Edited by Linh Dihn. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1996, 2006. 172 pp.
The stories of Night, Again reflect a contemporary Vietnam, one far removed from the images we may retain of the country from American memoirs and films. The American War appears several times in this remarkably diverse selection, in tales of bombings and veterans and even as a sort of specter in Do Khiem’s “The Pre-War Atmosphere,” which, though set in California and focused on memories of the Palestinian conflict, features a Vietnamese narrator longing for a time before war. But ordinary life is here as well, in domestic drama and coming of age stories and deathbed confessions.
Some of the stories are tragic, like Nguyen Thi Am’s “Sleeping on Earth,” in which a baby in Hanoi is rented out as a prop for begging. “A Marker on the Side of the Boat,” by Bao Ninh, one of the more haunting stories, tells of a chance encounter in wartime. In “Without a King,” Nguyen Huy Theip writes the story of Sihn, who marries a veteran and learns to live in a house full of men—his father and brothers. Other stories tell of prostitutes, drownings and unhappy romances in voices that range from the lyrical to the ironic.
It’s a challenging and enlightening collection that gives a glimpse, for American readers, of what is happening in Vietnamese fiction, particularly because editor Linh Dihn provides a helpful overview of Vietnamese literature in his introduction. And it’s an opportunity for armchair travel, to a land of heat and rain and tropical flowers, a welcome escape from a Midwestern winter.
