Duong Thu Huong

• Born: 1947
• Place of Birth: Thai Binh, Vietnam

Biography

Born in central Vietnam in 1947, when that country was still a French colony, Duong Thu Huong (zhung tew huong) started her life with modest beginnings as the daughter of a schoolteacher mother and a father who was a tailor and guerilla fighter for Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. As a teenager in the mid-1960’s, she joined the Communist Party, serving as the leader of a Communist youth brigade that, in part, provided entertainment for Communist troops during the Vietnam War. She was one of only three persons in the brigade of forty to survive the experience. Forever committed to and involved with politics, she also voluntarily joined the Vietnamese army in its brief war against China in 1979; she was the first woman to serve in combat on the front lines of the conflict. She also was a war correspondent and wrote news releases about the war. After the war, she wrote and spoke on behalf of the government and the Communist cause. During this time she supported herself primarily by writing fiction and screenplays.

In the early 1980’s, there was a major shift in her temperament and beliefs about the role of Communism in her country. She began to speak openly against corruption, bribery, chicanery, repression, and bureaucracy at public political events, as well as in her writings. During the decade she wrote three novels. The first two, Hành trình ngày tho âu (1985; journey in childhood) and Bên kia bo oa vong: Tiên thuyêt (1988; Beyond Illusions, 2002), were not problematic for the government. In fact, at this time the government in Hanoi had called for writers in the country to comment about the nation’s social, economic, and political problems.

However, when she published Nhung thiên duong mù: Tiêu thuyêt (1988; Paradise of the Blind, 1993), she ran into trouble with government censors and mainline Communists. While no one thought the work to be overtly anti-Communist or antigovernment propaganda, which would be censored, it was too revealing of problems in its nuances and undertones. The two major objections from the government seem to have been the subtle comments about the role of women, both in Vietnamese society and in a Communist-controlled country, and about the government’s policy of land reform—the collective rather than private ownership of businesses and property. The work was extremely popular in Vietnam, where some forty thousand copies were sold before the novel was withdrawn and the government forbid it to be circulated. Ownership of the novel was declared illegal and punishable by imprisonment.

In addition, during the controversy about the novel, Duong committed a sin unpardonable by the Communist hierarchy, when she spoke openly for “pluralism,” meaning the recognition and legitimate involvement of political parties other than the Communist Party in the affairs of the nation. She also advocated for human rights in a manner that was unacceptable to the government. She was expelled from the Communist Party in 1989, and in April, 1991, she was arrested on fabricated charges and imprisoned without trial. Government officials accused her of having unsanctioned contacts with agents of foreign governments and of smuggling illegal documents out of the country. There was no substance to the charges, as Duong’s activities had always been open and public. During her seven months in prison, Duong was recognized by Amnesty International and other organizations as a political prisoner. In addition, she was fired from her job as a screenwriter for the government-sanctioned Vietnam Film Company. Previously, she had been awarded prizes for her work with the organization.

Upon her release from prison in 1991, she found herself the subject of international attention and curiosity. Paradise of the Blind had been critically acclaimed, but the government then banned all of her works in Vietnam. However, her work was recognized and honored by other countries. In 1992 and 1996, two of her novels were short-listed for a French literary prize, the Prix Femina; in France, Paradise of the Blind was so well received that she was also given the title Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. In 1992, she received a grant from the United States-based Hammet-Hellman Foundation. In 1995, she sent another novel, Tiêu thuyêt vô dê (1991), to publishers in France and England; an English translation, Novel Without a Name, was published in 1995.

Duong’s passport was revoked and other recriminations followed, primarily to prevent her from having contact with the outside world. Nevertheless, she was further honored with the International Dublin IMPAC Award in 1997, the Prince Claus Foundation Award in 1999, and the Grinzane Cavour Literary Award in 2005. In the spring of 2006, the Vietnamese government gave her permission to travel abroad, and she was interviewed by American novelist Robert Stone in New York City. That same year, she received the PEN-Novib Freedom of Expression Award.

