THE ITALY LETTERS

Vi Khi Nao was born in Long Khánh, Vietnam, and immigrated to the United States at a young age. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film, and cross-genre collaboration, and has been featured in periodicals such as Conjunctions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Chicago Review, Glimmer Train, the Bafller, and McSweeney’s, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology. A former Black Mountain Institute fellow, she lives in Iowa City

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“Queer, sensual, ‘literary fantasia.'” —Ms Magazine

“Explodes with feeling.” —Publisher’s Weekly

“Vi Khi Nao’s work crosses mediums — poetry, film, and visual art, to name a few — and her intensely lyrical latest novel has a similar range, putting the erotic side by side with political and personal history.” —New York Magazine’s Vulture

“For years, Vi Khi Nao has been one of the most interesting and bewitching writers of an English sentence. With this book she expresses all the loneliness and longing and absurdity of what it’s been like to live out this past decade in America, in sentences you want to lift off the page, put in your mouth, and swallow down whole.” —Madeleine Watts, author of The Inland Sea

1. What is food’s role in this novel? What does the narrator’s connection with food tell you about her? How does food feature in the narrator’s relation with her mother?

2. What is the role of money in this novel? How does money play into the journey of the narrator? How does it play into the relationship between the narrator and her lover? What do you think the author is trying to convey about capitalism?

3. Death and sex are juxtaposed constantly throughout the novel. What type of effect does this have on the reader?

4. What is the significance of this text being written in letters, and written in the second person? How does this impact the reading experience?

5. How does the narrator cultivate her identity? What is important to her? How do you think she would define herself?

6. What is the role of art in this novel? How are the short stories, videos, and other media the narrator evokes vital to understanding these characters, their connection to the world, and this novel?

7. What is the effect of only having the narrator’s perspective? How would the novel be different if each of the letters had responses?

8. What does the relationship between the narrator and her mother tell a reader about motherhood? Care? Love?

9. This novel is grounded in specific locations, but also has a sense of placelessness and wandering. How does this mirror the narrator’s experiences? What does this convey about immigrant identities?

10. What role does yearning play in the narrator’s life? Where is this yearning expressed within the text? What do each of the characters yearn for?

11. How does queerness play a role in the novel, and how does it relate to the theme of yearning? Has your perception of queerness changed throughout? Why or why not?

12. Passion and love are central themes throughout the novel. What is the difference between passion and love? Where are these emotions infused in the text? How do they enhance the reader’s connection to the narrator?

EXCERPT FROM THE ITALY LETTERS BY VI KHI NAO, PUBLISHED BY MELVILLE HOUSE

I do not know if this friendship has an ending. If there is an end for us or if this is, this epistolary letter, a way of saying goodbye to a future early. As you already know I am in Vegas with my convalescent mother. My mother doesn’t want to die slowly, but rather quickly, the way my mentor passed, in her sleep. My mentor’s death wasn’t a cat drowned in a pool of light. I do not believe her death was quick. She had an interior torturous sixty-seven-years-old life, which led me to believe that was how she formed her endless compassion and love for me so early. I am in Vegas. In the early morning, I wrote you and when you woke up you wrote back. You asked me in the early morning if I worked better at night. I told you that Vegas was gorgeous and that I worked well when no one was around. You told me that you wanted to see the desert. You said you had never been there. I surreptitiously wanted to invite you here, but the lips of my fingers wouldn’t move. I have been indigent and that I have been vulnerable and terrified in the last three years and I feel I don’t have anything to offer you that you would want. Not being able to afford a bed, I had slept on the floor for months before and up to nearly the night of my interview at Notre Dame. If I invited you to Vegas, it would break my heart to ask you to sleep on the floor with me. I told you in the early morning when it was 7 a.m. your London time and 2 a.m. my time that you would love it here. It’s dry. The mountain has silhouettes. And, endless nothingness, depending on where you go. Death Valley is pretty close, I told you. It’s very beautiful when it rains. The fog drapes the sun, draping the mountain here.

