ABSTRACT
Võ Phiến (1925–2015), a fiction-writer, poet, and essayist, was the only writer among the Vietnamese expatriates who undertook the task of writing a history of the literature of South Vietnam. As a refugee in south California, he knew and welcomed to his house virtually all of the Vietnamese writers and artists who had settled in the vicinity, and did much, through his hospitality to hold the community together. He is the subject of a study in English by John Shafer entitled Võ Phiến and the Sadness of Exile. The present article discusses the beginnings of his career, when, in addition to fiction, he wrote a monograph concerning the communist project of kidnapping Southern children, so as to use them to infiltrate the South later on. The article goes on to describe his work on the literary history of the South, and concludes with an account of his life in old age. Võ Phiến was unusual in that, in addition to writing, he held down a job as a public functionary in Los Angeles until he reached retirement age in 2003. — Eric Henry.
KEYWORDS
Exile, literary history, literature of South Vietnam, Vietnamese satire, occasional essays
Figure 1. Portrait of the Writer, Võ Phiến, in 2015. (Viễn Phố, personal archives).
“Before and after the period 1954–1975 in the South, I never saw any other place in our country where literature was able to develop in such an atmosphere of freedom and openness” (Võ Phiến in a conversation with Đặng Tiến on October 28, 1995.
Võ Phiến is among the most written about and discussed of South Vietnamese authors. Before I became personally acquainted with Võ Phiến, I was thoroughly familiar with the characters in his novels, such as anh Ba Thê đồng thời (“Three-Wives-at-once”), anh Bốn thôi (“No More than Four”), ông Năm tản (“Five-Times-a-Refugee”), ông tú Từ Lâm (“Licentiate Từ Lâm”), and sister Bốn chìa vôi (“Four-wagtails”) from his collections of stories, such as Farewell (Giã Từ), Again, A Letter From Home (Lại Thư Nhà), and Alone (Một Mình).
Figure 2. Days in Saigon in the 1970s. From the right: Bình Nguyên Lộc, Võ Phiến, Lê Tất Điều. (Viễn Phố, personal archives).
Then, through my close friend Nghiêu Đề, who took me to the office of Cyclopedia (Bách Khoa), I got to know him some years before 1960, a connection that continued when he went abroad later on.
Võ Phiến’s Catching Youngsters Amid Green Fields
Võ Phiến wrote “Catching Youngsters Amid Green Fields” (Bắt Trẻ Đồng Xanh) and published it in Bách Khoa in October 1968. Its title was borrowed from the translation by Phùng Khánh and Phùng Thăng of The Catcher in the Rye by the American writer J.D. Salinger, but its content had to do with the Communist practice in the North of kidnapping children in the South, so as to bring them to the North for training, and reintroduce them to the South later on. The Communists started doing this as soon as the Geneva Accords were signed in 1954. Võ Phiến wrote:
In the final cruel phase of fighting in the South, the party and the communist nation would never undergo the heavy toil of collecting youths here and taking them to the North if there were not a serious reason to do so. They are exposing themselves to so much difficulty and exhausting labor. . . They are striving to implement a plan to kidnap children on a large scale and over the widest possible area. Our people have discovered that children are being kidnapped everywhere from Quảng Trị, Thừa Thiên, Pleiku, Kontum in the central area, to Mỹ Tho and Cà Mau in the south; and people have even encountered children being moved to North Vietnam by airplane from Cambodia, or being led north in small groups along the Hồ Chí Minh trail.
Oh, children of the verdant delta of South Vietnam forced to travel in your ranks and squads, one after the other, to the mountains of North Vietnam! Your personal destinies have been cut off from this moment on, and the country will be plunged by your departure into a state of endless misery! The disaster now befalling you will be a disaster for your entire land! (Võ Phiến, “Catching Youngsters Amid Green Fields,” Bách Khoa, October, 1968).
Catching Youngsters was not at all an occasional essay or a short story; it was rather a political essay, a white paper denouncing the barbarism of the Vietnamese Communists, who never harbored a sincere desire for peace—if there was to be a conference, it was merely an expedient they used to delay hostilities and prepare for the next phase of fighting. The article had the force of prophesy—an alarm signal that raised an upheaval in public opinion both within the country and among international communities, and the price that Võ Phiến had to pay for this was that the Việt Cộng accused him of crimes and threatened his life—this was right after the killing of the journalist, Từ Chung, the general secretary of the newspaper, Main Opinion (Chính Luận), by a Communist assassination squad. According to Lê Tất Điều, there was a period when Võ Phiến entertained the thought of going down to the Hòa Hảo area for refuge—it was a region regarded as being immune to every sort of Communist infiltration. That was the reason why Võ Phiến taught literature for a time in the Hòa Hảo University in Long Xuyên. Adversity sometimes brings good fortune—it was there that Võ Phiến made the acquaintance of Đỗ Văn Gia, a young colleague who was then teaching Eastern Philosophy at the same university. Later, after they went abroad, it was Đỗ Văn Gia, when he was a lecturer in Vietnamese language and literature at Cornell starting in 1982, who assisted Võ Phiến by providing him with large quantities of material for his set of books on the literature of South Vietnam.
