Swamp of the Assassins: Cyberspace country

18 Feb 2015

By Thomas A. Bass

Today Index on Censorship completes 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.

A few weeks after talking to Duong Thu Huong, I arrange another meeting with a writer driven into exile by Vietnam’s censors. This time, I travel to Berlin to meet Pham Thi Hoai. Born in 1960 in Hai Duong, east of Hanoi, Hoai studied archival science at Humboldt University in the former East Berlin. Then she began to write stories and novels and translate into Vietnamese the works of Kafka, Brecht, Tanazaki, Amado, and other writers. Combining the fastidiousness of the Germans with the fastidiousness of the Vietnamese, Hoai has long presided over Vietnam’s intellectual community-in-exile. For thirteen years, as producer, editor, writer, and translator, she ran talawas and its successor pro&contra, two electronic journals of culture and politics that were the key sites for anyone interested in learning what was really happening in Vietnam. From her exile on the Spree, forbidden from returning home to Vietnam, Hoai became the Sybil known for delivering the final word on her country’s benighted fate. This work will end, she promises, at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 2014, when her websites will be closed. “I will return to being a writer, but perhaps not to fiction,” she says. “I am not really interested in fiction.”

We agree to meet at 6:00 p.m. on a Saturday night for dinner at her apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, in the former East Berlin. Hoai will be cooking. The menu, discussed in several emails, will blend East and West in a medley of flavors. Even before the first bite, I am impressed by the logic and rigor of her planning.

I ride the S train to Bornholmer Strasse and exit onto the bridge where thousands of East Berliners gathered on November 9, 1989 to demand entry to the West. This was the first border crossing to fall on that momentous night. Soon the Wall would come tumbling down and then all of East Germany and then the Soviet Union, as forty years of Cold War came to an end. Today the last vestige of this war can be found only in the few states like Vietnam that are still propped up by Marxist-Leninist ideology.

I walk down a wide boulevard with a trolley running down the middle of it. The street is lined with modest five-story buildings, a few small cafes and billiard parlors, a bookshop, and some stores selling vegetables, beer, and coffee. I ring the bell and walk upstairs to the apartment that Hoai shares with her German partner. I am greeted at the door by a trim woman with a round face, pixie haircut, and lustrous smile. The first thing I notice on entering Hoai’s apartment is a blinking array of lights and switches—an industrial strength security system that Hoai installed after death threats and attacks on her computers.

Walking down a hallway, we pass a bathroom with a Japanese soaking tub and a modern kitchen to arrive at a large room that opens onto bedrooms and studies and yet more doors, hidden behind Japanese sliding screens. Hoai tells me that the unusual layout is due to the fact that she and her partner recently knocked down the walls and put together two separate apartments. The room holds a dining room table, decorated with a bouquet of freshly cut daisies, and a bookshelf filled floor-to-ceiling with a neatly archived collection. In Hoai’s office next door, more shelves are filled with clasp binders in serried ranks.

Seated at the table are Andreas, Hoai’s companion, and Dan, her son from her former marriage. A handsome man in a blue work shirt, Andreas runs a ten-person electrical engineering firm that specializes, among other things, in installing alarm systems. The apartment is his handiwork, and so, too, is the security system at the front door. With an ironic tug to his smile, he is the kind of solid fellow one would want to consult after receiving death threats.

Dan, nineteen, is a slender young man who will be studying applied computation and mathematics at Jacobs University in Bremen in the fall. He lives nearby with Hoai’s former husband, a German whom she married in 1991. Hoai speaks English quite well, but Dan is fluent, and he is being pressed into service tonight as his mother’s translator.

Hoai explains that the meal will be running from spicy to not-so-spicy, from hot to cold, “the opposite direction from normal,” she says. The thought enters my mind that the meal will be retracing her steps into exile, moving from the spicy East to the temperate West. While Hoai busies herself in the kitchen, I chat with Andreas about Prenzlauer Berg, the bohemian enclave that is rapidly being gentrified. “In this building we have Italians, Argentineans, Russians, Americans, and Vietnamese,” he says. “I am the only German.”

“The reason this part of the city still exists is because the East Germans had no money to destroy it,” he says. “The area is full of artists. The poor ones live in the basement. The rich ones live on top.” Bemused by Berlin’s new-found prosperity, Andreas for kicks spends his weekends cycling pedicabs full of tourists around the city.

The table is set with a full assortment of crystal glasses, a fish knife, and three forks for each upcoming course. We start drinking a Gewürztraminer Riesling and later switch to a Spanish Rioja. During our first course—papaya salad with shrimp, a Thai dish—I get a closer look at my hostess. Nam, as she is known to her friends (her full name is Pham Thi Hoai Nam) has the classic features, flat nose, golden skin, high cheekbones, of a north Vietnamese. Dressed in jeans, a white blouse, and a light wool sweater, also white, she wears wire-rim spectacles with tortoise shell highlights and a pair of silver earrings holding a dark stone, maybe an emerald. The conversation flows through English, German, French, and Vietnamese—whichever is the sharpest tool for the concept at hand.

“I am not sure of my exact birth date,” Hoai says, when I ask about her family. “It was sometime in 1960, during the war, when people didn’t register births until weeks or months after they occurred.”

“During Ho Chi Minh’s version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in the 1950s, my parents were sent from Hanoi to the countryside, to work as school teachers,” she says. “My grandfather had been Minister of Education in Thanh Hoa province, but my father, revolting against his bourgeois background, had left at the age of twelve to fight with the Viet Minh. His big dream was to become a Party member, but he was never allowed to join.”

Her father’s uncle was Pham Quynh, a journalist and publisher of the largest Vietnamese newspaper in the French colony. Quynh was minister of education and then minister of the interior in the government of the last Vietnamese emperor, before he was kidnapped and killed by the communists in 1945.

