SPECIAL ISSUE
THE CREATORS OF SOUTH VIETNAM:
AT HOME AND ABROAD

NGÔ THẾ VINH, Author / ERIC HENRY, Translator

JOURNEY TO FREEDOM
The Writer and Boat-person Mai Thảo

ABSTRACT

Mai Thảo (1927–1998) was a fiction-writer, poet, and editor who, after rising to prominence in South Vietnam under the Southern Republic, became, for two decades, a central figure in the literary life of Vietnamese exiles in southern California. He was notable for the spartan simplicity with which he lived, his idealistic devotion to artistic excellence, and his high-minded refusal to take part in literary quarrels. Unlike most of the other subjects of Dr. Vinh’s studies, he was not imprisoned in a labor reform camp after the downfall of the South, but instead remained in strict hiding—a sort of subterranean living death—in a private residence in Saigon before escaping from Vietnam by boat in 1977. – Eric Henry.

KEYWORDS
Vietnam, Saigon, exile, boat-person, literature

Figure 1. Mai Thảo in front of a signed painting by Tạ Tỵ. (Source: E. E. Emprunt Empreinte).

“Perhaps some day Vietnam will be free and I will be able to return. I lead a fortunate life here, but inside I feel very sad—sad for my people. I don’t know if there will be a future for our people. Far from our homeland, it is truly hard to maintain our traditions. We feel as if we have lost a part of our soul.”

It has been 36 years since the day Mai Thảo gave this reply to his interviewer, Jane Katz, on July 10, 1980, two years after he had set foot on U.S. soil, and it has been 18 years since the day he passed away—and Vietnam still lacks freedom—and his body lies buried on a continent very distant from his homeland.

Mai Thảo’s Desk-in-Exile

It is hard to fully conceive of the desolation of Mai Thảo’s life in America. His existence consisted merely of a small room, No. 209, on the second floor of an apartment complex reserved for the elderly directly behind the restaurant Song Long (“The Paired Dragons”). It had only a desk and a narrow, single-person bed, a cracked lamp at the head of the bed, and some bottles of strong spirits beneath the bed. On the wall there were some photos of Mai Thảo, and in particular one that showed him, tall and thin, looking frail in a velvet áo dài, sitting on a porch next to the poet Vũ Hoàng Chương, looking frail as well in a long silken gown. Beneath this photo was a shelf of books. Mai Thảo had many friends, but among the many photos that show him sitting in their company, this was perhaps the one he particularly liked. With regard to age, Vũ Hoàng Chương was a dozen years older than Mai Thảo, so his fellow writer-in-exile Nguyễn Xuân Hoàng was astonished, on one occasion, to hear Mai Thảo addressing him with the intimate pronoun “mày” (a second-person pronoun, insulting unless used between intimates).

The author Nguyễn Hưng Quốc reports that he heard Mai Thảo make the following remarks about his friend Vũ Hoàng Chương: “He’s a strange fellow, an authentic poet. The expression on his face always has traces of child-like bewilderment. But his remarks about poetry are beyond compare, splendid. He refers to everyone as “fellow” (thằng). Li Bo, the great Chinese poet, is a “fellow.”  Nguyễn Du, the supreme Vietnamese poet, is a “fellow.” He’s a person who loves poetry, and has an endless knowledge of poetry.”

Nguyễn Đình Toàn, the poet, novelist and radio commentator, having been born in 1936, was nine years younger than Mai Thảo, but he and Mai Thảo still used the intimate pronouns “mày” and “tao” (an arrogant first-person pronoun used between intimates) with each other—which shows that in their literary life, they were two hapless companions beneath heaven—and that literary friends know no distinctions of age.

That cramped room, hot by day and cold by night, was both Mai Thảo’s living space and also the editorial office of his overseas journal, Literature (Văn). Every time I went to visit him, I would observe his little portable desk shoved tight against the frame of a low window, through which one could catch a glimpse of the prospect outside. On drawing near the bookshelf, I saw that it had few books bearing the name “Mai Thảo,” and there were a few books in French, a few issues of Literature, and a few new books that friends had given him as gifts. Mai Thảo was good at French, and read many books in that language. He also kept close to U.S. literature and was fond of such authors as Henry Miller, Hemingway, and John Steinbeck, but he read those authors too in French.

Figure 2. Mai Thảo and Vũ Hoàng Chương. (Source: special issue of Literature (Văn) commemorating Mai Thảo, February 1998).

