Looking back on childhood
Innocent times are captured by a popular Vietnamese writer
If universal truths exist, what better place to find them than in childhood memories? There, untarnished by the loss of innocence and the hardships of adulthood, life — even in hindsight — is a boundless adventure.
Through the eyes of a child, there is no distinction between the unknown and the unknowable, which makes every moment one of fantastic wonder.
Nguyen Nhat Anh, a revered and bestselling author in his native Vietnam, seems to have an innate understanding of childhood’s appeal. The majority of his bibliography features either teenage or child characters, and his serialized short stories are wildly popular among Vietnamese readers.
One of these, “Ticket to Childhood,” marks the first appearance of Nguyen’s work in English translation.
This slim volume sold a reported 350,000 copies in Vietnam when it was originally published in 2009, qualifying it as an unprecedented literary sensation in that country.
Told in a series of vignettes by an adult narrator looking back on his eight-year-old self, the novella employs a voice that combines the worldweariness of age with the wit and energy of youth.
The absence of any real plot gives the book a somewhat manic feel, with the narrator rattling off a day in the life one minute before firing off a humorous story or two, peppered with truisms such as “One man’s boring rut is another man’s domestic harmony,” and “The function of children, as adults see it, is to outgrow their childishness.”
As the narrator delves into his stockpile of memories, he apologizes to the reader for confusing chronology and jumps between the adult self writing the book and the child envisioned within it. This gives “Ticket to Childhood” a fabulous quality, making it a sort of anti-memoir.
Stripped of maudlin effect, the novella does in some respects deliver what its title promises. While the narrator’s tales of home life and school are rife with Confucian themes that have clearly resonated with a Vietnamese audience, the vignettes also manage to spark a universal familiarity.
At one point, to battle monotony and escape conformity, the narrator and three of his closest friends decide to arbitrarily replace certain words with others, saying, “We did this because we were so young, and the world was so old. It was a way of staking our claim to a new, richer dominion of our world.”
Any parent who has thwarted endless barrages of “why?” understands that the world of a child is not yet bound by explanations (or logic, for that matter).
When Nguyen’s narrator decides to drink water from an empty soda bottle and eat rice out of a wash basin (both deemed strange behaviour by his parents), he does so only “to make (his) orbit a little more erratic.”
Reflecting on his parents’ puzzled queries, the narrator writes, “The objects in an adult’s world are defined by their function. Consult a dictionary if you want to know the meaning of adult life ... But kids possess an invaluable treasure — their power to assign strange functions to familiar things.”
It is this type of reflection that forms the core strength of “Ticket to Childhood.” Since there is no plot per se, in a sense the narrative garners its momentum from the long glance backwards by the introspective narrator 40 years on.
The arrival of adulthood, he indicates, does not come all at once in a single moment of bittersweet revelation. Instead, childhood seems to disappear piece by piece, and only if we are lucky can we find the ticket back.