Vietnamese Rice-paper Crepes Transplanted to the United States
From 1980 on, Mr. and Mrs. Võ Phiên had served as public functionaries in Los Angeles District, and from that time on lived in their home at 5621 Baltimore Street for twenty-three years. The house had a spacious garden with all sorts of fruit trees—lime, orange, grapefruit, and persimmon. Most plentiful of all were the rose bushes heavy with blossoms, with a bronze bust of Võ Phiến carved by Ưu Đàm, son of the painter Rừng. Inside the house, aside from bookshelves, there were statues of the Buddha, and of Christ, with only a small altar for family ancestors. In this house also, Võ Phiến wrote a number of his overseas works: the series Literature of the South (bộ Văn Học Miền Nam), Letters Sent to a Friend (Thư Gửi Bạn), Intact (Nguyên Vẹn), Stories Truly Short (Truyện Thật Ngắn), and Dialogues (Đối Thoại).
Figure 3. Lê Ngộ Châu, the editor-in-chief of Cyclopedia (Bách Khoa), meeting again with Võ Phiến in the United States. (Viễn Phố, personal archives).
My visits to Võ Phiến usually occurred at the end of the week, on Saturdays, because he and his guests were still of an age that required them to hold down jobs. Those who visited generally belonged to distinct groups. Sometimes it would be Nguyễn Mộng Giác with Từ Mẫn (Võ Thắng Tiết), sometimes Tạ Chí Đại Trường with Thạch Hãn (Lê Thọ Giáo), and sometimes Mr. and Mrs. Trần Huy Bích—Bích’s wife was an especially close friend of Mrs. Võ Phiến.
Trùng Dương at times referred to Mrs. Võ Phiến as “the woman behind the multi-volume Literature of the South 1954–1975.” But it seems that I should also record here that a number of other friends contributed many sets of books from that period that they procured from libraries in French and American Universities to help Võ Phiến with materials necessary to complete his project. These people included Đặng Tiến in Europe, Trần Huy Bích on the interlibrary loan staff at the University of California at Los Angeles, Đỗ Văn Gia at Cornell, and the artist Võ Đình. And before that, Huỳnh Sanh Thông at Yale University (translator of the Tale of Kiều) was the person whose introduction enabled Võ Phiến to secure a grant for his work from the Indochina Studies Program of the Social Science Research Council.
Figure 4. From the left: Huỳnh Sanh Thông (1926–2008), Đỗ Văn Gia (1946–1992), and Từ Mai (Trần Huy Bích). (Võ Phiến family, personal archives).
The guests usually stayed to eat lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Võ Phiến. The meals that Mrs. Võ Phiến prepared sometimes included a few dishes brought by the guests. To this day, there is one dish prepared by Mrs. Võ Phiến that I cannot forget—it was a kind of rice-paper crepe (bánh tráng) dipped in a fluid absolutely unique to Bình Đình Province, flavored to taste with fish sauce in which were bits of lime and red pepper. The lime grew on the trees in the garden, and the red peppers grew there as well. Everyone thought that this simple dish with an exotic flavor was delicious, and the guests found it still more delicious when the host would recount witty anecdotes linking rice-paper crepes to the victory of Emperor Quang Trung—the crepes had been used as dry rations for his troops during his lightning-swift march from Nghệ An to Thăng Long, where he vanquished 200,000 Qing-dynasty troops.
A Conversation with Đặng Tiến in 1998
On April 8, 1998, Võ Phiến sent me photocopies of a three-page handwritten transcript of a conversation he had had with Đặng Tiến. It was accompanied by a few lines, as follows: “My dear friend: This is an edited version, not a literal transcription of what we said. When we were actually speaking, there were a few spots where Đặng Tiến interjected a few words. It seems that the broadcast in all likelihood occurred on Oct. 28, 1998. I don’t know if this is correct or not. Yours, Võ Phiến.”
Đặng Tiến (pen name Nam Chi), active as a literary critic starting from the end of the 1950s, was a “friend from olden times” (bạn cựu, an expression applied by Võ Phiến to all acquaintances of longstanding). Đặng Tiến and Võ Phiến were like Bóyá and Zhōng Zǐqí.[1] Đặng Tiến followed all the literary accomplishments of Võ Phiến with avid appreciation from their first appearances in 1954 and through all the years that followed, and produced many critical articles and book reviews concerning his work.
Figure 5. The handwritten note from Võ Phiến to Ngô Thế Vinh, dated April 11, 1998.
(Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives).
As for me, I didn’t get to hear that broadcast, but if I had, I would most likely have found that the content did not differ from the written transcript made by Võ Phiến. Through Phạm Phú Minh, I was able to communicate via email with Đặng Tiến, who was then in France, and ask him about the matter. He replied that he had no memory of the occasion. I wasn’t surprised—fourteen years had passed since then. After that I sent him photocopies of the three pages that Võ Phiến had sent me, hoping that this would jog his memory and enable him to send me more details. But three days later, I received a reply in the same vein: “To NTV: I don’t recall this. I’ll search my memory and answer later. Stay in touch. ĐT.”