“The first generation of communist leaders all came from bourgeois families,” she says. “But after the Party was formed, they closed the door behind them. No one else from the bourgeoisie could rise into the ranks. They needed followers, not leaders. They needed useful idiots.

“Ho Chi Minh is the perfect example. He eliminated all the intellectuals around him, thereby removing the competition. Since then, the idiots have reproduced themselves so successfully that in the present government not a single official speaks a foreign language, and this is in spite of the fact that eighty percent of them have Ph.D. in their title.”

Excelling in school, Hoai in 1977 was chosen as one of a hundred and thirty students sent to the Eastern Bloc to be trained as archivists by the Stasi and other communist police agencies. “This was paradise for us,” she says, about leaving war-torn Vietnam for Europe. The war had been present for the first fifteen years of her life “like clouds in the sky,” and then after the war came the “reign of hardline ideology,” a period of “poverty, backwardness, and repression.”

One day, one of her professors at Humboldt University saw her waiting at a bus stop reading a book. Another day, he cracked a joke in class about Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities. “I was the only one who laughed, because I was the only one who had read the book,” she says.

“He sent me on an internship, first to the Goethe archives, then to the Schiller and Brecht archives, where I wrote my master’s thesis. These were happy days for me, spent reading and living among the papers of these great writers. My professor did me a big favor,” she says.

After six years in Germany Hoai moved back to Vietnam in 1983, where she worked as an archivist at the Institute of History and began, in her spare time, to write short stories and novels. “When I was twelve, I thought I was born to be a writer. Now, I think I may not have been correct. One is not born to be anything. One chooses what to do.”

“I went back to Vietnam because I was disappointed by life in East Germany,” she says. “It was just like Vietnam. There was no freedom or human rights, and the East German food was horrible.”

“I thought I had a debt to Vietnam, for having sent me here to be trained,” she says. “But on my return, I was classified as ‘untrustworthy,’ because of the time I had spent abroad.”

In 1988 Hoai published The Crystal Messenger, the novel that made her famous in Vietnam and pushed her to the forefront of doi moi writers. It also got her censored and eventually banished from the country. Vietnamese censors, with what Hoai describes as “a twinge of idiocy,” will block books from publication, if there is too much interest in them, or ban books that have already been published, if they become too successful. This is what happened with The Crystal Messenger. It was pulled from the shelves after selling fifty thousand copies and winning the LiBeraturpreis for the best foreign novel at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Told through the interweaving stories of several young women, one of them a Vietnamese Amerasian who comes of age in a country corrupted by careerism and consumerism, The Crystal Messenger is an allegory about the reunification of north and south Vietnam. It tells a wry tale about how a beautiful Vietnamese Amerasian with Texan blood can conquer the hearts of all the uptight men in Hanoi. In their banning order, the censors charged Hoai with “salacious” writing, an “excessively pessimistic view” of Vietnam, and of abusing the “sacred mission of a writer.”

Hoai went on to publish literary essays, two collections of short stories, Me Lo (1989) and Man Nuong (1995), and another novel, Marie Sen (1996). At the same time, she was producing numerous translations from German into Vietnamese. After publication of The Crystal Messenger, nothing written by Hoai has been published in Vietnam, except for a few things that appeared in print and were quickly suppressed. “The censors never tell you when a book is withdrawn from circulation. I consider myself lucky if I even learn that something has been published in the first place.”

“The same thing happened all the time in East Germany,” says Andreas. “Here we had lots of films that were made, and then the censors got scared and never released them.”

“One day I received in the mail an article that I had written,” says Hoai. “It had been heavily censored, and it even had someone else’s name on it. Everyone in Vietnam accepts this level of corruption. It doesn’t even surprise me anymore.”

Now Hoai posts all her writing online. “I’m not writing books for money,” she says. “I write to make myself happy.”

“Every author I deem important is publishing his or her works online, rather than allowing them to be censored. Some let their work be published in hard copy—censored—and then send it to Talawas to be published in its original form.” She suggests that I do the same thing with The Spy Who Loved Us, and I tell her that I will be pleased to accept her offer.

Moving on to a German recipe, our next course is celery-apple soup. Dan is working hard as his mother’s amanuensis, while Andreas sits listening, sometimes offering a humorous quip or story of his own.

In 1993 Hoai returned to Berlin, where she had lived as a student a decade earlier. The city had been transformed in her absence, with the Wall coming down and Westerners flooding into the ramshackle neighborhoods of the former East Berlin. Hoai settled in the city and married. “I made several trips back to Vietnam when Dan was small, but since 2004, I have been banned from traveling to Vietnam,” she says.

In 2001 she had begun publishing the censored news out of Vietnam on her Talawas web site. “Talawas is a Dadaist name,” she says. “It was created by putting ‘Ta la’ (we are) together with ‘was,’ as in ‘Was ist los?’ (‘What’s up?’), which gives you a double entendre meaning either, ‘What are we?’ or ‘We are something.’” Her “journal of culture” became a target for government hackers who tried for years to close the site with denial-of-service and other electronic attacks. Hoai kept outsmarting them behind ever-more-elaborate firewalls, and she is proud of the fact that Talawas was only briefly closed twice. Electronically, she was following in the footsteps of her great uncle Pham Quynh.

“It lasted nine years, as long as Vietnam’s war with the French,” she says about her decision to close the site. “It took an entire day to put it out. It was updated several times a day. No one was volunteering to do the work; so I decided to put an end to it.”

“Ten years ago I stopped writing fiction,” she says. “Now, in two years’ time, I plan to write fiction again.” In the meantime, she has begun publishing a blog called pro&contra. “I want to use the next two years, via the blog, to return to writing. I want to get an inventory of what I am able to do and my strengths. This is a transitional phase for me to learn to walk again.”

