The Freedom to Write

This essay is the first of a year-long series of essays exploring and paying homage to Vietnamese “dissident” writers for whom all writers of Vietnamese descent owe their current ability to read this essay or create their own masterpieces of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction works whether via a selfie on Instagram, a 280-character tweet, or in a published novel. Visit diaCRITICS every month for new installments.

The freedom of expression enjoyed by many Vietnamese in the diaspora is a fundamental right that was hard-won by writers who sacrificed their lives so that we can manifest the words that we imagine, type, pen, and speak. One need only visit PEN America’s Freedom to Write Index and their Writers at Risk Database to understand how tenuous or nonexistent this right is for so many. Vietnam has been consistently listed by human rights organizations as a nation that suppresses these rights. A short list includes: Freedom on the Net 2021 and Vietnam’s Freedom in the World Ranking, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Vietnam Human Rights Network.

The recent imprisonment of dissident writers in Vietnam have made clear the Vietnamese government’s low tolerance for criticism despite its rich history of dissident-fueled transformation. In December, Vietnam sentenced four prominent dissident writers for “anti-state propaganda.” In 2021 alone, Vietnam tried and convicted 20 dissident writers in a crackdown on three activist groups. Moreover, between late 2019 and June 2020, Human Rights Watch reported that Vietnam convicted scores of writers and journalists, including members of the Independent Journalists Association and the human rights group, Brotherhood for Democracy.

Of note is blogger Phạm Đoan Trang who was arrested on October 7, 2020 for “making, storing, spreading information, materials, items for the purpose of opposing the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” Phạm was the recipient of the 2017 Homo Homini Award from People In Need for using her blog, Luật Khoa tạp chí (Journal of Law), “to fight the lack of freedom, corruption and the despotism of the communist regime.” The prosecutor requested eight years; the court gave her nine years for “propaganda against the State.” Activists claim that the act of giving her more time than was requested was Vietnam’s way of sending a clear message to the world of their prerogative to control, unhampered, the narratives within its borders. Vietnam understands how critical its allyship is against global power, China, and pleas from human rights groups are going unheeded.

Once sentenced, Phạm, despite frequent interruptions, got out this statement:

“You may imprison me and bask in celebration for eliminating a long-standing thorn in your eye, but you will never be rid of your ugly, authoritarian, undemocratic, anti-democratic reputation because an animal is forever an animal. It can never become human.”

Vietnamese in the diaspora owe, in part, our freedom to express ourselves to artists, writers, and advocates who came before us in the countries where we live. For Vietnamese Americans, these include African American advocates such as Sojourner Truth, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Shuttlesworth, Elizabeth Jennings, Robert Moses, John Lewis, Alton Lemon, Jaffree and Anthony Griffin, and Native American activists such as Ruth Muskrat Bronson who all fought for the freedoms of speech and press that we all now enjoy in abundance (though not without challenges and contradictions).

We also owe this freedom to Vietnamese writers who are, for many Vietnamese in the diaspora (and possibly in Vietnam), unknown to us. Here in the diaspora, many of us have grown up on the writings of others not our own and yet we know very little (or nothing) about the work of Vietnamese writers who came before us in Vietnam, the intent behind their silencing, imprisonment, executions, exiles, and murders realized in the modern era. For some of these writers, nothing remains of their work in Vietnam but ashes, their words burnt in events such as the 2002 book burning in Ho Chi Minh City that destroyed 7.6 tons of books identified as “culturally poisonous.”  These artists, poets, writers, and apparently, the oldest known dissident, a guitar, fought against a political and ideological machine that attempted to bury their art so that I could do something that I take for granted: wake up every morning, take a pen to paper, and write.

There are few things I find more painful for a writer than to have the words you bled to write be buried in time by those who sought to silence you.

But I write to prevent erasure. Because I know a thing or two about censorship—both cultural and familial.

As Vietnamese writers, someone’s always telling us not to write. If it’s not the reactionary politics of our communities, then it’s our families who censor us either out of genuine love and concern for our well-being and livelihood (or lack thereof), or out of shame, guilt, and a preference for extreme privacy. If it’s not any of the above—then we censor ourselves for fear of the above.

