Writing About Writing: Reflections on “The Floating Coffins of Tĩnh-Tâm”

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on our Vietnamese site on 4/3/23. Here we present the updated English version of the text with minor edits.

Wendy Nicole Duong

I have pasted above the 2023 updated version of my first piece of Vietnamese creative writing penned in the United States,  in or about 1988.  

I am going to call the 1988 original version “The Piece,” a literary memoir.   

My petit memoir. 

I wrote The Piece after I had just started my job as a junior lawyer for the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C.. I had been the first Vietnam-born lawyer hired by Wilmer Cutler & Pickering (now Wilmer Hale) (originally the Washington D.C. “spin-off” of Cravath Swaine & Moore, New York City. From there, I jumped ship, and became the first Vietnam-born lawyer hired by the SEC.  

But my boss at the SEC later said to me, “Wendy, it didn’t matter whether you were the first.  What matter was what you did for the agency, and that you were qualified for the job. Nobody cared or should care whether you were the first.”

Boy, she was right.  She had stated the greatest statement of equal opportunity and diversity for America: no affirmative action, no quota. Only qualifications and performance matter, not race, gender, or origin. 

What should matter to us, the close-knit pocket of Vietnamese Americans in the 1980s, was that I proved her statement.  

And that was the only meaning of being “the first.” 

***

Leaving my law firm to work as a government lawyer in 1988 meant that I could get away from big-firm billable hours, in order to write at night.  

Out of an impulse, I stayed late at work one evening and wrote The Piece. In the old SEC Building on 5th street, Northwest Washington D.C., I wrote without a break, and cried on every line of text.  

This was the first and the only time I wept my heart out for the loss of my maternal grandmother. The loss of love. 

***  

In The Piece, I described my maternal grandmother waiting by a river to catch floating coffins.  Those floating coffins came to her in a dream.   

But, whose coffins?

And why floating?   

***

That same weekend, I sent The Piece to my father in Texas.  In 1988, my father had not retired yet, but as a teacher, he had the summer off.  

In the following days, my father retyped The Piece on his manual typewriter, put in the Vietnamese diacritics by hand, and sent it to Vietnamese literary magazines in California. The Piece was read by the editor of Thế Kỷ 21, Nguyễn Xuân Hoàng, who, in 1994, ultimately took over the job of Mai Thao (South Vietnam’s most noted novelist in exile, for Văn Học magazine.

The next thing I knew was that The Piece was published, both in Van Hoc and in The Ky 21 for the Vietnamese-speaking community in America.      

My father delivered this news. He told me I had “arrived.”  My father explained that Nguyen Xuan Hoang felt the coldness of the floating coffins, and the loneliness of the woman who was waiting by the river to catch them.  In total silence.  The image sent poignant chills down the spine. 

Just like that. I had “arrived.” My father recognized me as a professional creative writer of the Vietnamese language.  

Almost overnight! (My father never read my creative writings in Vietnam before the Communist takeover; my first novel, thousands of pages handwritten in pencil, was left in the attic of our house on Le Van Duyet Street; nobody had read it but myself).  Naturally, today, it’s lost. 

***

The Piece was also the beginning of Mui Huong Que (The Cinnamon Fragrance), my first Vietnamese collection of creative writing written and published in America for the exile community, all thanks to my father, with encouragement from the Vietnamese writer-former political prisoner Doan Quoc Sy, a teacher whom I called Uncle Sy. My father and Uncle Sy were long-time friends. The California-based one-man publishing house Van Nghe bought the collection, financed the printing and distribution, and even paid me a lump-sum royalty. (It was barely one-tenth of my monthly salary at Wilmer Cutler, but, considering our state of existence as the newest exiled ethnic community in America, the royalty was meaningful.)  

Văn Nghệ was probably the only real (traditional) publisher of artistic work for the Vietnamese exile community in the U.S. By “traditional,” I mean Văn Nghệ was not a self-publishing printing service, as was the norm for the exile community. I learned much later, that the southern California-based sole proprietorship was actually the Buddhist hermit, Từ Mẫn Võ Thắng Tiết, who used to own Lá Bối, the biggest, most reliable, and most prestigious publishing house in Saigon. Lá Bối had been started in Saigon by Thích Nhất Hạnh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and writer whose books were read by a substantial segment of American readership (the monk appeared on Oprah Winfrey. In pre-1975 Saigon, Thích Nhất Hạnh eventually transferred ownership of Lá Bối to Từ Mẫn, whose major accomplishment was the publication of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, as translated by Nguyễn Hiến Lê, a renowned scholar. When the communists took over Saigon, naturally they dismantled Lá Bối and confiscated the warehouse of books. The hermit-owner tried escaping Vietnam by boat about eight times before he successfully settled in southern California, after a series of wage-earning jobs, including a fishing and shrimping position in Alaska, where he saved money in order to return to Vietnamese publishing.

There, in Little Saigon, California, Lá Bối became Văn Nghệ, the Vietnamese compounded word for “Literature and Art.”  

My father beamed at the news: 

“Văn Nghệ would pay to print your work. You have earned your place in Vietnamese literature, even though we’ve lost the country, and our language is now in exile,” Daddy said, with a twinkle in his eyes.  

Then, I didn’t realize what the twinkle really meant. Clearly, the collection was the fruit of my father’s own work, as typist, editor, proofreader, and event agent — his sense of accomplishment, vicariously through me. 