I paid particular attention to a book on his shelves with an eye-catching red cover, Artists in Exile, American Odyssey, by Jane Katz. In that book, Katz, a journalist, interviews writers and artists from all over the world who have come to the U.S. as refugees. They are from diverse locales such as Russia, China, Afghanistan, South Africa, Argentina, and Vietnam. . . Katz interviews and introduces Mai Thảo as a “boat person,” the author of forty-two books in Vietnamese, all of which are kept in the library of Cornell University. The interview with Mai Thảo took place on July 10, 1980, two years after he first stepped onto American soil, with translation provided by Nguyễn Thanh Trang, a friend of Mai Thảo’s, who had arrived from San Diego. Though it was an interview, the questions of the interviewer are omitted, so in content it has the character of a personal reminiscence.

Jane Katz recorded her feelings after the interview as follows: “He speaks with quiet dignity, and with the restraint that years of privation have taught him.”

I took the book, which had Katz’s handwritten inscription, from the shelves and asked to borrow it. I made a cursory translation of the interview and published it in some literary magazines, including, eventually, the special issue of Literature devoted to Mai Thảo, giving the name of the translator as “Tâm Bình.”[1] Then I returned the book to his shelves.

Figure 3. Left: Front cover of Artists in Exile by Jane Katz, jacket design by Ted Berstein (Stein and Day Publishers, New York, 1983). Right: A portrait of Mai Thảo, photo by Kathryn Oneita, with the inscription “The sea was calm, and the people began to sing.”

Figure 4. The handwritten inscription by Jane Katz in a special printed edition of her book that she presented to Mai Thảo.

When I delivered an issue of Literature to Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng in 1996, Mai Thảo’s health had begun to take a decisive turn for the worse; he moved about with difficulty. It got so bad, according to an account by Khánh Trường, that once, on returning home late at night, he lacked the strength to climb the single flight of stairs that led up to his accustomed room where he had dwelt for years. After that, he had to move to a different room on the ground floor. Right above that room was the room of the artist Khánh Trường. Khánh Trường’s health was not all that good either, but he was strong enough to assist Mai Thảo when it was necessary. The means Mai Thảo used to signal Khánh Trường was not the telephone, but usually a cane that he used to knock on the ceiling.

Figure 5. Mai Thảo and the “Street Artist of New York,” a sobriquet he bestowed on Khánh Trường. (Khánh Trường. Personal archives).

Khánh Trường was a dashing habitué of the Confluence (Hợp Lưu) group[2] and Mai Thảo was at the center of the Literature group—they differed greatly in age and lifestyle, but they were nevertheless loyal to each other as friends. “The Street Artist of New York” was the name Mai Thảo used to refer to Khánh Trường. It was like the case of Cao Xuân Huy, a bold soldier who at first kept his distance from Mai Thảo, but after that drew near to him and developed an intense regard for him. In the book Portraits of Fifteen Writers and Poets of Vietnam (Chân Dung 15 Nhà Văn Nhà Thơ Việt Nam), published in the United States by Văn Khoa in 1985, Mai Thảo has incisive descriptions of his literary friends in the titles of these essays, as, for example “A Nhật Tiến Still Standing Out in the Sun” (“Một Nhật Tiến vẫn đứng ở ngoài nắng), “A Mode of Being: Bình Nguyên Lộc” (“Một nhân cách Bình Nguyên Lộc”), “A Mặc Đỗ Living in Seclusion” (“một Mặc Đỗ quy ẩn”), “The Road of Dương Nghiêm Mậu” (“Con Đường Dương Nghiêm Mậu), “The Sword of Lê Tất Điều” (“Đường gươm Lê Tất Điều”), and “Nhã Ca in the Deluge” (“Nhã Ca Giữa Hồng Thủy”).

The Journal Literature (Văn) on American Soil

Mai Thảo’s reputation is closely connected with the journal Creation (Sáng Tạo), though that journal’s period of existence was relatively short. The journal Literature (Văn), however, carried his creations for a longer time, from the period before 1975, when it was an in-country publication founded in 1964, to the period abroad, when it lasted until 1996.

In 1982, two years after arriving in the United States, Mai Thảo resumed publishing Literature, and kept it going for fourteen years. It is hard to imagine how he managed it—he did not drive, and belonged to the school of those who “write by hand,” using a pen only, never resorting to a typewriter or computer. Bent over his desk, he even wrote out the addresses of the subscribers, who numbered in the hundreds, on the mailers before sending out the issues. He had young friends who wanted to save him some time by using a computer to print out mailing labels, but he refused. Mai Thảo laid stress on feeling; he wanted to have a personal relationship with each of the journal’s readers through the presence of his own handwriting on each issue. Throughout the fourteen years in which he lived with, and by means of, the journal, he was always elated whenever he discovered some new writer endowed with talent. The journal Literature, also served as a collecting place for all the writers of the South living abroad in exile. An example is Thảo Trường, a one-time writer for the Southern journal Creation. On coming to the United States after seventeen years in communist prisons, he sent his first new articles to Mai Thảo for publication in Literature.

