree stumps cut down to the ground near the centre of the boulevard. Between a lane for traffic and double-tracks for trams.

I didn’t expect to see anyone on my path, and there would be none for a while. I suddenly realised, despite ridiculous expectation prior, that I might not be able to meet that young chap on the way. There was no worthy probability for that to happen, only hope. A silly hope, that was true. But when you’re nearly seventy you ought to be allowed a few slivers of such a thing.

I looked at the boulevard more properly, further up in front. Two lines of large elms, with typically black trunks and branches, running along the footpath almost to the horizon. Across a wide traffic lane (but no traffic, you understand) next to me, one more line. Across the two tram tracks, yes, the same, another line. Across the traffic lane the other side onto the opposite footpath, well, one more. Twenty thirty metres apart for every pair, five lines of trees, on a stretch of more than two kilometres. Probably four hundred specimens all up, more than a hundred years old. Speaking about a lavish endeavour at the turn of the last century, when labour was cheap, time and materials plentiful.

I was much relieved. I thought there would be more than just the two forlorn stumps at the beginning. But really that’s all there were. Quite likely because the new tunnel had to go through the roots.

These trees were English elms, the fallen leaves in late autumn carrying a bright yellow hue. The leaf fit well inside the hand - I used to have a similar one in my old house of nearly thirty years. I crossed the empty traffic lane and stepped onto the wide nature strip near the boulevard centre, stepping on a yellow carpet. Soft and thick under my shoes. I walked a length before getting back to the footpath. The university ground was on my right – gate 13 beckoned for a quick rest on a stone bench between old buildings, such I knew well enough, even if there had been a passage of time in between. But no, I had to see him, my young friend, before time blurred his face and my eyes could no longer see the details. I walked on, occasionally looked up to the leaves on high, abundant still in mid-June. What could I say, I loved these trees, these leaves, this time of the year. I loved this walk – even though this being only the second time, that was true, but like an old lover who always remained graceful and beautiful, for her time and frequency were never paramount and neither really was even passion. Instead a slow process had started that ripened the memory of her, the opposite to the mills of “god”. It was the slow-burn haunting of love, not the delayed retribution for sins.

I lowered my eyes, looked ahead. There was now someone with a pet dog further on, and then, was that him, my young friend. My young friend, my old friend, walking with eyes looking up the tree tops?

If it was him, was he thinking of Công Lý or Pasteur when the world was still young, of the tamarinds covering the two streets. Four lines of trees each street, between pedestrians and lanes for cars and lanes for bikes. The trees were planted long ago by the French. Not as grandiose as Champs Elysees but exceptionally beautiful. Nearly three kilometres long, those streets, parallel each other. A thousand tamarinds all up. A hundred years old, give or take.

February 1975, when the young chap walked the Royal Parade, when the tamarinds of Pasteur and Công Lý still lived fresh in the mind, still compared well to the elms of the Royal. When the two Phú-Nhuận to Sài-Gòn Central routes laid alongside the Brunswick to Melbourne CBD, showing off their deep green shade.

February 1975, when Janis Ian pronounced that her slightly earlier world was younger still. But never mind that intricate detail of the delightful Ms. Ian for a moment, that moment in time of 1975 was young, very young, to the chap that I once knew. How many such Februaries existed in a lifetime of a sentient? Before welt- and realpolitik came with all its brutal force, canons and ideologies, with retribution and without love.

February 1975, was it a month that was now no longer in the calendar of the mind, when the tamarinds had ripened their fruits long ago, had dropped offsprings on the ground – rotting, eaten by sundry birds, sundry worms, crushed to oblivion by sundry shoes, sundry bare poverty feet, such as they were.

That friend of mine, the young chap with eyes so wide and mind so hopeful, not even twenty, did I really see him the Sunday morning just past? Coming to this boulevard after nearly fifty neglecting years simply to walk along these elms, did I really sight an old friend? Or was I, am I, now too jaded to even concede that my eyesight, my mindscape, are no longer equal to the task of dissecting memory?

One afternoon in a past landscape, February cradled the chap under the summer green of four hundred elms, the green of a thousand tamarinds. One step out of time, somehow, and February no longer, the tamarinds died. Only the late autumnal yellow of the elms remained.

Long Vo-Phuoc, winter 2023

(Note: Speaking of cheap and plentiful labour, above, when the Royal Parade elms were planted, I couldn’t resist a note here. At least in Melbourne, then, labour was paid for more or less in accordance with the law of the land. Anglo-Irish labour for the tree planting, mostly. Not well-underpaid, forced or slave labour all over the colonies of Europe at the time: much of Asia, Africa, Latin America, the US South, and in Australia itself with Chinese labour for the early gold rush. Who would ever forget the four to six million Congolese slave-labourers killed by Leopold II and his Belgian henchmen in the name of greed for ivory and especially rubber more than a century ago? Hitler and Stalin were nasty beyond nasty. What word, then, can be used to describe Leopold, him among the clubby European royalties (yes, the English especially with cousin Victoria) and friendly republics at the time?

Things are still difficult in many parts of the world today – where women, in particular, continue to suffer as they did decades and centuries ago.

The Elms image is a photo from my phone. The Tamarinds from Google Image.)

Chapter 9 - Monologue

Gazette du Bon Ton, 1913

North-East - Chapter 9

Monologue

(Nga’s personal notes. Cao Bằng, autumn 1947.)

The war rages on. A nation's bewildering romance of autumn 1945 has faded. In its place is the numbing reality of lost and found, found and lost. My days struggle under the numerous tasks. The minutes between days, in the still of darkness when midnight comes, lengthen, intolerable.

I write these pages to escape those moments. To clear out the thoughts mutating in them, clear out the mind, clear out the festering. A waste of precious paper, that is true. A frivolous activity, perhaps - but surely there must be leniency from the altar of ideology.

…..

Hồ and Giáp barely escaped French claws in Bắc Kạn. The comrades were relieved but tension has since steadily built up. This novelty of our time, the paratrooper assault. Soon the enemies will attack our Cao Bằng redoubt. The town will likely be lost but the village is fifteen kilometres away. If needed we simply filter into the Chinese jungle leaving non-essential equipment behind. After a while they will withdraw, and we will be back. As always they need a decisive fight. As always we deny them one. That’s the way war works for the weak, weak in firepower but steely in the mind. Or so Hồ insists, casualties notwithstanding.

I work efficiently. We were even commended at times. But there is a hollow detachment in my soul. Not a death wish in face of the battle ahead, no, simply an indifference.

.....

Occasionally I miss a café noir. Put the pencil down, a break, and memory of the dark liquid on the tongue stirs. So many nuisances for a bourgeois habit. Isn’t it easier to forget it altogether? But it’s almost a year.

It’s almost a year since the last shared cup. Autumn then was deepening. The days darker at five and six. The Celsius fell steadily. The humidity pervasive. It rained a little, every day.

Like now.

The young comrade said the French had started to demolish the area to build new homes. February. Making homes for the returning French. The bulldozers carried fallen comrades’ rotting bodies away to the dumps.

Bones and skins – unpleasant creatures still feasting on.

The comrade looked older than his twentysomething. He said, “I’m sorry comrade chị Nga”. Why sorry. Because he himself had escaped with the barest margin of life over death?

I miss Thân. I wish I had loved him near as much as he loved me. I wish I was, am, less of a cynic.

Thân and the last café noir. How we miss the details, the profound and the minor. I know: because all are no longer with us.

