Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel (Modern Southeast Asian Literature)

by Ho Anh Thai

  Modern

  Southeast

  Asian Literature

  Wayne Karlin, series editor

  Copyright © 2012 by Ho Anh Thai; translation copyright © 2012 Jonathan R. S. McIntyre and Wayne Karlin.

  Originally published as Cõi người rung chuông tận thế copyright © 2002 by Ho Anh Thai.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except by explicit prior written permission of the publisher. Brief passages excerpted for review and critical purposes are excepted.

  This book is typeset in Minion Pro. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997).

  Designed by Kasey McBeath

  Cover illustration by Kasey McBeath

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ho, Anh Thai.

  [Cõi người rung chuông tận thế. English]

  Apocalypse hotel : a novel / Ho Anh Thai ; translated by Jonathan R.S. McIntyre ; adapted and introduced by Wayne Karlin.

  p. cm. — (Modern Southeast Asian literature)

  Summary: “Now in English, a cautionary tale about how wars meant to liberate can nevertheless present degrading aftereffects and unforeseen consequences”—Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-89672-803-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-89672-804-2 (e-book)

  I. McIntyre, Jonathan R. S. II. Karlin, Wayne. III. Title. IV. Series: Modern Southeast Asian literature.

  PL4378.9.H47C6513 2012

  895.9'2233—dc23 20120311482012031148

  Printed in the United States of America

  12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 / 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Texas Tech University Press

  Box 41037 | Lubbock, Texas 79409-1037 USA

  800.832.4042 | ttup@ttu.edu | www.ttupress.org

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Epilogue

  Notes

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Apocalypse Hotel presents the reader with a world of sordid Hobbesian cruelty: distorted personalities prey on each other with gleeful malevolence; sex is a weapon, corruption a given, violence an amusement, and greed a cultivated norm. In spite of that grim litany the novel—brought out in 2002 by a daring and courageous editor at the Danang Publishing House after all other major, and even minor, publishers in the country refused to publish it—has sold more than 50,000 copies, and has had ten printings in Vietnam. Apocalypse was received enthusiastically by both the public and critics as a work of literary innovation: it achieved the seemingly contradictory feat of evoking nostalgia for the lost strengths and certainties of traditional Vietnamese culture through an experimental style and contemporaneous, bitterly humorous language that throws fantastical situations and a character with superhuman powers against a grimly realistic and undermining modern sensibility. The book generated over forty articles and book reviews, became the subject of several master’s and PhD theses in literature, and created the phenomenon of readers who would gleefully memorize and repeat certain choice sentences and passages among themselves. In 2003, the novel won an overwhelming majority of votes in the secret ballots (preliminary and final) of the Vietnam Writers Association awards jury, which should have meant winning the Association’s Best Book Award—the equivalent of the National Book Award in the United States—for that year. Yet the executive committee of the Association—under pressure from the Orwellian-named Committee of Ideology and Culture of the Party—vetoed the award, giving rise to protests to and within the Association and a scandal that was widely reported in the Vietnamese media.

  The CI&C’s main criticisms of the novel concerned its depiction of sex and violence—and even the way the title itself smacked of both archaic religious sensibility and (in the word “apocalypse”) an implication of the cataclysmic end of an era or system.1 But it was perhaps the sense of perversity and bleakness that permeates the novel that the Committee found so disturbing and subversive—and that also may account most for the novel’s popularity, which the author contends stems from the book’s “frank reflection of a society at the beginning of market economy and the side effects of a consumer life.” “I wanted to write,” he said, “a powerful warning about a society torn by crimes and sins,” and he does, but he deliberately makes those crimes and sins so unrelentingly vicious and twisted as to be funny—the laugh-to-keep-from-crying kind of funny that marks the best social satire.

  The market economy whose vicissitudes Ho Anh Thai lampoons in the novel was introduced to Vietnam in the mid-1980s, through the policy of doi moi (renovation), when it became clear that collectivization and state-owned enterprises were not working and had led to widespread poverty and starvation. It was a sea change in the country, one symbolized in the novel with a passage describing language instruction for privileged kids:

  At the time, if one studied English or French he was considered second-rate compared to those who studied Russian. Thế had had to intervene to get his son into the Russian class, which was for many people then the road to a paradise of thermoses, refrigerators, and pressure cookers. Entering the Russian course in the Russian department was a natural thing for privileged kids, and a real stroke of luck for kids from working-class families. Phũ was able to switch into the class easily, and Thế was also easily able to secure him a spot on the team of students competing in the Russian Language Olympics, or send him to some university over there. But suddenly that paradise exploded in disorder and confusion like a mine blowing up among nobles, angels, and fairies. The day the masquerade ball finally ended, heaven simply reverted into a stretch of dry and desolate earth populated with make-believe princes and officials rushing to take off their disguises and switching to ordinary fare and clothing. That year, those that had just finished their university courses in Russian wisely made the decision to switch over to English and French, so they would have the chance to find work in the Western companies who were finally flooding into the country. It was a repeat of the way many had abandoned Chinese for other languages ten years earlier, and then had to go back and start studying Chinese again so that they could try to find work for bosses from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Having to make quick adjustments and swim with the tide is the special characteristic of Homo sapiens, in its incarnation as modern man.

