d r a g o n f i s h
by vu tran
Dragon Fish, Vu Tran first novel, is story of exile and loss strapped into the cockpit of a thriller. Robert Ruen, the first- peson narrator, is a forty-five-yer-old Okland policeman, two years divorced from him his Vietnamese wife, Suzy, a woman who left him the day after he stugged her in the face. Five months ago to learned that she had been thrown down a fight of stairs by her new husband, Sonny Van Nguyen -- restaurateur, smuggler, gambler, and all- around bad actor. The new sent Robert bombing off to Las Vegas. Sonny' s home base, to wreak vengeance, exacting some but receiving his own portion of hurt. Now, back to the present -- if only briefly -- he receives a visit from a couple of Sonny' s gun- toting sidekicks, who tell him that. Suzy has dissappeared and it' s up to Robert to find her. The incentives is a videotape of Robert assaulting Sonny, which they intend to turn over to the authorities unless he follows their directions -- so off they all go, back to Las Vegas.
But who is this Suzy? In the first place her real name is Hong, but, as Robert reports " it sounded a big piggish the way Americans pronouncd it, " so he dubs her " Suzy", the name of his first girlfriend. Although it is not exactly the main element of the story, Robert's take- change attitude suggests that he suffers from a familiar brand of male obliviouness as, say, represented by his insisiting, against Suzy' s wishes, that the couple take a road trip to San Diego for their honeymoon. The journey is marked by his forgetting, " the cooler with all the drinks and snacks she prepared, " her becoming violently carsick, and his bringing her to eat, ,as he tell us, to "a place I once took a girlfriend years ago. " There they had an expensive meal she didn' t want and couldn' t eat. Shr storms off, he rolls his eyes and admits, " I' d had women do this to me before." I had to laugh.
Still, it is clear that Robert loved Suzy and still does, and that, despite his fit of violent rage, he wants to do right by her. Suzy, it is also clear, was drawn, to marry him less out of love and more out of his being a source of safety and stability. It wasn' t enough. Her character, her history, and her attendant self- loathing and yearning for something -- she hardly knows what -- plunge her into episodes of depression and vicious ill temper. Robert knows she escaped by boat to Malaysia after the fall of Saigon, but she has never told him the details of that terrible voyage, or what happened in the refugee camp in Malaysia before she made it to America. Most astoundingly, she has also kept secret the fact that she had a daughter whom she abandoned to relatives in Los Angeles when the girl was five. All this we learn from long excerpts from her secret journal that appear intermittently throughout the book.
Suzy is an exile and traumatized survivor, but she is also, and perhaps as a consequence, crarzy, possessed of an explosive temper, and tormented by an endless, unappeasble, and contradictory yearning for both freedom and attachment. Tran shows us Robert' s pinability to understand his wife, not only because she cannot be reduced an explanation -- but also because, even if she could be, he' s probalbly not the guy to do it. That dosen' t make him bad : it makes him a twenty- year- veteran of the Okland police force, married -- then unma-
rried -- to a woman who doesn' t know what she wants.
Robert learns more of Suzy' s story as he moves through an extremely curious and violent plot, the main ingrdient of which is his meeting Suzy' s daughter, Mai, and taking her along in the search for her mother. Also involved is a suitcase containing $100.000, an unlucky Vietnamese card dealer called Happy, back- stories from Vietnam and Malaysia, as well as knives, guns, murder, mayhem, another videotape, and a couple of ghosts. Though this fast- moving, engine- gunning rattletrap of a plot keeps the reader whipping through the pages, it has too many gears and levers, and sits oddly with Tran' s fine precision of prose style.
He evokes setting with economy and vigor : the overcrowded, stinking boat waking its perilous nine- days voyage to Malaysia, the refugee camp and its way of life, a super- down- market Las Vegas hotel/ casino. His rendering of this dismal etablishment and its habitués doesn' t lexuriate in the phantasmagorial luridness that so many depictions of
Las Vegas do but still perfectly captures its peerless crumminess. The building reveal " its age during the day, with its big- bulbed signs flashing sixties glamour, its fat, crusty walls a world away from its mirrored splendor on the Strip. "At the registration desk is " an overweight family besieged by luggage and cigarettes smoke the two parents puffing away as their sniggering tons took turns punching each other in the arm." Inside the poker room is "l lit like some foodless cafeteria", populated some by collage- age cludes in baseball caps and sunglasses, their white- haired elders in plaid and khakhis, and the solitary middle - aged woman with her purse in her lap.
Every description has its little grace notes, small or observations that give unique life to the scene. Here, as a final example, is Robert showing up at Sonny' s restaurant, asking the Mexican sweeping the patio to get his boss, though it's the son who appears:
The Mexican, for some reason handed me his broom, and dissappeared behind two giant mahogang doors. A minute later a young Vietnamese woman late twenties, brightly groomed, dressed in a spendidly tailored tan suit a precise pind- tie appeared in his place. He smiled at me, shook my hand tenderly. He relieved me of the broom and learned it aganist one of the wooden pillars that blanket the patio." How may I help you, sir? he held his hands behind his back and spoke with a slight accent, his tone as formal as if he'd ironed it.
Everything is prefect there, those quiet little gamishes of diosyneratic detail are gifts,
both amusing and full of character Tran 's novel is filled with this sort of inspired
meticulousness and reading it is to enter its world.
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( viet-studies)
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