Most people hate Vegas, but I have fallen in love with it across time. For its bright light and its angels of darkness. The fallen souls that bind their hopes to gambling. It’s a city filled with sinners in their sincerity to be fallen. You told me that you loved how you can love a place over time. I told you how it took me a while to fall in love with it. It was a slow love like Venice was for you. Taking its sweet time. New York was a head-over-heel experience for me. It was terrible, I said. And, here, I found out how you didn’t like New York. I fell in love quickly with it and fell out of it just as quickly. And, soon, you will wake up to wash your face, to attend to your tea, and to start your day. It’s nearly the end of my day. Although I didn’t want to go, I told you I must go and hold Vegas in my arms. In case she slips away. And I am utterly homeless in my evanescence.

Yesterday, my mother in her endless hacking and nocturnal sweating that soaked through her pajamas turned on YouTube for me. She invited me to listen to this song called “Còn Yêu Em Mãi.” It was about a Vietnamese soldier who has been captured by the Việt Cộng. My mother told me that the soldier was also a poet. He knew he would die in prison and he wrote this song in prison, a letter to his sweetheart explaining his departure from life. In case you would like to know this poet’s name: Nguyễn Trung Cang. In the morning, my mother, in her whisper of a voice, begged me that if she passed away in her sleep, to please wash her face and put sunscreen on it to help wash away the ugliness that death had imprinted on her. And, so it would be respectable for others to mourn her. Knowing that my mother has had a hard, torturous life, I selfishly want my mother to live. Not because I believe in life or in existence or we should be here as longer than we have to. But rather, I want her to live because there is so much I want to do for my mother. I want to accumulate all the wealth I can so I can give my mother the lighthearted, blithe, debt-free life she deserves. I have been pushing my books out into the world in hopes at least one will reinvent the memory of the public and shower me with the economic prosperity I could afford her. Five of my books have entered the public face, if you can call sales ranking on Amazon at two to five million as having a public face. But they’re out there. My sixth will exit the womb into the air. Crying hopefully, hiccupping hopefully, and burping hopefully. Over Skype last night, I told Cherimoya, my friend in South Bend, that when this child enters the world it would be fragile and pneumonic and it would find its baby mouth coughing with febricity. I don’t want my love for you to be some vacant, distant memory, Gatto. I hope you do not see this letter as being one. I tell you that I drift all the time now. The interview took much out of me. You tell me that it must have been so hard to do that interview. I think perhaps I need to drift. You asked if I were angry. And you said that sometimes life loses its lustre for a while.

Today I learned about your ancestry. You are Italian. Your parents are from Napoli and everyone before them is from Napoli. You were born and raised in New York. Your mother is from an island and your father from the mainland. But your Neapolitan parents met each other on a bus in Newburgh, New York, in 1956. My parents’ marriage was concocted through an arranged coordination. My father fell in love with my mother and my grandmother fell in love with my father and so my grandmother wanted my father to have my mother. I used to believe in arranged marriages. But I don’t know any more especially since my mother did not love my father and found him unbearable and intolerable. In 1989, when I arrived to the United States, we were both ten as you pointed out. Nine to be accurate since my birthday came three months after my arrival. Your uncle in Italy had pigs. He was a butcher, you said. And you had a goat named Daisy. When I think of your goat, I will think of it as a flower. Here I discovered you have three master’s degrees. You have one in Liberal Studies, another in Contemporary Art, and the last one in Museums Galleries and Contemporary Culture. When you lived in Rome, you ate bread with ricotta cheese and some honey on top and drank tea. When I lived in Providence, my breakfast was a cup of rice and sautéed salmon in red sauce. A sauce my mother taught me how to nurture from scratch by using three very simple ingredients: sugar, salt, broth. In the early morning, when it was cold in London, in the forties, before you told me that after a disappointing job interview in which you drew a mustache on your face and sideburns and called yourself Joseph, I asked you how were your testicles today. In which you replied that they were translucent and enticing like two pieces of salmon caviar. The conversation of your testicles led me to think of my trans woman friend who told me that before she exits her apartment, she must make sure that she didn’t leave her testicles and spectacles behind. It was this same trans friend who abandoned my friendship for eight years before agreeing to meet me again just a few days ago. It was this same trans friend who in order to read my book Time Is Lost purchased a new reading table and lamp. It was this same trans friend whose quasi-partner had been tortured and left for dead in the middle of the desert by a serial killer. She survived and when the rescue team came to airlift her to Europe where her father, who was in the Air Force, could provide superior care for her. It was this same trans friend who told me to pay attention to her partner’s existence. In particularly to her partner’s face which endured numerous plastic surgeries from the hammer blow by the serial killer and to her feet, which were twisted, curled, and warped from the torture. She was only fourteen years old then. It was the same morning in which I told you that the college where I interviewed had someone in mind already before I interviewed for the job. I told you that I am just a wallflower who just found out that is just a wallflower. But you convinced me that I was a cypress tree that was hard to miss and that I smelled good. I don’t know if I smelled good, but I will imagine myself as you may have imagined it: evergreen, refulgent, tall and redolent and green and leaning. I told you that I spent a month on that interview. Only it didn’t matter. The stars already knew each other. Knew each other’s alignment. What I didn’t tell you is that the university is doing an investigation on faculty misconduct. The faculty affairs specialist had spoken to Cherimoya. If the university discovers misconduct (and no doubt in my mind that the interview process was fair or honorable or impartial), the Department of English and the Creative Writing Department would get a slight slap on the wrist and a slight reminder, like a wink, or rather two or three winks, not to repeat such an uneven-handed deportment again. It’s not like the university hires someone every day. At times like this, I think of the tennis players who must face each other during intense competition. Especially when a lineman and even the umpire himself miscalls an important, decisive shot. The opponent could expend all the energy fighting the umpire for that one point and lose his focus or to continue to make the most of the next point. The sad part about this whole ordeal was that the director of the program was adamant and passionate about advocating for minority rights. She was just lip-mouthing an empty gesture. The department ended up hiring a white Princeton male. Most of the faculty is white. I have been meaning to ask you without wanting to ask you about the controversy behind the privileged of whiteness and since you are white, how do you feel about the attacks against your race? I think about these things now. I also didn’t tell you that one of the students, after hearing the news of the Princeton dude being hired via Facebook, rushed home to cry.