Figure 6. The wayfarer Mai Thảo in January 1996, a photo taken two years before he died. (Photo by Nguyễn Bá Khanh).

In speaking of the journal Literature, Mai Thảo once offered these reflections:

Since restarting the journal Literature in the U.S. a few years ago, I have felt that my daily existence as a wanderer has been a little less forlorn, because the work has allowed me to drift back to the atmosphere of an editing office, an atmosphere of decision-making—though different, it has some vague resemblance to the past—I work at a desk beneath a bright light, a life I led for years in the homeland, and this provides my mind with occasions to wander back in memory to my office of former days on 38 Phạm Ngũ Lão Street in Saigon. (From: Mai Thảo, Portraits of Fifteen Poets and Writers of Vietnam [Chân Dung 15 nhà thơ nhà văn Việt Nam], Văn Khóa Publishing House, California, 1985).

By the year 1996, after the publication of issues 158 and 159, Mai Thảo had to relinquish his editorship of the journal, turning it over to Du Tử Lê. After issue 160, the journal was officially turned over to the direction of Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng, and the next three issues, 161 to 163, were produced under him.

Figure 7. From the left: Mai Thảo, Kiều Loan (the daughter of the poet Hoàng Cầm), and Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng in 1996, the year Mai Thảo turned the journal Literature over to Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng. (Photo by Nguyễn Bá Khanh).

At the beginning of 1997, Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng published the first issue of Literature, New Series, and continued to publish it for twelve years. In 2008, the final issues, nos. 125-129, devoted to the artist Thái Tuấn, with all the articles laid out, were delivered to the printer, but then, for financial reasons, Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng had to discontinue publication. Literature could still be sold, but the profits were not great enough to pay a debt (to Kim Select Graphics and Printing on Euclid Street, Garden Grove) that Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng and his wife would otherwise have had to assume and gradually repay.

A further, deadlier reason that no one wanted to discuss was that when Literature under Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng ceased publication, the case was similar to that of The Arts (Văn Nghệ) under Tù Mẫn (Võ Thắng Tiết). Both publications had to cease activity because, though they could still be sold, the bookstores did not promptly pay the publishers what was owing to them.

Mai Thảo’s Compassion

Mai Thảo was known to everybody as a writer, a well-known author of occasional essays, and later on as a poet. On making his acquaintance, people came to revere him even more. His feelings with regard to others were truly beautiful. He was kind to everyone and also very direct. He would speak frankly to people who held views opposite to his own, sometimes even becoming angry, but would later forget it all, never dwelling on such disagreements. Throughout his career as a writer, he never used his pen to speak ill of anyone, though there was no lack of articles that subjected him to heavy criticism. Perhaps he never read them; at any rate, he never responded. His younger brother Nguyễn Đăng Khánh wrote about him as follows:

Many times when I read articles in journals that cast severe aspersions on him, I would be upset and go to him, asking, “Why don’t you protest when you see people criticizing you so severely?” He would reply, “When you live with others, and live with life, you have to have heart. Heart, in this matter, is the same as bonté [goodness]. A person devoid of bonté is to be cast aside. One must live sincerely with others, and with life. That is why I never use my pen to raise a protest or to criticize or speak ill of anyone, or to respond to attacks made on me. If people wish to criticize me or speak ill of me, let them do so. You see, Khánh, people criticize me in journals only because they wish readers to see their names on the same page as the name Mai Thảo. If they like to do so, let them go ahead—I will never write a reply.” (From: “A Reminiscence” by Nguyễn Đăng Khánh, published in a special commemorative issue of the journal Literature, February 1998).  

On another, earlier occasion in 1989, Mai Thảo expressed views similar to Nguyễn Hưng Quốc in Paris:

I have a principle in this life: don’t ever use literature to do anything ugly. It is not at all the case that I am unaware that some people are kind, and some ugly, in their dealings with me. But whichever it is, I ignore it. If people are kind, I draw near and share a glass with them; if they are ugly, I just keep my distance. I have not the slightest desire to get involved. But one should never drag such things onto paper and engage in dirty disputes. Literature is beauty; it is the realm of beauty, and that realm has its own currency. One must use that currency. One must be honest; one must have principles. The currency to be used may be termed ‘beauty.’ (From: Nguyễn Hưng Quốc, “Some Observations on Mai Thảo” [Vai ghi mhận về Mai Thảo], Voice of America, December 1, 2011).