Through these essays, I will explore Vietnamese literature through the lens of the dissident writer, individuals who disagree or have a dissenting opinion or attitude about an established religious, political, or belief system that is in power and who engage in some form of activism to express or attempt to express their thoughts. I will explore Northern and Southern writers alike. The cultural, political, and ideological world of these writers was an extremely complex knot of ideological differences. Scholar, Tuấn Ngọc Nguyễn remarked:

Contemporary Vietnamese literature is notable for its fissure along ideological fault lines. From 1945 to 1954 this fissure marked the boundary between the literature of those who participated in the anti-French resistance under the Communist Party’s banner and those who did not. From 1954 to 1975 it was the ideological divide between South and Communist North Vietnam; and from 1975 to the present, the divide, both ideological and emotional, between homeland and exile.

Although these essays will identify these differences and provide the political and historical backdrop, the spirit of these essays will be less on the ideological beliefs of the various writers and more so on their shared longing and belief that intellectual, cultural, and artistic freedom of expression would inspire transformational dialogue.

Basically, I’m into dissident writers. My interest lies in Vietnamese writers who fed the engine of social change despite oppressive censorship. Given the history of censorship in Vietnam, many writers’ works were published during very small windows (literally 4 to 10 years) when it was possible to write in contradiction to the government. In these tiny moments, the reader can grasp the spark of brilliance that freedom of expression nourished in a brief and troubled period.

A snapshot of writers or periods explored include:

• Hồ Xuân Hương and Nguyễn Du (Truyện Kiều) (18th Century)
• Phan Bội Châu (1903 to 1940) & Phụ Nữ Tân Văn (New Literary Women) (1929—1935)
• Tự Lực Văn Đoàn (The Self-Reliant Literary Group) & Phong-trào Thơ-mới (The New Poetry Movement) (1931-1941)
• Phong Trào Nhân Văn-Giai Phẩm (The Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm affair) (1955-1958)
• South Vietnamese writers before 1975 & after ~ Nguyễn Chí Thiện
• The exiled authors of Đổi Mới (The Renovation Literary Movement) (1988 – 1989)
• Dissident writers in Vietnam and Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora (1975 to Now)

A few disclaimers: Firstly, as a South Vietnamese refugee who toddled onto a San Diegan shore decades ago, I barely read Vietnamese and I do not read French at all. Thus, my review is limited to those works that have been translated into English. This has its own challenges since many early translators were not Vietnamese so it’s entirely possible that the works I’ve read have been reshaped by the hands of the translator. Most translators tried their best to stay to the culture, tradition, and values exemplified in the Vietnamese writing – but you never know what can get lost in translation. Case in point: Nước = Water. What just got lost? Those of Vietnamese descent know, perhaps non-Vietnamese translators also know, for everyone else, you probably have no idea. And that is a very BIG “no idea” because what just got lost was a whole-ass lot.

English is a problematic medium when translating postcolonial language because, as scholar Keith Taylor, has pointed out:

“English has acquired a position of global centrality that challenges translations from other languages with its own categories of representations often designed to exercise the power of imperialized, bureaucratized, or euphemized knowledge…English language usage articulates international domains of mission and proselytization…Voices apart from or resisting the centralizing force of this idiom are acknowledged, normalized, and absorbed in translation.”

One clear example of the tragedies of translation can be seen in Timothy Allen’s plot-driven translation of Nguyễn Du’s “Truyện Kiều” or “Tale of Kiều.” The epic 18th Century 3,250-verse narrative poem is considered to be emblematic of Vietnamese culture. Segments of Allen’s translation, however, have been criticized for violating the “equivalent effect” which commits the translator to transmit cultural sentiments and the experience enjoyed by readers in Vietnamese in their translation. Allen, who learned Vietnamese while translating the poem, had no language or historical literacy skills, and his translation, sadly, strips the poem of its cultural and historical significance. See for yourself. The following excerpts compare three different translations of the final verse of Truyện Kiều:

Huỳnh Sanh Thông:

Does Heaven ever favor anyone, bestowing both rare talent and good luck?
In talent take no overweening pride, for talent and disaster form a pair,
Our karma we must carry as our lot – let’s stop decrying Heaven’s whims and quirks.
Inside ourselves there lies the root of good: the heart outweighs all talents on this earth.

