The Wandering Motorbike (Preface)

Title: Xe máy tiếu ngạo (The Wandering Motorbike)

Author: Nguyễn Trương Quý

Translator: Jacob O. Gold

Center for Southeast Asian Studies

University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48104

Translator’s Preface

            Nguyễn Trương Quý was born in Hanoi in 1977. A graduate of the Hanoi University of Architecture, Trương Quý’s successes as an essayist and, most recently, an author of short fiction, seem to derive from his application of an architect’s sensibility to the pages of his prose. Each essay seems a guided tour through spaces of nostalgic memory, social description, wide-ranging cultural references, and bitingly humorous invention. A true architect, his decorative motifs, as much as his supporting thematic columns, stand in service to a balanced whole. And just as an architect designs buildings that will join the living fabric of the cities in which they are built, Trương Quý’s works are inimtately bound up in the life of the rapidly-evolving city that inspires them: Hanoi.

            Trương Quý began to make a name for himself by publishing essays in various online and print publications, and his first essay collection, Tự nhiên như người Hà Nội (“As Natural as a Hanoian”— a half-joking reference to Hanoi’s sense of its own culutral refinements), was released in 2004. This was followed by Ăn phở rất khó thấy ngon (“It’s hard to find a good bowl of phở”—that is, Vietnam’s famous beef noodle soup) in 2008, and Hà Nội là Hà Nội (Hanoi is Hanoi) in 2010. Xe máy tiếu ngạo was published in 2012. This translation project is the first time that any of Trương Quý works have appeared in English, or any other language outside of Vietnamese. Trương Quý has also translated several English-language works into Vietnamese, most notably, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire in 2011. The author’s first collection of short fiction is slated for publication sometime in 2013.

            The concept behind The Wandering Motorbike is simple yet effective: use the motorbike as a guiding theme through which to explore the changes that have taken place in Hanoi, and in the lives of its residents, over the past thirty years. It must be mentioned here that the motorbike is perhaps the most iconic feature of Vietnamese modernity. There are over 2 million registered motorbikes in Hanoi, and more than twice that number in Ho Chi Minh City (also known as Saigon). Before the economic and, to some extent, social liberalizations of the Dổi Mới (Renewal) Policy were launched in 1986 (paralleling Deng Xiaoping’s similarly sweeping reforms in China), Hanoi was a city of bicycles, streetcars, and oxcarts on the road, dispensaries and ration books in place of grocery stores, and little if any access to consumer goods. Trương Quý belongs to the generation that came of age just at the cusp of Vietnam’s massive socioeconomic transformation. He is old enough to remember what came before, and young enough to be excited about what the future holds for Hanoi (he seems particularly fascinated with the projected completion of Hanoi’s first subway line several years from now). Trương Quý’s intermediate historical perspective means that he can more impartially weigh and compare the past and the present: on the one hand, savoring the simple pleasures that stood out among yesteryear’s material deprivation, while on the other, jabbing at the frivolity and conspicious consumption that seem endemic to today’s new wealthy classes. At the same time, this is not a collection of charicatured social types. Trương Quý is a master at conveying the compact, yet acute, daily dramas of children and parents, husbands and wives, boyfriend and girlfriends, office workers and their bosses. He also takes advantage of the inflows of global media now available in Vietnam. In addition to quoting from Vietnamese novels, poetry, and cinema, Trương Quý muses upon Easy Rider, Roman Holiday, The Wild Ones, and, interestingly, The Motorcycle Diaries, whose protagonist, Che Guevara—as Trương Quý reminds us— has become as much a fixture of Western t-shirts as the pages of Marxist hagiography. And of course, the super-protagonist of Trương Quý’s work is the city of Hanoi itself: its famous boulevards and twisting mazelike alleyways, its famous cafes and scenic lakes, its Old Quarter and its nouveau riche proto-suburbs.

            Bringing this book into English has a second layer of significance for me, the translator. I came to Hanoi for the first time in 2007, working for a year at the official English-language newspaper, The Việt Nam News, through a fellowship organized by the university from which I had graduated the previous year. At that time, my only knowledge of Vietnamese came from the Pimsleur language-learning discs that I had listened to before heading overseas. After my fellowship posting ended, I did not return to Hanoi for four years, although I did work as a journalist elsewhere in Southeast Asia. This past summer (after having completed the Advanced Vietnamese course sequence here at Michigan), I finally had the chance to return to Hanoi, expressly in order to initiate this translation project. The introduction between the author and myself was made by Michigan’s stellar Vietnamese instructor, Nguyễn Thủy-Anh, who is also my advisor on the independent course dimension of the project. My first sojourn in Hanoi had been absolutely wonderful, and for those four years I had honestly been pining for a city that I fell in love with (the fragrance of milk-flowers, described in the sample chapter, was a particular sensory touchpoint for these emotions), yet never knew if I would see again. It was doubly thrilling, then, both to return to Hanoi and be able to speak Vietnamese with everyone there. I was not just returning to the city, I was rediscovering it on a deeper level. With every chapter that I translate here in Ann Arbor, that process of rediscovery advances that much further. My hope is to transition this project from a purely academic and personal challenge into actual matter for publication in Vietnam.