I haven’t spoken to you in a couple of days. Which is normal. Our interactions are varied. Sometimes for weeks and months we don’t speak and one day, it all rushes out like water from a waterfall. I would see you online and I want to wave hello, but I don’t. I think about you a lot. I think about your quotidian engagement with your husband. And, why urinals appeal to you. I think about my vulnerable letter on its way to you. My days are devoted to my mother. To running errands and making meals for her. I run most errands for my mother because I do not want my mother to die and I don’t want to fill my heart to the brim with regret. I don’t want to say that my love for my mother isn’t born out of guilt. Yes, duty or obligation perhaps. In the bright afternoon of Vegas light, I made my mother mahi-mahi soup with freshly cut tomatoes and pineapples. I sprinkled hot chili flakes, which my mother recently brought back when she went to Iowa for the birth of my first niece, to spice up its sweetness. To round the taste up, I squeezed 2/3 of a whole lime. I concocted this sweet and sour soup outside, using an abandoned ironing table for the makeshift cooking surface.

It’s almost midnight here and you are about to wake up into your London light. I think about you curling up into a ball, but perhaps you do not want to curl. I still grieve my friend; you advised that I needed to put my grief somewhere to feel better. After much contemplation, I still do not know where to put it. I have told you about him. The one who got married and I went to the wedding reception in late July in Madison. The one who I had to befriend his fiancée in order to speak to him because he would cease communicating with me. This decade-long friendship ended the day he met his wife-to-be. I would like to think that I am one of those people in the world who doesn’t just randomly get cross without provocation.

Insomnia has befriended my mother intimately. My mother feared this intimacy as she found herself coughing up a bazaar in the middle of the night. She feared the cough has invited pneumonia and bronchitis into her body. My mother depicted her pain along the side of her ribs as some rats munching. There was nothing I could do for my mother, but urged her to go to the hospital. In the morning I took my mother to a Vietnamese urgent care on Rainbow Boulevard, about a thirty-minute drive from Henderson, passing through the heart of Las Vegas. During her violent diurnal and nocturnal coughs, she must have pulled muscles along her ribs, muscles she had never used before in her life, I assumed, bruising her lungs like an Olympic athlete during one of their marathon trainings. The human is able to endure a lot. We have the ability to overcome anything. My mother, on her best suicidal note, thinks that certain things are not worth overcoming. For the past two or three or five weeks, my mother said that if God calls her name to return to earth, she would welcome it with all her heart.

Excerpted from The Italy Letters by Vi Khi Nao Copyright © 2024 by Vi Khi Nao. Excerpted by permission of Melville House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.