“When you’ve lived to a certain age, you don’t ask whether or not something is true, you ask which truth it is.”
This sentence comes towards the end of Water: A Chronicle, the recently translated novel by Nguyễn Ngọc Tư, and can help readers navigate the disorienting, sometimes difficult but ultimately rewarding work by one of contemporary Vietnam’s most beloved writers. If one approaches the work unconcerned by how events and characters impact one another or connect, but simply let the underlying narrative currents pull the reading experience forward to an uncertain destination one will arrive at a satisfying experience.
Nguyễn Ngọc Tư. Photo via VNTre News.
Nguyễn Ngọc Tư is impressively prolific, having penned more than 20 collections of short stories and essays, but Water: A Chronicle is only her second novel, first published in Vietnamese under the name Biên sử nước in 2020. Her expertise with the short story genre is abundantly clear as Water could be interpreted as a set of nine loosely connected stories, rather than a novel with a central plot and cohesive structure that includes rising tension and resolution. Different chapters introduce and discard idiosyncratic characters facing disparate situations. A journalist returns to her hometown to cover a mystery that may involve a former classmate; a literature teacher who raises cockroaches vanishes, her last image captured by a convenience store security camera; a transgender youth is heinously abused by their mother; a water tap no one can turn off floods a town, forcing an entire community to evacuate; a group of prisoners inadvertently escape into the forest where they hide out in a shack with a mother whose baby will not cease crying; and a privileged teenager delights in anarchic destruction knowing her family name will absolve her of all responsibility. These characters and their circumstances arrive with little to no exposition and readers may struggle to orient themselves before the chapter ends and the narrative changes focus.
Those anticipating a familiar reading experience will likely spend the first several chapters wondering when and how the characters and places will meet. But this never happens, and the sooner the reader realizes this, the more they will enjoy the slim novel. While characters frequently disappear and predicaments are abandoned to focus on the next set of misery-stricken people, the chapters are connected via the environment. Dangerous rivers, unrelenting storms and precarious economies fill stories set in an unspecified region of the Mekong Delta. It’s familiar terrain for Nguyễn Ngọc Tư that makes great use of her talents for terse but emotionally resonant descriptions.
Nature as both a setting and an adversary
The book’s events take place in fictional towns and small cities that are not places “favoured by avid travelers, boasting neither tourist traps nor national heritage sites.” Almost certainly placed somewhere in miền Tây, they are all impacted by the surrounding “watery expanse, like a blister on the horizon.” As in much of her other work, Tư presents the landscape with a certain reserved admiration for its propensity to dish out hostility. It’s far from idyllic, but she is able to bring out its unrelenting beauty in lines like: “There were but a few families on the whole isle, it was so forlorn even a rooster’s crow could startle you, and at night the laments of waterfowl hacking deep cuts at your gut.”
Consisting of powerful rivers, volatile floodplains and dusty towns, nature is often one of the main adversaries in the chapters. Characters contend with its brutality, such as when a swarm of locusts causes a breakdown in the social order. The chapter that focuses on a group of escaped convicts observes the supremacy of nature as the men’s suffering at the hands of the terrain is presented as more exacting than their fear of the police chasing them. “Without a look back, we mad men ran raging on the reeds near the edge of the swamp forest, wading across canals of water as red as blood, crawling over patches of water spinach that pulled at our legs, until the guards' whistles could be heard no more. I couldn’t remember how many forest miles how many canals how many red swamps I crossed before collapsing on my abused legs, exhausted lungs heaving. There was a hint of blood in the smell of mud; those green blades had probably had a field day on my flesh.”
Dangerous rivers, unrelenting storms and precarious economies fill stories set in an unspecified region of the Mekong Delta. It’s familiar terrain for Nguyễn Ngọc Tư that makes great use of her talents for terse but emotionally resonant descriptions.
