Aubade with Burning City

The poem captures the fundamental strangeness of several sensory experiences happening in one moment in Saigon: a Christmas song plays on the radio in April; tanks crush the city walls; shells explode; people and dogs run in the street; lovers drink champagne; Americans and their allies evacuate via helicopter; living beings suffer. Vuong incorporates lyrics from "White Christmas" into his poem to capture the irony of the moment. In some places, the song lyrics exist alongside the action on separate lines: “May your days be merry and bright… // He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips. / Open, he says. / She opens” (Lines 3-6). Here, the strangeness lies in the contrast between lines. In other places in the poem, the boundary between holiday song and war blur as the two become part of one sentence: “May all / your Christmases be white as the traffic guard / unstraps his holster” (Lines 9-11). In this way, the Christmas song and the brutality of the moment become one thing.

The poem also expresses strangeness and absurdity of the Fall of Saigon with an irregular form and intentional use of white space. There is no pattern to the indentation, the line breaks, or the stanza breaks. This unpredictable form forces the reader to exist in the moment because they can’t expect what has happened before to predict the future form of the poem; this mimics the unpredictable chaos of the Fall of Saigon described in the poem. Because many lines are comparatively short, the indentations, frequent enjambment, and liberal stanza breaks leave much of the page blank. This white space invites the reader to consider the role absence plays in the poem, both conceptually (what is the narrator leaving out?) and narratively (what is lost when the city falls?).

The poem includes a cast of seemingly ordinary characters and objects: a traffic cop, a girl’s dress, a flower, a hotel, a city square. However, as the poet assigns them surprising descriptions, the ordinary takes on a surreal quality. Sometimes this occurs through a conceptual simile: “On the bed stand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard / for the first time” (Lines 24-25). The blooming flower is likely an image the reader finds familiar; the secret expanding, however, is not. Sometimes the image is arguably figurative, as in the description of the hotel lovers as “A single candle. / Their shadows: two wicks” (Lines 16-17). The speaker could mean that the light source in the room casts two shadows, one from each body. However, “wick” is a metaphorical stretch because that is the object that would hold the light, not the shadow. There’s not sufficient evidence in the poem to determine whether the lone candle is a literal object or a metaphor for the lovers coming together. Likewise, the police chief lying “facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola. / A palm-sized photo of his father soaking / beside his left ear” (Lines 27-29) has some elements that could be read as metaphorical, such as the Coca-Cola, but those are confounded by the specificity of the size of the photo and its proximity to his body. The quick flow of the poem and the narrator’s penchant for switching between perspectives suggests that the reader is not meant to take the poem as a historically accurate description of the battle and each party’s position. What is clear from reading this poem is the way these images crystallize a variety of references to explain how such a strange thing could happen in real life. The police chief is probably not lying in a literal pool of Coca-Cola, but the all-American brand reminds the reader of the fact that United States Armed Forces killed millions of Vietnamese people in the course of the Vietnam War. These nonliteral images are a quest for meaning amidst the confusion of destruction.

Vuong intentionally crafted “Aubade with Burning City” to be legible to an audience that doesn’t necessarily have an intimate connection with the Vietnam War. At the same time, the poem has even more levels of meaning for those who do have insider knowledge, and also for those who know more of Vuong’s story. For example, the name "[m]ilkflower" (Line 1) suggests that the petals are small and white, so they bear a physical resemblance to snow. Some readers might also know that these flowers typically bloom in October. Because the poem takes place in April, this rewards the familiar reader with another odd circumstance to color their understanding. In the context of Vuong’s work, this poem appears fourth in Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). Reading through the rest of the book confirms that the lovers in the hotel are figurations of Vuong’s grandmother and grandfather. The tension between them in “Aubade with Burning City” arises from their celebratory behavior while the city falls outside, and the soldier insisting that they have nothing to worry about. In the course of the collection, this moment functions as foreshadowing for their future difficulties. It also connects with the challenging history of Vuong’s Vietnamese American identity. He articulates this concern in his poem “Notebook Fragments”: “An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists. / Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me. // Yikes” (Lines 38-40).

A noteworthy feature of “Aubade with Burning City” is that it centers the experiences of the Vietnamese people who are living through the Fall of Saigon. An American soldier appears in the poem, only because he is in love with a Vietnamese woman. The poem gestures toward evacuating Americans as they exit the scene—they are part of the moment but “just out of reach” (Line 36). The vast majority of the poem’s descriptions are situated firmly inside the city, and the vast majority of characters call Saigon home. While so much Vietnam War literature in America prioritizes the experiences of soldiers and people in the United States, Vuong’s bold departure refocuses the spotlight on a population so often pushed to the margins.