  Although the doi moi reforms made Vietnam one of the emerging economic tigers of Asia and led to more efficient systems and substantial improvements in both the economy of Vietnam and the quality of life for many of its citizens, the developing gap between rich and poor and the ensuing worship of a shallow and selfish materialism also meant for many others the inevitable loss not only of traditional culture and values in a globalized consumer society, but also of the ideals of social equality and social justice promised by the revolution. Even if those principles had never been realized, their articulation as slogans and goals and their connection, in the minds of many who had fought for the country’s independence, to a willingness to sacrifice self for a collective good—and perhaps as well a need to believe that the huge sacrifices of the war were worth, and worthy of, its ending—engendered a form of nostalgia: one tied as well to the loss of the more traditional village communal values that superseded communism and in many ways had been the soil that nourished it. When peasants
in the novel protest the confiscation of their land to create a stopover for well-heeled tourists returning from the beach, one remarks that one of the policemen who has thrown him and his family off the land had, during the war, asked that same peasant’s family for logs to help line the roads for supply trucks. “To take out the posts,” he says, “we had to dismantle our entire house. And my whole family had to move down into our shelter. But . . . we were still determined to fight the Americans. Suffer now and live better afterward! Now we can see clearly. Suffer then and still suffer now! After all we did, he still lets people beat me bloody.”

  The novel’s narrator, Tạ Dương Đông—Uncle Đông, as he is called—is a landlocked merchant marine captain, a frustrated artist, and a cuckolded husband whose daughter has been murdered. He is also the twisted mentor and enabler of his predatory nephews and their circle, a group that finds its various amusements in coercive sex or downright rape, whoring with prostitutes kidnapped into the trade, suicidal motor scooter races that frequently kill drivers and their passengers as well as innocent bystanders, and strangling the occasional goat. The most repulsive member of the group, Đông’s nephew Cốc, is a former action-movie star who was never given lines in his films because of his habit of spraying saliva when he spoke—a habit that didn’t preclude his later success as a pop singer idolized mainly for his disdainful looks and indifferent attitude. Cốc is also the first of the group to die, after his attempted rape of a woman he comes across at the beach.

  That woman, Mai Trừng, becomes the prime mover and central mystery of the novel. Đông’s journey to find her reveals a world without a moral center, a grotesquerie of corrupt characters and situations: crooked businessmen and public officials, amoral opportunists, thieves, and con artists. He witnesses entrenched and unearned privilege that contrasts with the kind of suffering and poverty exemplified at one point by a gravely ill peasant woman who is refused medical treatment because “during this era of the market economy, where the principle ‘you have to pay to play’ prevails, the have-nots are afforded only one right—the right to die.” He sees the destruction of symbols of endurance and culture as peasants no longer able to make a living on their farms ruin three venerated mountains by digging up slate to sell: “Those three symbols of an era when the region was famous for the preparation for scholarly examinations have been so thoroughly destroyed that each year the scholars’ modern descendents manage to get only two or three kids from the entire district into universities.” Đông’s quest after Mai Trừng forces him finally to confront the brutishness he sees all around him and his own shortcomings; what began as a deeply cynical and deeply amoral account turns into a deeply moral and spiritual quest to find for himself a needed path whose final shape he, and we, cannot yet envision.

  In 2007, the diary of Dr. Dang Thuy Tram was published. That book, taken from the body of a young woman killed during the war and then preserved and returned by an American soldier, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The diary is filled with idealism, innocence, and hope, as well as selflessness and self-sacrifice: ideals that remind people of qualities that now seem hopelessly lost, as when Đông sees people praying at a pagoda, their faces “dark and credulous, tormented by ignorance. They’d come to the temple to burn incense, to listen to the prayers and chants, to give donations, and then to ask for blessings from heaven. They strolled around the temple garden, stuck joss sticks everywhere, and wedged in a prayer—wishing for nothing but their own desires, nothing but the good life. If they had one house, then they wanted to build three. Turn one million into four hundred million, four hundred times . . . demanding four hundred times as much, what else could [one] be doing besides planning a robbery? In reality, there are thieves who, before every job, very sincerely go to the church, temple, or pagoda to ask for blessings. And after they’ve done the deed, they return to express their thankfulness and confess their sins.”

