12 Feb 15
By Thomas A. Bass
Today Index on Censorship continues publishing Swamp of the Assassins by American academic and journalist Thomas Bass, who takes a detailed look at the Kafkaesque experience of publishing his biography of Pham Xuan An in Vietnam.
The first installment was published on Feb 2 and can be read here.
With the censor’s boot on their necks, a generation of Vietnamese writers has been forced into silence or exile. To report on their plight, I met with three of the country’s best-known authors: Bao Ninh in Hanoi, Duong Thu Huong in Paris, and Pham Thi Hoai in Berlin. Each had his or her own story to tell about censorship, arrest, banishment, or silence—realities that are becoming increasingly dire in Vietnam.
Bao Ninh (whose real name is Hoang Au Phuong, with Bao Ninh being the name of his family’s native village) was a seventeen-year-old student when he enlisted in 1969 as an infantryman in the 5th Battalion/24th Regiment/10th Division. He would spend six years fighting his way down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, surviving some of the war’s deadliest battles, before his regiment captured Saigon’s Ton Son Nhut airport in 1975. Of the five hundred men who joined his military unit in 1969, Ninh is commonly reported to be one of ten who survived.
Son of Hoang Tue, former director of Vietnam’s Linguistics Institute, Bao Ninh went back to school after the war and finished college in 1981. He worked briefly in a biology lab at Vietnam’s Science Institute and then picked up his pen to become a writer. In 1984, the thirty-two-year-old former soldier enrolled in the second class admitted to the Nguyen Du Writers School (named after the celebrated Vietnamese poet who wrote The Tale of Kieu). For his school thesis, Ninh wrote a novel about his war-time experience. “The Sorrow of War” began circulating around Hanoi in roneo form in the late 1980s. This stenciled duplication, similar to a mimeograph, was published in 1990 under the anodyne title Fate of Love. The original title was restored in a 1991 edition and then removed again when Fate of Love was reissued in 1992. The book won a major literary award and became instantly famous—too famous, apparently. A denunciation campaign was launched against Bao Ninh, his literary award was retracted, and his book went out of print. In fact, it went out of print for a decade. “The time is not right” to republish it, he was told. Fate of Love reappeared in 2003, but it was not until 2006—fifteen years after its original publication—that The Sorrow of War reappeared in Vietnam. The Vietnamese use a variety of euphemisms to describe this gap in Bao Ninh’s literary career, but the correct term is censorship. He was not thrown in prison or banned. In fact, he was rewarded for his silence, but he was censored, nonetheless.
Translated into English by Vietnamese poet Phan Thanh Hao and Australian journalist Frank Palmos, The Sorrow of War sparked another literary sensation when it was published in London in 1993. The book revealed that Vietnam’s veterans on the winning side suffered the same trauma and disillusionment as the losers. Hailed as a great novel, comparable to Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, The Sorrow of War has been republished in a dozen languages and named by the Society of Authors as one of the fifty best translations of the twentieth century.
While the novel was becoming a best-seller in the West, in Vietnam the book reverted to being passed hand-to-hand in pirated editions. Bao Ninh stopped writing, or, to be more precise, he stopped publishing. He took a government job, and his son was allowed to leave the country to study economics at the University of Massachusetts. The Sorrow of War is currently widely available in Vietnam, but its two successor volumes remain unpublished.
At my first meeting with Bao Ninh in Hanoi in 2008, we talked about his unpublished books. He assured me the works had been written, gave me their titles, and described their plots. I have to say that I have not personally verified the existence of these manuscripts, which have assumed a status in Vietnamese literature comparable to Captain Ahab’s great white whale—doubted by many, believed by some, seen by few. The subversive nature of Bao Ninh’s trilogy is revealed only after confronting the shock of the first volume. The Sorrow of War may be a great war novel, but it holds a double surprise for readers in the West by revealing the bitterness of NVA soldiers, the soldiers who won the war. They were betrayed by incompetent commanders and self-serving politicians. They were scorned by a post-war generation that wanted to forget the incredible suffering inflicted on Vietnam during thirty years of war and turn instead to making money. The survivors of the war are ravaged by guilt, attacked by bad dreams. They drink too much, brawl too much, and drift all too often from failure to suicide. They display all the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, shell-shock, battle fatigue, or whatever we call the soul-sucking misery that invades a soldier’s bones at the sight of men killing other men.
