Author of Mrs. Rossi’s Dream, a 2019 Foreword Reviews INDIES Silver and Bronze Winner (War & Military Adult Fiction); and A Mother’s Tale & Other Stories, a Foreword Reviews INDIES Bronze Winner
From Vietnam to America, this story collection, jewel-like, evocative and layered, brings to the readers a unique sense of love, passions and the tragedy of rape, all together contrasting a darker theme of perils. The titular story captures a simple love story that transcends cultural barriers. The opening story “A Woman-Child” brings the shy eroticism of adolescence set against a backdrop of the seaside with its ever present ecological beauty. A youthful love affair between an older American man and a much younger Vietnamese girl has its poignant brevity in “All the Pretty Little Horses.” In “The Yin-Yang Market” magical realism and the beauty of innocence abounds in deep dark places, teeming with life and danger. “A Mute Girl’s Yarn” tells a magical coming-of-age story like sketches in a child’s fairy book.
Bringing together the damned, the unfit, the brave who succumb by their own doing to the call of fate, their desire to survive never dying, it is a great journey to inhabit this world where redemption of human goodness arises out of violence and beauty to become part of its essential mercy.
Review:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Having read one of Khanh Ha’s books before, I knew his writing style is going to leave an impact on me, at least for a few days, with the melancholic plots and stories with very real and relatable characters. This book and its short stories are no different too. I particularly enjoy Khanh’s stories, as they depict struggles the Vietnamese face, from the time of war and its impact post-war. The everyday lives of people are filled with sadness, contentment, and a mixture of feelings that leave you feeling sad.
I like how each story, like the one in The Woman-Child, reflects the life of a young girl, and how being born into a poor family, she yearns to go to school, and also perceives Americans to be rich in general. Overall, I loved reading these stories and I would highly recommend it if you would love to explore different cultures and the impact wars have on people.
A Mother’s Tale is a tale of salvaging one’s soul from received and inherited war-related trauma. Within the titular beautiful story of a mother’s love for her son is the cruelty and senselessness of the Vietnam War, the poignant human connection, and a haunting narrative whose setting and atmosphere appear at times otherworldly through their landscape and inhabitants. Captured in the vivid descriptions of Vietnam’s country and culture are a host of characters, tortured and maimed and generous and still empathetic despite many obstacles, including a culture wrecked by losses. Somewhere in this chaos readers will find a tender link between the present-day survivors and those already gone. Rich and yet buoyant with a vision-like quality, this collection shares a common theme of love and loneliness, longing and compassion, where beauty is discovered in the moments of brutality, and agony is felt in ecstasy.
Review
A great book consisting of 11 short stories based on the Vietnam war and how the war has impacted people from all walks of life. One of my favourite stories is “The Bridge Behind”, where we are introduced to an old man who suffered the loss of his wife and now struggles to keep up with the everyday life amidst the cruelty of the soldiers who have invaded their place. We see how rude the soldiers were towards the people of Vietnam, including the old man, who literally lives life at the mercy of the soldiers. Finally, we see how an explosion that took place shattered the old man’s life as he watches the explosion with tears.
I feel like the stories are written so authentically that anyone reading them could feel the emotions of the characters and what the stings of war could do to people. At times, I also feel that we are fortunate to have not gone through them in life.
A five star for this book! Wonderfully written. Very poignant stories.
“I live in a coastal town in the deep south of the Mekong Delta. During the war this was IV Corps, which saw many savage fights. Although the battles might have long been forgotten, some places cannot forget.” Thus begins the harrowing yet poignant story of a North Vietnamese communist defector who spends ten years in a far-flung reform prison after the war, and now, in 1987, a free man again, finds work as caretaker at a roadside inn in the U Minh region. One day new guests arrive at the inn: an elderly American woman and her daughter, an eighteen-year-old Vietnamese girl adopted at the age of five from an orphanage in the Mekong Delta before the war ended. Catherine Rossi has come to this region to find the remains of her son, a lieutenant who went missing-in-action during the war. Mrs. Rossi’s Dream tells the stories of two men in time parallel: Giang, the thirty-nine-year-old war veteran; Nicola Rossi, a deceased lieutenant in the United States Army, the voice of a spirit. From the haunting ugliness of the Vietnam War, the stories of these two men shout, cry, and whisper to us the voices of love and loneliness, barbarity and longing, lived and felt by a multitude of people from all walks of life: the tender adolescent vulnerability of a girl toward a man who, as a drifter and a war-hardened man, draws beautifully in his spare time; the test of love and faith endured by a mother whose dogged patience even baffles the local hired hand who thinks the poor old lady must have gone out of her mind, and whose determination drives her into the spooky forest, rain or shine, until one day she claims she has sensed an otherworldly presence in there with her. In the end she wishes to see, just once, a river the local Vietnamese call “The River of White Water Lilies,” the very river her son saw, now that all her hopes to find his remains die out. Just then something happens. She finds out where he has lain buried for twenty years and how he was killed.
