Bruce Weigl’s life changed irrevocably in 1967, the year he enlisted in the Army and went to Vietnam. For Weigl, this year divided his life into a “before” and an “after” that could not be integrated into a coherent narrative until Weigl and his family decided to adopt a Vietnamese child. This decision gave Weigl the impetus to craft his story and to bring his life full circle.
For those familiar with the literature of the Vietnam War, Bruce Weigl’s name is a familiar one. A noted and prolific poet, critic, and essayist, Weigl has published many books. By the time The Circle of Hanh appeared in bookstores, Weigl had published ten volumes of poetry and edited three collections of critical essays. Song of Napalm (1988), What Saves Us (1992), Sweet Lorain (1996), and Archaeology of the Circle (1999) are among his best-known works. In addition, he has coedited and cotranslated three volumes of poetry from the Vietnamese and Romanian. His own work has been widely translated and published internationally. Further, his work has been anthologized in a number of important collections, including The Best American Poetry (1994), The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets (1985), The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern War (1991), edited by the noted scholar Paul Fussell, and Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993), edited by the poet Carolyn Forché.
In The Circle of Hanh, Weigl turns to a different genre—the memoir—to explore the early years of his life, his Vietnam War years, his return from Vietnam, and the experience that finally made his life whole, the adoption of a young Vietnamese child in 1996. Throughout, Weigl demonstrates his respect for the story, for the way that words can take shape into a narrative that brings structure and meaning into a life. This respect did not come easily to Weigl. He did not grow up in a home that valued academics or the written word. Nonetheless, as he writes early in the book:
What endures is the story. The story circles back on itself if you let it have its way, and if you care for the words as if they were living things whose care your own life depends upon, because it does.
Like fellow Vietnam War writer Tim O’Brien, Weigl looks for the story to save him.
The story Weigl tells is not a pretty one, although there are moments of great beauty and love woven in the painful tapestry of Weigl’s life. He grew up poor in a working-class neighborhood in Lorain, Ohio. His people were immigrants from Serbia, Slovakia, and Poland who worked in the hot and dirty Ohio steel mills. Living in rented apartments that smelled of urine from the communal toilets, Weigl found himself born into a community and a family he loved. Most of all, he loved the stories.
The book opens with a brief prologue in which Weigl describes the arc of his story—from boyhood in Lorain to the war—and back again. He also reveals that his love of the story did not come naturally or easily. In the opening sentence of the book, he tells the reader, “I want to resurrect something ancient from inside me because I was not raised to be a man who cares for words as if they were living things.” The prologue prepares the reader for the journey that takes Weigl from this oral storytelling background to the writing of stories, a kind of a circle that allows him to recapture his youth and his heritage.
After the prologue, Weigl begins his story in October of 1996 when he was in Vietnam to finally meet the daughter he had been trying to adopt for two years. In the rush to leave for Hanoi, Weigl did not notice an error in his visa, an error that nearly cost him his chance to bring home Hanh, the little girl waiting for him in the Vietnamese orphanage. Weigl deftly uses the story of his 1996 trip back to Vietnam and the terrible frustrations that he encountered there to provide a framework for his memoir. Thus, on one hand, the “circle” referred to in his title is the circle of his journey to Vietnam and back. On the other hand, the notion of circle refers to a great deal more: the circle of generations turning back to important stories, and the circle of Weigl’s life from childhood to adulthood to regeneration with his own family and the adoption of Hanh.
The circle is an important symbol for Weigl, one he examines not only in this book but also in his 1999 collection of poetry, Archeology of the Circle. Moreover, the circle becomes the literary device through which Weigl tells his tale. Inside the chronological narrative of Weigl’s trip to Vietnam circulate the stories that belong to his grandparents, his parents, his youth, and his year in Vietnam. These stories move in circles across time and space without defined order. Indeed, the stories work like human memory, one thought leading to another through connections and links that might not seem initially obvious. There is a constant circling back to stories and ideas introduced earlier, each version refining and redefining the purpose of the narrative. Often, Weigl circles a story over and over before spiraling in on its heart.
