On the day the communists marched into Saigon in 1975, Brother Khang, the narrator of Khanh Ha's new novel The Afterlife of a Threadbare Jester (Red Hen Press; 312 pages), offers an optimistic thought: "Regardless of who the victor was, they would find ways to improve people's lives." Khang, a member of the South Vietnam Central Intelligence Office, was among the many military and government officials who voluntarily entered the Communist Party's Reform Program. The novel explores, in detail, the dehumanizing aftermath of the war and the shattering of hope for those who believed in reconciliation. 

That's not to say it maintains a consistent feeling of depression. During his fifteen years in the camps, Khang meets an array of unique characters who keep the plot moving forward and, at times, offer moments of levity. Captain Bé and Father Ninh are Khang's partners in the escape plot, and both were also tortured following its failure. Bee, a poet, critic, and former political analyst, becomes Khang's confidant and shows the campers' resilience while still holding on to a bit of hope. Cao, whom Khang meets later in the book, exhibits all the characteristics of a madman, though perhaps it's just an act as a way to survive until he one day drives away from the camp and is never heard from again. And Dr. Dam, a former South Vietnamese Army doctor, offers us an example of the compassion these detainees maintained in impossible circumstances as he is often tasked with treating "cadres" (the workers who oversee the camps). The colorful characters keep the plot moving when it might otherwise risk feeling redundant.  

Bee is particularly important because he represents what can be lost when the victorious party seeks to totally eradicate the opposing culture. From the time Khang meets him in 1978 until Bee is finally released in 1989, they bond over poetry, with Khang recalling important poems by former South Vietnamese intellectuals and Bee writing his own. Their friendship represents an effort to protect exactly what the North Vietnamese hope to snuff out, as the discovery of written poems is always met with punishment. As one child Khang meets during a labor excursion explains, "Books are useless…The new regime said if things are not edible, they are useless." The attempted purge of an entire culture and the ways some of these prisoners tried to keep it alive are among the most important points Ha tries to make. But he also shows how hard it is to succeed. As Khang approaches his fifteenth year of captivity, his resolve is worn down. He no longer has a family waiting for him at home. It's not just his hope that's eroded; it's his entire life and his spirit. Even if he's finally released from the camps, does he have a life to go home to?

Ha shows a particular strength in crafting Khang's voice. He refrains from abject anger, choosing a thoughtful, reflective approach, which is particularly effective when highlighting the philosophical differences between the detainees and their Communist guards, who have been brainwashed by the regime to a depressing extent. The cadre espouses information provided by the ruling party that seeks to literally rewrite historical facts. And they fail to understand the quality of life of their Southern counterparts. For instance, one cadre finds it ludicrous that the Southerners had a readily available supply of sugar before the war. Everything to him is rationing and scarcity. And in one particularly somber moment, he points out to Brother Khang, "We are prisoners on the outside." Through Ha’s strong writing, the novel sadly shows that the system is set up to punish not just those the regime feels need reform, but also the lower class who aren’t reaping the benefits of the Communist government.

Though it’s explained very early in the novel, it takes quite a while before we're reminded that Brother Khang and his fellow detainees entered these camps voluntarily. But the terms of their "reform" change almost immediately. At first, they're told to expect a month-long stay; then it's three to five years; eventually, the entire reform proposition is all but abandoned, and the camps pivot to forced labor. It's reminiscent of the constantly moving goalposts in Catch-22, and the mark of a ruling class that has absolutely no idea what it's doing. If Ha's primary desire in writing this novel was to highlight how these camps existed after America's departure from the war, and we know too little about them here, he succeeds. If his secondary desire is to prove how pointless these camps were at instituting "reform," he succeeds with that as well.   

Fiction has the power to spark imaginations, to transport us into a specific time and place. It allows the writer to manufacture artistic details, to breed hope or despair with words that hit us harder than a simple recitation of facts we might get in a nonfiction book. Ha's novel joins a body of literature intent on exposing the experiences of survivors of so-called re-education camps and the traumas of postwar Vietnam. But it can also be a grind for a reader who might approach it with misplaced expectations of optimism and resolve, rather than a journey with Brother Khang that we slowly understand doesn't point toward a particularly happy ending.