“I begged your mother-in-law to let me see this diary,” Ms. Thoai said, “but she always said it was not a good time for me to read it.”

  She ran her fingers over the worn plastic cover of the diary.

  “Did you read it?” she asked. “Did he really hate me?”

  I smiled. “Why don’t you read it and find out?”

  Soon the sun started to rise. A thick December fog covered the rice paddies on the outskirts of the village. A stiff wind blew through the banana tree gardens, making a sound like a long sigh. Up in the endless sky, the winter moon looked dull and colorless, like a human face drained of blood.

  7 / THE CORPORAL

  NGUYEN TRONG LUAN

  Nguyen Trong Luan was born in 1952 in Phu Tho and currently lives in Hanoi. He joined the army while he was a mechanical engineering student and served through the end of the war. He has written short stories, essays, and novels about the war, and is the recipient of awards from Military Literature Magazine and the magazine Cua Viet. His 2016 novel, Hungry Forest (Rung doi), was well received in Vietnam, and is currently being adapted into a play and a film. In “The Corporal,” Nguyen Trong Luan pays homage to the hundreds of thousands of female soldiers who served in the North Vietnamese Army. His portrait of Xuan, the poor rural young woman who returns to her village hardened by years of war, highlights the challenges many of these women faced in a patriarchal postwar society still clinging to traditional gender roles. Despite her heroism as a soldier, Xuan’s postwar life is ignominious, characterized by an unhappy arranged marriage, hard physical labor, and crushing poverty. Despite victory in 1975 and the reunification of the country, Xuan is doomed to live a “miserable life.”

  * * *

  Mr. Buong died the day I returned to my hometown from Hanoi. The entire village was in shock. He hadn’t been sick that long, but now suddenly he was no longer with us. My mother just said that he’d had a cold for two days and had stopped speaking. The funeral was simple. I felt sorry for Mr. Buong. My family’s house was at the top of a hill while his home was at the bottom. Funeral trumpets blew their mournful sounds that echoed off the hillsides surrounding our village. My mother was the chairwoman of the village’s Association of Elderly Citizens, so she kept busy attending to the funeral guests and spent her evenings at Mr. Buong’s house, down below. In our house up on the hill, I couldn’t sleep.

  When I was a kid, I used to tend to a water buffalo very early every morning. My father said I should join Mr. Buong so I’d learn to be braver around the animal. Mr. Buong showed me how to climb onto a buffalo’s back, how to guide them to the river so they could bathe, and how to remove leeches from their hooves. Usually, I’d ride on the back of my buffalo, while Mr. Buong walked behind me, leading his own animal with a stick. All my knowledge of how to take care of buffaloes came from Mr. Buong. This experience figures very prominently in my memories of childhood. Mr. Buong always called me cu and never used my real name, Luan. He said the fact that I was a fast learner was a blessing to the family, and that my intelligence was worth more even than many acres of tea trees.

  His family was poor, even though Mr. Buong was strong and worked very hard. He’d go into the woods to dig up bamboo shoots and sweet potatoes, then diligently carry them to the market, where he was able to earn just enough money to buy a jar of fermented shrimp paste and a small bottle of rice wine.

  My grandfather said to him one time, “Buong, you work too hard. A person who does too much physical labor won’t enjoy life!”

  To which Mr. Buong laughed and replied, “That’s my fate, sir.”

  “You were born in the Year of the Monkey,” my grandfather continued. “So if you want to be successful, you must have specific plans.”

  “Yes, sir. I know,” Mr. Buong said.

  But his family remained penniless. Mr. Buong’s wife was a small-framed woman who knew only how dig up wild forest plants and sell them at the market. Together the couple toiled tirelessly in the woods, digging up whatever they could find, but their life didn’t get any better. Still, Mr. Buong never complained or asked his neighbors for anything.