As for Võ Phiến, there was no hope that he would recall things that occurred seventeen years earlier, but I shall nevertheless record the content of those three handwritten pages (only 938 words in total) as a datum that has some value as an overview of literature in the South in the period 1954–1975.
My dear friend (Đặng Tiến)
At the end of the pre-war period [c. 1946] Mr. Vũ Ngọc Phan made a critical study of literature in Vietnam over the preceding thirty years. Among all the prose writers of that period, he could distinguish only three writers of the south and central regions (Võ Phiến noted in the margin that they were Hồ Biểu Chánh, Thanh Tịnh, and Nguyễn Vỹ). All three were story-writers. As for plays, memoirs, and essays—there was nothing.
Figure 6. Left: Võ Phiến at the age of seventy. (Photo by Nguyễn Bá Khanh), and Đặng Tiến. (Viễn Phố, personal archives).
Toward the end of the period 1954–1975, Mr. Cao Huy Khanh made a critical study that included only novels written over a twenty-year period in South Vietnam. He stated that close to 200 people produced novels during this period, and of those writers, approximately sixty figures produced work of value. If anyone should suspect that Cao Huy Khanh was influenced by partiality to his friends and reduce his estimate by half—that is, thirty novelists of value—then those twenty years still produced more than ten times as many significant novelists than the thirty years that came before. And that is to pay no attention to the essayists and dramatists of the later period.
As for the pre-war period in the central area—from Phú Yên to Bình Thuận—no writer in that region became well-known—except for the married couple of Đông Hồ,[2] one could not find a single individual whose reputation had spread in the literary world. This view is based on the work of Vũ Ngọc Phan and Hoài Thanh.
But then in the twenty years beginning in 1954, one writer after another appeared in Phú Yên (Võ Hồng), in Ninh Thuận and Bình Thuận (Nguyễn Bắc Sơn and Nguyễn Đức Sơn), in Cà Mau (Sơn Nam), Long Xuyên (Nguyễn Hiến Lê), Gia Đình (Tô Thùy Yên), Vĩnh Long (Nguyễn Thị Thụy Vũ), Sóc Trang (Vương Hồng Sển) [the names of writers in the preceding parentheses were all added by Võ Phiến]. The numbers of writers and poets were so great, and the literary world became so much broader, that this can only be regarded as a significant contribution.
Another contribution was the spirit of freedom, of expansive liberation, in this literary period. Everyone spoke of the spirit of oppression that had prevailed in all periods of domination by a foreign power—whether by China or by France. Actually, it was not just in such periods that this oppression existed—even in periods of independence, both the feudal warlord regimes and the democratic republics in our land failed to tolerate criticism of those who held power. Even when independence and democracy was established, only one kind of freedom was promulgated: the freedom to praise those in high positions.
In the Vietnam of 1954 to 1975, though in the midst of war, a totally different type of literature arose. Gay and sharp laughter spread freely over books and journals, laughter that attacked mistaken deeds and perverse policies, and made fun of personages guilty of unworthy behavior. These elements were not of the Lý Toét Xã Xệ sort [refers to comic, rural cartoon characters who were a staple of the northern periodical Ngày Nay from 1930 to 1942]—no such “little people” were objects of ridicule in this period—the objects of attack were provincial or national leaders and power brokers. The sound of laughter ran freely and noisily across all books and journals. . .
At the same time, every view of human life, every faith, both fine and deluded, both noble and crazed, existed as well; one could seek to understand, expound, and promulgate these beliefs, just as one pleased.
At no time before or after 1954–1975 in the South can one find any literary tradition in our country that developed in such a free and open manner.
Aside from this freedom and openness, we may note a further contribution of this period: the phenomenon of philosophical thought in the South. Toward the end of the pre-war period, our novels were of about ten different types, including psychological and ethical novels, but novels of a philosophical bent had not yet appeared. In 1954–1975 philosophical concerns began to appear in many branches of literature: in novels, in songs and poems, in plays, and in essays. Philosophy sometimes spread through society as if it were a fad, and became the subject of ridicule.
Nevertheless, this new preoccupation had arrived at the right time, and in a suitable environment. The people were dying in their millions because of differences in ideology, differences in attitudes toward life. At such a time, how could one not think of the purpose of life; how could one calmly resign such concerns to the leadership? At the same time, that was also a period when many new schools of thought were creating upheavals in the West; our reaction in the South to these developments showed that we had a class of sensitive intellectuals, that we had a lively spiritual life.
Figure 7. Võ Phiến’s three-page handwritten transcription of his conversation with Đặng Tiến. (Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives).
The literature of South Vietnam in the period 1954 to 1975 has in the past been hidden away and distorted. It has met with proposals that it be destroyed, and met with stupid slanders. It has not yet met with anyone to speak of who sought to understand it, to make a correct and full estimate of its value. The observations I have made here are very likely inadequate, incorrect, and shallow. The assessment of this body of literature can scarcely be said to have seriously begun. (My greetings to Đặng Tiến, and my greetings to the listeners.) — Võ Phiến, October 1998.
