By DAVID LIEBHOLD/Hanoi
APRIL 17, 2000 VOL. 155 NO. 15 - TIME ASIA
"Undeterred by a ban on her books and the seizure of her passport, Duong Thu Huong attacks the Hanoi regime for betraying the revolution."
Duong Thu Huong may be small, but she refuses to be intimidated by anyone--not the Communist Party apparatus, not the secret police, not even prison. She speaks about her persecutors with a broad smile and a hint of mockery, maybe even pity, in her sparkling brown eyes. Huong, 53, is one of Vietnam's best-known authors, though her books are effectively banned in her country. She is also one of the most scathing critics of the society that has emerged in the past 25 years. "In the war the Vietnamese were brave," she says, "but in peace they are cowards."
In 1991, while imprisoned without trial for her writings, Huong was told by an interrogator: "You will be smashed into dust." But the author of Novel Without a Name, Paradise of the Blind and three other works of fiction is still in one piece. She lives in Hanoi, unbowed and determined to speak the truth as she sees it. "The system in Vietnam is a combination of feudalism and Stalinist communism," she says, arguing that the country's leaders have exploited the memory of the war to justify their authoritarian rule. "They have built the war into an arch of triumph. But behind that arch are mountains of bones and rivers of blood shed by Vietnamese people."
Huong speaks from bitter experience. She traveled south from Hanoi in 1967 to lead a troupe of singers, entertaining North Vietnamese soldiers in jungle camps. Many of her comrades were killed over the next seven years, and Huong had to carry several of their corpses. "I didn't mind when they were still warm," she says, "but sometimes they were already cold." Huong lost hearing in her right ear when a bomb exploded, killing the girl sitting next to her. She rejoiced when Saigon fell. But a few weeks later, she saw the city's affluence and well-stocked bookshops, confirming her doubts about North Vietnamese propaganda, which said the war was aimed at liberating the south from oppression and suffering. "Other people were talking and laughing in the street," she recalls. "I sat alone and cried. I had to ask myself what I had been struggling for."
Back in the north with her two young children, she wrote screenplays to order for the Vietnam Film Co., winning popularity and five state prizes for a series of love stories. But Huong, fluent in French, spent most of her free time reading "deviant" literature, including critiques of the Soviet system. In the mid-1980s she began to write the serious novels that have earned her recognition abroad (including France's Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres) and trouble at home. "Foreigners may feel that there have been changes in Vietnam over the past 10 years, but those are only superficial--more buildings, more hotels, better-dressed people," she says. "This country is still governed by a dictatorship of a few powerful figures, with the assistance of the army and the police."
In 1995 authorities confiscated Huong's passport; it hasn't been returned. Plainclothes police follow her around. But she won't be silenced. Most of the leadership is "not very well educated," she says, while the people keep their opinions to themselves. The result: "Everyone makes the same speech." Everyone, that is, but Huong and a few dissidents for whom peace alone--and even rising living standards--is not enough.