As for me, I didn’t consider writing as “work.” 

I took all for granted. 

***

The collection received almost no marketing.  In fact, I forgot about it.  Since my parents liked it, that’s all that mattered. 

Unknown to me, the collection shocked a number of people, many of whom were my parents’ acquaintances and even friends.  It delighted some, probably for the wrong reason. Overall, it earned me respect in some. The bottom line: To many Vietnamese, my collection was unusual and controversial, not because of its latent thematic treatment, but, instead, because of the daring nature of two short stories that had gender relations and sexuality in each, told from the female perspective, often misconstrued and misunderstood. I didn’t care how certain readers reacted to the treatment of female sexuality in these two short stories (actually two novellas), and neither did my parents. (Curiously, my ethnic community wasn’t shocked at all about my law career in the mainstream, but they chose to be shocked by my Vietnamese creative writing.  What did that say about me and those first few Vietnam-born professional women in the mainstream after 1975?  Here, again, the meaning of being “the first.”)  

My mother, the traditional Vietnamese mother and wife, thought of my collection as feministic. She used that term. 

“You’re a career woman,” she surprised me. 

Where did she get the terminology, the career woman and feminism? These words were never part of her lingo before. 

My mother, too, was once a career woman in the old country, I poignantly recalled, whether she realized it or not. For her time and life choices, she probably was feministic. In 1955, Mommy left her ancestral house in Hue to arrive alone in the port town Hoi An, as one of the first teachers at the new school, appointed by South Vietnam’s Ministry of Education, under President Diem. Hoi An was considered among “vùng xôi đậu,” areas mixed with Communist sympathizers and South Vietnamese bureaucrats, among inhabitants of the central region.  There, in Hoi An, she met and married my father, a fellow teacher.  Theirs was not an arranged marriage , nor the result of any matchmaker.

Mommy was a writer herself,  unpublished. An avid reader of literature.

The yesteryears! 

***

Back in 1999, I understood my father to mean that if I had earned my place in Vietnamese exile literature, such a place was due to The Piece, one of the two rare memoirs in The Cinnamon Fragrance.  Why?  If I hadn’t sent The Piece to my father, there would never have been the  collection published by Văn Nghệ. I never intended to become a writer of Vietnamese for my exiled community. 

Yet, the collection was born. 

The Cinnamon Fragrance consisted of dancer-turned-mermaid, child abuse, domestic violence, broken dreams, date rape, sado-masochism, the controversial philosophy of Marquis de Sade, American corporate culture, threesome love affairs, platonic versus sexual relationships, a single woman living alone in a big city, the trading of body as the way out of a fallen capital for family salvation, conflict between daytime job and night-time art, homeless children used as tourist bait in the Third World, the disappearance of a woman traveler in Nepal during her search for Buddha’s footsteps, and last but not least, betrayal in Kalorama, Washington D.C. (America’s affluent socio-political residential neighborhood of internationalism and diplomats, where the Obamas settled post-White House). 

Plus one three-act play, a vampire story set in ancient Vietnam – the severance between body and thoughts symbolic of a writer’s journey.  

In between those novelistic tales, the two short memoirs spoke of my life and my heart, unadorned and starkly truthful:  the floating coffins in a dream of an aging Vietnamese aristocratic beauty, and memory of an American courtroom trial immersed in…the fragrance of Southeast Asian cinnamon!!! (Both themes were subsequently featured in my two novels: one was already published by Ravensyard/AmazonEncore-Lake Union as “Daughters of the River Huong”; the other one, “The Prosecutor,” is still being penned!) 

Such a heavy load, indeed, The Cinnamon Fragrance, not only for one lifetime, but perhaps stories of…multiple reincarnated lives!

By the end of the millennium, my father had read them all, typed them all, edited here and there, and compiled the collection for the only royalty-paying Vietnamese publishing house in the whole of America, testament that a vibrant reading community still existed in exile, beyond the fall of Saigon and outside the S-shaped Vietnam now called a “Socialist Republic.”  

The Cinnamon Fragrance is here to stay, but out of edition! The one-man publishing house Văn Nghệ is gone!

***

In compiling the collection, Daddy asked me if I wanted a foreword to be written by his friend, Uncle Doan Quoc Sy. I immediately said no, although I had read stories written by this Vietnamese teacher-author (and former political prisoner) since I was six years old.   I did not feel right asking the aging author to have to swallow such heavy load of torments and challenges told from a naked female soul, even if the tales might be written in the best of pre-1975 Vietnamese prose, as I was trained to do, and Uncle Sy, of all people, would spot, assess, appreciate, and capture such beauty via his foreword.  Cinnamon Fragrance was meant to be my child and my voice alone, not what was traditionally expected in a foreword by a respected Vietnamese elder.  I really did not want to bother Uncle Sy. 