The “friendly, simple peasant fighters … were the ones ready to bear the catastrophic consequences of this war, yet they never had a say in deciding the course of the war,” writes Kien, the narrator of the novel, who, like its author, spent a decade fighting Americans in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. “We have so many of those damned idiots up there in the North enjoying the profits of war, but it’s the sons of peasants who have to leave home,” he writes in a manuscript that turns out to be the book we are holding in our hands.
At war’s end, the former infantryman is detailed into recovering the corpses of his fallen comrades. “Over a long period, over many, many graves, the souls of the beloved dead silently and gloomily dragged the sorrow of war into his life.” He returns to his native Hanoi in 1976 to find the city consumed by careerism, graft, corruption, and all the other ailments of an emerging Asian Tiger. The political propaganda is ham-fisted. His former fiancée is a prostitute. He joins the ranks of the “traumatized misfits” who survived the war, works as a journalist, and writes a novel that sits abandoned on his desk, until the pages blow away in the wind.
“Those who survived continue to live,” writes Kien. “But that will has gone, that burning will which was once Vietnam’s salvation. Where is the reward of enlightenment due to us for attaining our sacred war goals? Our history-making efforts for the great generations have been to no avail. What’s so different here and now from the vulgar and cruel life we all experienced during the war?”
“In this kind of peace it seems people have unmasked themselves and revealed their true, horrible selves,” Kien says to a fellow veteran. “So much blood, so many lives were sacrificed—for what?”
“I’m simply a soldier like you who’ll now have to live with broken dreams and with pain,” his colleague replies. “But, my friend, our era is finished. After this hard-won victory fighters like you, Kien, will never be normal again.”
Kien is wracked by the kind of survivor guilt that comes from knowing “that the kindest, most worthy people have all fallen away, or even been tortured, humiliated before being killed, or buried and wiped away by the machinery of war.” He is left with the “appalling paradox” that “Justice may have been won, but cruelty, death, and inhuman violence have also won.”
On the two occasions when Bao Ninh was allowed to travel to the United States (he visited Boston in 1999 and Texas in 2005) he gravitated to the war veterans in the crowd. They swapped reticent greetings, established whether they had carried guns or flown airplanes, and then started drinking, letting the silence fill with the ghosts of departed friends. Bao Ninh had more dead friends than the Americans, and they died more gruesome deaths, but dead is dead, and he bore no grudges as he sat among his fellow soldiers. “Soldiers never say ‘sorry’ to each other,” he told me later. “They have nothing to apologize for.”
When former U.S. marine Wayne Karlin met Bao Ninh at a hotel café in Hanoi in 2007, Karlin was reminded of another Vietnam veteran turned writer, Tim O’Brien. “Both men are compact, their faces not so much sharp as sharpened, their eyes bright, at times with a flare of pain, at times with a gleefully malevolent intelligence, a sardonic, challenging grunt’s stare. And they both smoke like hell,” wrote Karlin in his book Wandering Souls (2009).
I am not a former soldier who fought in Vietnam, but the war was the cloud under which I came of age, and I seized the chance to begin traveling to Vietnam when the country opened to outsiders in the early 1990s. I met Pham Xuan An on my first trip in 1991, when the journalist-spy was still under police surveillance, and I kept returning to see him as I wrote my New Yorker profile and then my book, both entitled The Spy Who Loved Us. After An’s death in 2006, I visited Vietnam again two years later to talk to sources reticent about speaking while he was alive, and it was on this trip that I first met Bao Ninh.
Part 10: Eyes in the back of his head
This ninth installment of the serialisation of Swamp of the Assassins by Thomas A. Bass was posted on February 11, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
11 Feb 15
By Thomas A. Bass
Today Index on Censorship continues publishing Swamp of the Assassins by American academic and journalist Thomas Bass, who takes a detailed look at the Kafkaesque experience of publishing his biography of Pham Xuan An in Vietnam.
The first installment was published on Feb 2 and can be read here.
Nguyen The Vinh, editor at Hong Duc publishers, is the last censor I meet on my Vietnamese publishing tour. I am to appear at a Hanoi book fair for an author signing and then sit on a panel discussing my book. Flanking me are the sober Vinh, who, like many editors, seems to prefer books to authors, and another gentleman, Duong Trung Quoc, who also had a hand in getting my book published. Quoc is an historian and politician. I don’t know what kind of history he writes, but, as an elected member of Vietnam’s National Assembly, Quoc—a hearty fellow who resembles a Vietnamese Bill Clinton—is obviously a successful politician.
