Vi Khi Nào & Lily Hoàng: Timber & Lụa

Timber & Lụa, by Vi Khi Nào and Lily Hoàng, is billed as experimental narratives. Each short story is written in three versions: Vietlish, English, and Vietnamese. I read several pages of the Vietlish version and gave up before my head was about to explode. Here’s a sample excerpt:

Love, mặc dù phổ quát, is not a ngôn ngữ she is designed to speak and its performance always feels a bit lập dị and nổi bật. She wants to understand it like the way ruy băng understands its lăng kính or tù giam. She was built to be a rô bô sắc sảo, từng hàng of code is perfect. Vì vậy, what is không đúng about her now? She nhìn lên nhìn xuống with her rotating eyeballs and asks Chalk, “Is fucking like a một bữa tiệc xa hoa. Or, ngoại trừ me, is it a bathroom door everyone knows how to open?”

What the fuck did I just read? The English version flows a bit better, but the Vietnamese version reads like Google Translate. I experimented with alternating between English and Vietnamese as I turned a page and that confused me even more. Even as someone who reads and writes both English and Vietnamese, I was having a hard time grasping the narratives.

Timber & Lụa is a bold, daring experimentation, but that’s about it.