Please read the author interview with Khanh Ha here
Review:
If you love books that teleport you to a different culture and time, Mrs. Rossi’s Dream will not disappoint you!
This story is about Mrs. Rossi, who had lost her son in the Vietnam War. She arrives at Vietnam and comes in contact with Giang, who was a communist defector in the Vietnam war. She tells him the purpose of her visit to Vietnam; which is to find the remains of her son.
The story is told from the voices of Giang and Mrs. Rossi’s late son. The author had done an excellent job in weaving the gripping details of the Vietnam War, and the harrowing experiences the warriors had gone through.
It felt like as if the readers are invited in to the world of the Vietnam War and at many times, the book would make you feel so bad for those affected by war. It somehow reminded me of my visit to the Memorial Park at Cambodia, which was very disturbing.
A book I cannot put down and I loved how the author invites us to the lives of the two main characters of the book, coupled with the love of a mother who relentlessly searches for the remains of her dead son.
Khanh Ha is the author of Flesh (Black Heron Press) and The Demon Who Peddled Longing (Underground Voices). He is a seven-time Pushcart nominee, a Best Indie Lit New England nominee, a twice finalist of THE WILLIAM FAULKNER-WISDOM CREATIVE WRITING AWARD, the recipient of Sand Hills Prize for Best Fiction, and Greensboro Review’s ROBERT WATSON LITERARY PRIZE IN FICTION. The Demon Who Peddled Longing was honored by Shelf Unbound as a Notable Indie Book. Ha graduated from Ohio University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.
Sometimes there’s fear but never self-doubts as a writer. It takes time, patience and a whole lot of self-depreciation, but never self-doubt. There’s fear for physical disasters, but never irrational fear. I can’t help remembering the words from Jiddu Krishnamurti: “If you are totally free of fear, then Heaven is with you.”
What makes you happiest?
The harmony that comes from my family. You long to go home where you have love. Having both, you’re blessed. And love is the oil that erases friction. I believe that was said by Friedrich Nietzsche.
Why do you write?
There was this dinky book-for-rent store in Hue, Vietnam, that my older brother and I used to haunt. I was nine. We would pool our money we got from Grandma and rent all the books we could read, most of them Chinese classics. My favorites then were The Tale of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West. One day we ran out of books to rent.
Bookish
addiction! I started making up stories in a chapbook. Did I want to become a
writer someday? No. But something was sowed in my fertile mind during that
time. It must have started with The
Count of Monte Cristo. Fifty some volumes of it in Vietnamese
translation, pocket-sized, were sent to us in serial each week from my mother
who was then living in Saigon. I would devour each volume and grow hungry for
more. Outlandish worlds. They would ebb and flow in my mind, leaving the fecund
silt on its bottom, and one day in my teenage years I wanted to become a writer.
What writing are you most proud of?
All of the books I have published: “Flesh,” “The Demon Who Peddled Longing,” “Mrs. Rossi’s Dream.”
Location and life experiences can really influence writing. Tell us where you grew up and where you now live?
I grew up in Hue, Vietnam, where my childhood was imbued with the cultural intellect of a city known for its moss-stained citadel, the imperial tombs nestled in the pine forest, temples and pagodas tucked away at the foot of gentle hills by a quiet stream. Its damp, foggy climate had left moisture damage on the ancient buildings, on old houses with moss-covered yin-yang roof tiles. As a child, I lived in its mysterious atmosphere, half real, half magic. I used to walk home under the shade of the Indian almond trees, the poon trees. At the base of these old trees I would pass a shrine. If I went with my grandmother, she would push my head down. “Don’t stare at it,” grandmother said. “That’s disrespect to the genies.” Like many other children, I had an indelible belief in animism. An unseen presence dwelling in an odd-looking rock by the roadside where people placed a bowl of rice grains and a stick of incense long gone cold. Those anthropomorphic images sown in a child’s mind later became inspirations for my writing. Then I moved to the United States for my college education, and this has become my second homeland ever since. I learn to blend my eastern culture with the western culture. My journalism background taught me to write lean prose; but I’m a novelist, not a journalist. A journalist targets an audience; a novelist builds a make-believe world. It may be a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea; but if it’s believable, readers will come.
