The collection of short stories, Hà Nôi at Midnight, has been held back from publication in the West for 30 years by the author, Bảo Ninh. Ninh joined the military at 17 and fought in the Vietnam War on the side of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), a.k.a the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).
He published an earlier work in Vietnam about the war, The Sorrow of War, which was banned in Vietnam until 2006. This was recently translated and edited by Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran, published by Texas Tech University Press in 2023.
Hà Nôi at Midnight opens with “Farewell to a Soldier’s Life.” The narrator is looking back on his life after the war with regret. After the euphoria of winning the war, driving out the Americans and vanquishing the South Vietnamese, his days have passed slowly and without the heightened intensities he experiences during warfare:
“When I returned from the battlefield, my parents were not yet retired, but now they are in their seventies. My siblings have scattered and live elsewhere; they are also getting old. After Tét this year, my son will be the same age I was when I joined the military. My wife, known for her youthfulness, no longer looks that way… Life and time have a way of drowning me.”
The narrator is aging out of remaining possible choices, taking on various jobs before settling on being a writer. The life after war has been uneventful whereas the war had been momentous and life-defining. Still, former soldiers in peacetime do not make an effort to acknowledge each other, even with their shared history:
“At one time, living side by side, we survived amid bomb explosions, but nowadays we don’t even say hello or acknowledge each other, as though everything we’ve been through together never happened.”
At the heart of the story is the hard-won peace, in which the surviving soldiers live in a quiet struggle. There are unresolved traumas: “When we are awake, we can try to repress and forget, but asleep, how do we control our dreams?”
Yet the narrator’s memories are overlaid with a rosy patriotic nostalgia to which nothing else compares. There are regrets for the immense losses of life, but foremost are regrets for the self, what-ifs, and missed opportunities. After liberation and a reunited country under Communist rule, the narrator in “Farewell to a Soldier’s Life” realizes the brevity of human life and the severe limits of the few choices that define a life.
The Americans, as their enemy combatants, are depicted as callous and devious fighters, conducting bombing runs and burying soldiers alive in trenches and dropping chemicals to cause deforestation. Ninh writes:
“No matter how young we were then, by shouldering the memories of war that seemed heavy as a thousand-year burden, we felt as though we had lived through the most profound years of our lives…We were a young generation who became men in the trenches and on the battlefields, and this was what gave our lives meaning.”
“Beloved Son” centers around Tân, who inherited a trunk that his late mother left behind. While his siblings made off with her appliances, he chose a trunk, which holds some secrets of the family. This work describes the re-discovery of a young sibling, Nghĩa, who joined the army as a young man and disappeared from all their lives, without a clear fate except over time.
This work describes the dogged persistence in parental love for a missing child. The mother writes letters to an unregistered place, and the father mistakes strangers for the missing child. The other surviving children are accomplished, studying abroad in the Soviet Union, E. Germany, and Czechoslovakia, but the parents are too immersed in their grief for their youngest son that overshadows their remaining lives. It is unclear what their beliefs are in terms of fate and the afterlife.
A man is passing by a cafe when he hears a war anthem playing on a cassette player in “301.” A woman in her 40s serves him coffee. A photo on the wall sparks a conversation between the two, and a story of the seminal war unspools. Happenstance evokes shared histories that would simply have been lost to time. In their sharing, the Viet Cong soldiers are depicted as gallant and not advantage-taking of a young woman they meet at her home photography studio. (Given the widespread practice of censorship, the reviewer wonders at how much of the story is propagandistic.)
“Letters from the Year of the Water Buffalo” centers on Hill 400, which is a contested space. Ninh writes:
“American bombs would rain down endlessly before the day was over. Sometimes the sky filled with bombers, flying either in pairs or alone. They would hover for a long time above us like a Ferris wheel. Then suddenly, tilting and banking down, they screamed through the sky. Their bombs glistened under the sun and grew larger before the inevitable impact. You could count to give before the bombs struck the hill. Rocks and earth were blasted from hillsides, leaving scars across the land…Sometimes four napalm bombs fell on the A side of Hill 400, drowning the whole land in a sea of fire. After the bomber pilots flew away, the gunners came in, then the artillery ranks, and infantrymen finally entered.”