......

Liễu said, it hurts seeing you bottle up anguish inside, can anyone do anything? She is loyal and affectionate, more so than ever. Cheerful, kind-hearted - there is a nice local admirer for her, still early days, but she never asks him here, our little home and work station.

I said, I am not really against socialising myself with the comrades, but I am used to deal with things this way. She said, you push even the closest of friends away when you have a bad problem.

The mask that we wear.

The ronéo printer is ancient. It was probably never good when new, a lifetime ago. We actually paid for it, second hand at a much reduced price, at the same time with the battered typewriter, a small supply of stencils, paper, ink, sundries. From a dilapidated printing house in Cao Bằng last winter. The stencils will soon run out, what remain are creased in places almost like a crumpled page – streaks of carbon black showing. The production is rudimentary, and both of us smudged from head to toe on printing days (often Lieu asks, there are black spots on your cheeks, your lips, eyelids, would you like me to clean them for you – even though she’s no better). A dozen pages in all for each edition, every page, almost every space, covered with words, small font and narrow spacing. Fifty copies - any more and the stencils would disintegrate. And the paper has to be saved up for later editions, for the classes, for other Party work. Every three months an edition, when the change of seasons comes. Each copy passes from hand to hand, by the hundreds, this side of river Lô, even further on to the Red and Brown basins. The comrades would read and compare with other newsletters from other Liễus other Ngas.

Everything is manual. I am an old hand at rolling stencils since well before the autumn-revolution days. The half-broken wooden handle must be manipulated with care. I can even feel the worn-out bearing balls, judge the amount of ink, press on the stencil here and there to make sure the ink is evenly spread out – “evenly” is a very generous term here. For each page I attach the row of holes at top of the stencil onto the gauges and spread it out; a delicate task with almost no margin for error. I wait a little, then roll fast for the first few copies, gingerly for the next few, fast again, slow again, always checking on the sheet coming out. Judgement, judgement. Liễu and Cả watch as if in a trance. They probably watch me more than watch the machine. My perspiration seeps from hair onto the forehead. I feel strands of it on my cheeks. My shirt sleeves are rolled up high, arms alternate between warm from the effort and cool from rest in between the pages. My neck becomes hot.

The last occasion Liễu said quietly, standing next to me, “you’re so beautiful Nga”, eyes shining. The noise generated from my arm on the little iron workhorse half drowned her voice; the little table shook as always. I was embarrassed, but the machine demanded full attention.

Every season. For almost a year now. On those printing days I discover I am still vain. So tiresome, vanity. But I am a young woman, not yet thirty.

They like our work. Snippets of very general news of the struggle, carefully considered and discussed prior at the committee. Helpful hints on health, hygiene, food and clothes - what little of the last two items that can be had. Present too are rehashed anecdotes on troop spirit from old Viet and recent Soviet travails - mushy stirring tales all but I am careful not to cheapen them with flowery and overt party-loyal language.

It is not easy. Many times I have to step away from the Nga that is still a stranger at heart to the Party. This is a task I have committed to do, thus I must do it well. Regardless of personal feelings, bourgeois reactionary tendency from long long past as a Party theoretician may fairly accuse. I want to contribute to the struggle. I want to offer practical help. Tighten the mind, I tell myself.

Liễu too contributes. She writes carefully, types diligently, striking hard on the keys to penetrate the recalcitrant wax of the stencils. We will die young from heart diseases, she rues. She is happy, innocent even. Her eyes at times are red, baggy, like mine. We hug each other after an edition is done. Her embrace is tight, giving, while mine reserved, reluctant.

Young Cả never refuses a task no matter how trivial how physically arduous. He brings timber for the heating of some of the numerous drums of water that he brings also. Yes, for our Hà Nội decadent daily wash – at night in late autumn and winter when it is cold, but we don't tell him that. He once offered to bring some chicken meat, some tasty fish maybe. We said no, thank you Cả, we are vegetarians, not buddhists but vegetarian atheists in Uncle Hồ's revolutionary spirit, and we three all smiled, Cả reddening slightly. He can read now, and is very thankful. It takes him only a few days to finish a newsletter. He distributes the copies to the various post comrades, by foot - a bicycle not yet available for him, never a complaint, always with a bright smile, bright eyes. Occasionally he practises with a rifle when temporarily in hand – more often these days coming from China. And a hundred little unpaid tasks demanded by the Party machinery, in between farming, helping with sick parents, taking care of small siblings. There are a thousand like him in this province. Many more in the North-East.

There is spirit in this struggle, yes, spirit intermingled with coercion. If I could only find a personal hope to bring into it ...

....

There are few books here, there being little room for such burdens. I remember a passage from a writer ’s memoir – was it Nhat Linh’s “Westward Bound”? The alter-ego, twenty-one twenty-two, a non-believer in ideology or religion. After many trying and convoluted manoeuvres somehow found himself at the 1931 Paris colonial expo.

The young man was there, wind in hair and mind. By chance met an old Hà Nội acquaintance. They had a meal together, a young man and a young woman, deliriously exiled from home for that little while. Life brightened suddenly under a sky belonging to others. The young man said he was here and there on the way – waiter on ships and all. The young woman said, yes, she too was here and there. But it mattered not, they assured each other, because they were now in Paris. Can life sparkle in any other way?

Do we struggle through life so as to build an expo for others to meet, to renew acquaintance, to renew love, vigour?

Or more often than not we struggle in order to, simply, finally, attend others’ expo? Strangers in a strange land? To smoke a cigarette, have a sip of cafe, of wine, pretend to look at the trees outside the window so as to look at the soul of the love interest opposite? Really, are those us, we Việts who have never been so inventive yet who are always keen to fight, among ourselves and against others, and thus find not much else to do?

My sister and brother comrades, by all means build or attend expos. And not to fight through life.

As for me, there is no purpose at all to be at an expo, Hà Nội Paris or Moscow. I wish only to pave over midnight thoughts with pencil and precious paper, ironing out invisible cancerous cells. One day the midnight minutes will lengthen into days, into months. These pages must then be burnt into ashes.

......

The comrades had finally killed the writer Khái Hưng in Nam Định. Or so they whispered at the committee. The cadres there, loyal members all, demonstrated pleasure to each other, slapping each other's back, praising the determined cleverness of the men responsible.

They got hold of him in the countryside. They put him in a large canvas pouch, added stones. And threw him into the middle of the river. The deeds that men do, either side of the dividing line.

The deed that was done to this writer. One who never received a favour from the French or the puppet royal bureaucracy. One whom the French disliked, imprisoned even, because he was a progressive. One whom the comrades disliked, because he worshipped the rights of the individual above all else. A liberal with a pen. One who fervently espoused liberalism. One who, from this side of the divide I shall deeply miss.

I too believe in liberalism, mind and soul.

I was a little upset. I didn’t say anything. Perhaps that will be quietly reported to the highest channel. I smiled to myself – by all means do so. Soon later, cycling back home, alone in front of the table, the tiny blackboard, the printer in the corner - comfort things all, I realised I was still upset.

Khái Hưng. Was it that long ago when I read “Hồn Bướm Mơ Tiên ” when it was first published. “Nửa Chừng Xuân” a year older. And “Trống Mái ”, that strange bourgeois novel - so bourgeoisie, so far removed from the sad reality of this land, yet it was part of Hà Nội life. Trống Mái, where sexual feelings in a young woman threatened to overcome class, education, social standing, prejudice. Only threatened, never remotely had a chance to eventuate – a bridge simply too far.

