Prisoner with a Dictionary

And so a young man was thrown in prison and found in his otherwise empty cell a foreign dictionary. It was always dark in there and he couldn’t even tell that it was a dictionary at first. He was not an intellectual type and had never even owned a dictionary in his life. He was far from stupid, however, but had an ironic turn of mind that could squeeze out a joke from most tragic situations. He could also be very witty around certain women. In any case, he did not know what to do with this nearly worthless book but to use it as a stool and as a pillow. Periodically he also tore out pages from it to wipe himself. Soon, however, out of sheer boredom, he decided to look at this dictionary. His eyes had adjusted to the dim light by now and he could make out all the words with relative ease in that eternal twilight. Although he was not familiar with the foreign language, and did not even know what language it was, he suddenly felt challenged to learn it. His main virtue, and the main curse of his life, was the ability to follow through on any course of action once he had set his mind to it. This book represented the last problem, the only problem, he would ever solve. The prisoner began by picking out words at random and scrutinizing their definitions . Of course, each definition was made up of words entirely unknown to him. Undeterred, he would look up all the words in the definition , which lead him to even more unfathomable words. To define“man,” for example, the prisoner had to look up not only “human” and “person” but also “opposable” and “thumb.” To defi ne “thumb,” he had to look up not only “short” and “digit” but also “thick” and “of” and “a” and “the.” To defi ne “the,” he had to look up “that” and “a” (again) and “person” (again) and “thing” and “group.” Being alone in his cell night and day, without any distraction, allowed the prisoner to concentrate with such rigor that soon he could retain and cross index hundreds of defi nitions in his head. The dictionary had well over a thousand pages but the prisoner was determined to memorize every defi nition on every page. He cringed at the thought that he had once torn out pages to wipe himself. These pages now represented to him gaps in his eventual knowledge. Because they were gone forever he would never be able to know all the words in that particular language. Still, it was with an elation bordering on madness that he woke up each morning, eager to eat up more words. Like many people, he equated the acquisition of a vast vocabulary with knowledge, even with wisdom, and so he could feel his stature growing by the day, if not by the second. Although he did not know what the words meant, what they referred to in real life, he reasoned that he understood these words because he knew their defi nitions. And because he was living inside this language all the time, like a fetus thriving inside a womb, there were times when he felt sure he could guess at the general implications of a word, whether it was a plant or an animal, for example, or whether it indicated something positive or negative. But his guesses were always wrong, of course. Because “bladder” sounded somehow vast and nebulous to the prisoner, he thought that it must have something to do with the outdoors, most likely the weather, a gust of wind or a torrential rain or a bolt of lightning. “Father,” with its forlorn, exasperated tone, made the prisoner 3 think of something dead and putrid: a corpse or a heap of garbage. He guessed that “homicide” was a fl ower. He thought “July” meant “August.” The prisoner was also justifi ably proud of his pronunciation, which was remarkably crisp and confi dent, the stresses more often than not falling on the right syllables. If he were to speak on the phone, the prisoner could almost be mistaken for a native speaker, albeit one of the lower class. But if the prisoner was convinced he was gaining a new language he was also surely losing one because he had, by this time, forgotten nearly all the words of his native language. By this time he could no longer name any part of the anatomy, even the most basic, hand, nose, face, mouth, etc., and so his own body was becoming vague, impersonal, unreal. Although he was surrounded by fi lth, he could no longer conjure up the word “fi lth.” The only word that came readily to his tongue, automatically, unbidden, was “prison” because that was the last thing he thought of each night, and the fi rst thing he thought of each morning. His dreams had become entirely devoid of conversations or thoughts. Often they were just a series of images or abstract patches of colors. Sometimes they were also made up entirely of sounds, a cacophony of his own voice reciting bits of defi nitions. Even in his worst nightmare, he could no longer shout out “mother!” in his own language. But this loss never bothered him, he barely noticed it, because he was convinced he was remaking himself anew. As he was being squeezed out of the world, the only world he had a right to belong in, he thought he was entering a new universe. Perhaps by purging himself of his native language, the prisoner was unconsciously trying to get rid of his horrible past, because, frankly, there was not a single word of his native tongue that did not evoke, for the prisoner, some horrible experience or humiliation. Perhaps he could sense that his native tongue was the very author of his horrible life. But these are only conjectures, we do not know for sure.