“When I get back to writing, I will be writing a combination of fiction and nonfiction,” she says. “Pure fiction is too boring. The Vietnamese reality is more interesting than any fiction I could imagine.”

While running her web sites, Hoai has supported herself as a simultaneous translator—rejecting only the most odious clients. “I watch the delegations of high Vietnamese officials,” she says. “They come to Germany to learn, but they learn nothing. They are people with no education. This is why they hire me. They don’t even know who I am.”

“She is seldom at home,” says Dan, of his mother’s busy schedule as an interpreter.

After a salad of radish sprouts, tomatoes, and carrots, our next course is a baked codfish served with rice. “While talking, I forgot to turn on the oven,” Hoai apologizes. “Cooking is like prose writing, not poetry. It takes the same attention to creative detail.”

We return to talking about censorship. “The governments of China and Vietnam are not afraid of anything,” she says. “This is linked to U.S. tolerance of their oppression. The U.S. does nothing to oppose them; so they have nothing to be afraid of.”

“Before their economies boomed, they weren’t sure of the Western response, but now they know,” she says. “If business is booming, then they have nothing to fear from the West. Whenever I criticize human rights in Vietnam, the government refers to the prisoners in Guantánamo. ‘If the Americans can do it, why can’t we? We aren’t doing anything different.’ Whenever I criticize corruption, they start talking about Lehman Brothers. Whenever I criticize the economy, they say, ‘Look at Spain or Greece.’ The pool of bad examples they draw from is just too large.”

“The government in Hanoi was lucky,” she says. “During the Cold War they had a lot of support from Western countries, especially from leftist movements. Now they have the support of the global capitalists. Standing in this good light, they don’t need to fear anybody. They have always found support in the West, whether during the Cold War or now.”

Andreas opens another bottle wine for our next course, a fruit and cheese tray, and Hoai excuses herself to go smoke a cigarette.

“When I first started writing, I had no money for cigarettes,” she says, on her return. “A friend said, ‘I will give you one cigarette per page.’ As time went on, to fill up the pages faster, my letters got bigger and bigger. I still write for cigarettes,” she says. “But now, I allow myself to smoke after every line.”

Hoai tells me a story about how censorship destroys even successful writers. “One day in Vietnam a writer came to me, asking for my advice. ‘How can I write about the war?’ he said. He had written books about the war, but they were not working anymore, and now he had no clue what to write.

“This is a story about a writer who has died as a writer, who has been eliminated. A serious writer would not consider what people wanted to read. He would look at his own perception of the war. This writer had been writing in a style approved by the government. He had voluntarily adopted this style, which made the work of the censors superfluous. It also made him susceptible to every new way of being censored, including censorship through the market, which allows you to write only what you’re expected to write, and which is happening more and more.”

She tells me the Vietnamese are borrowing their approach to censorship from the Chinese. “We always look to the Chinese and copy them, but when we copy them, we do it even worse than the Chinese, several orders of magnitude worse and in even more minute detail.”

“It is mandatory for every high Vietnamese official to get training in China once a year, just as it was in the time of the Cold War,” she says. “It is no accident that every campaign and law in China a half year later is introduced into Vietnam. Right now the press is filled with the Bo Xi Lai scandal—a high official accused of corruption. In Vietnam the sides are set for a similar struggle for power. I am certain that a Vietnamese official will soon be suffering the same fate.”

“Your story about the writer who came to visit you reminds me of Bao Ninh,” I say. “Without consulting anyone, he wrote the great novel about the war.”

“I don’t think it’s a great novel,” she says. “I am not fond of the Romantic style, and the way it’s written in Vietnamese is very Romantic. The English translation is different from the original, and perhaps this explains why the book is more popular for English readers than Vietnamese. The English translation was inevitably—because of the nature of English—more direct.”

“I prefer Franz Kafka to Thomas Mann,” she says. “I prefer a clear, crisp intelligent use of language, which dispenses with any decoration or superfluous elements.”

“This is the language she uses to boss me around,” says Dan. All of us, including his mother, laugh at the joke.

I ask about the two novels Bao Ninh wrote after The Sorrow of War. “He has retreated because of censorship, gone into internal exile,” she says. “Everybody who hasn’t migrated from Vietnam suffers from this.”

“The best thing for Bao Ninh would be live his life, after writing his one book,” she says. “At the end of his life he can publish his last, best work. Then he will have two books in his life, one at the beginning and one at the end. This is the best thing for a writer.”

She explains how it is getting rarer for artists to leave Vietnam for the West. “Artists and writers live better than ever before in Vietnam,” she says. “With today’s media, the people who can write, who can create things for radio, TV, and the internet are at a premium. Intellectuals and artists who have spent time abroad find that life is so expensive that they are not able to create anything. You can’t be creative and write under these circumstances, so you return.”

“I am no longer a Vietnamese citizen,” Hoai says. “I have a German passport. It is my trauma to be Vietnamese. My son has been spared this trauma. Why am I still confronted by Vietnamese problems? They stopped worrying about human rights and losing the support of the West when they realized that all the West cares about is making money.”

The major exception to the banalization of Vietnamese literature is Duong Thu Huong. She is a throwback to the days when exiled authors were politically potent. When I mention her name, I can tell from Andreas’s and Dan’s raised eyebrows that Huong has already been a subject of conversation. “I admire her courage and bravery,” Hoai says. “She can be very disagreeable, but that’s alright. She is very honest and frank.

“I am not fond of her work, though. Her writing is tendentious. When she claims something is bad she tries to prove it in her writing. When you read her books, you won’t find any surprises. You know what’s going to happen. You know in advance who are the good guys and the bad guys, and that’s pretty boring.

