Following is a presentation I gave in the summer of 2015 as Keynote Speaker at the 7th Annual Engaging in Vietnam conference in Hanoi, Vietnam.
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Hi there. My name is David Joiner and I’m the author of the novel Lotusland, which was released this past March by Guernica Editions. Before I begin my talk, I’d like to thank Dr. Lê-Hà Phan and Dr. Liam Kelley for taking the time to read my novel and invite me to speak at this conference.
Although I’m originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, and currently live in Kanazawa, Japan, I’ve spent over three years in Hanoi – the first time was in 1994, when I lived in Bách Khoa for six weeks before traveling to Bien Hoa to teach at a teacher training college; and the last time was for just over one year, from 2010 to 2011. Most recently, after living in Mui Ne and then HCMC for eighteen months, I visited Hanoi in March of this year, one week before moving back to Japan.
For those of you here who have already read my novel, I thank you. For those of you who have not read it, let me summarize it for you:
Nathan Monroe, the novel’s protagonist, is a 28-year-old American; his closest friend, and the novel’s antagonist, is another American, Anthony. Nathan is an idealistic, struggling writer and, like Anthony, has spent several years in Vietnam. Enamored with the country, fluent in its language, and comfortable engaging with the local culture, Nathan falls in love with a Vietnamese lacquer painter who dreams of starting a new life in America. Anthony, in contrast, has struck it rich in real estate but finds himself trapped in an unsatisfying domestic life with a Vietnamese wife and two children he can barely communicate with. After living in different Vietnamese cities for several years, Nathan and Anthony revive their friendship only for it to suffer from deception, clashes of values, and the power imbalances that mark their lives – in love and friendship, in the consequences of war, and in the pursuit of dreams.
Lotusland took me around seven years to write – with long breaks thrown in to make the enterprise more difficult than normal – and the wait between finding a publisher and the novel being published took another four years. As strange as this sounds, the novel is one of the first by a US writer to be set in contemporary Vietnam. Even though the war between the US and North Vietnam ended forty years ago, most US novels that deal with Vietnam do so with their focus squarely on the war. In many ways that makes sense, as the event has had such a huge impact in the US and all over the world, and much of the literature that has come out of the war has been incredible, but forty years on I feel that the time has come for people to encounter different perspectives – not on war as a subject to write about, but on Vietnam. At times I worry, though, that forty years isn’t long enough for America to move forward. As a country it sometimes seems stuck in a time-warp, and – I speak as an American here – we seem to love to make new heroes of ourselves, even, or perhaps especially, out of wars we started and lost. I will come back several more times in my presentation to the scarcity of novels written in English about postwar Vietnam, so please bear with me if it seems I overdo this.
In terms of my experience in Vietnam, I’ve made the country my home for eleven of the last twenty-one years. My first year here was as a volunteer teacher in Bien Hoa in 1994 when I became the first American since the end of the American War to live and work there. I’ve lived in Vietnam on seven separate occasions – possibly more, but the moves kind of blur together now – and I’ve also called Hanoi, HCMC, and Mui Ne my home for long stretches.
Since Lotusland’s publication, I’ve done a reading tour through parts of the US and Canada, and now Vietnam; I have sold a few books; and I’ve received feedback from people who attended my readings. Today I’m going to talk about some of this feedback. Perhaps, if we’re lucky, what I share will elucidate where the reading audience for American fiction about Vietnam currently stands.
Many questions people asked me on my book tour were neither about my novel nor writing, but instead about life in Vietnam today, tourist destinations, or Vietnamese food and coffee. Every now and then, however, people voiced interest in Lotusland or the writing of it. Some questions that I wrote down after my readings, so as not to forget them, included:
What is it about Vietnam that interests you so much?
What motivated you to write Lotusland?
How is what you’ve written different from what others have written about Vietnam?
What made you think there’s an audience for your novel?
Don’t most people find deeper meaning in war stories?
You don’t find your work…I don’t know…misguided in any way?
What do you want people to take away from your book?
What is it about Vietnam that interests you so much?
This seems like a simple question, and it’s certainly of relevance for an American who writes about Vietnam, yet I’m not sure I can answer it satisfactorily. And for those of you here today, especially if you’re from somewhere else, our reasons for being interested in this country will probably overlap to a large degree. Certainly I’m interested in Vietnam. I wouldn’t have spent eleven of the last twenty-one years here if I hadn’t been.
