Open Arms
The first short story is entitled ‘’Open Arms’’ and the title makes reference to a practice that took place during the Vietnam War. Then, the people who wanted to change sides could do so without having to face any consequences from the United Sates or the other countries.
The action takes place during the war but the exact year is not mentioned. The story is told from the perspective of Vietnamese soldier who was witness to the arrival of a former communist named Thập.
The narrator worked as a translator for the Americans and the Australians and he read Thập’s file. Through this, he found that Thập’s wife and child were killed by communists and this pushed him to join to other side.
This experience has the purpose of showing just how cruel the communist side was. They had no regard for human life and would easily massacre entire villages to send a message. Their ideologies remained however attractive to many and Thập, even though remained without a family, continued to believe in communism and in their ideals. This made it hard for him to adapt to a new way of life and had problems accepting Western ideas.
One of the ideas that were hard for him to accept was pornography. Both Thập and the narrator felt a deep connection with their spouses and even though they had different political views, they appreciated one another because of the love they had for their wives.
Thập is convinced to go and see a movie and he later realizes that it is a pornographic movie. For communists, this represents the degradation of the Western world and of family values and is something Thập does not agree with. Despite this, he stays until the end of the movie and does not voice his opinion.
That night however, Thập kills the man who invited him to the movie and then commits suicide. The end of the story is extremely important because it shows just how hard it is for a traditional society to adapt to a new way of life. When the old ideas clash with the new ones, an internal battle takes place and it is hard for many to find a middle ground.
The narrator moved to America after the war and as a way of coping with the painful memories of the past, he decides that the best was a person to live their life is to have no ambition and no dreams and thus he becomes just like that as well.
The story ‘’Mr. Green’’ is told from the perspective of a woman who remains unnamed. In the beginning of the story, the woman is living in Vietnam together with her family. One of the people who lived in their house is her elderly grandfather and a parrot named Mr. Greed who the family considers as being the incarnation of their loved ones.
When the narrator is a young girl, she is told that the living must pray for the souls of the dead after they passed on. Because the narrator loved her grandfather, she assured him that she will pray for him after he is dead.
The grandfather makes the young girl be aware of her limitations as a woman in the Vietnamese society. It is believed that the prayers told by a woman have no value and thus if the young girl were to pray for the soul of her grandfather, his soul will not be happy. Instead, the narrator learns from a young age that her purpose in life is to be a wife, work the fields and do house chores.
Just like the other characters in the other stories, the narrator moves to America and there she is faced with a completely different world. She no longer has to submit to the limitations imposed on her in her home country but she still continues to care for the parrot.
As time passes, the parrot grows older and starts to pluck its own feathers. This action transmits the idea that tradition is dying mainly because it is resilient to accept change and submit to the new ideas in the world. In a sense, tradition is the only one responsible for its own degradation and while the others may try and stop it, it is an irreversible process.
The end of the story is also deeply symbolic because the narrator decides to kill the bird. In a sense, this is the time when she breaks away from the ideas she was told as a child and becomes a woman capable of taking care of herself and taking her own decisions.
Thus, the death of Mr. Green represents the death of the old traditions and the birth of independence and modernity.
The Trip Back
The major idea transmitted in the story ‘’The Trip Back’’ is that the most important memories do not always survive. The main character is about a man who drives to the airport to pick up his wife’s grandfather. After traveling with him for a bit, the narrator realizes that the grandfather has Alzheimer and does not remember his granddaughter which he took care of for a number of years.
During the trip back, the narrator thinks about the way he perceives life and the way some of the important things are forgotten. The narrator gives as an example the same morning when he confronted his wife and yet all he could remember was the sound made by the clock near their bed. The question raised here is what will a person remember in their old age and why some trivial things in our life and more easy to remember than the times we spend with our family and loved ones.
The story also analyzes the clash between the Vietnamese way of life and the American one and how the two are different from one another. Again, the idea that the traditional way of life is not sustainable is promoted and the narrator would rather live a modern way of life. Through this, he puts a great accent on keeping a close relationship only with the closest members of one’s family, speaking one’s mind and pursuing wealth.
Fairy Tale
The next story also has as its narrator a woman, this time someone who used to be a bargirl or a prostitute in Vietnam. During that time, she got pregnant with an American soldier, a common practice, but she was unable to raise her child as her mother shunned her from the family because of this.
The narrator meets a man who promised to bring her to the USA and marry her. The narrator agrees that she was stupid in believing him but she wanted above all to become a housewife and so she went to the USA with him.
There she became a prostitute again after she broke up with the first man. The narrator describes her experience as a prostitute but it is not presented in a negative way. Instead, it is the way through which she finds independence and is capable of taking care of herself. She does not give herself to every man freely and she looks down upon those who do not stay the night with her. The narrator wants to take care of those men, thus showing that the way in which prostitutes are portrayed is more than often misleading. The narrator is a simple woman, who desires comfort and love just like any other person.
She is approached by a man with whom she sleeps two times before he proposes to her with an apple. The fruit is mentioned many times in the story and has a great significance for the narrator. When she was in Vietnam, apples were not something she could buy and so she would ask the soldiers who came to her to bring apples. After she moved to America, she ate so many apples that she lost the taste for them. The apples are used here as a symbol for the sexual favors she was giving. In the beginning, it was something special but as time passed it became something normal, boring.
The narrator stopped eating apples so much after she got married and soon her desire to eat them came back as well. This shows that marriage changed her perspective on sex and it was no longer something she dreaded doing. Instead, it became something she enjoyed.
Crickets
The story mentioned above is told from the perspective of a man named Ted who lives in America. His real name is Thiệu but his name was changed when he moved to America.
Ted thinks about the time when the communist soldiers entered Saigon and he admits that he tried to hide himself among the other people by giving up his uniform and throwing rocks at the tanks entering the city in an attempt to fight against them.
His effort is desperate and Ted admits that his actions did nothing to stop the tanks. Despite knowing this, Ted and other soldiers continued to fight, urged by their patriotism and desire to save their country.
Ted escaped with his new wife and reached Louisiana. As soon as they reached America, they found out they will be expecting a child which they named Ben. As the child grew, Ted noticed how Bill was rejecting the Vietnamese way of life and becoming more and more American. Ted’s wife urges him not to worry, coming to terms with the idea that Ben is American and not Vietnamese.
To try to make his son understand about the Vietnamese culture, Ted decides to teach his son about cricket fighting. Bill becomes quickly uninterested and his father gives up trying to teach him about them. Ted feels frustrated because of this and this transmits the way in which many Vietnamese parents felt about their children’s lack of interest for their own culture.