Naturally, those days, too busy to think more deeply, I overlooked my father’s hidden disappointment – that my collection would be without the foreword by his trusted friend, the famous and virtuous writer-teacher of South Vietnam, our beloved Uncle Sy. Here was the gist of Uncle Sy’s life:  for his writing career in South Vietnam and his criticism of totalitarian communism (a consistent theme in his novels), after 1975, Uncle Sy was imprisoned in the Communist gulag for years. Not once, but twice. The Commies first rounded him up for their gulag right after they took over the South. The frail yet enduring author barely made it through those hard long years, yet after they released him, guess what, he continued writing (of course) and, God forbade, he even sneaked his work to the exile community in America! Caught, he went back to jail, the second time, until Reagan-Bush intervened (called the “HO” program) to negotiate a way out for all South Vietnamese political prisoners, and then his “Boat People” daughter sponsored him out of the country. Honest to God, if there was one Vietnamese novelist from the 20th Century whose body of lifetime work deserves a Nobel nomination, my vote would be for Uncle Sy. He was the writer of humanity, whose work was the testament for the Cold War conflict carried out in proxy Vietnam. Uncle Sy also wrote historical non-fiction and pedagogical textbooks. He was also the writer who had paid his dues, yet keeping both his humility and perpetual optimism for life. He turns 100 this year, 2023. 

Ater 1995, from Australia, Uncle Sy moved to Houston and rekindled his friendship with my father in Texas’s oil capital. Those were my father’s happy years, in the company of Uncle Sy. They were both natives of northern Vietnam, with literature in their heart.  

My father felt I needed the foreword from Uncle Sy for my own good. So, unknown to me, while I was in Washington, D.C., the two men exchanged correspondence about my collection. Years later, only after my father had died did I discover, in going through his papers, that my father had sent selected short stories from my manuscript to Uncle Sy for comments. In response, Uncle Sy confirmed what my father had always known in his heart: I, his first born, was destined to write. 

***

Hence, I must write, emphasized Uncle Sy!  

***

My father’s knowledge of my propensity to write must have dated back to our time in Hoi An, the port town in Central Vietnam where my parents met, and where I was born.  During my first birthday, my mother scattered so many toys around me, each signifying a future career. I ignored everything else, immediately crawled toward the pen, and seriously picked it up to stare.  

According to my mother, I was staring at my sealed destiny.  

***

But there is something else, besides my memory of the twinkle in my father’s eyes when he delivered the news that Mr. Van Nghe wanted to publish my collection, of which my petit memoir about Grandma’s eery floating coffins (in her nightmare) was supposedly the centerpiece (and the shortest). 

That something else so important to my father was his own creation and contribution to my creative life in my native tongue.  Daddy would like to know if I could insert his observations into The Piece.   

In retyping The Piece, my father had come up with two conceptual additions to my petit literary memoir. He told me of his suggestions.  He felt I should mention, first, the river, and then, the galaxy or universe. He even mentioned Neil Armstrong, the first American to walk on the moon.  

Short-sighted me, once I heard Neil Armstrong’s name, I immediately turned my father down.  What did the astronaut have anything to do with me and Grandma’s floating coffins? 

***

Almost two decades later, only after my father’s death in 2019 did that part of our past in Saigon come back to me, in all its clarity. I then realized in sorrow:  Of course, the astronaut had everything to do with us.  I should have known better. 

Oh Daddy!

It was July 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and Armstrong made history that summer. Apollo 11 was launched about a year after the 1968 Tet Offensive — the massacre of Hue, my mother’s imperial hometown. During the Tet Offensive, my father built a rocket shelter right in the main bedroom of our new house, to shield us from rockets by the Viet Cong.  Our neighbor’s house was hit, the whole family died, but we survived intact, just opposite the alley. 

Soon, the Viet Cong was chased out of Saigon, and the Republic proudly declared its victory. 

My maternal grandmother had survived the massacre of Hue and arrived in Saigon as a surprise to us.  What did all that mean? My maternal grandparents had decided to leave Hue for good. The message was clear:  the massacre made Hue vulnerable, thousands of Hue civilians were buried alive, but Saigon was intact. Hue inhabitants eventually learned their hard lesson. Middle-class South Vietnamese did not want communism on their territory south of the 17th latitude, and they were strong enough to fight off the Viet Cong who violated the Year of the Monkey’s ceasefire. The Republic’s soldiers had served their people well – they had fought hard to protect their territory.  

When 1969 New Year arrived, despite the past year’s bloodshed in the heart of the Capital, an aura of exhilarating celebration filled the hot air of free Saigon. By then, I had entered the Fifth Grade. (The Fifth Grade was a super-major event for kids my age, because to be admitted, all 10- or 11-year-old’s in South Vietnam had to pass a competitive, comprehensive national examination, during which the cut-off passing rate was to select only a couple of hundreds of youngsters per public secondary school (called “Thi Đệ Thất” in Vietnamese). I needed to pass Thi Đệ Thất in order to have free public education.  (Yes, it was all tuition-free, although we didn’t have free lunch like America!) 

Not only did I pass, but I was among the top percentiles. In my little life, that was the first time I officially received confirmation from the Republic that I had earned my place. I’d “arrived!” My father must have thought that was no big deal, since he never praised me. After all, I was his first-born daughter — What else to expect? (Under French colonial education, my father had had to pass national examinations five times between age 11 and 18.)

Such a contrast:  in 1999, in America, the twinkle in my father’s eyes spoke a different message, the first of its kind, ever:  my father was utmostly proud of me because of the collection, The Cinnamon Fragrance. In Daddy’s mind, only then did I truly “arrive”!!!  (To me, having to be the first law-career woman bearing our last name Duong in America, tested in “these high places” like Wilmer Cutler, was much more of a burden, so the collection of Vietnamese creative writing was indeed no big deal!)