In the early twenty-first century, Duong continued to write while in semiretirement in Hanoi, where she lived with her two children on a meager monthly pension from the government and the royalties from her work. In 2005, Chốn vắng (No man's land) was published and this novel again confronts social and political issues. The book depicts a woman whose first husband suddenly reappears after the war where he had been presumed dead, ending her second happy and prosperous marriage. Due to social and political pressures, she leaves her second husband and her family to live with her first husband in poverty. In 2006, Duong moved to Paris and in 2009 published Đỉnh Cao Chói Lọi (The zenith) which is a novel about the final days of President Ho Chi Minh. Duong followed Đỉnh Cao Chói Lọi with the novels Hậu cung của con tim (2011) and Đồi bạch đàn (2013). In 2023, the author was awarded the Cino Del Duca World Prize, a prestigious international literary award.

Analysis

Since Duong Thu Huong’s novels were first translated into French, English, and other languages in the late 1980’s, she has been by far the most widely read and acclaimed writer from her native Vietnam. The success of her works lies in her ability to successfully intertwine themes that are both personal and political. It is hard to escape the omnipresent historical and biographical elements of her books; yet it would be misleading to interpret her novels by giving too much attention to these matters. She has lived her life amid the backdrop of the Vietnamese War; hence, this war is her subject matter. Similarly, the biographical elements of her life sometimes find their way into her fiction in heavy-handed ways. Nevertheless, the impetus of her efforts is neither historical nor biographical.

Of more importance are the political elements in her work, which are never far from the background of her plots and the lives of her characters. Originally, she used and developed her talents as a writer to promote the Communist cause in press releases from the front lines during the short Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979. Her writings during the early 1980’s were primarily her work for the Vietnam Film Company, a government organization.

However, by the time she wrote her first novel, Hành trình ngày tho âu, she had begun to expose weaknesses and failures of the Communist government after its takeover of Vietnam in 1975. She realized that the government, primarily because of its corruption and violations of human rights, was systematically making life worse for all citizens. In this first book, which is a novel of initiation, a twelve-year-old girl travels across the country to find her father, who is fighting in the war, to seek his help for a social problem—the abuse of one of her friends. The girl comes to see that justice cannot be found because of the war and the policies of the government, which are alluded to but not overtly condemned. Duong more forthrightly tackles this conflict between loyalty to government and loyalty to justice in her second work, Beyond Illusions, in which a young married couple is divided in the course of action for its life. Linh, the wife and Duong persona, is committed to doing what is right, despite the consequences. Her husband, Nguyen, on the other hand, betrays justice and human rights in order to secure favors for himself and to protect his family. Both novels were extremely popular in Vietnam during the 1980’s, and hundreds of thousands of copies were sold.

With the publication of Paradise of the Blind in 1988, however, Duong came into serious trouble with the government. While she followed her usual method of criticizing the government by criticizing individual members of the government, her exposé of the weaknesses of land reform was not visibly directed at the corruption of individual Communist Party members so much as at the established policy of the entire government. Accordingly, the work was banned in Vietnam, while becoming an international best-seller in Europe and North America. Readers will note that the comments about land reform in the novel are few in number and of little substance; nevertheless, the Communist government would not permit the novel’s circulation.

In Novel Without a Name, Duong again increased the scope and magnanimity of her attack on the government by writing what is basically an antiwar novel, but of course the war is the American war in Vietnam. She came to question the purpose of removing the capitalists and democrats from South Vietnam when the result was increased economic disaster and the loss of human rights for all citizens, whether in North or South Vietnam. The novel is told from the point of view of a young soldier in the army who is fighting for North Vietnam and comes to understand the futility of his efforts, even after his country’s victory. Duong creates another novel with a similar theme in Luu Ly (1997; Memories of a Pure Spring, 2000), which is the most biographical of her works and recalls many of her own experiences in Vietnam’s wars against the United States and China.

Ostensibly, she left war and politics behind in Chon vang (1999; No Man’s Land, 2005) by turning to the personal and internal conflicts of women. The main character, Mien, is happily married and living on a farm with her husband, when a previous husband whom she thought dead returns after an absence of fourteen years. Politics have not been completely omitted, however, as the returning husband represents the life that Mien could have had, in contrast to her current husband, who embodies the life she is living. In something of a national, disparate allegory, questioning what might have happened if South Vietnam had won the war, Duong suggests that things would be horrid, no matter which country won.