I try to hide my annoyance when most of the evening is devoted to discussing Pham Xuan An as a “perfect spy.” Remember, Vinh has edited—and censored—both the “official” biography of An and my own work. I have been advised to curb my tongue and not jeopardize the continued sale of my book. The ordeal continues over dinner, where I am still holding my tongue, while Vinh and Quoc tuck into a multi-course feast. In spite of their work doing the final pruning of my book, these men are the rainmakers who got it published. I owe them a couple of bucks in royalties, which I think I’ll donate to some of the millions of needy souls in Vietnam’s post-war diaspora. By the time our meal has moved from sautéed vegetables to steamed fish, my tongue has slipped enough to broach the subject of censorship.
“By law there is no censorship system in Vietnam,” says Vinh. “Mainly what we have is self-censorship.”
Quoc the politician agrees with his literary friend. “Here in Vietnam censorship is inside the brain of everyone,” he says. “It was your editors who cut your book, not the government.”
I ask them to elaborate on how a country without censorship manages to censor so many writers. “Publishers belong to the state,” says Vinh. “Everyone who works in the system understands this. For the higher purpose of the nation they have to sacrifice something. We have an expression here in Vietnam: ‘It is better to kill an innocent man than let a guilty one escape.’”
Quoc allows a smile to spread across his face, before gently chiding his friend. “You are speaking like a political commissar,” he says.
Later in the evening Quoc will hint at why my book was finally published after having been blocked for five years. “The authorized biographies on Pham Xuan An were works of stenography,” he says. “People printed what he told them to print. Your book is something different. It is documented and researched, but, more importantly, it captures his personality. This is why I thought it should be published.”
I take the compliment, but note that my book has not actually been published in Vietnam. A promotional teaser is for sale, while a complete Vietnamese translation can exist only outside the country. This will happen when the book is retranslated and released in Berlin as an electronic file stored on computers hardened against attacks from Vietnam’s censors. That Vietnam has censors trying to reach across the world and disable computers in Berlin makes these agents far less benign than Vinh would have me believe. In this case, the censors are working not as freelance gardeners, shaping topiaries in their minds, but as political operatives executing orders to attack people in foreign countries.
As we move from fish to grilled meats, Quoc indicates that he is going to give me an important scoop. Not only did Pham Xuan An continue working as a spy after the end of the Vietnam war, but he did so at the highest levels. “He was hieu truong, or dean, of the post-war military intelligence school in Ho Chi Minh City.” An’s eight-month stint in 1978 at the Nguyen Ai Quoc National Political Academy in Hanoi had prepared him for this important assignment.
I have seen no evidence supporting this claim, and, in fact, I suspect it is part of the propaganda campaign designed to make Pham Xuan An into a perfect apparatchik. The claim is even more improbable, because, earlier in the evening, Quoc had confessed that An, as a southerner who had worked for the Americans, was always distrusted by his northern colleagues. “People in Pham Xuan An’s position were not trusted by the government,” he says. “There were a lot of questions about him.” Apparently, these questions will remain unanswered for a long time. “It takes at least seventy years for documents in Vietnam to be declassified,” he says.
Later, to verify Quoc’s claim that Pham Xuan An was dean of Vietnam’s spy academy, I visit Bui Tin in his one-room garret in Paris. Tin is another famous journalist spy. He was deputy editor of Nhan Dan, Vietnam’s Communist Party newspaper, when he penned an editorial in the spring of 1990 praising the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the introduction of democratic reforms into the communist world. He was about to be cashiered by the Politburo, which was preparing to sign a secret agreement allying Vietnam and China. (“The Thanh Do agreement in September 1990 was the beginning of the Chinese colonization of Vietnam,” he says.) To avoid being arrested, Tin left his wife and two children in Hanoi and flew to Paris for a meeting of communist newspaper editors. After the meeting, he didn’t fly home. He thought the situation would reverse itself in a year or two. Vietnam’s progressive forces would regain the upper hand and reintroduce democratic reforms into the country. Twenty-five years later, Tin is still in Paris, while his wife, whom he has not seen since 1990, remains “under close surveillance” in Hanoi.
As an army colonel and confidante of General Giap, and as a fellow journalist who befriended Pham Xuan An after the two men met in 1975, Tin is a reliable source for double checking Quoc’s information. “Yes, Pham Xuan An wrote reports on his visitors,” Tin confirms, “and every once in a while he was asked to give lectures to the Ministry of Interior spies being trained in Saigon. But he was nothing as grand as the dean of a spy academy. The government treated him like an interesting artifact. He was a bauble they toyed with and admired. He was good for propaganda, but they never trusted him.”