Trống Mái surprised me. The narrative was suitably reflective of a spoilt rich girl, attractive, well-educated, modern. Sophisticated in a materialistic way. A little callous to begin with but never ill-meaning to anyone. A superb Viet elite product in the French mould. Vulnerability she had, but well-defended by the confidence of breeding and education.

The young woman had empathy, feelings, and with those came understanding and appreciation of the less fortunate. Yet there would be no radical ending. A ponderous tale, perhaps pointless, quite, but a tale well illustrating the empty French education of the Viet serving class. Well-learned, this new class, to be sure, but existed solely to serve the masters of the land. As long as one did not step astray: because there would be harsh penalty. A half-hearted liberalism offered to suit the mother country’s exploitative ways, much less than half of what a Khái Hưng would hope for. And so on to this day in towns and cities occupied by the colonialists.

My family, sisters, had stepped outside the constraint. Paid the price (how do the French and cronies feel, executing young women on grounds of ideology: the Inquisition all over again for modernity?). And all that once was is now reduced to this self, this self who writes these reactionary words when autumn is falling outside.

Nguyễn Tuân, Khái Hưng ... writers almost of my generation, ten twenty years older. I feel affectionate to them. I could touch them with my mind. And now one side, my side, had cruelly murdered him because Khái Hưng was a non-believer, on his own side. As cruelly as the colonialists and collaborators killed millions of Viets from battlefields and prisons for 80 years.

The odious dividing line of humanity who does harm to each other in the name of ideology, religion, greed. And in so doing we think we are closer to a higher being, to a purer self.

Yes, these pages must turn into ash one day. I only wish, when that happens, no harm would come to Liễu who shares this work station with me, my comrade and loyal friend.

I have no ambition, no family, hardly a friend. No possession - the reclaimed old family home having been sold to donate to the cause. Not even a book from the long past survives. Nothing but conflicts in the mind, nothing but memory.

I am an able comrade, who quietly writes these passages whilst working for the Party and the nation. When I’m no longer useful I shall go.

But until then, until then, there is still rain to watch, yellow leaves from rare deciduous in Cao Bằng to search for, memory of the abundant French poplars in Hà Nội to fester in the mind. Teasing from Thái and Thi who live in a fairy tale I cannot fathom. In such a tale live also Cậu Mợ who voice loving concern. As do Thân and the shared cafe – his tender thoughts, tender acts on earthy form.

Is memory a dangerous thing that is ever ready to suffocate the mind? Did the Austrians really believe that before war came to them? Did they revise their premature snippets at war’s end? Amid ruins, amid bodies with unpleasant creatures still feasting on?

Until then until then.

One from the 70s

I came across the below from a stall selling old books and papers in a street market – a lifelong habit of being amused by old written artifacts here and there now and then.

I read it cursorily at first, then again more thoroughly, and suddenly wished I was back at my den, at home, doing so. Because, well, you see, I do give myself some credit for having a little romantic notion, a little romantic reminiscence, in life. Yet this piece of writing is way above that notion – I know I’m really a lesser being in that regard, my lower station at the present time.

Without further ado I reprint it herewith. Seeing that there is no name signed at the end (on another page now well-disintegrated somewhere?), I assume intellectual ownership of it here. If you think that’s blatant plagiarism, well here’s my neck, slice it away with a sixteenth century katana owned by a Shogun. Silly in all frankness, true – I couldn’t have penned a piece like that. My mind, which recently has been pondering on the greed and idiocy for decades of the big Swiss bank Credit Suisse that just went bust creating mayhem for the Western-world banking market for weeks, as well as on the amateurish handling of the bailout by Swiss banking regulators that was in some part quite ugly and morally wrong – with a mental hobby like that (just hobbies, nowadays), ahem, surely I couldn’t have written anything as tender, as touching, as hopeful, even during all those years ago. You could see that, surely. Heavens, I wish I once could be able to pen such a love letter.

Naturally, being a thoughtful person in these matters, I shall take this post down if the rightful owner of the piece, the recipient, whoever she is, starts proceedings against me.

LVP.

My dear Abc,

How difficult is it to fly? Are there many who can do so (without machinery help, that is)?

Probably not, and probably many. Because I am doing that right now, and I am only an average person. I am flying over these buildings of central Sydney, the Pitts the Georges the Williams. Kings Cross ... the CBD ... Taylor's Square ... Anzac Parade ...

What is there not to fly, I ask myself. And you might ask: Xyz, why do you have to fly?

I fly because, my dear Abc, because I love you. You may not love me, but at least you let me hug you, at least you gently kissed me on the cheek when we parted (only for now, my eternal hope). If those things don't make me lift myself into the air, seeing the world in all its exciting and wondrous colours (with the loveliest hues being those on your cheeks), well, I don't know what does.

What does it take to make one happy? I can't make a full inventory of the causes, but in my short life to date there have been many. From the seemingly less significant but quite consequential to the clearly visible. I was happy when seeing the moon above when as a six-year old walking home with his mum, when going to buy rice sake for grand-mum, when lying on gravel in primary school yard looking up the late afternoon summer sky of the old capital ....

And many many others when I started growing up.

But, perhaps, nothing ever compared to holding you in my arms, holding carefully, and somewhat in fear, feeling your gentle breaths, your slightest pulse, breathing through your hair, feeling close to your face ...

It's strange that the feelings of love (spiritually and, yes, physically) are so strong. I'm sure that applies to animals also. But animals don't pass exams, don't win at war or sport, don't consciously conquer the highest mountains (presumably), the widest rivers (presumably), the stormiest of oceans (but surely whales do), and don't get suddenly rich with millions of dollars from lotteries or the sharemarket ....

And yet, none of that would beat my humble pleasure of being with you.

But maybe I should stop going into further pondering, lest you become embarrassed and forbid me from seeing you any further. That would be a severe punishment, a tragedy. I can stand the fact that you don't reciprocate my feelings, but not being able to see your smile, to hear your gentle voice and your thoughts, to look at your lovely face, your kind gestures, your ethereal form?

Speaking of the simple innocent pleasures of life, you know, dearest Abc, as I mentioned just now, I used to go and buy "first-grade" rice sake for my paternal grandmother when ten. That was in the old capital, summer, back in the mid 1960s. I walked through those little lanes inside the citadel , narrow lanes that hardly ever saw motorcycles let alone cars, but bicycles, tri-cycles. It's about 45 minutes' for me from grandparents' small house at the top of the citadel (sounds grand, but it's a very poor and badly-serviced area) to the "shop", which was a house. The first few times my grand mum walked with me there to show the way, the home-grown distiller being an old lady friend of hers, and the first produced batch of sake was called "first-grade". It's good, I believe, but not expensive.

Anyway, I walked under the summer sun, late in the morning. Cicadas sang from end to end. Red (not purple) jacaranda covered the streets on high up. I walked, and felt elated in a peaceful way. Had I gone to paradise at that tender age of ten, that would have been the way to go. I walked there, and I walked back. Two hours, completely forgot that I lived with grandparents, sisters, aunt, cousins, but no parents. Slipped from my mind also was the fact that the country had a coup d’état a year or two before, that war started to rage in the countryside, that people protested and died on the streets, that trains had become a thing in the past due to mines ....

I forgot all that, because the walk was so elating, peaceful, scarcely imaginable, tangible yet wondrously spiritual, both; my flesh and skin acutely feeling that dreamy summer of childhood ...

