By Jonathan Chan

Chronicles of a Village
Nguyễn Thanh Hiện, translated by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng
Yale University Press (2024) / 144 pages / SGD 31.10

Often, I have thought about the efflorescence of literary writing related to Vietnam in English. I say this with some hesitation – the writing I am thinking of is chiefly by Vietnamese American writers who, by some function of familial choice or history, are more comfortable writing in English. Viet Thanh Nguyen is a prominent example, decorated both in his academic and literary ventures, painfully conscious of the difficulties in representing the 'other' and the refugee. He views his inclusion within an Asian American literary corpus as part of a larger project of an imperial literature of the United States, as he has articulated in his Norton Lectures at Harvard.

Other writers who have contributed to this flourishing are poets. One thinks of Ocean Vuong, Hieu Minh Nguyen and Paul Tran, among many others who have made substantial contributions to American letters as the children of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants. The imagination of a second-generation Vietnamese American is shaped by traumas and silences, of the snippets of memories of evacuation shared by parents or pulled from childhood, of growing up under the tremendous influence of the white gaze. These are poets who have been affected in particular ways by their circumstances, imbuing their poetry with a tenderness and honesty that is often not distant from the enduring legacies of the American War in Vietnam.

The accolades and successes of American writers in the Vietnamese diaspora has, in some senses, influenced the endeavours of present-day writers in Vietnam. While on a trip to Hồ Chí Minh City, or Saigon, as has been contested across political affiliations in the global Vietnamese diaspora, I met with students from Fulbright University Vietnam. They spoke of how they had been inspired by Vietnamese American writers in their own writing. The existential imperatives of literary activity for these Vietnamese American writers, and the consequent shaping of the English language in their writing, informed the creative interests of students in Vietnam itself, who have been contesting and forming a future for themselves in their creative work.

This can, in part, be attributed to the historical normalisation of relations between Vietnam and the US. After the war, US veterans contributed to diplomatic overtures upon their ascension to the Senate or other positions of political influence. That Vice-President Kamala Harris visited Vietnam during a trip to Southeast Asia in 2021, neglecting other longer standing allies in the region, is a reflection of the ways in which this bilateral relationship has transformed drastically over the course of the last three decades. The fact that Vietnam is also a major source of international students to the US is suggestive of how this transformation in diplomatic ties has allowed for the creation of new transnational subjects between both nations.

This is all to say that the publication of Chronicles of a Village by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện, translated from Vietnamese to English by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, by Yale University Press bears a sense of the miraculous. While the book was previously published in translation by Penguin Random House Southeast Asia, its consequent acquisition by an American press reveals the contemporary appetite for literary work by writers from Vietnam, which could be seen in the light of the successes of the aforementioned Vietnamese American authors. Nguyễn-Hoàng herself lies within the category of Vietnamese students educated in the US. Currently a doctoral student in art history at Stanford, Nguyễn-Hoàng uses her scholarly work to address art that explores the tensions between Vietnam's Kinh majority and ethnic or tribal minorities who have been assimilated into modern, westernised ways of living. She has spoken of an emerging generation of Vietnamese students who continue to look to the West as an educational ideal.

Nguyễn-Hoàng has had an itinerant experience between Vietnam and the US. She was raised in Hanoi, attended Stanford as an undergraduate in comparative literature and art history, returned to Vietnam to work in a gallery in Hồ Chí Minh City, then decided to return to academia at Stanford. Nguyễn-Hoàng was and continues to be involved with AJAR, a bilingual journal and independent small press publishing works of Vietnamese literature translated into English and vice-versa, which has just published a poetry collection by the Singaporean writer Samuel Caleb Wee that Nguyễn-Hoàng translated. Nguyễn-Hoàng comes from a home of translators, with both parents having studied to work as translators of Vietnamese to Japanese and vice-versa during a time of Japanese investment after Vietnam's Đổi Mới reforms. Her grandfather, too, was a translator from Russian and French while also working as an editor for Marxist publications.

