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

NGÔ THẾ VINH, Author / ERIC HENRY, Translator

THE MEMORY OF THE SCENT OF BLOOD
Poet and Journalist Trần Mộng Tú in a “Decrepit Old War”

ABSTRACT

This item is excerpted from a longer article in which the author discusses the war poems of three women, Trần Mộng Tú and two others. TMT did work in many literary genres but is best known as a prolific and many-faceted poet. Still productive at the age of eighty-two, she lives currently in Seattle, Washington, having resided in the United States, chiefly California, since 1975. This article describes how she began as a journalist employed by the Associated Press in Saigon in the late 1960s. Her adult life was overshadowed from the beginning by the death of her husband in a military encounter in the third month of their marriage. He was a French teacher who had been inducted into the South Vietnamese army. — Eric Henry.

KEYWORDS
Vietnamese war poems, Vietnamese women poets, Vietnamese journalism, Vietnamese expatriates, the Associated Press in Vietnam

I give to you the smell of blood
On clothes I wore while fighting,
My own blood and the enemy’s—
Please, my dearest, grieve for both.
- Trần Mộng Tú, “Gifts Bestowed in War.”

Figure 1. The journalist’s pass of Trần Mộng Tú when she worked for the Associated Press (AP) in Saigon. This card was issued by MACV (U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam), and each time issued was effective for three months only. (TMT, personal archives).

1969: Trần Mộng Tú Receives News of Her Husband’s Death in Saigon Surrounded by War

Trần Mộng Tú was born in 1943 in Hà Đông. Like every young woman, she had a magical girlhood including her first experience of love. Her marriage occurred one week after Easter on April 12, 1969. Then, Thái Hoàng Cung died on a battlefield. And on July 30, 1969—only three months after the marriage—her husband’s funeral took place. TMT thus became a widow shortly after having turned twenty. It was on that mournful occasion that she wrote her poem, “Gifts Bestowed in War,” which sprang from her feelings at the loss of her husband, who was her first love.

Figure 2. Trần Mộng Tú and Thái Hoàng Cung on their wedding day, April 12, 1969. Kiên Giang – Rạch Gia was the fated location, the place where the warrant officer and educator Thái Hoàng Cung, the recently married husband of Trần Mộng Tú, died in the course of a military operation three months after the wedding (in July 1969), which was when Trần Mộng Tú made this poem. (Trần Mộng Tú, personal archives).

1990 was the first year that Trần Mộng Tú’s two war poems, “Gifts in Wartime,” and “A Dream of Peace” were brought before an international audience by being selected for inclusion in the poetry anthology, Visions of War, Dreams of Peace. “A Dream of Peace” is the poem that the present author has chosen to introduce in this article.

Gifts in Wartime
[translated by Vann Phan; lightly edited by E. Henry]

I offer you roses
Buried in your new grave
I offer you my wedding gown
To cover your tomb still green with grass 

You give me medals
Mixed with silver stars
Your badge with yellow pips
Unused, still shining 

I offer you my youth,
The days when still we loved.
My youth died away
When they told me the bad news 

You give me the smell of blood
From your war dress
Your blood and your enemy’s
So that I may be moved. 

I offer you clouds
That linger on my eyes on summer days;
I offer you cold winters
Amid the springtime of my life 

You give me your lips with no smile
You give me your ams without tenderness
You give me your eyes with no sight
And your motionless body 

Seriously, I apologize to you
I promise to meet you in our next life
I will hold this shrapnel as a token
By which we will recognize each other.

This poem, in the original Vietnamese, is in the form of a dialogue between the poet and the departed; but in Vann Phan’s translation, there are places where it becomes a monologue using a first-person pronoun.

A somewhat surprising aspect of this poem is that one cannot detect in it the anguished sobbing arising from the heavy loss suffered by the young widow, Trần Mộng Tú, when faced with the death in battle of her first love, her just-married husband. At that time, and during the years that followed, no one could detect the fiery hatred subsisting between “us and the enemy” in her poems—only sadness and pity for both sides involved in the war.

I give to you the smell of blood
On clothes I wore while fighting
My own blood and the enemy’s—
Please, my dearest, grieve for both

Phạm Xuân Đài, in a review of the book Selected Poems 1969–2009 (Thơ tuyển 1969–2009) by Trần Mộng Tú, wrote: “The essential skill of Trần Mộng Tú is to swallow her bitterness so that it may crystallize as tear drops of jade that appear in her poems.”

Not true. TMT weeps to be sure, but this does not mean that she sheds tears the moment she receives the coffin that exhales the smell of death and allows her hand to rest there, but rather that she weeps years later in long sleepless nights when her tears fall slowly and quietly:

I float without cease, but still must come up against a single place. Seven years later (1976) I took a husband and bore children; I lived an ordinary life, just as all other women did in a country without war. I too responded with pleasure and sadness to the ups and downs of life. In my daily activities, I gradually forgot the misfortune I had suffered a score or so years previously. But I remembered very clearly that this misfortune had appeared in the life of a person dear to me. From time to time, Cung would appear to me in a dream, though throughout the day before I had not thought of him at all. He would come, sometimes as if alive, and sometimes as if dead, and when I awoke, my tears would still be falling on the pillow. I would try not to disturb the peaceful sleep of the person next to me. Upon awakening in the morning, I would change the pillowcase and then step calmly into my usual activities: washing my husband’s clothes, preparing food for my children.

She would at length have a very grievous spell of weeping—but it would be twenty-three years later, when TMT made her first return trip to Vietnam and visited the Tân Định church, the place where the ashes of her husband of long ago were still kept:

I slipped along the shelves, reading the series of names, until I came to the letter “T”—the first letter of my husband’s surname. I saw a small drawer. It had no image, just his name, his day of birth, and day of death. I stood in a daze before it, and ran my trembling fingers over the words. The feeling I had when I ran my fingers over his coffin in 1969 suddenly grew beneath my fingers. A sob arose in my throat, and then burst forth, and then I wept as I had never done before. The tears that had been collecting all those years, the tears from the days when I received his corpse in Kiên Giang and that had since dried, now poured out on the broken floor in a stream. I crossed my legs and sat in the passage between two rows of shelves and cried, as never before, without restraint. Everything around me was empty and quiet. I buried myself in my tears, my unhappiness, my loneliness. The little drawer with the ashes above my head looked down silently and impassively, just as it had before my arrival.

