Trần Vũ, Gore Envy and Trauma Fulfilled

As published at SubStack, 3/12/22:

[Trần Vũ, center front, with his family in Saigon in 1968]

On 1/27/22, a Vietnamese webzine, Trẻ [Youth], published an interview of Trần Vũ, who is widely regarded as the finest Vietnamese prose writer of his generation. Most of his best writing has not been translated into French or English, however, for an obvious reason. It’s too gorgeously embedded in its language for even a very skilled translator to mess with.

I was already in awe of Trần Vũ before I met him in northern Virginia around 1994, and to my surprise, he was completely unassuming. When men meet, they size each other up and, no matter how subtle, try to assert themselves, with their body and speech, to show they’re at least an equal, and not some anxiety racked boy, fearful of ridicule and, well, just about everything else. Slightly built, Trần Vũ had a small, disarmed voice, without any ego driven strain.

A sure sign of a collapsed culture is men acting toughest when they risk nothing, with nameless and faceless ticks roaring like titans, with uncivility or bitchiness masking abject fear.

From Trần Vũ’s interview, “There are images that a young child can never forget. For me it’s when my father died. Three days after Duong Van Minh surrendered, father vomited blood from anguish [uất]. The room filled with blood. Father lay still. I bawled and the adults yanked me away. He was driven to Grall Hospital and ten days later he died. The death of the South, to me, was the death of my father. I want to forget, but the room’s still there.”

To most Americans, the Vietnam War was about Uncle Sam as imperialist or defender of democracy, with all Vietnamese reduced to Communists or puppets, but there’s a Vietnamese saying, “Nine men, ten opinions.” Vietnamese were fighting among themselves even before the US got there, though Uncle Sam, as usual, was keen to exploit this divisiveness to his advantage, without benefiting any Vietnamese faction! That’s just realpolitik 101. The American grunts sent there also got a very raw deal, of course. Like the South Vietnamese, they were just pawns. As always, the surest winners were the war profiteers.

Trần Vũ was 12-years-old when his father died. At 16, he escaped Vietnam on a barely seaworthy fishing boat. After roughly 500 miles in the Pacific, it hit a sand bank and nearly broke apart. Fearful the boat would capsize if the refugees were allowed on deck, the owner forced everyone, but himself and the skipper, to remain in the flooded hull.

Trần Vũ, “During the day the water reached our chests, by afternoon it lowered to our bellies and by evening to our thighs, but at night it rose past our heads. We clutched to wooden planks, ropes and each other tightly all night […] We stayed in the water 13 days altogether. My skin wrinkled up like an old woman’s. Luckily the ocean was warm and there was rain.”

Rescued by a Filipino navy boat, Trần Vũ eventually ended up at an orphanage in northern France, where he had to fight, twice, with a bully, before being moved to a Center for Children in Great Difficulties. To his great surprise, it was filled with Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, who even fought each other.

Brighter than the others, Trần Vũ was the only one to graduate from high school, then sent to college. Living in a group home for young workers [foyer des jeunes travailleurs], he was seduced by a Polish girl, but only after they had played chess for four months. So naïve, he missed all hints and even asked why she didn’t cry after the act?

Surprised, Jadwiga asked back, “Why should I cry?”

It was my turn to be surprised, “In novels, after lovemaking, all the girls cry.”

Jadwiga laughed out loud, “How weird! Which novels? Who wrote them?”

I was getting irritated, “Vietnamese novels. To make love is to give one’s body. After giving her body, the girl cries.”

Laughing so hard, Jadwiga grabbed her belly, “I want to cry for you to make you happy but you’re cracking me up!”

I’m sharing these passages from Trần Vũ’s interview to show how a boy who’s completely out of his depth, at one point literally, managed to survive, not just because he had to, but because he had a reservoir of toughness, psychic and physical, to endure whatever came his way. Tales of endurance should inspire.

T.E. Lawrence was said to be “extremely indifferent to what he eats or how he lives.” At age 20, he bicycled 2,400 miles in one summer. Apsley Cherry-Garrard was an aristocrat who joined Robert Scott’s 1911 expedition to Antarctica. His The Worst Journey in the World (1922) used to invigorate readers, for perseverance was among the most admired of virtues, “We had spent days in reaching this place through the darkness in cold such as had never been experienced by human beings. We had been out for four weeks under conditions in which no man had existed previously for more than a few days, if that. During this time we had seldom slept except from sheer physical exhaustion, as men sleep on the rack; and every minute of it we had been fighting for the bed-rock necessaries of bare existence, and always in the dark […] When we were lucky and not too cold we could almost wring water from our clothes, and directly we got out of our sleeping bags we were frozen into solid sheets of armoured ice.”

Though Cherry-Garrard’s hardships were voluntary, one shouldn’t assume one’s world won’t be turned upside down or blown up, as has happened to millions of Laotians, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis, Afghanis, Syrians, Libyans and Ukrainians, etc.

Extreme violence is not just abrupt, but irreversible, leaving permanent losses. Trần Vũ, “Just yesterday, I still had a father, mother, family and my dignity. Why did my country disappear? Why did my parents disappear? Why did my big sister disappear? As for my big brother who sold fried potatoes at night… Why?”

A Vietnamese born in 1930 lived through the Japanese occupation, which ended with at least a million dead from famine, then the First Indochina War (roughly 500,000 killed), Vietnam War (2 million butchered), the Sino-Vietnamese War (56,000 massacred), the Cambodian-Vietnamese War (nearly 300,000 slaughtered, mostly in Cambodia) and the Boat People crisis (with 200,000 to 400,000 people dead from drowning, starvation or being murdered by pirates). On top of this, Vietnam from 1975 to 1990 experienced widespread hunger, thanks to hardcore Communism.

Other nations have also endured seemingly endless horrors, of course, but some have been unmolested for decades, with one untouched since 12/7/41, so no city razed or under siege, no skeletal bodies starving in public, no hordes fleeing its borders and no foreign soldiers strutting down its streets! Spared of calamities, it can only deliver them or turn them into porn. It’s unrivalled in sexing up suffering.

Deprived of action, many of its citizens suffer acute gore or trauma envy. Lusting for Mars, they sometimes burn down the nearest bodega or loot a liquor store. Most, though, are resigned to just watching TV, that purveyor of violence, whatever is shown, and instrument of mass torture.

Among the bored and trauma deprived, there are those, like Trần Vũ, who know what it’s like to be pushed beyond one’s assumed limits, for if there’s a 14th, 15th or 16th night of death by drowning an inch or minute away, with nothing certain ahead, so be it.

If you haven’t already, you, too, will soon ask, “Why did everything I knew disappear?”