A Mother’s Tale and Other Stories by Khanh Ha
Publisher: C&R Press (October 15, 2021)
Category: Linked Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
Tour dates: October 11-November 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1949540239
Available in Print and ebook, 150 pages
Description Mother’s Tale and Other Stories by Khanh Ha
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 set ting and atmosphere appear at times otherworldly through their land scape 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.
Excerpt Mother’s Tale and Other Stories by Khanh Ha
From the Short Story, A Mother’s Tale
The barge arrives very late, the rain falling in gray sheets across the quay.
I wipe my face and pull my raincoat tight around me. I cough. My throat hurts. People are coming onto the quay. Bicycles and motor scooters rev in tandem in their lanes. The air smells of gasoline fumes. The wet dusk glows with the scooters’ headlights. I watch for the next wave of passengers, those on foot. Waiting behind them are the big, blue trucks. Rain slants and pops on the quay, on the gray-steel hatch of the barge’s liftgate. I scan the blurred faces of the passengers hurrying up the quay, nylon bags, pink, blue, in hands, jute bags slung across shoulders. They stream past me, rustling in their nylon raincoats. Here, the locals bring them along after checking the color of the sky and shapes of the clouds.
Then I see them: a girl and a white woman, both wearing wide-brimmed straw hats but no raincoats, lugging their suitcases down the hatch. They are coming toward me, as I stand to one side, hunched, on the quay’s slope. I raise my hand. “Mrs. Rossi?”
The woman turns toward me. “Hello!” she says, half smiling, half wincing from the pelting rain.
I extend my hand to help her with the suitcase. Instead, her hand comes up to shake mine.
“Please, let me help,” I say, reaching for her suitcase.
“Are you from the inn?” she says.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m terribly sorry about the delay. I thought you must’ve left. I’m awfully glad to see you still here.”
“Yes, ma’am. May I take you and your daughter to the car?”
“Yes, of course.” She smiles, wrinkling the corners of her blue eyes. She takes the girl’s hand and both of them follow me to the Peugeot, parked on the ramp. She talks to the girl about getting raincoats for their stay, for monsoon season has arrived. Although wrinkled and gray, perhaps in her late sixties, Mrs. Rossi has a clear, cheerful voice.
I open the rear door. The girl says, “Thank you,” as she slides onto the seat. She must be Vietnamese, slender, rather tall. Her blue jeans are notched above the ankles, and her light skin blends perfectly with her scarlet blouse, collarless, fringed white. Mrs. Rossi takes off her wet straw hat, shaking it against her leg, and says, “No one here carries an umbrella.”
“People here wear raincoats when it rains,” I say as she clears a wet lock of white hair from her brow.
“In Ho Chi Minh City, too?” Mrs. Rossi asks.
“Yes, everywhere.”
I put their suitcases in the trunk and close it. The rain smears the windshield as I drive through the town. Shop lights flicker. Water is rising on the main street and motor scooters sloshing through standing water kick up fantails in light-colored spouts. Ho Chi Minh City. The old name is Saigon. I hunch forward to look through the smeary windshield. Rain drums the car roof. From the ferry comes the sound of a horn. Another barge is arriving.
“This looks like a badly crowded Chinese quarter,” Mrs. Rossi says from the back seat.
“Very crowded, ma’am. You never see the sun when you walk the streets here.”
A surge of running water against the tires shakes the steering wheel. Water is rising to the shops’ thresholds; store awnings flap like wings of some wet fowl.
“Are you from here by any chance?” Mrs. Rossi asks me.
“No. Most townspeople here come from somewhere else. Drifters, ma’am.”
“You too?” Mrs. Rossi asks with a chuckle.
“Me too,” I say, coughing, my throat dry as sand.
“I didn’t catch your name.”
“Giang, ma’am.”
She repeats my name. “Can you spell it for me?” Then, hearing it spelled, she says, “So it’s Zhang, like the Chinese name.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m Catherine Rossi. My daughter is Chi Lan.”