Biographical Overview

She was born in Hà Đông in North Vietnam. Her childhood was in Hanoi, and then in Hải Phong until, in 1954, she moved to the South. From 1968 to 1975 she was a journalist working for the Associated Press in Saigon. She emigrated to the United States in April 1975. Living abroad, she worked for various literary magazines and websites in the U.S. and other countries. She now lives with her family in a peaceful suburb near Seattle, Washington. Having lived into old age, she still writes poetry and prose, and every weekend goes with her husband to a church to do charitable work.

From an Autobiographical Poem by Trần Mộng Tú

I’m a woman poet of Vietnam,
I relinquished in my homeland
A love:
A love that bears a medal,
A medal bestowed upon an accidental hero.

I’m a woman poet of Vietnam,
I live now in America,
My husband native to this place;
We have three children, still not fully grown.
Our life is gentle here
In this little town.

Published Works by TMT

Figure 3. The front covers of a number of works published in Vietnamese by Trần Mộng Tú. From the left: Mangosteen Garden (Vườn Măng Cụt; 2009), Selected Poems of Forty Years (1969–2009) (Thơ Tuyển Bốn Mươi Năm; 2009), Let Me Stir Up the Wind (Để Em Làm Gió; 1996), Seattle Rain, Saigon Rain (Mưa Seattle, Mưa Sài Gòn; 1996), Matters Concerning Maple Leaves (Câu Chuyện Của Lá Phong; short story collection, 1994), A Tardy Stick of Incense (Ngọn Nến Muộn Màng; 2005), Poems of Trần Mộng Tú (Thơ Trần Mộng Tú; 1990), Miss Straw and Some Short Stories (Cô Rơm và Những Truyện Ngắn; 1999), The Calendar of Trần Mộng Tú in the Ắt Mùi Spring of 2015 (Lịch Trần Mộng Tú Xuân Ắt Mùi 2015). (Source: Blogs of TMT).

Figure 4. Left: cover and title page of the book Saigon Rain, Seattle Rain, a collection of articles by Trần Mộng Tú, Văn Mới, 2006; right: the cover and title page of Selected Poems of Forty Years (1969–2009) by Trần Mộng Tú, self-published in 2009. By now she has been active for more than half a century, or to be more precise, fifty-six years (1969–2025), and she has now entered her eighties. She still writes poetry with no diminution of creative power. One can say that she is a rare phenomenon: a poet who has no age.

Trần Mộng Tú makes poems and writes short stories, occasional essays, and journalism. Poetry forms the principal part of her literary activity. Her poetry is of many types, including love poems and poems about current events. She writes with passionate tenderness when faced with tragedies, such as war in the Middle East, the terrorist attack of 9/11 in the United States (“Trả Lại Tôi,” or “Give It Back To Me”), the thirty-nine people in a boxcar who died in their pursuit of life (“Tôi Không Thở Được” or “I Can’t Breathe”), and the Formosan tragedy with its multitudes of dead fish (“Gửi Người Em Vũng Áng” or “Sent to my Little Brother in Vũng Áng”). 

Trần Mộng Tú’s writing is pristine. It contains not the slightest trace of hatred, and no matter what the genre is, it is full of love and generous feeling—it is, in a word, extremely “Trần Mộng Tú.”

Seeking the Recovery of a Lost Time:  

1968 and TMT’s Association with Associated Press Saigon  

After passing her second baccalaureate exam, Trần Mộng Tú continued studying English in some privately offered courses. When her father retired, she wanted to take on some additional work to help her family. She worked for a short while in a PX store, the “PX Ambassador.” This PX was reserved for high-ranking officers and members of the embassy staff. Though her father had held an official position in the Diocese, being known as “Mr. Judge” or “Mr. Director,” his salary there didn’t amount to much.

TMT had a gift for languages and spoke English well, but she didn’t know much about journalism. She had an elder cousin at the time named Đinh Văn Ngọc, who was studying law and at the same time working for the Associated Press, having been hired in 1968. He said to her, “If you come here [to AP], you’ll learn English faster than you would at school—why not give it a try?” Then he brought her there and introduced her. Tú took the leap, not realizing at the time that AP had for many years been composed exclusively of men, and had no female employees whatsoever. She thought the reason the Bureau Chief wanted to have a woman enter the company was surely because he wanted to have a “flower” as a decoration for his office. Tú learned a great deal working at AP, and the salary was higher than in other places. The work was substantive, and the AP allowed her to study English every afternoon for two hours.

The AP office was on the fourth floor, rooms 400-402, of a building called Passage Eden. The offices of the NBC Broadcasting Station, and of U.S. News and World Report were in the same location. TMT has many memories of Passage Eden, with its Givral ice cream shop on the corner of Tự Do and Lê Lợi Streets, the place where her beloved Thái Hoàng Cung would come to meet her, after which they would go to his house to eat, sometimes buying ice cream or pastries to bring with them. Though they were not yet married, Cung’s mother—a teacher famous her for strictness, at the time the rector of the Thanh Quan Women’s College on Trần Quý Cạp Street—loved her future daughter-in-law and regarded her as one of the children in the family.

1968: A Love Beautiful as a Dream  

Because the mothers in the two families were close friends, TMT and Thái Hoàng Cung got to know each other when they were still in middle school. Cung was the second born in a family with three sons. Cung’s father was originally a French teacher who founded a school in Nam Định. The Việt Minh arrested and executed him during the anti-French Resistance War. Cung’s mother was also a teacher at that time. Widowed at a very young age, she brought her three sons, the oldest of whom was only ten, to Hanoi, where she struggled to raise her children while working as a schoolteacher. Because she didn’t know the date of her husband’s death, she observed his death anniversaries on the date of his arrest. Then, in 1954,  after the signing of the Geneva Accord, she emigrated to the South with her three sons.

Cung completed his studies at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau School and, after taking his second baccalaureate exam, chose to take the teacher’s college entrance examination. After graduating there with a degree in French literature, he was sent to take up a position as a French teacher at a school in the western part of the country, but before completing his first year there he was called up in the general mobilization that followed the Tết 1968 attacks.

After completing an officer training course in Thủ Đức, and before going out to his unit, he asked TMT’s family to grant permission for his marriage with TMT to take place, because he feared that this would be difficult to accomplish when he was in the army.

The Anxious Feelings of a Soldier’s Wife

1968: One Noon in Saigon  
The rainy season is returning to Saigon
A thunderstorm assails Tự Do Street,
I walk along it underneath the rain.

I remember you,
I weep    

The taxis wrapped in silence.
Saigon in the rain,
Saigon at noon,
Saigon like a sense of death.

