The Stars, the Earth, the River: Short Fiction (Voices from Vietnam, No 1)

Rating:
Summary: Revolution and Struggle
Review: Le Minh Khue writes: "To understand my stories, you need to understand the history of revolution, war and struggle that my country has gone through and out of which those stories grew."

Khue definately helps her readers to understand.

Le Minh Khue is an extraordinary woman who uses her personal experiences to enrich her stories. When she was very young, she lost her parents in the Land Reforms of the early fifties and in 1965, at age 16 she lied about her age so that she could join the People's Army. We get a first hand account of how it was to grow up in Vietnam prior to, during, and after the war. Khue details the influences of Western culture on the youth of Vietnam and shatters the sterotypes that others may have of the Vietnamese way of life.

Most of Khue's stories are very dark. In "Tony D", a story about the grief that an American soldier's skeletal remains bring to an old man and his son, the son forces his father to cut off his finger to prove that he is not lying. In other stories, the characters are driven to suicide, some are obsessed with the material world and would do anything for the "Almighty Dollar", and a great deal of the male characters are unfaithful, have overly cynical views on life, or knife their brother's pregnant wife in the stomach.

As Wayne Karlin (editor) says, "Le Minh Khue the writer continues to perform the task of Le Minh Khue the sapper: searching out and identifying the bombs that lay buried along the Trail along which we must move, bringing them out of the earth and sometimes identifying them, and sometimes defusing them, and sometimes exploding them, and sometimes smoothing over the scars they leave in the earth. She never lets us forget what is buried and where; in doing so, she gently suggests the directions we must continue to travel."

I greatly enjoyed The Stars, The Earth, The River, and find Le Minh Khue to be a very compelling and enjoyable writer.

Rating:
Summary: Was That What I Was Fighting For?
Review: The author can write a good story, but very often this devolves into the genre of Commie Literature. This whole thing about "revolution," "liberation," etc., etc., gets real tiresome.

As a former sapper and journalist during the Second Indochina War (using the American History terminology), I found her stories quite interesting. The fact that she was patriotic is nothing to sneer at. She, like women in too many wars, is usually looked down on as a lesbian or slut. This no matter that she is taking the same chances as the men and shows more guts than most men.

This book is hard to describe. In "The Blue Sky" she, as a journalist, tries to tell the truth but is put down by her male editor. In "A Very Late Afternoon" and "Rain" she also shows the corruption rampant in Vietnam and how those who travel to the West can do quite well. She also describes the grinding poverty of her country and how people become old before their time. Thanks to communist liberation (my view), the "working class" have an almost feral existence while the elites continue to skate.

I think her longer story "A Small Tragedy" speaks on a number of levels, most I can't understand. The former mandarin turned communist--naturally after showing his "credentials" by abandoning his first wife to the crowds--is shown to be heartless and corrupt. This passes on to his daughter, who is always unhappy. In a version of the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, she meets her perfect groom (described as French although he is a Vietnamese refugee with a French passport), she only finds out too late who he really is. This was a fascinating story put in a Vietnamese perspective.

I don't care when a Vietnamese author refers to events I was in as "American aggressors" as long as they skip "feudal running dogs" or "puppet troops" (which actually describes the ARVN, not me). Her writing, though, came pretty close to that style at times. I think Vietnamese writers like her need to recognize one thing: we both showed misplaced patriotism and were used. Her regime was about as corrupt as ours at the time (I was sent by Nixon).

Rating:
Summary: good personal stuff, friction free
Review: This is a series of short stories of a girl's life in Vietnam during the 1970's. She was very involved in the war effort, at an age of about 20. For me this was pure communication and I could share her experiences easily. Short, easy sentences, on the point. With depth of feeling and honesty. Not political.