*** 

Back to Neil Armstrong of 1969.  His place in our Saigonese lives.    

Prior to the Tet Offensive, my father had been sent to America as a delegate representing South Vietnam’s Minister of Education and Culture, Dr. Tran Ngoc Ninh. My father’s job as Dr. Ninh’s deputy was to study the U.S.’s Medicare and Social Security systems. The Republic would implement a similar program for our old folks in South Vietnam.  Old folks included my paternal and maternal grandparents. Then, our old folks relied on their children within the self-sufficient extended family system, so Vietnamese actually had no need for Medicare or Social Security. Poor or rich, Vietnamese families took care of the old.  A cultural norm. However, there was American aid, and the U.S., our ally, had suggested Medicare and Social Security, so Dr. Ninh sent my father to find out what America did for its old folks. 

From his fact-finding trip to the U.S., my father had taken home a black-and-white 11-inch television. That was our treasure, as we moved into our first house on Le Van Duyet Street (now Cach Mang Thang Tam, named after the communist August Revolution of 1946; by the way, that “August Revolution” was left out of our history textbook in the South back then; it was referred to in one phrase: “Việt-Minh cướp chính quyền” (“the Viet-Minh usurped to seize government control”), and that was it!  

Ownership of this newly purchased house meant that we no longer had to share household with another family as in the past.  (We had had to share household with my paternal grandparents in their crowded, little townhome on Sư Vạn Hạnh Street (named after the Buddhist monk who helped form the Ly Dynasty (1009-1225). And then we moved to the prestigious Công Lý (Justice) Street to share a three-story concrete and stucco townhouse of French architecture with the family of Colonel Nguyễn Vinh, a friend of my maternal family from Hue — without that Hue connection, we would not have been living on the well-to-do thoroughfare Công Lý (south of the bridge where Nguyễn Văn Trổi had hidden in his attempt to assassinate U.S. Defense Secretary McNamara). Today, Công Lý has different name, Nam Kỳ Khởi Nghĩa (meaning “the Southern [Communist] Uprising”).   

The 11-inch television bought in the U.S. was proof of my father’s successful career at the Ministry of Education. Also testament of his first home ownership in a crowded alley of metropolitan Saigon.  

My father’s original plan for the summer of 1968 was to open up our front door so all the children in the neighborhood could come in to watch TV, but the Tet Offensive delayed our plan. Then came the big global event: That summer of 1969, my father officially opened our door for the neighborhood kids to watch the greatest news of all: mankind had finally reached the Moon, and the Americans beat the Russians in the race!  

Two American men were shown walking the surface of the Moon right there in front of my eyes, in that little square box my father had brought back from America! Nothing was gloriously pretty. Nothing was strikingly fantastic. Just a boring, depressing sight of those two men in their strange-looking astronaut suits (with helmet-like structure covering their head, like a steel watermelon), all against a bare horizon! I didn’t even see the men. I saw two bulky walking suits below two steel watermelons!  The two men looked slow, heavy, and desperately lonely! 

I, too, was just a kid like the rest of the audience, who glued their eyes to the box.  We children were used to believing in the enchanting Vietnamese folk tale:  On the Moon, there existed a tall and bushy banyan tree, called cây đa.  A little boy named Thang Cuoi sat underneath the tree – that was his abode. Thang Cuoi was originally from Earth. A beautiful fairy named chi Hang, Miss Lunar, had visited Earth, and when she left, Thang Cuoi the precocious boy hung on to her dress as she flew back to her Moon. Together, they flew upward against all that wind. Together with his fairy, Chi Hang, Thang Cuoi inhabited the Moon. He never grew up, and never aged!

We took the fable to mean: one of us, a Vietnamese kid, could own the Moon! 

Not any more, after that night when all the kids and I and my siblings stared at Neil Armstrong dragging his feet in his funny-looking astronaut suit on that black-and-white 11-inch screen. (The box was a Sony, I still remember, our first and only television. We kept it until 1975.) 

After that night, there was no more Thang Cuoi the little boy who slept underneath the shade of his banyan tree, nor the beautiful Chi Hang Ms. Lunar who danced her fluttering silky sleeves over the sleepy head of the mischievous Thang Cuoi.  All fantasies and fables were destroyed as Armstrong and his cohort walked their few steps.

Their ugly, strange-looking astronaut suits under their steel watermelons were the stark reality.   

***

In America, why in the world did my father mention Armstrong for his suggested addition to The Piece? 

That day in 1993, when the manuscript of The Cinnamon Fragrance was still being compiled by my father, I had immediately dismissed Armstrong, without even an afterthought.  First, my father must have stretched his imagination too far, as advancing age might have taken away his objectivity. Second, since The Piece brought us back to our former Saigon, Daddy must have been thinking far too much about our first house and the memory of summer 1969, when life had returned to normal after the nightmare of the 1968 Tet Offensive. Back home in 1969, the television was the center of attention, not just for our family but also the whole neighborhood, and Armstrong was definitely in that box.    