In the fighting, every side is devious and cold. Yet, during the Lunar New Year, the northern and the southern troops find a moment to break bread and share rations from their respective trenches. For a brief respite, the Viêt Công troops and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) or South Vietnamese army remember their common humanity. They are not fighting for animus against fellow Vietnamese, but they are fighting because of leadership and their conflicting views of how Vietnam’s future should unfold.
“The Camp of the Seven Dwarves” follows a postal worker who is walking through a bamboo forest when a sudden tropical rainstorm drives him to seek shelter. He is walking along the Sa Thầy River in the A10 region. In the woods, he runs into a recluse who invites him into his home. The postal worker hears Mộc’s story of love and loss. This work has a Chekhovian feel, with the surface normalcy and the underlying profundity.
A 17-year-old private of Battalion 5 in Bầi Nai is hurrying back to base, from which he will deploy shortly, in “Giang.” He meets a young woman at a well, who helps him clean off from mud. That chance encounter leads to a visit to her home, and then he deploys, never to see her again. Yet, that meeting between strangers remains with the soldier the rest of his life, for reasons which he cannot fully explain. “An Unnamed Star” portrays soldiers as selfless folk who deny themselves in order to provide for the commonfolk, especially the poor.
Tâm is a high school student who wants to join the military in “Reminiscences.” He needs his father’s permission to do so because of his youth. His father, though, is protective of his son. He refuses to let him smoke or drink, and he refuses to sign the release. His father starts a conversation, “I want to…” but never moves past that initial fragment. His mother says, “You can’t separate patriotism from romantic love, so let him go.” She is willing to give him up to the ways of the world and to trust that things will work out.
This work touches on a motivation for why the youth wants to go to the military, even though the reasons may be hidden from himself. The next story, “Evidence,” reads as almost a follow-on work from “Reminiscences.” Here, a father is astounded at his youngest son, Hùng, risking himself to save a colleague’s life. He remembers the boy’s growing up and cannot get past his judgment of his son.
People are caught up in the floodwaters of the hometown river in “The Secret of the River.” The main character works at the local dike, which is giving way. His wife is in labor. Several people are caught up in flooding and are holding on to a tree. This story reads as an allegory, in which the river is an expression of inexorable time. There are constant losses, and perhaps, the rare redemption is precious but depends on the right choices when dilemmas arise.
“Hà Nôi at Midnight,” the title work, follows interactions around a small group of neighbors. There is Năm Tìn, a local artist. There is Giao, a woman about whom men dream. Two men, Trung and “Pec,” get into fisticuffs over Giao’s attention and affections. Then, 34 years later, one of the group tracks down Giao to see how she is, and the mysteries of that night are revealed.
“Untamed Winds” describes a haunting of Diêm Vilage by Diệu Nu’o’ng, who appears and who sings, distracting the soldiers. While there is death all around during war, something particularly egregious has happened to Nu’o’ng to explain the apparition. The leaders of soldiers fear that they will be “seduced by her voice.” They fear that this malicious spirit would “trick our men and lead them astray.” In this work, the author writes of human fragility: “Humans are like trees and grass. War, like fields set ablaze, can burn us to ash in a single moment.”
If past is prologue, humanity is destined to mass destruction to settle issues of governance and land. If humanity learns lessons, perhaps millions of human lives do not have to be lost to settle senses of threat and counter-threat between states.
Hà Nôi at Midnight is a sentimental and piercing work that tries to make sense of what it means to be a warfighter. There are recurrent themes. Even on the “winning” side, the losses evoke a pyrrhic calculus. Incidental experiences between people may be profound and remembered over a lifetime. The world itself is not fair – even the question of fairness does not truly arise. The Lunar New Year appears as a recurring time of hope and celebration. Nature is constantly refreshing itself even as human warfare scars the landscape. And all humanity exists in the fast currents of time, to which all victories and memories and achievements dissipate and disappear.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
