HOME > REVIEWS > NO MAN'S LAND

Remembering the 'American War'

NO MAN'S LAND
By Duong Thu Huong
(Hyperion, 402 pages, $24.95)

Mien, a Vietnamese woman, is happily married and the mother of a son. Hers is a second marriage, we are told, following a youthful elopement that involved more pain than joy. She comes home from the forest one day to find that her first husband, declared dead in the "American war," has returned. Village officials expect Mien to honor the veteran, as do her neighbors, and Mien's own conscience instructs her to abandon happiness and prosperity for this shabby man, whom she scarcely recognizes.

That's the front story of "No Man's Land," a novel by Duong Thu Huong. But the title refers equally to the nation in which the author now lives in internal exile -- a popular writer, age 58, long at odds with the Vietnamese government. Huong's books are banned in the Democratic Republic for their clear-eyed account of life "amid the dirty, hungry masses," as she puts it in "No Man's Land," "amid the heads bowed over bowls of watery [soup] in the grim state cafeterias, like livestock from numbered feeding troughs, eating from tin spoons that had been clipped to prevent theft."

For the Western reader, this back story is easily as fascinating as the book itself. The Vietnam War, as we would call it, is seldom mentioned in "No Man's Land," and then only in passing: The one gift that Mien's first husband brings to her from his long absence is a bar of Camay soap.

The translation, by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong, is completely convincing. Mien's second husband, reflecting on their shattered marriage, realizes that 13 years have passed "as swiftly as the shadow of a cloud across the mountains." Not since Norman di Giovanni's renderings of Jorge Luis Borges's early fiction have I found a foreign story so accessible, or so moving.

---- Daniel Ford