I have to pause here in remembrance of how the universe and space travel seem to be my fate: in 1992, just around the time of my appointment to the Houston municipal court, I met the man of space travel: Admiral Alan Sheppard, at the River Oaks High Rise in Houston where we both lived. He was my neighbor all this time and I didn’t even know, until we ran into each other in the gym and then both of us rode the elevator to our apartments. He gave me a business card and I didn’t even recognize his name because I didn’t attend high school in America. (Other than Armstrong and my Saigonese neighborhood, and memory of the Sony television, I practically didn’t follow science or space travel, not to mention my demanding lawyer job and hectic lifestyle those days: I was still trying to dance ballet while working the billable hours at New York City- based Weil Gotshal & Manges, plus the new judgeship that took up my weekends and evenings: the municipal docket was that intense!). So the name Alan Sheppard meant nothing to me.  When we both stepped off the elevator to the top floor of the River Oaks, I didn’t know that my next-door neighbor was the first man in space and the 5th man to walk the Moon.  

*** 

As a result, when my father started to explain why he mentioned Armstrong for The Piece, I stopped him and quickly turned down his suggestions.  

I realize now the real reason for my shortsightedness. Back then, I was still on this blinding path of Americanism. I wanted to extract myself from any parental influence on my creative process, even though The Piece was my cry for my Vietnamese past, and I had entrusted The Piece to my diligent beloved father who instigated and shared my passion for Vietnamese literature. Although the publication of The Piece itself was not that big of a deal to me, the haunting effect of the Floating Coffins motif was the subconscious awakening of losses in my psyche. All of that had nothing to do with Armstrong or space travel. 

As to Admiral Sheppard, by 1999, I had blocked him out of my mind. My parents, of course, knew nothing about my encounter and friendship with the world-famous astronaut. 

Like a fool, I had given my father no chance.  

No mentioning of Neil Armstrong in The Piece, Daddy. 

My father immediately stopped talking, and silently accepted my rejection. Although he could occasionally go into a rage, and could lecture for hours on subjects of his interest, on the surface, he was basically a soft-spoken and retrospective man. He knew very little about my life as a lawyer in the Capital City or in Houston, so quite often he took my rejection with a sense of resignation. America became the line he drew between us, so he could stay a stranger to my daily life although he was the real compiler behind my Cinnamon Fragrance. The collection was as much his child as mine. 

***

I found out, much later, until after his death, the real reason why my father had mentioned Armstrong — what Armstrong stood for in my father’s love for Vietnamese creative literature.  In my father’s vision, Neil Armstrong and his outer space travels should become the other motif, beyond the Floating Coffins in The Piece. 

Far too late.

In 2019, after my father had died, I discovered that my father’s own literary experience with the Vietnamese language had centered around stars, galaxies, and the mysterious universe — all those dreams of youth formed during the Indochina war fought by the Viet-Minh against the French in northern Vietnam. For many northern Vietnamese, such period (1946-1954) was a nomadic life of torn conflicts — running from war versus joining the war — what the Vietnamese described as “tản cư,” or “về Tề,” where patriotism stood against mistrust for Ho Chi Minh’s troops and the longing for a normal, peaceful existence in between the two sides: Viet-Minh versus French. Young Vietnamese had to find ways to embryo their dreams of youth and escapism. In my father’s reminiscence of those dreams he must have formed for himself, there existed the reality later symbolized by Armstrong in 1969’s Saigon.  

***

Today, my father is dead, although I still feel his presence and hear his clear, tender voice around me each time rueful memory comes back. (My father had a very young, tenure-ranged voice, with a soft, authentic Hanoian accent, fitting his small, slender stature and mild mannerism.)   

After his funeral, among the papers he left in his study upstairs, I found a copy of his book published in Saigon in 1970:  “An Anthology of Vietnamese Contemporary Creative Literature.” 

He had used this anthology as a textbook on the art of translation, as his method of teaching English to Vietnamese college students in Saigon.  I’d call this anthology “The Textbook” from now on. The young men in his classes at the Faculty of Letters, University of Saigon, had to join the battlefields unless they passed his exam, because English as a Second Language was an important, required subject for a bachelor’s degree granted by the Faculty of Letters.  

(Let me jump time at this point, to tell you about how this old anthology had made its way from Socialist Vietnam to America such that I found it in my father’s study in 2019 after his death. In the early 2000s, for his 70th birthday, my father returned to Saigon for a visit, his first and only time. By then, the communist government had had almost 6 years of market economy implementation, following the U.S. lifting of its trade embargo in 1994. The Communist Party had encouraged foreign investment and refugee homecoming.  

My father came back from his home-coming trip, happy like a child, recounting how he had re-met his childhood friend from elementary school in his former village. The last time they saw each other, they were 7-year-old boys. When they re-met, they found each other as 70-year-old men, an absence of 64 years.  

During his trip, by chance, my father had found a copy of the Textbook (he never told me how he found it). He immediately repurchased it from the owner and took it back to the U.S. Thus, his home-coming was laced with two biggest pieces of luck: finding his childhood friend from elementary school, and finding the best-of-Vietnamese-prose anthology Textbook he had compiled and translated, memory of his University teaching career.)  

Hard to believe, but this one copy of the Textbook had been reunited with its author. Just like that!  

Coincidence. At random. Or simple pre-destiny, like my picking up the pen on my first birthday! 

***

When I picked up The Textbook, the compact little volume felt as if it wanted to wilt in my hands. The pages were so old they had turned yellow and even brown, and could crumble under my fingertips.  But, somehow, the old pages endured amazingly and refused to disintegrate, as though they had found a way to preserve themselves, waiting all these years for me to touch, turn, and read them.  

