https://www.institutdefrance.fr/actu...ong-thu-huong/

She Dares To Live Free
Brian Eads / Reader's Digest 10-1998

Vietnam's most famous novelist writes what others only think
The insistent knocking on the hotel room door in Hanoi startled us. "Maybe the secret police," I half joked. As the interpreter translated my remark, Duong Thu Huong grinned impishly.

My rendezvous last March with Vietnam's world-famous novelist was forbidden. Foreign journalists wanting to meet Huong, a fearless critic of her nation's Communist regime, need official permission, which is seldom granted, and must be accompanied by a government minder. I had neither. But when I'd proposed meeting anyway, she agreed without hesitation. "I'll meet whom I please," the petite 51-year-old said.

Now, as I opened the door, seven men in green uniforms and peaked hats burst into the room. "You have broken the laws of Vietnam," their leader barked. Huong was not intimidated. Composed, eyes narrowed in contempt, she watched as they pored over notebooks, documents and copies of her novels lying about the room. Twenty minutes later the officers escorted us outside.

"This is good for you," Huong said to me in French as we approached a posse of waiting vehicles. "This is the reality of Vietnam today. It is a police state."

Government agents have tapped her telephone, restricted access to or banned her novels, and imprisoned her without trial. It is a measure of the power of her writing that Viet-nam's leaders have tried so hard to silence her. And it is a measure of her courage and determination that they have failed.

Singing Soldiers

Huong was two when her father joined Ho Chi Minh's guerrillas in their fight against French colonial rule. Five years later, in 1954, he returned home to a hero's welcome in the Communist North. In the ruthless land-reform program that soon followed, Party cadres condemned an estimated 10,000 people to death, stripped some 100,000 "landlord" farmers of their land and imprisoned thousands. Some of Huong's relatives fled to Saigon in the anti-communist South; her father remained.

"My enduring memory of childhood is being hungry," says Huong. One day when she and some classmates were digging in their school playground to plant vegetables, they unearthed a heap of human skulls. Huong heard that Communists had murdered landowners there.

The discovery was unsettling, but it didn't shake the young woman's patriotic fervor. Huong enrolled at an arts college in Hanoi, where she studied music, dance and painting. When she graduated, Vietnam was again locked in conflict, "the war against the Americans."

Although not a Party member, Huong volunteered in 1968 to lead a Communist Youth Brigade of "singing soldiers." Their mission was to "sing louder than the bombs," boost soldiers' morale with theatrical performances, care for the wounded and bury the dead. For Huong it was the start of a painful disenchantment .

Subversive Thoughts

She served on the front line for the next seven years. Of the many women in Huong's troupe, she was one of the few to survive. Living in caves, underground tunnels and the jungle, Huong witnessed all the horrors of war.

She married and had two children, but the union was unhappy and would ultimately fail. The independent-minded young woman rebelled against the traditionally submissive role assigned to wives in Vietnamese society.

Huong began to have other, subversive thoughts. According to the Communist Party, Vietnam was fighting American invaders. But to Huong it looked like a civil war. Most enemy prisoners were Vietnamese, just like her.

When North Vietnam won the war on April 30, 1975, Huong hitched a ride to Saigon to see relatives. She was struck by their wealth and elegance. For years Huong had been told that Vietnamese in the South lived like dogs under the Americans.

But what overwhelmed her were the books. Literature in the North was heavily censored. In Saigon she discovered Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy.

Her disillusionment only deepened when she returned to Hanoi. Working as a screenwriter at a Hanoi film studio, Huong watched as the ideals for which she sacrificed her youth were abandoned. The authorities, she noted, were "interested only in themselves." The army meat ration, for example, used to be equal regardless of rank. Now she saw ordinary soldiers getting less than a quarter-pound a month, while lieutenants got more than a pound. Huong, who recalls hunger vividly, was shocked.

She started writing and distributing political pamphlets, arguing that Vietnam's "socialism" was more like feudalism. Censors ordered her to stop. She spoke out against censorship and lost her job. Only her exemplary war record saved her from worse punishment. "Shut up now," she was warned, "because next time nobody can save you." Meanwhile, late into the night, she began to pour out her feelings in short stories.

