This issue of Rising Asia is devoted to a series of literary portraits of Vietnamese writers, artists, and musicians. They are translations of the work of Dr. Ngô Thế Vinh, who is both a practicing physician and a prolific writer.
 Ngô Thế Vinh |
 Eric Henry |
Like most of the people he writes about in these excerpted studies, Dr. Vinh came into prominence in South Vietnam in the days of the Southern Republic (1954–1975). As a young man in Saigon in the 1960s, he began at once to combine literature with medicine, editing a journal and writing novels while at the same time going to medical school. In the 1970s, after graduation from medical school, he became an Airborne Ranger of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and served as a Green Beret MD in the Vietnam War. After the war, he suffered incarceration in communist labor reform camps for over three years (1975–1978). In 1983 he made his way to the United States, where he established himself as a physician while continuing to write. He currently lives in Southern California, where he is an internist, attending physician, and a clinical professor teaching at a Veterans Administration hospital in Southern California,
Dr. Vinh’s works include five novels, a book of short pieces related to the last days of Saigon prior to its conquest by the forces of North Vietnam, and a memoir of a journey he made along the entire length of the Mekong River, the purpose of which was to document the damage done to the river by Chinese mega dam projects. A number of the forgoing works have won prizes and exist in English translation.
Beginning around 2015, Dr. Vinh began writing the series of personal and artistic studies from which the items in this issue of Rising Asia are chosen, and of which thirty-nine exist so far. These studies consist of various elements: memories, anecdotes, descriptions of material and social surroundings, selections from correspondence, poems, and excerpted portions of articles and prose narratives. Since the author is a physician as well as a writer, he often discusses the medical problems faced by his subjects and uses their ways of dealing with their illnesses as an additional means of revealing character. No two of these studies is identical in form. The one thing that binds them together is that the author was a close friend of all the people he writes about. Dr. Vinh evidently does not write about people with whom he had no personal relationship, but this is scarcely a limitation, for he was friends with virtually everybody active in the arts and sciences in South Vietnam.
The people he depicts came to maturity in the South in the period 1954 to 1975. This was, in the South, a period of artistic freedom never previously achieved, and never subsequently duplicated in any Vietnamese society. Võ Phiến (1925–2015), essayist, novelist, and literary historian, characterized the literature that arose under the southern Vietnamese republic as follows:
In the Vietnam of 1954 to 1975, a totally different type of literature arose. Gay and sharp laughter spread freely over books and journals, laughter that attacked mistaken deeds and perverse policies, and made fun of elements guilty of unworthy behavior. . . . The objects of attack were provincial or national leaders and power brokers. The sound of laughter ran freely and noisily across all books and journals. At the same time, every view of human life, every faith, both fine and deluded, both noble and crazed, existed as well; one could seek to understand, expound, and promulgate these beliefs, just as one pleased. At no time before or after 1954–1975 in the South can one find any literary tradition in our country that developed in such a free and open manner.
The regime that took over in 1975 sought to eradicate this legacy by criminalizing it and by physically destroying all remnants of it that could be collected. One result of these acts is that the most complete collections of the literature of Vietnam from this period are to be found, not in Vietnam, but in certain U.S. university libraries. It seems that the most complete collection of Vietnamese literature created under the Southern republic is to be found in the library of Cornell University. This library has, for example, all forty-two of the books that the novelist Mai Thảo published before 1975, and it has all of the pre-1975 works of Ngô Thế Vinh.
The creators depicted in Dr. Vinh’s studies are of different types and temperaments, but most, if not all, were endowed with a quasi-monastic devotion to certain lofty artistic and social ideals. Most of them were subjected to years of harsh imprisonment in communist “labor-reform” camps subsequent to the fall of Saigon, and most, subsequent their imprisonment, risked their lives escaping from Vietnam in overcrowded, unseaworthy boats, after which they lived for months in Southeast Asian refugee camps, and at length came as refugees to the United States, where they gradually rebuilt their lives. Most of the figures who had published work in Vietnam before 1975 continued to be artistically productive in the United States.