The Series, “Literature of the South, 1954–1975”
Võ Phiến’s conversation with Đặng Tiến took place in October 1998, just one year before the completion of his series, “The Literature of the South” (Vol. 1 was A General View of the Literature of the South, published in 1986, and the last was Essays and Plays of the South, published in 1999). It appears that we must pay particular attention to his concluding words in the conversation recorded above: “The assessment of this body of literature can scarcely be said to have seriously begun.”
Figure 8. From the left: Trần Dạ Từ, Phạm Duy, and Mr. and Mrs. Võ Phiến at their home in Los Angeles. (Viễn Phố, personal archives).
Thus, one can say that even though Võ Phiến had to toil with untiring patience for fifteen years (1984–1999) to complete his series of books on the literature of the South, he himself never regarded this as a perfectly realized project, and still felt that the evaluation of this literature in the period 1954–1975 still needed to be seriously undertaken.
In any case, this set of books had certain limitations that led to heated disputes. People took him severely to task for certain omissions, such as his decision to exclude some well-known writers of the period 1954–1975 from A General View of the Literature of the South, and even the style he used to criticize writers and poets was borrowed from the manner he used in his occasional essays—this style, while effective in the essays, proved to be a liability in a work of historical criticism: it seemed to many that it was too ironic and satirical and at times too personal and too prone to odd and flighty judgements.
The writer Mặc Đỗ of the Quan Điểm (“Point of View”) group was quite indignant about it. Mai Thảo of the Sáng Tạo (Creation) group in his last conversation with Thụy Khuê in July 1997 was unable to repress his feelings about what he called the “Emperor Lê and Lord Trịnh gang” and had the hardihood to say, “Võ Phiến is satisfactory in some places, but unsatisfactory in others. In general he isn’t satisfactory in my eyes as a critic of literature. His General View of the Literature of the South isn’t satisfactory. His writing about poetry is bad. What he writes about magazines is good.”
But, speaking objectively, the written style of Võ Phiến did not lack cultivation, and he was capable of directing satire against himself. In the responses he gave in an interview conducted by Lê Quỳnh Mai on October 29, 2000 in Montreal on the TNVN Program, “Literature and Art,” he did not hesitate to compare himself to Xuân Tóc Đỏ (“Red-haired Xuân,” a comically lucky nincompoop) in a work by Vũ Trọng Phụng: “If you wish to speak of luck, we probably must recall Dumb Luck (Số Đỏ) by Vũ Trọng Phụng—if some number of readers have paid attention to me, then the case is merely comparable to that of Xuân Tóc Đỏ in that book.”
Võ Phiến himself knew quite clearly what the reaction of the literary community to this series of books was. In a letter that he wrote to Lê Thị Huệ of the Gió-O literary journal on December 16, 2001 he declared: “Among those who worked as writers in the South during the period 1954–1975, quite a few are highly critical of this set of books. I’ll just have to put up with it. What sort of results can you obtain if you write solely to please everybody?!”
If the reader will calmly reread the introduction to A General View of the Literature of the South, he will see that Võ Phiến discusses his reasons for writing “this book full of digressions and lacunae.”
He explains himself very clearly: “First of all, I am not a critic or a scholar; to set myself up as such would be unjustifiable. Furthermore, the circumstances in which I write are very difficult; no materials lie around me, and I have no means of going in search of them; what can I use to pursue this investigation?”
He also foresaw the troublesome consequences that would ensue: “If you write anything that touches on others, and if you praise and blame them without reserve, then it is a certainty that you will arouse a storm of objections.”
Having these reflections, he went on to write:
Though troubled to distraction by all this, I nevertheless decided to go ahead and write this book. The chief reason was my deep attachment to an era in our literary history that has suffered misfortune. Yes indeed, the period from 1954 to 1975 was unfortunate to a degree seldom seen, one reason being that in this entire twenty-year period, no professional critic appeared on the scene. Though a just and intelligent assessment still lies in the future, we may still hope for a bit of attentive concern.
Of this period, he wrote:
No one is unaware of the destruction of cultural artefacts of the South after 1975. We were unable to prevent this destruction, unable to preserve the literary accomplishments of this period; therefore, it behooves us now to make an overall assessment, a cursory examination, so that anyone who at a later time concerns himself with this, will have a little something to serve as a basis for further inquiry. How can we resign ourselves to omitting this step? (Introduction, General View of the Literature of the South, 1954–1975).
Because of his “deep attachment to an era of literary history that was unfortunate,” he was in the end forced, against all inclination, to write this book under conditions that should have discouraged him from writing it. He wrote it as a preliminary draft, an outline, a suggestion, a reminder, a way of introducing the problem, so that later on people with the necessary qualifications and means could write a book worthy of the subject.
