Last month, on a typically dull, gray late-winter Hanoi day, I stopped in at the city’s sole respectable foreign-language bookstore, the Bookworm, for a conversation with a Vietnamese fan of Tim O’Brien. “The Things They Carried,” O’Brien’s celebrated collection of linked stories about the Vietnam War, has just been reissued in a 20th-anniversary edition, and I was interested in gathering a Vietnamese perspective on O’Brien’s work. But it took me days of calls and e-mail messages to find anyone in Hanoi who had read any of it. Finally the manager of the Bookworm suggested I speak with Tran Ngoc Hieu, a lecturer at Hanoi’s Pedagogical University. I needed a while to track him down, as he is perhaps the only person in the city who does not use a mobile phone. Hieu, 30, looks young for his age, and compensates by wearing a sport jacket and speaking a careful, deliberate English with an exceptionally rich vocabulary, interrupting himself frequently to apologize for not speaking English well.
“Vietnamese authors should learn to tell their war stories the way O’Brien does,” Hieu said. “With parody, nonlinear plot exposition. The fusion of reality and dreams.”
It shouldn’t have been so hard to find Vietnamese who could talk about O’Brien. He is, after all, a seminal American novelist of the Vietnam War, and one would think his books — including “If I Die in a Combat Zone” (1973) and “Going After Cacciato” (1978) — would be reasonably well known to Vietnamese readers. They are not. In fact, almost none of the major American novels about the war are known to Vietnamese readers; they have not been translated and published here. You can buy photocopied English-language editions of Robert Stone’s “Dog Soldiers,” Denis Johnson’s “Tree of Smoke” or many classic American works of nonfiction from wandering booksellers who ply the tourist neighborhoods in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, but like most people around the world, few Vietnamese read in foreign languages for pleasure. A small group of the literary elite read unofficial translations of some American works on Vietnamese-language émigré literary Web sites, like Talawas. But for the most part, Vietnamese are simply unfamiliar with American fiction about the war.
To some extent, the lack of familiarity stems from censorship. Vietnam today is in many ways a rather open society; Vietnamese can surf the Internet (though writing blogs on political topics can get you arrested), foreign television streams in via satellite and cable, and pirated DVDs circulate freely. But when it comes to books, the old Communist machinery of censorship remains in place.
But censorship is only part of the story. Vietnamese also seem largely uninterested in foreign accounts of the war. For example, Graham Greene’s “Quiet American” is available in translation, but most Vietnamese I’ve spoken to dislike it. They find the book’s main Vietnamese character, the beautiful Phuong, demeaning in her passivity. The lack of interest extends to movies, too. You can purchase a copy of “Apocalypse Now” at any DVD store in Hanoi, but even the Vietnamese film buffs I’ve asked have not seen it. Last year, Vietnam’s first chain of modern multiplexes showed two movies one would never have expected to make it past the censors: “Watchmen,” which includes a sequence in which an American superhero ensures that Nixon wins the war, and “Tropic Thunder,” a parody of serious Vietnam films like “Platoon.” Audiences here yawned at both.
In the case of “Tropic Thunder,” Vietnamese simply didn’t recognize the themes it parodied. The film was essentially a burlesque of that central motif of Vietnam in American culture, the “heart of darkness” story: the descent of innocents into savagery, the dissolution of reason in a violent encounter with an incomprehensible alien society.
The Vietnamese, obviously, are that society. And they don’t find themselves particularly incomprehensible. Nor do they find themselves silent and mysterious, like Greene’s Phuong. Moreover, the current Vietnamese government is descended from the side that won the war, a condition much less conducive to irony than America’s experience of quagmire and defeat.
A triumphant political narrative, enforced with deadening rigor in textbooks and museums, limits the kinds of stories that can be told in Vietnamese literature about the “American War.”
As Hieu puts it, it’s not just that censorship restricts the contents of most novels, but that it pushes even rebellious authors to concentrate on breaking the barriers of factual content, rather than on aesthetic innovations.
“Vietnamese writers are still focused on telling the ‘true stories’ that aren’t taught in schools, the secret truths,” Hieu said. Most forgo complex formal approaches. “If you watch Dang Nhat Minh’s film of ‘Don’t Burn,’ you’ll see.”
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