Timothy Allen:

The most talented are not always the ones who succeed:
That would be too neat and is too rare.
Looks and luck don’t always rhyme.
Never complain about your fate: you have one life. Live it.

Hoài Văn Tử:

Heaven is free from any partiality,
He never privileges anyone with both talent and good destiny.
Of our talent, let us not be arrogant
Because catastrophe seems to always follow talent.
We all carry with us our own karma.

So, we should not blame Heaven, be He near or far.
In our heart, good has its origin and commencement.
A noble heart is three times better than the best talent.

It is clear from just this one example that Huỳnh Sanh Thông and Hoài Văn Tử’s translation capture a yearning within Vietnamese culture to understand the tragedies that fell upon generations of Vietnamese under Chinese occupation and feudalism in the Lê dynasty. Allen’s version, however, has stripped away the heart of the poem to focus only on talent and beauty with a final note on yolo, a truly “American dream” based perspective. The poem, in Allen’s hands, has been perverted with a Western lens. Of note, Allen was awarded the 2008 Stephen Spender prize for his translation of the poem’s opening lines which led to being awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship to complete his translation. Moral: sometimes searching for unfunded, unsupported work by passionate artists toiling at their desks late at night on obscure visually painful websites may land you the authenticity you seek. For Truyện Kiều, try translations by Vietnamese translators, Huỳnh Sanh Thông, Hoài Văn Tử, or Phan Huy’s – for free.

Finally, I am, at best, an amateur literary nerd and an armchair historian who pours through research in my free time with a fistful of popcorn and an obsessive unsalaried passion. I am not an academic or a scholar. I am a reader, and, as a result, I have probably missed nuances that more expert hands could have massaged better. These essays are an attempt to share a topic I am passionate about to a lay audience of which I’m a member of. I rely a great deal on the detailed study and work of others to craft these essays. Apologies in advance for any inaccuracies and I welcome corrections.  A list of sources follows every essay for the truly nerdy who want to read the theories posited in my essays in well-cited form.

Sources:

• The 88 Project, 2022.
• Allen, Timothy. The Song of Kieu: A New Lament. Penguin Classics, 2019.
• Human Rights Watch. (2020, June 19). “Vietnam: Crackdown on Peaceful Dissent Intensifies New Wave of Arrests Ahead of the 13th Party Congress.” Human Rights Watch, 2020 June 19.
• Huỳnh, Thông Sanh. The Tale of Kieu: A Bilingual Edition of Nguyen Du’s Truyen Kieu. Yale Press, 1987.
• Morreale, Anthony. “Misconceived.” Mekong Review, Issue 16, 2019 Aug.
• Nguyen, Lại and Holcombe, Alec. “The Heart and Mind of the Poet Xuân Diệu: 1954–1958.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2, Summer 2010, pp. 1-90.
• Nguyễn, Tuấn Ngọc. Socialist Realism in Vietnamese Literature: an Analysis of the Relationship between Literature and Politics. Victoria University, 2004. PhD thesis.
• Phan Huy. The English Version of Truyện Kiều. 2013.
• Sullivan, Michael. “Vietnam sentences dissidents to prison for spreading anti-state propaganda.” NPR, 2021 Dec. 24.
• Taylor, Keith W. “Locating and translating boundaries in Nguyen Huy Thiep’s short stories.” Vietnam Review 1, Autumn-Winter 1996, 439-465.
• Tử, Hoài Văn. Poetic English Version of Kiều, 2018.
• Viet Nam Literature Project. Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc, 2018
• Wikivietlit. Vietnam Literature Project, 2014.

Contributor’s Bio

Z.M. Quỳnh is currently working on a novel that highlights the experiences of ARVN soldiers. You can visit her at zmquynh.com.