  I knew that my father loved Mr. Buong. Sometimes when my father caught fish, he’d ask my brother to invite Mr. Buong over to eat and drink with him. Mr. Buong usually drank in silence. But one night, he took a drink, then sighed and told my father, “I am worried about my daughter, Xuan. She dropped out of school and now has to take care of the buffaloes. She’s not as good-looking as the other girls, so in the future …”

  My father interrupted. “You’re thinking too far ahead. She’s a good, hardworking girl.”

  Xuan was Buong’s oldest daughter. She was two years younger than I, but we treated each other as peers. Xuan looked like a typical peasant, with a scrawny neck and dirty black feet. But she was unusually strong and hardworking. I couldn’t even pull her bundle of firewood. In school she studied poorly, so she always sat in the last row, and every month she was named the worst student in her class.

  From our house, we could hear Buong’s wife shouting, “Oh, Xuan! Xuan! I pay the tuition and contribute rice to the school every month, but you always get the lowest grades. You’re a big girl now, but you’re still studying with the little kids.”

  Xuan was embarrassed and went to cry by herself underneath a palm tree outside. She didn’t dare enter the house. I stood in my family’s manioc garden, listening to Buong’s wife berate her daughter, and felt sorry for Xuan.

  Eventually I went off to college and only came back to my hometown twice a year to visit my family. When I came back, I noticed that Xuan had grown up—she was taller, and now we called each other anh and em, “brother” and “little sister.” She had become a youth officer, and I heard that she was doing a good job.

  A few years later I joined the military. At the end of 1975, I returned to the village. On the day I got back from the South, my mother asked me, “Did you see Xuan, Mr. Buong’s daughter? She sent me a letter saying that she’d gone to Gia Lai to look for you last May.” There were stories that women who went to the highlands became infertile, that the malaria fevers they might contract could wreak havoc on their bodies and cause baldness. I had seen it myself.

  In 1979 Xuan returned to the village. She carried a huge rucksack on her back, but she walked with perfectly straight, upright posture. She spent all of her money to buy her mother a cotton blanket, because she said that her mother had never slept under one. At the age of twenty-five she’d lost most of her hair, and her skin was much darker now. She’d stayed in the highlands after the war to help cultivate land for rubber plantations in Doc Co, Le Thanh, and Chu Pa. Several people had died, Xuan said, from the remaining bombs and land mines hidden in the earth. She’d asked for permission to come home finally because she missed her family. So she was allowed to come back, and she eventually returned to the work of tending to the buffaloes.

  Xuan was still single when she turned thirty. Because she had no formal education or experience, she was not qualified for a comfortable position in the local government. She worked on her family’s farm for a few years, but there was still no marriage proposal, and Xuan was extremely sad.

  “Do you want to be a single woman forever, Xuan?” her mother asked.

  “I will get married, Mom. I’ll even marry a crazy man with cracked lips and a belly button that sticks out,” Xuan replied bitterly.

  But eventually this prediction came true. A dull, slow-witted man with a limp was introduced to Xuan by the man’s family. Xuan didn’t look at anyone; she just nodded in agreement and the wedding was arranged. The man’s family offered five chickens, twenty kilograms of rice, a bundle of areca fruit, and several bottles of manioc wine in exchange for Xuan’s hand in marriage. During the wedding, Mr. Buong sat hugging his knees and watched the neighborhood children eating around a tray of food laid on a bed of banana leaves. He sighed to himself. He loved his daughter Xuan a lot. It was unfortunate that this had to be her fate.

  Xuan and her husband didn’t have their own house, so after the wedding, Xuan said to her father, “Dad, please build a hut for me on a hillside and I will live there.” Mr. Buong spent ten days building a hut on a remote, abandoned manioc farm. On the day Xuan moved into her new home, my mother gave her a hand. Xuan carried two baskets balanced on a bamboo pole. The baskets were filled with everything she needed—pots and pans, bowls and dishes, clothes. Lowering her head, Xuan muttered a farewell to her parents as tears began to fall from her eyes. Her mother’s shadow became as small as a clay sauce jar under a palm tree.