Knowing that it would be inadequate, and knowing that in writing his General View of the Literature of the South, 1954–1975 he would suffer limitations, Võ Phiến acted in a way contrary to his innate reserve and sense of responsibility and plunged into this risky venture—a task that would require much arduous and hidden labor, and which would subject him to unpleasant consequences as well. We should also note in this place that through most of the fifteen years he devoted to this work of more than three thousand pages, he was a full-time employee of the Retirement Pension Office of Los Angeles District. This meant that he had to write this work during after-hours and on weekends. After retiring in July 1994, he continued writing it for five more years in order to complete the Literature of the South in 1999. Without immense ambition and effort on the part of the author, this could not have been achieved.
Figure 9. Left: Cover of A General View of the Literature of the South by Võ Phiến, Văn Nghệ publishing house, California, 1986. Right: Selected Items, including occasional essays, stories, poems, opinion pieces, and criticism, Văn Mới publishers, Los Angeles, 2001; 2nd edition, 2006, Người Việt, California; supplemented with further stories and dialogues.
In spite of all this, when he completed writing the work, Võ Phiến himself could not escape a crowd of self-doubts:
What have I written? Is it a study and assessment of the literature of the South? It is clear that three-quarters of it is not worthy to be called history or criticism at all. It lacks unity and breadth; in its dealings with all types and tendencies of literature it lacks persistence and precision of thought and analysis; it is nothing but a collection of very general observations on the works and writers of a particular period” (Introduction, General View of the Literature of the South, 1954–1975).
Figure 10. From the right: Ngô Thế Vinh, Trúc Chi (Tôn Thất Kỳ), Mr. and Mrs. Võ Phiến, and Đỗ Anh Tài. (Viễn Phố, personal archives).
Actually, none of the faultfinding from within and without the Vietnamese literary community with regard to Võ Phiến’s General View of the Literature of the South, 1954–1975 was as severe as the criticism to which he subjected himself in his Introduction to that work.
This research project of Võ Phiến must be evaluated in the context of the decade that immediately followed 1975, and in light of the circumstances that prevailed when it was published: a time when, within the country, there was a deliberate policy of destroying that literature in toto, of erasing the twenty-year history of the culture of the South. In that context, Võ Phiến’s project was one of salvation and rescue, and should be regarded as a preliminary effort deserving the highest respect.
Everyone can grasp the fact that Võ Phiến’s “unprofessional” set of books on the Literature of the South will never be the last word on that period, but it is still a first step, an initial facilitation, a roadmap that will conduct us to a substantial body of material that we may consult later; it is a “launchpad” for projects that will follow. This is indeed the responsibility and the professional duty of those who specialize as critics; they must have the boldness to make a serious beginning at the job of assigning value to the work of 1954 to 1975 by creating studies worthy of the subject, rather than obsessing about the “half-empty glass” of Võ Phiến’s work.
So, I here propose a question: who among us can make a serious beginning at pursuing this research project? And this leads to a further question: who will inherit the huge mass of material that Võ Phiến dealt with before it is all lost and forgotten?
Lê Ngộ Châu the Peacebroker
In 1994, Lê Ngộ Châu came to the United States after eighteen years of directing the journal, Cyclopedia (Bách Khoa). He had many close friends and, of these, Võ Phiến was perhaps the closest of all. Due to this personal relationship, he knew that there was a “problem” between Võ Phiến and Nguyễn Mộng Giác in their interchanges regarding the journal, Văn Học Nghệ Thuật (Literature and Art), and its successor, Văn Học (Literature).
Nguyễn Mộng Giác and Võ Phiến were compatriots—they came from the same province. In an interview, Võ Phiến once expressed himself as follows: “Meeting a writer from one’s own province is a joy, and when one discovers that some special regional qualities lie at the basis of the beauty of his work what could else could be so pleasurable? How can one repress one’s feelings? One must speak of Bình Định, what else, my friend!” (Interview of Lê Quỳnh Mai with Võ Phiến, Montreal, 2004).
But this feeling of shared provincial origin was not sufficient to prevent obstacles that arose in the management of Văn Học and in the selection of contributions to the journal when Võ Phiến’s name still appeared as the director and when Nguyễn Mộng Giác was its editor-in-chief. A man of sensitive perception, Lê Ngộ Châu saw at once that an obstruction existed between the two, and set about immediately, and with a sense of urgency, to serve as a “peacebroker” (hòa giải), a word used by Lê Ngộ Châu himself.
As if to provide a pretext for this to occur, I arranged a meeting to welcome Lê Ngộ Châu at a clubhouse on Bellflower Road, Long Beach, near my home. Naturally Võ Phiến and Nguyễn Mộng Giác were there. Only Lê Tất Điều wasn’t there; he took Võ Phiến to the clubhouse but didn’t participate, but about twenty close friends and associates of Lê Ngộ Châu and Văn Học were there, including Từ Mẫn (Võ Thắng Tiêt), Từ Mai (Trần Huy Bích), Trúc Chi (Tốn Thất Kỳ), Thạch Hãn (Lê Thọ Giáo), Khánh Trường, Hoàng Khởi Phong, and Cao Xuân Huy. . . The joyous feeling of “old friends meeting in a far-away place” prevailed in everyone’s interactions and, as always, the lively, gay, and witty conversation of Lê Ngộ Châu served as a sort of “cement” uniting everyone who was there. One could see how Lê Ngộ Châu had kept a lively and complicated enterprise like Cyclopedia (Bách Khoa) running harmoniously for eighteen years prior to 1975.