Why were you so young,
Why was I so young,
Why was our love so young
And yet fell into
a tottering, decrepit war?

Now a new young soldier
Holds an old, decrepit gun
and goes out to Trà Bồng field.
a name the sound of which
creates confusion.

And now a girl, young,
Holds her heart in her two hands,
going underneath the rain
full of splashing drops.     

Oh, Saigon at noon
I miss you,
I miss you,
I weep.

 - Trần Mộng Tú, 1968.

1969, Midday: А Piece of News  
I go along the city streets
Winter following at my heels 
Wind sweeps by the spires of Blessed Virgin church 
I cower in the body of a pedicab 

I take the news back to the paper’s office 
The numbers of the killed, the enemy’s and our own
are very evenly divided

At the office where I work
The journalists are getting things in order
to go tomorrow to Đà Nẵng
no one’s going to Kiên Giang.
what can I do to send to you
a little packaged kiss, 
what can I do to send to you
the tears I have this morning
inside a pack of cigarettes? 

I cower in our news room 
Dazed,
I bend to see the latest bit of news,

At noon today,
We hаd more dead than the enemy.

In my ribcage full of bitter care I call

My dear!
My dear!
My dear!

Then later in the day
I return.
the pedicab still full of wind.

- Trần Mộng Tú, March,

Three Months Аfter Marriage—the Funeral, 1969 

“One evening in early August, 1969, when I—TMT—was sitting and looking over some color photos of a wedding sent back to me from the United States, preparatory to arranging them in an album, I heard the doorbell ring. I went to open the door, and was astonished to see Carl and Huân, two of my colleagues at the news agency, standing before my eyes. Huân worked in the darkroom and was responsible for developing negatives and printing images, and Carl was both a correspondent and a photographer. These two never came to where I lived, and this time they surely had not come to call me to work. I was at that time a secretary for the Associated Press. My work was to deal with all the miscellaneous business of the agency, such as distributing paychecks to the employees, keeping records of expenditures and income, buying and selling photographs, going to press conferences and pocketing reports of the proceedings. . . These things were never done at the end of the week and also were never done in the night shift.

“The two stepped into my living room. They both looked at me, and they both looked at each other, neither wishing to speak first. I sensed that something bad had happened, but could not guess what it was. At last Carl said, ‘The agency received a phone call from Rạch Giá this afternoon, saying that Cung, your husband, has died on the battlefield.’ I stood bewildered, looking at the two of them, unable to say a word. Carl continued: ‘Throughout the afternoon, we communicated with Rạch Giá (Kiên Giang). In order to confirm what we had heard, we talked on the phone to the university campus director Mrs. Trần Quý Cáp, Cung’s mother. She had already learned the news.’ I sat down on my heels unable to listen further, hearing only the sounds of grief coming from the father, mother, and the family.

“We had gotten married just after the Easter service in April of that year. Cung died in battle on July 30, 1969. Cung was not a military man by training. He had graduated from a teacher’s college, majoring in French literature, and had taught for one year only when he was called to serve in the General Mobilization Program. When he received his draft notice, he went to my parents and asked them to allow me to marry him early, because he feared that this would be difficult after he entered the army. According to the documents concerned, I had had a husband ever since June 1968. At the time of our betrothal, my future fiancé was not present (he was stationed in Trà Bông sector); only his mother was there to bring the betrothal gift of betel leaves. It was an unhappy situation, but it was wartime. What could be done? After the marriage ceremony, Cung returned to his unit, while I remained at home with my mother and father, waiting for Cung to be transferred back to his teaching position (the Education Department had promised that all teachers would be allowed to return to their positions in October, 1969), after which we would set up our own household.

“An American transport plane landed at the Bình Thủy airport in Cần Thơ. The copilot turned around to speak with Cung’s older brother and me as we sat next to the coffin and said, ‘We’re very sorry that we have to let you two off here, with the coffin. This, you see, is an American fuel-transport plane. From here we’re going directly to Cần Thơ. There’s no way we can go back to Saigon.’

“The tail of the plane opened up, and a forklift came forward and lifted the coffin from the plane, placing it in the midst of the runway. My husband’s older brother said to me, ‘You wait here. Let me go in and talk with the airport manager—perhaps someone can help us.’

“It was high noon in the month of August. The sun shot burning, dazzling shafts of light on the airfield, a vast airfield from which jutted out a coffin covered with a disheveled national flag with a few fragments of incense sticks which formed a dull, off-white solid layer on the yellow of the flag and a few twisted leaves from the flower wreaths from the previous afternoon still sticking to it. I felt small and fragile in my pale blue áo dài, my crumpled blouse, and uncombed hair, gazing uncomprehendingly at the scene around me. The airfield looked so immense, and the coffin so utterly tiny, with myself, still tinier, beside it. There was not a single person in the entire airfield. A few military planes were stationed here and there next to some oil drums that had not yet been put in storage. It seemed that an unpleasant smell was coming from the coffin. I backed away from it a little, pressed my hand to my chest, feeling that it was difficult to breathe, that my chest was heavy and pain-filled. The pain went down as far as my stomach, and I felt I was about to faint.

“The two days and one night I had spent in Kiên Giang had made me lose strength. Not that I did anything unusual. It was just that I didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, didn’t cry and didn’t even wash myself. No doubt I was seriously dehydrated. My husband’s mother and his elder brother were next to me and poured me glasses of ‘Longevity Milk.’ My mother-in-law knew just what to do. She was familiar with war, and familiar with death, so when she went to receive her son’s body, she remembered to bring along a little carton of ‘Longevity Milk’ for her daughter-in-law to digest, a daughter-in-law as pristine as a piece of silk that had never been embroidered.

“‘Drink it, my child. If you remained collapsed as you are, then what will I be able to say to your parents?’ But I couldn’t drink anything. The smell of death that came forth that noon from the several dozen corpses arranged in layers before the morgue still suffused my body. It spread from the tip of my head to the soles of my feet as I slipped past the soldiers placed outside to the place inside where the bodies of officers lay. I had to step past bags with bodies inside. There was one from which a pair of hands, still undamaged, protruded, and a boot as well. There was another from which a head of hair, mixed with dirt, could be seen, and another from which a whole face, dull, pale, and yellow, extended, with a few flies crawling on the eyes that were not quite closed. I followed where the hand of my husband’s brother led me, utterly dazed into insensibility with shock and emotion. I didn’t know if I was stepping on any of the corpses. I tried not to step on the men lying there. Once inside, I ceased to see anything. I heard only a burst of weeping from my mother-in-law and my brother-in-law’s voice saying, ‘Yes, that’s Cung.’