“The structure of her work is also boring, which is too bad, because she is a good observer of details, and her narrative skills are pretty good. When she’s not drifting into propaganda, her use of language can be very beautiful, as well. If she could get beyond propaganda and make use of her skills, she could be a fine writer.”

Pham Thi Hoai is the polar opposite of Duong Thu Huong. Her writing is concise and elegant. Her stories are deftly crafted. She is conducting an intellectual conversation, not with the ghosts of dead combatants, but with Kafka and the other writers whom she has translated into Vietnamese.

In other ways, though, Pham Thi Hoai is very much like Duong Thu Huong. Both decided to place the fight against Vietnam’s authoritarian government above their work as writers. Both are committed militants, fearless opponents of a regime they consider corrupt and oppressive. While Hoai runs the most important websites for Vietnamese dissidents, her writing is required reading for tens of thousands of Vietnamese, both inside and outside the country. She is one of the axes around which Vietnam’s artistic community turns, a commander leading the attack on Vietnam’s censors.

When I ask Hoai about Duong Thu Huong’s Novel Without a Name, she says, “I read only twenty pages and put it down.” So who is she reading today? Hoai mentions Mo Mieng, the Open Your Mouth poets, who have not been translated into English, since their writing is “difficult.” Mo Mieng began as a quartet of poets who set out in the early 2000s to shock the niceties of Vietnam’s Confucian norms. They use the language people speak on the street and publish their work in samizdat xeroxes passed from hand-to-hand. “We want to avoid the state censorship that often cuts the life out of literary works,” Open Your Mouth poet Ly Doi told the BBC in 2004. Since then a dozen other Vietnamese artists have begun writing “dirty” poetry, and Hoai recently released on her website the dirtiest of Vietnamese literary transgressions, a work called “Di Thui” (“Stinking Whore”) by Nguyen Vien, which retells Vietnam’s national epic, The Tale of Kieu, as an attack on the Communist Party.

I ask Hoai if she sees any signs of hope for things getting better in Vietnam.

She clears her throat for an oracular pronouncement, and Andreas laughs. “Twenty years from now the ocean will be much higher than it is today, so the coastal area won’t exist anymore,” she says. “If the coastal people are gone, the mountainous people will remain. If Vietnamese literature succeeds in moving from the coastal areas to the mountains, it will survive. It might also learn to swim.”

“The internet does not know the flooding of oceans, so the internet is a space where one can survive,” she says. “Maybe Vietnam will become the first cyberspace country—a country that exists only in cyberspace.”

By then Vietnam’s literature and culture, maybe all of Vietnam itself, will be updated daily and living online, and cyberspace will be the only space in Vietnam free of censorship.

This thirteenth and final installment of the serialisation of Swamp of the Assassins by Thomas A. Bass was posted on February 18, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org

Swamp of the Assassins: The struggle

17 Feb 2015

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.

It is a sunny morning in July 2012 when my daughter Maude and I set out to meet Duong Thu Huong, Vietnam’s best-known novelist, who is currently living in exile in the 13th arrondisement of Paris, the city’s Chinatown, southeast of the Seine. I know from talking to her on the telephone that Madame Thu Huong speaks heavily-accented French, rich in vocabulary, but weak in grammar. She says she learned French in prison, during seven months of solitary confinement in 1991. After falling out of favor as the “fille bien aimée par le Parti” (the darling of the Communist Party), she was arrested for “selling secret documents to foreigners,” the documents being, in this case, the manuscript for her fourth work of fiction, Novel Without a Name. Allowed to have one book with her in prison, Huong chose a French dictionary. Hence the rich vocabulary and wobbly grammar.

My daughter lives in Paris and speaks fluent French. She will help translate, but I have also brought her along as a witness in case the interview gets tricky. Huong lives alone in a two-room apartment on the ninth floor of a modern building with a car dealership on the ground floor. She works at night, writing from midnight to six in the morning, sleeps until noon, and then spends the rest of the day on “la lutte.” The French word for struggle usually entails a political platform on the left, but, in this case, la lutte describes Huong’s fight against the Vietnamese Communist Party. Huong refers to herself as a “sans papier,” an illegal immigrant. Her passport was stolen in Marseille a few years ago, and neither the Vietnamese nor French government has offered to replace it. During the “Sarkozy mandarinate,” as she dismissively refers to the right-wing government of Nicolas Sarkozy, she was afraid to leave her apartment, for fear of being picked up on the street and deported. For Huong, one of the benefits of voting Sarkozy out of office was the fact that the new government gave her a French carte d’identité, although she still has no passport.

Huong is a lively woman, with flashing black eyes and shoulder-length hair, dyed blue—the same color as her eye shadow, the pillows on her sofa, her blouse, and jeans. Her round face is smooth and even-featured, with tattooed eyebrows and rouged lips that break often into a winning smile. She has the hands of a musician, with long, tapered fingers that have begun to curl with arthritis, but her girlish charm and colored hair make her look younger than someone born in 1947. Seated in the salle de séjour that doubles as her office, she plies us with cherries, sliced pineapple, tea, and chocolate.

Huong is a natural-born story-teller. She answers my questions in discursive loops that reach back through hundreds of years of Vietnamese history. We begin by talking about her family, which sets the scene and dictates everything that follows in a Vietnamese narrative. A “beloved daughter of the Communist Party” might be expected to have working class roots, but Huong, born in a village north of Hanoi, is the granddaughter of a mandarin landowner. Her family lost its wealth and status by getting in trouble, first with the French, for manufacturing rice wine without paying the necessary fees to the colonial government, and then with the Communists, for being bourgeois landowners during the agrarian reforms of the1950s.

