A story of forgotten fiction in Vietnam

17 Jan 2025 | Asia and Pacific, News and features, Vietnam, Volume 53.04 Winter 2024

This article first appeared in Volume 53, Issue 4 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Unsung Heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression. Read more about the issue here. The issue was published on 12 December 2024.

Hoàng Minh Tường has published 17 novels. Seven of these have been banned from re-publication or circulation in Vietnam and two had to be published overseas due to political sensitivities. But the Hanoi-based writer remains upbeat.

“I have been blessed by the heavenly gods,” said the 76-year-old, who used to work as a teacher and journalist. “Many times, I was afraid that I might be imprisoned. Yet I still remain alive.”

The award-winning novelist is currently seeking help to have his best- known novel Thời của Thánh Thần (The Time of the Gods) translated into English. On release in 2008, it was widely regarded as a literary phenomenon yet was immediately recalled and has been banned ever since.

Hoàng, and many other writers I spoke to for this article, agreed that censorship is accepted as part of living and working in Vietnam, where the Communist Party monopolises the publishing industry. The 2012 Publishing Law emphasises the need to “fight against all thoughts and behaviour detrimental to the national interests and contribute to the construction and defence of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam”.

But censorship of fiction is just one part of the country’s free expression quandary. Reporters Without Borders has long categorised Vietnam as being among the worst countries for freedom of the press. The Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) is the government agency responsible for state management of press, publishing and printing activities. Writers have to regularly negotiate with censors – and then creatively rise above them or patiently wait for the individuals or agencies in charge to change their minds.

Living with censorship

Hoàng, a Communist Party member, said that The Time of the Gods, written between 2005 and 2008, was a turning point in his literary career, which has spanned three decades.

“After finishing writing the book in 2008, my biggest concern was how to get it published,” he said. “I gave it to three influential friends in three publishing houses, all of whom rejected it because if they published it they would be sent to jail.”

In his banned novel, the characters are multi-faceted. Four brothers navigate different sides of armed conflicts, align with various factions and transcend the simplistic “us versus the enemy” narrative often depicted by the Communist Party.

They endure many of the hidden, historical tribulations of Vietnam – from the Maoist land reform in the 1950s, which seized agricultural land and property owned by landlords for redistribution, to the fall of Saigon in 1975, which ended the Vietnam War and resulted in a mass exodus to escape the victorious communist regime.

“The story of a family is not just the story of a single family but the story of the times, the story of the nation, the story of the two communist and capitalist factions, of the North and South regions of Vietnam and the United States,” said Hoàng. “Perhaps that is why, for the past 15 years, tens of thousands of illegal copies of the book have been printed and people still seek it out to read.”

The ban has created fertile ground for black market circulation, he said, with online and offline pirated copies often full of mistakes. There have never been any official government documents justifying the book ban, nor has there been any explanation for the sensitivities surrounding his works. He asserted that this lack of transparency and accountability was a common occurrence for novelists. “Most of the bans [on my books] were purely by word of mouth,” he said.

For years, Hoàng has communicated with editors at the state-owned Writers’ Association Publishing House (which originally published the book), but to no avail. However, the novel has made its way to global audiences, being translated into Korean, French, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese.

His 2014 novel Nguyên khí (Vitality) was originally rejected for publication, and again reasons were not disclosed. The story, revolving around Nguyễn Trãi – a 15th century historical figure who was a loyal and skilled official falsely accused of killing an emperor – symbolises the still strained relationship between single-party rule and patriotic intellectuals. In response, Hoàng revised the narrative of the novel by getting rid of a character – a security agent doubling as a censor and eavesdropper. He retitled the work to The Tragedy of a Great Character, a rebranding that managed to pass through pre-print censorship. Subsequently, in 2019, the book was published and sold out. However, its previous ban was soon recognised, so it didn’t secure a permit for republication.