In the early 1980s Vietnamese leaders began edging toward economic reforms to encourage investment in the shattered economy. Friends urged Huong to join the Communist Party. Only inside the Party, where decisions were made, they reasoned, could she fight effectively for human rights and artistic freedom. Against her better instinct, Huong agreed. But she continued to write.

Paradise of the Blind

In her first novel, Beyond Illusions, Huong presents a passionate young heroine who is confronted at every turn by cynicism and lies, but affirms that even in a society that degrades moral values, liberty and personal dignity are worth striving for.

Huong's message struck a deep chord, and the book sold an enormous 60,000 copies in Vietnam. She wasn't sure whether it slipped through the cracks in state control or benefited from a brief thaw in artistic repression. Either way, it made her famous.

Next came Paradise of the Blind, a haunting story of Hang, a young woman whose modest dreams - a new roof for her mother's shack and a college education - are trampled by Party corruption. No writer before had been brave enough to say so explicitly that Vietnam's Marxist "paradise" exists only for those blind to the truth.

"My novels are cries of pain," Huong says. They are also regarded by many as works of art. Paradise of the Blind sold 100,000 copies and became the first Vietnamese novel since the Vietnam War to be translated into English and published in the United States. It is read and studied today in American college classrooms.

Huong was now attracting international acclaim and would speak out ever more boldly. At a conference organized by Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Van Linh in 1988, Huong declared there was no "intelligentsia" in Vietnam. All that the "archaic" one-party state produced, she told them, were servants.

After her speech an official quietly offered Huong "a nice house built for ministers." It was a flagrant attempt to buy her silence. "Twenty thousand teachers are waiting for a house," she replied. "If the comrade wants to give away a house, give it to them."

Eventually Huong would be summoned to a meeting of her Party cell. High officials demanded that she be expelled for "indiscipline." A ballot was held: five members voted for her expulsion, five against. Relishing the absurdity of the situation, she used her own vote to expel herself.

Publishing houses now refused to print her books, and one morning in April 1991 she was arrested. The government accused her of sending abroad documents containing "state secrets" when, in fact, she had sent the manuscript for Novel Without a Name. Though never formally charged or brought to trial, Huong was locked in a small, windowless cell and endlessly interrogated.

"If you die, nobody will remember you one week later," an officer taunted. But Amnesty International adopted her as a "prisoner of conscience" and urged her release. Ironically, when she was finally freed after more than seven months, her guards confessed that they enjoyed her novels.

Bowing to international pressure, Hanoi allowed Huong to travel to France. At a ceremony in Paris in December 1994, French Culture Minister Jacques Toubon praised Huong's struggle for freedom, then decorated her with the high literary honor of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Huong could have sought political asylum in France but instead returned to Vietnam. "I want to stay here to insult those in power," she says.

Stung by her criticism, the government has revoked her passport, and she is watched by its agents. Even so, Huong knows that international stature gives her a measure of protection few in her country enjoy. Amnesty International estimates there are currently close to 60 political prisoners in Vietnam; one of them, Nguyen Dan Que, a doctor, is in jail for 20 years because he advocated democratic reform.

Flowers That Cannot Bloom

While we were detained by the authorities in Hanoi last March, officers interrogated Huong for several hours. "You must read and remember the laws of Vietnam," they said.

"Okay," Huong replied. "But I don't have a good memory."

In a separate room I was questioned for seven hours, then told to leave the country. Some days later I telephoned Huong from Bangkok to see how she was. "They asked me a lot of stupid questions," she said. "But I'm used to it."

"The government is determined to silence Huong," says Siobhan Dowd of International PEN, which campaigns for persecuted writers. "But she is irrepressible."

"I never intended to become a writer," Huong reflects. "It just happened." But she also feels the pull of the past. "I lost many friends in the war, and their ghosts haunt me. They're like flowers that cannot bloom."

Through her writing, she says, she wants "to gain respect for my rights as a free citizen here in my own country," Those rights are still denied her. But by daring to say in public what others think , Huong has already won a major victory, notes Phan Huy Duong, her translator. "She gives an example every day that if you dare to live as a free person, you can."