Growing up with generations of people who enjoyed reading and thinking about language in a syntactical way, Nguyễn-Hoàng was steeped in translation, though she did not anticipate becoming a translator. Now, Nguyễn-Hoàng describes herself as living in the space of translation, not just in the linguistic sense but also the temporal and geographic. As a translator, impermanence, as derived from Buddhist philosophy, is key to her practice, with change as a neutral force that fascinates her, and a multiplicity of translations providing more potential for compassion, goodness and love to arise by connecting readers.

The opportunity for Nguyễn-Hoàng to work with Nguyễn Thanh Hiện itself reveals several contrasts with her own translation work – between a small indie press and a large corporate press, between young writers eager to provide context to their work and Nguyễn himself, with whom Nguyễn-Hoàng experienced a more respectful and deferential relationship due to his age. Nguyễn Thanh Hiện was born in 1940 in Nam Tuong village, part of An Nhơn district in Bình Định province in Vietnam's South Central Coast region. The province is known for its agriculture, fisheries and forestry. He received a BA in Western Philosophy at the then University of Saigon, was part of the student movement against the war in Vietnam, wrote stories for anti-war magazines, and lived in Vietnam and abroad. Nguyễn's literary output has also been prolific, having written 24 novels, 22 epic poems, three volumes of short stories and numerous poems.

Nguyễn-Hoàng was introduced to Nguyễn in 2017 when he was looking for someone to translate Chronicles of a Village into English. Set in an anonymous Vietnamese village at the foot of Mun Mountain, the novel details the experience of an unnamed male protagonist experiencing waves of historical and material change. It is steeped in the mythologies and stories of the unnamed villages, approximating a sense of oral storytelling juxtaposed against the harsh physical demands of agrarian life. Inspired by Nguyễn's memories of Nam Tuong, engaging with the text provided Nguyễn-Hoàng the opportunity to engage with a different mode of being in the world, given her urban upbringing. The village remains distant from Vietnam's centres of knowledge and power while holding to forms of non-anthropocentric language. Nguyễn-Hoàng's correspondence with Nguyễn helped her consider processes of knowledge creation, illuminating the limits of social science methods devised primarily in the West to describe rural life. The rapid urbanisation and modernisation of Vietnam has resulted in literature about villages invariably participating in a mode of nostalgia.

To capture these senses of historical, political, cultural and material change, Nguyễn-Hoàng's approach was to rely primarily on a prose poem form throughout, a way of meshing autobiographical recollections and local fictions. For example, the unnamed narrator recalls:

my people seem well-informed about others' stories, but what about their own stories, the fates and lives determined not so much by destiny, as is commonly believed, but by severe, tragic and ashen relations, relations between humans and the land, between humans and the institutions of the land, between humans and a world that seems straightforward but turns out to be incomprehensible, history, like a cruel game, often pauses or slows down in certain places, my village exemplifies a place where people find themselves operating in a world that resembles a bizarre game, a world that becomes easier to notice once it's abstracted and shrunken into words, in my childhood, the world was made up of what i could hear in the village,

The text does not contain any full stops but relies on commas between clauses, creating a sense of parataxis. At their most effective, these long, run-on sentences are not encumbered by the propulsion of commas. Rather, they help the prose to be paced in such a way as to approximate verbal storytelling. This also allows Nguyễn-Hoàng's translation to better represent the orality of Nguyễn's original text, giving sense of the pauses between different phrases in a narrative being verbalised. In her translator's afterword, Nguyễn-Hoàng describes Nguyễn as writing down his "perception of history in a manner akin to what he calls an act of drifting".

The novel's opening chapter reveals Nguyễn-Hoàng's approach to translating this sense of drifting into English:

breathlessly i run through the prehistoric months and years, rummaging in the soil for the sad and happy sequences of a human life, the traces of survival always making me feel a little less lonely, when contemplating my beloved village i often still see handfuls of old bones in the soil, the road to my village is now raised high, now left to collapse, the houses in my village are now turned into multistory towers, now incinerated by heavenly fires, or are they human fires