And, my lovely Abc, I felt all of that, and much more, holding you in my arms just yesterday .....

Yours humbly,

Xyz

Early autumn, 2023.

Reflections on a War

5 Reflections (Evening in Vijaya)

(Personal letter from King Che Bunga of Champa to Duchess ऱ्ओश्नि, written on his return from military expedition to Thăng Long in the eleventh year of his reign, 14th century.)

My dear Light,

I am writing to you from the upper deck of my quarter. The adjutant has just taken away my last armour change, smelly and tainted with soot and unpleasant things. It is noon, with a little wind. We are quite some way off the coast of Đại Việt. We departed before first light, the sun slanted by our left when we left the river’s estuary.

You would have known by now from our previous despatch: we had total victory. There is not much more to add to it, except that we have now withdrawn. The Viets’ large army is badly depleted yet survives, we destroyed only the substantial Thăng Long contingent. Their king fled from the capital, and somehow they were reluctant to mount a major counterattack during our occupation. They will have to live with their absolute shock, dismay, and thereby reinforce their hatred of us. But the Việts will rebuild their capital, their fleet and their pride.

The Chams, well, the Chams will have to start preparing for further major battles ahead against a weakened enemy, at the same time plan for peace as per the wishes of their King and, especially, of their spiritual leader and finest thinker for generations - yourself, my beloved Light.

Is revenge so sweet, or is it overrated like most things in life? Are victories and material gains enough to make up for the remorse aftermath that is always the price exacted from the victor, this victor at any rate? Or are they as ephemeral as mayflies? The questions you always ask on my behalf, and an answer we both could not find.

But this is a love letter, not a royal command, not an official correspondence, and certainly not an end-chapter note in a king’s self-serving war memoir. I always write such a one (the love letter, not a book addendum) to you following a long campaign. You always are embarrassed after reading it even though, as you say on every occasion, you were looking forward to receiving it - because you miss me when I am away (and I you)? You would say, “your letter is difficult for me and unfair to the Queen, but thank you”. I would say, how is it unfair if I have been so writing to you since childhood. You: but there is now your family to focus your affection. I: I love my family but I still love you. You: that is disloyal to your lady. I: but you and I are as chaste and distant in the matter of the flesh as the sun and the moon, how is it disloyalty?

(My simple argument never registers any conviction with you. Well, I am a sailor and you the philosopher.)

Somehow you would give me a half-smile, and say: nevertheless ... your letter is still long, passionate, and quite funny, as always. I: I’m glad it pleases you, and would not mind if you recite a passage back to me – I simply couldn’t remember. And this is when you would bid me goodbye if we have no further matter to discuss, a half-smile again, touch my forehead, my face, with your lovely hands, in broad daylight or in full lanterns’ glare for everyone to see, and leave me. You are radiant yet exceptionally lonely in those instances, it cuts me, and I immediately miss you when the first sound of your steps echoes away. At such times I feel helpless. I am the King of this strong and united kingdom, the Cham Red King to the Việts, an absolute terror from the South to them for at least five hundred years, yet I have no power over our fate. Was the pursuit of a kingdom and of revenge on its behalf worth my while not being with you? Was it worth your while simply to watch over my soul and the kingdom?

The sun has dipped in the West – it now carries a bright orange hue. The wind still gentle, the sea calm, the sailors are keeping good speed, everyone eager to see home again. In the Northern land it is becoming late spring. Very soon we shall celebrate our New Year, a few months after the Việts and the Chinese theirs. The Northerners have a clear change in the air to celebrate spring, we do not. True, the next few months the buds on our trees will be more abundant, the colour of foliage will be paler than its usual deep green. Yet I somehow feel we could celebrate spring at any time of the year in our land.

Is that a curse or a gift from the heavens? Why is that that we Chams, and the Javanese, are better at sailing, at building ships, rather than to sit against walls, watch the seasons change and write poetry? Is it so hot in the South?

But immediately I find a contradiction to that theory: Cham scripts exist for more than a thousand years, you are a most accomplished reader and writer (and a beautiful loving friend and cousin, I can’t resist adding, rather irrelevantly as you would bemusedly say). And you would be a great ruler too if I have my way. You have insisted everyone in the palace, at court, from young attendants to brute generals, to learn how to read and write. The captains of the Fleet and the Army, the junior officers, even the plain sailors and the foot soldiers, the apprentice merchants, the simple farmers, the women and men of the land, the growing children; all have been encouraged – not so much for reading the sayings of past sadhus, but how to add up, how to understand meanings and instructions from each other in writing. We are not half way as yet for the Fleet, but if not for you ...

If my dear Light is not the furthest-thinking ruler of the land, I don’t know who is. When, if, peace comes I would gladly abdicate the throne in your favour (quite unprecedentedly, even as you are Champa’s high sādhvī) – strenuous objection from yourself and the paramount prejudices in this corner of the world notwithstanding.

Thus my deepest gratitude. A future historian would do well noting your outsize contributions. I could not have achieved all to date by myself, simple warrior-king that I am, no matter how brave how clever.

Isn’t it amusing that I have been writing to you for twenty-five years (who's counting here?) since we were wide-eyed tiny children. My sole scholarly occupation. One or two crooked words of a child, at first. Then lines. Then flowery lines with silly ship drawings. Then long letters. Longer letters – passionate, you would say. And so on ...

What have you done with them, may I ask?

On my part I put yours, all, in the loveliest sandalwood boxes in the land. Boxes that are made only for a king (you refused to accept any from me)! For each campaign I select a letter, bring it with me, re-read it the night after victory. Using it to calm myself from battlefield elation, to tell myself that blood and gore and winning and revenge are not the end of life and are transient in all their ugliness; while your letters are transcendental, are part of the heavenly sky at night and the sun-drenched blue at day, your words, your hand writings, your thoughts.

The Chinese invented paper, credit to them, the Chams put it to good use, the two of us in particular.

This letter, in my hand, right now, was written when you, when we, were nineteen. Teaching me how to make a simple meal if those prepared by soldiers were all too plain! Alas, I read your instructions a thousand times but never put them in practice. At the time I was soon to become King – political alliances the beast of burden for royalties (but my lady has been a loving queen, a loving mother). You was soon to become Sādhvī and Seer of the Land. Our lives would irretrievably change, and we escaped sober reality by writing to each other, living with each other in paper and ink when we could find a little time.

Things have since moved on. My chef has become a little more skillful. But your writing remains. I closed my eyes for an instant that first night when I stood in the Việts’ royal state chamber – generals and captains respectfully kept their distance afar. They too treasured the moment that never happened prior in history. Intricate carvings on rare timber on the architraves, the columns, the walls – dragons abound, Chinese scripts ... And there we were, my Chams who sailed with me three thousand li's from the South, my Chams with their families at home waiting, my lady and child waiting, you waiting ...

I closed my eyes for an instant, that first instant in the supreme centre of Việt sovereignty, and saw the Chams whose lives were lost from wars long past, the disabled's sufferings, the ruined villages and destroyed capitals, the ships that had sunk, the sailors that had drowned, the armies that had fallen. And the lost lives and sufferings, too, of the Viets ...

And I felt your letter deep inside my battle-dirty armour, and saw us eighteen nineteen again, not even twenty, not knowing how the future would come but wishing for peace and happiness, how to make them come and stay, wishing we would still be together ...