In spite of his dubious pronouncements, I have warmed to Quoc as we plowed through a steady round of beers and ended the evening with toothpicks propped in our mouths, a sign of having eaten well. Quoc had surprised me with another confession. Unlike the old days, he said, the Vietnamese government is not run by intellectual giants and military geniuses. “Today the government of Vietnam isn’t smart enough to allow a Pham Xuan An to do what he did,” he says. “It requires bravery and intelligence to run a spy like that. What is your expression in English? ‘The first victim of war is truth.’ Here in Vietnam, we have the habits of war.”
By this point in the evening, convivial friends at the end of a good meal, agreeing on almost everything, my censors and I have begun toasting each other, bottoms up.
Part 9: Wandering souls
This eighth installment of the serialisation of Swamp of the Assassins by Thomas A. Bass was posted on February 11, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
10 Feb 15
By Thomas A. Bass
Today Index on Censorship continues publishing Swamp of the Assassins by American academic and journalist Thomas Bass, who takes a detailed look at the Kafkaesque experience of publishing his biography of Pham Xuan An in Vietnam.
The first installment was published on Feb 2 and can be read here.
To date, there have been six books written about Pham Xuan An, three in Vietnamese, one in French, and two in English. The self-described “official” biography, Perfect Spy, was published in the United States in 2007 and translated into Vietnamese a year later. “We turned the book red,” said someone knowledgeable about its publication in Vietnam. In other words, Vietnamese censors brightened the patriotic color in an already selective portrait of a national hero.
From the title alone, one understands that Perfect Spy portrays Pham Xuan An as a Vietnamese nationalist and patriot. The book also claims that he retired happily at the end of the Vietnam war in 1975. The problem with this narrative is that appears not to be true. Every spy has a cover, the life he hides behind while leading a double existence or, in Pham Xuan An’s case, a quadruple existence, since, at one time or another, he worked for the French Deuxième Bureau, the CIA, and both the South and North Vietnamese intelligence agencies. His spying for the French was limited to moonlighting as a censor at the Post Office, trimming Graham Greene’s dispatches to Paris Match. His work for the Americans included his being trained in psychological warfare in the1950s by Edward Lansdale and other CIA operatives.
His work for South Vietnamese intelligence, where he served as right-hand man to spy chief Tran Kim Tuyen, supposedly ended in 1962, when Tuyen was cashiered in a failed coup attempt. But An kept in touch with Tuyen, who remained an inveterate “coup cooker.” He took him food and medicine while the master spy was under house arrest (undoubtedly passing messages during these exchanges). Then An did Tuyen one final service. He saved his life. The famous 1975 photo of the last U.S. helicopter lifting off from the roof of 22 Gia Long Street shows a rickety ladder leading up to the chopper. The last man climbing that ladder, thanks to the intercession of his former right-hand man, is Tran Kim Tuyen. Why did An help the long-time head of South Vietnamese intelligence escape from the communists? “I knew I would be in trouble,” An told me. “This was the chief of intelligence, an important man to capture, but he was my friend. I owed him.” Who knows what bonds of loyalty were served or embarrassing questions avoided as Tuyen flew off to exile in England.
For twenty years An maintained his cover as a journalist, but when this was blown at the end of the Vietnam war, he developed a second cover—that of a happily-retired global strategist who spent his days shooting the breeze with Western journalists and other visitors. Recently I saw film footage of An being interviewed in 1988 by Vietnamese refugee and Hollywood actress Tiana Silliphant. Tiana was gathering material for her documentary From Hollywood to Hanoi. While being interviewed, An sits casually on the front steps of his house, with not one but two German shepherds guarding his back. Tiana asks him straight away about the people he betrayed and the friends who died as a result of his spying. An goes bug-eyed and shifty. One sees him making up his answers on the spot, beginning to spin the story that will develop into his second cover. “I retired from the military a few weeks ago,” he says. “I never betrayed anyone.”
An is on record saying that he retired from the military in 1988. But he is also on record saying that he retired in 2002 and again in 2005. This is when a visitor noticed a large, flat-panel TV in his living room, with a card attached saying that the TV was a retirement present from his “friends” in Tong Cuc II—Vietnamese military intelligence. It is more likely that An never retired, that he remained a member of the intelligence services until the day he died. Under his first cover, as a journalist, he worked as a spy from the 1950s until the end of the Vietnam war in 1975. Under his second cover, as a retired strategist, he worked as a spy for another thirty years—even longer than his first career. What he did as an intelligence agent in active service remains unknown, but he undoubtedly wrote reports on his visitors and offered the kind of political analysis for which he was famous. With his humorous quips about how the communists had failed to “reeducate” him, An deflected any suspicions that he was still working as a spy. This aspect of his life was only revealed after his death, when General Nguyen Chi Vinh, who was then head of Tong Cuc II, delivered the oration at An’s funeral. General Vinh’s speech about An’s “extraordinary military achievements,” accomplished while living “in the bowels of the enemy,” included the list of An’s military medals, each of which tells an important story about his life.