Her grandmother, Le Thi Cam, sold half the family land to bail out of prison an alcoholic uncle. (The hapless male saved by a noble female is a common trope in Huong’s fiction.). Huong’s father fought in the maquis against the French and led a troop of engineers in General Giap’s signal corps, but the General did nothing to save Huong’s father during Vietnam’s Maoist-inspired land campaign. In 1954, he was sent to a labor camp in the mountains. (This will become another trope in Huong’s fiction—Party ideologues protecting their own prerogatives, while throwing their loyal followers to the mob.)

After losing their land, Le Thi Cam and three of her four sons moved to south Vietnam. Huong’s father, the youngest, worked for the post office after he got out of prison. Her mother taught in a primary school. In spite of the ardor with which Huong joined her classmates in chanting “Down with the landowners!” she was penalized for her class background. Not allowed to learn foreign languages or go to university, she enrolled in art school and then dropped out in 1967, at the age of twenty, to join a Communist youth brigade. She played accordion in a troupe of female singers and dancers who were sent to the military front to raise morale. Out of her art school class of eighty, Huong tells us that two others survived the war, one with no arms and the other crazy from shell shock.

Huong spent seven years in the jungles and tunnels north of the 17th Parallel, the dividing line between the opposing armies and the most heavily bombed part of Vietnam. A girl crouching next to her was killed by a bomb that left Huong deaf in her right ear. Her fiancé was also killed. In 1968 Huong married a fellow student from the Ministry of Culture Arts College. She gave birth to a son, Minh, in 1970, and a daughter, Ha, in 1972. “He was not talented enough to perform at the front,” she says dismissively of her husband, whom she divorced in 1982. (Her unhappy marriage provided Huong with another theme that runs through her writing. Wars are fought by good men who die young. The Party hacks with special privileges survive, while the unlucky women who marry them will either suffer in silence or revolt against these men who oppress them.)

After the war Huong began writing screenplays for propaganda films and working as a “nègre,” a ghostwriter, for communist generals penning their memoirs. Five of her scripts were made into forgettable movies by the Hanoi Fiction Film Studio. She wrote anti-Chinese tracts while serving as a combatant-reporter during Vietnam’s war with China in 1979. She was admitted to the Communist Party in 1985 and traveled to the Soviet Union the following year in a delegation of screenwriters. She also began publishing fiction, beginning with a short work called Journey Into Childhood (1985). Her first full-length novel, Beyond Illusions (1987), tells the story of a woman’s disillusionment with her marriage, which parallels her falling out of love with the Communist Party. In bed—in government—unworthy men plague women everywhere. The novel sold as many as a hundred thousand copies before it was banned.

According to Nina McPherson, who for a decade worked as Huong’s English translator into English, the artist first tangled with Vietnam’s censors in 1982, when one of her screenplays was suppressed. Huong protested at a Writers Union congress, but banning orders against her work remained in place until 1985. Perhaps as a result of joining the Communist Party, Huong was allowed to publish her writing for the next two years, until her novel Paradise of the Blind, an attack on Vietnam’s Maoist land reform campaign, was banned in 1988. Paradise—the first Vietnamese novel published in the United States in English—tells the story of a young woman who labors as a “guest worker” at a textile factory in the Soviet Union. The book attacks Party hacks who use their political connections to traffic in consumer goods. It also attacks the government officials who implemented Ho Chi Minh’s disastrous agrarian campaign. Equally radical is Huong’s redefinition of the Vietnam war, which, by this time, she has come to see not as a holy crusade against Western invaders, but as an internecine struggle among north and south Vietnamese family members.

Huong publishes one more novel in Vietnam, The Lost Life (1989), before the censors began moving against her with increasing ferocity. She is expelled from the Party in 1990 and arrested in 1991. This ends her career as a novelist published in her own country. Her next three books, Novel Without a Name (1991), Memories of a Pure Spring (2000), and No Man’s Land (2002), will appear only in foreign editions. None of her books is legally sold today in Vietnam, with the exception of some stories that the government bowdlerized and republished in 1997. (This allows them to claim with a straight face that the author is not censored in Vietnam.) The dance of the censors, with works allowed to appear in print and then removed from bookstore shelves and then reprinted in altered form, shadows all of Vietnam’s writers, but none more than Duong Thu Huong. Beginning with Novel Without a Name, she has published her works in French, English, and overseas Vietnamese editions, but not in Vietnam. The sole exception is her eighth novel, The Zenith (2009), which Huong allowed to be released in a Vietnamese edition on the web. The book has been read online by a half million readers, says Huong of this novel about the murder of Ho Chi Minh’s wife in 1958 by the Vietnamese Communist Party, who wanted the “father” of the country to preserve his purity.

“My British agent tells me I shouldn’t release any more books on the web,” she says. Apparently, he was displeased by the lost sales. “My life is dedicated to the fight against communism,” she says. “Writing is in second place, and I leave everything having to do with that to my agent.” For someone who dismisses her writing, Huong is remarkably prolific. Her ninth novel, Sanctuary of the Heart, published in France in 2011, tells the story of a Vietnamese gigolo kept in a luxurious villa by a wealthy businesswoman. Her tenth novel, The Hills of Eucalyptus, published in 2014, is the story of a homosexual man imprisoned and sentenced to forced labor.

Today, Huong has an international and generally appreciative audience. In 1991, for example, she was awarded France’s Prix Femina. In the words of one critic, “She is unmatched in her ability to capture the small, telling details of everyday life.” Other readers are more critical. Reviewer Brendan Wolfe calls her style “intensely sentimental and unfashionably melodramatic.” Vietnamese American poet Linh Dinh, who appreciates “Huong’s literary gifts sans soapbox,” describes how her “fine descriptive passages are perverted by a heavy-handed political subtext. Its bias can be traced to the war, in which both North and South demonized each other.”