An article by Thái Tú Hạp, “A Few Memories of the writer Mai Thảo” (“Một Vài Kỷ Niệm với nhà văn Mai Thảo”), appeared in the Saigon Times toward the end of 1997. It tells how the author visited Mai Thảo when he was in the hospital in Fountain Valley, Orange County, California. Thái Tú Hạp remembers with emotion something that Mai Thảo confided to him when he was still strong. He often went to the restaurant Doanh Doanh at the end of Sunset Street in Los Angeles—it was a family-run place, very cultured, run by Thái Tú Hạp and his wife Ái Cầm, with classical music and even a large oil painting by Nguyễn Khai. Mai Thảo said,

I will tell you something Hạp—in this life it’s possible that one won’t like this person, feel antipathy for some other person, and trade curses and insults with them for a while . . .  cast it all aside! Don’t drag the fight into some journal—that’s no way to behave! Let the realm of literature remain clear and bright. Use your pen in a principled way, so as to fulfill your obligations to every person… (Saigon Times, 1997; the reminiscence of his conversation with Mai Thảo was included in this article).  

Figure 8. Mai Thảo, as represented in a drawing by Duy Thanh (July 31, 1997), collected by Lê Thiệp. (Source: special issue of Literature to commemorate Mai Thảo in February 1998).

In an interview that took place on June 5, 2008, ten years after Mai Thảo’s death, the last question addressed by the journalist Thụy Khê to the writer Trần Vũ was: “What more do you wish to say about Mai Thảo?” Trần Vũ replied,

When he was still alive, Mai Thảo would often stress the following: “I never use words for non-literary purposes. I never curse anyone. Literature is not a place for me to cast dirt. I don’t have the right to.” When his temper was aroused, he would get grumpy. Not just once, but many times he would offer advice, or give orders. Now he is dead, and I too am no longer young, but whenever I think of him, I always think of those words of his. Yesterday and today, I still keep the promise I made to the person who was my highest authority.” (Interview with Trần Vũ conducted by Thụy Khê on June 5, 2008). See https://hopluu.net/a1153/noi-chuyen-voi-nha-van-mai-thao-va-tran-vu); text published in the journal Confluence (Hợp Lưu), March 15, 2009.

Figure 9. From left: Mai Thảo, Kiều Chinh, and Võ Phiến at a gathering.
(Viễn Phố, personal archives).

Throughout his life as a user of the written word, he continued, with utter consistency, to be the same Mai Thảo, always protecting the purity and elevation of the realm of literature. Though not a practicing monk, he nevertheless had the heart of a Buddha.

And now I suddenly recall two lines from the poem, “I’ve Been Living a Fantasy Since Ancient Times” (“Em đang hoang đường từ cổ đại”), in his verse collection We See Our Images: So Many Shrines (Ta thấy hình ta những miếu đền):

My heart, a Buddha, yours, a Buddha too;
On each heart there rests a stick of incense.

His Days and Months in the Hospital

Not long after Mai Thảo turned his journal over to Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng, his health began to decline rapidly; sometimes he had insufficient strength to leave his room, even though he had moved to the ground floor. His sense of loneliness, and the signs of his illness had already caused him, a few years earlier, to create the poem, “Beckoning to Illness” (“Dỗ Bệnh):

Each time my body causes trouble,
I engage it in a conversation;
I urge it not to bring things to extremes—
It seems to think this over and permits
The illness in me to become a friend
Lingering long, it grows a cozy partner,
And the two of us grow firm as gold and stone.[3]

When he could “beckon illness” no longer, the time came when he had to forsake his desk-in-exile, depart from his room behind the “Paired Dragons” restaurant, and take turns living in the hospitals of Fountain Valley in Orange County: Good Samaritan Los Angeles and then Barlow County Hospital. He never afterward had a chance to return to his former surroundings.

Good Samaritan was the hospital where I went to visit him. There I met Nguyễn Phúc Vĩnh Khiêm, a young doctor specializing in cardiovascular medicine, who was providing his immediate care. Khiêm had studied in French schools from early childhood, and, on attaining adulthood, had studied medicine in the United States, so he knew nothing about the literary work of Mai Thảo, but thanks to his father, he knew that he was caring for a person named Nguyễn Đăng Quý, a famous Vietnamese writer with the pen name Mai Thảo.

Figure 10. Left: the Bolsa apartment complex for the elderly behind the “Paired Dragons” restaurant; right: room 209, the address of Literature and of Mai Thảo’s desk-in-exile.
(Photos by Ngô Thế Vinh).

Figure 11. His first poetry collection, We See Our Images: So Many Shrines (Ta Thấy Hình Ta Những Miếu Đền); cover photo designed by Trần Cao Lĩnh; inscribed autograph by Mai Thảo. (Source: Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives).