In a glancing reference, Perfect Spy mentions that Pham Xuan An won eleven military medals. He actually won sixteen military medals, and six of these medals were awarded after 1975. Fourteen of the total number of medals, and four of the medals awarded after 1975, are combat medals. These are given not for strategic analysis, but for specific military actions. An won medals for his tactical assistance in battles ranging from Ap Bac in 1963 and Ia Drang in 1965 to the Tet Offensive in 1968 and on to the Ho Chi Minh Campaign that ended the war in 1975. What An did to win four military medals after 1975 remains unknown.
To undercount An’s medals, ignore their significance, and overlook the fact that many of these medals were awarded after 1975 is part of the campaign to make Pham Xuan An a “perfect spy,” a benign figure, like Ho Chi Minh, removed from the staggering violence that marked Vietnam’s anti-colonial wars. In Perfect Spy other aspects of An’s career have been trimmed or suppressed. Softened in the narrative are his criticisms of communist incompetence and corruption, his acerbic comments about Russian influence in Vietnam, his attacks on Chinese meddling in the nation’s affairs, his jokes about having been “reeducated” in 1978, and his opposition to the Chinese-influenced clique that currently runs the country. Also downplayed or ignored are the details that explain why An’s wife and four children were sent to the United States in 1975 and then, a year later, recalled to Vietnam. In the version crafted for public consumption, and as reported by An’s “official” biographer, he remained in Saigon at the end of the war to care for his sick mother. In fact, the Vietnamese intelligence services planned to send An to the United States, where he would continue spying for the communists. Only when this plan was overruled by the Politburo was An forced to stay in Vietnam and recall his family. This information about An’s post-war activities reveals how Vietnam intended—and undoubtedly succeeded—in placing spies in the United States at the end of the war. It also reveals a rift between the country’s intelligence services and the Politburo, a rift that Vietnamese propaganda would like to paper over with a story about a sick mother.
Once the shadows are put back into Pham Xuan An’s life, the censors are bound to object to his less-than-perfect narrative. In fact, they will spend five years rewriting the story and struggling to get it as close as possible to the official version. Nha Nam’s gambit was flawed. Because one book about Pham Xuan by a westerner had been translated and published in Vietnam did not mean that a second book would follow easily. In fact, as we learned recently, even the “red” version of An’s life had been a hard sell. This was revealed in a State Department cable of September 2007, which was released by Wikileaks in 2011. The cable, by a consular official in Ho Chi Minh City, describes how the Vietnamese translation of Perfect Spy, although it was published by a government-owned company, was nearly pulped at the last minute by censors in the Ministry of Public Security. They objected “to the numerous quotes from Pham Xuan An lamenting that Vietnam had simply traded one overlord for another—the Soviet Union—and his criticism of post-war policies.” The editors were in trouble for “supporting the publication of a book in which one of the country’s most renowned heroes unleashes broadside attacks on post-war GVN policy and the closed nature of Vietnamese society.” According to the consular memo, “the pro-reform faction within the GVN” got “the upper hand” over “the counter-reform faction” only when the president of Vietnam himself gave his approval to publish the book.
One can see in these stories about Vietnamese censorship how the rule of law has been replaced by the rule of the jungle. Powerful people will do everything possible to protect their prerogatives. I am alarmed by these stories, but many people yawn when I talk to them about censorship in Vietnam. “What do you expect?” they say. “There’s nothing surprising here.” Even my Vietnamese friends have succumbed to fatalism and a strange belief that they can read around corners. “I can tell where a book has been cut,” novelist Bao Ninh assured me. “We know what’s missing. We just can’t talk about these things.”
It is hard to argue against censorship in the face of rampant cynicism, but a worthy effort was made recently by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. In an essay written for Index on Censorship in 2013, Sen chastises his native India for thinking that they should emulate China, which appears to be the model for how authoritarian governments can swap personal freedom for economic growth. Sen argues the opposite position, that “press freedom is crucially important for development.” Free speech has “intrinsic value,” he says. It is “a necessary requirement of informed politics.” It gives “voice to the neglected and disadvantaged,” and it is crucial for “generating new ideas.” China appears to be doing quite nicely at the moment, but Sen—an economist who did his award-winning work on the theory of famine—reminds us what can happen when propaganda replace news.