The girl offers a hello from the back seat. I simply nod. Mrs. Rossi says, “My daughter understands Vietnamese. Only she can’t speak it very well.”
“She must not have lived here long.”
“No, she didn’t. She became my daughter when she was five years old. She’s eighteen now.”
“You adopted her, ma’am?” I glance again at the rearview mirror and meet the girl’s eyes. I feel odd asking her mother about her in her presence.
“Yes, I adopted her in 1974. Just a year before the collapse of South Vietnam. How fortunate for us!”
“You came here that year?”
“Yes.” Mrs. Rossi clears her throat. “And what were you doing in ’74?”
I give her question some thought, then say, “I was in the South Vietnamese Army.”
“Were you an interpreter?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then you must excuse my assumption. You speak English very well. And I’m glad you do. Otherwise we’d be making sign language now.”
She laughs and the girl smiles. Her oval face, framed by raven, shoulder-length hair, is fresh. Her eyebrows curve gracefully, like crayoned black. I remember a face like that from my past.
“Were you an army lifer?” asks Mrs. Rossi.
“What is that?” I ask.
“Did you spend a lifetime career in the army?”
“No, ma’am. Only a few years.”
“Did you teach school before that?”
These curious Americans. “I was on the other side. A soldier of the North Vietnamese Army.”
“Were you born in the North?”
“Yes.”
“And then you defected to the South and joined the South Vietnamese Army?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“They have a name for those. I’m trying to remember.”
Then I hear the girl say it for her: hoi chánh.
Mrs. Rossi seems to be deep in thought as we leave the town, following the one-lane road north toward the U Minh district. The headlights pick up windblown rain in sprays, blurring the blacktop. There is no lane divider. Along the road drenched palms toss in the wind. Wet leaves and white cajeput flowers fall onto the windshield, and the wipers sweep over them, pressing them to the glass.
Praise Mother’s Tale and Other Stories by Khanh Ha
WINNER C&R PRESS 2021 FICTION AWARD
“. . . a highly recommended literary work for those who seek fictional pieces embedded with the spirit and history of the Vietnam War and the nation. . . . This juxtaposition of pain and beauty runs through every story and makes them impossible to put down and hard to forget. . . . Literary collections strong in Asian cultural representation should consider A Mother’s Tale & Other Stories a key acquisition.—Midwest Book Review
“The eleven linked short stories of this collection revisit the complexities of the controversial Vietnam War. . . . The author navigates this amalgam of the living, the dead, and those caught in a hard limbo between the two extremes with grace and a superb sense of dramatic rhythm. . . . This compelling collection could only be imagined and written from the perspective of a native intimately familiar with his national culture and history, making this a must-read for anyone interested in the French Indochina and Vietnam conflicts.”—The US Review of Books
“It is often the second generation, the children of immigrants and refugees, who add their stories to enrich and expand the American literary canon. The best of them also add to and expand the human canon—a feat Khanh Ha accomplishes with grace and power in this collection.”—Wayne Karlin, winner of the Juniper Prize in Fiction
“In these eleven poetic tales, Khanh Ha individualizes the Vietnam War and makes it hauntingly real. . . . Told with Heming- way-esque simplicity, these stories assail us like ghosts and linger way beyond their initial reading.”—James Hanna, author of The Siege and Call Me Pomeroy.
About Khanh Ha
Khanh Ha is the author of Flesh, The Demon Who Peddled Longing, and Mrs. Rossi’s Dream. He is a seven-time Pushcart nominee, finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize, Many Voices Project, Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and The University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize. He is the recipient of the Sand Hills Prize for Best Fiction, the Robert Watson Literary Prize in Fiction, and the Orison Anthology Award for Fiction. Mrs. Rossi’s Dream, was named Best New Book by Booklist and a 2019 Foreword Reviews INDIES Silver Winner and Bronze Winner. A Mother’s Tale & Other Stories has already won the C&R Press Fiction Prize.
Website: http://www.authorkhanhha.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/KhanhHa69784776
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorkhanhha
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