LatinosUSA

A short story in Vietnamese by Mai Thảo
Translator: Nguyễn Thị Phương Trâm

Halong Bay, Vietnam. Photography by Nguyễn Thị Phương Trâm

Picture a boat dock in a small town. A winter afternoon. Cement pillars damp with dew. The orange flicker of oil lamps spilling out from under the low grass huts. People huddled together on benches shoulder to shoulder like a wall looking out onto the dock. Girls in black pants, loose white sleeves under cardigans embroidered like a chess board, red and green woolen jumpers knitted with canarium, beehives, rope, ladles ladling food from deep yellow deerskin pots onto a plate the shape of a peach. Pork belly stew, sticky brown sauce, an abundant starry fat deposit floating on top, scattered with fresh green scallions, substantially textured fake soft-shell turtle dish with snails, green banana, galangal and yogurt, thinly sliced braised carp, each slice still holding a cluster of yellow fish eggs. The rain sprinkling. A shirtless Chinese merchant sitting under a make ship shelter at end of the jetty gets up and steps down into his boat puffing on cigarette smoke.

And the boy stood there. He wears a white bucket hat with the strings wrapped tightly around his chin. His bamboo cloth trousers rustling. His tunic far too big for him reached halfway down his ankles, he had to rolled up his sleeves twice, otherwise they would have covered the tips of his fingers.

Note:

Mai Thảo [1927-1998] real name is Nguyen Dang Quy, another pen name: Nguyen Dang, he was born on June 8, 1927 in Con market, Quan Phuong Ha commune, Hai Hau district, Nam Dinh province (originally from Tho Khoi village, Gia Lam district, Bac Ninh province, the same hometown and related to the painter Le Thi Luu), his father was a merchant and wealthy landowner. Mai Thao absorbed his mother’s love of literature from Bac Ninh. As a child, he studied at a village school, went to Nam Dinh high school and then Hanoi (studied at Do Huu Vi school, later Chu Van An). In 1945, he followed the school to Hung Yen. When the war broke out in 1946, the family evacuated from Hanoi to Con market, in the “House of the Salt Water Region”, from then on Mai Thao left home to Thanh Hoa to join the resistance, wrote for newspapers, participated in art troupes traveling everywhere from Lien Khu Ba, Lien Khu Tu to the Viet Bac resistance zone. This period left a deep mark on his literature. In 1951, Mai Thao abandoned the resistance and went into the city to do business. In 1954, he migrated to the South. He wrote short stories for the newspapers Dan Chu, Lua Viet, and Nguoi Viet. He was the editor-in-chief of the newspapers Sang Tao (1956), Nghe Thuat (1965), and from 1974, he oversaw the Van newspaper. He participated in the literature and art programs of radio stations in Saigon from 1960 to 1975. On December 4, 1977, Mai Thao crossed the sea. After 7 days and nights at sea, the boat arrived at Pulau Besar, Malaysia. In early 1978, he was sponsored by his brother to go to the United States. Shortly after, he collaborated with Thanh Nam’s Dat Moi newspaper and several other overseas newspapers. In July 1982, he republished the Van magazine, and was editor-in-chief until 1996, when due to health problems, he handed it over to Nguyen Xuan Hoang; Two years later he died in Santa Ana, California on January 10, 1998.

Nguyễn Thị Phương Trâm, the blogger, poet, and translator, was born in 1971 in Phu Nhuan, Saigon, Vietnam. The pharmacist currently lives and works in Western Sydney, Australia.