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Ta Duy Anh (author), Quan Manh Ha and Charles Waugh (translators), The Termite Queen, Penguin Random House SEA, 2023. 256 pgs.

Ta Duy Anh’s novels, replete as they are with social and political commentary, have drawn the ire of the Vietnamese government. His most recent novel to be translated into English, The Termite Queen—a satirical and hyperbolic critique of land-grabbing in today’s Vietnam—is no exception. Ta delves into the shady and corrupt history of development projects throughout Vietnam’s rural communities and pristine landscapes. Though it is an allegorical work of fiction, Ta’s novel speaks to a long history of conflict over land distribution in Vietnam and to the challenges that rural and lower-income communities face as powerful corporations seeks to profit from industrialisation and urbanisation in any way they can. The novel critiques the individualistic nature of capitalism in a way that remains relevant in both contemporary Vietnam as well as the rest of the modern industrial world.

The tale is told from the perspective of Viet, who takes over his deceased father’s role as president and CEO of a land development corporation. When Viet starts his new job, the company is planning to build a golf course in a rural village that relies on its natural resources for growing rice paddies and fishing. As he works to fill his father’s shoes, Viet quickly learns the cause of the stress he had seen his father labour under on a daily basis. He is tasked with convincing the villagers to give up their land on a false promise that the golf course is the first step in improving their quality of life and creating a more progressive society. But after digging into his father’s past development projects, Viet learns that the golf course would in reality benefit only a select few wealthy investors and politicians, while the villagers would struggle to make a living on newly polluted land and water, left to live in poverty or face displacement.

If Viet takes issue with this corrupt scheme, he remains passive and compliant. As a protagonist, his motivations and values are often vague, except that as a member of the bourgeoisie himself, he is compelled to hang on to his own wealth and to follow in the footsteps of his father. The story follows Viet’s escapades in the company, delving into a world of toxic masculinity, where he concludes that, “to get rich, one must be heartless”. He tries to integrate into the wealthy business world of bribery, blackmail, and men who treat both land and women as objects to be obtained and exploited. Viet remains disconcertingly passive until the final third of the novel when he meets Dieu, a law student who is outspoken in her opposition of the golf course, and whom he is instantly besotted with. He can no longer find it within himself to be heartless, not because of the community or land  at risk, but because something personal is now at stake.

Although Ta successfully depicts the abuse of power, corruption, and avarice within the development industry, the novel could have expanded upon the personal stories of the people who were negatively affected as a meaningful way to broaden his critique. The plot line at times felt overdramatised and exaggerated with lurid details as a story about business and land repurposing became packed with theatrics, car chases, violence, torture, forbidden love, extravagant parties, and sex-obsessed men. However, when considered within the political context in which Ta wrote this novel—in a country where such work is usually censored—these eccentricities come off as brave and fervent expressions of cultural critique, the bold language a form of protest.

The dynamic which Ta illustrates in The Termite Queen, where the government and big investors profit off the exploitation of the rural poor, has a long and enduring history in Vietnam.

Despite its ubiquity, a record of this history has been impeded by Vietnam’s strict censorship of all kinds of media, which filters out narratives that depict the government or its leaders unfavourably. The Termite Queen unveils this history by writing about a system that fails to protect and provide for agricultural communities and by exposing the characters who uphold it. In so doing, Ta challenges Vietnam’s capitalist system by showing how it is at odds with the wellbeing of its people.

Rather than self-censoring in order to fit within the narrow confines of what the state deems fit for publication, Ta uses an animated, exaggerated, dark and satirical style that lays bare the social ills he says he witnesses “on a daily basis in Vietnamese society”. The novel was published in Vietnam in 2017 and banned just six months later.

By translating this novel from Vietnamese into English, Quan Manh Ha and Charles Waugh bring an otherwise buried story into the English-speaking world for the first time. Through their translation, they breathe new life into a story that can no longer exist freely within a country of tightly controlled media, and paint a daring and unsettling portrait of the corruption lurking within land distribution operations in Vietnam.

How to cite: Tompkins, Mia. “A Daring and Unsettling Portrait: Ta Duy Anh’s The Termite Queen.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 12 Aug. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/08/12/termite-queen.

Mia Tompkins graduated from the University of Montana in 2019 with a BA in English, concentrating in literature. Her work focuses on traumatic memory, diasporic identity, and Vietnam War discourse and has appeared in the Rocky Mountain Review. [All contributions by Mia Tompkins.]

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