In any case nights and days the prisoner shouted out defi nitions to himself. If one were to press one’s ear against the thick iron door at midnight, one would hear, for example: “an animal with a long, thin tail that commonly infests buildings.” Or “a deep and tender feeling for an arch enemy.” Or “a shuddering fear and disgust accompanied by much self loathing.” With so many strange words and defi nitions accumulating, surely some profound knowledge, some revelation, was at hand? What is a revelation, after all, but the hard-earned result of an exceptional mind working at peak capacity? The prisoner was thankful to be given a chance to concentrate unmolested for such a continuous length of time. He felt himself victorious: condemned to an empty cell, he had been robbed of the world, but through a heroic act of will, he had remade the universe. He had (nearly) everything because he had (nearly) all the words of an entire language. But the truth is the prisoner had regained nothing. He only thought that way, of course, because he had to think that way. After decades of unceasing mental exertion, the only fruit of the prisoner’s remarkable labor, the only word he ever acquired for sure, was “dictionary,” simply because it was printed on the cover of a book he knew for sure was a dictionary. For even as he ran across the defi nition for “prisoner,” and was memorizing it by heart, he didn’t even know that he was only reading about himself.

Our Northernmost Governor

If it’s true that each country is refl ected by its government, then we must be the most dishonest and idiotic people in the world. In any case, we are the most superstitious. Like savages or schizophrenics, we see signs everywhere. We believe the universe is a web of causes and effects decipherable through magic and intuition. If eleven clouds were aligned in the sky and our soccer team won a match, for example, then these two extremely rare phenomena had to be related.

We distrust all sciences.

As a rational man, a lawyer and a disciple of Cicero, however, I can step away from the common stupidities of my fellow countrymen. I don’t believe you must squash the head of a snake when you kill it to prevent it from biting you three days later. Nor do I believe that buttons must be removed from the shirt of a corpse to allow it to reach the afterlife. Nor do I believe that oral sex erases short-term memories. (Our prostitutes don’t mind “playing jazz,” it is said, because they want their short-term memories erased.) But a man cannot divorce himself from the ethos of his homeland completely. I’ve had a few incidents in my life that can only be deemed miraculous. I’ll give you just one example. This happened nine years ago:

I had just fi nished a meal at Fang’s, a Chinese restaurant downtown, when I opened a newspaper to see my father’s face smiling at me. Dressed in a badly cut suit, he was about to cut the ribbon at some ceremony. A glance at the caption revealed the man to be the governor of our northernmost province. Still, his resemblance to my father was so uncanny that I decided to cut the image out to show it to him later that evening. This act became so imperative that I demanded, in a very gruff voice, that the waiter brought me a pair of scissors immediately.

The governor’s face resembled my father’s in every detail, down to the chipped tooth and misaligned eyebrows. He even wore my father’s favorite paisley tie. We’ll have a good laugh over this, I thought as I waited impatiently for the waiter to return with a pair of scissors. Although my father and I did not always enjoy the warmest relationship, we did get along and we did love each other. As he grew more dependent on me, I became more tolerant of him. I gradually learnt to forgive all the cruelties he had infl icted on us when the old man was the man of the house. How he had forced his wife and fi ve children to be vegetarians until, literally overnight, he decided to become a meat eater. After that we were made to eat pork almost every night. He did not let me date a girl until I was twenty-one. I even learnt to forget the fact that he had kept many mistresses, a situation that humiliated my mother when she was alive.

My father also crammed us constantly with a million tidbits of useless information. At every family gathering, he would blurt out weird sentences such as: “Do you know that Leonard da Vinci wrote backward?” Or: “An elephant hair can be used as a toothpick!” Or: “If a panda gives birth to twins, she would only raise one, and left the other to die!” Or: “The fl ags of Monaco and Indonesia are exactly the same!” He simply assumed that anything he happened to know or 7 cared about was relevant to everyone else’s well-being, but perhaps that’s not such an unusual presumption.

But, like I said, we did get along and we did love each other. We had several interests in common. We were both soccer fanatics and went to the stadium for every important match. My father was something of a wordsmith and came up with many memorable phrases to describe his favorite players. A midfi elder was said to have “the dreamlike tenacity of a marathon runner.” He praised our national goalie for having “the grunting concentration of a weightlifter.” As for the opposing team, he loved to throw batteries at them. We also enjoyed an occasional game of chess and a snifter or two of cognac in the evening.