  Xuan’s hut was isolated in the woods. Occasionally local kids looking for their lost water buffaloes would stop by and ask for a glass of water, but those were the only visitors she had. Next to the hut, Xuan farmed a piece of land given to her as a favor by the village so she wouldn’t have to travel somewhere else to work. Once a month she went to the market to buy food. After two or three years of this life, Xuan began to walk unsteadily. And she remained childless. People said that her husband was impotent. Xuan worked hard on her farm, digging holes to plant manioc and banana trees. She said she would keep burying manioc roots until she was buried herself. She planted only banana trees because she didn’t know how long she would live. Trees like jackfruit and plum needed a long time to grow.

  I lived far away from the village, so I only heard about Xuan second hand. I heard that she’d had a bad experience with her husband’s family. Her brothers-in-law had come to the farm and taken all the good, ripe bananas. They even pulled up the young maniocs and taro roots to make a sweet soup. Meanwhile, Xuan’s dimwitted husband was sick all the time. Xuan, of course, wasn’t allowed to get sick, otherwise both of them would starve to death in the woods.

  The kids who tended to the buffaloes said that in her hut there was a military medal in a glass frame. The framed medal hung high up on a pillar where Xuan had tied the frame so it wouldn’t fall and break. The medal was for the rank of corporal; after nearly a decade in the military, that was the highest rank she’d been allowed to attain. She was Corporal Xuan of our village.

  At Mr. Buong’s funeral, Xuan wore an old soldier’s uniform and a white mourning cloth tied around her head. Later that evening, I talked to my mother. “I forgot to tell you,” she said. “The day Xuan moved out, she had no clothes or blankets to take with her, so I gave her the two sets of uniforms that you brought home and left here. When I gave them to her she started crying and said, ‘So then, I’ll wear the clothes of a soldier from the central highlands again.”

  Mr. Buong died, and his daughter continued to live a miserable life. He must have known about her fate. That was why, when he stopped breathing, his eyes were still open.

  8 / RED APPLES

  VUONG TAM

  Vuong Tam was born in 1946 in Hanoi. He studied at Hanoi University of Science and Technology and has published both poetry and fiction. He is a member of the Vietnam Writers’ Association and works as a reporter for the newspaper New Hanoi. His story “Red Apples” first appeared in 2008 and was included in the short-story anthology The Female Faces of War (Chien tranh cung mang guong mat dan ba). The story is unique in that it features a character from the van cong, the North Vietnamese Army military unit composed of singers and performers tasked with traveling the country during the war to provide uplifting, nationalistic entertainment to both military and civilian audiences. For the pianist at the center of the story, the injuries she sustained as part of the van cong make it difficult for her to leave the house and establish an independent life in postwar Hanoi. She is similar, in this sense, to other female veterans in Vietnamese war fiction—stoic yet traumatized and scarred by the war, and unable to easily transition to the traditional roles of wife and mother.

  * * *

  I glanced at the piece of paper in my hands. It contained the address of a girl I wanted to get to know. A newspaper dating agency called “Looking for Friends” had sent me the address. Obviously I was nervous because the information about her couldn’t really help me imagine how she might actually be. She was apparently 1 meter and 58 centimeters tall and “healthy,” which made it hard to say whether she was chubby or skinny. Her hobby was interesting. In that category she’d written only two words: “sad music.”

  It was chilly outside, and the alley seemed quiet and empty. I stood near the entrance and looked for someone to ask about Miss Hanh An’s house. From somewhere in the distance I heard the sweet singing voices of a children’s choir and the sounds of a piano slowly accompanying the singing. “Mother’s eyes are gentle,” the voices sang. “We listen to her lullaby …”

  As I stood there listening to the slow rhythm of the music, a boy came running toward me. I stopped him and asked for directions.

  “Over there, where you hear the singing,” he said, pointing immediately to the end of the alley. “That’s Miss Hanh An’s house.”

  I started to get more nervous as I walked closer to where the boy had been pointing. Then, all of a sudden, the children opened the iron gate of the house and came rushing out into the alley.

  “Good-bye, Miss Hanh An!” they called out.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” a voice replied.

  Hesitantly I walked to the gate and saw a young woman wearing a pair of glasses with dark lenses.

