from a writer' s diary : the phong / translated from the vietnamese by dam xuân cận

TENGGARA - October 1968
Dept. of English- Univ. of Malaya
Kuala Lumpir- Malaysia

                                           
Thephong*

                                         translated from the Vietnamese                                                                                                         by Dam Xuân Cân

          
                                         FROM THE WRITER' S DIARY

---
*  A selection of Thephong's poetry appeared in the April 1968 sisue of TENGGARA.


Saigon 1968

I started writing in 1952 in Hanoi  -  in the first days of the Vietminh-launched autumn winter offensive when the rumble of artillery reached even the capital.  My
mother was the last of the Đỗ clan to be reported as lost after the fall of my native town Nghĩa Lộ.  I felt compelled to write in my lonely state.  Writing then brought me some solace.

As the beginning of 1953 when I ceased to receive any money from my mother, I was obliged to embark on journalism of the humblest sort.  I was charged with collecting news tips around the four districts of Hanoi nad the corts as well. I also assumed the duties of a proof-reader in the afternoon and evening. Whereas my colleagues received one thousand five hundred piasters monthly, my boss Vũ Ngọc Các paid me one thousand.  I had to earn my daily bread by the sweat of my brow.

I came to South Vietnam before Dien Bien Phu and the subsequent Geneva Agreements.  Of my first ten years of my profession as a writer, I was an official on a contractual basis for eighteen months only.  I was known under the pen name ThêPhong coined by LTD and myself at the foot of an electric pole in front of my aunt villa in Chợ Đuổi Street.  This magical name keeps ringing in my ears.

In those days, there were very few Notherners and life was pretty hard for me.  The highest price I enjoyed for a review was one hundred and fifty piasters.  At that time, I had in store some memorial novels dealing with life of my montagnards in my homeland in the nothernmost part of North Vietnam.  They were  Tình sơn nữ
 ( A Highland Lass's Love) written in Hanoi, Đợi ngày chiến thắng ( Waiting for Day of Victory), and Gái Nghĩa Lộ  ( A Girl from Nghĩa Lộ)  , written in Saigon.  The royalties for this trio were three thousands piasters for the first edition of two thousand copies.  It was really great for an apprentice writer like me.  The public received my novels with much enthusiasm.

The charge that I held many a critic in slight contempt was partly justified.  The so-called critic could not fail to acclaim any book by any influtential man.  Take this case.  When a book by [Phan Văn] Tạo was released, lots of provincial cadres offered to sell it and some tens of newspapers were quick to comment on it favourably.  Even a minister in Bảo Đại' s  era wrote a partisan review in his extremely polished style in le journal d' Extrême Orient the prominent French language daily in Saigon.  I knew and I still believe he did not write it out of sincere admiration.  When Phan Văn Tạo presented his book to Nguyễn Đức Quỳnh, then adviser to the Minister, the latter said, " You're only a writer with half of your being because you're only acquainted with the pink side of things."  To quote Jan Kott,

         Uniformity of opinion writing intellectuals is always a bad thing. The more complete it is, the worse the ornen is.  Uniformity of poorly informed opinions are all the more so.  We deplore conformity.  It's like witnessing a farce to hear a Minister of Culture Affairs makinga place to  writers to work harder while he did not believe in literature.

Although the situation then was not so bad as in Poland where writers were commi- ssioned by the government, we are heading towards such a course of things.  After the war many writers who could not put up with privation, hunger, and misery have dropped their sense of mission.  Here is another quotation by Jan Kott,

        What worrie me is no the fact that many Polish stories are badly written, but the fact that many Polish writers are standing around and telling lies.  As a critic, I feel  it is any duty to scrutinize  the  artist's motivation, that is, real behaviour or his attitude towards life.  I cannot praise a book  if it does not reflect some concern about life.  I felt nauseous when literary awards were decided by government officials who had very little knowledge, if any,  of literature.  

Can government officials become great writer ?  Perhaps, but only something like one out of a million.  The majority of them only uphold the order of the Town Hall clock, not that of the Eternal  Clock.  

I was never keen on behaving myself and writing as if I had my head in the clouds.  Only those to whom luxury and misery make no difference and who do not compromise with their conscience can understand me.  For this I wrote these words by Essenin in capitals  : DRINK WITH ME, O SUFFERING FEMALE DOG!  DO COME AND DRINK WITH ME !  In alien Paris, after losing his money Mayakovsky aked for help from friends and had to swear, shrugging his shoulders,  " How could these lousy bastards dare to think of generosity."

Those who insist on having a tasty breafast with a gulp of delicious coffee, those who enjoy the wishful thinking of having contributed to national culture after attending functions held in luxurious hotels has better and read my books if they wish to avoid disappointment.  My sort of rugged literature is definitely not to your taste.  Don't torture me any more.  Stop giving me the fly-caused itchy sensation to a pussy wound.  You can go and pick up pretty girls, suits expertly tailored in cities as far as Paris, a set of wierd buttons, a new pipe, a specially imported on a top bottle of perfume.  Sophisticates, you are surely much smarter than I can afford to be.  Most of us writers are lucky if we have enough for ourselves to eat, let alone feeding wives and kids.  We write because we cannot escape it, being victims of what we may all complexe d' obession .


