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Profile of and interview with writer Duong Thu Huong, former Vietnamese Communist Party member who was expelled as traitor and became dissident; she has been allowed to travel to Europe for second time since spending eight months in prison in 1991; her latest book, No Man's Land, was published...
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"PARIS, July 9 - Wearing an elegant tweed jacket and sipping fruit juice in a Left Bank cafe here, the writer Duong Thu Huong hardly cuts a threatening figure. But Ms. Huong, 58, evidently does in her native Vietnam, where she has spent time in jail, has seen her books banned and for 11 years was denied a passport to travel abroad.
Her sins, it seems, are many. Her novels dissecting life under one of the last Communist regimes are published and well received in the West. She is a former Communist Party member who was expelled as a traitor. And above all, she is a dissident -- a "dissident whore," one party leader said -- who refused to be silenced even after spending eight months in prison in 1991.
Now, for the second time, she has been allowed to travel to Europe. But in a sense, Vietnam has traveled here with her. She is willing to talk about her life and to discuss her five novels, including her latest, "No Man's Land," published in the United States in April. But her priority is to denounce the Hanoi government as irremediably corrupt and abusive.
"It is my mission to do so on behalf of those who have died under this shameful regime," she said, speaking fluent but heavily accented French. "Because I have a small reputation abroad, I have to say these things. I have to empty what is inside me to feel my conscience is clear. The people have lost the power to react, to reflect, to think. Perhaps I will give people courage."
She feels her message is more urgent than ever. Thirty years after the Vietnam War, she sees the regime gaining acceptance abroad by opening up its economy to foreigners under a communism-with-capitalism strategy. She also noted with alarm that Vietnam's prime minister, Phan Van Khai, was received by President Bush at the White House last month.
"It is a brutal and ignoble regime that does lots of things to fool foreigners," she said during a long conversation. "If Bush supports this regime, it will be engaging in another war that will drive the people into the mud. This time, instead of using B-52 bombers, it will be using the hands of native turncoats."
Until now, she went on, the Vietnam War served to justify the government's grip on power.
"All its propaganda is designed to feed the myth of the war, to flatter and threaten the people," she said. "It tells them: 'You are a heroic people. You should be proud of your history. But never forget that it was the party that led the people to victory.' It deceives the people with blind pride."
Ms. Huong's life, too, was inevitably shaped by the war.
As a child, she said, she was refused a good education because she belonged to neither the peasantry nor the proletariat class: her grandmother was a landowner who in the mid-1950's moved to South Vietnam. But, at 16, Duong Thu Huong (pronounced zung tu hung) was allowed to join a nomadic theater troupe and, showing talent, was then sent to a college training actors, dancers and singers for popular entertainment.
There she again did well and in 1968 was offered the chance to study in the Soviet Union, East Germany or Bulgaria. "But I chose to go to the front because our country was at war and my ancestors have always fought for our country," she said. "I joined a group of young artists performing for the troops and victims of the war. The slogan was: 'Our songs are louder than the bombing.' We would silence the screams with songs."
But even then, she recalled, she noticed that party members enjoyed special privileges. A bigger shock followed when South Vietnamese prisoners arrived in her zone. "I discovered the truth that we were also fighting Vietnamese," she said. "Yes, we were being bombed all the time by the Americans, but they were high in the sky and I never saw them. I only saw Vietnamese."
She kept her thoughts to herself, as she did after the war when she met up with relatives in Ho Chi Minh City (as Saigon was renamed) and realized that the defeated were better off than the victors. By then, she was organizing artistic events in the city of Hue. When she was 30, she returned to Hanoi to work in the government's movie industry. "I wrote five screenplays which were made into bad films," she said, "but I couldn't live off my salary."
One freelance job proved to be another eye-opener. Working for a group of army generals, she ghost wrote a history of the Vietnam War. "The generals would discuss among themselves how to correct my text to suit their interests," she said. "They wanted to increase the number of Vietnamese who died to show that no sacrifice was too great for the people."
Ms. Huong said she was invited to join the Communist Party in 1979 and did so reluctantly in 1985 at the urging of friends who hoped she could help them. That was also the year that her first novel, "Beyond Illusions," was published in Vietnam to popular acclaim, selling 100,000 copies. But two years later, she said, with the publication of "Paradise of the Blind," another best seller, her problems began.
"The party's general secretary, Nguyen Van Linh, offered me a house of the kind reserved for ministers if I would remain silent," she said. "I told him, 'I fight for democracy, I place myself on the side of the people and would never agree to be like a minister.' My principle is that you can lose everything, even your life, but never your honor."
Soon afterward, she said, she evaded two assassination plots. She wrote a speech for the 1989 Congress of Vietnamese Writers called "The Party Should Thank the People" and was duly drummed out of the party. In 1991 she was jailed for selling secret documents to foreigners, the "secrets" being her manuscripts. Unsurprisingly, her next three books -- "Novel Without a Name," "Memories of a Pure Spring" and "No Man's Land" -- have not been published in Vietnam.
But all her novels have been published in several foreign languages. And thanks to Will Schwalbe, then at William Morrow and now editor in chief at Hyperion, they have also appeared in English. "I first heard about her when she was in prison," Mr. Schwalbe said in a telephone interview from New York. "I read 30 or 40 pages of 'Paradise of the Blind' and was blown away. It was the first Vietnamese novel ever published in the United States in translation."
Ms. Huong's novels are not openly political, but their leitmotif is the disillusionment of people trapped by a fate beyond their control. Reviewing "Memories of a Pure Spring" in The New York Times in 2000, Richard Bernstein wrote: "One reads it certainly for its politics, but even more for the depth and complexity of its characters who strive to define themselves in a world that still puts everything and everybody in one or another category of ideology and national aspiration."
In 1994, through the intervention of Danielle Mitterrand, France's first lady at that time, Ms. Huong was allowed to come to France to receive an award. She was offered political asylum. "I said, 'Thank you, but in my country fear crushes everything, brave soldiers have become cowardly civilians,"' she recalled. "'That's why I have to return. I return to do one thing: to spit in the face of the regime."'
This time, the Italian Embassy in Vietnam obtained her passport, but after a few weeks in Italy and France, she again intends to return to Hanoi, where her two children and four grandchildren live. (Ms. Huong was divorced in 1982.) And once there, if the government has no other plans, she says she will continue writing. "I am an idealist," she said, before adding with a mischievous smile, "and an imbecile, too."
A version of this article appears in print on July 11, 2005, Section E, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: Vietnamese Writer Won't Be Silenced.
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