Then finally Lan spoke. She spoke on behalf of the spirit. In general, the spirit missed and loved his parents and every day protected all members of his family.

  “Please, spirit,” Ms. Hoa said, “we respectfully request that you show us the way to your grave.”

  Lan stopped crying for a moment. She wiped the tears from her cheek with the back of her hand.

  “That’s my house,” she said, pointing to the area directly in front of where she was seated. Then she added that the spirit had just apologized to Mr. Thang’s spirit because of the mistaken exhumation.

  Quan and everyone else seemed thrilled and began to enthusiastically dig and clear trees. Yet another area of the hillside was eventually cleared and dug up. Occasionally someone would shout out, “Oh!” as if they’d found something, but it would only be a mound of dirt built by termites.

  It was late afternoon, and a light rain had started to fall. Cold winds blew across the now barren and ripped-up hillside, making us shiver. The air was full of incense smoke, which drifted off into the dark, quiet woods.

  The medium, Ms. Hoa, continued her job. She burned more incense and kept repeating mantras.

  “I summon you, the spirit of the dead,” she said, sitting in meditation again, her eyes closed. “We miss you. We invite you to come here and be seated wherever you like. You are a sacred spirit. Please show us the way.…”

  I listened as her praying continued.

  Someone off down the hillside let out a long, weary sigh. It seemed like there was no real borderline out here in the dark woods between the living and the dead. It began to rain more heavily. Out on the horizon I saw the day ending, the bright aura of the sun glowing as if it were trying to say good-bye.

  Quan’s cell phone rang and he answered. It was the voice of his uncle back in Hanoi.

  “What are you guys doing there?” Quan’s uncle said, his voice ringing out through the phone. “It sounds like soldiers marching!”

  Quan seemed astonished and looked around. Everything was quiet. On the far side of the hill, down near the creek bed, a group of blue birds swooped down and landed on the ground near where the laborers were continuing to dig. It seemed like they never stopped digging. The holes became bigger and deeper.

  Suddenly one of the laborers shouted, “I found a piece of green cloth, and a belt …!”

  Everybody rushed over to the hole. We all stood around anxiously staring down into the dark, upturned earth.

  Quan paced back and forth. He looked haggard. I noticed for the first time that there were some gray spots in his hair. His voice, when he spoke finally, sounded like a sob.

  “Tomorrow is December 23rd of the lunar calendar, almost Tet,” Quan said. “Brother, when will you come home?”

  11 / WAR

  THAI BA TAN

  Thai Ba Tan was born in 1949 in Nghe An and lives in Hanoi. He is a writer, poet, translator, and English teacher. He earned his BA in English at Moscow State University of Foreign Languages in 1974, and has been active in Vietnamese literary circles ever since. For years, he was vice chairman of the International Literature Department at the Vietnam Writers’ Association. More recently he has earned the ire of several high-ranking Communist Party officials by using his Facebook account to publicly criticize the Vietnamese government; as a result, he is now considered a controversial figure in Vietnam. In “War,” Thai Ba Tan turns his attention to a domestic conflict that emerges between a young married couple after the husband returns from battle. This “new war,” the narrator says, “required something more complicated and subtle” than simple battlefield endurance—“compassion and forgiveness.” The story highlights a common theme and concern shared by writers of this generation: for the Vietnamese people, the war did not really end in 1975.

  * * *

  Imagine a story that happened like this:

  There was a young couple who were in love. A few days after their wedding, the husband left for the battlefield, leaving his young wife at home all alone. She worked and waited wearily for him to come back. It wasn’t only one or two years—she waited for ten years. And during those long ten years she never received any news about her husband. Nobody knew why, exactly, or what had happened to him. Then the war ended and the husband came home. He was very moved to see that his wife had waited faithfully for him all this time. But when they lay in bed together that first night, he put his hand on her belly and suddenly sat up.

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “Yes,” said the wife.

  Silence.

  “Who were you with?”

  “With you, of course,” she replied calmly. “How could I be with anyone else besides you?”

  The husband said nothing and crawled quietly out of the mosquito net. He put on his clothes and sat at the kitchen table, smoking for one hour, two hours, probably longer. Then, because there was only one bed in the house, he pulled out a piece of plastic, spread it out on the floor, and lay down.

  It all started that night, the night that ended ten long years of longing caused by a cruel war, the night that presented new challenges and the declaration of a new war these two people now had to fight. Unlike the war they had just won, this new war was without weapons.

  It was hard to tell if they would be victorious in this new conflict. There were new challenges in peace time that didn’t necessarily require extraordinary endurance or sacrifice, but required something bigger, something more complicated and subtle: compassion and forgiveness.

  Dear readers, the scene I described above did not derive from my imagination. It was a true story that happened in my village.

  The husband was named Nam, and his wife was Xuyen. They didn’t say anything else to each other that night, though neither of them could fall asleep. The next morning, Nam took a walk around the village. He wanted to ask people about his wife during the time he’d been away. He was surprised, and a little confused, when everyone reported positive things about Xuyen: that she was hardworking, well mannered, and respectful in all her relationships.

  Maybe she hid it so cleverly that nobody knows, Nam thought.

