“Water: a Chronicle” by Nguyễn Ngọc Tư

Nguyễn Ngọc Tư

Nguyễn Ngọc Tư’s second novel, and the first to be rendered in English by Nguyễn An Lý opens with a mysterious description.

 

Day two thousand and forty-six, The Lord has nothing left but his heart. The woman who is to take it has arrived at the river, her babe in her arms.

 

What follows is a chronicle of nine accounts told by nine different characters living in the provinces of Vietnam through which the Mekong River runs its course, each providing clues as to who The Lord is, who the woman may be, and why she wants his heart. Among them, one is told through the voice of The Lord himself, another is the story of a villager who needed to evacuate his home due to a bizarre flood, another still is the voyeuristic observations of a newcomer to town whose neighbor has long been the topic of the town’s gossip. Most of the stories are told by ordinary people, and each of them either know person behind the cult figure of The Lord—originally an orphan who stumbled across an island near the delta that’s laden with gold—or know someone who could be the woman who travels with the baby in her arms—often mothers with an ill child, or mothers who have lost their child to miscarriages or disease.

One account is that of a news reporter, Phúc, who is tasked with investigating how this desperate mother “pulled down an empire” by taking The Lord’s heart. What this means remains unclear; even Phúc’s factual reporting fails to say whether or not the heart was physically taken and fed to the mother’s ailing baby, as is the insinuation. Her reporting ends on a cliffhanger, a “To be continued”, but is not returned to for the rest of the book. Sources say that the mother came from Phúc’s home village in the delta. Phúc is thus assigned this beat, though she is not eager to return—like many who came from this region, she had left to escape the poverty and diseases that endlessly haunts this underdeveloped region. The death of Phúc’s mother, who fell into a ditch because she was carrying too much produce on her bike on her way to sell them in the market, had cut the filial and only link that anchors her to this village. She leaves quickly after she has gathered the information necessary for her report:

 

My mum sleeping in her fresh tomb, my uncle drinking down bitter tea and breathing out bitter words, his dripping wife disappearing in and out of the kitchen with ellipses in her speech, I’d left them all behind.

 

Here, Nguyễn An Lý—the award-winning translator who has in recent years been bringing contemporary Vietnamese literature to the world stage—skillfully emulates the musicality of the Vietnamese original by using alliteration and rhythm, thereby painting a picture of a region that is worn down by the hardship that it has long endured, whether caused by natural disaster or economic challenges. Events like floods, pandemics, and poverty resurface time and again throughout the novel, reflecting the consistent poverty of the Mekong Delta—a region often romanticized in advertisements for tourism, but which has historically been overlooked in development projects.

Lacking the financial resources to cope with disasters and diseases, people’s trust in money, science, and technology—typical hallmarks of development—seems to drain from the Delta along with the flow of the river. Instead, belief in the mystical prevails. Each subsequent account seems to take on more fantastical elements: in one, a village floods because a young woman forgot to turn off a water tap in her backyard; in another, the world comes to an apocalyptic halt due to an infestation of deadly parasitic flies.

Nguyễn Ngọc Tư plays with perceptions of reality.

Water: a Chronicle, Nguyễn Ngọc Tư, Nguyễn An Lý (trans) (Major Books, October 2024)
Water: a Chronicle, Nguyễn Ngọc Tư, Nguyễn An Lý (trans) (Major Books, October 2024)

Nguyễn Ngọc Tư plays with perceptions of reality, blending the supernatural with the real through her use of vernacular vocabulary—as opposed to extravagant literary language—building unique voices for her characters along the way. The laconic nature of her prose reflects her craft and confidence as an acclaimed short story writer who has won multiple awards in Vietnam. It seems she values the precise impact of each word and chooses them carefully—an attitude reflected in the actions of Cẩm, a character who survives the aforementioned fly apocalypse by eating and extracting nutrition from words in books:

 

Once she pulled out a book and suggested we eat all the words that were superfluous. The ones that, taken out, wouldn’t make much difference to the story. The book ended up with less than a hundred words, and Cẩm commented on how we’d stuffed ourselves with empty calories.

 

In these bizarre conditions, the people in this chronicle believe even more in the impossible—in the story of The Lord’s heart and its curing abilities. Each account features a character who would leave everything behind in search of this all-powerful solution to the hardship that they have to struggle through. Some side characters—such as Phúc’s uncle—are skeptical, but it does not stop the myth from growing and the story from spreading across the watery expanse of the Delta, and perhaps also across time, as the world of the apocalyptic fly infestation seems to be set somewhere in the future.

Throughout it all, Tư refrains from revealing too much to the reader, creating a fever-dream of an experience, as if readers themselves are drifting through the heat and humidity that shroud the winding Mekong and encountering other vagabonds along the way. The fleetingness of each account, of characters that readers only get to see once or twice throughout the novel, adds to the fluidity of the narrative, capturing the fleetingness of the lives in this region, as people constantly migrate with an almost blind faith in search of a better life. Though the lives that Water portray are riddled with poverty, there’s also beauty to be seen in nature and in the resilience of the people. One, drifting on a raft in his flooded village, searching for his neighbor, “relished the magnificent exhibition of all those rooftops, normally forgotten and banished, a world where only cats roam.” He continues, rather feverishly:

 

Now I could appreciate their beauty and individuality, those moss-greened shingles those patchwork iron sheets those leaf thatching fortified by plastic. I could feast my eyes on them as the boat passed further into a world afloat.

 

Nguyễn Ngọc Tư’s Water similarly paints a complex and atmospheric portrait of the overlooked miseries of the often beautified Mekong Delta, and invites readers to immerse themselves in it, learn about these lives and follow the lead of characters to partake in the rare moments of hope and resilience, which carry in themselves a somber kind of beauty.


Thảo Tô is a writer from Vietnam. Her writing can be found in Sine Theta Magazine, diaCRITICS and The Augment Review.