What we did not have in common was any physical resemblance. A few relatives even suspected I was a bastard. A ridiculous rumor. My mother was absolutely faithful.

When the waiter returned with the scissors, I grabbed them eagerly from his hand. To my chagrin, the young man did not go away but stood where he was to watch me cut the image out. He even asked me impudently, “Someone you know, Sir?”

Maybe it was because I was being observed, but my hand trembled as I clipped. I felt light-headed and my eyes blurred. The waiter seemed to enjoy my nervousness and even started to whistle. As soon as I fi nished, I realized what I had done: by cutting my father’s likeness out of the newspaper, I had removed him from the world. I had just committed patricide. The waiter snatched the scissors from my hand and walked briskly away. I thought for a moment he was going to call the police. Sure enough, when I returned home, I found the old man lying dead on the sofa.

The coroner fi xed the time of death between fi ve and six o’clock, the exact time I spent at the restaurant. I knew in my heart I was a murderer. For years afterwards, I had a recurring nightmare of being strapped to an electric chair. I also had dreams of my father walking through a revolving door or sitting in an airport lounge, smoking a cigar. But how could I resist cutting his image out of the newspaper when the man in the photo had suggested it to me himself by holding a pair of scissors in his hand?

In my desperation to cast off guilt, I came up with an alternative explanation: since a man cannot be in two places at the same time, my father had to die before I showed him the photo. Conversely, if I had intended to show the governor a photo of my father, then the governor would have died.

I decided, fi nally, that my father’s death was not so much a murder but a suicide, or at least an assisted suicide. Bored, constantly drunk, and in poor health, he wanted his life to end but he did not have the courage to kill himself. He needed me to help him. Since he could not ask me directly, he caused the photo of our northernmost governor to appear in the newspaper to entice me into killing him.

“!”

In The Workers newspaper of October 10, 2000, there was a curious item about a fake doctor. A certain Ngo Thi Nghe had been practicing medicine for over ten years on a false degree, which she procured, it is speculated, by killing its original owner. She had all the accoutrements of medicine, a white suit, a thermometer, a bedpan, a syringe, many bottles of pills, but no formal knowledge of medicine. In fact, she had never gotten out of the eighth grade. The mortality rate of her patients, however, was no higher than usual, and she was even defended by some of her clients, after all the facts had come out, for saving their lives. “A most compassionate doctor,” said one elderly gentleman.

There are so many scams nowadays that this case drew no special attention. Every day there are news reports of fake lawyers, fake architects, fake professors, and fake politicians doing business without the proper license or training. A most curious case in recent memory, however, is that of Ho Muoi, who was accused of being a fake English teacher. From perusing innumerable newspaper accounts, I was able to piece together the following:

Ho Muoi was born in 1952 in Ky Dong village. His family made fi recrackers until they were banned because of the war. Thereafter the father became an alcoholic and left the family. Although Ho Muoi was only six at the time, he knew enough to swear that he would never mention or even think of his father’s name again. His mother supported the children, all fi ve of them, by carrying water and night soil for hire, a backbreaking labor that made her shorter by several inches. She also made meat dumplings that she sold on special occasions. Ky Dong Village is known for a festival, held every January 5th, in honor of a legendary general of a mythical king who fought against a real enemy two or three thousand years ago. The festival features a duck-catching demonstration, a wrestling tournament for the boys, a meat dumpling making contest for the girls, and, until it was banned because of the war, a procession of fi recrackers.

Those who’ve witnessed this procession of fi recrackers describe a scene where boys and girls and gay men jiggle papier-mâché animals and genitals strung from bamboo sticks amid the smoke and din of a million fi recrackers.

But the excitement from the festival only came once a year. For the rest of the time, the villagers were preoccupied with the tedium and anxieties of daily life. Most of the young men were drafted into the army, sent away and never came back, but the war never came directly to Ky Dong Village.

When Ho Muoi was ten, his mother enrolled him in school for the fi rst time. He was slow and it took him a year to learn the alphabet. He could never fi gure out how to add or subtract. His worst subject, however, was geography. It was inconceivable to him that there are hundreds of countries in the world, each with a different spoken language. Every single word of his own language felt so inevitable that he thought it would be a crime against nature to call a cow or a bird anything different.

Ho Muoi could not even conceive of two countries sharing this same earth. “Countries” in the plural sounds like either a tautology or an oxymoron. “Country,” “earth,” and “universe” were all synonymous in his mind.

