Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel (Modern Southeast Asian Literature)

Modern

Southeast

Asian Literature

Wayne Karlin, series editor

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Epilogue

Notes

About the Author

Introduction

A
pocalypse 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.