“There is an inescapable fragility in any authoritarian system,” he writes. The last time this phenomenon revealed itself in China, during the botched agrarian reforms of the Great Leap Forward, the country suffered one of the world’s most devastating famines. “The Chinese famine of 1959-1962 … killed at least 30 million people, when the regime failed to understand what was going on and there was no public pressure against its policies, as would have arisen in a functioning democracy.”
“The policy mistakes continued throughout these three years of devastating famine,” says Sen. “The information blackout was so complete with censorship and control of the state media that government itself came to be deceived by its own propaganda and believed that the country had 100 million more metric tons of rice than it actually had. Eventually, Chairman Mao himself made a famous speech in 1962, lamenting the ‘lack of democracy,’” a lack that, in this case, had proved lethal. India and other parts of the world might be tempted to emulate China, in light of its double-digit growth, but people would be foolish, says Sen, to adopt the anti-democratic measures that weaken totalitarian systems and make them susceptible to believing their own lies.
Part 8: The habits of war
This seventh installment of the serialisation of Swamp of the Assassins by Thomas A. Bass was posted on February 10, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
09 Feb 15
By Thomas A. Bass
Today Index on Censorship continues publishing Swamp of the Assassins by American academic and journalist Thomas Bass, who takes a detailed look at the Kafkaesque experience of publishing his biography of Pham Xuan An in Vietnam.
The first installment was published on Feb 2 and can be read here.
The next morning, taking a taxi to the Cau Giay district on the west side of town, I pass several of the lakes that dot downtown Hanoi to arrive at a tree-line boulevard where Nha Nam, my publisher, fills an old building with louvered windows that open onto iron-fronted balconies. Already by ten in the morning a gray blanket of heat and humidity has draped itself over the city. Nha Nam’s ground-floor bookshop is filled with translations of Proust, Kundera, and Nabokov, and I am pleased to find a stack of my own books displayed next to Lolita. I introduce myself to the receptionist and am led upstairs to meet Nguyen Nhat Anh, chairman of the company, and Vu Hoang Giang, his vice-director and partner. I had actually met Giang the night before. Without my knowing that he would be there, he had attended a lecture I gave at the Hanoi Cinematheque and introduced himself afterwards. As the chairman of Nha Nam presents me with a bouquet of purple lotus blossoms, I fear that my remarks the previous evening may have been too candid.
Nguyen Nhat Anh, a slender man in a black tee shirt, jeans, and sandals, looks more like a coffee shop habitué than the editor of a major publishing company. Known for his literary nose, he works at a desk covered with books and manuscripts piled ten deep. His partner, Giang, wearing an open-necked polo shirt, is a tall, handsome fellow with a ready smile and a small tattoo decorating his right wrist. I imagine they have divided the corporate turf between them, with Anh responsible for scholarship and Giang for sales. Later I learn that a lot of the manuscripts piled on Anh’s desk are actually publishing contracts, while Giang has his own literary interests, and, in fact, he was the person who finally arranged to got my book published.
Thu Yen, the editor with whom I have been sparring for the last few years, has not been invited to this meeting. She remains at her desk in the contracts department, while another translator has been hired for the occasion—a young Vietnamese woman, a former office manager at an American law firm. As the scholarly Anh and smiling Giang discuss the nuances of Vietnamese publishing, the young woman’s translations get shorter and shorter, until finally she seems on the verge of giving up completely. Fortunately, I have brought my own translator, and we will spend several hours later that afternoon reconstructing the conversation.
I take a seat on the couch in Anh’s office. Outside the louvered windows, the cicadas in the trees are making a fearsome racket. Giang has already warned me an in email about the “tight and rather heavy-handed censorship system of state-owned publishers in Vietnam. This you may not fully imagine.” I am offered a cup of green tea and then we launch into a discussion of censorship, how it is handled generally in Vietnam and particularly in my case.
Anh takes the lead, giving lengthy, formal answers to my questions, until Giang takes over when the boss heads to the espresso machine next to his desk and brews himself a cup of coffee. I am tempted to ask for one myself but decide to be polite and stick with tea. Anh describes how the censors dictate even the smallest details. He gives as an example the fact that political figures must have honorifics. One is not allowed to refer to the founder of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as Ho Chi Minh. He has to be Bac Ho—Uncle Ho—which inscribes him simultaneously into Vietnamese family structure and history.