Ho Muoi’s teacher was a very sophisticated young man from Hanoi. He was the only one within a fi fty-mile radius who had ever read a newspaper or who owned even a single book. He even fancied himself a poet in his spare time. He did not mind teaching a bunch of village idiots, however, because it spared him from the bombs and landmines that were the fate of his contemporaries. In the evening he could be found in his dark room reading a Russian novel. The teacher was short and scrawny and had a habit of shutting his eyes tight and sticking his lips out when concentrating. Still, it was odd that he managed to attract no women in a village almost entirely emptied of its young men.

Whenever this teacher was exasperated with his charge he would shout “!” but no one knew what the word meant or what language it was in so it was dismissed as a sort of a sneeze or a clearing of the throat.

At twelve, something happened to Ho Muoi that would change his whole outlook on life. He was walking home from school when he saw a crowd gathering around three men who were at least two heads taller than the average person. The men had a pink, almost red complexion and their hair varied from a bright orange to a whitish yellow. They were not unfriendly and allowed people to tug at the abundant hair growing on their arms. “Wonderful creatures,” Ho Muoi thought as he stared at them, transfi xed. One of the men noticed Ho Muoi and started to say something. The words were rapid, like curses, but the man was smiling as he was saying them. All eyes turned to look at Ho Muoi. Some people started to laugh and he wanted to laugh along with them but he could not. Suddenly his face fl ushed and he felt an intense hatred against these foreign men. If he had a gun he would have shot them already. Without premeditation he blurted out “!” then ran away.

When Ho Muoi got home his heart was still beating wildly. The excitement of blurting out a magical word, a word he did not know the meaning of, was overwhelming. He also remembered the look of shock on the man’s face after the word had left his mouth. He repeated “!” several times and felt its power each time.

Ho Muoi would think about this incident for years afterward. He recalled how he was initially enraged by a series of foreign words, and that he had retaliated with a foreign word of his own. In his mind, foreign words became equated with a terrible power. The fact that his own language would be foreign to a foreigner never occurred to him.

The incident also turned Ho Muoi into a celebrity. The villagers would recall with relish how one of their own, a twelve-year-old boy, had “stood up to a foreigner” by hurling a curse at him in his own language. Many marveled at the boy’s intelligence for knowing how to use a foreign word, heard maybe once or twice in passing, on just the right occasion and with authority. They even suggested to the schoolteacher that he teach “the boy genius” all the foreign words from his Russian novels.

The schoolteacher never got around to doing this. He was drafted soon after, sent south, and was never heard from again. As for Ho Muoi, he became convinced that, given the opportunity, he could quickly learn any foreign language. This opportunity came after Ho Muoi himself was drafted into the army.

His battalion served in the Central Highlands, along the Truong Son Mountain, guarding supply lines. They rarely made contact with the enemy but whenever they did, Ho Muoi acquitted himself miserably. He often froze and had to be literally kicked into action. What was perceived by his comrades as cowardice, however, was not so much a fear of physical pain as the dread that he would not be allowed to fulfi ll his destiny.

The war was an outrage, Ho Muoi thought, not because it was wiping out thousands of people a day, the young, the old, and the unborn, but that it could exterminate a man of destiny like himself. And yet he understood that wars also provide many lessons to those who survived them. A war is a working man’s university. Knowing that, he almost felt grateful.

Ho Muoi also had the superstition (or the inspiration) that if the war eliminates a single book from this earth, then that would be a greater loss than all the lives wasted. The death of a man affects three or four other individuals, at most. Its signifi cance is symbolic and sentimental, but the loss of a single book is tangible, a disaster which should be mourned forever by all of mankind. The worth of a society is measured by how many books it has produced. This, from a man who had never actually read a book. Ho Muoi had seen so few books, he could not tell one from another; they were all equal in his mind. He never suspected that war is the chief generator of books. A war is a thinking man’s university.

In 1970 or 1971, after a brief skirmish, they caught an American soldier whom they kept for about thirty days. The prisoner was made to march along with Ho Muoi’s battalion until he fell ill and died (he was not badly injured). This man was given the same ration as the others but the food did not agree with him. Once, they even gave him an extra helping of orangutan meat, thinking it would restore his health.