Figure 11. Lê Ngộ Châu during his 1994 visit to California. From the left: Đỗ Hải Minh/Dohamide, Lê Ngộ Châu, Ngô Thế Vinh, and Võ Phiến.
(Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives).
Figure 12. The meeting organized to welcome Lê Ngộ Châu (October 30, 1994) at the clubhouse on Bellflower Road, Long Beach, California. From the left: Nghiêu Đề, Võ Phiến, Bùi Vĩnh Phúc, Hoàng Khởi Phòng, Hà Thúc Sinh, Nguyễn Mộng Giác, Trúc Chi (Tôn Thất Kỳ), Như Phong (Lê Văn Tiến), Lê Ngộ Châu, Lưu Trung Khảo, and Từ Mai (Trần Huy Bích
(Photo by Ngô Thế Vinh).
Figure 13. From the right: Từ Mẫn (Võ Thắng Tiết), Lê Ngộ Châu, Võ Phiến, Nguyễn Mộng Giác, and Lê Tất Điều. (Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives, California, 1994).
That visit of 1994 was the only time that Lê Ngộ Châu came to the United States. Like the director of the Khai Trí Bookstore, he chose to return to Saigon to live. In 2006, when I was attending a meeting of the Friends of the Mekong, I met Lê Ngộ Châu again in the editorial office of Cyclopedia (Bách Khoa) at 160 Phan Đình Phùng. He still remembered our former meeting. When I asked him if he had thought of writing a memoir of his eighteen years with Bách Khoa, he laughed and delivered the following witty reply: “Anh Vinh, you ask Võ Phiến if he would let me do it, okay?” He was referring to the various extra-literary things that occurred in the office of Bách Khoa throughout that period. I learned only a short time after my return to the United States that Lê Ngộ Châu had passed away on September 24, 2006. He was eighty-four years old.
Võ Phiến at Age Seventy-Five, ‘Older than He had Wished For’
At the end of 1998, in December I received a Spring festival card from Võ Phiến in which he wrote: “Another year has slipped by, and I have staggered into my 75th year—more than I ever wished for! You are about to reach sixty yourself—not exactly young! But sixty is an age when you can let your pen dance along as it pleases. I wish you all good things in the coming year—and in particular you should be publishing a new book! Yours, Võ Phiến.”
Figure 14. Handwritten note from Võ Phiến to Ngô Thế Vinh, December 1998).
(Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives).
Actually, Võ Phiến had only attained the age of seventy-three that year; he was born in 1925, an “Ất Sửu” [“ox”] year. No less than three of his literary friends, the writer Doãn Quốc Sỹ, the journalist Như Phong, and the editor Lê Ngộ Châu were all born in the year “Quý Hợi” (1923, a “pig” year), and thus were two years older than Võ Phiến. Doãn Quốc Sỹ had the humorous habit of calling Lê Ngộ Châu “Lê Quý Hợi,” and Châu in return called him “Doãn Quý Hợi.” Of these three “Quý Hợi” gentleman, only Doãn Quốc Sỹ remains: the journalist Như Phong died in Virginia in 2001, and Chief Editor Lê Ngộ Châu died in Saigon in 2006.
In a letter to Lê Ngộ Châu dated August 29, 1996, Doãn Quốc Sỹ maintained the joking tone, referring to Võ Phiến as “Elder Warrior Bình Định” (Cụ Võ Bình Định), after his home province: “I saw a photo of Elder Võ Bình Định wearing a very young-looking shirt. Looking at his mirthful face in the photo, I imagined I was hearing the amused laughter that accompanied all my exchanges with him over the years in the office of Bách Khoa years ago.”
Before passing the threshold into his seventies, Võ Phiến had undergone two major open-heart surgeries—coronary artery bypass procedures—the first was in 1960 when Võ Phiến had just turned sixty. He began at that time to be obsessed with death:
Having reached an even fifty years,
Where will another fifty take me?
A thousand years of trailing wispy clouds.
Seven years later, at the age of sixty-seven, Võ Phiến underwent his second heart operation, which was more difficult and complicated than the first. He was pessimistic about it, and thought even more about death.
In This Indifferent Life (Cái Sống Hững Hờ), he made the following observations:
I myself once had to enter a hospital to undergo surgery. Plunged in sadness, I wrote a few letters to friends and entrusted a literary friend with the job of sending them to the recipients after . . . my final departure. It turned out that after the operation I continued, feebly, to live. So I lived on, embarrassed and aimless.
The years and months kept flowing on. As I entered my eighties, I began, furtively, to direct my thoughts to the conclusion of my life. It was surely, in any case, drawing near. What harm could there be in taking a peek at it? Peeking, and then peeking again, I was surprised to note that I was not overcome by any unusual feeling. Life kept going on, going on with utter regularity.
