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The poet Quan Barry, author of several collections including, most recently, Loose Strife, has just published her first novel, She Weeps Each Time You're Born.
This work of fiction about the tumultuous history of modern Vietnam could only have been written by a poet. Under a full moon, in the aftermath of the destruction of a village, a baby girl who will be called Rabbit is born with the ability to hear the voices of the dead. With a small band of characters who will become her makeshift family, we leave Rabbit’s burnt-out birthplace and journey through the chaos of war and post-war reunification, hearing along the way the stories that have been buried, sometimes literally, in the earth of this embattled country. The scene below takes place along the Song Ma river in 1972, just before Rabbit enters the story — it begins, as do many sections in the book, with an italic section of poetry that speaks about the events of the novel
from just outside its narrative walls. |
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| From She Weeps Each Time You're Born |
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On this we do not agree. Some of us say she was made manifest in a muddy ditch on the way to the pineapple plantation. Others say it happened hunkered down in a piggery, the little ones with their wet snouts full of wonder at the strange bristleless being wriggling among them for milk. Either way we bow to you. Believe us when we say life is a wheel. There was no beginning. There is no end. But we will tell you the story as she believes it occurred under the full rabbit moon six feet below ground in a wooden box, her mother's hands cold as ice, overhead the bats of good fortune flitting through the dark.
When Little Mother took off her non la under the jackfruit tree, Lam knew what he had to do, and he knew what he wasn't capable of doing. All his long life he'd been the hand that shields the candle guttering in the storm. And now this young woman was standing in his yard underneath the jackfruit tree, the cuffs of her loose black pants dirty from paddy water. It was obviously the mosquito sickness, the kind that can eat twenty pounds off a grown man in under a week. Yes, it was definitely the mosquito sickness, but there was something else. He tried not to stare. Her pregnant stomach was stretched tight, her cheeks sunken, gums receding as if she had already died and nobody told her.
He was just coming back from gathering the wild peony root. With his cane, the errand took twice as long. The flower grew in a small grove along the road to the mountain. He had heard that on the other side of the mountain the landscape was bombed flat, empty C-rations and discarded magazines and clothes and everything the Americans no longer wanted strewn in the places where the butterfly bush used to flower.
He lifted his cane and motioned for her to follow him inside. A jackfruit fell from the tree and broke open, the smell instantly on the wind. Little Mother nodded and put her hat back on. Something shimmered at her feet. Lam blinked and rubbed his eyes. When he looked again, it was gone. He was an old man, older than Uncle Ho would have been were the old patriot still alive. He was old enough to remember the famines brought on by the Japanese army and their insatiable hunger for rice. Still, he knew what he'd seen shimmering at her feet-a ring of words shining in a perfect circle on the ground around her. Sông dài cá lôi biêt ta˘m. In the long river, fish swim off without a trace. The sunlight streaming through the
reeds in her hat.
Then Lam heard the sound of a door banging shut in the wind. His nearest neighbor was more than a mile away. This is what happens when you live in two worlds at once, he thought, but all he said to her was come. |
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Excerpt from SHE WEEPS EACH TIME YOU'RE BORN Copyright © 2015 by Quan Barry. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. |
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