I shall pause here, Light. I will need to briefly address the troops on the ship before their meals, get them raise another royal standard for others in the Fleet to see, share with them pleasant thoughts for those who’re still here and sad but fond reminiscence for the braver ones who were cremated in Thăng Long and now well on their way to the next life.

I shall pause, and promise to myself that when I see you in Vijaya at sunrise the day after tomorrow, I shall crush you in my arms in front of everyone, while daylight overflows us all.

I shall crush you in my arms because I almost forget the last time I did that.

Your loving cousin and friend,
Bunga

Long Vo-Phuoc, May 2016

From the Economist, 20 December 2022, a leader article (I am a subscriber):

Our country of the year for 2022 can only be Ukraine

For the heroism of its people, and for standing up to a bully

Dec 20th 2022

In normal times, picking The Economist’s country of the year is hard. Our writers and editors usually begin with a freewheeling debate in which they spar over the rival claims of half a dozen shortlisted nations. But this year, for the first time since we started naming countries of the year in 2013, the choice is obvious. It can only be Ukraine.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/12/20/our-country-of-the-year-for-2022-can-only-be-ukraine

Such a long while ...

It's been such a long while . . .

. . . writing a page in the old language

Long Vo-Phuoc, November 2022

The Publishing Endeavours ...

The publishing endeavours of yesteryears

(or, Gazette du Bon Ton and what came later)

1 Thoảng Hương

In 1971 we decided to publish a book, a collection of poems and short stories – really more snippets of thoughts in prose than short stories.

The earliest verse in that book to be was one I wrote back in 1968, the year of the Tết Offensive. Written after that Tết though it had nothing to do with the war. It was about the flagrance, in my mind at least at the time, of a Year 12 student who left it behind when she walked past my house. She wore the uniform of the white áo dài, white pants. She walked with long flowing hair, with her slightly younger sister, the latter back from her own school. This was at noon, a few days a week. I was home from the same school with her some ten minutes earlier, fast-paced for a young boy. At the time the Girls’ High hadn’t yet catered for Year 12, so it was my school’s privilege to be graced upon by those few, herself in particular.

They're still shooting ...

They’re still shooting at each other after all these years

When I left the old country we’re still very much in the killing mood, both sides

The peace thing signed the year before, words were cheap

Lovely place, but hatred and hunger for power took over

The a-kaes and the em-sixteen deep in vogue …

(… sixteen is a lovely age for a girl, I said with the eyes closed, dreaming

the mate flicked the capstan butt out to the window,

said, sixteen is the name of my thing,

and forty-seven is of things belonging to guys the other side …

so don’t make me cry,

‘cos there ain't no sixteen- eighteen-year-old lovelies

where I was …)

we shot at each other every year,

towns near the Ben Hai river, the Huong, the Binh Dinh,

not to forget the Sai-Gon and the Mekong,

neighbour chappies, well … thought they were trendy

joining the orgy – Tonle Sap this way, upper stream Vientiane the other

and wherever not

the parties went on in earnest

all in the families, siblings against siblings

the Yanks from faraway came along in big battalions, big bucks, big artilleries

... And on the other parts of the planet

They’ve too been shooting at each other ever since

fifty years on …

……

The humanity of this planet, now doing the killing in Yemen, Syria, Africa, and in Ukraine. And, less organised but just as deadly, in the homes of towns and countryside everywhere, for greed and hatred and all the shades in between.

I've felt compelled to re-read the soldier-poet Linh Phuong of South Vietnam from the late 60s and early 70s, and to listen to Thai-Thanh sing “A War Memento for the Darling”. The wonderful piece was Linh Phuong's most famous, faithfully adapted to song by the composer Pham Duy.

He also wrote a few others. A less well-known, just as good as any, is below, "Hành Quân - Military Operation". I translated it into English yesterday.

And the lines above? Half of a poem this year. One day I might complete it.

Long Vo-Phuoc, March 2022.

Military Operation

A few chappies came along. A few died.

Somehow left this self to carry on living

Fuck it, sometimes I feel real sad

Rather kaput now than losing a leg later

Going on an operation – months without a break

Hair grows over ears like gorilla on the hill

I am the hero Kinh Kha with the rifle crossing the Dich

Swear never to go back with an empty hand

The mates, esprit de corps all, tough as nuts

Getting drunk and foul-mouthed on and on

A love lost? Hell we tattoo four words

on the arm - Hate The Cheating Bitch

Evening before nearly got a slug in the heart

Dirty guerrilla on the river bank poked a shot through

Lucky the shit was a lousy sniper

Scared of this mean face and couldn’t fucking shoot straight

A few days back caught a girl commie

Pretty as the sweetheart back in Sai-Gon

Suddenly became a knight on white horse

Gave a nod to let the beauty go

One fine day, darling, the next battlefield

Seeing here from the other side –

remember to shoot, don’t be shy

There’s never room for humanity in war

Never a mix for compassion and belief.

Linh Phương, early 1970s – Translated, Long Vo-Phuoc, March 2022.

(Note: Kinh Kha, or Jing Ke, is the name of a famous assassin of China’s Warring States, third century BC. He was sent by the Crown Prince of Yen, or Yan, crossing the river Dich between Yen and Tan, or Qin, in the process, to assassinate the soon-to-become First Emperor of China. The attempt failed, and China’s history turned out as it is today.

And the term "humanity" in the second last line is quite forced, because war is humanity manifested itself, there being nothing noble about it, sadly. I used the word only to please the poet, who I have no doubt was/is an exceptionally nice guy - rest in peace if he's no longer with us. A better word (but still unnatural, because I dislike its pretention) is "morality". LVP.)

Hành quân - Linh Phương

Dăm thằng đánh trận. Dăm thằng chết
Chỉ sót mình ta cứ sống nhăn
Đù má nhiều khi buồn hết biết
Lo mãi sau này cụt mất chân

Mấy tháng hành quân chưa ngơi nghỉ
Tóc tai dài thượt giống người rừng
Kinh Kha vác súng qua Dịch Thuỷ
Thề chẳng trở về với tay không

Chiến hữu ta toàn dân thứ dữ
Uống rượu say chửi đổng dài dài
Bồ bỏ. Tức mình xâm bốn chữ
Hận kẻ bạc tình trên cánh tay

Chiều qua sém chết vì viên đạn
Du kích bên sông bắn tỉa hù
Cũng may gặp phải thằng cà chớn
Thấy mặt ta ngầu bắn đéo vô

Nhớ hôm bắt được em Việt Cộng
Xinh đẹp như con gái Sài Gòn
Ta nổi máu giang hồ hảo hán
Gật đầu ra lệnh thả mỹ nhân

Mai mốt này đây nơi trận tuyến
Gặp ta em bắn chớ ngại ngùng
Cuộc chiến đâu dành cho nhân nghĩa
Đời nào đạo lý với bao dung

Linh Phương, circa early 1970s

A Neuron for Memories ...

A Neuron for Memories

On Sunday I walked the streets of the CBD from before 7am. Sunday, you see, the day before Lunar New Year’s Eve. The Viets would say, the Twenty-Eighth Day (of December, before) Tet, and there were only twenty-nine days in December this past lunar year.

I hadn’t done this, felt this, in so many years. Well, at times I was busy on those days. Sydney, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, were open. I had things to do. Sai-Gon was closed, but I had nothing material to do with Sai-Gon for almost half a century.

Or with Nha-Trang either, the town that I had left. Or with Hue, where in a little rented house my mother dug a little hole into my plastered arm for me to scratch the itch from the healing process.

