By contrast, the Vietnamese narrator in "Open Arms," whose yearning resonates organically into the story as it's reconceived, does a similar heinous thing; but he himself is conscious of it — and so am I as writer. Both the Vietnamese narrator in "Open Arms" and the American narrator in "Chieu Hoi" know ahead of time that the man's family was murdered and that is why he left his home. In both cases, even though they know it, they make him say it. But the Vietnamese narrator, says: "To my shame." He says it both times. To my shame. He knows he's doing a terrible thing here and acknowledges it. We see that tension in him.
Of course, you might write a story with an insensitive character like the narrator of "The Chieu Hoi." Obviously there are cruel characters and cruel acts in fiction. But in that story the cruelty is totally incidental — or maybe the intent of the author was to show a sensitive guy responding to a sad character who misses his wife. And that's all he takes away from an afternoon of porn films. How pathetic. The narrator's insensitivity is not an issue; there's no repercussion, there's no realization, and no seeming ill effect on Thanh. We don't see the cruelty of it in any manifest way. It's just on-the-surface cruelty, and it stays on the surface.
Let me elaborate on a point I made earlier in passing about the beginning of "Open Arms": "I have no hatred in me. I am almost certain of that." How do you establish dramatic irony in a story? Well, to begin with, anyone who has to say he's got no hatred in him is already protesting too much. And then, one way to suggest irony is with a qualifier, in this case just that one word almost. "I have no hatred in me. I am almost certain of that." He has self-doubt that lets us doubt him. "I fought for my country long enough to lose my wife to another man, a cripple. This was because even though I was alive, I was dead to her, being far away. Perhaps it bothers me a little" — perhaps—"that his deformity was something he was born with and not earned in the war. But even that doesn't matter. In the end, my country itself was lost. " My country.
This whole story, as you soon learn, has to do with trying to find a place in the world. "In the end my country was lost and I am no longer there.." It's not that it's no longer his country, it is his country, but he's no longer there. He takes some pleasure in the fact that his wife and her new lover are suffering. And then he brings up this stranger, this guy:
. who suffered the most complicated feeling I could imagine. It is he who makes me feel sometimes that I am sitting with my legs crossed in an attitude of peace and with an acceptance of all that I've been taught about the suffering that comes from desire.
Let me indulge in a bit of artificial and secondary analysis. The Vietnamese narrator asserts that he understands the story he's going to tell. As a result of it, he has accepted his fate. None of that's true. I hope you understand the irony at the end, that little litany of I'm OK: I've got a VCR, I've got a good job, there's no hatred in me, everything's fine. Not so. He is utterly lost, for the same reason as that other man, Thap, who came to a moment in which he realized that he had no country whatsoever. That's what our narrator is really responding to, because in spite of his avowals at the end of the story, deep down he feels he belongs nowhere. I live on Mary Poppins Drive in Gretna, Louisiana. . And of course, his yearning is for a place in the world.
Understand that when I came to write "Open Arms," I did not refer to this older story at all. In 1988 I was finishing my sixth novel, The Deuce, which is in the voice of a sixteen-year-old half-Vietnamese, half-American former Saigon street kid who ends up on Forty-second Street in the bad old days before Mickey Mouse overran the place. Alan Cheuse called me to say he was producing a series for National Public Radio called The Sound of Writing, and he was soliciting original short stories that would be read by actors on the radio. He said, Would you give us one? You bet. I hung up the phone and… what have I done? I was writing good novels, and I'd convinced myself that it's a rare writer who is adept in both forms. I went back to those stories to see if there was something I could salvage, but they were worse than I remembered. So I put them away again.
However, there was a bit of Vietnamese folkway on one of the three-by-five cards I'd made for The Deuce, which I'd expected to put into the novel but hadn't. The card that fell out of the stack had to do with a Vietnamese boy who loved to catch, train, and fight crickets. Suddenly a voice came out of my unconscious, the voice of a Vietnamese father in Lake Charles, Louisiana, on a Sunday afternoon. Everything's boring and dull and his son is bored and he tries to interest the kid in cricket fighting. So I sat down and wrote it in one six-and-a-half-hour stretch. It turned out well.
I went to bed that night and the next morning when I woke up I had two dozen other voices in my unconscious, saying me, me, me. All the stories in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain presented themselves to me at once. When "Open Arms" came to me, it was not in reference to that old story; it wasn't even a reference to the notebook. I didn't look at the notebook either. The voices came strictly from my unconscious at that point.
Before you go, let me give you an assignment for next week: you'll need to be able to tell some personal anecdote, something you've told before aloud. I don't want you to give this any thought; you don't need to write it out; it doesn't need to be profound; it can be totally triviaclass="underline" taking a shower, sitting at a traffic light. You don't have to be funny, it doesn't have to be moving or well told. Just tell an anecdote as you would over coffee. Of course it's going to be full of summary and generalization and analysis. It should be. An anecdote is not a work of art; it's something else. So do the something else. It'll give me a little fragment of your life to walk you back through in a special exercise.
8. The Anecdote Exercise
How many seriously want to do this tonight? We're going to hear your informal anecdotes first, so you have to make a quick choice about whether you're open to doing this in front of the class. You will also get a fair amount of benefit from just observing and listening. Volunteers.?
You have to actually lift your arm above your head. One, two, three, four.
Good. Now the four of you are going to tell your anecdotes as you would over a couple of beers, and after you're all done I'll bring you up front one at a time. Everyone else — these are your instructions for the evening — when we redo these little narratives, nobody look at the speaker. Or at me. All of you are to go into your trance state and participate moment to moment with the person retelling a fragment of the anecdote. You will all stare at a blank sheet of paper, or your thumbs, or you'll close your eyes, meditating. You will concentrate on evoking the images that come out of the subject's