Figure 5. A corner of the Bình Thủy Airfield, Cần Thơ, 1969, the fated place where the coffin of Second Lieutenant Thái Hoàng Cung was left after being taken there in an American transport plane.
(Source: Hồi ức Trần Mộng Tú, Mưa Sài Gòn Mưa Seattle, Nxb Văn Mới, California, 2006).

“I was vaguely aware that someone had taken me in their arms and set me down on a porch outside. Wind from a river blew on my face, helping me to return to consciousness. Opening my eyes and looking down, I saw a muddy stream coursing along below me. It appeared that the morgue of the Kiên Giang hospital lay right by a riverbank. I didn’t dare look at the women who were making their way among the poncho-covered bodies in search of their husbands and sons in front of the morgue. I felt that I was more fortunate than they were.

“People brought Cung’s body to a sector of the military camp to perform the ceremony. I was placed right next to the coffin as the deputy provincial governor read the eulogy. As he read it, I stood looking at the burning sticks of incense, at the funeral wreaths that had begun to wither, as well as bowls of rice that were going dry, with boiled eggs lying beneath flies flying up and down, the whole covered with incense ashes. When he finished reading the eulogy, the deputy provincial governor hurried off. No doubt he was disappointed because he didn’t see me weep and thus had no opportunity to murmur a few words of comfort. A few wives of soldiers stationed at the camp came by to pay their respects, and a number of the soldiers’ little children ran around the coffin with dogs so thin that their bones showed, and their hides had bare patches. Their shirts were cut short, their bellies protruded, mucus streamed unwiped from their noses. They looked wide-eyed at us people from Saigon, people who had not the slightest resemblance to people at the camp. There were also some people who had come from far away to look for bodies of husbands and sons who came to exchange greetings with my mother-in-law, with dull, spiritless eyes.

“I stood dazed, listening to the different voices, one covering another, every person with his own story to tell. It was a scene such as those that took place at my home every time people came back from the movies, and talked confusedly, each striving to be heard. It seemed that they were talking about a battle taking place right in Vĩnh Thanh Vân. I had no idea where this place was, but it was surely very near. They said that the fighting had been going on there for three or four days and had not yet ceased, so there was no way to carry out all the corpses. They had no choice but to sit and wait. If they just kept sitting and waiting, they would surely meet the ones they knew. ‘If you don’t see the person himself, you’ll see his corpse—one way or another we’ll meet!’ they said to each other.

“My brother-in-law went elsewhere from time to time. I didn’t know where he was going—no doubt it was to find a way to return everybody to their homes. I saw that among the various people who came to identify a corpse only the three people in my family didn’t weep. My mother-in-law’s face was twisted with grief as she sought ways to get boiling water to make instant milk for her daughter-in-law to drink. ‘This child was thin to begin with, and now she hasn’t eaten anything or said anything for two days.’ This worried her terribly. If her daughter-in-law had only wept and wept like the other soldiers’ wives in the scene before us, she would have worried less. How long would she remain stuck in this state? Exercising her French abilities, she spoke with an American army officer to see if he could let her ride on a military airplane that was returning to Saigon. Then she would use a civilian plane to come back here and collect her children. She was very resourceful. Some dozen or so years earlier, she had gone alone on a ferryboat to Nam Định to seek her husband. He had left at night with some Việt Minh who invited him to go with them, and then had not returned for a whole month. He had been led away because at the time he ran a small French school in Nam Định. She went on the ferry and then walked for several miles. When she reached her destination, no one dared make inquiries about her husband on her behalf. They told her to return; her husband had been shot already. She went back by ferry and chose the day her husband had left to be the date of his yearly death anniversary, because she didn’t know the date of his execution. Some days later, she left  her home in Nam Định and took her little ones, the biggest of whom was ten years old, to make her way to Hanoi. There she found work that enabled her to care for her children and send them to school. Then she took them with her to the South. Whatever others did, she was able to do as well. She surely wept as well. But her tears would dry swiftly, because they didn’t flow out in their entirety at once. They seeped out a little at a time. They flowed throughout her life. Her daughter-in-law had been married just three months. She was very young, and as yet had no child. When she went to retrieve her husband’s body, she had her mother-in-law and brother-in-law with her. Compared with her mother-in-law, she surely was more fortunate.

“And sure enough, the fate faced by my resourceful mother-in-law was more difficult than mine. When she gained permission to board a plane and returned a day earlier than her children, she too was deposited that night at the Bình Thủy airfield; the plane did not go on to Saigon. A heavy August rainstorm suddenly poured down and drenched her clothes. She walked unsteadily to a church and asked to pass the night there. She had no need to weep any more; the sky was weeping for her. The next morning, she went by ferry to Saigon. Meanwhile her children, the living one and the dead one, were let out where she had been let out the day before, but not at night in the midst of a rainstorm; it was noon, and the sky was sunny.

“In the end they were able to take the coffin to Saigon. When they got out at Tân Sơn Nhất airport, both the people and the scene were truly eye-catching. If it had been possible to film the scene for a war movie, it would have been splendid. It would not have been necessary to add things to the coffin to increase the mournfulness of its appearance. The flag that covered it was ragged, crooked, and lonely; it was already a study in tragedy. The two individuals walking unsteadily beside it did not need to have make-up applied or benefit from the attentions of a director. They looked perfect for the parts they played, dazed, lost and bewildered, like soldiers just returned from a battle in which they had been defeated. If a movie camera could have been set up in front of them, everything would already have been perfect.

“As I reflected on this later on, questions arose in my mind. Why were we then so calm and undemonstrative? Why didn’t we lose our minds, go mad, and hurl ourselves head-first against a wall? A hundred questions kept running though my head for ever so many years.

“A military vehicle met us and carried the coffin to the morgue at the Grall Hospital. As I have already written, my mother-in-law was truly resourceful. She requested a patch of earth for Cung’s burial in Mặc Đình Chỉ, for her visits to the grave would then be much more convenient—how could she ever make regular visits to the Army Cemetery!?

