The Other Country: Stories and a Novella
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UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations 1-1-2006 The Other Country: Stories and a novella Vu Hoang Tran University of Nevada, Las Vegas Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/rtds Repository Citation Tran, Vu Hoang, "The Other Country: Stories and a novella" (2006). UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations. 2670. http://dx.doi.org/10.25669/oqxe-i2xn This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by Digital Scholarship@UNLV with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Scholarship@UNLV. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE OTHER COUNTRY: STORIES AND A NOVELLA by Yu Hoang Tran Bachelor of Arts University of Tulsa 1998 Master of Arts University of Tulsa 2000 Master of Fine Arts University of Iowa 2002 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree in English Department of English College of Liberal Arts Graduate College University of Nevada, Las Vegas May 2006 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 3226632 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI UMI Microform 3226632 Copyright 2006 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced witfi permission of tfie copyrigfit owner. Furtfier reproduction profiibited witfiout permission. Dissertation Approval The Graduate College University of Nevada, Las Vegas April 13 ,2006 The Dissertation prepared by Vu Hoang Tran_____ Entitled The Other Country: Stories and a Novella is approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in EngTish and Creative Writing Examination Committee Chair 1 Dean of the Graduate College OWv-vV\. Examination Committee Member Examination Committee 'acuity Representative 1017,52 11 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT The Other Country: Stories and a Novella by Vu Hoang Tran Douglas Unger, Examinations Committee Chair Professor of English University of Nevada, Las Vegas The Other Country is a collection of seven short stories and a novella, all of which take place in Saigon and the Saigon area and portray the lives of its citizens in contemporary Vietnam. Given the country’s recent history, this setting inevitably evokes the Vietnam War, a connection that casts the book—especially from the American perspective—into the shadow of contemporary American fiction that focuses on the war both as a historical experience and as a cultural idea; important novels like Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story, and Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried. But although the stories in this collection often show the war’s influence on the cultural landscape and personal histories of its characters, the war itself is rarely the dramatic focus. There are characters who embody obvious connections—former soldiers, the children and wives of soldiers, a woman fleeing Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, a man returning two decades after fleeing—but their dilemmas are always more personal and cultural than political or ideological. Most of the iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. collection does not mention the war or America at all. The focus remains exclusively on Vietnamese characters and how they negotiate themselves in a society shaped by centuries of conflict and occupation—by memory, religion, family ties, and the constant struggle for survival, whether it’s physical, economic, spiritual, or even artistic. The most prominent theme, inherent in every story, is the struggle with love and loneliness in a culture where people are rarely alone and rarely without familial and societal obligations. IV Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT..................................................................................................................................iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..........................................................................................................vi HALONG B A Y ............................................................................................................................. 1 MONSOON................................................................................................................................. 89 THE GIFT...................................................................................................................................109 WOMAN AT SEA.....................................................................................................................138 THE OTHER COUNTRY....................................................................................................... 143 A PAINTED FACE...................................................................................................................166 VAGARIES................................................................................................................................189 VESPERTINE................................................................................. ;......................................... 222 VITA............................................................................................................................................244 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For all their support and guidance, I would like to thank Douglas Unger, Richard Wiley, Timothy Erwin, John Irsfeld, and John Swetnam. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Glenn Schaeffer and his generous support these last three years. And finally to my parents. Son and Nhai Tran, without whom these stories could not have been written. VI Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. HALONG BAY Tuan remembered her in the early morning. If he were to awake before dawn, when the new day lingered between light and darkness, he would stroll the riverbank beyond the farm, along a path overgrown with weeds, and now and then be reminded of her. There were times she came to mind shadowed by people he had hurt and lies he had told. Other times, though they were few, he’d see her likeness in a stranger, a passerby, and find himself momentarily perplexed. He once was sure she wore men’s sandals and a flower in her hair the morning they met, but in the years since such details felt trite and imagined—if he thought long enough, there might have been no awkwardness between them, no fraught words or shared glances, no reason after all to think these gestures would become, years later, the ghostly remnants of a wish. “My name is Mi,” she said after Bà Bien, the cook, introduced him that day. “My father named me.” She shaded her eyes from the sun with her hand. “It feels like another country here.” They were standing in the red-brick courtyard of his family’s farm estate, with forty acres of duck ponds and palm trees surrounding them, and at their backs the three-story villa that was his parents’ house, embellished then and still with marble, gilded iron, and his father’s private admiration for the French. Tuan was twenty-eight-years-old. She was possibly ten years younger. He could not tell if it was the surroundings or his presence that had urged her formal bow, the slow dip of her head, her eyes downcast. In 1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. any case, the elegance of the moment impressed him. She was the new girl hired to help Bà Bien in the kitchen. “Newly widowed,” Bà Bien had told him. “Poor girl. I don’t know how it happened and shouldn’t yet ask, but she looks well-mannered and pleasant enough. And so young for a widow.” “She couldn’t possibly be that young,” he said, thinking then that the girl’s youth was apparent perhaps from a distance, but not up close where the eyes and bloom of a smile would betray, in his experience with widows, an oldness brought about not by age but by the irrevocable fatigue of grief. He thought of this still when he approached her waiting beneath