Khiêm was also the doctor in the Good Samaritan Hospital who had operated on Abbot Thích Mãn Giác (that is, the poet Huyền Không), and was a member of the team that had carried out Võ Phiến’s second heart operation. Due to our respective medical specialties, I had many opportunities to discuss Mai Thảo’s medical status with Khiêm. He needed an oxygen tube in order to breathe, and for nourishment needed a G-tube that fed food into his stomach. In this period his life depended totally on machinery and on special care. After hospital treatment, Mai Thảo’s health stabilized, but his recovery was very slow due to his general weakness, and due to many years of drinking alcohol, eating little, and smoking cigarettes. He was seriously undernourished and had difficulty even in breathing.

When the writer Nguyễn Mộng Giác went with his wife Nguyễn Khoa Diệu Chi and two other women (Bùi Bích Hà and Trần Thị Lai Hồng, the wife of the artist Võ Đình) to visit Mai Thảo at Barlow Hospital in Los Angeles, his writer’s instinct suggested to him that “though we had no knowledge of medicine, we all felt that Mai Thảo was on a one-way street, and that there was no chance that he could return to a normal existence.”

After he was freed from the breathing tube, it was no longer necessary for him to stay in acute care, so Mai Thảo was transferred to a rehabilitation facility in Orange County. He didn’t have any terminal disease. Though he had been a drinker for so many years, he still had a “liver of iron”—but he continued to decline like a tree deprived of sap until the day of his death on January 10, 1998.

Figure 12. A gathering of writers, poets, and journalists in the home of Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng, July 1994. From left: Nguyên Sa, Thụy Khuê, Mai Thảo, Nguyễn Mộng Giác, Đỗ Ngọc Yến, Võ Phiến, and Hoàng Khởi Phòng. (Viễn Phố, personal archives).

I recall that when Mai Thảo had just died, Đỗ Ngọc Yến had the idea of establishing a literary prize in his name. I said to Yến that, before establishing such a prize, the thing to be done right away was to preserve his desk-in-exile, as a memento of the cultural life of Little Saigon in Orange County.

After his death, all the objects in Mai Thảo’s living space were collected by his younger brother Nguyễn Đăng Khánh—they filled only a few cardboard boxes. And there was no longer the slightest trace of the desk-in-exile of the “boat person” named Mai Thảo.

When the Vietnamese, driven all across five continents, make pilgimages to the refugee capital (Little Saigon), they surely deserve to see more than the commercial Phước Lộc Thọ shopping center, with Văn Khoa, its lone bookstore, now also gone. A young family friend came with his group of second-generation children from the snowy land of Toronto and observed that Little Saigon should surely offer an opportunity for them to see more than just some phở shops and some signs posted in front of doctors’ and lawyers’ offices. He wanted to suggest the idea of a Vietnamese Cultural Park.

Three Poems Written in Confinement

After April 30, 1975, Mai Thảo, like most of the South’s writers and artists, was trapped. And he was among those that the communist regime particularly wished to capture. Since he had for a time been part of the Resistance movement, he understood the communists, and was determined not to announce himself to the new regime, because he knew that if he did so, he would be tortured, imprisoned, and would very likely meet with death.

Figure 13. Four creators who have now entered the eternal past: from the right: Thanh Tâm Tuyền (poet; died 2006), Đinh Cường (artist; died 2016), Mai Thảo (writer and editor; died 1998), and Ngọc Dũng (thinker; died 2000). (Source: Đinh Cường, personal archives).

Mai Thảo lived in hiding for almost two years, from 1975 to the end of 1977, under the protection of family and friends, among whom one must note that the writer Nhã Ca was particularly courageous. She had a flock of children and a husband in prison, and lived under constant surveillance, but, disregarding danger, she concealed Mai Thảo in a house on Tự do Street in Saigon until he was able to escape to Malaysia as a boat person. During his time as a fugitive, at times sunk in despair, Mai Thảo wrote some poems that reflect his feelings when he was in confinement, stripped of freedom.

Here are three poems of uncertain date written by Mai Thảo in the period 1975–1977 in Vietnam (Source: Phan Nguyên, E. E. Emprunt Empreinte):

CRYSTAL
I toss and turn amid immense bed sheets
My cramped dreams still caught in toils of life
My dream cannot erase the person who
In night’s deep pit is stirred by crystal laughter

 METAL
A piece of leather binds my eyes, night comes
A metal spike, my mouth is like the grave;
Arms and legs, securely bound by rope
That leather, spike, and rope is now precisely me

IMAGE
Immured inside, I peer out through the door
Near me, leaves; far off, the sea and sky
The leaves astir: a thousand lives away
The sea is still; the image of a realm not mine 

The Interview of Jane Katz with Mai Thảo

And here is my rendering of the interview with Mai Thảo, which appears in English in the book Artists in Exile, American Odyssey, by Jane Katz, Stein and Day Publishers, 1983:

I was born in 1930[4] in Nam Định Province, North Vietnam. My father was a landlord, a man of substance who was much respected by the people of our village. He was our head of household. My mother stayed at home with those who helped her. I and my brothers and sisters obeyed our father in everything.