“They took Cung past his old home and paused there a bit, so he could look at the place he had lived and grown to adulthood one last time. I can’t imagine who first thought of this beautiful custom, whereby people who don’t die at home are taken there once more prior to their final journey! I saw some people who lived nearby and a few relatives who stood waiting for us before the door. They looked at me and looked at the coffin like people watching a slow-motion movie. They were all too familiar with scenes such as these that had taken place in recent years. She is still so young, they thought. One way or another, she will surely forget, and will surely take a husband. Only the mother and the brother are to be pitied. (From “Bình Thủy 1969: Some Recollections of Trần Mộng Tú” (“Bình Thủy 1969: Hồi ức Trần Mộng Tú”) in Saigon Rain, Seattle Rain (Mưa Sài Gòn Mưa Seattle, Văn Mới Publishers, California, 2006).

TMT Returns Again to Ordinary Life, 1970 

Though filled through and through with unending layers of pain and sorrow the “decrepit old war”—TMT’s expression—kept impassively progressing, with countless numbers of insentient, unfeeling bombs used by both sides. Every day in Saigon, and on all the roads and lanes of the country, the number of widows’ veils kept increasing, and yet people kept on living, kept on dealing with life’s problems.

After Cung’s death, TMT returned to her work with the Associated Press, and continued to enjoy the love and esteem of her colleagues. They participated in her wedding and then participated in her husband’s burial ceremony, events separated by only three months. Because TMT’s mother and Cung’s mother were close friends, nothing changed in the relationship of the two families after the day of Cung’s death. Throughout the seven additional years that she remained in Vietnam, she left the office every day at noon and came to eat lunch with Cung’s mother in her home, and whenever it was a day when she didn’t have to go to class, she went to the Mạc Đĩnh Chi cemetery to visit her husband’s grave, and after that went back to her office.

After she returned to her work at the AP, the agency changed bureau chiefs every two years. Each of them cherished and protected the unfortunate young woman who worked for them—the only female employee at the AP. Though she was not a correspondent, TMT got to go abroad a number of times in the period 1971–1972. It was very difficult to go out of the country in that period. TMT would go on those trips and then return, with no thought of remaining in the United States. Mrs. Tú loved her daughter, and would admonish her, saying, “Go and enjoy yourself, my child, but don’t remain all alone in some place filled with strangers.”

Figure 6. Left: Trần Mộng Tú in Tokyo, 1971. Right: in New York, 1972.
(TMT, personal archives).

She associated every day with correspondents and photographers from all different regions of the United States. They came and then went back; it never occurred to her that she might establish a family with a foreigner. Even after her newly-wed husband died on the battlefield, she continued to behave coolly with the newsmen who wanted to seek a close relationship with her.

Though not a reporter, she sometimes had to run to places where a news conference was going on to get materials and take notes if the reporters in her own agency were all off on assignments. Sometimes the AP office would be empty for a whole week, with no one there but Tú and the agency chief, and Tú would have to take care of everything, from purchasing photos, to taking news reports, to ad hoc news conferences. A number of non-professional photographers would like to meet Tù when she came to sell photos, because she always paid them more; instead of twenty dollars (US), she paid twenty-five dollars. Among such people was the journalist, Nguyễn Tú A, whom Tú still remembers.

While still a young student just out of high school, TMT dropped into the American journalistic world in the midst of the Vietnam War. Between the war and the life that was going on then, she learned a lot. TMT thinks it was due to this that she was able to mature as a war writer later on. Occasionally, she would go to the office of Time Magazine by the Continental Hotel, to deliver or collect materials, and on those occasions she met Phạm Xuân An.[1] His manner was dry and reserved, but TMT remembers that, though he didn’t talk and laugh much, he was always gentle and kind with her, with no trace of “Secret Agent 007” about him.

TMT learned fast. Things were difficult only at first: occasionally when there would be a street demonstration right in front of the National Assembly Building, American reporters would drag Tú along to the scene, and ask her to translate the slogans on the banners for them. Tú was utterly bewildered, because she didn’t know the precise English equivalents of such expressions as “đả đảo” (down with…!) or “hoan hô” (hurrah for…!). By slow degrees though, she became fluent at that work. She now has forgotten a lot of what she learned then. Occasionally, when the AP office was empty, the reporters having all gone to the war front, and MACV or the Repatriation Office held a “lightning press conference,” the AP agency chief would send TMT there, and she would be able to take notes and bring them back for her chief to see. 

“The Flock of Home-forsaking Birds”:[2] The First Days of Exile—TMT and Frank

More than anyone else, those in the American journalistic world were clearly aware of the fate confronting Vietnam in the last days and months of Saigon. The AP’s first flight for refugees took place on April 25, 1975, five days before the fall of Saigon.

 The group of Vietnamese that got out early included Trần Mộng Tú and her father and mother, together with Nick Út, and the family of Đặng Văn Phước. When they got to the United States, they were taken at once to the resettlement center at Camp Pendleton, a marine base camp close to San Diego. A friend of TMT’s named John Parkson, who had worked earlier for NBC in an office right next to AP, came right away with his Japanese wife to visit her in the resettlement center. When he saw that TMT had a pair of aged parents with her, he wanted to receive and sponsor them right away. TMT and her parents left the resettlement camp on June  6, 1975 and stayed at the home of that friend in Encino, California. Only two weeks later, a Japanese bank, Sumitomo Mitsui, on Figueroa Street in San Francisco had an opening for a bank teller that they wished to fill. TMT submitted an application to their office and went for an interview with two American women, who were also applicants. Whether through luck or some other reason, they accepted TMT’s application—perhaps because they saw that she, too, was Asian, and also because she had excellent English.

Her NBC friend helped also by renting an apartment for the family near the World Trade Center on Figueroa Street, where the Mitsui bank was located. That way, she was able to go on foot from her home to her place of work, for at that time she still had no car and had also had no driving lessons. She was overjoyed to have a job and started working at once, but she was unaware that she was entitled to receive government support that would have enabled her to study somewhere free of charge. Had she known that, she would probably have chosen to train for some profession.

Aside from Nick Út, who in 1973 won a Pulitzer prize for his “Napalm Girl” photograph and was kept on as a photographer by the AP, Đặng Văn Phước, another of AP’s photographers, was also kept on, but he was sent to work in Hong Kong. He found the work there too laborious, so he withdrew from AP and returned to the states.

AP’s other employees were all terminated, but each was given a severance sum of US$3,000.  According to the banking expert Võ Tá Hân, this was a pretty large figure; it was equivalent to US$16,000 in today’s dollars.

