ABSTRACT
The Nguyen Huy Thieps short story The Water Nymph manifests some of the post-modern elements, as it mixes apparently straight forward narration of everyday village life with surreal scenes in which the narrator encounters a figure that may or may not be a supernatural water nymph. The story is set in the Vietnamese countryside during and after the protracted Vietnamese-American war, and evokes the hardships of rural life that are to be found in its many daily tasks, from tending rice fields, to plowing the earth, to carving stone from quarries. Thiep plays with Vietnamese belief systems, in which spirits of the water and soil hold a prominent place. It is also a story about social and interpersonal dynamics, illustrating the relationship between the individual and village leaders, between village boys, that between a mother and her son, and that between teachers and their pupils. Thieps story suggests the difficulties of Vietnamese life in wartime and post-war years.
