Tu Luc Van Doan Collection

On Sun, 26 Mar 2000, Daniel Duffy wrote:

I've been hearing about the Tu Luc Van Doan collection that appeared in Viet Nam in 1999. The occasion for gossip is that these prose artists, poets, reporters, columnists, cartoonists, editors, publishers, and anticolonial activists are appearing together as canonical authors in Viet Nam.

The leaders of their group, Nhat Linh and Khai Hung, fled the revolution, and the idea is that they have not been promoted within VCP territory since then. That seems to be case, just from what I have on hand. My NXB Giao Duc and NXB Van Hoc collections of short stories from the 30s don't include their work. The afterlife of TLVD in VN has got to be more complicated than that, though. I've been reading criticism from VN that reflects a long and rich discussion of these authors.

I finally handled the collection, "Van Chuong Tu Luc Van Doan", in the Tu Luc bookstore in Westminster, CA, earlier this month. There are three thick volumes, bound in boards. They are a project of the Institute of Literature. They present Nhat Linh, The Lu, Tu Mo (v. I); Khai Hung and Hoang Do (v. II); and Khai Hung/Nhat Linh, Thach Lam, Tran Tieu, and Xuan Dieu (v. III) each in his own section.

The editors, Phan Tran Thuong and Nguyen Cu, provide biographical notes, publishing history, and offer brief selected criticism, old and new, at the end of each volume. Spot-checking the publishing histories, I notice some editions from RVN as well as RVN/SRVN, but not any from other nations.

You have to make choices when you present an author. The choice that is easy for me to point out, just hefting these books in my hand, is the choice to represent writers who thrived in many genres, as collaborators in controversy with each other, in the form of a collection of individual authors of fiction or poetry. The other obvious choice, something I looked for immediately, was to report the fate of Khai Hung in silence. The artist came to a bad end, on the run from revolutionaries, and I would like to hear all about it from someone who has access to records and witnesses and does not have an obvious agenda to slander the revolution.

Beyond that, I'm not yet competent to say more about these books, except that to my nose they have an air of care and skill. It's good to have them, but I want to page through Phong Hoa and Ngay Nay, the TLVD periodicals, for myself, and look at the monograph editions of the time. I would very much like for a scholar, working at liberty with good materials and proper support in a critical and cosmopolitan environment, to narrate in full the mortal careers of these fascinating men.

I am familiar with their careers as immortals. The works of the TLVD have been in continual reprint and new editions for decades, among those who fled the VCP more successfully than KH managed to. I can't walk through a Vietnamese bookstore in the

US, often even a grocery store or video shop, without seeing the subtitle, "Trong tu luc van doan" on a book, and without seeing puns and references to the names of the group's magazines, publishing houses, and famous books, on the covers of the most contemporary publications. From groping around in archives, it seems to me that such has been the case among Vietnamese people since they first fled the VCP.

There is an exuberance to the afterlife of the TLVD among the overseas people, an orientation toward the present moment, to the reader. I gather that it was this way in Saigon, too. Often the traces of TLVD have no history on them at all. There are photo-offset reprints of TLVD books that carry absolutely no publication data, not even the address of the mail-order house that distributes them.

Neil Jamieson elaborates how yin and yang call each forth in the social life of Vietnamese books. I find that a useful way of thinking about these things.

After all, I handled the yang, establishment, Vien Van Hoc collection of TLVD in the very yin, entrepreneurial Tu Luc bookstore in Orange County. The collection itself is sponsored by an old, Ha Noi publisher, NXB Giao Duc, but actually is published by its new, Da Nang branch. Even within the three volumes, there is a dynamic of yang canon-building and yin consideration for the desire of the reader.

Right next to the hefty, subdued, TLVD volumes on the "Van Hoc" shelf in Tu Luc were slender, colorful paperbacks of reader's classics by individual TLVD authors, also recently published, of course by a Saigon press, NXB Van Nghe TPHCM.

I bought them all, like popcorn. I got:

Hon buom, by Khai Hung

Anh phai song, by Khai Hung

Doan tuyet, by Nhat Linh

Ngay moi, by Thach Lam

Tat den, by Ngo Tat To

Goi thuoc la, by The Lu

There are nineteen others listed on the backs. These things are way yin, a dynamic response to the Ha Noi tomes. The only editors credited are production people, and there are no notes or introduction at all. Compared to the US reprints, the print is bright and clean, the chapbook trim size leaps into the hand, and there is no "Trong Tu Luc Van Doan" legend on the front.

I judge books by their covers all day long. Each cover of this series invites the reader to open the book, comments on the text while you read it, and represents the issues of the book after you've read it. The back cover tells you more things to read. It's a really wonderful project. Some kid is going to read these things the way I read Kim and Treasure Island and The Big Sleep, with no idea that the twentieth century even happened.

Dan Duffy

Graduate student

Department of Anthropology

University of North Carolina

Chapel Hill, NC

27599 USA

919-932-2624

<dduffy@email.unc.edu

From: Sinh Vinh <sinh.vinh@ualberta.ca

To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu

Subject: Re: Tu Luc Van Doan books

Dear Dan,

You might be interested in knowing that back in 1997, while in Hanoi, I had an opportunity to attend and observe the defence of a "Pho' tie^'n si~" (as I do not wish to open a can of worms, I shall not attempt to provide an English equivalent of this degree) dissertation on Nhat Linh at Vien Van hoc. The defence had been announced on newspaper(s) and was opened to the public. To me, it was quite an exciting experience.

Before ddo^?i mo+'i, selecting such a topic to write one's dissertation would have been unthinkable in Vietnam. One minor thing that surprised me at the defence was that the candidate cited Qua?ng Nam as Nhat Linh's birthplace, and no correction made by her supervision committee members. In actuality, we know that Quang Nam was this writer's nguye^n qua'n (original domicile/place of origin), and Cam Giang, Hai Duong (presently Hai Hung) was his birthplace (no+i sinh).

Last but not least, thanks for sharing your whiskey with me in San Diego two weeks ago.

Best.

VINH Sinh

From: "Stephen O'Harrow" <soh@hawaii.edu

To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu

Subject: Re: Tu Luc Van Doan books

Hello Dan,

For what it's worth:

One fellow who has apparently been insturmental in last decade's revivification of the TLVD is Phan Cu De of the VN literature dept. at the Truong Dai hoc Tong hop Ha Noi of yore. As I remember first meeting him in about 1982, he was rather staunchly behind the interpretation that the TLVD were worthless bourgeois romantics, but I guess he changed his views somehow (I shall leave to our fellow VSGers' imaginations how that might have come about) and, lo and behold, he comes out with a series of re-editions of TLVD in the 90s ("I owe it all to Doi Moi"), mirabile dictu.

As I remember, Tran Khanh Giu (a.k.a. "Khai Hung") was active in post WW2 politics (as were all the TLVD prime movers, with the exception of Thach Lam, whose reputation was saved by his having expired of TB at a tender age at the beginning of WW2), and his views/activities were most likely not totaly appreciated by some folks in the Viet Minh. I am not too sure if he was a member of the Dai Viet or active in some other group but, in any event, he was arrested (from the school where he was teaching and taken off to be shot by the river bank, I am told) in 1947 and never again heard from. A biography of Khai Hung was published in Saigon in the late 50s I believe and it is probabaly at the bottom of some old bookcase around this office if I can get some dynamite and reduce the pile of stuff in here and if I ever do I will let folks have the proper bibliographic references.

Aloha, Steve O'H.