TMT has always believed that the events of our lives are all arranged by Heaven. At that time, there was a young man in the building named Frank. His father’s family was from England, and his mother’s from Ireland. He, too, was a new arrival, having just moved in a month earlier. He had come up from Orange County and had a job as a government employee. The two met from time to time by the mailboxes in the apartment building. When TMT questioned him about the city’s streets, Frank showed her around with great thoroughness, and when he saw that TMT had a father and mother, and did not yet have a car, he undertook the task of driving Tú’s mother to church every weekend. He also was Catholic.

And so, the two of them, Frank and TMT, became man and wife. In September 1976—seven years after Cung’s death—Frank and Tú officially embarked on their married life. It was only then that TMT discovered that Frank was five years younger than she was.

When they began their marriage TMT was just about devoid of resources, but she had a job. The two of them rented an apartment to live in. When their first child was born, her husband’s mother supplied them with money to use as a down payment on their first house. They only had to pay a small monthly sum for it; it was not too onerous. Frank lived very simply and was a devoted worker. He said that Tú could remain at home and care for the child. It would be enough for him to have a job. TMT always remembered something that Frank said: “If you don’t want your child to put you into an assisted care facility for the aged, then don’t put him in a nursery school.” TMT remained at home until her youngest child was eleven years old. Her subsequent new profession was that of a sworn interpreter. Passing the requisite examination wasn’t easy, but she passed that hurdle and continued in that profession, in medical contexts, until she retired.

Frank graduated from the Catholic Loyola University in Chicago with a master’s degree in mathematics, and at first worked in the accounting field, but complained that the work was excessively dreary! TMT advised her husband to study computing; she felt that would suit him better. That was during the 1980s, when computer science was a relatively new field of study. Frank took his wife’s advice and left his accounting job. TMT sold their house and used the money they got from this to make a down payment on another, smaller, house and the remaining sum to enable Frank to study. Frank took a six-month course in computer programming and, upon completing it, found work at once for which he received a decent salary. Tú said that this was still not enough; Frank should continue working but at the same time pursue further studies that would be equivalent to completing work at a four-year institution. Frank accepted this advice and took courses at the University of California at Los Angeles while working, shifting from one program to another.

With the skill and high sense of responsibility of a typical Vietnamese woman, she thought of nothing but the well-being of her husband and children. Night after night, after putting her children to bed, TMT waited until 11:00 P.M. for her husband’s return, upon which they had their evening meal and finally went to bed. Frank was innately gifted in mathematics, and stepped into the computing field like a fish entering water. Wherever he went he was successful and became one of the principal employees in the firms he worked at.

Until the present day Frank has always said, “It is entirely due to my wife that I found suitable employment.” One can easily see from this the manner in which Vietnamese women care for their husbands and children, and the skill with which they arrange their circumstances.

When TMT was forced out of Vietnam, Cung’s whole family left as well. Only Cung, deceased, remained in Vietnam. And Cung was no different from the family’s living members in the treatment he received. His property (that is, his place of burial) was seized and he also was expelled from his home (his place of burial). His remains in the plot that his mother had purchased in the Mặc Đình Chỉ Cemetery were removed. His elder brother, who stayed behind, found a new repository for his remains in the Tân Định cathedral in Saigon.

Seattle: A Migrant Bird’s Cold Perch 

After thirteen years of living in California, Trần Mộng Tú moved with her family to Seattle, Washington at the age of forty-five. It was a place with clear, cold air and a calmer mode of life than Los Angeles. With the peaceful passage of days and months, her three children, two sons and a daughter, grew up, and then, having their own children, moved elsewhere to live independently.

Frank was a friend as well as a husband to TMT. He held everybody in high esteem and was devoid of prejudice. He respected TMT’s Vietnamese friends to such a degree that one of them remarked that he was gentle as a saint. TMT didn’t altogether agree with this, because this saint had his moments of “stormy seas and crumbling mountains.” But the two nevertheless cared for each other, treated each other as honored guests, knew how to make concessions, and knew how to prize their days of sweet domestic peace.

As for his literary tastes, Frank, though unable to participate in her creative life, nevertheless did all he could to encourage and support her. Their house being spacious, each of them had a room reserved for their own activities. Frank kept his office in the master bedroom. TMT had a room and an office. In addition there was a room left over that TMT turned into a Japanese-style library. It had bamboo curtains and pillows that she brought from Vietnam.

Figure 7. Left: Trần Mộng Tú in her library. On the door of the room where she does her work is a piece of paper with words in Frank’s handwriting saying “Quiet! Poet at work!” which he made to keep the children from disturbing their mother. After forty years of marriage, they have become grandparents, but still treat each other like honored guests.
(Source: Blogs posted by TMT).

TMT believes in destiny; she believes that God writes a script for every person and, in accordance with that belief, she plays the roles assigned to her, and looks for nothing further. “I am thankful to God for making me a person who is able to love the written word, and especially poetry.”

The Tân Định Cathedral

It was in November 1998 that she returned to Vietnam for the first time twenty-three years after her departure and sought out Cung’s remains in a row of wooden drawers in Tân Định cathedral. Her words concerning that visit are to be found in the reminiscence entitled: “Bình Thủy 1969: Some Recollections of Trần Mộng Tú” (see above).

Many people refer to “Bình Thủy 1969” as a short story, but it is actually TMT’s personal reminiscence. The writer Phùng Nguyễn considered it “the finest wartime reminiscence ever written.”

TMT’s Poetry in an American Textbook, 2000

Around the year 2000, three developments occurred in TMT’s literary career:

1. Beginning in 2000, TMT wrote children’s stories for a time in the Los Angeles Times.
2. One of her poems appeared in English in an American high school textbook (American Literature, Glencoe, 1999).
3. She served as the editor-in-chief of Nguyệt San Phụ Nữ Gia Đình Người Việt (Vietnamese Family Women’s Monthly) from 2002 to 2005.

Figure 8. A page from the Los Angeles Times showing one of the children’s stories that TMT wrote every weekend for that paper, beginning in 2000. (Source: L.A. Times Archive). 

In the textbook series “Glencoe Literature,” a paragraph entitled “Meeting Trần Mộng Tú” that precedes her poem “Gifts in Wartime” (“Quà Tặng Trong Chiến Tranh”), introduces the author of the poem as follows:

Trần Mộng Tú, a person with personal experience of war, has said, “War is horrifying.” TMT was born in Ha Đông, in North Vietnam. She emigrated with her family to South Vietnam in 1954. In the Indochinese war, France was pushed out of Vietnam by communist forces, after which, the south of Vietnam was not left in peace for long: a war broke out between communist forces and non-communist nationalist forces. In the 1960s, when the United States intervened directly in the war, TMT worked for the Associated Press news agency in Saigon. When the United States pulled its troops out of Vietnam in 1975 [actually, this withdrawal occurred in 1972; author’s note], AP evacuated its employees from Vietnam, for fear that the communists would take revenge on them. At that time, TMT and her family, as well as many thousands of others, came to the United States as refugees. From her elementary school days on, TMT had dreamed of becoming an author.

