Ticket to Childhood (Asian Review, 28-1-2015)

[Po_2008]

Ticket to Childhood

Ticket to Childhood, a slender novel by Vietnam’s Nguyen Nhat Anh, begins with the inauspicious, but ultimately ironic, line: “One day, I suddenly realized that life was dull and boring.”

Little Mui, the narrator looking back from the vantage point of adulthood, proceeds to recount a childhood of mischievous effort to overcome that tedium. And such efforts, he discovers, are what makes life exciting and gives it meaning. And what works in life works for the novel as well.

The book, the author’s first to appear in English, comprises a dozen vignettes about four children in Vietnam as they defy their parents, teachers and friends and deal with the repercussions of their ill-thought actions. Through the wringer of childhood they arrive at some very adult truths.

Little Mui tells of his adventures with Ti, a big-eared girl with a kind heart; Tun, the dimpled girl he loved; and Han, tall, one year older and whom Tun at least appears to fancy. One of the pleasures of this lighthearted book is the way Little Mui values different things in his life-long friends when he is young than he does when he is middle-aged: Ti’s missing tooth, for instance, doesn't seem as significant a drawback when they’re both adults. When he was eight, however, he thought much more highly of Tun’s dimples.

Yet, the book, which can be enjoyed by teenagers and adults, is no straight-up bildungsroman. Midway through, the narrator addresses the reader to explain the purpose of putting these stories down in ink. He says he had intended to use the stories for a conference workshop titled “Children as a World, organized by UNESCO Vietnam”. This meta-fictional device serves to hold all the book’s anecdotes together, although, in the end, it is a little confusing and probably unnecessary. The stories stand on their own.

The paper, however, is never delivered to UNESCO. After writing several passages, the narrator finds that he has given a less than “sober and factual” account of his childhood, qualities apparently required of such a paper. Instead, he has written fiction, something that addresses the emotions if not the facts of growing up. Indeed, that much is clear when he recounts his anachronistic and amusing use of a cell phone to try to woo Tun by texting some of the very adult phrases that he has cribbed from his uncle’s fiancée.

The other reason he doesn’t send his stories to UNESCO is because Tun and Hai initially say they don’t want their reputations ruined. They are now, as adults, school headmistress and CEO. If their employers learned of their childhood exploits it could hurt their careers, they say. However, it is Ti who goads him to send his book, presumably, Ticket to Childhood, not to UNESCO, but to a publisher.

It is her consideration that helps the adult Little Mui to conclude:

There are lots of intelligent people in the world, and lots of honest people. As a rule, the super-smart ones are glib and self-serving, while the congenitally honest tend to be simple-minded. What a pity for civilization. Yet Ti was a special case. She was both honest and intelligent.

Each story in the book works to bridge the gap between childhood and adulthood, highlighting what one age group has to teach the other. One story depicts the young foursome getting into trouble pretending to be adults and, when doing so, inventing their own bizarro world. In this milieu, getting into a schoolyard fight was good and studying hard was bad. Their parents only really become wise to this when the children let this imagined world spill into the real one, as often happens.

In a later story, the narrator proclaims,

“From this day forward, we will no longer call a chicken a chicken, a notebook a notebook, or a pen a pen.”

“What shall we call them?” asked Tun.

“Anything else!” I replied.

This was their effort to “reject the arbitrary rules invented by grownups,” the narrator explains. But it’s only a few paragraphs later when he says that, as he became a grownup, he learned that adults are often even more adept at this game:

They call bribes gifts, for example, and speak of corruption as the cost of doing business. The purpose of renaming actions or concepts in this way is to muddy what is crystal clear, to use ambiguous language in place of a simple word that nobody could misunderstand.

This is as good a place as any to talk of another of the book’s strengths: clear, concise language. The prose, at least in its English translation, is almost always right on the money. The sentences, like the chapters and the anecdotes, never go on too long. The novella can be read in one sitting or dipped into periodically never missing a step.

Naturally, as such a short work of fiction, the book might not provide readers a deep understanding of what it is like to be a child in Vietnam, specifically. But, another of its qualities, is that it shows how the concerns of childhood are universal. What goes for Vietnam, more or less, goes for the rest of the world. One imagines that children, like fiction writers, force their imaginations on the world they've been handed by their parents—an obvious effort to ward off boredom, but, more importantly, gain understanding.

TIMOTHY SIFERT

(Asian Review, 28-1-2015)
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Timothy Sifert is a Hong Kong-based journalist.