Phan Xích Long là ai?
On one far-out early 20th century mystic, and the meaning of Kafkaesque (to some) in Saigon.
WHO WAS PHAN XICH LONG? A few years ago, I asked around town. Literally everyone in Saigon knows the name. The eponymous street in Phu Nhuan District is the main artery in a neighbourhood that’s brimming over with local grill joints, fast food franchises, old school cafes, street side watering holes, karaoke bars, hotels with neon lights (advertising rooms by the hour)… suffice to say, it’s lively of a Saturday evening. Actually, it’s lively most evenings.
But the life and times of Phan Xich Long – the man, not the street – remain a mystery to many locals, which, for the record, I’m not saying is anything unusual… as time goes by, a city’s residents inevitably become further and further removed from century- or centuries-old historical figures. You could stop many a local in my hometown Dublin and play the same game – who is the ‘Grafton’ of Grafton street? I know he’s a duke, but I can’t tell you anymore without turning to Google.
It’s just the story behind Phan Xich Long’s hapless attempt at insurrection sounds flabbergastingly brilliant and deserving of more attention, so I figure every now and then, I’ll do my bit for posterity. So please see below a version of a story I wrote for Mekong Review a few years ago with a **very brief** (just a teaser like1) summary of the man’s swift (attempt to) rise and immediate fall.
The article is actually about a bookshop, which is called Kafka2 (neither me nor my editor, knew anything about the bookstore but I am sure he was imagining a secret society of politically minded bookworms and gift-wrapped opportunity to put ‘Kafkaesque’ in a headline… ) – I was instructed to first research the neighbourhood around Kakfa (the bookstore, not the man) and give the reader a little insight into its history, so down the rabbit hole I went….
Kafka (and other mysteries) in Saigon
IN 1916, A MYSTERIOUS YOUNG MAN using the name Phan Xich Long claimed to be the rightful Emperor of Vietnam and then tried to overthrow the French of Cochinchina. Having studied sorcery and pyrotechnics in Siam and Cambodia, Phan Xich Long (born and named Phan Phát Sanh in 1893) concocted a potion so one group of devotees, armed with just sticks and spears, would be invisible as they marched on Saigon (apparently, it didn’t work). For his pièce de résistance, Long had also prepared a batch of bombs (ingredients: cannon shot, carbon, sulphur, saltpetre, a sprinkling of supernatural seasoning), all of which failed to detonate outside various French military installations. Before either of these flops even occurred, Long had been arrested and, after a botched jailbreak, was executed along with scores of his followers.
For this wholehearted albeit calamitous coup, the 23-year-old revolutionary, who was evidently ‘out there’, would be hazily remembered as a martyr for the nationalist cause, and many decades later, in a reunified Vietnam, his name would be resurrected by town planners looking to christen a road (more of a dirt track at the time) in Ho Chi Minh City (née Saigon). By the turn of the 21st century, Phan Xich Long, as an address, had a seedy, rundown reputation. Now, thanks to a well-financed urban renewal project, the street has been reborn as a wide, rather salubrious thoroughfare that’s the epicentre of a thriving inner city neighbourhood.
Weirdly, or not, nobody in Ho Chi Minh City seems to know much, if anything, about the brief life of Phan Xich Long (let alone his failed, fantastical insurrection). I’d only dug into the history as I planned to visit the area to locate a bookstore called Kafka, curious to know why Prague’s most celebrated literary son had earned his own resurrection in a part of town, known for its near limitless culinary pleasures, but not for its literary credentials.
“Nobody reads books by Kafka in Vietnam,” warned one Vietnamese bookworm, dismissing the notion of a Kafka club, or a secret society. “They just pretend that they do.” On hearing that, my enthusiasm waned while suspicions waxed. In a city, where people visit decorative so-called book cafes for the Instagram value, or pose for photos while pretending to read books, I begin to fear the name ‘Kafka’ is just a ruse to get me to ‘check-in’, order a matcha latte and buy a copy of “Everything is F*cked’…
But when I eventually locate the store, I’m relieved to find nothing showy — just lots of books inside a homely space and a trio of 20-somethings browsing the shelves, rather than posing for selfies. When the owner, Tita, arrives, we chat about books and favourite authors (Romain Gary for her) while she makes preparations for a small invite-only event for which regular customers would spend the night at the bookstore. I picture my editor gleefully picturing the scene he covets – a coterie of the city’s literati gathering for a clandestine affair, and exchanging cognac-fuelled conspiracies by candlelight till dawn. But Tita’s vision turns out to be a little more innocent: “I am often here at night, rearranging the shelves, and there’s something magical about a bookstore at that time. I just want others to experience that feeling.”
Tita, whose full name is Tran Thi Thanh Thuan, was born and raised in Tien Giang Province in the Mekong Delta, where she had learned to read by the age of
four thanks to a bookworm mother: “When my mum divorced my father, she lost her entire book collection, so she recited stories to me from memory, but that made me more curious to find books for myself. The only one I owned was given to me by a woman who collected waste paper for recycling. It was a fairytale and had no cover. So to this day, I don’t know what it was called.”
Desperate for text of any kind, she read her granny’s prayer books, old newspapers, her sister’s schoolbooks, her aunt’s slushy romance novels, basically “anything and everything” she came across. Now, surrounded by a world of literature, I express admiration (and considerable envy) at how much she has read (pretty much the entire stock in the shop, and more), and ask if she’s worried that people in Ho Chi Minh City don’t read enough nowadays. “Sometimes I think my friends and I read too much,” she says gravely, as if fearing that they have all, foolishly, forsaken a life of prosperity as a result of their reading habits.
Alas, selling books, Tita freely admits, isn’t going to make her rich. She has bills to pay, family obligations and her own financial aspirations. An architect by trade, she has a day job and runs an Airbnb above the bookstore, where she also lives with a nuisance of cats and her brother, who studies, of all things in Vietnam’s heaving financial hub, literature. All of Kafka’s booksellers, who tag-team part-time shifts through the week, are gainfully employed elsewhere, accepting a meagre stipend for the chance to read for free and discuss literature with customers. That is why, Tita believes, customers do come.
I start to wonder if, for this small community of literature lovers in Ho Chi Minh City, the word Kafkaesque conjures up a feeling of cosiness, warmth and togetherness, you know, like hygge in Danish, rather than uneasy dreams of impenetrable bureaucracy. So I clumsily ask her if she knows the meaning of the word, and if she or any of her customers have even read the work Kafka. “Yes, I do, and I have read all of his books, and many of my customers have, too,” she says, without sounding insulted by my patronising line of interrogation. “But actually, my business partner, Lien, named the store after the Murakami novel Kafka on the Shore, in which the character Kafka seeks refuge in the Komura Library.”
A large penny drops (for me) and, right on cue, I hear a rumble of thunder in the distance. Outside a heavy deluge will soon empty out the heavens but none of the customers in the store budge, or seem to care; safe, warm, happily ensconced, they continue to drift along the shelves in search of other worlds and borrowed memories before finding a corner to dive in and forget themselves. If what Franz K. said is true, that books are a narcotic, then in Saigon, Kafka is where these kids come to score.3
Feel free to put me in the right elevator with the right producer and I’ll pitch the motion picture....
The physical location of Kafka in the Phan Xich Long neighbourhood is sadly no more. The store is now found in Tra Vinh Province in the Mekong Delta, and everyone is welcome to spend time there, reading in the gardens, drinking tea/coffee, and surrounded by cats, dogs, chickens… you can find them on Facebook.
A version of this story was originally published by Mekong Review in 2018.