Chín chiều ruột đau – An anatomy of sadness by Bùi Công Khánh

“As a child, I was haunted by dreams that wove through my feverish chills, drawing me into a three-dimensional space where my doussie wood bed stretched long and wide, with a green-and-red rush mat resembling a field of colorful crops. There I lay, exposed and alone on the ‘bed field,’ my eyes wide open, my body curled tight, squinting at a shadowy figure gliding by, shifting and transforming its shape like dark clouds. Terror gripped me as my body grew limp and swayed upon the bed, which kept deforming beneath me.

Until I grew up…”

Within these recurring dreams of an exhausted body, an awareness – and then an anatomy – took shape. This anatomy, aside from acknowledging abstract meanings assigned to the body, dissects the flesh to examine the blood and innards that once connected us to the body of our mother. Result? Pain? Disgust when confronted with an alienated endoscopy, compared to our imagination of the self? Waiting for death? Acceptance.