I saw my father’s work. The type of meticulous work that symbolized a lifetime love. 

My father had carefully selected what he considered to the best and most representative of Vietnamese modern prose, in all its simplistic linguistic beauty, spanning almost 100 years of history, describing nation-building efforts and morals, all contained and arranged methodically into an anthology. Little it was, indeed, almost like a pocket dictionary.  It would fit in a travel bag, a small briefcase, or a woman’s purse.  Its cover was custard-light brown. The print fonts were large enough not to tire the eyes, all in black ink. The English translation followed the original Vietnamese text, separated by explanation of vocabularies, idioms, and usage for learning English.   

Among the short stories he selected for his anthology was “The Illuminating Stars of Dieu,” written by South Vietnam’s premier novelist, Mai Thao, the deceased editor of Van Hoc literary magazine based in California, which had published my “The Piece.” To my father, this short story about “stars” marked the talent and literary career of the formidable Mai Thao in the now defunct Republic.  Incredibly talented with the written words and descriptive writings, Mai Thao emerged as the voice of my father’s generation in the 1960s, following the Geneva partition that segregated North from South, communist versus nationalist.  Writing full-time for a living (as opposed to, for example, other South Vietnamese writers who combined writing with full-time teaching like Uncle Sy), Mai Thao eventually turned himself into a romance novelist for the Vietnamese middle-class, like one-step above the talented Sidney Sheldon of 20th-Century America. But even so, in his semi-commercial novels, one could still sense Mai Thao’s yearning for nobility. In my father’s view, Mai Thao’s purity showed in his early writings as the newcomer to South Vietnam’s literary scene, in particular this “star” story about friendship.

The “star” story was about two young Vietnamese men who found each other during the Indochina war, one of whom was Dieu, literally a star-lover (not ‘stars’ like Elizabeth Taylor, but ‘stars’ in the galaxy, which appear each night to follow night travelers.)  Stars bound the two men together and became their inspiration. Stars witnessed their joint creativity.  The two men had met each other through their war-refugee experience – they both had to relocate and moved away from war zones during the Indochinese war:  Ho Chi Minh had called for a national voluntary draft of all young men to join his Viet Minh troops to fight the French.  Women, too, joined this “Resistance” call in various war-support capacities, from nurses to sentries.  

In Mai Thao’s “star” story, the character Dieu was obsessed with stars.  He taught his new friend, the author/narrator, what stars meant to him.  When the war subsided, the two young men each returned to their former village. (Many others became disappointed by the Viet-Minh “Resistance” movement, so they escaped to areas controlled by the French and a provisionary government under our former emperor Bao Dai as head of state. Dieu visited his friend once, during which time they talked more about stars, and watched stars together.  Deep friendship was shared that way during whatever intermittent peace time they could have in the countryside of northern Vietnam.  (Here, the post-modern reader can query whether there might have been suggestion of intellectual or creative homosexuality in the making, which was a taboo in Vietnamese society at the time or in subsequent époques.  That touch of queer love was absent from Mai Thao’s descriptive prose). 

The story had no climax or denouement, except that after they parted, the narrator received news that Dieu had died because of tuberculosis, the most prevalent killer of young Vietnamese during such time.  Hence, their being together in watching stars and during sparks of poetic creativity was actually Dieu’s premonition of his own death. (TB was also considered the killer of poverty and intellectual burnout – people who were too poor, living in unsanitary conditions, or who worked far too much with their brain or their body under malnutrition would get TB.  For the newly formed non-communist Republic of (South) Vietnam, in the 1950s and 1960s, TB became a national health crisis.)  

Dieu’s death thus symbolized what happened to romantic Third-World youth during wartime – the period of untiring quest for national independence, freeing the country and ending global colonialism. To escape the devastating impact of war, the young made their quest for individuality by searching for their place in something higher and more surreal, yet existing steadily in their fragile existence:  the stars above came to them regularly during nighttime, supplying inspiration and imagination, consistent with their epistemology of the ancient East. In the Vietnamese archetype of myth, Dieu’s death must have meant that the “star” controlling Dieu’s fate and life must have extinguished.   

In my father’s anthology, the excerpt from this “star” story, which my father had translated into English for his students, read as follows:

MY FIRST STARS

At the age of seventeen, I spent a good deal of time looking at stars.  I called them “The Illuminating Stars of Dieu.”   I will explain later why I always recalled those stars as memory of my youth and the war of our time.  During that time, we were taking refuge in Hien street, in the thatched boarding house of the old village Bang. That was our abode. The small spot in the garden near the pond became our astronomic observatory.  We went there to sit every night. Our young and naive souls opened dreamy paths to the peak of the sky.  The manuscript of my first poems, with its foreword written by Dieu, was never printed eventually, but during such time, we gave it a title: The Stars of my Horizon.  Those first poems of mine were written during the late hours of endless provincial nights under a small lamp, while we both knew that out there, there was a war awaiting us.  The virginally white pages of the manuscript that awaited my words consisted of space as immense as the universe of stars.  As I composed and Dieu wrote down the words to fill that space, we felt as though we were travelling to reach those stars above us.  We used to go back to the boarding house very late at night.  Icy night.  A thin wattle. The leaves and flowers in the garden emanated a mysterious scent.  The exotic perfume of our paths.       