Huong would say that Linh Dinh and her other critics have missed the point. She cares more about politics than literature. Her life is dedicated to the struggle for social justice and democracy, a global campaign that employs novelists but values them foremost as propagandists. “We want to see a democratic government in Vietnam,” she says. “Our example is Korea. Here you have the same people, the same history, until the people are cut in half. In the north, under communism, the people live like wild animals in caves. In the south, you have a relatively powerful and prosperous country. This is how you liberate people, how you change society for the better. Our struggle in Vietnam is similar. It is very difficult, but one must not abandon hope.”

Phan Huy Duong, the exiled Vietnamese writer living in Paris who for a decade was Huong’s translator into French, says of the author that “she was the first writer who dared to criticize the Vietnamese land reform campaigns and the degradation of intellectual life in Vietnam under the communists.” The Maoist campaigns, lasting from 1951 to 1953, were followed in 1956 by the repression of intellectuals and artists—a dark period in Vietnamese history that ended, albeit briefly, only with the onset of the doi moi “Renovation” movement in 1986.

Unfortunately, doi moi, quickly gave way to the paranoia of today’s censorious regime. “Vietnamese literature is in a grave state,” says Duong. “The people in power have developed a mafia of corruption” that allows only for the publication of propaganda and third-rate authors imported from the West.

“It is the old resistance fighters like Bao Ninh and Duong Thu Huong who frighten the government, because they speak the language of the people,” he says. “These writers are the only ones who can bring Vietnamese literature and culture back to life.”

“Duong Thu Huong shows that the power of the communists resides solely in violence,” he concludes. “First, the popular violence against colonialism. Then the violence against the Vietnamese people themselves. … Duong Thu Huong is respected because she says out loud what everyone else in Vietnam only says to themselves.”

Apart from her novels and speeches at Party congresses, Huong’s most politically subversive act was a film, “The Sanctuary of Despair,” which she began shooting in 1986. Huong had discovered in the mountains near Tan Ky, at the narrow waist of Vietnam above the 17th parallel, a concentration camp holding seven hundred North Vietnamese soldiers. This “gulag-style psychiatric camp,” as Nina McPherson describes it, was filthy with excrement and disease-wracked prisoners who looked like walking cadavers.

Huong began filming in the camp. “It was a movie about soldiers driven crazy by the war,” she says. “They were thrown in a concentration camp in the forest to hide the fact that they had been driven crazy. They were treated like criminals. The authorities are hypocrites. They want to hide these facts. The soldiers were pissing and crapping everywhere. The place was filthy. The nurses and doctors had become crazy along with the soldiers. They, too, were prisoners.”

“This was the most atrocious, the most stupid war in our history,” she says. “This is why everything written about the war by the Vietnamese is nothing but propaganda, while the real history is hidden. All my friends were killed in the war. Others were driven insane. I am the only one who has returned to bear witness.”

“We are a people deprived of hope, “she says. “We yearn for freedom and are given only enough to survive. We are condemned to unhappiness. This destiny weighs on me. It crushes me. This is why I made this film. I would finish it and wait for the right moment to release it.”

Huong’s film was being processed at a lab in Saigon when government agents broke into the facility in 1988 and destroyed the negatives with acid. Officials moved to expel Huong from the Party, and, by the time she was arrested in 1991, Communist Party Secretary Nguyen Van Linh was referring to Huong as “con di cua dang,” “the Party’s whore,” a denigrating reference to everything she had done since working as a female performer at the front.

Duong Thu Huong (Photo: Thomas Bass)

After spending seven months in solitary confinement in a high-security prison for political prisoners, Huong was released through the intercession of Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the former French president. “The French government also paid the Vietnamese a large bribe,” she says. Made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1994, Huong was given political asylum in France in 2006. This is also the year she appeared on stage at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Praised by war novelist Robert Stone and cheered by the crowd, Huong, after introducing herself as a “criminal,” launched a fierce attack on governmental stupidity and corruption.

By the time I find her in Paris’s Chinatown in 2012, the French government has shifted from right to left, but her scorn for the French president (“that little mandarin Sarkozy”) is as piquant as that for the communist rulers back in Vietnam. “I was like a dish rag, a prisoner in my house,” she says of her life as “a sans papier” (an illegal immigrant) in France. Now that the French government has given her an identity card, “I’m as good as the street sweepers,” she says. “I have my working papers. I can circulate in France, but I can’t leave the country.”

Her feud with the French government is part of a larger feud that Huong has been waging with former friends and colleagues. “I detest Vietnamese men,” she says at the end of a story about why she has fallen out with her French translator, Pham Huy Duong. Huong has also fallen out with her American translator, Nina McPherson. Huong tells us that she is a member of no political party and not close to her fellow refugees or French hosts. Her friends, she says, are Americans or Australians, who, unlike the French, are not “too sophisticated.” “I am sorry for your daughter who has to work here,” she says.

Now that she has broken with her former translators and friends, Huong has nothing to do but write, producing a book every couple of years and becoming almost as quirky and famous as that other great Franco-Vietnamese writer, Marguerite Duras. Indistinguishable by now are the biographical details in Huong’s life and the recurring tropes in her novels. Women are ensnared through “the drug of love” by men unworthy of them. Sexual jealousy divides the world into possessed and possessors. Instead of socialist harmony we live in a fallen state of greed and hypocrisy. The solitary hero is the author speaking truth to power. To comfort herself in the loneliness of this struggle, Huong tells herself stories, late at night, when the ghosts of her dead friends return to talk to her. Expelled from her country, cut off from the translators who made her famous, disillusioned with the French political mandarins, a lonely woman with blue hair and tattooed eyebrows sits in front of me, a brave, even heroic figure who is creating out of her loneliness a partial and one-sided, but also a noble vision of what Vietnam could be.