We must note that this biographical note in the Glencoe educational series (2000) lacks important details. It says only that TMT worked for the Associated Press and wrote poetry. It fails to mention the crucial fact that she became a widow when she had just turned twenty, when her husband, whom she had married only three months earlier, died as a combat casualty.

Another fairly important detail is that her poem “Gifts in Wartime” (“Quà Tặng), written originally in Vietnamese, was in the form of a dialogue between two people: TMT when she was a young woman, and her newly deceased husband; but the English translation has a passage made into a monologue written in the first person. This blemish is repeated in two more American textbooks that include the poem, published nine years apart (Visions of War 1991, and “Glencoe Literature,” 2000).

A translation of the poem by Đặng Vũ Vương is faithful to the spirit of the original poem, though it appeared only in 2023, fifty-four years after the poem was written (1969). [Mr Vương’s translation, below, is lightly revised by E. Henry].

Gifts in Wartime
My gift to you a rose
For burial in the fresh new grave
My gift to you my wedding dress
For spreading on the still green tomb
you gave to me the silver star
that accompanied your medal
and the yellow-petalled emblem,
Still shiny, never worn

I gave you my precious years of youth
the days we loved each other,
days that fell insensible
the moment I received the grievous news.
You gave the smell of blood
still lingering on your battle dress,
your blood and the enemy’s blood,
beseeching me to pity both.

I gave you hanging clouds,
my eyes on summer days.
I gave you wintry frost
Amid the verdant spring.
you gave non-smiling lips
and gave me unclenched hands,
you gave me sightless eyes,
A form devoid of life.
I beseech you to forgive me,
That we may reunite in some existence
This shrapnel is for me to keep,
a token that will let us find each other.

 - Sài Gòn Tháng 7/1969, Trần Mộng Tú. [Đặng Vũ Vương–Translated 4/16/2023].

Figure 9. From the left: (1) The cover of the American Literature textbook; (2) the title page of the textbook with written inscription of the poet to the present author; (3) the biographical page introducing Trần Mộng Tú; (4) the page containing the poem “Gifts in Wartime” with two photos found on the body of a fallen soldier in the Northern Army (Glencoe Literature, Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, A Division of McGraw-Hill Companies, 2000.
[Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives].

An English translation of the poem “Gifts in Wartime” was chosen for inclusion in the textbook Glencoe Literature: American Literature, published by Glencoe/McGraw Hill in 1999, to allow students an opportunity to compare it with Abraham Lincoln’s celebrated and moving “Gettysburg Address.”

TMT was deeply stirred when this poem appeared in English-language textbooks, because it was written in 1969 in Vietnam, when, thirty years in the past, it had been like a piece of “spirit money” burned over a fresh grave. Now that it was being brought out in the United States, it was like a piece taken from a plaster cast covering a wound that had turned into a scar. Sometimes the scar would turn a darker red, as she bent down to look at it.

An Anecdote about “Auntie” Trần Mộng Tủ

Her husband Frank had a nephew, Jessy, who was an eleventh-grade student in Houston, Texas. When he was told to read “Gifts in Wartime,” he raised his hand and said, “That’s a poem that my aunt wrote.” But nobody believed him because he was a child with utterly American features, including blond hair and blue eyes. A month later the boy went to Seattle and had someone take a photo of him sitting next to “Aunt Tú” that he could use as evidence. Only after seeing the photo did his classmates believe what he had said.

Figure 10. Trần Mộng Tú in 1994. [Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives].  

The Ethnic Pulitzer

In 2003, Trần Mộng Tú was awarded a journalism prize by The New California Media (NCM) for her essay, “A Safe Place,” which had appeared in Nguyệt San Phụ Nữ Gia Đình Người Việt (Vietnamese Family Women’s Monthly). This prize was also known as “the Ethnic Pulitzer.”

Figure 11. NCM’s announcement of the award bestowed on TMT in 2003.
[Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives].  

The NCM organization wrote about TMT as follows: “. . . ever since she became a secretary working for the Associated Press Agency in Saigon in 1964 [should be: 1968; author’s correction], Trần Mộng Tú has been familiar with the world of media. When the war ended in 1975, she escaped from Vietnam as a refugee. Her innate love of literature coupled with the feelings prompted by her new situation as an exile impelled her to become a writer. In addition to her literary work, she also undertook responsibility for the editorial page in a Vietnamese-language periodical that dealt with topics suggested by the name of the publication: “Vietnamese Family Women’s Monthly.” Trần Mộng Tú has published a book of poetry and a book of short stories. The essay of hers that won the prize was about her daughter’s decision to travel to New York City to do volunteer work for the Red Cross after the events of September 11, 2001. She suddenly felt that the United States, the place she had chosen to live in after the horrors of the Vietnam War, was no longer the safe place that she had imagined it to be. What impelled her to write the essay were her feelings of pride and concern for her daughter in the land where she had taken refuge. “Though this is the worry of a Vietnamese mother, it is also the worry of all other mothers.”

Figure 12. A photo taken in 2002 in the offices of the Vietnamese-language newspaper Người Việt (the Vietnamese People). From the left, the people are: Minh Phú, Đỗ Quý Toàn, Trần Mộng Tú, Bùi Bích Hà, Hoàng Vĩnh, and Phạm Phú Minh. This was the period when Trần Mộng Tú, together with Bùi Bích Hà, was acting as the general editor of the Vietnamese Family Women’s Monthly” (2002–2005). [Ngọc Dung, personal archives].

Figure 13. The bilingual poetry collection The Defiant Muse (Nàng Thơ Ngạo Mạn), published in 2007 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York. This is the only publication that includes Trần Mộng Tú’s poem “The Lonely Cat” (Con Mèo Cô Đơn).

An AP Reunion After Thirty-six Years (Saigon 1975, Little Saigon 2011)

In 2011, in a place abroad, the first reunion of former members of the Associated Press Agency Saigon took place in the offices of the newspaper Người Việt in Little Saigon, California.

