Summary
It was twenty days since the day at the lake. Kien never returned to the school, and the lake became a symbol of beautiful, young, marvelous Phuong. That day by the lake, Phuong wanted to have sex with Kien for the first time but he felt guilty and nervous.
Their conversation was fraught, with Kien not understanding some of the things she began saying. She spoke of how she was with his father when he burned the paintings, how she and he were different than Kien, who was suited for these warring times. She knew he loved the idea of war and proclaimed that the two of them would go their own ways—not just Kien. She wanted to offer her life somehow as well, but she told him ardently that she did love him and he could think of her as his wife. He was still too confused and nervous to sleep with her. The next day he was called to the recruiting office.
During war, Kien mostly missed Phuong at night. During battle, he was hyper-focused and disciplined, and there was no room for dreaming. There were only three occasions when he thought of her during the day. The first was when he had malaria marching across Laos and thought of her during his fever. The second was when he was wounded and recovering—nearly dying—at Clinic 8. The nurse who attended him became Phuong in his mind.
The third was during the situation with the farmhouse girls and his scout platoon. He did not think of her until the evening when he dreamed of her, along with painful forebodings of disaster. When he was about to kill the commandos who’d murdered the girls, he thought the heard Phuong’s voice chiding him that he thought he was a hero. He gave the men a reprieve, uncharacteristically.
Phuong had left Kien twice. It was the first time and it was after the merry autumn they spent together. They’d had fun, with many guests and laughter. Kien went to her place on her birthday anyway, bringing a bouquet of roses. When he went to the apartment she did not answer the door; it was an older man named Mr. Phu, who seemed to be a lover of Phuong’s. Phuong was solicitous and grateful for the flowers.
Kien left, full of anger and self-pity. Phuong came in to see him and told him that she had to do things in the past to keep afloat even though she felt like an animal. She proclaimed she was rotten and soiled and would probably “die some sinful, pleasurable death” (145). Kien begged her to return, to live with him instead of next door, but she refused and said they must go their separate ways. She said they would never see each other anymore. They embraced and she told him as she left to forget her. He asked if she loved him and she said yes, he was the only man she ever loved. He said he still loved her. In fact, he had loved twice—Phuong at seventeen and Phuong now. Before Phuong left the building for good, she slipped a note under his door telling him that she was leaving and it was better for them both and she wishes him great success.
Kien knew he must write, to “rid myself of these devils, to put my tormented soul finally to rest instead of letting it float in a pool of shame and sorrow” (146). He walked around Hanoi and was inspired by some of the street scenes, but ended up returning to what he experienced.
Memories came back to him at night when he walked about. He thought of how people called the troops from Hanoi the “Holyland Boys,” and how these Holylanders would test each other on Hanoi trivia. No one could beat Kien, but he never told them that he picked up everything during the war and knew little of the city when he was a teenager living there.
While in the jungle he developed a deep love for Hanoi, but when he returned he saw that it was not the same. He had changed and postwar Hanoi “revealed an unbroken, monotonous sorrow and suffering. There were joys, but those images blinked on and off like cheap flashing lights in a shop window” (149). He thought of returning to Doi Mo to be with Lan. Mostly he thought of how he needed to travel away from Hanoi.
There was a place called the Balcony Café, a nightspot near the end of a narrow alley that became a place for veterans. It opened during the first days of peace when demobilized, wounded, and discombobulated soldiers began congregating there. In the early days, things were pleasant and lively. Kien remembered “Clumsy” Vuong, a former armored-car driver who had devolved into drunkenness and despair. He had his own spot at the Café and told grotesque stories of driving the tanks over bodies in the jungle.
The club had a reputation as an interesting place and more and more veterans came, though few were easily recognized as such. One night an ugly and ragged prostitute sat with Kien and asked him to get drunk and he told her to leave. He thought of how he’d only been truly drunk a few times in his life—the airport on Victory Day, and here at the Balcony Café in 1977.
It had been a bleak, black day. He had only been coming to the Balcony Café for a short time. Four toughs drove up on Hondas and one started complaining that victory was garbage. Kien muttered that the man was garbage. The two got in an altercation and the man said he remembered Kien from seeing him at the cinema the prior weekend, and that Phuong, whom he was with, was a whore whom his friend had enjoyed. The irate Kien punched him and pounded his head with a chair. The fight fell outside and Kien slammed him on a sewer outlet. The police came and he was arrested. He was released the next morning without being charged.
Years later he was embraced by the now-portly owner when he returned to the Balcony Cafe. He was with that prostitute who wanted him to get drunk, but he just left money for her and left. He thought of the tram that old Huynh used to drive. His three sons were killed in battle and now he and his wife lived silent, sad lives. Kien remembered the sons; he had even been there when Toan was killed.
Kien volunteered for the army in 1965, called up in the autumn. He and the other Hanoi boys were given a break to go home and see their families before departing. When Kien went to his own street he saw it was deserted. Most buildings were locked, most families gone. He ran into an old friend who asked if he was looking for Phuong. Kien assented and the man told him she was at the station.
Kien made his way to the station, which was crowded and noisy. He had no idea which train she was on, but finally saw and heard a handsome young man calling out for Phuong to hurry. Kien turned and saw her and she ran to him, not caring that the train was taking the other young man, now angry, away. She exclaimed that this was lucky and suggested all the fun things they might do that night. Kien told her hoarsely he was going to the front and could not be a minute late back to his squad or he’d be considered a deserter.
Phuong called a pedicab and said they still have time, but then the air-raid siren sounded. The driver panicked and ran off, so Phuong suggested they take the cyclo and go to the train. The two of them laughed with joy as they sped throughout the streets. Shockingly, though, when they reached the station, the platform was empty and the train was gone. Kien was now a deserter. Phuong only smiled and said they both missed their trains, but they would find a way to make it work. What Kien did not know was that the train he was supposed to be on was bombed and only a few men were left. He learned much of this later from his deputy commander Huy, whom he ran into on the peace train.