What interests me most about Vietnam (and this is true about Japan, too, where I now live) are the differences between where I grew up, in the Midwest of the United States, and here. I realize that’s a very general statement, but the differences are often so great that it would take more time than I have here today to list them, much less to describe them in any detail. Having spent over a year each in three different Vietnamese cities and a resort town, and having traveled through much of the country, it should be no surprise to hear me say that I’ve discovered vast differences between places within Vietnam – between regions, obviously, but also within regions, and even within cities both large and small. Of course, differences, generally speaking, exist within many countries, but inevitably those differences deepen my fascination with Vietnam. As a writer, having a fascination for the place (or places) you’re writing about is obviously very helpful.
But it’s not always easy writing about place, especially when it happens to be a country that’s not your own. You set yourself up for charges that you’ve taken liberties, or that you’ve written about a country and culture that you can never know as intimately as someone native-born – and that that’s bad, that it should be avoided. But I disagree with those notions. I admire and respect the people in this country, I’ve made close friends in Vietnam over the years, and I’ve also fallen in love with the physical place itself. And that last point is something I’d like to talk about now with respect to writing – that is, Vietnam as setting.
I was recently interviewed about Lotusland by the quarterly publication Rain Taxi, and I’m going to borrow for a bit here a response I made about “Vietnam as setting.” What I said, basically, was that as a writer, setting is important to my aesthetic, to my manner of storytelling, and I think this is fairly apparent in my novel – I certainly don’t ignore my love of place in Vietnam. US Ambassador Ted Ossius, who read my novel and emailed me about it afterward, described Lotusland as “evocative.” It may be immodest for me to agree with him, but I do think it’s true. One of my aims in writing about Vietnam, and about foreign cultures generally, is to evoke “place” effectively and authentically. (I think this is one reason why McMillan publishers in Australia picked up a blog post of mine about Vietnam, which was originally featured in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and included it several years ago in a high school reader as an example of how to write about foreign cultures. That was probably one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received as a writer.) As a follow-up to what I just said about my fascination with Vietnam, however, there are many times when both the rural and urban landscapes of Vietnam have affected me in ways that other landscapes never have. It’s kind of a wabi-sabi ethic, if I may borrow this term from Japanese, where one finds beauty in the potential of things, in their imperfections. To me, no other country possesses the kind of beauty Vietnam is endowed with, and because that beauty, that aesthetic, really can’t be replicated in the West, I suppose I feel the need to paint scenes with a certain type of brushstroke, a definite amount of color, to ensconce readers in the place itself.
Vietnam is also eminently observable. So much happens in the streets and sidewalks of the cities, especially, that the life collectively lived in them is a gift to anyone drawn to writing. One’s senses are overwhelmed at every moment, one feels enormously alive here, and I don’t know how that could be kept out of any writing about Vietnam. Furthermore, in the countryside there’s often a sense of seeing the world as it used to be hundreds of years ago. A great whirlwind of change is passing through the cities of Vietnam, but in the countryside there’s still, at times, a feeling of ancientness, of an ancient slowness, of something we’ve long lost sight of and fail to appreciate now. I have a tendency to write imagistically, and to use setting like drapery – not to obfuscate the reader’s vision, but to hang it as close as possible before their mind’s eye so they not only see it but also feel immersed in whatever place I describe. That’s the hope, anyway. But of course setting can function in stories as more than merely place and time.
Another thing that interests me about Vietnam, or maybe I should say I appreciate, is the ways it has supported my journey as a writer. I’ve long wanted to be a writer – ever since I was twenty-four or twenty-five and living for the first time in Vietnam, in the quasi-countryside of outer Bien Hoa. Vietnam can do that to a person. I don’t just mean that the country somehow imparts in us a desire to pick up a pen and start writing stories. What I mean is that living here often changes people – people, that is, who have come from other places. And having a country that supports my literary aspirations interests me. So does being surrounded by a generally happy, humorous, curious, and friendly populace.
The next question I heard more than any other, I think. That was:
“What motivated you to write Lotusland?”
I don’t know that a specific idea led to the inception of Lotusland, but I do remember wanting to fill a niche in American literature about Vietnam. I wanted to set my novel in contemporary Vietnam, during the time that I was writing it, and have it turn the page on the war America fought here.
And I think it bears mentioning that the novels we read aren’t necessarily the same novels that writers originally set out to write. In the case of Lotusland, the protagonist’s love interest, Le, was originally two separate love interests – twin sisters, in fact. One sister was a businesswoman, very materialistic, who lived in HCMC, while the other was an artist, almost ascetic in her lifestyle, who lived in Hanoi. Neither twin spoke to the other due to family strife that had played out years before, though that didn’t stop Nathan from falling in love with them both. But in the end I decided I needed to conflate both characters, and combining the twins’ attributes into those of a single character ultimately made Le deeper and more complex. That’s one example of many I could share to underline the point that author motivation is a hard thing to pinpoint, because novels have their own lives, perhaps even their own heartbeats, and they come together according to a logic that writers are obviously close to but can’t claim entirely as their own, can’t claim entirely to understand. When I first started Lotusland, the story I was motivated to write wasn’t necessarily the same story I was motivated to finish and share with readers.