  “Excuse me, are you Miss Hanh An?” I asked.

  “Yes, that’s me,” the young woman replied. “Are you Cuong? I received a note from the newspaper that said you’d be coming today. Please come in.”

  At that moment an elderly woman hurriedly ran out from the house, greeted me with a nod, and closed the iron gate. Then she held Hanh An’s hand and led her up the steps to the house. I followed behind them.

  “Do you like Chopin?” Hanh An asked cheerfully. To the elderly woman she said, “Nanny, please take Cuong to the living room.” She turned to me and smiled. “Give me a few minutes.”

  Hanh An went into the adjacent room and I followed the old nanny into the living room.

  “Please have a seat,” she said. “Every morning, Hanh An teaches music here. You’ve come at a good time.”

  A cold wind blew in through the open window, scattering sheets of music all over the floor. The nanny began picking them up, and I went to help her collect the scattered music from the marble tiles. One of the sheets of music, I noticed suddenly, had been written by hand. It contained a handwritten note across the top of the page: “For you, Hanh An. This is a song written in a combat trench, a memory of the days we fought side by side. Composer Doan Thanh.”

  Gently I placed the handwritten song on the piano and sat down quietly in my chair. There was a photo hanging on the wall above me; I could clearly make out Hanh An’s oval face and sad eyes as she leaned against a young soldier. She must have joined the war as an entertainment performer, I figured, adjusting my collar so I looked as proper as a soldier. I was fully aware that making conversation with a musician was not a simple proposition. Maybe I had no hesitation when crossing a combat trench, a gun in my hands, the sounds of trumpets and marching chants urging us forward, but I felt that in this moment it would be difficult for me to express my feelings accurately to Hanh An. Before coming here, I had arranged logically all my ideas about what I would say to her, but now my mind had suddenly gone blank.

  Well, whatever happens, happens, I thought, taking a deep breath. As long as I am honest.…

  At that moment, Hanh An entered the living room carrying a big plate of apples. They were red apples and smelled very good. I noticed now that Hanh An’s body had a nice symmetry to it and she was actually taller than I had previously realized. The old nanny seemed upset when she noticed me staring at Hanh An’s dark glasses.

  “Cuong, please have some apples.”

  “Thank you, Hanh An.”

  Nanny hurriedly stepped forward and said, “Let me peel the apples for you.”

  “You don’t need to, Nanny. I can do it myself,” Hanh An said. “Look, they are big apples.”

  I felt uneasy because the old nanny seemed perplexed.

  Meanwhile, Hanh An seemed to be staring at me attentively as she peeled the first apple.

  “Hanh An,” I asked, “do you often play sad music by Chopin?”

  “Yes. Almost every day.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” she repeated. Then suddenly she flinched. “Ouch!”

  “Oh no! I told you. Now you’ve cut yourself,” said the nanny. “Here’s a bandage.”

  She must have known this was going to happen; that was why she’d placed some gauze bandages in her pocket.

  A drop of red blood ran down the white flesh of the apple. I hurried over to Hanh An and helped her tighten the bandage around her index finger. Nanny took the plate of apples away and left the room.

  Hanh An’s arms were trembling. I tried to comfort her.

  “That’s nothing! It’s just a minor cut. Soldiers aren’t afraid of a little blood.”

  “Blood?” Hanh An screamed. “Is there blood?”

  Her face turned pale. It seemed like she had suddenly descended into some sort of bad dream. As I finished tightening the bandage around her finger, she held my hand and whispered, almost babbling, “I see blood on his forehead, where the bullet hit …”

  My heart was beating fast at seeing Hanh An so terrified. All of a sudden, the old nanny re-entered the room and said, “Please don’t scare your guest.”

  I was speechless and didn’t know what to do. But Hanh An stood up suddenly.

  “Get up from your seat and run away like everyone else,” she said. “Yes, I am blind. Look …”

  Hanh An removed her dark glasses. Her eyes looked soulless and cold. They stared directly at me.

  “You are afraid, so please leave,” she said.