"For a short time there is magic in us", the illuminated book by the American-Vietnamese poet Ocean Wong, is written as a letter from a young man to his mother.
In this letter he tells her the story of their lives: a story of immigration, of foreignness, of poverty and intergenerational trauma, but also a story of tenderness, compassion and beauty.
Through the letter he tries to decipher their lives and reconcile, with his mother and no less with himself.
But his mother, born in Vietnam in the years immediately after the war, never learned to read.
This fact makes the letter futile, an attempt at communication doomed in advance to failure;
At the same time, it allows the writer a frankness that would not have been possible otherwise: "I have the courage to tell you only because the chances of this letter reaching you are slim - the impossibility of you reading it is all that allows me to tell it" (p. 108).
The book, therefore, is structured as a paradox: a confession that is not a confession, a letter that was not intended to reach its destination.
The book describes the years of Wong's childhood and youth in the poor neighborhoods of Hartford, Connecticut - a city with a glorious past that is now one of the poorest in the US. It is a book in which the personal and the political are inseparable: the narrator's family is a product of the Vietnam War and of the country to which they immigrated, which in reality Its political and social they meet every day.
The America that emerges from the pages of the book is a bleak and crumbling place: shootings on a regular basis, poverty, drugs and corporate rule.
By the time he was 20, five of Wong's friends had already died of overdoses, victims of the drug-fueled opiate epidemic.
Even work, that venerated American ideal, is depicted here as a continuous suffering, mainly in the mother's theory, her hands and lungs are ruined from years of working in a beauty parlor, where she kneels at the feet of other women and flatters them in the hope of tips.
Most of all, the existence that Wong describes is atomistic, devoid of support circles: apart from family, the only places where the narrator finds a sense of community are working on a tobacco farm, alongside migrant workers from Mexico and Central America, and visiting Vietnam after the death of his grandmother.
A great many stories have been written about the Vietnam War, which is one of the formative experiences of American society in the 20th century, but much less about what was left there after the evacuation of the forces;
In the American mind, Vietnam suddenly jumped from a war zone to a popular tourist destination.
The book provides a glimpse into the scars left by the war on the other side of the border: whether it is the narrator's mother, the daughter of a Vietnamese mother and an American father that the children in Kfara smeared her with mud so that she would stop being white, and who asked to verify at the store if the clothes she was buying were fireproof;
And between his grandmother, who, hearing fireworks on the 4th of July, darkened the house so that the bombs wouldn't find them.
The family story is more complex and ambivalent than the political one: Wong grew up with his mother and grandmother - his abusive father was removed by the police when he was a young child, and his grandfather's identity is in doubt - both of whom suffered from mental disorders.
Wong's mother beat him many times, sometimes bloody, threw objects at him and locked him in the basement after he wet the bed.
On the other hand, it is clear that the abuse did not stem from malice but from distress;
And between the son and his mother there is great intimacy, even if it cannot find its expression in words.
The ambivalent attitude is reflected, among other things, in the nickname attached to Wong, "little dog" - apparently a humiliating nickname, but one intended to protect him from the evil spirits from the Vietnamese tradition.
The same complexity also prevails in the love story between Wong and a boy named Trevor, a representative of the agricultural America that has degenerated into an inferior Hebrew.
The relationship between the two is a mixture of violence and tenderness, bluntness and tenderness.
The sexual relationship between them is described almost as rape but at the same time also as devotion, a moment where "two people carve one body, until there is no corner left that says 'I'" (p. 185).
This is a book written by a poet, and this is evident: the events are sketched in conversations with a minute brush, not life processes and moves but a series of moments.
The writing is full of metaphors, improbable juxtapositions that somehow manage to work despite this, such as Wong asking his mother "if it is possible to combine sadness with happiness to create a deep purple sensation" (p. 116), or his description of memory as "a deer in a fog so thick and brilliant that the deer The second nearby looks like an unfinished shadow of the first" (p. 15).
Part of the secret of the book's power is the way its aesthetic beauty makes it possible to bear the pain it bears.
Certain images become recurring symbols: a carriage of majestic Danes as a symbol of immigration, cows and calves as a symbol of human cruelty, Tiger Woods as a symbol of the complexity of race in America.
Some of these symbols appear for a few paragraphs, while others appear throughout the book.
Sometimes, instead of telling one narrative, two or three such symbols are woven together, each of them in paragraphs dedicated to it - a bit like the way lines are rhymed in poetry.
It's an interesting narrative form, though its success depends in no small measure on the reader deciphering the symbols in the way the author intended them;
When it comes to obscure or ambiguous symbols, as sometimes happens, the result is confusing and breaks the sequence of reading.
The writing hand here is original and talented, but still unstable.
The author fails to maintain a uniform level throughout the book: parts of the middle of the book shuffle and repeat themselves thematically;
The insertions from different thinkers, such as Roland Barthes or Simon Weil, are unnecessarily sophisticated;
And unlike the preoccupation with the trauma of Vietnam, most pieces dealing with racial politics in the US fail to innovate in relation to much writing on the subject.
Alongside this, there are beautiful moments of kindness: for example, a street funeral in Vietnam accompanied by sweets and a drag show, or the pedicure given by Wong's mother to an amputee woman.
"All this time I told myself that we were born from war," writes Wong, "but I was wrong, Mama. We were born from beauty" (202) - and this claim about the power of beauty is proven from the pages.
Translation of such a book, so much of which is rooted in language and the meeting between languages, is a particularly complex craft.
In this context, it is worth noting to praise Esnat Hadar's translation, which succeeds in conveying Wong's poetics in a smooth and natural manner, and allows the Hebrew reader to take part in this short-lived magic.
Ocean Wong / For a short time we have magic;
From English: Esnat Hadar, Mater Publishing, 223 p.
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