  While Dr. Dang’s diary evoked what people liked to hope may have been the best in themselves, Apocalypse Hotel reminds them not of what has been lost, but what has never been realized. In the Sylvia Plath poem “Mirror,” the speaker, the mirror, says that it can only reflect what was actually there “unmisted by love or dislike,” even though the person gazing into it tries to “turn to those liars / the candles or the moon.” It isn’t until one has the courage, as Đông eventually has, to stare into the mirror in the full light of day that one can see one’s flaws, see what is unmisted by what should be, and perhaps reflect on what could be. It is the courage of the author to see with that clarity of vision that in the end accounts for this novel’s abiding resonance and popularity in a Vietnam torn apart by war and struggling to find its new identity in a world without the narrowly defined but certain purpose that can make war so attractive and peace and freedom so difficult.

  Wayne Karlin

  ONE

  During the summer of that year the beach of Bình Sơn was shaken by the reported death of a young lady who had gone swimming with some male friends. Every summer, on some beach, a victim would drown: the annual tax the beach pays to the ocean. That summer she was it. Who knows, maybe next year it’ll be me. The beach tax collector is strict as fate. In fact, he is exactly like fate—he collects what is owed without any warning. In the summer heat, people impulsively hop into their vehicles and drive to the beach for a swim. They stop off for a quick dip and without any warning become the poor souls who have to pay that year’s tax for the whole damn beach.

  But the person who died that summer wasn’t, as rumor had it, a young lady. The deceased was actually a young man. As a close companion of the victim, and as a witness, I feel I have to correct this misinformation. But it is my fervent hope that my report will correct much more important matters than the sex of the victim.

  That morning Phũ had called me up on the phone. “Hey, Uncle, the three of us guys just decided to head over to Bình Sơn. Can you come?” Ten minutes later, Phũ drove up in his Toyota Corona. The four of us cruised down Highway 1, heading south. Thanks to Phũ’s—my nephew’s—car, we would all go on these freewheeling trips anywhere within a radius of a few hundred kilometers from Hanoi, as easily as other citizens of the capital would drive their motorbikes down to Four Seasons Ice Cream, next to Hoàn Kiếm Lake. It was all thanks to the tactful lobbying of my older brother. It was all thanks to the private hotel that he started. It was all thanks to the government’s giving permission to have private cars with white license plates. Long live white license plates!

  I remember that Phũ was behind the wheel that day. Cốc was sitting next to him. Bóp and I were sitting in the back. Cốc turned his head around to tell us a dirty story. As he spoke, a tiny mist of saliva sprayed from his mouth, visible as a puff of breath in the depths of winter. No matter where he was, or with whom, he always emitted such a mist. Nevertheless, among the mobs of young ladies that surrounded him, not a one avoided his face. They would raise their own faces proudly and defiantly, their infatuated eyes fixed on the beautiful and ruthless visage of the man emitting this fine spray. Neither did we avoid his face. The distance from the front to the back seats wasn’t too small, and saliva can’t transmit AIDS—only respiratory diseases. That wasn’t something we worried about with Cốc, whose lungs were strong enough to pump air through all four of our bodies.

  Cốc could never be satisfied telling any story that had a bit of sexual innuendo without bringing up the thing itself. His real name is Công, but his clique all called him Cốc, which he would pronounce a bit off, so as to turn it into the English word Cock, which refers to a male chicken and also that thing that wriggles between a guy’s legs. Both meanings suited Cốc just fine.

  During his first year of university Cốc had been discovered by a movie director. The director was both experienced and well qualified, but he’d allowed himself to play second fiddle to a novice French director and jointly direct a movie. During the filming, both the inexperienced French director and the experienced Vietna
mese director tried in vain to get Cốc to stop spraying saliva. The crew’s special effects man was likewise unable to find a cure for that veil of mist that hung perpetually front of Cốc’s face. The upshot was that Cốc had to take a role without any lines. A party of Legionnaires was driving by in an uncovered vehicle, returning from a raid. It was imperative that in the vehicle there could be seen an Asian face, lips pursed in an action hero’s scowl. Cốc was placed in this role: all he had to do was to sit clutching his gun and smiling scornfully, his eyes aglow with cruelty, and his hair wild in the wind.

  Those few moments in a Western-made film raised Cốc to such a level of popularity and fame that two young female classmates had to get abortions. His fame rose to the point that a gaggle of would-be directors competed with each other to get Cốc to sign movie contracts with them. Their movies featured men and women fistfighting while hanging from trees, making out on the ocean floor, having sex in airplanes, and parachuting after each other from cliffs into the ocean below.

  After a few years of this, audiences grew more knowledgeable and finally woke up to the fact that they were being treated as children by such movies. As the shock of maturity hit them, Cốc walked away from the movies with both fame and money: a net worth of almost twenty thousand dollars. Having arrived at this level, Cốc wasn’t foolish enough to turn around and go back to the university just to become an engineer or a small-time civil servant. Almost every young man dreamed of being like Cốc. Of fame and fortune arriving at their doorsteps through some stroke of destiny. They would show their faces on the street, linger in public places, or pay their respects at holy places—always praying that some powerful celebrity would spot them, clap them on the shoulder, and invite them to be in a film or to be a model.

  That would be the way to the good life. No more worrying about hardships like homework, examinations, term papers, or theses.