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“We love books. Literature matters because words lets us explore and share the best of what we think, and who we can be. Good fiction, nonfiction, and poetry grow our knowledge and imagination, take us into new lives, and illuminate truths we never knew.” (Website) Operating in the United States, since 2006.

Other C&R (Conscious & Responsible) Reading:
When I ordered A Mother’s Tale, I also ordered these two books of poetry by Dustin Pearson, encouraged by the poem featured on the site and Jericho Brown’s praise: Millennial Roost (2019) and A Family Is A House (2019).

RECENT READ: Khanh Ha’s A Mother’s Tale & Other Stories (2021)

I was eager to read this collection because I have appreciated and admired his other fiction: 2012’s Flesh, 2014’s The Devil Who Peddled Longing, and most recently, 2019’s Mrs. Rossi’s Dream.

If you’ve not read his fiction before, this collection would serve as an excellent introduction. Thematically, it’s of-a-piece with his booklength fiction and, indeed, some of these stories are extracts from the novels (sometimes with slight modifications).

Interestingly (well, to me anyway!), there was very little overlap between the passages that I noted when I had read these sections previously in the longer work; it’s as though approaching them in short fiction, I was more attentive to detail and the subtle layering.

In “Heartbreak Grass”, for instance, I felt keenly aware of the focus on perspective, both as it applies to the characters and, further, to the author. There are literal references to vision (“I couldn’t tell if he was blind, but his eyes had the look of fake eyes you put in stuffed animals,” for instance), thematically the narrator is developing a capacity to view the impact of the war differently and, in turn, the reader’s perspective on the personal cost of political conflict also evolves.

This political conflict is what North American readers call the “Vietnam War”, but it’s through reading fiction like Khanh Ha’s, that American readers are reminded that, from another perspective, it is the “American War.” This particular cognitive shift is reason enough to explore these fictions, but even if readers have little interest in history, there is a lot to unearth here. Short exchanges (the dialogue is impeccable and could so easily be overdone in this kind of narrative) afford the opportunity to revision one’s understanding of this conflict:

“They can tell. A woman’s chin bone is smaller than a man’s chin bone. The eye sockets are deeper. That sort of thing.”
“Ah, now,” Maggie says, nodding. “Nurses, weren’t they?”
“Soldiers. Women fighters.”

“In a Far Country” reminds women readers that western assumptions about the role that women play in wartime there is not necessarily as expected.

Khanh Ha’s astute observations and attention-to-detail amplify the reader’s experience. Consider the buoyancy of these twinned images in “A Bridge Behind”, when “suddenly magpies flew out from the trees, their legs yellow in the sun. Then gongs sounded noisily deep in the hamlet and voices screamed, ‘Airplane! Airplane!’” These are wartime stories; simultaneously, they are stories about people’s everyday lives.

The natural world remains central to these fictions; readers cannot forget that the devastation wrecked by humans impacts not only other humans but the broader web of life as well. “He looked up. Flying in orderly inverted Vs, a squadron of planes looked so tiny it could pass for a flock of geese.” These simple observations remind us that there is nothing natural about war; they create the opportunity for reflection, in that moment, that we read about military conflict in the news daily but there are other reasons to look up too.

Characters also make choices about how they interpret their experiences, how they speak about them to others. From “The American Prisoner”: “It was his bad karma, he said, that he had stepped on the mine. He said it in Vietnamese and we all laughed at the word he used. Nghiep. Smart man. Said the mine was made from a howitzer shell. American artillery shell, he said. Then he winked at us as we sensed the irony.”

Because there are winks and smiles here for the reader—“Popping sounds came from the rice pot and the lid was quickly put back on. They all grinned happily, like children on the Lunar New Year”—but the presence of these moments only accentuates the pain and sorrow of wartime. These characters locate small pleasures but they face massive challenges: “From stall to stall people talked about the execution. ‘They’d rather kill by mistake,’ a man said, ‘than to make mistake by not killing.’”

Reading stories like these reminds me that words can change the world. In “The Red Fox,” one character says that “Man gotta read. It wakes up the man in the child and child in the man.” We awaken in response to stories that are written with pain and beauty intertwined—stories like Khanh Ha’s.

Contents: Heartbreak Glass, A Bridge Behind, In a Far Country, The River of White Lilies, The American Prisoner, The Virgin’s Mole, A Mother’s Tale, The Leper Colony, The Red Fox, The General is Sleeping, All the Pretty Horses

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