Civil War, Socialism’s Underworld, and the Environment

This chapter examines how Nguyễn Trí’s novel, The Fantasy of Paradise, along with his short stories from the collection Gold, Gems, Incense interrogate Vietnam’s environmental and economic precarity. His works link these twin vulnerabilities not only to contemporary globalization, but also to Vietnam’s state policies that, implemented after the Second Indochina War, marginalized former war enemies. Nguyễn Trí writes about South Vietnamese war veterans who served time in labor camps and then failed to assimilate into a society that continued to exclude and alienate them. These men and their families resorted to nature for their survival in postwar Vietnam. Nguyễn Trí’s characters mine for gold, raise livestock off the land, traffic timber, cut down trees to make coal, or surreptitiously grow cashews. This body of fiction traces economic disparity and environmental degradation to the lingering effects of the Republic of Vietnam’s war economy, propped up by US aid money, and the postwar treatment of South Vietnamese family members, not just veterans themselves, as irrelevant to the national economy and society.