The use of commas offers a sense of quickening in this instance, the narrator scrounging the history of his village not just through oral histories but also the physical traces of change in the village's environment. The soil holds these "sad and happy sequences of a human life" each recounted in various forms to the speaker, slippages intimating the sense of a history that is constantly beyond reach. The speaker looks to this simple act of recounting history through an atavistic frame, undergirding the impulses of ancient writing forms that have persisted to his own task in the novel's narrative. The juxtaposition of archival work and agrarian life are shown to bear no contradiction, as inspired by the speaker's father, described as such:

he contemplated the world of books, he contemplated the furrows in the soil, he contemplated the life of the villagers, always restlessly trying to build a fateful bond between rice, fabric and poetry, a bond between the soil and the human condition, a bond between the books and the ploughs, most people simply grab a bowl of rice, feeling nothing, sparing not a single thought about where the rice grain came from (perhaps not knowing, or not bothering to wonder what a rice grain is), as if being a human naturally meant having rice to eat

The thoughtfulness of the narrator's father and the continuity between agricultural labour and literary intrigue are shown to be uncommon in his village yet proffer hope for the task of description and recollection. Nguyễn-Hoàng highlights two key phrases that recur throughout the novel. The first is "rice and fabric" (cơm áo), of which she describes an equivalent in English as "bread", "livelihood" or "means of subsistence". These basic attributes of daily living, and the struggles that come with worrying over them, are the key material dreams that farming households aspire towards, vulnerable to changes in weather patterns. The narrator describes how:

the villagers would always notice some strange colour in the clouds, either gold or crimson, those signs of rain or sun frequently made the headlines in the village, draughts and hurricanes, these things could wreak havoc on this small fragment of the world, from the day the land was discovered to the day i learnt to write its chorography, my village remained a small fragment of the world, and yet it carried all of the aspirations ever possessed by mankind

The other is "birthsoil", Nguyễn-Hoàng's translation of the word quê, which is usually translated as "hometown". Nguyễn-Hoàng explains that the word "birthsoil" conjures "the image of soil as a space of creation, the burial ground of one's placenta and umbilical cord, the base of one's existence and nourishment".

These ideas are essential to the faceless narrator or scribe's intimate relationship with his village, its material needs and concerns, and the ways it has been buffeted by the forces of change. Modernisation arrives in concert with various types of encroachment: historical Vietnamese imperial entities, French colonists, American soldiers, social scientists like anthropologists, industrial machinery, Communist revolutionaries. The narrator's father even remarks offhandedly, "why march to this poor skeleton of a village where sadness always haunts and winds through the country roads?"

For the narrator to write of the history of the village, therefore, is to honour the legacy of his father, to see beyond the disfiguration and desolation instigated by drastic social and environmental transformations, and to see beyond the artifice of his village. Stories of contemporary change are placed beside those of the village's residents being reincarnated as khuóc birds. The passage of time is pondered in cyclical frames, such as in the narrator's following moment of reflection:

i went in the fall so that i could listen to the stirrings of the mountains and forests, the wilting leaves were a trace of sadness, and the yellowing foliage a trace of gloom, as the forest shed visions of decay and recovery onto my mind, the fallen leaves were turning into a poetry of the fall, while i was busy pondering the complexity of cyclicality, there must have been others, perhaps many, who were also living on this planet with their dreams, going to the Mun Mountain was my way of following my ancestral legacy of dreams, back in the day, one had nothing but dreams, in the fall, along the Ràng stream, one could hear the crabs and fish brushing against each other in the stream, after thousands of years, these crabs and fish were still living together among the withering weeds of the stream,

The lushness of natural cycles provides for the speaker to see in the present evidence of the past, of comprehending a shared experience with his ancestors of the ephemerality of time. An awareness of the procession of time is entwined intimately with a recognition of the cycles that have defined the natural environs, from the "decay and recovery" of the leaves to the co-existence of "crabs and fish" in the streams. Time is a plane in which an ecological consciousness can be forged. The narrator speaks of this relation between humankind and the land through the intimacy of agricultural labour:

'this year the fields are filled with earthworms, which must mean a high yield of cotton,' he said, so there was a relation after all, consequential and sustainable, between the fertility of the soil and the life of the earthworms, little did i know then that these ontological questions, hidden somewhere in my consciousness, were kindling in me a noble spirit, an ardent love for the land, i loved the cotton shrubs my parents laboriously worked on day by day, just imagine if human beings and nature were to co-exist, just imagine

The narrator's ability to observe, question and listen are the seeds of an enduring love for his village and its environs. The transmission of natural and agricultural knowledge is facilitated by the wisdom and labour of his parents. This intuits a kinship with the land forged by the most fundamental labour of physical exertion and an awareness of the many relationships that constitute the fecundity of the soil.

