The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam

In the attic apartment where Kien’s father used to keep his paintings, an unnamed mute girl keeps Kien’s manuscript pages. Some nights Kien writes about her, from her point of view, as if she is looking at him. He describes how she sees him. Some night he visits her, and she understands, as he drunkenly tells her stories, that he is repeating whatever stories he just finished writing that night. Kien says she helped him remember, but does not say what he remembered. Nor does he know that she is in love with him. She knows he mistakes her for other girls: Hoa, from the jungle; Phuong, his first love; Hien, on the train; and the naked dead girl at the Saigon airport. When Kien finishes his novel, he says he doesn’t know what to do with the manuscript pages. He begins to burn them, but the mute girl stops him. She knows she won’t see him again, but she collects his manuscript pages and keeps them for him. 

One early morning, Kien thinks he dies a little death. He sees his life as a river, and this reminds him of a day with Phuong, just before the start of the war. He says it was the last perfect day before the war began, and with the thought of war, his mind skips to the first bombing raids. From the bombing raids he remembers different battles: shooting a man in the face with a submachine gun; the Tet Offensive; the day when Elephant Tac was shot. In his room with his memories, he wants to die, but there is too much to do: “He had the burden of a generation, a debt to repay before dying” (122).

Remembering his debt—the novel he is writing—reminds Kien of his father’s sleepwalking. He remembers that he never understood his mother or his father. In the last days of his life, just before the war began, Kien’s father stayed up all night drinking and painting. He lost his will to live, and died the first day the Hanoi air-raid sirens sounded. 

It is Phuong who understood Kien’s father’s paintings. She recalls the night she helped him burn them all, but she does not tell Kien. Instead, the two of them return, in memory, to the perfect day on the lake, just before the war began. Phuong wears a bathing suit beneath her school uniform, and the two of them skip school to swim in the lake. Lying on the bank, Phuong wants Kien to make love to her, but Kien cannot. She tells him then the future is war, destruction, and death. She says he will throw his life away as a soldier, but that she will throw hers away as well. The next day, at school, everyone but Kien is dismissed for university exams—Kien is sent to war.   

Remembering the perfect lake day, Kien is also reminded of the times during the war when he missed Phuong: once when he had malaria; another time when he was severely wounded; and finally when he and his men captured the commandos who murdered the three farm girls. 

After the war, Phuong decides to break off their relationship. She has been living next door to Kien, and men come to her every night, but Kien says he would rather listen to their laughter through the walls than for her to leave. But Phuong has also been devastated by the war; she tells Kien she has done horrible things to survive. She says they will never see each other again.