After the people of the West invaded our land, conflicts arose between the younger and older generations. But the foreigners were unable to damage the foundations of the family in our country. That was a system that had existed for ages, and no one had the ability to destroy it.

My father managed farms. He was wealthy, so he didn’t have us work in the fields. I had to go to school and study, but after school I was able to run about in the fields and amuse myself. I mingled with the water buffalo that pulled ploughs in the Red River delta area. The grassy fields were green and fertile. Some people in the village worked for my father, and others had fields of their own.

My people love their fields, and they believe that the souls of their ancestors are alive in them. Every family worked in the fields and no one had to suffer hunger.

When I turned ten years old, my father lost all his fields. My family had to withdraw to Hanoi. It was terribly difficult for my father to be forced to forsake his fields, which belonged to our ancestors and to the village. He knew everyone in the village. He had a secure basis there that he could not find in the city.

In Hanoi, I got to see the city walls, and ancient temples dating from the eighth to the tenth centuries. One temple was called Ngọc Sơn, and a different structure, a shrine, was called Quan Thánh. In the middle of the city was a large lake, a place where people met after putting in long days of work. In the summer, we went out to the sea.

Though we lived in the city, we still preserved our ancient traditions, such as respecting the old and reverently observing rites proper to particular occasions.

A spirit of loyalty to the nation was part of Vietnamese tradition. For a thousand years the Vietnamese people were ruled by the Chinese. This influenced our educational system and our thought, but the Vietnamese never entirely submitted to this influence. Then in the nineteenth century, when the French attacked and occupied many provinces in Vietnam, they established an administrative system, created a government to rule the country, and set up regional civic organizations.

When I was sixteen, I joined the anti-French resistance movement. We organized musical and dramatic programs in all the villages in order to stimulate patriotic feelings. We wrote many essays concerning history and yearned for freedom. Four years later, I abandoned the resistance when I learned that the communists had exploited the movement to destroy our traditional social order and stir up class conflict.

The Franco-Vietnamese war ended in 1954 and the country was divided in two. I emigrated with my family to Saigon. That was a way of resisting the communists. My father didn’t trust them, and they didn’t trust him. Under communist domination the people ceased to pay attention to art. How can you create paintings when every day you have to worry about every bite of food? Intellectuals lost their freedom and were often forced to join the army.

Beginning in 1958, an open struggle began between two regions of the country: the North, ruled by the communists, was supported by the communist Chinese, and the noncommunist South was supported by the United States and the various allied countries.

A constant war of propaganda was maintained on both sides. The North proclaimed everywhere that it was necessary to liberate the South from imperialist America, while the government of the South maintained that we must resist being governed by Communist China and the Soviet Union. The armed forces of the communists hid in the deep forests and used guerrilla tactics. American aircraft scattered poisonous substances everywhere to force those forces to reveal themselves. In doing this, they also poisoned the forests and mountains, the vegetation, the animals, and food sources in general.

My memories of the war are vivid. I can still see the houses hit by bombs, the trees deprived by fire of foliage, with bare limbs sticking out, a shrine consumed in fire, children with distended bellies, with missing eyes or legs, and old ladies with no homes, wandering about as if they had lost their souls…

I started writing in 1950. Writers are highly respected in my land. My books were published by many small private companies in South Vietnam and were widely distributed. Some became “best-sellers,” but to live by one’s pen is very difficult. I wrote many stories and novels. We didn’t have many translators, and my books were not put into foreign languages. I also was the editor-in-chief of a few journals and literary magazines.

I have read some American authors whom I like very much, such as: Henry Miller, Hemingway, and John Steinbeck—in French translations. These authors had no influence on my own writing. Our own literature is very different. We have our own thousand-year-old literary tradition. Our literature is very formal; and it has the goal of advancing society.

I wrote a short story that I like very much, with the title “A Last Testament on the Top of the Highest Mountain” (“Bản Chúc Thư Trên Ngọn Đỉnh Trời”). A man and a woman lived together next to a stream in a forest. For a reason the woman could not understand the man left one day. The man’s journey led him to the highest point at the top of a mountain to the east. He wanted to know how high the mountain was. He wanted to find absolute truth and happiness. When he reached the highest point on the mountain, he fell into despair because he perceived that absolute truth can never be obtained. The woman went to look for him and found the man’s body lying by the stream. No one knew how the man had died. The woman took the man’s body into the village and asked herself why the man had died. And, finally, the woman came to the realization that while on his journey to seek the truth, the man had chosen death.