                                                         ***

In the last ten years of writing how I did live ?  Time and again, I faced hunger, humiliations of all sorts and committed such unsavoury acts as theft and extortion of money from friends.  All sorts of queer things.  All my enemies can use these to discredit me if they want to; there is no need for them to forge any other accusations. Or,  they can just quote from my published autobiography Nửa đường đi xuống ( Midway in my Life' s Journey), wherein the author is never evasive about any issue, however touchy it is.  I have never practised blackmail and I am living victim of blackmail; I have never been a vandal and I am branded a literary vandalist un-
honourably.  I am just an agnostic - never an atheist.   I am condemned of being a Judas, the traitor who sold out Jesus Christ.  An innocent I was reported to be chief of the destructive commitee.  All this happened to the simple writer that I was when the tempo of my literary activities as an all time low.

In France the great playwright Jean Anouilh swore he would never write for dailies.  I cannot but thoroughly agree with him, knowing what rubbish Vietnamese dailies are.  As a former journalist, I cannot believe my eyes when I read all the rubbish in the newspapers.  Fortunately I am no longer a journalist.  I was once a contractual official for eighteen months because of hunger and because of my lack of courage.  Afterwards, I served again as an official for six months.  According to the contract,
 I was to receive five thousand  piasters a month.  After two months, I was given four thousand only, due to the budget squeeze.  I was forced to resign when I learnt there would be a further cut in my salary.  And it took me unbelievable patience to realise
a claim for the salary.   I was entitled to.  At last I was convinced that I could not hang on to the government payroll as long as I wanted to write.  Independence of thought is the sine qua non of any conscientious writer.

In my ten years of writing, there are at least three memorable events concerning three of my readers and myself.  I am going to ralate them one by one.  I did not know the first reader, a Quang Trung Training Center Canteen salesgirl.  [Nguyễn Quốc] Toàn, a man who had fed me for some time came to the Center as a national serviceman.   He took some of my books there to read and lent her my autobiography Nửa đường đi xuống ( Midway in My Life's Journey) .  Upon returning it to him she said, " I think I should lodge a complaint against you.  I was so absorbed in reading the Thephong you lent me I forgot to watch the customers.  As a result, I lost a couple of fountain pens!".  Nguyễn Quốc Toàn also said he was allowed to buy on credit.  I felt immensely proud of having such a keen reader.  The second reader was a Faculty of Letters student from Central Vietnam who met me in the street.  He stopped to say, 
" Hello there " and then continued, " I know you because I've read your book Nửa đường đi xuống which my brother bought.  I can recognise you from your photo on the jacket."

Heisitatingly, he asked me whether I has lunch.  It was around three in the afternoon then.  I was deeply moved knowing my account of hunger in the autobiography was very convincing.  I have not seen him since and do not even recall his name.  But I would will recognise him if I saw him again and I remenber the address he gave me, 66 Phó đức Chính St.  I did not go then.  The third event occurred during I visit I paid in 1963 to Tùng Nghĩa, the settlement area reserved for the Tháis of Lai Châu , Sơn La and Nghĩa Lộ.  I had brought a camera with the intention of taking snapshots of the sweet Thái girls -- the beautiful flowers of my hometown Nghĩa Lộ.  I was a bit disappointed because I did not see any girl in the traditional dress.  When my friend and I stopped in front of a house next to a well I struck up a conversation with a Thái woman.  When her daughter of about seventeen or eighteen overheard me speaking in Thai she came out to join us although she was ill at the time.  I asked her in Vietnameses whether she was Thái.  She nodded and very graciously she invited us in. We sat around a table made of enough unplaned wood.  She asked us where we came from and what we were doing.  Before I could reply my friend hastily declared I was a writer.  She put out her tongue and frankly confessed she was very much afraid of journalists.  Then she sked me about my job.  She let me know that she read a "forest"  story about Thailand and had enjoyed it very much.  I enquired about the title of the book and the name of the author.  I also asked her if she had kept it.  She went in and brought it out.  The cover of the book was  torn and covered with signatures of all sizes and descriptions and in all sorts of ink.  The student accompanying me was very young and did not know much about me except that I was a writer.  Looking at the jacket, he said in surprise, " Here he is,  the author of this book."  I was deeply touched that my book was appreciated by a girl in this isolated place -- a girl from my hometown.  I told her I wrote it a long time ago.  She praised and criticized me at the same time.  According to her, the description of life in Thailand was accurate; but I had made a mistake in using the word koóng khảu for kóm khảu.  I learned that her name is Lò Lệ Thu or La lệ Thu if it is Vietnamesed.  But I prefer the first. Later I wrote a dedication to her at the beginning of my book of poetry Trước mắt nhìn thi sĩ ( Under the Poet's Eyes) written in Dalat in this period.  Those who cared for me most were poor people.