We are headed into our third hour of conversation, when I broach the subject of plagiarism. Especially in their first twenty pages, Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War and Duong Thu Huong’s Novel Without a Name are remarkably similar. Both novels tell the story of a twenty-eight-year-old soldier fighting in the Central Highlands. One book opens in the Jungle of Screaming Souls, the other in the Gorge of Lost Souls. The infantryman hero encounters innocent girls mutilated by marauding troops, a dead orangutan with human characteristics, and narcotic flowers blooming in a hallucinatory forest. While Bao Ninh’s novel burns with the intensity of lived experience, Duong Thu Huong’s work often falls into set pieces with “soap box” dialogue.

Roneo copies of The Sorrow of War began circulating around Hanoi in 1989. A year later, what Nina McPherson calls the “hastily titled” Novel Without a Name, was sent to small overseas publishers in France and the United States. The best-selling author of three novels was rushing her fourth book into print, while a thirty-seven-year-old former soldier was trying to finish his thesis at the Nguyen Du Writers School.

“Scenes in your novel resemble scenes from Bao Ninh’s book,” I say. Before I can continue, Huong sits bolt upright on the sofa. Her face hardens. She adopts the formal French that inserts monsieur into its declarations. “Yes, this is true,” she says about the similarities between the two texts. “We were writing our books at the same time. Each of us was approaching the same subject from different directions.”

“But you wrote your book after the appearance of Bao Ninh’s novel,” I say, mentioning the date at the end of her manuscript, which says it was finished in “Hanoi, December 11, 1990.”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I only read his book many years later, here in France. I never read it in Vietnam. I am not close to Bao Ninh. We live in different worlds. I am a committed dissident, while he leads a normal life.”

Then Huong tells me a story about meeting Bao Ninh. The story is composed of Huong’s customary elements. It reveals a weak man overwhelmed by fear, but it has a surprise ending.

“When Bao Ninh visited me in Paris last year, I asked him, ‘Why is this book the only thing you have written in your life?’

“‘It is because of my wife,’ he said. ‘She was worried about the safety of our family.’ To protect his son and allow him to study in the United States, he rejected his other son. Literature is a child also. We give birth to it. He had to refuse this child out of fear for his family. It’s sad. This may be hard for you to understand, but he had to turn his back on his own book. The police tortured him by threatening his family.

“‘This was a mistake,’ he confessed. ‘It was wrong of me to do this. I regret it. I should have done things differently. You have to forgive me. I did it for my wife, so my son could finish his studies and travel overseas.”

“This is the inevitable bargain for every Vietnamese writer,” Huong says.

After talking for more than four hours, after drinking endless cups of tea and being plied with cherries and cashews, we are given as a parting gift not one but two boxes of chocolates. I am reminded of the fact that in Vietnam a gift is not a gift. It is an obligation.

“I believe you are a true journalist, a journalist who can interview gangsters and criminals,” she says on parting. “I myself feel like a sort of criminal who has just had her past history examined.”

“I’m sorry for making you feel like a criminal,” I say.

Back on the street, my daughter and I begin searching for a florist. I will be the next man in her life to send Duong Thu Huong his apologies, along with a large bouquet of flowers.

Part 13: Cyberspace country

This twelveth installment of the serialisation of Swamp of the Assassins by Thomas A. Bass was posted on February 17, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org

Swamp of the Assassins: The black cloud

16 Feb 2015

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.

I meet Bao Ninh again in 2014, when I am visiting Hanoi after the publication of The Spy Who Loved Us. I arrive at his house at seven in the evening, again with a translator and an assistant who wish to remain anonymous. Also with me are my twin sons, who will be celebrating their twenty-first birthdays in Hanoi. The evening heat is wrapped around us like a clay pot baking in Hanoi’s summer oven, Ninh uncorks a bottle of Chilean red wine and welcomes us into a living room that looks cheerier than the last time I was here, with the neon tubes on the wall not quite so pallid and a new sofa angled next to his chair, which is placed looking out toward the front door.

Ninh’s wife, Thanh, has skipped her exercise class to come home and cook dinner for us. A secondary school teacher with a wary smile, she has fried up a few dozen egg rolls, which are laid out on the coffee table along with bowls of hot sauce and nuoc mam fish sauce. I have brought soft drinks, pastries, and beer. Ninh urges us to begin eating, and my sons tuck into the meal. Our host sticks to drinking wine while Thanh flutters in and out of the kitchen. We chat about Ninh’s son, who now works in Saigon for Vina Capital, an investment company.

“It’s a different world from the one I know,” he says. He himself has retired from writing for Bao Van Nghe Tre, the literary journal for which he used to pen a weekly column. Now he works for himself, rising at midnight to write through the night, and then shredding his work at dawn, or so he says. Even relaxed over a glass of wine, Ninh is reticent about discussing his work.

When I broach the subject of his two unpublished novels, Ninh tells me that I have the wrong titles for his books and that he never wrote one of them anyway, except for a short piece that was published somewhere (he can’t remember where). Ninh has a way of shaking his head from side to side and grinning under his moustache when he disagrees with you or wants to avoid talking about something. So forget about discussing censorship, internal exile, or other sensitive subjects. He is not going to retell his story about how a thousand South Vietnamese POWs were brought North to impregnate a thousand widows in Ho Chi Minh’s natal village—even if this tale summarizes in one allegorical masterstroke the history of postwar Vietnam.