Nguyễn's portrayal of rural life, however, does not play into reductive notions of agrarian simplicity. The novel's narrator insists on the ways in which intimate relations with the land belie a poeticism and depth of historical knowledge of the village itself. These in part help create an unbroken chain of continuity for the village. It is this that accords the village resilience in pivotal moments of change or upheaval, such as with the outbreak of the war in Vietnam through French colonial aggression:

we often saw the adults dig these deep shelter tunnels in anticipation of the air attacks of the French, and the older boys often got enlisted, whenever we heard the adults discuss the historical wars of the world, fought by infantrymen and cavalrymen, we thought they sounded just like fairy tales, and we were ecstatic to learn that the cavalry was a unit of troops who fought on horseback, if those men could fight on real horseback, did that mean we could fight on grass horseback, well of course, why not? we initiated our own discussion, and soon all of us, the little cowherds in the village, concluded that we needed to start a cavalry war of our own, a brand new game fashioned out of the ambiguous knowledge that we gleaned from the adults, our horses, braided out of grass, were called grass horses, our innocent passion had turned into an extremely serious deal

These recollections reveal the ways in which boyhood play forms a mirror to the anxieties and fears of the village adults. The village is distant enough from the centres of power captured and governed from the French that it does not incur a sense of forced linguistic or cultural assimilation, yet the physical rather than epistemic violence that accompanies the colonial project seeps into the lives of the village's children.

This sense of the village being at the periphery of major instances of political upheaval remains as the novel goes on. The narrator recalls households with "ra-đi-ô's" being instructed by headman Mr Quì to turn up the volume to hear:

the news about an overthrown dynasty, at four in the morning, the defence forces at the presidential palace had surrendered to the revolutionary army, said the news reporter on the radio, in our backwoodsy village, the useful daily news had usually been related to things like which new strain of fertilizer was available, or which rice variety was certified

Alluding to the overthrow of President Ngô Đình Diệm of South Vietnam in 1963, this forms a prelude to subsequent skirmishes and conflicts that would further upend village life. The violence of war translates to forms of damage to the environs, with the narrator describing how "the trees were all knocked down by bombs and bullets" without a "single plant left by the village entrance", though one could "still hear the sound of the geckos", "this century-long exile of the tokay geckos". The narrator's literature teacher, who praises him as "a fragment of the soil's grieving soul" for his writing, later stops teaching at his school. Upon discovering him again decades later, the narrator asks:

'but why did you leave back then, teacher?' i asked, 'son, back in the day, honouring grief was considered a defective trait, and so, i was denounced for compromising the beauty of the nation-salvaging struggle,' the quiet pain of the wound was still too deep for my teacher to explain in detail why he'd left

The most profound shifts in the village's political and social culture are refracted through the experiences of the speaker himself, of recollections of childhood and more tangible influences on daily life.

Yet, Nguyễn seems less concerned with memorialising what might have otherwise been regarded as ruptures to the life and identity of the village, but rather with the durable myths that contribute to the strength of its identity. The narrator presents a founding mythology that weaves migration and an evolving intersubjectivity with the forests surrounding the village:

thirty people entered the Upper Forest on dates and months not recorded in any official historical record, i am simply following the village genealogy, one day, the elephants, deer, bears and tigers were fighting over the tares and weeds in the Hóc fields, it was an era when soil, water, mountains and rivers were still taking shape, an era recorded not by the common-era dates of the western calendar but by the behaviours of the species, the vast universe was made up of soil, water, plants and animals, whose behaviours and communications generated a rhythm much more poetic than linear chronologies

[…]

the vagrant brothers realized that the forest had receded into the horizon, and the wild beasts had spared the Hóc fields for the growth of rice and legumes, the joyous brothers all joined hands and went to the forest where they danced with the birds, i learnt from reading the village genealogy that my ancestors loved in the fields and kissed in the forest, that we are the descendants of a marvellous love affair, and that the Upper Forest was later renamed Lâm Thượng, a more formal designation also meaning 'upper forest', this is the oldest recorded name of my village.