Mai Thao

Translated by Duong Duc Nhu

I had to close the anthology as the chill sneaked through my spinal cord.  I had read  “The Illuminating Stars of Dieu” in the 1970s in Vietnam).  The youngster I was at that time did not fully understand the significance of Dieu’s stars and the character’s death. The plot came back vividly and reeled through my mind.  

Dieu’s death. 

My father’s death. 

Oh Daddy, Oh Daddy…

In America, my parents had taken turns dying after a long period of being bed-ridden.  I was their caregiver.  I saw and heard it all. 

Oh Daddy, Oh Daddy…

 My mother had passed on first.  In the following months, my father often woke up in the morning, asking me the same question:

“Did Mom die of TB?  Do I have TB?”   Fear was in his blood-shot eyes.  I can never forget that  pained look.   

I assured him, no, no, no.  TB was not the problem in America.  Nobody had TB. 

He calmed down. 

***

My father eventually developed pneumonia, the typical end for elderlies who were bed-ridden from other chronic diseases.  During those final days, we had decided to have him under home hospice. 

One day my father woke up and could not breathe.  

He simply could not breathe! 

“I have TB”, he tried to shout out the coarse words.   

***

Down the lane of memory, come to my rescue, readers!  Help me. Help me. My hands tremble as I type these words, my fingertips gripping memory.  Hospice. The end of the nation-building generation. Hospice. The final end of exile, in America.  Hospice, and my father’s fear. TB.

*** 

TB, he despaired. 

TB, he uttered.  

Oh Daddy, oh Daddy…

“I have TB. Mom died of TB,” he kept on.

I perceived, and received, the terror from his eye sockets. The pupils had rolled up.

***

Oh readers, , empathetic readers, chilled readers, help us both: 

Help me type. Help him breathe. 

***

I grabbed a mirror and held it before him to catch the mist caused by his weak breath.  

“That’s my father. Your grandfather. He’s here,” he stopped mentioning TB, pointing to the mirror I held in front of him.  

He had seen himself in the mirror. His old and haggard self. He thought his own image was that of his father. My paternal grandfather, who was long dead.    They looked very much alike. Same genes. 

***

I raised the misted mirror to my face.  Thank God he was breathing. I wanted to kiss the mist that represented his life force, but all of a sudden, he became very strong, perking up. He yanked the mirror from my hand.  

“Don’t kiss that.  I don’t want you to get TB from me,” he shrieked. 

***

I understand now.   

1. The disease that killed Dieu during the Indochina war. Gone were Dieu’s Illuminating Stars.  
2. The disease that haunted my father during hospice.  He relived his youth, those hard days of 1954, after the Geneva Convention. The beginning year of nation-building for the South. An alternative Vietnam.  Approximately one million Vietnamese refugees escaping communism from the North arrived in Saigon, awaiting resettlement.

I wasn’t born yet, as Daddy had not met Mommy.  But, being his oldest child, the stories of the paternal family’s resettlement in the South in 1954 were told to me, in bits and pieces. 

1954. The country had been split.  In Saigon, my paternal family, like most refugees from the North, had to rebuild their lives from scratch. My paternal grandparents were once landowners in the North who had fed Viet Minh troops with their rice. For their village, my paternal grandfather built the brick road that connected the village to the main thoroughfare running from North to South (called Con Đường Cái Quan in the choral symphony composed by the celebrated Vietnamese songwriter Phạm Duy. Paternal grandpa also renovated the village’s meeting hall (called Đình Làng in Vietnamese), which was deliberately destroyed by the Viet Minh as part of their warfare strategy (Tiêu thổ Kháng Chiến, the warfare tactic of totally destroying infrastructures before military retreat, in order to incapacitate the enemy’s advancing troops).  In 1954, just before their scheduled public persecution by the Viet Minh, my paternal grandparents left everything they owned in their village to escape to Saigon.  There, both of my paternal grandparents worked manual labor to feed the family and to provide education for their 10 children. Paternal Grandpa picked up rocks for a French construction company, and Paternal Grandma carried water barrels with her fragile frame, in order to distribute water from the public fountains to Saigonese households. These were the hard jobs my paternal grandparents had to undertake in 1954 until my father found a high-school teaching appointment and took over as breadwinner for the paternal family. Their history was my pride. (Eventually, the Catholic fishermen from the North regrouped, forming fishing villages, carrying on their sea life and fish-sauce making in the southern provinces of Hố Nai and Phước Tỉnh.  Eventually, my paternal grandparents bought their first home on Sư Vạn Hạnh Street. They became Saigonese speaking with a northern accent, the inconspicuous heritage of their northern village.)  
1955. My father, then a law student, took up housing at the Minh Mang dormitory, cư xá Minh Mạng, crowded with poor refugee students evacuated from the North. The dormitory became proof of nation-building: it was the place that housed the country’s future – the college students, the “hopeful” of the South. The dorm wasn’t exactly Graham Greene’s Continental Hotel.  Many of the dorm residents had TB.  The disease left them frail and pale. They coughed blood — it was believed that their lung was torn. Many were unable to study and pass exams for appointments to national public-service jobs needed for the South.  Some died from the devastating disease, making them the “unwanted.”  The Hồng Bàng public hospital was created for the treatment of TB, the contagious nightmare of the new Republic.  

