AGAINST THE FLOOD
By MA VAN KHANG
Translated by Phan Thanh Hao and Wayne Karlin. Willimantic, Connecticut: Curbstone Press, 2000. 309 pages, $15.95 (paperback)

Kim Ninh

Published in early 1999, the novel Against the Flood by Ma Van Khang immediately attracted attention with its depiction of sex and politics more frank than socialist Vietnam is used to. The novel's larger context is contemporary Vietnamese society as the country makes the uneasy transition from the clear-cut economic, political, and social guidelines of a socialist system to a more market-oriented environment with all its inherent ambiguities. The central plot, though, revolves around the relationship between a proofreader named Hoan and her boss, Khiem, a prominent writer who also happens to be editor-in-chief of a publishing house.
As the novel opens, Hoan and Khiem finally consummate their longstanding relationship. It is a reckless act since Khiem is married (and it turns out be the most hopeful act of the novel). Then, Khiem is outmaneuvered by a number of his colleagues who capitalize on the fact that his latest novel has been banned. A violent confrontation with Thoa, Khiem's wife, sparks Hoan's departure from Hanoi. From that point on, the two lovers never meet again, though the reader follows them on their individual journeys through hell and back.
Khiem falls seriously ill and has to confront both his wife's infidelity and the news of his mother's death. Upon his recovery, he retreats to his village. His trip by boat back to the midlands is one of the most lyrical passages of the novel, conveying both the physical harshness of the land and his distraught state of mind. The boat at first fails, then succeeds in moving upstream past a large whirlpool, as though to illustrate that it is the determination of men that overcomes adversity, as was the case during the Vietnam War and now with Khiem. Eventually, aided in part by new friends, Khiem takes up his pen again.
Hoan takes a more harrowing route. She also returns to her village, but finds no solace in an environment transformed by the new market economy: "The roads had been widened, and everywhere old houses had been torn down, dozens of new hotels, guest houses, and restaurants were jammed in next to each other, all of them pushing her recollections of an idyllic village life into the realm of legend." Despondent and disillusioned, Hoan joins a drug-running network and even runs her own successful operation, but soon discovers her need to return to Khiem. The love between them remains the one true beauty, which can only be recovered by, in Hoan's words, "living bravely." The novel ends with the promise of the two lovers' reunion.

Against the Flood ponders the question of how one can manage to live an honest and graceful life in a world filled with greed, pettiness, and depravity. Love that has been tested by adversity is clearly one solution, but embedded within the author's worldview is an extraordinary emphasis on literature as a humanizing agent, with social power. Throughout the novel, people express themselves through literary means: Khiem is a well-respected writer; Hoan regularly writes poetry in her journal; and people whom Khiem meets along the way trade stories and recite poetry. Literature becomes a repository of truth and ideals that can clarify difficult life choices and offer comfort in confusing times.
Even though Against the Flood is a profoundly idealistic book, somehow it does not manage to get beyond its moral indignation to approach the extraordinary complexities of life in the new Vietnam. The nouveaux riches, for example, are mentioned disdainfully several times but with no discussion of who they are. For all the references to the changes in the countryside, the novel focuses on a set of characters and situations that are essentially untouched by developments that have affected Vietnam in the last decade. Khiem's book may have been banned because of its content, but his professional downfall was not because of the ban but rather his colleagues' use of it to force him out. It was not politics in the larger sense, but office politics.
Perhaps because of Ma Van Khang's moral agenda, characters are drawn too broadly and situations come across as contrived. Bad characters are uniformly portrayed as vulgar and animal-like, and good characters are all beautiful and virtuous. The contrast between Khiem' wife, Thoa, and his lover, Hoan, is particularly extreme. Thoa is a sexual predator with "narrow eyes gleaming with a repressed lust," whereas Hoan is described as being "in her forties, her body ripened to a harmonious and lovely maturity." Every man who crosses Hoan's path falls deeply in love with her. It is Hoan's turn to drug smuggling that weakens the novel considerably. She shows no understanding of the consequences of her action, and, hence, no remorse. If the intent was to emphasize her hopelessness and her detached nature, it was an unconvincing effort, to this reader.
Curbstone Press has taken on the admirable task of bringing quality translations of Vietnamese literary works to a Western audience. This is the third in a series, and one hopes to see more. In Against the Flood, Ma Van Khang manages to capture some of the difficult challenges that face those who want to maintain dignity and integrity in the face of chaos and shifting social and moral values. This is an issue that will continue to be relevant as Vietnam undergoes even more changes, but novelists who insist on a big role for literature and want to ask the big questions need to be much sharper in their assessments of past as well as current conditions. If the nouveaux riches are to be viewed with contempt, then what can we say about the old socialist system that produced the greedy men and women and the deadening intellectual structure described in the novel?

Kim Ninh writes regularly on Asian politics and culture. Her book, The Politics of Culture in Socialist Vietnam, 1945-1965, is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press.