Ninh complains about the heat, and then he starts complaining about the Chinese, which is currently the number one topic in Vietnam. On April 30th—Vietnam’s national holiday for marking the unification of north and south Vietnam, the day you pick if you want to kick your enemy in the nuts and then spit in his eye—China moved a billion-dollar oil rig into Vietnam’s offshore waters and started drilling for oil. China surrounded the rig with an armada of ships and chased off any Vietnamese boats that dared to approach. The Chinese rammed Vietnamese coast guard vessels. They sank fishing boats. They fired water cannons that looked like medieval dragons spouting blue flames. As silly as these dragon boats may have looked, they proved quite effective at destroying electrical gear on the Vietnamese boats that were forced to flee.

Following this Chinese aggression, thirty thousand Vietnamese rose up in protest and started sacking Chinese textile factories around Saigon. Mobs burned at least fifteen companies and damaged another five hundred before police got the area locked down. Speculation abounds about the cause of these riots. They were orchestrated by government agents or by anti-government agents or by criminal gangs or by the Chinese themselves, since the looted factories turned out to be owned by Taiwanese and Koreans.

“We are experts on China,” says Ninh. “We just don’t talk about it. They are always smiling, but their smile is dangerous. They will be the nightmare of the world. By 2030, China will be far stronger than the United States. Our civilization will be threatened. I’m pessimistic. I see no light at the end of the tunnel,” he says, using a phrase employed by Richard Nixon during the Vietnam war. “I see only darkness,” Ninh says. “The younger generation should prepare. I feel a black cloud coming. Danger is approaching.”

Now that the red wine is gone, Ninh fills his glass with white and urges us to eat more egg rolls. Our host has a thatch of salt and pepper hair, now more salt than pepper, and a Fu Manchu moustache that gives his face the look of a window shuttered behind Venetian blinds. Wearing dark slacks and a white, short-sleeved shirt, he has kicked off his sandals and is cooling his feet on the linoleum as he settles back in his chair to ponder the dark cloud floating over Vietnam. It is quiet out on the street, save for the occasional motorbike rolling down the lane, but Ninh tells us how, during the day, he hears a constant din from the loudspeaker attached to a pole outside his door. The Party directives and propaganda become increasingly strident around holidays, the worst being April 30th, which commemorates the day in 1975 that Bao Ninh and his fellow soldiers captured Saigon.

“They talk about the old victories over and over again,” he says. “Even as a soldier I don’t like it. It’s like telling a beautiful girl she’s beautiful. She already knows she’s beautiful; so all you’re doing is annoying her. Next year, which marks the 40th anniversary of the end of the war, it’s going to be really annoying,” he says.

I have given Ninh a copy of my newly-published book. He keeps fingering it, flipping through the pages, stopping now and then to study a passage. “I don’t like intelligence agents and the police,” he says. “Maybe I’ll like them better after I read this.”

Ninh pours himself another glass of wine. “I never met Pham Xuan An,” he says. “He was a big general. I was just a soldier. Now that the government has made him a hero, they’ve started telling young people to act like him, which is really stupid. It’s like telling American teenagers they should grow up to be like Lyndon Johnson.”

Ninh stops to read the opening paragraph. “This is how you can tell if a translation is worth reading,” he says. “It looks pretty good.” Later he will send me an email praising the book and telling me how much he enjoyed reading it, even with the missing passages.

Ninh’s face is animated by the thick eyebrows that sweep over his black eyes. He windmills his hands through the air and slaps the back of his head. Then he pushes his hands in front of him like a surf swimmer heading for deep water. “The more we understand the Chinese the more we fear them,” he says. “Hitler was able to come to power because he was helped by Britain and France. They took care of him. The same is true with the United States and China. The Americans built up China’s industrial capacity. You moved your factories to China. You made the Chinese strong by doing business with them, but this strategy is going to fail in the end, just like it failed with Hitler.”

I nudge the conversation back to writing. “We have to follow the Communist Party line,” he says about censorship in Vietnam. “Every writer knows this. You’re hired for a reason; so don’t talk back. If you don’t accept the censorship system, then don’t be a writer.”

“They want to make Pham Xuan An into a political commissar,” he says. “This is why they censored your book. A good intelligence agent is like a priest. He keeps his secrets to himself.” The secrets of Pham Xuan An could be revealed only after the war and only selectively, after having been shaped into a heroic tale.

“For Vietnamese readers, a book without any cuts is a surprise,” says Ninh. “People will know where your book was cut. I prefer to read the printed version, but young people will go online to learn what you really wrote. This is becoming second nature for us, and soon we won’t have any printed books at all.”

He tells me he is writing a new novel, but he won’t say what it’s about. “We have to work quietly and not talk about it to anyone,” he says. “My time is over. I just write. I don’t publish.”

I ask him what Vietnamese writers I should be reading. “There is no generation of young writers,” he says. “There are just some individuals, one or two that I read.”

Next we talk about the movie that was being made of his novel. Film rights to The Sorrow of War were sold to a young American producer, Nicholas Simon, who also wrote the screenplay, but the project unraveled a few days before filming was to start. “We didn’t understand each other,” says Ninh. “We’re both stubborn people. He was young. He knew nothing about Vietnam. The script was so far from reality that it was ludicrous. I kept editing it, but it never got better. I yelled at him in Vietnamese. He yelled at me in English. The translator cried. Finally, the main investor, who was a friend of mine, fled after seeing our inability to get along. A movie has to be easy. My book is too hard to make into a movie.”

Before saying goodnight, Bao Ninh offers his final word on the subject of censorship. “Some guy who grew up as a peasant has the right to mess with your work? No one has the right to censor a book. When politics enters the room, ethics flies out the door. Other countries have laws protecting writers. In Vietnam, we have nothing. There are no rules to follow. The politicians make the rules.”

Part 12: The struggle

This eleventh installment of the serialisation of Swamp of the Assassins by Thomas A. Bass was posted on February 16, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org