Learning from history

In his 2022 article Banishing the Poets: Reflections on Free Speech and Literary Censorship in Vietnam, Richard Quang Anh Trần, assistant professor of Southeast Asian studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, concluded that the literary landscape in Vietnam was “as limited as political speech itself”.

“The boundaries of permissible speech, moreover, are ever changing that one may find oneself caught in the crosshairs and on the wrong side at any given moment,” he wrote.

Trần identified two turning points when writers were fooled into believing that the Communist Party had allowed them to challenge the established literary norms of serving the party. The first occurred in the 1950s, during a cultural-political movement in Hanoi, called the Nhân Văn-Giai Phẩm Affair. A group of party-loyal writers and intellectuals launched two journals, Nhân Văn (Humanity) and Giai Phẩm (Masterpieces). They sought to convince the party of the need for greater artistic and intellectual freedom. Despite their distinguished service to the state, they were condemned in state media and their publications were banned.

The second case came in the late 1980s and early 1990s during Doi Moi (the Renovation Period), a series of economic and political reforms which started in 1986. Vietnam’s market liberalisation breathed new life into war-centric literature, and many writers crafted brilliant post-war novels that challenged prevailing narratives – but their works were censored. This was done through limiting the number of approved copies, recalling and confiscating books from libraries and bookshops, and destroying original drafts.

Censorship was at its worst when the party decided to burn the books of those it regarded as its enemies. Following the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, it embarked on a campaign to eliminate what it classified as decadent and reactionary culture, including many books and magazines published in the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam).

“South Vietnamese publications were the main target, plus much of popular music, movies and the fine arts,” said Dr Tuấn Hoàng, associate professor of great books at Pepperdine University’s Seaver College in California. “Government workers entered businesses and private residences suspected of having such materials and took away what they could find.”

“Those materials were burned or recycled at factories,” he said. “Citizens were urged to give up banned materials to the government, or to destroy them themselves. A lot of materials were therefore destroyed in the first few years after the war.”

But some materials were hidden, circulated clandestinely or sold on the black market. Phạm Thị Hoài is one of the most celebrated writers of the post- Renovation Period, whose debut novel The Crystal Messenger was a success both at home and abroad. The first edition (1988) and second edition (1995) were published by the Writers’ Association Publishing House, bar a few censored paragraphs, according to Phạm. But it was later banned by the government.

After leaving Vietnam for Germany, in 2001 she established Talawas, an online forum dedicated to reviving literary works by Vietnamese writers. She says she has been banned from travelling back to her home country since 2004, a fact she attributes to Talawas and her literary works, which have been ambiguously deemed to be “sensitive”. Her books have not been permitted to be republished in Vietnam.

“A few years ago, a friend in the publishing industry also tried to inquire about reprinting a collection of my short stories, which were entirely about love, but no publishing house accepted it,” she said.

In 2018, the government introduced a new cybersecurity law, which has made censorship worse. Critical voices that challenge the state’s version of history online are deemed to be hostile forces that are seeking to discredit the party’s revolutionary achievements.

Appreciate, don’t criticise

Censorship also makes its way into education as, in Vietnam, literature is first and foremost intended to inculcate party- defined patriotism into young minds.

According to Dr Ngọc, a high-school literature teacher in Hanoi, Vietnamese authors who are featured in school textbooks normally have very “red” (communist) backgrounds or hold party leadership positions. She added that the higher an author’s position in government, the more focus is given to their work in textbooks. “Many great writers were unfortunately not selected for the literature textbooks,” she said.

Ngọc provides tutoring for high- school students to help them prepare for their national entrance exams. These exams mostly focus on wartime hardship and heroism. Students’ responses need to show that they revere communist leaders and revile invaders. But this teaching method is not best placed to help them appreciate literature.

But ill-fated books still find their way to readers, often through the black market. Phương (not her real name) has been selling books in Hanoi for the past two decades. She says that every now and then people still look for banned books, which she collects and sells. However, these are reserved only for her closest customers.

“I would not sell sensitive books to a random buyer,” she said. “They might be disguised security agents trying to recall the book from the market.”