But that Sunday I decided to celebrate Tet. The only way to celebrate such a thing these days was to do it by myself, in the mind, sure, but the body needed to be a little active. The feet traversed the ground, so the mind could drift, could drift further away, could drift back. Could drift back.

Two hours - before people appeared in droves in the CBD. Two hours were enough time for me to make the first celebration in, what, forty odd years?

I saw approximately where I had the first lunch in this town, back in 1973. Approximately? Well, because they had demolished it years ago from the face of the earth, and built things over it. In the mind I saw the small square tables in the basement, the food on mine - was it a breast of chicken, with salads?, and suddenly remembered the glasses of filtered coffee in Tin My café in Nha-Trang.

I saw where Les Pussycats Brasserie had once been, no trace left under the concrete of forty storeys. And, of course, saw the images of those I loved here fleet past my neurons. And the images of sisters and friends in Nha-Trang, and of a girl I loved who lived on a busy street, where we both crossed the street at the same time to each other, in the middle of wild motorcycles’ traffic.

I saw the old park next to the train station that was quaintly called Museum. The station looked the same, a little dilapidated as always, but the park swankier, much swankier, putting the London park of the same name to shame. Saw it, and thought of a park in Sai-Gon centre, on Cong-Ly Street, where rubbish strewn over sparse brown grass, homeless war veterans slept on the few old benches – there would be many more of these a few years later, the sad defeated soldiers from the sad defeated side, my side. But in 1970, 1973, there were tall evergreens blocking out the harsh sun, and I had marvelled at them.

……

Long Vo-Phuoc, February 2022

April in Viet-Nam

Tháng Tư Việt-Nam (1973-76 & Rho)

(April in Viet-Nam - 1976)

Một hôm thứ Hai, bảy giờ sáng, anh Hai ra ngoài đường đợi chiếc buýt về nhà. Chỗ anh Hai đứng là một ngã tư. Hai con đường lớn gặp nhau, thẳng tắp, trơn-tru, bóng-loáng, rộng rãi. Cây cối trồng oai vệ lề đường. Trời đầu mùa thu xanh và ấm dễ chịu. Anh Hai đứng đó, một chút cô đơn. Anh lẩm bẩm: Buồn ngủ dữ.

Góc đường South-Dowling và Anzac Parade, Sydney, Úc-châu, anh Hai đón xe buýt về nhà. Suốt đêm, anh uống rượu, bài bạc, tán dóc, mơ mộng. Như thế cho tới bảy giờ sáng thì bạn bè anh lục đục đi ngủ, anh lục đục về nhà, để ngủ. Trong người anh, hơi men đâu đó còn êm-đềm di chuyển. Trong túi quần anh, một vài đồng bạc đâu đó nói cười. Trong đầu anh, những nước tính toán tiền tài, những con số đỏ đen, những câu chuyện tầm phào dục vọng; còn lại, ngạo nghễ, chế nhạo. Con người anh như thể sinh ra tám tiếng đồng hồ trước, sống hung tàng vô-dụng nửa đời; bây giờ, vì vậy, chỉ còn lại nửa đời cuối cùng, tàn trong giấc ngũ.

Anh Hai thở dài: Buồn ngủ quá. Anh móc túi một điếu Winfield, châm lửa nhả khói trong không-khí nhuyễn đục buổi sáng thứ Hai đầu mùa thu. Trong khói thuốc lá, mơ hồ anh thấy đèn xanh đèn đỏ đổi màu. Trong không khí lẻ loi một buổi sáng xứ người, bỗng nhiên, anh Hai thấy cơ-man xe cộ ngược xuôi. Động cơ vội vã nổ, khói xăng phì phà phun. Những ánh sáng đầu một ngày vội vã tát vào khuôn mặt đìu-hiu buồn-rầu anh Hai.

Như thế, buổi sáng thứ hai góc đường South-Dowling và Anzac Parade anh Hai thấy cả một dòng đời ê-chề trôi. Một dòng đời, mới đó mà đã năm tháng qua. Một dòng đời, mới đó còn mãnh liệt sự sống, còn ào ạt tiếng động từng phút từng giây, một dòng đời như thế tự nhiên chết khô thành những nếp nhăn dài trên trán, tự nhiên ngắt ngoải, khổ cực. Đã bắt đầu chết-tiệt, đã bắt đầu mất đi vĩnh viễn tiếng cười mỗi đêm …

Thế mà, thực là nhẹ nhàng và ngạc nhiên, tại sao sáng thứ Hai hôm nay bỗng sống dậy một dòng đời khác, một nơi chốn khác, qua màn một khói thuốc lá khác, hơi men một thứ rượu khác, tưởng cũng chết lâu rồi nhưng sao bất ngờ sống dậy, số-phận tầm gửi như thế mà sống dậy, ăn nhờ ở đậu như thế mà sống dậy, vật-vờ như vậy mà kỳ lạ chưa, đầy màu sắc và góc cạnh bất ngờ.

…..

Long Vo-Phuoc, April 1976

("Tin Tuc Sinh-Vien", Sydney, edition April 1976)

Zelenskyy, at his desk …

(courtesy Moir, the Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday 2 July 2022)

One day, Zelenskyy mate, I would pay the 100 AUD entrance fee to listen to you at the Sydney Opera House, reminiscing the travails of 2022 and beyond … One day.

... and many congratulations to Maryna Viazovska for her Fields Medal.

Long Vo-Phuoc, July 2022.

Fun with the ...

Fun with the (here and the) there (Time Slows ... & R)

I miss traveling. One year absentia, no problem. Two years, well, I do have books to read, paperwork to catch up, and conundrums to ponder on the market, liquidity and supply bottlenecks – and not to forget the poor in Africa, who, in between wars and unrests and institutional corruption, couldn’t even have a look-in to anything the last two years, depressing as it always is.

Now the time has gone on to three years, and there is still simply no “there” at all for practical reasons. I miss it, what can I say, never mind books and paperwork and statistics and old and new theories and evidences and tiresome algorithms. I do miss the there.

.....

Long Vo-Phuoc, Jan 2022.

Up in Smoke

Up in smoke (1973-76 & Rho)

.....

Quang Dũng certainly did, a cigarette on one hand (a roll-your-own surely, such I knew quite well), a pen on the other, a piece of paper, a flickering candle light, an antiquated rifle leaning against the straw wall in a dilapidated peasant house, his enemies the odious invaders on the other side of the river, saw at the bottom of the cup a fleeting image of his beloved from so-close-yet-so-far Ha Noi, saw life and death balanced on the thread of blue smoke, felt December come again to this two-year-old war, felt the Celsius falling, felt the mind dissolved, high ... and wrote:

Khói thuốc xanh dòng khơi lối xưa

Đêm đêm sông Đáy lạnh đôi bờ

Thoáng hiện em về trong đáy cốc

Nói cười như chuyện một đêm mơ

(Blue smoke opens the mind’s lost path

Nightfall on the Day shivers the banks

Saw you at the bottom of the cup, in a flash

Converse as if still in a dream)

("Đôi Bờ” ("Two Sides"), 1948, Quang Dũng)

.....