I will say, however, that I intended, before I ever set down a single word, to attempt several things in Lotusland. One, as I’ve said, was to fill what I felt was an enormous gap in American literature about Vietnam by giving my novel a contemporary setting. A second was to develop a storyline that enabled me to show Western readers how Agent Orange continues to ravage people’s lives in Vietnam. A third was to share the beauty of Vietnamese lacquer painting, which I’ve always deeply admired. And a fourth was to share the physical beauty of Vietnam itself, in both its urban and rural areas. In any case, these were very general ideas I had from the moment I conceived of the novel, and they motivated me from start to finish. How much I saw them through, I don’t know. I found it hard to dramatize the issue of Agent Orange, for example, without having my characters directly affected by it, and one can only focus so long on describing Vietnam – or anywhere, really – before pacing becomes an issue and you risk losing the reader’s interest.
And here’s a bit of trivia about my initial attempts to write Lotusland. It, too, ties into questions of motivation, though in this case it has much to do with style as well as direct influences on my writing. I started Lotusland in the middle of an intensive re-reading of Yasunari Kawabata’s oeuvre. (Kawabata, for those of you who don’t know, was Japan’s first Nobel Prize winner in Literature, in 1968.) I remember using multicolored highlighters to mark up old copies of Kawabata’s Snow Country and Thousand Cranes, to study and learn from them, and later typing out all of the former on my laptop. I was interested in how he did what he did in those novels – their indirectness, the power of silence, their pacing, the rhythms and deceptive simplicity of his prose (or the translation of his prose). In fact, the first scene of Lotusland is my homage to Snow Country. My novel, too, starts with a scene on a train, though his is more beautiful than mine, and more successful. There’s a bit more snow in his opening, too.
To me, the questions that follow are probably the most interesting ones I heard on my tour. Initially, they made me question – a bit – my approach to writing Lotusland more than any other questions I was asked.
What makes Lotusland different from other American novels set in Vietnam?
The interviewer from Rain Taxi described Lotusland as a “State-of-Vietnam novel,” adding that it reveals both the worst things about Vietnam but also the best. My response was that if it is such a novel, then by necessity it’s really just one that’s seen through the eyes of an individual foreigner. Because that’s the perspective I know, and I can write about it authentically. Regardless, a state-of-Vietnam novel, though hardly a breakthrough concept, is still a departure from what publishers in America historically give readers access to.
Not to belabor the point, but again, I was interested in developing a contemporary narrative about Vietnam. I wanted to invite readers to step outside of a literary landscape built upon so many Vietnam War stories. I wanted to veer far from typical wartime portrayals of Saigon and Hanoi – both novelistic and journalistic – and I wanted to present Hanoi, especially, in a way that managed to show it as something more than simply the center of communist rule in Vietnam. To an extent I wanted to express Hanoi as a place of culture. Hanoi is richer than Saigon with respect to the arts, and Vietnam’s lacquer painting tradition was developed in the north. And as I said before, I also wanted to share with readers how Agent Orange continues to affect people in Vietnam three generations since the war’s end. Agent Orange is frequently in the news in Vietnam, yet how many people in the West realize the extent to which it continues to devastate people’s lives?
Finally, one follows closely the lives of two Americans in my novel, as well as the lives of certain Vietnamese people who are attached for various reasons to these Americans – with everyone seemingly trying to profit in one way or another. And by “profit” I don’t just mean trying to strike it rich through new opportunities arising from Vietnam’s development. I also mean coming out on top of relationships, being at the top of a power structure that favors money, maleness, and American-ness, where love and sex have broken free of tradition and convention, and where both can be bought outright or purchased on credit – social credit – that is, one’s status, which is not always earned. This approach to writing about contemporary Vietnam of course applies to novels written about wartime Vietnam, too, but in the latter case the power dynamics between Westerners and Vietnamese are marked more clearly and definitively by the exigencies of military conflict, by siding with one of two political-economic systems. In the case of Lotusland, however, in which contemporary Vietnam is the setting, I believe that portrayals of power dynamics are marked more clearly by economics, culture, history, and race.
Let’s look now at questions I was asked about audience and meaning:
What made you think there’s an audience for this type of work?
Don’t most people find deeper meaning in war stories?
You don’t find your work misguided in any way?