Identity is grounded in the dance between forms of historical record: from mythopoesis to the actual inscriptions of language, from the demarcations of time by natural rhythm and instinct to the mythicised genealogy traced a romance seemingly forbidden. The name of the village is borrowed from the forest itself, the conditions for life coming into being through the interactions of creatures and bodies of water and the fertility of the soil. The promise of agriculture ensures material provision. Narratives of the village's founding are interwoven with the narrator's father's memory and imperial records. The narrator describes the presence of the Ràng or Tangle stream owing to the "forest vines and creepers" that are "entangled" in it, "blocking the flow of the fallen leaves, which turn into a fantastic shelter for the nép fish". When "braised in green onions", their flesh is "redolent of the forest after a morning sunshower". 

The romantic myth at the heart of the village's history considers a "young maiden of the southern land" who is also a "khắc bird", having left "footsteps wave upon wave of đằng flowers" in the past. It is her affair with a village resident, a "misty romance made on clouds and waters" that creates a yearning that one day a descendant of hers will return. Other stories are stitched into the body of the novel, from tales of hares and cats at Chớp Vung Mountain to tales of mountain gods and elephants and other creatures. These stories of beauty and intrigue are punctured by the brutality of contemporary histories captured in personal diaries. Yet, the certainty of historical fact is never a given. Of his brother, Lực, the narrator writes that he died twice: "the first time, he was hung in the blood-soaked purge of the village; the second time, he was hit by a bomb in the cemetery knoll of the village".

It is here that we may find the epistemological and philosophical core of Nguyễn's novel: what can be defined, understood and taken as history? An opening passage by the narrator asserts:

these are the chronicles of my village, the vessels of remembering and reminiscing, tale upon tale of yesterday, yesteryear, yestercentury or yestermillennia, now plainly precise, now hazily adrift, an abundance, or maybe an overabundance of news that reads like some kind of novel, some kind of novella or some kind of essay reshaped into fictional form, they, the news, the chronicles, constantly expand, contract, compel, pressure, evoke and awaken before culminating in a perhaps inevitable explosion, shattering all the burnished grandiose narratives that so desperately try to conceal the fatal historical disabilities of a land.

It is a definition of chronicling that seems in a state of constant slippage, both definite and inchoate, certain and uncertain, precise and excessive, obfuscatory and sober. A concluding statement by the novel's end from the narrator's father asserts that "history is only a draft copy, son, nothing is certain, nothing is true", loosening the grip of any kind of ossified or official record. Elsewhere, the narrator writes of passing through "ninety-nine empires of the dead", where he sees "ignorance and dogma stagger as if they had no refuge left" among "the dead".

This does not quite bespeak the notion of an 'unreliable narrator' as might be understood within Anglophone literary traditions, but pays heed to the complex dynamics at play in the formation of a history of Vietnam, overlaid with centuries of imperial invasion and conquest, betrayal and division, political contestation, material and mythic conceptions of humanity, and the ongoing relationship between the urban and the rural. History is invariably tied to the elusiveness of personal and collective memory and the intergenerational transmission of oral traditions.

Reading Here was Once the Sea: An Anthology of Southeast Asian Ecowriting, published in 2024 by Mānoa, I found a poem, 'a dislocation' by poet Phương Anh, that uses the term "birth-soil" by citing Chronicles of a Village, working through notions of defamiliarisation and the passage of history. A line in the poem reads, "But a birth-soil / only blooms / outside the eye." The novel has begun to find its own descendants, inspired by its handling of the indeterminacy of translation between English and Vietnamese, the forms of internal displacement generated by the present wave of changes that have overtaken contemporary Vietnam.

Nguyễn-Hoàng's act of translation has brought Nguyễn's endeavour of remembering and forgetting to an audience beyond one that is solely Vietnamese-speaking, intensity captured in lyrical form. In its representation of palimpsestic identities and dizzying change, it bears elements familiar to readers in Singapore, so often distanced intellectually and emotionally from its Southeast Asian neighbours by the gulf of language. Literature, defying the strictures of anthropology and the social sciences, will continue to provide a countervailing mode of engaging with history, a thread that ties Vietnamese, Vietnamese American and other Southeast Asian literary traditions together.

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