1954 and these ensuing years.  My father struggled to finish college while teaching high school full-time to help feed the paternal family.  Naturally, he was in perpetual fear of TB.     

I am still typing, grabbing on to memory. Help me readers.  Help me God.  

TB:  the extinguishment of Dieu’s Illuminating Stars. 

Oh Daddy.  You are safe now.  You never had TB, or if you did, back then, it was cured. I would never let TB touch you.   You are safe from TB, Daddy.  If I can’t save your life, on these pages, you will live forever.  With me, forever, Daddy…  

…You are forever safe. 

***

I flipped through the pages of the Anthology, and found stars mentioned in other literary excerpts written by other nationally known writers of South Vietnam, translated to English by my father. In a passage written by Doan Quoc Sy, who could have written the foreword for my “The Piece,” Uncle Sy described the goal of the newly formed Faculty of Letters, University of Saigon, He called the Faculty the “flower of the universe” (bông hoa của vũ trụ).  Both Uncle Sy and my father taught there before 1975, a period of time that perhaps represented the peak of their respective career, and the chronicle of nation-building in the South. In Uncle Sy’s view, the Faculty of Letters should serve as “the leading star” (Sao Bắc Đẩu), representing the center of thoughts for the people of South Vietnam. 

In another passage written by Vu Trong Phung (the best-known realist-novelist of colonial time), the main character, an orphan, declared the most quoted sentence in Vietnamese creative literature, North and South both: “I was born under an unlucky star.”  (Tôi sinh ra đời dưới một ngôi sao xấu…) I couldn’t help but ruefully questioning:  How many Vietnamese in the 20th century, or even now, have repeated this quote and applied it to themselves?  

In another passage written by Toan Phong Nguyễn Xuân Vinh, the Vietnamese pilot-writer often considered the equivalent of St. Exupéry in France by Vietnamese readers), the pilot-writer described his night flight: when day yielded to night, the lights of the landing track competed with emerging stars shining on, over the pilot’s head. 

Stars, stars, and stars… 

My father’s love, his inner world. 

 ***

Among my father’s papers, I also found the two concepts he had written down as suggested additions to “The Piece.” 

My beloved readers who are reading these typed words now, you must know, without me having to tell you, that tears are blurring my vision. 

I no longer see words. Just stars.   

Keep on typing, girl, through the film of tears.

***

I have typed and added the two additions my father made to The Piece, making it anew as of today, in my father’s honor.  The two additions are bold-faced in the revised version of The Piece.  The Piece has a new name: 

The Floating Coffins of Tĩnh Tâm:

Story of The River and The Stars.

My father’s two additions are brilliant, like stars, but it is too late now for me to tell him this.  

The old culture has taught us Vietnamese to be humble. but I no longer want to be humble now. I want to tell the world that my father was brilliant, is brilliant, and will forever be brilliant.  In fact, I think that every Vietnamese American child who was blessed enough to know of his or her father’s work in the old country (that short-lived mission called nation-building for a non-communist Vietnam), should be entitled to shout to the whole world out there:  

“My father is brilliant!”

I will be the first to shout it out, proudly, and my former SEC boss would probably have little to say about the grandiose nature of my words in this context: what it means to be the first.  Here’s the one and only incident where race, gender, culture, and national origin have everything to do with being the first, and rightfully so.

Daddy, you’re brilliant! I repeat.

Like the star that follows your destiny.  

And mine.  

I am your first-born. I wrote The Piece (Appendix A), my tribute to my maternal grandmother whom we left behind to die in poverty-stricken Vietnam, after its 1975 “great liberation.”  

Her floating coffins.  

And The Cinnamon Fragrance, where you, Daddy, belong! 

I am so sorry, Daddy, for my stupidity in rejecting Uncle Sy’s foreword, and the two additions that represent your brilliance, your star!

The twinkle in your eyes is your star, the star that follows you:   “You’ve arrived, my precious child who crawled toward and chose the pen at one year of age,”  your brightened eyes say to me. Your star says it all. 

Oh Daddy, forever Daddy, 

the brilliance of your star… 

…is what I chose! 

***

1. Appendix A

THE FLOATING COFFINS OF TINH TAM: STORY OF THE RIVER AND THE STARS 

The 2023 renewed version

A gift to my reader Nguyễn Hà, whom I have never met.

“Here it is, Daddy, my renewed piece, 

with your two additions, bearing your fingerprints, footprints, 

prints of your thoughts, fruits of your prose, 

stars from your eyes, stars of your brain, 

wherever you are now, out there, waiting for our reunion:  

our family, our roots, the foundation of our culture in exile, 

together again, on our river, and among our stars”

©DNN 3/2023

Time flows like rivers going downstream.  Time moves forward like rivers passing through forests and flowing onto the sea.  Only we go backward to find memory, like stone-bearing Sisyphus climbing up his mountain.  Time moves forward toward the end of our life, while we turn around and go backward, up the hill of our shouldered burden, to catch a glimpse of our past. In the unreachable sky, up there, peeping from the unending depth of the universe, stars look down on us, the silent witnesses of our life, watching over us, involved, yet uninvolved like nonchalant spectators. They speak our journey, our climb against our fate…DNN

[The English manuscript, fully developed and updated from its 1988 published Vietnamese version, is reserved for future book publication in the mainstream]

~~~***~~~