Giấy Vụn

Hi all,

I just received a literary publication by email from Saigon.

Intellectuals there have been using photocopy and now the internet for

some time to express themselves. What catches my eye about this

publication is that it is issued by a publishing house: Nhat xuat ban

Gia^~y Vu.n.

Literary and general publishing in Viet Nam has been deadly dull for a

long time. In some ways it has got worse since doi moi. Part of the

reforms were to reduce the subsidy to editorial staff. While the

business staff were freed to entrepreneurial ventures, that income has

stayed on the business side of the house. So there is no link between

editorial vision and return.

Where during the war we had such intellectuals as Nguyen Khac Vien and

Huu Ngoc dodging bombs to run the Foreign Languages Publishing House to

clear national purpose, and then after the war serving the people with

an abundance of publications, now we have editorial staff reduced to

selling their franchise, the government monopoly on the press reserved

to the publishing house directors, to whoever has cash.

Worse, the only income they expect or plan to get from selling a

publishing license is the bribe itself. I was dismayed on a tour of

publishing house in Ha Noi in 1994 to see basement after basement of

books placed in this manner by foreign NGOs that clearly weren't going

anywhere.

It is a depressing situation, one you don't have to speak Vietnamese to

pick up on. When I was showing the former Minister of Education of the

Youth International Party around Ha Noi in 1995, I could barely get him

out of bed after the first day. The miasma of fear and mediocrity tied

to intellectual life in Viet Nam, conveyed by the situation of

publishers, is stupefying, commented on eloquently in essays by insiders

like Nguyen Huy Thiep.

So the email I got yesterday is something new, to me anyways, some

people sitting in Saigon not just passing essays around in photocopy or

posting poems on the Internet but actually calling themselves a

publishing house. It's a testment to the improvisation and forward

thinking exemplified by such as Vien and Ngoc in the old days within the

Party, and amply documented throughout the rest of civil life by

Kierklievet and DiGregorio.

Now will someone tell me what Gia^`y Vu.n means?

Dan

Dan,

When we talk Giay Vun, we talk my language!. Giay Vun is waste paper,

literally, the bits of waste paper that are scattered along the streets.

At least, that how the junk buyers refer to it.

Mike

What a fabulous name for a publishing house, especially in Saigon!

Joe Hannah

This Gia^'y Vu.n publishing house sounds a bit unusual for me. As far as I

know, there's no private publishing house in Vietnam until now. There're in

total 42 publishing houses in the whole country. I don't know where this Giay

Vun house comes from, but if it exists, it has to belong to some "umbrella"

state organization. And I'm even not sure if such a provocative (though very

interesting) name can be approved.

CamLy

Then again, there are definitely now some fully private movie

production companies in Vietnam, which would probably have to pass a

higher set of start up standards than publishing companies. The

Enterprise Law required that specific legislation would need to be

introduced to block start ups in particular sub-industries.

markus

I think the name itself says that it's a samidatz type of publication. I am

not aware of any publishing house sending out their products overseas via

mailing lists, esp. if it's a journal type.

Literary journals in Vietnam have enough problems finding an audience.

Marketing via mailing lists is perhaps furthest from the editors' mind.

Nguyen Ba Chung