THE DRAGON HUNT: Five Stories
By TRAN VU
Translated from the Vietnamese by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong New York: Hyperion, 1999. 146 pages, $21

Kim Ninh

A boat teeming with refugees runs aground on a coral reef. By the time it is ready to face the open sea once more, twenty-five people have perished-some from being thrown overboard in an attempt to lighten the load. This story, told in an almost dispassionate tone, leads off The Dragon Hunt: Five Stories by the young Vietnamese-French writer Tran Vu. An incestuous relationship develops within the confines of a small apartment in Paris; an adulterous liaison plays out under the watchful eyes of the inhabitants of a sleepy, ancient town in Vietnam; a group of friends come together for a time in an imaginary country to slaughter dragons for pleasure. The reader enters into worlds the author has constructed in which men and women are locked in a perpetual battle against each other and ultimately against themselves, consumed by history, memories, and myths.
Feelings of disengagement, on the one hand, and claustrophobia, on the other, permeate all five stories and convey the devastating psychological dislocation of the refugee experience. But for someone who is only thirty-seven and has lived in France for twenty years, Tran Vu responds to the new world in a deeply conservative manner: by looking back rather than forward. In sharp, at times lyrical prose, he asserts that history has a powerful hold on all Vietnamese, whether living in the old country or abroad. Sometimes that shared history is recent: leaving and its painful consequences. Sometimes it is ancient: the bloody destruction of Champa by the Vietnamese. Sometimes it is a myth of origin which once united a people but no longer does.
But how is that history defined and by whom? The past that Tran Vu refers to is one that he himself has constructed-what he imagines to be a particular Vietnamese past. The theme of history defining behavior, which runs throughout the collection, becomes less and less convincing as the author tries to make the connection across increasingly wide gaps of time and experience. What makes the brother and sister in "Gunboat on the Yangtze," one raped and the other badly disfigured while fleeing the country, cling to one another and justify their bizarre passion play has immediacy: they both have sacrificed something of themselves. The brutal psychology of the adulterous relationship in "The Back Streets of Hoi An" is grippingly detailed, but Tran Vu's attempt to construct a direct linkage between the cruelty of ancient history and the sadism that underlies the couple's mutual attraction is ultimately artificial. "The Dragon Hunt," the longest and the most explicitly mythical of the stories, suffers from a similar effort at historical weightiness; although there are moments when the inventiveness of the mythical conceit truly soars, lack of narrative control pulls the story in too many different directions.
These stories are more fascinating when viewed as explorations of the extremes to which people will pursue their desires regardless of consequences. Society with its mores and conventions barely exists here; the world is a brutal place in which women are used by men to satisfy their craving for war, power, and domination. Violence is equated with desire, and rape figures powerfully in virtually every story. Violence done to women as a metaphor for war is all the more discordant, however, because there seems to be such energy and fascination in Tran Vu's depiction of brutality.
In the "Notes from the Author" section at the end of the book, Tran Vu attempts to explain the "meaning" of these stories along somewhat grandiose lines concerning the refugee experience, morality, history, and myth. But the stories themselves cannot live up to these explanations, and the moral ambivalence that suffuses them belies the author's notes. The point of these stories may well be that morality is not possible when the self is not defined by any thing or any place. No one is to blame, and yet everyone participates in the savagery; cruelty has its own terrible beauty in the floating world as perceived by Tran Vu. As the narrator of "The Dragon Hunt" states:

In myself I feel the simultaneous presence of all things, the world dissolving, then condensing around me, as I lose this self, as it scatters, leaking through the cells of my body, sinking into matter, unconscious, inexplicable, impossible to experience or control in this cruel void of silence and stillness.
Everything freezes. Everything goes silent. I am alone. Naked. Wild.

Kim Ninh holds a doctorate in political science and an M.A in international relations from Yale University and has written on Vietnamese politics and culture for a variety of publications. She is currently the Assistant Coordinator of The Asia Foundation's Governance and Law Theme.