The Creator has a tender heart; his fingers lightly direct our feelings; the older a person gets, the more his emotions cease to be turbulent, cease to be passionately committed. What finally remains is a feeling of indifference: “Death? Who can avoid it? Why fear it?” Reflecting quietly on this, I begin to suspect that the benevolence of the Creator is revealed in this. We should not subject him to nagging demands, but should whistle tunes as we die. I just hope that the steps that I myself take toward my grave will be leisurely, indifferent steps. That, in sum, is all.
Though Võ Phiến and his wife had purchased grave sites years before so that their last rites could be carried out, Võ Phiến’s steps did not lead him to the place he had reserved. His remains were instead cremated, and afterward the ashes were taken to Điều Ngự Temple, a place presided over by an abbot who, like Võ Phiến, was from Bình Định and who had always held him in the highest esteem (author’s note).
Figure 15. The work Cuối Cùng (At the End) by Võ Phiến, published in 2009 by 21st Century (Thế Kỷ 21) in California. This copy bears an inscription inside made with great difficulty and with the assistance of his wife, Viễn Phố on October 5, 2015.
(Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives).
Figure 16. Handwritten note from Võ Phiến to Ngô Thế Vinh in May, 2000: “Sent with affection to Ngô Thế Vinh. Thanks for your appreciation of this article. When it is printed in a book, I’ll dedicate it to you. Whenever you have a convenient day, please come pay us a visit during these sunny summer days). (Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives).
After Võ Phiến’s wife retired, the two of them no longer needed to live close to the place where they had worked, so in 2003 they moved to a spot close to Little Saigon in Orange Country, California. Their new house was a pert and attractive two-story dwelling in a quiet residential district at the end of Fifth Street (no. 5) in the town of Santa Anna. This house also had a garden; it was very small, surrounded by rose bushes, and had a few fruit trees. It suited the strength of the elderly couple, who having entered their seventies, could enjoy adding to it and tending it. Aside from various reprinted books, such as The Collected Works of Võ Phiến (Võ Phiến Toàn Tập), At the End (Cuối Cùng) was Võ Phiến’s last work. He completed it in his new home in 2007, and it was published in 2009 by 21st Century (Thế Kỷ 21).
Figure 17. The autumn sun in the garden next to the house of Mr. and Mrs. Võ Phiến on Baltimore Street, Los Angeles, in September, 2001. From right to left: Mr. and Mrs. Võ Phiến, Tạ Chí Đại Trường, Nguyễn Huệ Chi, and Nguyễn Mộng Giác. In the background is the sculptural bust of Võ Phiến made by Ưu Đàm. (Viễn Phố, personal archives).
Võ Phiến at Ninety
Having been born on October 20, 1925, Võ Phiến was exactly ninety in 2015. He was perhaps among the three writers of the South who lived to the greatest ages. In this regard he was behind only Mặc Đỗ in Austin, Texas who lived to be ninety-eight (he was born in 1917), and, in southern California, Doãn Quốc Sỹ who is currently 102 (he was born in 1923).
When Võ Phiến sent me a Spring festival card that year, he reused a sentence he had written on a card seventeen years earlier: “Another year has slipped by, and so I have staggered into my 90th year—more than I ever wished for!”
And so Võ Phiến’s life kept going on, with utter regularity. His wife Viễn Phố made sure that he went for a walk each day with his walker, which was equipped with wheels. At the age of ninety, his physical strength could be assessed as not too bad, though in terms of intellect, he was often afflicted with forgetfulness—the forgetfulness of senile dementia. He didn’t remember the faces of everyone close to him, but with a few “bạn cựu,” “friends of old”—his expression for people he had been intimate with for many years, like Hoàng Ngọc Biên, Đặng Tiến, and Lê Tất Điều—he still retained his longer-term memory through telephone conversations and face-to-face meetings.
Figure 18. In the house of Mr. and Mrs. Võ Phiến on Baltimore Street, Los Angeles, in April, 1992. From the left: Professor Trần Ngọc Ninh, the writer Võ Phiến, and Ngô Thế Vịnh.
(Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives).
Figure 19. This photo was taken in Võ Phiến’s rear garden twenty years after his second heart operation, with a nurse—his wife—standing behind him. (Viễn Phố, personal archives, with her annotation).
Throughout his forty years of exile, Võ Phiến had wept only twice, first in the office of Bách Khoa when he was about to depart from Vietnam, and the second time on the ship Challenger, when he left Phú Quốc Island (Ngô Thế Vinh, “Bốn Mươi Năm Dương Nghiễm Mậu va Tự Truyện Nguyễn Du” http://damau.org/rchives/35745). Throughout those twenty years water flowed ceaselessly beneath the bridge, and Võ Phiến lived the life of a writer in exile, working sadly and in loneliness (John Schafer, Võ Phiến and the Sadness of Exile, Southeast Asia Publications, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University, March 1, 2006).
I sent the above article, finished in April, 2001 to Võ Phiến as he was entering his nineties, an age rarely attained by anyone. I also sent to Võ Phiến and Viễn Phố the wish that their “tree of life would remain always green and fresh” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the tree of life springs ever green”).
A Poem by Võ Phiến in the year 2000
After his death, I found a poem that Võ Phiến had written and bestowed on me as a gift in the year 2000.