First of all, it should be obvious that there’s no way to know if an audience exists for a story until you write it and then try to put it in front of other people. But writing is in many ways an act of faith, and you need to believe in what you’re doing, that the appeal of the story you’re telling will extend beyond your own eyes and heart, and, in the end, into some kind of positive judgment people will make. This may sound counterintuitive, or even plain stupid, but my goal as a writer has never been to become a famous or bestselling author. I do want an audience, but I’m more interested in my novel connecting with people who care deeply about Vietnam and also about the experience of being a foreigner here – or for that matter being a foreigner anywhere. One friend suggested that I had too much the attitude of a craftsman, not a modern writer. But writing is a craft. I have no problem with the approach I’ve taken toward establishing an audience. Having said this, my challenge is to find ways simply to make people aware that the novel exists. It’s not nearly as easy or as straightforward as it sounds.
One might ask, “But is Vietnam too foreign for Western readers?” I don’t think that life in Vietnam is so foreign that people anywhere couldn’t relate to what happens in Lotusland. People could learn much about the country by reading my novel – or at least about the way one person sees Vietnam, as an American. And if someone told me they weren’t interested in Vietnam, then they’re not likely to be interested in any place other than where they are. I do think Lotusland develops certain universal themes – love is one, finding one’s place in the world is another, learning to do what is morally right is one more. I like to think that’s a good thing.
Perhaps my novel doesn’t have the kind of built-in audience that novels about the war do. The American War ended a long time ago, so there’s always a chance for people to look back on it with a certain nostalgia, with a chance to re-evaluate history and re-formulate one’s views toward it. But Lotusland doesn’t really allow that, for it’s not based on, or set against a backdrop of, a war that countries – not just the United States and Vietnam – participated in and later built largely self-serving mythologies around.
Vietnam War stories often do offer readers deep meaning, and the stakes in those stories are considerably high – where Communism and Capitalism are pitted against each other, millions of lives are at stake, as are presidencies, governments, countries’ futures, etc. But that doesn’t mean that a novel about two American expats and their Vietnamese wives and lovers in contemporary Vietnam doesn’t also offer readers chances to experience a certain place and time – a certain moment in history – and various insights that are attached to them. So, while it may be true that some people find deeper meaning in war stories, I think it’s also true that some people may find deep meaning in a portrayal of Vietnam today. The war is over. It ended forty years ago. What remains, with respect to Vietnam, is a country moving forward, and there is huge significance to that.
I like to think that Americans are rooting for Vietnam to succeed where for many years, through America’s war here and then its nineteen-year embargo following the war’s end, the US government ensured that it wouldn’t. As a writer it seems natural to want to give Western readers a way to re-imagine Vietnam, so that they can see it in a more positive light – not that the book is wholly positive about Vietnam, because it’s not – and to show how Americans and Vietnamese have found ways to connect and disconnect, to live and love together, to get along and not get along, to treat each other increasingly as equals, but at other times also as rivals – but in the context of peace, not war. There is great beauty in Vietnam, and great potential for Vietnam to become what no one could have imagined it might become forty years ago. If there’s no meaning in stories that allow for that, then maybe I should give up writing novels. But I don’t think that’s being misguided.
What do you want people to take away from your book?
There’s a risk of sounding sentimental here, though sentimentality may get too hard a rap when expressed publicly. But I’d like readers to come away with a better understanding of what life is like in Vietnam, to understand that the country is much more than a war America fought and lost, or that it’s more than just a popular tourist destination these days. I’d like readers to want to visit Vietnam – not just to hang out on its beaches and party in its backpacker bars, but also to learn more about the country and its people, which is partly why I wrote the book that I did. I’d like Americans, especially, to be more supportive of Vietnam as it pushes for solutions to the enormous Agent Orange problem it still faces. Like any writer feels about their work, I hope most of all that readers will discover and enjoy it.
Finally, what do I want people at this conference to take away from my presentation? (This is my own question, obviously.)
Again, there’s a risk of my sounding sentimental here. But I feel there’s room for many other novels to be written about Vietnam. Perhaps there’s a need for more war stories, but it would be nice to see more stories that take place in today’s Vietnam. Quality should be the determining factor, rather than just the call of the market, which never admits to satiety if money can still be made from what has long fattened it up. I think there’s a need for a different perspective on Vietnam by Americans, especially, and by the West generally.
My stance is that understanding can happen through fiction. And where there is understanding, there can also be healing if healing is needed. I’m guessing that most of us here today don’t normally pick up novels with the aim of being healed by them, but one can never have enough understanding. Stories about other cultures have more worth than I think most Americans realize or are willing to concede. I think that for those of us here today, Vietnam has carved out a deep space within our hearts and we come to the country again and again, if we ever even leave it, to fill that space with its seemingly endless marvels, with its seemingly endless warmth. I want Lotusland to do the same thing. I want it to fill that space, I want it to make that space deeper and more significant in all of you, and I want it to matter.