The Light of the Capital: Three Modern Vietnamese Classics

by Greg Lockhart, Monique Lockhart (Translator)

Set in the colonial era of Vietnam amid rapid urban transformation, this book offers in translation three seminal works that represent the first fine flowering of Vietnamese non-fiction writing.
"I Pulled a Rickshaw," Tam Lang's startling reportage written in 1932 after the onset of the Great Depression, is the first of its kind to depict people from the new underclasses that had formed in early modern Hanoi. Also set in Hanoi is Vu Trong Phung's 1936 narrative dispatch, "Household Servants," which offers a vivid but dark portrayal of the lives of the urban poor who had come from the countryside to the city looking for work as domestics, wet-nurses, and coolies (laborers or porters). Nguyen Hong's "Days of Childhood," generally regarded as the first modern Vietnamese autobiography, is placed in the northern provincial town of Nam Dinh in the period 1928-31. Published in Hanoi in 1938, it tells the haunting story of the disintegration of a feudal family under modern stress.
Stark, searing, and socially aware, these three Vietnamese classics are invaluable for their inside views of an era increasingly forgotten in the tumultuous, post-1939 decades of war and revolution, and for the indigenous perspective they provide on Hanoi's development today.

232 pages, Paperback

First published May 23, 1996

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are others who are not remembered, as if they had never lived, they died and were forgotten, they, and their children after them. But we will praise these godly men...
– Ecclesiasticus, 44: 9-10

One of the reasons that the numbskull demographic nowadays is so enamored of tales of the apocalypse may be that it distracts effectively from the real apocalypse that happens before their eyes every day. By this I mean: people live, now and before, unnoticed and unsung, cleaning our dishes, harvesting our food, and manufacturing the gadgets that ensure we will never, ever have to spend a single moment alone with our thoughts. The reaper comes on relentlessly, stilling their calloused hands and dispatching them to an early grave. The day after they die, it will be as if they never lived. Poof! Don't want to think about it? No problem: “The Walking Dead” is on!

I can't force people to spend their time more wisely, but I can compel myself to honor the memories of the forgotten, however briefly. Sometimes, as here, I stumble across a thin vein of like-minded souls. I try to follow their trail as much as I can, even though reading about the relentless misery of the poor can be, I admit, something of a chore.

In 1930s Vietnam, there was a brief fashion for writing about the lives of the bottom-most level of society. The most-frequently-translated practitioner of this school was Vũ Trọng Phụng, who appears in the middle of this volume with the shortest of the three translated novella-length pieces of reportage, about the lives of domestic servants in Hanoi. (Vu's novel Dumb Luck has recently appeared in a good English translation, and a long piece about VD clinics of that period has also recently been translated in book form.) Yokels from the countryside came into town in search of a better life and were treated worse than dirt for their trouble. This reporting is pretty good, but still the weakest piece in the volume.

The first piece is about what it was like to pull a rickshaw for a living in Hanoi's sticky heat and clammy cold. Spoiler alert: it was awful. The tales of rickshaw drivers scraping the insides of their opium pipes to get a few last toots of the residue will be disturbingly familiar to those who've been keeping up on the lit. of the crack epidemic. Then, as now, people would do whatever it takes to keep the misery at bay for a few more moments.

The last article is a memoir of a family's slide from the bottom rungs of the middle-class in a provincial town which is today two hours' drive from Hanoi. It's a little different in geography and content from the accounts of working people in the capital, but it is either well-written or well-translated, or both. (It's always hard for me to tell where the writer's art starts, and the translator's begins.)

The book starts with 50 pages of embarrassing gibberish by the translators, who apparently felt that non-fiction accounts of long-gone working people were more dramatic when embedded in Marxist/academic cant. A sample (p. 35): In some ways, this social self was already prefigured in various texts that were associated with the rise of feminine self-awareness in the enhanced publishing opportunities of the 1920s, and it will be helpful to set Nguyen Hong's autobiography against one of these. If this sample doesn't appeal to you, rest assured the whole section can be skipped without any loss of understanding.

[baelgia · Rating 5 out of 5]

*Have only finished reading the intro and third story, "Days of Childhood" by Nguyen Hong.