Behind the Red Mist

Behind The Red Mist, Ho Anh Thai, Curbstone Press, 1998

This is a group of contemporary stories from Vietnam, a country not normally heard from in the fiction world. One story is about an Indian man (several stories are set in India) who promised his dead mother that he would never leave her alone. He falls for a British woman who brings him back to England as the family cook. Not wanting to break his promise to his mother, he digs her up and carries her bones in a knapsack. Another story is about a Vietnamese party official who turns into a goat while watching a porno film. To create a tourist attraction for his poor village, a man asks the director of the local factory for a million rupees to build a great temple. Not willing to take no for an answer, the man chooses a spot on the road that the director must travel twice a day, and stands on one leg, all day, every day, in search of that million rupees.

An Indian woman is a nursing student, until her family says that it's time to get married. Her family barely manages to pay the huge dowry demanded by the groom's family, but the groom seems worth the trouble. The woman, named Neelam, and her mother-in-law don't get along at all. One day, Neelam is severely burned in an act of bride violence. She is sent back to her home village, though no one recognizes her. Whenever a woman in the village gives birth to a girl, Neelam is there to quietly take the child away and dispose of it.

This is an excellent group of tales about a different (to most Americans) part of the world and different culture. They are serious and whimsical, very well done and very much worth reading.