Long Vo-Phuoc, December 2021

From a leader article in The Economist, Weekly Edition 11/9/2021. The new rulers of Afghanistan would do well to take note:

Why nations that fail women fail

After America and its allies toppled the Taliban in 2001, primary-school enrolment of Afghan girls rose from 0% to above 80%. Infant mortality fell by half. Forced marriage was made illegal. Many of those schools were ropy, and many families ignored the law. But no one seriously doubts that Afghan women and girls have made great gains in the past 20 years, or that those gains are now in jeopardy.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/09/11/why-nations-that-fail-women-fail

DejaVuland

In the DejaVuland there was the north-west of the himalayas and the indus

The heart of the kush that was named hindu

There was too the south-east of the hoang-lien and the mekong

The heart of the truong-son

There was absolutism, there were shahs and kings,

Then there was imperialism spanning west to east

There were the afghans and the viets

The defeat of 1842

The defeat of 1975

Of 2021

There were neo-imperialism and communism and talibanism

There were ambition and grandiosity and cruelty – murderous isms all

There was destruction in the name of things, lovely things and not so lovely

But destruction and suffering, still

... plus ça change ...

Went and had a conversation with this chap witten

Enquired as to the depth of the multiverses and the dualies of beings

But in the know he was unfortunately not

Thus knocked on the door of the heaven

Wondered in the soul if this was the same path to the DejaVuland

Of human follies and the convoluted scheme of the universe

Cause and effect

Love and hate

Past and present and future

But the door stayed solid silent

Hiding the land of the DejaVu.

Long Vo-Phuoc, August's end, 2021

Winter musings

Winter musings (Time Slows ...)

I love July in this town, what can I say. I love it since 1974, in love, since 1975 when my back was against the wall. I love it every year thereafter, the wall in 1976 was still as rough as the year before. 1977, ah, a little smoother. 1978? An enlightened year, when colours constantly changing hues and shapes in the mind, in the eyes, even during the despairing few months when my treasured Valentine unfathomably got quite annoyed with me. And 1979, what a lovely year, and the 80s.

In the 90s my back was against the wall often – a different set of battles this time, and I was one hell of a lot more prepared. The thugs in front of me all looked similar, wearing pretty good suits, having powerful computer power, by and large having acquired some education from their universities (although uniformly lacking a sense, a deep knowledge, of history – essential in these battles) – quite a few PhDs from good institutions. They got nice large umbrellas set up above them, covering them, their employers that was, having big bucks big resources – the Goldmans of this world, the Warburgs, the Macquaries ... I had none other than what put together, heart and mind, by my Valentine, what a good cover that was. But you know what, their katanas were somehow not as sharp as mine, their steel somehow an inferior grade despite the back-up respective fortunes. Their skills, well, left much to be desired.

lt's really autumn ...

louvres, rose stem, gardenias, magnolia, stone steps, japanese maples ...

hôm nay có phải là thu

mấy năm xưa đã phiêu-du trở về

Đinh Hùng,

(“Bài Hát Mùa Thu” , Mê Hồn Ca, 1954)

it's really autumn. 2021.

LVP.

Biden - more interesting ...?

Biden – more interesting than I thought?

(A Contemporary Landscape)

The above is what in my mind, this moment thinking about politics in Yanksland, geo-political stuffs too for that matter. I thought he was dull during Obama’s tenure 2008-16, and was hoping that he didn’t try to have a go for the top job in 2016, a fresh Democrat candidate was needed (fresher than Hillary Clinton that’s for sure, but that didn’t turn out to be the case). His family tragedy prevented that to happen. There was of course the huge baggage on his back – his son Hunter, what kind of a sub-species of humanity is that? It’s hard to fathom, let alone having an iota of sympathy, these guys and gals whose belief of own ability and expectation of what life owes them is so far from their own worth as the distance from the centre of the galaxy to this puny lump of earth.

The King and The Diplomat

The King and The Diplomat (Time Slows ....)

1 Kings and their ignorance

2 Thugs ruling the world

3 The apprentice diplomat

4 The 1879 Hue cover to a mademoiselle

1 Kings and their ignorance

Since long ago I often wonder how things would have changed if Tu-Duc had been more of an open mind, more communicative, practical, knowledgeable. A little learning goes a long way, and in his case would have saved a kingdom, a people - Tu Duc, and his grandfather the stiff and stubborn Minh Mang. The grandfather was a stronger man but sadly even more curmudgeon. Single-mindedness is the hallmark of people who achieve things, as long as it doesn’t lead directly to disaster, the other side of the coin.

Tu-Duc was king of Viet-Nam, reigning during 1847-83. Before him was his father, Thieu-Tri, reigning 1841-47, and grandfather, Minh-Mang, 1820-1840. Minh-Mang’s father was Gia-Long, the founder of the Nguyen (more formally, “Nguyen-Phuc” or “Nguyen-Phuoc”) royal dynasty: they were Lords of Southern Vietnam for centuries since 1558. Gia-Long eventually reunited the country in 1802, reigned till 1819.

Well, I never had imagined ...

... that it would come to this - they are giving away oil on the streets of New York and Chicago, plus 13 USD for each barrel of the black liquid, no less, right now. An hour ago the extra gift was 40 USD.

April 20, 2020, Chicago time

10 Evening in Vijaya

10 Evening in Vijaya (Evening in Vijaya)

1 Sunset

2 Preludes

3 Evening

4 War aims

5 Saris and labels

6 Battle plan and firesticks

7 Midnight

15 Interlude

15 Interlude (North-East)

The second time I went to her place it was winter. There were no longer flowers at the front, skeleton rose bush hanging over trellis. Rosa multiflora.

I rang the bell. It’s only a moment before she opened the door. Cold air started to rush through. She looked the same as before. We shook hands, hers firm, cool. She beckoned me in, the eyes smiled. Subdued light in the foyer.

We had tea. While she poured I looked around. The walls were still the most spectacular part of the pretty house.

She asked, “How have you been?”

As if I were a long lost friend, 20, 40 years back from the past. As if I were someone from deep in the recess of her memory.

But no, that’s just the way she said things. A matter-of-fact yet bewitching way of saying things, simple but alive in your mind, the moment the words spoken.

I looked at her, a long second. I can’t stop myself. She was aware of that, took it with amusement.

“Now that you’re here”, she said, “surely you must want to convince me to go further? No, you are not bothering me. I’m very pleased to see you again.”

That last phrase made you want to fall for her.

I replied, “yes, I wasn’t even born in 1950, it’s hard for me to stop there”. I didn’t add: it‘s hard for me to no longer write about you.

“So many of my generation”, she said, “were seduced by Khái Hưng’s first book.”

It was as if the years had not passed since we last met, as if we simply carried on from yesterday.

“seeing that”, I added, “he was meant to be a pacesetter in the new Viet writing, clear, bright, practical, French-influenced …”

“yet mushy like anything in Hồn Bướm Mơ Tiên”

“worthy rival to La Porte Étroite?”

“yes, dreamy proses, dreamy characters, improbable settings, mush, so much mush.”

“but didn’t we all like it, because we believed there were ourselves in it whatever our station in life?”

“because we were young”

“I was ten”

“I was slightly older, but the book wasn’t written prior.”

We sipped tea.

“Would you like some wine? Or wait till lunch”

“I hope you didn’t go through much trouble.”

“only the usual for me, lentil salad, rather plain. But for you I have gruyère, herrings from a tin I bought yesterday. Sorry I can’t handle meat or even a small amount of smoked salmon.”

“Ah. I can only say thank you.”

“I hardly have visitors”, smiled.

The hair was grey white, perhaps a shade whiter since the few years back. Her skin was still smooth, faint wrinkles, the eyes black and sparkling. Stylish glasses. What can I say, she was beautiful even in her eighties.