Kien and Phuong knew the train would be slow but Kien was urgently worried about being branded a deserter. He did not think of what Phuong’s presence with him might solicit, as he was only concerned about catching up.
Phuong hailed a truck, whose driver stopped when he saw the beautiful girl. He was less pleased to see Kien, the soldier, but he grudgingly took them in. He tried flirting with Phuong and bragged about himself. Kien was pleased he was getting closer to his unit but “the happiness was tinged by an undefined fear” (169).
Finally, the truck driver called out that he could see the train, but scoffed that it was extremely visible to bombers. Kien acknowledged this was true, but Phuong giggled with excitement. The driver let them out and begged Phuong to ride with him again. He left, and the young lovers embraced.
They did not initially notice, though, the complete silence—the lack of voices, the lack of human activity. Phuong asked the stationmaster where the train was after the man brushed off Kien, and learned it went through twenty minutes ago but there was a freight train also headed toward Vinh. Kien and Phuong decided to try this, and they jumped on. They made their way through the other hangers-on on the train. They clung to each other; Phuong tried to press him to have sex but he could not. She wondered why he did not want her.
Kien would remember those last minutes on the train, especially after Phuong left him for the second time. He also remembered when the Chu Van An school’s Youth Union held a vacation camp at Do Son on the Tonkin Gulf. The students were having a wonderful time and had a bonfire in the evening. Phuong, though, told Kien that there was something abnormal about the sea. Indeed, a group of sailors came up to them and told them to put the fire out because there were orders from above. One told them sadly that it would be open news tomorrow, but that they were at war with the Americans now. Phuong played the guitar and sang as Kien began to feel that they were part of a doomed generation. It was telling to Kien that the war started with a storm, for not long after they heard of the Americans joining, rain and wind drowned their camp out.
Twenty years later Kien was thinking of this moment, and what had happened to Phuong in the years afterward—“She had in those years accumulated a mountain of sins and an avalanche of innuendo on her reputation. Yet she remained for him an enigma, someone ahead of her time in so many ways and strangely, eternally pure” (176).
On the freight train, Phuong felt the heightening of adventure and was excited, telling Kien she wanted to see war and be lost. The train barreled on and did not stop. New people got on and space became tighter. No one knew who they were—merchants? Soldiers? Robbers? It was delirious and romantic in those hours.
On the peace train home, Kien met Hien, the invalid girl. They were friendly and she flirted with him. Thus, Kien was with Phuong going into war and Hien going home. With Phuong, though, the peace was rent by the sound of planes and bombers. Someone yelled to stop the train and terror began to fill the compartments. All was chaos as men began to jump out and Kien lost track of Phuong. Once he saw her in the blinding light being attacked by a large man but a blast hit and he was flung from the compartment. He rolled down the embankment and was knocked out. When he awoke he saw the train was mostly intact and tried to get back on and find Phuong, but he could not locate her. He remembered what he’d seen before he was knocked out and realized this was his first real wound: when Phuong was taken from him; when his life became sorrow and failure.
Analysis
In this section, Kien begins devoting many of his memories to Phuong, his teenage sweetheart. She was the woman with whom he desperately wanted to be when he returned to war, but he found that this was not to be the case. Though Phuong was alive, she was changed (we learn more about why in the last section). She had other lovers and broke things off with Kien twice, the second time permanently. She claimed she was damaged, rotten, and that she’d “probably die some sinful, pleasurable death” (145); she knew from the moment Kien told her he was going off to war, when they were sitting by the lake on that perfect day, that things would be irrevocably changed between them, even if the love remained.
What happens with Phuong is not the only disillusioning thing about returning home after the war. In fact, one of the most salient themes of the novel is the hollowness of the postwar world, the failure of Marxist ideology to render the world a better place. Kien was certainly aware that he was the one that fundamentally changed rather than Hanoi, but he still saw the problems: “Postwar Hanoi, in reality, was not like his jungle dreams. The streets revealed an unbroken, monotonous sorrow and suffering. There were joys, but those images blinked on and off like cheap flashing lights in a shop window. There was a shared loneliness in poverty, and in his everyday walks he felt this mood in the stream of people he walked with” (149).
Bao Ninh is writing about something he knew all too well. Scholar Rohit Inani explains, “the official party discourse focused on the heroic efforts of the soldiers and their sacrifice for the country, but suppressed stories of their suffering and cruelty during the war,” and Heonik Kwon says that postwar Vietnam was “strongly mobilized to focus its attention on the forward-looking revolutionary vision for a prosperous political community and collective optimism based on ‘revolutionary sentiment’ and ‘love of labour.’ Crucial to this process was the empowerment of a heroic memory of war and related civic morality of commemoration.” What was lost in this was the attention paid to individual suffering; there was seemingly no right to be sad, just the “excluding and stigmatizing the expressions of pains and wounds.”
The Sorrow of War was controversial because it gave voice to real suffering, pain, and emptiness; by doing so, it subtly but explicitly challenged the prevailing narrative of the war. William J. Searle writes that “It is no secret that frequently there is a contrast, a certain dissonance, between the official version of a war, the sanitized record of noble endeavor sanctioned by the government that sent its sons and daughters to it and the much grittier, often more bitter, portrait revealed in the memoirs and novels of the participants who survived the turmoil.”
Ultimately, as Christopher Coker writes, “the novel is “not only an indictment of war, it is even more an indictment of Marxism not so much as a philosophy than as a political religion.” There is a “betrayal by History” because even though there was an eventual victory, “the socialist order had not been forged and humanity was not redeemed.”