  And as soon as he got home he asked his wife again, “Who were you with?”

  “You,” she replied gently.

  “Me? How could that be true?” Nam yelled. “Explain this to me!”

  Xuyen looked up at her husband. Her eyes were wet with tears and her face had turned red with embarrassment.

  “Go ahead, tell me!” Nam said, getting angrier now.

  “Nam, please don’t yell at me like that,” Xuyen said. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I love you. I’ve always loved you and been faithful to you. I wish you could know, even just a little, how I’ve lived the past ten years in misery and fear. Why am I pregnant? It’s simple. Every night when you were away I slept with your pillow next to mine. Sometimes I imagined I could feel you sleeping next to me. Then one night, a few months ago, I imagined you came home and got into bed like everything was normal. I could even feel the warmth coming from your body. I felt much closer to you on this night than the nights before. When I woke up, I was still alone, like all the other times. But I knew you had just been with me. I could still feel the warmth from your body on your side of the bed, and the blankets were even crumpled.…”

  “Do you expect me to believe you?” Nam said. “Do you actually believe such nonsense?”

  “Please don’t talk like that. I didn’t …”

  Nam walked out of the house.

  He thought about what Xuyen had said. He could certainly empathize with her—he used to dream about lying next to his wife all the time. But how could this actually explain her pregnancy? No! It’s impossible! he said to himself, though he wanted desperately to trust her words. He tried quoting the theory of telepathy that everyone seemed to be talking about recently, but it was no use. He concluded sadly that Xuyen had not been faithful to him and must have slept with another man. He could not bear this fact. It was an obstacle that he failed to overcome, though he’d always loved her. But there was no other way for him—he was the kind of man who could not hold a woman in his arms who had been held by another man.

  Nam, Xuyen, and the newborn baby all lived together in the same tiny house. Nobody ever heard them argue. Nam was a strong and healthy man who loved farming. He was able to provide his family with enough food and even had some extra rice left over to sell to the state. Within a short period of time he furnished their house with all the necessities. He didn’t talk much, especially to his wife. He worked hard during the day. When he finished his work, he’d sit quietly, often staring attentively at something in front of him for hours on end. At night he slept by himself, not on the piece of plastic on the floor but on a small, newly purchased bed placed next to the window.

  Xuyen was a small woman, and after giving birth she became even smaller. She moved around the house quietly, like a shadow. She wanted desperately to share with Nam the burden of the thoughts that tormented him, but he had such a cold and cruel attitude that her attempts failed. So in general she tried to avoid him and often sat by herself in a corner of the house farthest from her husband.

  Strangely, the baby looked just like Nam. For a moment, this fact made Nam reconsider Xuyen’s illogical explanation. The baby was beautiful. Nam harbored no resentment against the child whose existence had become the wall between him and his wife. In fact, to his surprise, Nam found that he loved the baby as much as he loved Xuyen, and he felt miserable when he had to conceal this love. Sometimes, if he was in a particularly good mood and Xuyen was busy, he would hold the baby and help wash the cloth diapers. Nam’s internal psychological debate raged on, but the prejudice within him always triumphed. He refused to let the baby inherit his last name and insisted that the child call him “Uncle,” not “Dad.” At night, when Nam heard his wife crying while she held the baby in her arms, he wanted to come to her, to caress and comfort her, and do something kind to make her feel better, but he decided not to. Lying quietly in his small bed underneath the window, he’d just stare up at the ceiling, or he’d go outside and walk and smoke until the morning. In moments like this, sometimes he’d get angry. He was frustrated with Xuyen, with the baby, and most of all with himself. The situation seemed hopeless. It was his personality, and nothing could be done about it.

  One day, Nam stopped by my house for a visit.

  “You have a few days off to visit your hometown, so why are you just sitting at home?” he asked loudly as soon as I opened the front gate. “Writing again?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “That’s my job.” I motioned for him to sit. “Please have a seat.”

  The baby was older now, running around the village with the other children, but his family remained the same. People said that several times the local authorities had advised Nam to reconcile with his wife, but he refused to listen. We all knew that Nam was a reasonable man, but once a thought entered his mind, it was not easy to get rid of it.

  “So Nam,” I asked, “are you still ‘at war’?”

  Nam said nothing. From his facial expression I could tell that he was sad. After a while, he said, “Look, what can I do?”

  “Why can’t you just have ‘peace’ with her?” I said gently. “You must know how much you’re making Xuyen suffer.”

  “Don’t you think I also suffer?”

  “That’s why you should let this whole thing go.”

  Nam sat in silence. Then suddenly he said, “Let me ask you something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Do you believe Xuyen’s story? I mean, the story of how she got pregnant?”

  “Yes, I do,” I replied.

  “Well, I don’t.” He stood up. He seemed furious all of a sudden. “No! Never!”

  “But at the end of the day that isn’t even important,” I said, getting angry myself. “What’s most important is that she waited for you all those years and she still loves you.”

  “Mr. Author, you talk like it’s an easy thing,” Nam said sarcastically, his lips barely parted. “Everything is so simple to you guys.”

  He said nothing else and left.