The bleakness and pessimism of the repeated themes of her work are abetted by the style of her prose. Many of her characters survive the atrocities of the war and its aftermath, but few are able to conquer or come even close to making peace with them. At times, she writes of Vietnam when life was war free and carefree, before the Communists and Americans wreaked havoc on the nation, and readers can find sentimentality in these depictions of a time when life was good. However, she becomes less sentimental in depicting life during and after the war. While wartime is never good and people are victimized to the point of no return, many people do go on and find stability in their lives and in society. Duong’s characters, however, are never able to do this.

Typically, her novels unfold in the same way. In straightforward prose, she records a series of episodic events punctuated and advanced by dialogue. Food, both its preparation and consumption, is discussed in great detail in her work, which shows the importance of food in Vietnamese society. Events are recorded from the points of view of two or three main characters, each of whom has a personal agenda that represents some political truth, policy, or ideology. Evil triumphs, though the good survive to suffer.

Paradise of the Blind

First published:Nhung thiên duong mù: Tiêu thuyêt, 1988 (English translation, 1993)

Type of work: Novel

Growing up in Vietnam in the 1980’s, Hang is reared without any men, and her life is torn between two forceful and strong-willed women: her mother Que, who represents the failure of the Communists after the Vietnam War, and her Aunt Tam, who embodies the government that could and should have been.

Even the title of Duong’s third novel, Paradise of the Blind, is itself an attack on the Communist government which took over Vietnam after the country’s war with the United States ended in 1975. The novel has no “paradise” but exists only as a dystopia, and not one of the characters is blind. The title refers to Communist leaders, who publicly spoke of and pretended to create what they called a “peasants’ paradise” or a “workers’ paradise,” but were clearly failing in Vietnam, as they were in other Communist countries. There is no paradise; there are only blind people promoting a paradise based on a flawed political theory, which can never succeed.

Duong constructs this novel as a political allegory around the three main characters. Hang, the young girl who is experiencing a coming-of-age, represents postwar Vietnam, and the two women who control her represent the political struggle occurring in Vietnam after the Vietnam War. Hang’s mother, Que, is the traditional Vietnamese who has “lost” after acquiescing to the circumstances of the war by giving herself over to the will of the Communists. She does this literally in the plot when she sends her husband off into hiding. The other woman, Aunt Tam, the sister of Hang’s exiled father, represents capitalism and democracy, but she also cannot succeed; she can only maneuver and buy into the corruption and bribery of the political and economic system in various ways as the plot enfolds.

At the end of the novel, Que loses her leg in a freak accident that is not her fault, and is left handicapped forever. Tam simply dies from hard work and her inability to make peace and survive within the Communist system. Both women spend their lives hating each other and maneuvering for the love and attention of Hang, and in so doing they destroy any chance Hang has for a successful, happy, and peaceful future. Such is the state of Vietnam.

Similarly, the two main male characters in the novel are also allegorical figures. Hang’s father, Ton, is an honorable, French-educated, intelligent, handsome, and resourceful schoolteacher. He is the French-American male power figure who would change the country’s government into a democracy with freedom, human rights, and capitalism. In contrast with him, his brother-in-law, Que’s brother Chinh, is a Communist who espouses a great ideology but behaves with little morality. He fails to take care of his family, and he ruins Que’s chance for happiness by forcing her to drive her own husband, Ton, into exile in the north. Here, Ton takes refuge among the Hmong, a traditional Vietnamese tribal minority, who take him in and provide shelter and safety. Ton eventually kills himself after a failed attempt to take care of his wife and daughter. His death represents the passing possibility of Vietnam’s political identity and success as a Western-style democracy.

Uncle Chinh, the Communist character, turns into the villain of the novel, with little or no goodness to his credit. Living in Russia, he survives there as something of a lackey and servant to foreign students at a university. After Hang completes her college education, paid for entirely by Aunt Tam, she, too, visits Russia as a “guest worker,” where she is summoned to see her uncle. Here he betrays her and leaves her in a room with a group of Russian men, who presumably rape her after he exits, though the narrative does not explicitly record this. Though absent from most of Hang’s daily life, Chinh is always somewhere in the background, causing trouble, and he surfaces only when he needs something from Tam, which usually turns out to be the money that she has earned, penny by penny, as a street vendor. Duong’s meaning is entirely clear: Uncle Chinh represents the greed and corruption of the Communist government.