As the prisoner sank into delirium, the color drained from his face but his eyes lit up. He would blather for hours on end. No one paid him any attention but Ho Muoi. In his tiny notebook he would record as much of the man’s rambling as possible. These phonetic notations became the source for Ho Muoi’s English lessons after the war. I’ve seen pages from the notebook. Its lines often ran diagonally from one corner to another. A typical run-on sentence: “hoo he hoo ah utta ma nut m pap m home.”

The notebook also includes numerous sketches of the American. Each portrait was meant as a visual clue to the words swarming around it. Ho Muoi’s skills as an artist were so poor, however, that the face depicted always appeared the same, that of a young man, any man, really, who has lost all touch with the world.

Ho Muoi was hoping his unit would catch at least one more American so he could continue his English lesson, but this tutor never materialized, unfortunately.

Though all the English he had was contained within a single notebook, Ho Muoi was not discouraged. The American must have spoken just about every word there was in his native language, he reasoned, 15 through all those nights of raving. And the invisible words can be inferred from the visible ones.

Words are like numbers, he further reasoned, a closed system with a small set of self-generated rules. And words arranged on a page resemble a dull, monotonous painting. If one could look at the weirdest picture and decipher, sooner or later, its organizing principle, why can’t one do the same with words?

Everything seems chaotic at fi rst, but nothing is chaotic. One can read anything: ants crawling on the ground; pimples on a face; trees in a forest. Fools will argue with you about this, but any surface can be deciphered. The entire world, as seen from an airplane, is just a warped surface.

A man may fancy he’s making an abstract painting, but there is no such thing as an abstract painting, only abstracted ones. Every horizontal surface is a landscape because it features a horizon (thus implying a journey, escape from the self, and the unreachable). Every vertical surface is either a door or a portrait (thus implying a house, another being, yourself as another being, and the unreachable). And all colors have shared and private associations. Red may inspire horror in one culture, elation in another, but it is still red, is still blood. Green always evokes trees and a pretty green dress.

Ho Muoi also believed that anything made by man can be duplicated: a chair, a gun, a language, provided one has the raw materials, as he did, with his one notebook of phonetic notations. If one can break apart a clock and reassemble it, one can scramble up phonetic notations and rearrange them in newer combinations, thus ending up with not just a language, but a literature.

At the time of his arrest, Ho Muoi was teaching hundreds of students beginning, intermediate, and advanced English three nights a week. For twenty-fi ve years, he had taught his students millions of vocabulary words. He had patiently explained to them the intricacies of English grammar, complete with built-in inconsistencies. He had even given them English poems and short stories (written by himself and the more advanced students) to read. When interrogated at the police station, however, our English teacher proved ignorant of the most basic knowledge of the language. He did not know the verb “to be” or “to do.” He did not know there is a past tense in English. He had never heard of Shakespeare and was not even aware that Australians and Englishmen also speak English.

In Ho Muoi’s made-up English, there are not fi ve but twenty-four vowels. The new nuances in pronunciation force each student to fi ne-tune his ear to the level of the fi nest musician. There is a vast vocabulary for pain and bamboo but no equivalent for cheese. Any adjective can be used as a verb. I will hot you, for example, or, Don’t red me. There are so many personal pronouns, each one denoting an exact relationship between speaker and subject, that even the most brilliant student cannot master them all.

By sheer coincidence, some of Ho Muoi’s made-up English words correspond exactly with actual English. In his system, a cat is also called a cat; a tractor, a tractor; and a rose, inevitably, perhaps, a rose.

Some of his more curious inventions include blanket, to denote a husband. Basin, to denote a wife. Pin prick: a son. A leaky faucet: a daughter.

Ho Muoi’s delusion was so absolute, however, that after he was sentenced to twenty-fi ve years for “defrauding the people,” he asked to be allowed to take to prison a “Dictionary of the English Language” and a “Dictionary of English Slang,” two volumes he himself had compiled, so that “I can continue my life studies.”

It is rumored that many of his former students have banded together to continue their English lessons. Harassed by the police, they must hold their nightly meetings in underground bunkers, lit by oil lamps. Their strange syllables, carried by the erratic winds, crosshatch the surrounding countryside.

But why are they doing this? You ask. Don’t they know they are studying a false language?

As the universal language—for now—English represents to these students the rest of the world. English is the world. These students also know that Vietnam, as it exists, is not of this world. To cling even to a false English is to insist on another reality.

A bogus English is better than no English, is better, in fact, than actual English, since it corresponds to no English or American reality.

Hoo he hoo ah utta ma nut m pap m home.

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