As a writer, I touch on the problem of human life: it is not my purpose to find a solution. Most of my books and stories are based on my own experience, or on that of people I have known. Things that I remember are mixed with things that I make up. Style—that’s the important element.

The Americans left Vietnam in 1975. Because of my previous anti-communist writings, my name was on a blacklist of authors who had done harm to the regime. Almost all the authors whose names were on that list were arrested and put in prison, and many of them died in prison because they lacked food and medicine.

I was relatively lucky—I was cared for and shielded by the people. If it had not been for their love, I could not have survived in Vietnam.

The communists announced that anyone who offered support to writers on the blacklist would be arrested. Their security system was very thorough. They directed everyone in a neighborhood to keep an eye on each other and make reports to the regional authority. But there still were people who took risks in order to shield me. I lived in dark tunnels, because any light or activity discovered in the neighborhood would pose a danger to my hosts. The places where I stayed had to be houses without children, because families all taught their children that they must not tell lies. The communists conducted searches in several houses, but achieved nothing; they failed to find me.

I hid for two long years, living like an animal in the darkness. There were nights when I went without sleep, and my days were dispiritingly monotonous. A friend brought me a mahjong set, and I would play both sides at once. A few times when my despair grew too great, I had to find some way of going out while maintaining secrecy in the darkness. At times I was unable to imagine that I had to live in these conditions. Sometimes I gave way to despair and imagined that I was in the midst of a long sleep from which I would never awaken. But Vietnamese people are accustomed to putting up with harsh conditions and finally escaping them. I deeply felt that writers belong to society and to the people with whom they live. And thinking of the people who had joined together to preserve my life, I felt that I had to be courageous in order to be worthy of the help that I had received.

I am not a Buddhist, though my family are followers of that faith. But I am a writer and a person who thinks, so I must look at my life and try to find meaning in it. For many hours every day I had stilled my heart and meditated. In such circumstances especially, people must seek truth, and seek meaning in their life. I had that opportunity. I believe that each one of us is home to a supreme being. A person can save himself from the turmoil of his life through his own actions and thoughts. This realization remains within me always.

Toward the end of 1977, private organizations appeared that helped people cross the ocean. They made contact with me and told me to wait in a sheltered place. I understood that an escape of this nature was an expensive undertaking, and I did not have a penny. I had no way of communicating with my family that would not expose them to danger. I waited. One dark night, a person wearing a black shirt came on a black Honda, stopped beneath a tree behind the house, directed me to mount the motorcycle, and furtively drove toward the bank of the Saigon River where a small fishing boat was waiting. I was told to pole a raft, pretending that I was a fisherman. After two or three hours, I was transferred to a motorboat on the ocean. Then the lady in charge of the boat told me that I could smoke a cigarette. I looked for the last time at the city of Saigon and burst into tears, because I realized that I would never again see it. The people of the south are very tightly bound to the city they call Saigon. I have the feeling that I have forsaken my own inheritance.

Once I was on the open ocean, I had the feeling that I had been released from confinement. I was a now a free person. It was a dark night with no moon. We reached the open ocean, but then a storm blew us from the Philippines. Tossing about in a small boat, we had no choice but to return to shore. I resumed hiding. A few days later, I received word that my father had died at the age of ninety-two. According to Asian custom, a son must return to take part in the mourning for his parents or be considered an unfilial child. But my elder brothers all urged me not to return, because I was being followed and might be seized. Fortunately, I was able to go secretly at night to my father’s grave and utter prayers to express my feelings of remembrance, and that lessened my distress.

Then a different motorcycle came in the dark night. The second escape was riskier than the first. A small fishing boat delivered me to a hut. I had to hide there for two days in a place full of sticky mud covered with foliage. Finally, a raft arrived and carried me to the open sea in the middle of the night. There I was transferred to a larger fishing boat. Suddenly and noiselessly a signal light flashed. It took careful calculation and a great deal of luck. I stepped onto a boat capable of carrying twenty people, but it had been boarded by fifty-eight. We had to be very sparing in our use of water and rice because there was no storage space. Every one drank and ate little, and no one died.

The people on the boat consisted of political refugees, students, schoolchildren, and families with toddlers. We were on the boat for six days and nights. Everyone was hungry and thirsty, and some fell sick. As we approached Malaysia, the sea was calm and the night was clear, and everyone began to sing. They asked me to intone a poem. I read a poem by a friend that spoke of a man having to leave his home with no one to bid him farewell.