Figure 14. The AP Reunion participants. From the left are: Neal Ulevich (AP), Terry Volkerstoffer (from the journal Tự Do), Carl Robinson (AP), Trần Mộng Tú (AP), Frank (TMT’s husband), Phương Dung Robinson (Carl’s wife), Đặng Văn Phước, dressed in black (AP photographer), Murray Fromsen (Tự Do), Linda Deutch (independent journalist), Valerie Komor (Tự Do), Nick Út (AP photographer), Edie Lederer (a Tự Do journalist), Dick Pyle (AP Briefing Room) and his wife; the person seated in front holding a photo is Lư Xây (the AP Dark Room Director).  [Trần Mộng Tú, personal archives].

Burning Photos Taken at a Wedding and at a Memorial Service

“I felt I had entered the final phase of my life,” observed TMT after her seventieth birthday. No longer knowing when she would be “swept into oblivion by the wind,” she said,

I can’t bring myself to leave my children a random cluster of materials. They wouldn’t burn them for fear of grieving their mother, but if they kept them they wouldn’t know where to keep them. Well, if can manage to find a way to save others from situations of sadness and indecision, I feel I should do so. I am already acquainted with pain. I am now hanging on to a little pile of dust.

She had about a hundred images of her marriage and of the funeral service that followed. She burned half of them at home. The rest she took down to California and burned them as well. She felt severe pain as she did so, and tears streamed down her face.

Figure 15. Burning photos of her wedding and the funeral service that followed, amid tears, turning her memorabilia into piles of dust on October 31, 2016, in the home of Bùi Bích Hà. [Trần Mộng Tú, personal archives].

TMT has no means of remembering how many poems she has written. Because she had no computer in her first fifteen years of exile, she wrote them all by hand in that period. She was always able to compose. Whether driving her car, standing still at a corner, or stuck in highway traffic, ideas came to her and she wrote them down. Once in that period she ran into a telephone pole, and once she ran into a truck preceding her because she was scribbling something on the steering wheel. Now, when she straightens the house, she sometimes comes across poems that she does not remember writing.

Is the Woman in the Photo Me?
Someone sent an image from the web: a youthful woman of Saigon,
White clothing on her form, white headband on her hair,
Walking forty years ago upon a Saigon street.
The woman in the photo, is she me?
Why do I recognize her form at once? 

A hundred women in Saigon are just like me,
A thousand headbands on the heads of widows.
The widow’s lips retain a trace of red,
Oh why do I instinctively protest?
Saigon that day was white throughout with headbands;
Those youthful women, all with eyes bedimmed by tears,
Following the hands that led them to a grave,
Saigon’s incense smoke is now all gone,
The innocent young widows now are gray and faded,
Looking at the image I recognize the youthful form
And softly call her name: “Trần Thị Born to War.”

 - TMT, April 30, 2009.

A Verse with the Word “If”
If Spring should ever actually exist,
Then I’ll forget all other seasons.
If you should ever come back in the flesh,
Then I’ll forget there ever was a war.

 - TMT.

It is 2023 but these Lines Still Carry on the Poem About a Certain April
Yesterday
Was here like Spring’s first day
The month of March is almost over;
April looks ahead, a tear that waits to drop.
My homeland’s March that year
The cities were all gripped in fear,
The streets all ran with blood
On every shore injustice reigned
A soldier’s life had just collapsed.. 

Combat boots had souls
And helmets all had minds,
Soldiers’ blouses all enclosed a heart;
Everything that clothed your form
Was a “Memoriаl Speech.”

In March,
People trаmpled people
Boats were pulled to sea,
Voices of appeal grew hoarse, then still,
Sounds of weeping were like wings of errant birds.

In March,
I came to seek you, mother.
Go, my child,
I’m old, I’ll stay behind.

In March,
A husband came to seek his wife;
Go, my dear,
And have the children go.
I’m a fighting man,
I’ll stay.

And thus, the mother lost her child,
Not knowing where he disappeared;
And thus the woman lost her husband,
Not knowing where he ceased to be.

In April,
All the land was lost,
All was lost for good,
And not a thing remained.

Things external to the self
May yet be found again,
But broken fragments in the heart,
Fall slowly piece by piece,
The day that I began to tread
The road of exile; fragments
That I’ll never find again.

The ones who suffer exile
Those of any country,
Lose fragments of their hearts
So when they die, they die
With hearts that lack completion,
And some who die
With spacious cavities beneath their ribs,
Have lost their hearts entirely.

March has entered spring time here;
And April’s filled with cherry blossoms,
Each bloom a tear from reddened eyes
That falls upon my heart.

 - TMT, March 20, 2023.

The Verse and Prose of TMT

From the time her initial poem appeared until the present moment, more than half a century has passed, in which her poetry and journalism have continued to appear. As she steps now into advanced old age, she shows not the slightest sign of slowing down. TMT is still there, like a freshwater spring, ever new and with no end in sight.

One may say that the excellence of her poetry lies in its simplicity, its freedom from restraints imposed by particular principles or formulae. TMT’s poetry is like a tale simply told, and at times brief as a piece of news and the poetic essence of her work lies directly in each word. And not only in poetry—TMT also writes prose that is like poetry.

In the days when Trần Mộng Tú was emerging from childhood and took her place in this world, she was nourished by its sweet and bitter fruits—les nourritures terrestres (the title of a prose piece by André Gide, 1897) and TMT still writes poetry; poetry and prose are the air that TMT breathes.

To compose an adequate account of the very special life of the poet Trần Mộng Tú, one would truly need to write a book. Let me use this occasion to suggest to all my young friends within and beyond the country that they create a dissertation: Trần Mộng Tú: the product of a war, but at the same time the apostle of a culture of peace. Such a portrait of TMT would be an attractive and rich subject for them to dive into and explore. 

Ngô Thế Vinh,
Little Saigon, Fourth of July, 2023.

Works Cited

American Literature Textbook, Glencoe (McGraw-Hill, A Division of McGraw-Hill Companies, 2000).

Bình Thủy 1969. Hồi ức Trần Mộng Tú, Mưa Sài Gòn Mưa Seattle. Nxb Văn Mới, California, 2006.

Ba câu hỏi cho Trần Mộng Tú. Phùng Nguyễn. Da Màu 27/09/2016 https://damau.org/44226/ba-cau-hoi-cho-tran-mong-tu

[1] After 1975, it became known that Phạm Xuân An, though a Time employee, had worked throughout the war as an espionage agent for the communist side. He is the subject of two books by American journalists.

[2] This is the title of a song cycle concerning Vietnamese expatriates by Phạm Duy.