Duong does not provide a chronological narrative of all of these events. Rather, the novel begins late in the action, when Hang is living in Russia and is summoned to visit Uncle Chinh. Hang visits him out of obedience to the traditional Vietnamese values of families, but she does so to her own detriment. Again, the political commentary shows how following the ways of the past will damn Vietnam as effectively as trying to make Communism work or resurrecting the ideals of the French and Americans. As Hang travels within Russia to find her uncle, Duong provides numerous flashbacks of Hang’s childhood in order to reveal the political intrigue surrounding the main character.

Vietnamese government censors objected to this novel, but their concern was probably not with its underlying political allegory. In her first two novels, Duong had written of the problems in the country, and her Communist characters did not fare well, but she was not subjected to censorship. However, in the first chapters of Paradise of the Blind, she explicitly focuses on one particular aspect of Communist ideology: land reform. Duong reveals several important ways in which everyone was victimized by this so-called reform and how no one benefited from it. It is noteworthy that the government itself gave up on land reform about the same time that the novel appeared. The Communists were evidently willing to change a misguided policy, but they were not willing for their policy to be publicly criticized in Duong’s novel.

Summary

Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, Duong Thu Huong has been the most successful novelist to come from Vietnam, attracting readers both at home and abroad. As one who initially promoted Communism and fought it in two wars herself, she is uniquely qualified to expose the weaknesses of the failed system, which manifested themselves after the Vietnam War. All of her work is political, though she seldom directly attacks her country’s government as she does in Paradise of the Blind. The international attention her novels have received, as well as the numerous awards bestowed on them, proves her ability to write books that are not only political but also literary.

Bibliography

Blodgett, Harriet. “The Feminist Artistry of Paradise of the Blind.” World Literature Today 75, nos. 3/4 (Summer/Autumn, 2001): 31-39.

Charle, Suzanne. “Good Morning, Vietnam: Novels by Duong Thu Huong.” Harper’s Bazaar (May, 1993): 60.

“Enemy of the State: Novelist Duong Thu Huong Rails Against Her Country’s Communist Rulers.” People Weekly 53, no. 17 (May 1, 2000): 99.

Freeman, John. "The Zenith by Duong Thu Huong." Review of The Zenith, by Duong Thu Huong, The Boston Globe, 25 Aug. 2012, www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2012/08/25/review-the-zenith-duong-thu-huong/2y9Fyegxz9EUNupIDpvnxH/story.html. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Karolides, Nicholas J. Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds. New York: Facts On File, 2006.

Liparulo, Steven P. "Incense and Ashes": The Postmodern Work of Refutation in Three Vietnam War Novels." War, Literature & the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities, 2003, vol. 15, no. 1, 2, pp. 71–94, Literary Reference Center Plus, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=12964908&site=lrc-plus. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

"Nhà văn Dương Thu Hương đoạt giải văn học Pháp trị giá 200 ngàn euro." [Writer Duong Thu Huong Wins French Literature Prize Worth 200,000 Euros." Ngui Viet, 22 Apr. 2023, www.nguoi-viet.com/little-saigon/nha-van-duong-thu-huong-doat-giai-van-hoc-phap-tri-gia-200-ngan-euro/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Saur, Pamela S. “Huong’s Paradise of the Blind.” The Explicator 60, no. 4 (Summer, 2002): 239-241.

Shenon, Philip. “In This Author’s Book, Villains Are Vietnamese: Novelist Duong Thu Huong.” The New York Times, April 12, 1994, p. A4.

Vietnam Language Centre in Singapore. "Vietnamese Novelist Duong Thu Huong Will Be Exiled in Paris for Some Time Yet." 6 Sept. 2012. https://vietnameselanguage.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/vietnamese-novelist-duong-thu-huong-will-be-exiled-in-paris-for-some-time-yet/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.