Vu Tran
Photo by Chris Kirzeder
Bio
Vu Tran's first novel, Dragonfish, was a New York Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of the Year. His short fiction has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Best American Mystery Stories, Best of Fence, and other publications. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and has been a fellow at Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the MacDowell Colony. Born in Vietnam and raised in Oklahoma, Vu received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his PhD from the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Practice in English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, where he directs the fiction program.
Writing is difficult for me, as it is for many writers. You spend five years on your first novel, your enthusiasm and passion mingled with doubt and impatience. You inch forward, your progress often marked only by a good sentence that took you hours, sometimes an entire day, to produce. Your breakthroughs feel miraculous because they are rare and require struggle. You finally finish the book and feel a flood of pride and relief, and if you’re lucky, you find some measure of success that makes all the hard work worth it, and you also give yourself some time to relax and enjoy that accomplishment. But you know that you’ll eventually need to get back into your desk chair and write that next book, and that doing so requires the same commitment and solitude and anxiety that the first book required.
Writing is my favorite mystery in life, and I know every writer has their own unique experience of it, many not nearly as difficult as mine. But I describe that difficulty only to express how invaluable it is, during the process, to have your work acknowledged by an organization as esteemed and essential as the NEA. The money is wonderful and helps in so many different ways, but it’s the recognition that is invigorating and will fortify me for however many more years it’ll take to finish this thing that means so much to me.
Excerpt from Dragonfish: A Novel
Our first night at sea, you cried for your father. You buried your face in my lap and clenched a fist to your ear as if to shut out my voice. I reminded you that we had to leave home and he could not make the trip with us. He would catch up with us soon. But you kept shaking your head. I couldn’t tell if I was failing to comfort you or if you were already, at four years old, refusing to believe in lies. You turned away from me, so alone in your distress that I no longer wanted to console you. I had never been able to anyway. Only he could soothe you. But why was I, even now, not enough? Did you imagine that I too would die without him?
Eventually you drifted off to sleep along with everyone around us. People were lying side by side, draped across each other’s legs, sitting and leaning against what they could. In the next nine days, there would be thirst and hunger, sickness, death. But that first night we had at last made it out to sea, all ninety of us, and as our boat bobbed along the waves, everyone slept soundly.
I sat awake just beneath the gunwale with the sea spraying the crown of my head, and I listened to the boat’s engine sputtering us toward Malaysia and farther and farther away from home. It was the sound of us leaving everything behind.
The truth was that I too thought only of your father. On the morning we left, I held you in the darkness before dawn and lingered with him as others called for us in the doorway. He kissed your forehead as you slept on my shoulder. Then he looked at me, placed his hand briefly on my arm before passing it over his shaven head. I could see the sickness in his face. The uncertainty too, clouding his always calm demeanor. He had already said good-bye in his thoughts and did not know now how to say it again in person. I did not want to go, but he had forced me. For her, he said, and looked at you one last time. Then he pushed me out the door.
If you ever read this, you should know that everything I write is necessary to explain what I later did. You are a woman now, and you will understand that I write this not as your mother but as a woman too.
On that first night, as I watched your chest rise and fall with the sea, I wished you away. I prayed to God that I might fall asleep and that when I awoke you would be gone
(From Dragonfish by Vu Tran. Copyright © 2015 by Vu Tran. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.)