“Khái Hưng’s lines flowed like water imported from the Seine, calm and seductive. Don’t forget it was 1930s in Hà Nội.”

“But so were Nguyễn Tuân’s. The way he described the elite’s gambling habit with poetry, habit that was soaked in poetry, all those years past.”

“Ah that’s so true”, she said, delighted, “Nguyễn Tuân whom I loved, but the water of Nguyễn Tuân hid always a darkness underneath”

“That’s surely the sign of the times, more than a deliberation”

“I prefer to think it’s both. Nguyễn Tuân carried on his shoulder ideals that clashed with obligations”

“Is that undesirable?”

“I used to know someone who would say yes to that.”

She meant to say, I had no doubt, that she used to know someone for a long time who would say that.

“what part would you like to go further?”

“ah I couldn’t know, you must point the way. I only know that I must go on …”

She turned and reached a shelf on the sideboard, long slender arm in cotton blue. A largish wooden box. Put it on the table. Took the lid off, rummaging lightly without looking down at the content. The slight scent of old raw cedar, of old paper too. Her hand knew exactly what to select, but she lingered on, obviously wanted to feel the paper. Texture, memory. Paper, ink. In the box was another interpretation of her life. An archaic form, perhaps, but true nevertheless. Writings, personal all, different times, different places, different tongues. I could not find a nobler way to interpret a life.

Pulled out a specimen. Eyes now glanced at it.

“There is this.”

Old brown envelope, old stamps rare on cover. Neatly slit opened at the top.

“This is more important than anything between 1950 and 1954?”

“yes”, a whisper.

“never mind the painful loss at Vinh Yen, the victories at Hoa Binh, Song Lo, even Dien Bien Phu?”

“ephemeral to me, glory for others”

“glory for the nation?”

“quite. For the correct side of the nation. Historical events are always debatable, contemporaneously and down the line – different perspectives of judgement, analysis, fractions.”

“this envelope is history too?”

“Ah yes, it is, to us. This particular part of history is never debatable to me. Perhaps it’s above history.”

She was greatly amused to contradict herself, to exaggerate a little on this winter day. Expected me to perfectly understand.

It was a letter, rough to the touch, a page from a primitive-quality notebook, the colour of the paper brown almost black. The kind of paper that bears the weight of poverty. But the hand writings were firm, beautiful, the ink still a sharp dark blue, a fountain pen of old, perhaps.

Hand of a writer. Carried with it the burden of time.

“I can go on with this?”

“if you must”

“against your wishes previously”

“yes. Memory, you know”, smiled bravely, “is now becoming almost unbearable.”

Mme Nicole Michelin

53 Rue de Rennes - Apt 4

St Germain

Paris

France

15 February 1955

Madame,

In the battle of Cao Bang in 1950, Corporal Jerome Dupre was wounded and taken prisoner by the Revolutionary Army of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam. He subsequently died, one day after capture.

Before he died, he had requested the undersigned to send his personal remains to you, 13 letters and a notebook. The letters all appeared to have been sent from you to M. Dupre.

The war is now over. I enclose the last dated letter. If it arrives safely kindly acknowledge and I shall forward the remaining.

Yours sincerely,

Comrade Nguyễn Thị Nga

Ministry of Culture

33 Phạm Ngũ Lão

Hà Nội

Democratic Republic of Viet Nam.

Long Vo-Phuoc October 2019

Note from The Archivist

Note from the Archivist (Evening in Vijaya, March 2019)

……….

The French were wanton in their cruel invasion and exploitation of Viet Nam? Well, what I can say about my forbears’ conduct to the Chams since that notorious 1471 victory (eighty years after the death of king Che Bunga)?

It is never a good idea to hold on to emotion when reading and writing, even thinking, history, because one would not otherwise properly understand things in a balanced and comprehensive context. As an example, I found it quite repetitive reading Geoffrey Wawro’s A Mad Catastrophe (Hachette UK, 2014), his recent book on Austria-Hungary walking into the First World War, because of his severe dislike of the Hungarians and their contribution to the downfall of that empire in 1918. I wish he concentrated a little less on the (clear) negatives of the Magyars, and much more on the inadequacy of the Empire itself, the German Austrians themselves. But Wawro was right, and his book was excellent, in highlighting the Magyars’ faults, because those faults accelerated the downfall. He was rather emotional (his family originally came from the empire), sure, but can it be helped? If he wasn’t digging far enough we would not have learnt of those details (but are more, many more, details always a useful thing?).

So, is that a good idea: no emotion at all?

…….

Les Pussycats Brasserie

Les Pussycats Brasserie (Time Slows ... , August 2018)

Long Vo-Phuoc

1

I first had a cup of coffee at the above some time in late 1975. Bathurst corner of George, the St Andrew Cathedral across the road by a thirty degree slant. Further on was the Sydney Townhall. The two structures were charming, old as this city went, all of a hundred-odd years of age. Medium-sized maples stood prettily in front. In winter, the early morning sun from the north-east shined on the bare branches, transforming the ugly office streetscape opposite into something conducive for reminiscences of things gone by.

Ten Years On ...

Ten years on: the road not taken – thoughts on the crisis (A Contemporary ...., Sep 2018)
Long Vo-Phuoc

First, a recount

This month and the next, to put it mildly, was an unpleasant period for the world a decade ago. Much worse than 1987, and perhaps just as bad as 1929 as regard potential for a global disaster. In hindsight the aftermath, to date, of 2008 was quite different from the 1930s. There has since been robust debates on causes, course and effects of the 2008-09 crisis all the way to this day, eating up, shall we say, a forest cut down for paper and quite a few quintillion electrons blasted out of the digital kingdom. From a market practitioner’s mindscope the arguments were about the difference in beliefs between the two camps in the intervening years: the bears, in the minority, and the bulls. There are of course many sitting on the fence but on a broad sweep I would say more than 9 out of 10 are ‘relieved’ with what have turned out, whether grudgingly, whether secretly; perhaps 99 out of 100. One could clearly see the abyss in late 2008 approaching the windows of the trading room, everyone would fall into it if things weren’t done quickly and forcefully. The well-connected world was ready to sink into the void because no bank trusted another to do business with, and we are speaking here of big commercial banks having customers rich and poor, retail and corporates: Citi, Bank of America, Bank of Scotland, Deutsche, UBS, and many wannabes in between, never mind the Goldman or Macquarie wheelers-dealers of this world. No trust (because who knew what decomposing subprimes hidden in ‘assets’), no business, no trade, no growth, no job, no money: one would get hungry in the US, Europe, the Antipodes, Asia, Africa, the rest of the Americas. Coups and uprisings as a result, any one?

Counting The Years ...

Counting The Years For Sài Gòn (Time Slows ..., April 2015)
Long Vo-Phuoc

It is now forty years since the fall of Sài Gòn, forty-one and a half since I left it. But who's counting ...

Shall we nevertheless count the trees, say, on Pasteur Street? There were trees on pavements both sides. There were trees too in the middle, two lines of which, between lanes for cars and lanes for bikes. All these trees stretched three four kilometers from one end near Phú Nhuận all the way to the centre. It would take time to count them and, even with the determined mind of a busy fifteen-year-old in 1970, one lost track.

From the Economist, 20 December 2022, a leader article (I am a subscriber):

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Our country of the year for 2022 can only be Ukraine

For the heroism of its people, and for standing up to a bully

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