What is hardest – getting published, writing or marketing?
Hardest is getting your work published. And I dread having to whore myself for that. Writing isn’t a lucrative business, unless writing ransom notes—someone said that. Then you’ll come to appreciate what Hemingway once said: “Most live writers do not exist. Their fame is created by critics who always need a genius of the season, someone they understand completely and feel safe in praising, but when these fabricated geniuses are dead they will not exist.” That’s the major frustration for a published writer. But that frustration is negated by the sense of self-fulfillment when you hold a copy of your book in your hands. Your book is the link that connects you with the world.
Is
there anyone you’d like to acknowledge and thank for their support?
My deepest gratitude goes to my co-pubishersMartin and Judith Shepard and my
wife whose love and devotion
has sustained me over the years.
Tell
us about your new book? Why did you write it?
My next novel is set in Dien Bien Phu where the French army
surrendered in 1954. It’s a love story. Think of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, because the
novel spans three decades from 1954, beginning in the valley of Dien Bien Phu,
that small valley in the fog and rain of the northwestern forest, a place and
time that captivates me all my life, where love blossoms and dies and blossoms
again after the lovers have lost each other, aged with the years. There were
things left out from “Mrs. Rossi’s Dream,” which later morphed into this new
novel. “Father once said in his diary that a man’s karma could be passed on to
his children,” said a 16-year-old mute girl whose inheritance from her
estranged father is his lifetime artwork. Thus begins the historical tale by the
young girl. Amid the horrific stories on the rice road, the cannon road, and in
the trenches is a love story between her father—an artist-reporter at
frontline—and a singer-performer who traveled with an entertainment ensemble to
the frontline. Their poignant story ended when they became separated after the
victory of Dien Bien Phu and her father was then sent to South Vietnam to fight
the American Vietnam war. From his diary, his sketchbook, his lifetime artwork,
and the work he contributed to the Must
Win newspaper at frontline, Hai Yen recreates a love story so innocent and
vulnerable within an epic Stalingrad of the East through her own sensitive
narrative.
When
you are not writing, how do you like to relax?
I read a lot between the long breaks from
writing novels. We’d vacation, as a family, sometimes to the seaside, sometimes
out of the country.
What do you hope people will take away from your writing? How will your words make them feel?
I never intend to send readers any message in any novel I write. I don’t believe in it. But I like novels that give me food for thought. I like novels that offer a redemptive value. I hope Mrs. Rossi’s Dream does. A good book will haunt you. I read The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner and found myself envying him. I believe that writers have influence on one another. Influence, not inspiration. Maybe someday what I wrote might bear some influence on some aspiring writers. If you are a reader, what you read at the early age―if you always trust your childhood memory―will become the undertone of what you want to read as an adult.
What’s the most memorable thing asked/said by a reader about your work? It came from a critic who reviewed Flesh, my debut novel. She said: “The book opens with two epigraphs, one from Charles Farrère: ‘Yes, I am no longer a man, no longer a man at all. But I have not yet become anything else.’ The second from Mr. Arthur Rimbaud, which in light of the outcome of Mr. Khanh’s exquisite book is the perfect introduction, and one to which you will return when you have finished the last page of the book: ‘When the world is reduced to a single dark wood for our four eyes’ astonishment—a beach for two faithful children, a musical house for one pure sympathy—I shall find you.’
“It is my honor to have been able to review this book by Mr.
Khanh Ha, the first book of his that I hope is one of many to come. I cannot
encourage you enough to read it, and savor all the morsels, and gather every
scent that rise up from every page.”
What is your work schedule like when you are writing?
A routine helps settle my mind before I write. My routine of
a typical day is to eat a light breakfast and be at my desk between 7:30 – 8 a.m.
I drink black coffee throughout the morning while I’m at work―no snacks. I
listen to classical or relaxation music while I write. It helps soothe my mind
unless I do need an absolute moment of quiet to capture my thoughts. In that
case, I write in the quiet. I read during my writing breaks. Have lunch, read a
newspaper, then be back at work until 4 p.m.
That’s the capsule of a day in a life of a writer. And it starts over
again the next day. If a novel takes a year or longer to write, the routine of
each day is duplicated over again like clockwork.
What challenges do you come across when writing/creating your story? Family crisis. You feel wrecked—as a husband, a father. The writer in you is annihilated because of that. But what annoys you the most while you’re writing a novel comes from interruption and sickness. In that order.
Do you have anything specific you’d like to tell the readers?
If you’re an aspired writer, consider how your day-to-day life influences your writing. In fact, it’s reciprocal. Live right and you write better. Write well and you live better.
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