  You see, a person who had spent fifteen years on the battlefield, who had done extraordinary acts of heroism, who had overcome thousands of dangerous challenges, had nonetheless failed to overcome a relatively minor obstacle to end suffering for himself and his beloved woman. This seemed unfair and extremely depressing. How were we supposed to convince him?

  In February 1979, when the border war with China occurred in the North, Nam volunteered to rejoin the military. Xuyen didn’t oppose this decision and only said, “You’re leaving again, and I will wait for you, no matter how long.”

  “And every night, will you dream of me coming to visit you?” Nam asked, derisively. “Will you be pregnant again when I come back?”

  “Yes,” Xuyen said, ignoring his tone of scorn. “But please believe me. I’ve always loved you and only you. If I get pregnant again, the baby is yours.”

  Nam said nothing and left quietly. He never returned.

  * * *

  Several years have passed, and Mrs. Xuyen has become Mrs. Elderly Xuyen. She has aged and become frail. She is still waiting for her husband, like she did during the war. And like before, she never receives a letter from Mr. Nam, who has become Mr. Elderly Nam.

  This was their personal story. At first I had no intention to write about it, but after considering various factors, I decided to go ahead and write all this down. I imitated the French author Andre Maurois, who wrote The Return of the Prisoner, and published this story in a local newspaper with a tiny hope that if Mr. Nam reads it, he will change his mind. Mr. Nam, Mrs. Xuyen, and I are all from the same village. I think none of us has the right, therefore, to be indifferent to the fate of others.

  12 / THE CHAU RIVER PIER

  SUONG NGUYET MINH

  Suong Nguyet Minh was born in 1958 in Ninh Binh and currently works at Military Literature Magazine in Hanoi. He joined the army in the 1970s and was among the Vietnamese troops who liberated Cambodia from the genocidal Pol Pot regime. He writes mostly about war and its effects on the Vietnamese countryside and its people, and has published one novel and many short stories. Like other female veterans found in Vietnamese fiction, the character of May in “The Chau River Pier” is portrayed as a heroic but damaged and somewhat lost figure. May has been changed by the war in a way that comes into stark relief when she returns to her village on the evening of her former fiancé’s wedding to a younger woman. It is painfully clear that May, a seasoned battlefield medic now missing a leg, cannot pick up her life where she left off before joining the army. Still, she manages to become a mother by the end of the story, fulfilling that traditional gender role even against the slim odds offered by the harsh realities of her postwar life.

  * * *

  San got married the same day Aunt May returned to the village. The water in the Chau River was red. Waves lapped against the lone remaining column of a collapsed pier; the column had been standing there all alone since the Americans had bombed the area. Thick dark clouds hovered in the sky. The water in the river began to rise and flow more quickly. The guests attending San’s wedding said, “The flood from the mountains is coming.”

  Mai didn’t want to think of Aunt May on this day, so tried to force the thought from her mind. She had been tasked with helping her grandfather transport guests to the wedding in his boat. San was getting married to Thanh, a schoolteacher from the village of Bai located on the other side of the river. San was still unemployed and had only recently returned from an apprenticeship abroad. He wore a shirt and tie and stood at the front of the boat. The young women, in shirts with lotus leaf-shaped collars, sat along the sides of the boat, chatting among themselves, while the elderly wedding guests wore simple brown outfits and sat down in the cabin, silently chewing betel nut. San looked happy; he smiled, showing a set of shiny teeth.

  Whenever Mai’s thoughts turned to Aunt May, she had the sudden urge to sink the boat. An evil thought! But mostly she just felt extremely anxious.

  Mai lifted her head and, not trying to hide the disrespect in her voice, said to San, “It seems like there are many guests attending your wedding. You should have rented a dragon boat.”

  San frowned. “Don’t say that. We don’t want to upset your grandpa.”

  Mai looked at her grandfather rowing slowly and steadily. He seemed to be sulking, with his chin held in the air and his long gray beard flapping in the wind. He had been given a peculiar job on this particular day: transporting his daughter’s former fiancé to the house of his new bride. But the old man revealed neither joy nor sadness as he sat there rowing the wedding party across the river. If you looked into his eyes it seemed like waves were gently lapping against his pupils. It wasn’t until the last wedding guest had debarked from the boat that he finally wiped away his tears with the sleeve of his shirt. Then he went to lie down in his hut while Mai anchored the boat to the pier.

  * * *

  Aunt May arrived at the village after the wedding ceremony had begun. She wore a faded old army uniform and had a soldier’s rucksack slung over one shoulder. She stood on the Bai side of the river and called to her father. Amid the sounds of lapping waves and the blowing wind, she heard some buffalo boys nearby saying to her, “Ma’am, you missed the boat.”

  In the hut, Mai thought she was dreaming. When she got up from the bed, she saw that Grandpa had untied the boat and was already rowing across the middle of the river.

  On the bank, Aunt May stepped onto the pier as she saw her father rowing toward her. He had started rowing faster. He was teary-eyed. His boat bounced on the waves as it reached the pier. When he finally embraced May, his shoulders trembled as he muttered in a broken voice, “Oh, May! Why has it taken you so long to come back? My dear child … I thought …”