Notes on the Translation Itself

            The essay form employed by Trương Quý is known as the tản văn, or “meandering writing.” The essay form in general has a long history within the greater tradition of Vietnamese letters, and its sub-genres are varied and eclectic. Even before mass print culture exploded with the adoption of Quốc ngữ (Romanized) script during the French colonial period, Vietnamese authors were composing travelogues, religious works, poetic anthologies, and so on. Even today, a newsstand in a major Vietnamese city will carry dozens of daily broasheets, literary journals, and the newer Western-inflected glossy magazines. The tản văn form in particular has its roots in the journal culture that arose early in the last century, when Vietnamese intellectuals were grappling with how to define their identity, and their sense of nationhood, under the paradoxical effects of French domination, which wounded national pride and yet helped forge, and only in part through opposition, a modernized, unified concept of “Vietnam”.

            True to its “meandering” name, a tản văn essay stems from a long-held Vietnamese aesthetic sensbility in which the units of expression, be they paragraphs or phrases, are valued as much for their individual poetry as for their service to the continuous whole. To the active reader, these become like movements in an orchestral work—it soon becomes easy for the mind to establish its own connections. This form is also perfect for the narrative “vehicle” of the motorbike, which, as Trương Quý often mentioned, allows the rider to zoom freely, and with unprecedented speed, from one part of the city to another. What is especially fun about translating, and hopefully, reading Trương Quý’s tản văn is that, in their playful stream-of-consciousness unfoldings, they also reveal a great deal about the author himself. In this book, one is transported to Hanoi, and has enjoys the opportunity of becoming well-acquainted with one of its sharpest citizen-observers, Trương Quý.

            There are several features of the Vietnamese language that present special difficulties for the English-language translator. The toughest of these to handle, but also the most interesting for an American student of Vietnamese, are the instaces of what linguists call “reduplication.” The basic forms of these simply involve following a word with an appended, similar-sounding attachment, to emphasize meaning or for euphonious effect. For example, if mạnh means “strong,” then mạnh mẽ means “very strong.” However, there is a more unique form of reduplication in Vietnamese that could be called “abstract onomatopoeia”. This is where word-pairs don’t “mean” anything in themselves, but can describe objects, actions, sounds, conditions, or feelings, to name a few, all with a multi-shaded range of meanings. These are a class of terms that a fluent speaker understands implicitly, but requires a careful process of internalization for the foreign language learner. Some of the many examples in Trương Quý’s work: Lănh nhăng means that something is vague, unspecified, but also subject to manipulation or avoidance. Chễm chệ can refer to a swaggering, even teetering motion, but also with shaded meanings of haughtiness, or the rocking of a royal palanquin. Uể oải connotes reluctance or boredom, absent-mindedly doing something. Chênh vênh means that something is slightly protruding, or creating an edge of some kind. Here are some more examples from Wikipedia that have not occured so far in Trương Quý’s work:

▪       loảng xoảng — sound of glass breaking to pieces or metallic objects falling to the ground

▪       hớt hơ hớt hải- (also hớt ha hớt hải) — hard gasps -> in extreme hurry, in panic, panic-stricken

▪       lục đục — the sound of hard, blunt (and likely wooden) objects hitting against each other -> disagreements and conflicts inside a group or an organization

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication#Vietnamese  Avail. 11-17-12)

       

        As a translator, one realizes that the Vietnamese language has created incredibly compact, richly descriptive terms that English, for all of its extensive vocabulary, cannot easily convey, especially because each of these terms calls up an entire bundle of physical, kinetic, affective and associative properties. The best that one can do is to find the mot juste based upon the context in which the reduplicative phrase is used, or provide an explanatory footnote.

      As a translator, I have made the decision to use footnotes extensively in my work. In this world of hypertext websites and multi-tasking media players, I felt that my readers could handle, and would ultimately appreciate, a bit of non-linearity. This is especially so because I am at the service of the author, Trương Quý, and it is my foremost responsibility to deliver his thoughts, and as best as possible, his style, to an English-language readership. There are many references to Vietnamese artists and writers, cultural features, locations in Hanoi, as well as Vietnamese idioms, the understandings of which are all crucial to the fullest appreciation of these chapters. Also, I couldn’t help but want to share some of the author’s wordplay and his neologisms with my readers.

      Another interesting feature of written Vietnamese what I would call its range of grammatical personalities. Between the 1st and 11th centuries BCE, Vietnam fell directly under Chinese imperial rule. Over the subsequent centuries, Chinese culture— especially the written culture of statecraft, religion, and the literary arts—continued to exert a profound influence on the culture of Vietnam. Under French colonization (as well as Vietnam’s subsequent participation in the Communist bloc of nations), the patterns of written Vietnamese took on a more “westernized” grammatical structure. What this means from a practical standpoint is that written Vietnamese is like an accordion. Depending on the effects that one is aiming for, the language can contract into the ideographic style of literary Chinese, or expand into what is almost a calque of Western grammatical parts. Classic Chinese also provided Vietnam with a high-literary, or more formal, register, especially in terms of vocabulary, known as Hán-Việt  (Sino-Vietnamese). Sino-Vietnamese and “common” Vietnamese can, often do, exist side by side in the same sentence. On average, Vietnamese sentences remain more compact than English ones, requiring fewer “in-between” connector words in order to deftly express equivalent ideas in English. This also presents something of a challenge for the translator in terms of finding the proper balance and tone of the author’s phrasing.

      Finally, there are the cultural barriers between Trương Quý and myself. I am not from Vietnam, or a Vietnamese-American, but I have spent time in Vietnam, and have continued to assiduously study Vietnamese culture and history here in the US, especially in the context of my work here at Michigan. Thanks to my interactions with the author, the advising of Vietnamese lecturer Nguyễn Thủy-Anh, and my own experiences, readings, media consumption, and inner contemplation, I am try my best to create a genuinely Vietnamese space in my mind through which to engage this author’s work. I hope you enjoy my efforts so far!