Butterfly Venom translated by Hien Trang, published by Tre Publishing House
1. Butterfly Venom brings the main character named Xuan back to his lost homeland, reviving memories of Saigon during the war years.
There, people of all ages, backgrounds, classes and social classes appear, like a film rewinding before our eyes.
While the war continued to take place at a pace that had become the "normal" rhythm of life for people living in a wartime society, a little girl named Xuan realized that her young body was gradually changing.
In this novel, readers will follow Xuan - the daughter of a military officer in Saigon before 1975. Together they will go through the turbulent years of adolescence, through the wartime city, through the changes of the times.
All appear under the pen of writer Anna Moi. Memories constantly flow, regress, strike out and drift in like waves.
Readers let themselves be curious before those memory films, piecing together each piece, reconstructing the atmosphere of a time, just a time whose influence seemed to weigh heavily on an entire life.
I remember The Lover by Marguerite Duras. A writer who also spent her youth in this faraway tropical country. A writer who, like Anna Moi, chose French as her writing language.
As she entered old age, Duras wrote about her Oriental "lover", about her experiences as a young girl on a ferry across the river, with a love story without a promise because there was nothing to promise.
Anna Moi was a contemporary of Xuan - her character. Many years after leaving this place, the writer once again brought this city back to life on the page, from the perspective of a young girl who had not yet grown up but seemed to have grown old. And if it were real in life, Noc Buom's daughter named Xuan would have also entered her senior years.
2. Anna Moi was born in 1955 in Saigon to a family of Northern immigrants. She lived in Saigon, Hoi An, and Buon Ma Thuot during her childhood. Since the 1970s, she studied abroad in France.
These biographical details help the novel give readers a sense of seeing the past through the eyes of contemporaries. Even though the publisher carefully wrote at the beginning of the book: "This is a work of fiction". Just to be sure.
The literary legacy of writer Anna Moi includes eight collections of short stories and three novels. The result of her "project" to restart her writing in the early 2000s, after a two-decade hiatus. Butterfly Venom is a look back at youth.
A passionate youth, blossoming right in the middle of a hastily written history with events rushing to turn the page. In the middle of escalating war, in the middle of intelligence (and even something resembling love), in the middle of a group of misfit youths who let themselves go as a hobby and as a choice.
The nostalgic, beautiful and dreary South in Duras's novel has developed into a modern city in Anna Moi's Butterfly Venom.
Anna Moi's rhythm of writing recreates the fast pace of life in a wartime city. Through the eyes of a young girl, everything around her resembles a caricature, with a sarcastic smile that sometimes needs no concealment.
Like Mom's cooking recipe inserted in the middle of the war situation, between the political views of the defeated father lost in the post-coup period, between the tropical climate, the gangs:
"Just like a good photo should be sharp, good pickled radish and chayote should be white. Blanching and salting in rice wine vinegar with a pinch of borax will coat the small pieces with a white, crispy skin."
In this way they passed through an age where death was easier than life; hatred was easier than love; destruction was easier than resurrection; a world in ruins, souls teetering without beginning or end, as if a young girl's spring would be eternal.
The novel begins with a monk's suicide and ends with "an agreement being reached about the table to be used in the peace conference".
Between those two times, there is a young girl who still lives and experiences that life in her own way. A small world of an ordinary individual in a large, chaotic, complex world that one day, Xuan's young girl steps must cross.
The abrupt ending of Butterfly Venom is to let the youth of a young girl named Xuan continue in a non-linear time dominated by memories.
Even the pen name Moi that the writer chose for himself has something that evokes smallness and difference, a word in Vietnamese that is not suitable when referring to someone.
But she beautified that noun, as Mr. Bui Giang once lovingly called "the little savage girl": You are a stranger, oh my dear/ You from the familiar family seek the heavens of a foreign land/ You seek a guest from many places/ Search for the old homeland that was once a distant memory/ Looking at you smiling and talking from front to back/ Your image hides the sadness of the beginning.
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HUYNH TRONG KHANG
Source: https://tuoitre.vn/kiem-tim-co-quan-tieu-tuong-ban-dau-2025051308131647.htm
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