Perhaps the clearest example of this technique can be found in the narratives about Sharon, Weigl’s childhood babysitter. While the Vietnam War remains the pivotal event in Weigl’s life, his experience of repeated sexual abuse at the hands of the high school student hired by his parents to sit for him and his sister foregrounds all else. Weigl writes:
To call the stories back I have to go to that childhood because everything begins with Sharon, or with the story of Sharon, which stays alive and grows inside me even still. . . . I want to tell you how our hours of wrestling helped shape me into who I am and how I love and how I am unable to love.
Weigl provides many versions of the story, but at its core is the dread, the shame, and the excitement Weigl felt during the game Sharon euphemistically called “wrestling.” The experience affected (and continues to affect) his relationships with women, including his sister Cheryl. Weigl uses the circling technique to first introduce the notion that Cheryl was in the other room asleep during the molestations. He returns to assert that Cheryl “knew nothing, or at least remembered nothing, about my nights of Sharon.” The reader finally understands that Cheryl knew something very, very wrong was happening in the next room, but that she was powerless to do anything about it. Thus, Weigl’s experience circles to include his sister as well.
The other clearly pivotal event in Weigl’s life is the time he spent as a soldier in the Vietnam War. The horrors of the war and his inability to tell anyone about it when he returned deeply affected his ability to think, work, and live. Everything in his life is either in the “before” (the time before he went to Vietnam) or in the “after” (the time after he was nearly hit by a 122-millimeter rocket that killed his captain). As a result of this explosion, he temporarily lost his hearing. Weigl seems to pinpoint this moment as the time when he was irrevocably changed. In some of the most effective passages in the book, Weigl poetically contrasts his experiences in the before and in the after, often using those expressions as a kind of refrain: “In the before, the injured and the beaten had always had a chance. In the after, Captain Carter died in our arms.”
Weigl tells of his return to the United States and the difficulty of his reintegration into the fabric of American life. For long periods of time, under the influence of drugs and alcohol, he found himself unable to settle anywhere, looking for solace in the arms of women until he “woke up among words.” Weigl credits the work of writing his stories with his salvation because the work led him to his wife, to his family, and ultimately, to a Vietnamese girl named Hanh.
If there is a criticism of Weigl’s prose, it might be about the abrupt ending of the story, in which he drives away in a car with Hanh and several friends. Ironically, the problem here seems to be that Weigl does not close the circle he has worked so hard to create. Rather, he stops the story just short of completion and does not show the reader either Hanh’s integration into the Weigl family or Weigl’s reintegration after the painful journey to Vietnam and back. The reader does not know if the circle of Hanh is complete—that is, if the child is able to work her healing arts on her adoptive father. Perhaps it is just as well: It would be possible for a book such as this to become sentimental or trite in the last moment, which would destroy the carefully crafted shape of the book. Nevertheless, the ending of the book seems less than satisfying.
Further, any reader familiar with Vietnam War literature may recognize phrases and ideas from other sources, particularly from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), arguably the best work of fiction to come out of the war. Weigl’s notion of the story and the saving grace of the story parallels a number of O’Brien’s motifs. “Lives of the Dead,” for example, the last story in The Things They Carried, closes as follows:
I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.
In another instance, Weigl writes about wanting to share what it was like in Vietnam:
I want to tell you about that light, but it hurts my eyes to remember. It is the light of bodies ascending through the heavy jungle air into the river of peace we wanted to believe lingered somewhere above us.
This image reminds the reader of Curt Lemon’s death in The Things They Carried: “when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms.” It is difficult to know whether these similarities are intentional, or if the similarity in experience creates a similarity in image and motif. Regardless, the experience of reading O’Brien and Weigl in tandem enriches both readings.
The Circle of Hanh is a masterful book that can be enjoyed by the reader interested in ideas of writing and storytelling and in following the aftermath of the Vietnam War into literature, and by the reader who appreciates lyrical language and a good story. At its heart, this is a book that asserts that love can save us, even from the most horrifying circumstances. It is through the love of family, spouse, children, and stories that one finds the way home.