“Censorship is a very tough question,” says Anh. “We don’t really have a system or set of rules for how it’s handled. All we know is that lots of publishers didn’t dare to publish your book.”
The jalousie doors and windows in Anh’s office open onto a porch overlooking the street, but they remain closed against the heat. Other than his desk, groaning under its layer of books, and a coffee table, piled with yet more books, the room holds nothing more than the couch on which I am sitting and bare green walls.
“Because another book had been published on the same subject, we thought this improved our chances,” he says. “We were sure we could get your book in print.”
I ask Anh why he chose a northerner to translate my book, someone who missed the nuances and even the jokes told by its southern hero.
“The differences are like music,” he says. “Singers sing the same songs but give them different interpretations. When we translated Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, we tried to keep it honest to the southern dialect. But in your case, we thought we were dealing with a political book, a work of non-fiction. The people who read these books are northerners, and you have to make the text understandable for them.”
I ask Anh and Giang to talk in more detail about censoring my book. They describe the by now well-known process, which begins with the translation, commissioned from someone who knows how the game is played. Then the book goes to the editor, who removes all the “sensitive” material.
“How does he know what to remove?”
Nha Nam Vice Director Vu Hoang Giang and Chairman Nguyen Nhat Anh (Photo: Thomas Bass)
“The process is dangerous, dangerous to the author, but also dangerous to the publisher,” says Anh. By this point in the conversation, he has kicked off his sandals and is cooling his bare feet on the tile floor. Overhead, a fan swirls tepid air around the room. Temperatures in Hanoi this spring are spiking over a hundred.
Anh tells me the story of a book of poems the company published in 2006 by an author named Tran Dan. Dan’s work has been banned in Vietnam since the 1950s, when he was involved in the nhan van giai pham affair. This was Vietnam’s version of Mao’s cultural revolution, a purging of writers, artists, and musicians who were blacklisted, imprisoned, and banned for fifty years. One of these artists was Van Cao, who, in 1945, had composed Vietnam’s national anthem. From 1957 until 1986, Vietnamese found themselves in the peculiar position of being allowed to play but not sing Van Cao’s anthem. Only when the words were changed was the song once again performed. Van Cao himself had long ago stopped composing, thereby joining the ranks of Vietnamese artists—hundreds of them, from the 1950s to the present—who have been driven into silence or exile.
With Mao long dead and his cultural revolution discredited, Nha Nam thought it was safe to bring the poet Tran Dan back into print. They had obtained a publishing license from a state-owned company in Danang and printed some of his poems when all hell broke loose. “The police came to the book fair and seized all our books,” says Anh. “Then they raided our offices and destroyed more books. This was terrifying for us. We thought we were going to be closed down and put out of business.”
“What went wrong?” I ask.
Anh lowers his voice and mentions the name of an agency named A25.
“Now it’s A87,” Giang says, correcting him.
Governmental departments that begin with the letter “A,” which stands for “an ninh,” meaning “security,” are legion, and A25—now known as A87—is the one that deals with publishers.
“In any case, it’s Cultural Security, cuc an ninh van hoa,” says Anh.
“What’s their address?” I ask.
“They don’t have an address,” he says, implying they are everywhere. The two men discuss among themselves in terse sentences what went wrong. None of their interchange is translated.
“There is no single organization in charge of censorship,” says Anh. “There are a lot of people involved.” Again, he mentions the Ministry of Public Security.
Giang mentions the Ministry of Information and Communication. “This is the office in charge of publishing,” he says.
Anh adds to this list the national police and other organizations. “It’s like a cloud,” he says. “They are everywhere.”
“Usually they don’t arrest editors,” he says. “This can happen to writers, but editors generally know in advance when they’re going to run into trouble.”
I ask them to speak in more detail about the censorship involved in publishing my book. This is when I hear for the first time about Nguyen The Vinh. Vinh is the man who produced the final list of cuts to my book and secured its publishing license. From their description of him, I get the idea that Vinh is a heavy-weight in the publishing world. The former director of various companies, he now works as an editor at Hong Duc, the state-owned publisher attached to the Ministry of Information and Communication. This company not only gave my book its publishing license, it also put its logo on the title page. Actually, the book has two logos on the title page: Nha Nam’s trudging water buffalo, with a book-reading buffalo boy (or girl) on its back, and Hong Duc’s white H inscribed inside a black D.