We got to Malaysia, but they didn’t want to receive us. The officials were unfriendly because too many refugees had already come. Malaysia was a poor country; they could not rescue everybody.  Each time we tried to approach a pier they would push us out again. Finally, a Malaysian fisherman signaled us—he said that we should drive our boat directly onto the shore; if our boat broke and could no longer be used, they would have to accept us. We did as he advised, and it was effective. The boat that carried us broke. We helped the little children, the old, and the sick to reach land. United Nations officials came and met us, and gave us money to buy food with. The first thing I bought was a pack of cigarettes. They conducted us to a refugee camp. The camp was very crowded, but there was enough food, and there were tents to stay in. And, as for us, we were free. We were not kept pent up in the camp. I began to love the people of Malaysia. There was a broadcasting station in the camp, and I was asked to write an article and read it on a program. I also acted as a chairperson of the camp.

Figure 14. The writer / boat person Mai Thảo in Dec. 1977, after reaching the shores of Pulao-Besar, Malaysia. (Internet posting by a  boat person).

I came to the United States because I had two younger siblings who lived here. Also, I was acquainted with a few writers who had preceded me to the United States. What I write is based on my own experience. I hope that my novels will be translated into English. I am also active in seeking ways to restore freedom to writers imprisoned in Vietnam. I’m afraid that our literature and art will be annihilated.

I send money back to my mother. I hope she will join us in the United States, but she doesn’t want to be a burden to her children who are over here. She also doesn’t want to die in a place far from her homeland.

I want to say to the world that twenty years of war have destroyed my country. The homes and roads can be rebuilt, but not the beauty of the land, nor the spirit of the people. At the very time we sit conversing with each other over here, the destruction continues under the communist regime.

Perhaps one day Vietnam will be free, and I will be able to return. I lead a fortunate life over here, but in my heart I’m sad. Sad for my people. I have no way of predicting if we have a future. Living so far from our homeland, it is hard to preserve our traditions. We feel that half our souls have been taken away. (Jane Katz, Artists in Exile: American Odyssey).

Going to Visit Mai Thảo

The first day of winter in southern California is still sunny and beautiful, though slightly chilly. A group of us, including Từ Mẫn (Võ Thắng Tiết), originally the director of Lá Bối (“Bamboo Leaf”) Publishers, and then of The Arts (Văn Nghệ), and Phạm Phú Minh, originally the editor-in-chief of Thế kỷ 21 (“The twenty-first Century”) and then of Diễn Đàn Thê Kỷ (“This Century’s Forum”), agreed to pay a visit to the grave of Mai Thảo. Only the poet Thành Tôn, the person with the most complete collection of materials on Mai Thảo, found at the last minute that he was too busy to go.

Figure 15. The grave of Mai Thảo is inscribed with four lines drawn from his verse collection, We See Our Images: So Many Shrines. Resting on the grave is the special issue of Literature devoted to his work. (Source: Thành Tôn, personal archives).

Figure 16. From the right: Từ Mẫn (Võ Thắng Tiết) and Phạm Phú Minh visiting the grave of Mai Thảo on December 4, 2016. (Photo by Ngô Thế Vinh).

Mai Thảo’s grave lies in the cemetery near the Westminster water pavilion. A Peek funeral parlor employee working there recognized the name of the writer Mai Thảo at once and let us know that visitors from afar often came to visit him. Mai Thảo’s grave is surrounded by fresh green grass, and in the middle rests his memorial plaque made of black stone, which remains intact after weathering the eighteen years that have passed since it was placed there. It has a portrait of Mai Thảo beneath which are inscribed four lines from his verse collection, We See Our Images: So Many Shrines:   

The world has a million things I fail to grasp,
And fail still more as I approach the end of life.
No matter; after I am safely in the ground
Whatever they might mean, the one above will know. 

We placed some incense sticks on Mai Thảo’s memorial plaque, upon which rested the special issue of Literature, and lit the incense, so that smoke billowed over it. Thus, we paid him a visit, and remembered him with a line from Nguyễn Du: “The body falls away; the essence brightly stays” (“Thác là thể phách còn là tinh anh”).

[1] Nguyễn Xuân Hoàng, “Remembering Mai Thảo” (“Nhớ Mai Thảo”), Literature (Văn), special issue on Mai Thảo, February1998.

[2] Confluence (Hợp Lưu) was a Vietnamese-language journal devoted to literature and art founded by the artist Khánh Trường and published in California from 1990 to 2003.

[3] The expression “gold and stone” (đá vàng) is used in Vietnamese to refer to unshakeable friendship (Eric Henry).

[4] Author’s note: Mai Thảo was born on June 8, 1927. The detail in Katz’s interview that he was born in 1930 is perhaps not accurate.