T H E
B O O K S E L L E R
Kafka in Saigon Connla Stokes
Janelle Retka
I
n 1916, a mysterious young man by the name of Phan Xich Long claimed he should be Emperor of Vietnam and tried to overthrow the French of Cochinchina. Having studied sorcery and pyrotechnics in Siam and Cambodia, he concocted a potion so one group of devotees, armed with just sticks and spears, would be invisible as they marched on Saigon (apparently, it didn’t work). For his pièce de résistance, Long also prepared a batch of bombs (ingredients: cannon shot, carbon, sulphur, saltpetre, a sprinkling of supernatural seasoning), all of which failed to detonate outside various French military installations. Before either of these flops even occurred, Long had been arrested and, after a botched jailbreak, was executed along with scores of his followers. For this wholehearted albeit calamitous coup, the twenty-three-year-old revolutionary would be remembered as a martyr for the nationalist cause, and many decades later, in a reunified Vietnam, his name would be resurrected by town planners looking to christen a road (more of a dirt track at the time) in Ho Chi Minh City. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Phan Xich Long, as an address, had a seedy, rundown reputation. Now, thanks to an ambitious urban renewal project, the street has been reborn as a wide, rather salubrious thoroughfare that’s the epicentre of a modern, thriving inner city neighbourhood. Weirdly, or not, nobody in Ho Chi Minh City seems to know much, if anything, about the brief life of Phan Xich Long (let alone his failed, fantastical insurrection). I’d only dug into the history as I planned to visit the area to locate a bookstore called Kafka, curious to know why Prague’s most celebrated literary son had earned his own resurrection in a part of town, 34
known for its near limitless culinary pleasures, but not for its literary credentials. “Nobody reads books by Kafka in Vietnam,” warned one Vietnamese friend. “They just pretend that they do.” Was he right? In a city, where people have certainly been known to visit decorative so-called book cafes for the Instagram value rather than the literature, was Kafka just a ruse to get me to drink an overpriced cold brew? When I eventually take the plunge and visit, I’m relieved to find nothing but books inside a homely space and a trio of millennials browsing the shelves, not posing for selfies. When the owner, Tita, arrives, we chat about books and favourite authors (Romain Gary for her) while she makes preparations for a small invite-only event for which regular customers would spend the night at the bookstore. I’d love to paint a picture involving a coterie of the city’s literati gathering for a clandestine affair, exchanging cognac-fuelled conspiracies by candlelight till dawn. But Tita’s vision is a little more innocent: “I am often here at night, rearranging the shelves, and there’s something magical about a bookstore at that time. I just want others to experience that feeling.” Tita, whose full name is Tran Thi Thanh Thuan, was born and raised in Tien Giang Province in the Mekong Delta, where she had learned to read by the age of four thanks to a bookworm mother: “When my mum divorced my father, she lost her entire book collection, so she recited stories to me from memory, but that made me more curious to find books for myself. The only one I owned was given to me by a woman who collected waste paper for recycling. It was a fairytale and had no cover. So to this day, I don’t know what it was called.” Desperate for text of any kind, she read her granny’s prayer books, old newspapers, her sister’s schoolbooks,
her aunt’s slushy romance novels, “anything and everything”. Now surrounded by a world of literature, I express admiration (and considerable envy) at how much she claims to have read (pretty much everything in the shop, and more), and ask if she’s worried that people in Ho Chi Minh City don’t read enough nowadays. “Sometimes I think my friends and I read too much,” she says gravely, as if she fears that they have all, foolishly, forsaken a life of prosperity as a result of their reading habits. Even selling books, Tita freely admits, isn’t going to make her rich. An architect by trade, she has a day job and runs an Airbnb above the bookstore, where she also lives with a nuisance of cats and her brother, who studies, of all things in Vietnam’s heaving financial hub, literature. All of Kafka’s booksellers, who tag-team parttime shifts through the week, are gainfully employed elsewhere, accepting a meagre stipend for the chance to read for free and discuss literature with customers. This is why, Tita believes, customers do come. I start to wonder if, for this small community of literature lovers in Ho Chi Minh City, the word Kafkaesque conjures up a feeling of cosiness, warmth and togetherness, you know, like hygge in Danish, rather than uneasy dreams of impenetrable bureaucracy. I ask her if she knows the meaning of the word, and if she or any of her customers have even read the work Kafka. “Yes, I do, and I have read all of his books, and many of my customers have, too,” she says without sounding insulted by my patronising line of interrogation. “But actually, my business partner, Lien, named the store after the Murakami novel Kafka on the Shore, in which the character Kafka seeks refuge in the Komura Library.” ☐ Connla Stokes is a writer based in Ho Chi Minh City