Figure 20. The poem “Twenty Years in a House,” a copy handwritten by Võ Phiến.
(Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives).
TWENTY YEARS IN A HOUSE
Affectionately presented to:
Mr. and Mrs. Ngô Thế Vinh.
I wonder all at once whose house this is—
In any case, I’ve been here twenty years—
I know the pines I walked by in the morning,
The paths I entered in the evening—
The gaiety I felt before the house,
The sadness of the garden in the back,
The dream that overcame me in a room,
The tension that erupted in another,
The tears and smiles adhering here and there.
We lived at ease, the marks are strewn about,
And now the house will be…whose house?
Who’ll go out, go in, each night, each morn?
Published Works by Võ Phiến
[In Chronological Order]
Chữ tình [Love] (Qui Nhơn, 1956); Người tù [The Prisoner] (Qui Nhơn, 1957); Mưa đêm cuối năm [Night Rain at Year’s End] (Sài Gòn, 1958); Đêm xuân trăng sáng [In A Moonlit Night in Spring] (Sài Gòn, 1961); Về một xóm quê [Returning to a Country Village] (Sài Gòn, 1961); Giã từ [Farewell] (Sài Gòn, 1962); Thương hoài ngàn năm [Love Cherished for a Thousand Years] (Sài Gòn, 1962); Thư nhà [A letter from home] (Sài Gòn, 1963); Tiểu thuyết hiện đại [The Contemporary Novel] (Sài Gòn, 1963); Hăm bốn giờ trong đời một người đàn bà [Twenty-four hours in a Woman’s Life] (dịch Stefan Zweig, Sài Gòn, 1963); Các trào lưu lớn của tư tưởng hiện đại [Les Grands Courants de la Pensée Contemporaine], [dịch André Maurois]; Một Mình [Alone] (Sài Gòn, 1965); Truyện hay các nước I, II [Interesting Stories from Different Countries] (dịch với Nguyễn Minh Hoàng, Sài Gòn, 1965); Văn học Nga xô hiện đại [Contemporary Russian Literature] (Sài Gòn, 1965); Tạp bút I, II & III [Miscellaneous Essays] (Sài Gòn, 1965-1966); Đàn ông [Men] (Sài Gòn, 1966); Ảo ảnh [Illusion] (Sài Gòn, 1967); Phù thế [In Changing World] (Sài Gòn, 1969); Tạp luận [Critics on Non-Literary Topics] (Sài Gòn, 1973); Chúng ta, qua cách viết [Looking at Ourselves through our Writing] (Sài Gòn, 1973); Đất nước Quê hương [In Country and Homeland] (Sài Gòn 1973); Ông chồng muôn thuở [The Eternal Husband, Dostoyevski] (Sài Gòn, 1973); Thư gửi bạn [Letters to a Friend] (Hoa Kỳ, 1976); Ly hương [Exile] (viết với Lê Tất Điều, Hoa Kỳ, 1977); Nguyên vẹn [Intact] (Hoa Kỳ, 1978); Lại thư gửi bạn [Again, Letters to a Friend] (Hoa Kỳ, 1979); Văn học Miền Nam, tổng quan [Literature in South Vietnam, An Overview] (Hoa Kỳ, 1987); Truyện thật ngắn [Really Short Stories] (Hoa Kỳ, 1991); Quê [Homeland] (Hoa Kỳ, 1992); Đối thoại [Dialogue] (Hoa Kỳ, 1993); Viết [To Write] (Hoa Kỳ, 1993); Sống và viết [To Live and To Write] (Hoa Kỳ, 1996); Thơ thẩn [Wandering] (Hoa Kỳ, 1997); Văn học Miền Nam, truyện I, II, III [Literature in South Vietnam, Stories] (Hoa Kỳ, 1999); Văn học Miền Nam, Ký [Literature in South Vietnam, Reportages] (Hoa Kỳ 1999); Văn học Miền Nam, Tuỳ bút & Kịch [Literature in South Vietnam, Narrative Essays & Plays] (Hoa Kỳ, 1999); Văn học Miền Nam, Thơ [Literature in South Vietnam, Poetry] (Hoa Kỳ, 1999); Cảm nhận [Realizations] (Hoa Kỳ, 1999); Cuối cùng [At the End] (Hoa Kỳ, 2009) [Source: Võ Phiến, Cuối cùng (Thế Kỷ 21, 2009)].
[1] This refers to two figures in Chinese historical legend. Bóyá was the greatest zither player in the realm, and Zhōng Zǐqí was the only man in the realm who could listen to Bóyá’s playing with complete understanding. The use of this allusion suggests that Võ Phiên and Đặng Tiến were complete soul-mates (Eric Henry).
[2] This refers to the poet Lâm Tấn Phác (1906–1969) and his wife Mộng Tuyết (1914–2007), also a poet. They came from Hà Tiên in Kiên Giang Province in the extreme southwest of Vietnam. They used Đông Hồ (“East Lake”) as a pseudonym, borrowing the name of a local geographical feature (Eric Henry).