In addition to the Mekong Delta, many stories connect via a gruesome legend. The single-paragraph first chapter explains: “The Lord has nothing left but his heart. The woman who is to take it has arrived at the river, her babe in her arms,” and throughout the book women with sick children venture to Vạn Thủy Island; readers are never certain which is the woman. Meanwhile, the foundations of the Lord’s legend are laid out in the story of three young gangsters who establish a cruel regime on an island after finding buried gold. “Following the scent of gold, all kinds of toughs and ruffians arrived at the isle, in response to which Báo orchestrated a succession of sensational assassinations whose outcome left the hitmen themselves awed, so awed they went around spreading the news that Phủ was a real deal deity made flesh, said they chopped him to pieces the previous night only to witness him back on his throne in the morning, accepting bows.” Readers are not privy to precisely what might have happened to preserve this Lord’s heart, but enough of the legend is given to suggest that Water’s world is one in which the mystical heart can heal a baby if only her mother can reach it.
Modernity with a sprinkle of magical realism
Striped of extensive exposition, many of the narratives have a certain timeless quality that untethers them from any specific decade or era. Occasional specific details, however, announce the book to be very much set in the modern day. Convenience store hotdogs have gone wrinkly after hours spinning on the grill; teenage friendships are formed via message boards and Kung Fu Hustle is screened on a laptop. Such moments of modernity allow readers to grasp hold of the slippery storylines, creating a sense of familiar immediacy.
Juxtaposing these very modern and realistic storylines are vignettes that delve into the surreal. A couple takes shelter in an abandoned library during the cataclysmic plague of locusts and survives by literally eating words, something they did before the insects arrived. The absurd behavior is described in lush and convincing specifics: “At seventeen, when I first discovered I could eat printed things for food, I did wonder if it was the paper pulp my body needed. Or the mineral oil in the printing ink. But the blank sheets I tried were all too bland and tasteless, and the ink too gross to be palatable. I’d even tried paper and ink mixed together before coming to the conviction that words on paper are what satiate my appetite. But such nuances were lost on my wife, who found them all to be savagery.” Meanwhile, a man marries a vaguely supernatural woman who “transformed with the landscape, and the sun and the light around her, the way she could create doubles of herself, or shapeshift in the blink of an eye.”
The novel feels like taking a bus ride through the region and overhearing the conversations of people who get on and off. Some of their experiences may overlap, a few might mingle with your dreams as you drift in and out of sleep, and others will get interrupted when a person reaches their stop, but they all combine to speak of what it means to be human.
The collision of this magical realism with the myth of the heart on Vạn Thủy and the stories that are established in our tangibly mundane world adds further difficulty to the reading. The looming element of the fantastic hinders attempts to connect the disjointed timelines and individuals. Such a realization thus returns us to the question of how one should read Water: A Chronicle. Several reviews of the original Vietnamese use a metaphor from the narrative of the couple that eats words. While the man eats words indiscriminately, the woman selects carefully, “a few words here, a few there,” and this is how readers can approach the chapters; deciding which chapters they enjoy and skipping the others at no loss.
I, however, disagree with such an approach and push back against claims that Water is simply a mashing together of stories and undeveloped sketches. Rather, reading it as a whole forefronts the universality of certain themes. The recurrence of isolation, departure, the power of community, babies as burdens, love that is insufficient and marriage that is worse, the fragility of connections, the unfairness of life, and the allure of placing hope in legend underscore their centrality to human experience, perhaps particularly so in the delta. In this way, the novel feels like taking a bus ride through the region and overhearing the conversations of people who get on and off. Some of their experiences may overlap, a few might mingle with your dreams as you drift in and out of sleep, and others will get interrupted when a person reaches their stop, but they all combine to speak of what it means to be human. And at the end, you will feel as if they have slipped into the watery landscape flowing past: truths you could never fully hold but will always carry with you.
Water: A Chronicle will be released worldwide on October 30. It is the first release by Major Books, a recently launched UK-based publisher committed to translating important Vietnamese works.