I learn another interesting fact about Vinh. He was the editor who secured the publishing license for Professor Berman’s Perfect Spy. The Vietnamese translation of this book was supposed to grease the skids for mine, and who better to perform this feat than the man who had already done it before.
As Anh busies himself making his cup of espresso, Giang takes over the narrative. “Your book was rejected by five or six publishers,” he says. “Other publishers who looked at it wanted to interfere a lot, changing the content. They kept asking to cut more and more. We resisted these changes, until finally Nguyen The Vinh agreed to publish it.”
“And what changes did he demand?” I ask.
Anh is pacing behind his desk. A frown darkens Giang’s face. “When you talk to him, you shouldn’t be too hard in your questions,” he says. “It could affect Vinh and the chances for your book to remain on sale.”
“Who asked Vinh to get involved?” I ask.
“Giang approached him,” says Anh. I can see that these men are nervous about talking to me in such detail. By now, both of them are sitting with their arms crossed over their chests.
“The publishers at Hong Duc wanted to write a forward to your book,” says Anh. “We rejected this idea.”
I can imagine how Hong Duc’s introduction would have reworked the standard tropes about Pham Xuan An as a “perfect” spy, an impeccable Communist cadre, who, nonetheless, garnered fulsome praise from his Western admirers. I am grateful to my editors for saving me this embarrassment.
“It was Vinh who took personal responsibility for publishing your book,” says Anh.
“You mean it can still be censored?”
Your book could be seized tomorrow,” he says. “No one knows where the trouble could come from. We have yet to see any negative signs, but someone can always find ‘sensitive’ items in a book.”
“What subjects would you like me to avoid talking about while I am in Vietnam?” I ask.
“Please remember that Vinh has his reputation and career on the line,” says Anh.
By now everyone knows my opinion of censorship—the cowardly business by which the powerful lie to the weak in order to protect their self-interest. I have no need to repeat myself.
“You shouldn’t be too direct with Vinh,” says Anh. “He was acting on directions from the publisher.”
“You should also know that your book is a living thing,” says Giang. “It can be published again, with material that was cut in the first edition added back in later editions.”
I assure Anh and Giang that I will do my best not to offend anyone. They know that an uncensored Vietnamese version of my book will be released later on the web.
“Right now we have no standards in Vietnam,” says Giang. “We don’t know our rights, and we don’t know from what direction the censorship is coming. But our system is changing. We hope you understand that we can improve. We can do better. We are learning how to function in the world of international publishing.”
“If your book is republished, we want to put back in the details that were cut,” he says. “You have a positive perception of Vietnam. People know this. So we’re asking for you to be patient. Give us some time to work things out. People appreciate you as an expert on Vietnam, a critic, sometimes a tough critic, but a fair one. Vietnamology—maybe that’s the right word for what you do.”
“How many ‘hard’ books do you publish each year?” I ask.
“In our career we are always working with difficult books,” says Anh. “This comes with the territory. But your book was a special case. It was the most difficult. I wanted to give up. I thought it was hopeless. I’m hot headed, and this was just too hard. I threw up my hands. ‘This book is never going to be published!’ I said. But my colleagues are more patient than I am. ‘Wait,’ they told me. ‘There is still a chance.’ It was thanks to Giang and Thu Yen that your book saw the light of day. They were patient. They persisted.”
“I felt like a hostage between two warring armies,” says Anh. “I was being fired on from two directions. The author was resisting cuts. The censors were demanding cuts. There are authors who know how this system works, Milan Kundera for example. He has lived under censorship. When we published his books, he understood our problems and agreed to let us do what we had to do. It would have been helpful if you had been more reassuring.”
“On behalf of the publisher, we want to tell you that we’re happy your book has been published,” says Giang. I suspect he’s feeling sorry about my having been compared unfavorably to Milan Kundera. Actually, I’m amused that a refugee from communist Czechoslovakia would prove tractable to being censored in communist Vietnam.
“This is not the first time that Vietnam and the United States have engaged in difficult negotiations,” I say. Anh and Giang appreciate the joke. “I’m glad we arrived at a happy conclusion.” We shake hands, and then I am asked to sit at Anh’s desk to sign copies of my book for members of Nha Nam’s staff. Apparently, everyone in the company wants a copy—perhaps before the book disappears from the shelves. All throughout lunch hour people keep drifting into Anh’s office with yet more copies for me to sign.
Part 7: Perfect spy?
This sixth installment of the serialisation of Swamp of the Assassins by Thomas A. Bass was posted on February 9, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