Let's stop wondering about the innumerable manifestation of hypocrisy in a society like Vietnam.  Let's not forget Vietnam has been under a process of disintegration for eighty years under French dominatiuon and twenty years of grinding war.

When I come to their lines it is eleven in the morning.  People are battling with each other right next to my boarding house.  The cause of it all ?  The rubbish from foreign-operated tracks stationed near the rubber plantation.  They hope and so I do.  But my hope is only that I would be able to write about their hard life, their relentless struggle for life in this hard core prostitute-inferred area. After probing deeper into their motives, I no longer feel nausceous.  They are just human beings.  Let us struggle for life, no matter how much sweat we will have in shed.  I wrote about them in  Khu rác ngoại thành ( The Rubbish Tip outside the City ).*
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* Thephong:  Khu rác ngoại thành 
  ( The Rubbish Tip outside the City, Dai Nam Van Hiên, Saigon ( 1963.)

How to sum up my experience in ten years of writing?  What makes me so bitter was just the sheer lack of courage on the part of the so-called intecllectruals, writers, artists, enginners of the masses' soul -- in short the backbone of any viable society. What makes me still hate them like hell is simply their hypocritical preaching about humanity's love and so on.  And I wrote,

          Be assured , intellectual worms who cling to the vegetable tops
          When you die, you'll occupy three-meter-long tombs
          And these bitter lines of poetry,
          Suddenly I was dumb-struck for the fact of my country was in full plight
          I live in Saigon the year round without a  warm coat
          Witnessing my people searching for food around the foreign-operated
                                                                                         rubbish dump
          I am standing pensively at the Bảy Hiền crossroads
          Watching kids growing on bread scattered on the earth
          And the older boy presenting his brother with a piece of chocolate
                                                        picked up from the roadside
          I cannot contain my anger ...
            Why on earth did they dare consider art as mere ornament
          The white-collared students by day turned artists by night
          The visiting-card supported poets are so numerous
                                    the painters cannot promptly carry out the orders
          All of them was using literature the same way as bar hostesses
          Look!  The millionaire's poet son is expressing his pity for beggers
          The ex-sub-prefecture chief is expounding a new way of life
          Can we believe in the love for humanity expressed in his book
          With a fervid  tone which can be matched by a judge's voice
          While he keeps giving his dog a daily ration better than a Viet's.

          When I visited Thai's settlers in Tùng Nghĩa ( Dalat )
          I was struck by this scene:
                 Thai kids have water in their moths, craving for sticky rice
                 And they cry because this Têt they won' t have firecrackers
          When their parents share their sadness, who is in a position
                                                      to tell them to be cheerful
          Thinking of what the future holds for them, I give this conclusion:
                  And this society, this life, this sun is still as dark as night itself
                  I believe my sane statements scattered here and there will shed
                  light on reality, and  consequently will help politicians to do
                  something about this shocking state of affairs
          O the people who have lived through many years of ordeal due
          to the communists and colonialists and the Fanoti rulers:
                  The million square meters of cultivated land
                                        belong to my countrymen
                   The million lines of poetry which can become
                                         directives for this nation in the future
                   Should be preceded by the million lines of poetry
                                      cataloguing the hardship of today ...

                                                                 ( Trước mắt nhìn thi sĩ -
                                                                 Under the Poet's Eyes )

After a full breakfast considering of steak and casse-croute a friend of mine, aged 50, gave me this 'advice'  reassuringly: " Go one like this for someone, man.  After you get it won't long before you understand us better and then it's entirely up to you to hate or pity us. "  I was really upset, although for a very brief moment only.

A lot of indecent intellectuals who used to be very keen on doing good to the public in pre-war times tried by any means to achieve wealth in the post-war period.  And their famous excuse was that they did such and such a thing because of wives and kids.   What a shame for them.  And what a pity for the women who are their wives and the boys who are their children!  Unsucessfully writers have the potential to become efficient censors or alert informers.

I think I will get married.  This year I am thirty-two.  Accoding to Shin Nai An who wrote that masterpiece of Chinese fiction, All Men Are Brothers.  I should not get married at this late age.  But if I do, I will strive to feed my wife and children by the sweat of my brow.  I am no different from you, nor do I want to be because I still cannot afford any other thing than red rice, dried fish, chilly and pepper.  But I' m
 a bit different from you because I have the guts to say that I have been a bloody liar or I have robbed needy friend.  I am not a coward and I know what I am doing for my country literature.  And this is the reason, I could not help writing this short account of my life as a writer.  I am not simply a man beset  by narcissim.

In 1959 writer Thiên Giang wrote an open letter to Nguiễn Ngu Í dicussing my case. Mr Ngu Í has shown  me the letter. He also expressed his desire to see me in his residence at Xóm Chuồng Ngựa,  Gia Định Province to have the opportunity to praise my efforts in promoting the national literary output.  that isenough for me.  I want to say thanks to the journalist who jokingly said, " Never think that there are such word as Thephong in the Vietnamese language. Never mention them ."

thephong

       ( TENGGARA, Volume II,   Number 2   1968 - p. 52 - 57).