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Stories
We have provided three of Qui-Phiet Tran’s English translations
of Tran Dieu Hang’s stories, each as a separate Word
document. The translator suggests you read them in the following
order, as they show the development of the artist.
Translator’s Notes
If fiction is autobiography since the author usually projects
his or her own experiences into the work, then Tran Dieu Hang’s
writing is a very pertinent case in point. Her two emigrations
in a span of twenty years—fleeing from her native Ha
Noi with her family and then from their home in Saigon—as
well as her traumatic personal experiences as a young single
mother, as an educated refugee toiling in a sweatshop in the
early years of her resettlement in America, and as a sensitive
immigrant woman writer strongly compel Tran Dieu Hang to tell
her unique story, which is also the story of her countless
fellow refugee/immigrant women from that war-torn region in
our most recent century.
The three pieces presented here by the Viet Nam Literature
Project span seventeen years in Tran Dieu Hang’s literary
career, from her first collection Vu Dieu cua Loai Cong (The
Peacock Dance) in 1984 to her third, most recent Niem Im Lang
cua May (The Silence of Clouds) in 2002.
The stories translated as “Darkness, Strange Land,” “Invisible
Woman” and “The Color of Burial” display
the development of Tran Dieu Hang’s writing from the
perspective of a helpless young refugee to that of an Asian
American feminist writer who assumes more than one role: contesting
the mainstream culture’s stereotyped perception of immigrant
and minority women, fulfilling her basic duties of motherhood,
and asserting her cultural and moral values as an Asian immigrant
woman.
“Darkness, Strange Land”
The most successful autobiographical story of Tran Dieu Hang’s
early years is “Darkness, Strange Land.” The story
depicts a young refugee caught between two concepts of belonging:
loyalty to her former native country and its baggage—darkness,
loss, war, uprooting, nostalgia—and acceptance of a present
that is harsh, uncertain, and full of threats. Neither option
provides a viable solution for Chan Chan.
In addition to facing racism and sexism on a daily basis at
the factory, Chan Chan is shocked by her American suitor’s
overweening self-confidence and inability to appreciate her
cultural and emotional values. In his optimistic and arrogant
American mind, Tim does not know that Chan Chan, in spite of
her desperate condition, “never wants . . . to be guided
like a blind person.” By contrast, caught in a past culture
that taught her to hold dear things of emotive order like memory, “small
happinesses,” “spiritual heritage,” and “the
heart’s language, ” Chan Chan cannot accept a man
who sees the world only in terms of expectations and possibilities.
Her rejection of Tim’s plea for marriage at the end of
the story—“I’ll love you only when you find
me, when we recognize each other”— reveals an unbridgeable
gap between the two souls entrenched in their deep-rooted cultural
beliefs.
“Invisible Woman”
The theme of isolation and separateness occurs also in “Invisible
Woman.” Invisibility informs the isolation imposed by
mainstream culture on the Asian immigrant woman to confine
her to marginal status. It is also, as the story shows, a ploy
employed by the narrator to protect herself and should not
be perceived as a sign of female submissiveness in a male-oriented
society. By finally confronting her sexual harasser in the
Personnel Director’s presence, and by defending and forgiving
him, Kim demonstrates the power of her invisibility: influencing
people through courage and compassion.
Comparing herself to a mother cat who would not trade her “quiet,
cozy life” with her little ones for anything else in
the world, Kim adopts invisibility as an operative trope of
survival, so that she can practice love and motherhood, her
most formidable female power: “I love my little ones
and love the mother who loves her little ones in me; I love
that mysterious silence, the latent force, that exists in woman
who is me” (emphasis added).
“The Color of Burial”
The Asian immigrant woman’s assertion of power, according
to Tran Dieu Hang, is “a way of claiming her identity
in the new land.” Having recovered from the shock of
uprooting and the tragedy of escape, Tran Dieu Hang’s
women in her recent collection Niem Im Lang cua May (Invisible
Woman), especially “The Color of Burial,” emerge
from the shards of their broken lives and set out to rebuild
and reinvent their identities.
An important strategy employed by Tran Dieu Hang’s female
characters in these stories is that of re-defining/re-configuring
the parameters of their search for identity. Rather than simply
accept the newly-found American self completely devoid of her
Asian past, Nicole in “The Color of Burial” returns
to her former homeland “to squarely confront the problems
that are still haunting” her. By understanding the past
thoroughly, Nicole understands herself better, is able to redefine
herself, to know who she is at present. The identity crisis
she has undergone due to her traumatic relocation experience
is finally resolved. Nicole can now return to America as a
full-fledged Asian-American and quickly transform her homelessness/un-belonging
to home/belonging.
Technically, “The Color of Burial” is the most
intriguing story in this collection. It is akin to fantastic
literature à la Jorge Luis Borges: Nicole’s hallucinatory
past and labyrinthine present are rendered through the intertwining
of double/multiple narrating consciousnesses, through the fusion
of dream and reality, History and Myth, the dead and the living,
Art and Life. This doubling technique alludes to the condition
of Nicole—and by extension to the general condition of
the Asian immigrant woman—of being “between worlds.” In
the fifth painting by N/Nicole/N(am) a woman is shown straddling
the two worlds: “[S]he does not ascend; neither does
she descend. Rather, she is positioned in the middle, between
Light and Darkness, Paradise and Hell, this Side and the Other
Side.”
This hovering image, which conveys the contingency, instability,
and discontinuity in an immigrant woman’s life, suggests
that the woman in the painting, like all other immigrant women
of color, has to reposition and redefine herself constantly
in the new society.
Qui-Phiet Tran
Schreiner University, 2005
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