Only a small minority of Dr. Vinh’s subjects chose to remain in Vietnam rather than risk an ocean voyage to seek freedom. These people each had to pay for their decision to remain by suffering a multitude of restraints on their activities. Two of Dr. Vinh’s subjects, the songwriter Phạm Duy and the painter Tạ Tỵ, chose, exceptionally, to return to Vietnam in their old age, after years of exile. This was possible because, at the time of their return, the Vietnamese government had somewhat relaxed a number of its previously existing controls and prohibitions.
Presented here are Dr. Vinh’s portraits of eleven individuals: Mai Thảo, a fiction-writer, editor and poet; Nhât Tiến, a novelist and playwright; Nghiêu Đề, a visual artist and book illustrator; Cao Xuân Huy, a war memoirist; Trần Mộng Tú, a poet and journalist; Dương Nghiêm Mậu, a fiction writer who remained in Vietnam after 1975; Phạm Duy, a songwriter, memoirist, and musicologist; Võ Phiên, a fiction-writer, poet and literary historian; Đinh Cường, a visual artist, poet, and art historian; Thanh Tâm Tuyền, an iconoclastic poet and fiction writer, and Phạm Hoàng Hộ, a botanist who devoted his life to the scientific study of the trees and plants of Vietnam. These figures had numerous interactions with each other, and each had his own way of coming to terms with war, oppression, exile, and modernity.
These studies may be regarded as a portrait of a nascent civilization which, though gravely injured, was by no means extinguished by the tragic events that transpired on Vietnamese soil in the 1960s and 1970s.
Aside from the items presented here, Dr. Vinh has written twenty-two others, including studies of Mặc Đồ (1917–2015), fiction-writer and translator; Như Phong (1923–2001), journalist, novelist and political analyst; Linh Bảo (1926–2024, female), novelist and short-story writer; Nguyễn Đình Toàn (1936–2023), fiction-writer, poet, composer, and host of a radio program devoted to music; Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng (1940–2014), fiction-writer, essayist, and editor; Hoàng Ngọc Biên (1938–2013), artist, painter, poet, novelist, and translator; Nguyên Khai (b. 1940), painter and sculptor; Phùng Nguyên (1950–2015), fiction-writer, essayist, and blogger; Phạm Biểu Tâm (1913–1999), doctor, surgeon, and educator; Ngủyễn Tường Bách (1916–2013), doctor and historian, and his spouse Hứa Bảo Liên (d. 2008), memoirist; Hoàng Tiên Bảo (1920–2008), doctor and surgeon; Tạ Tỵ (1921–2004), visual artist and memoirist; Trần Ngọc Ninh (b. 1923), physician; Lê Ngộ Châu (1927–1998), editor and author; Nguyễn Văn Trung (b. 1930), essayist, critic, and intellectual historian; Dolamide (1934–2021), Cham historian; Lê Ngọc Huệ (b. 1936), sculptor; Nghiễm Sỹ Tuấn (1937–1968), army medic and translator; Đoàn Văn Bá (1937–2020), ARVN officer and author; Trần Hoài Thư (b. 1942), author, editor and researcher; Phan Nhật Nam (b. 1943), soldier, memoirist, and historian; John Steinbeck (1902–1968), the celebrated U.S. novelist who served as a war correspondent in Vietnam; and finally a study, not of a person, but of a city district, “Book Street,” an area next to the Saigon central post office occupied exclusively by bookstores, each of which is an outlet for a publisher.
Ngô Thế Vinh was born in 1941. He graduated from Saigon University’s School of Medicine in 1968. During his years in medical school, he edited a journal, Y và Tình Thương (Medicine and Compassion) that published articles, editorials, and fiction. His novel The Green Belt (Vòng Đài Xanh), which deals with the problems of the Montagnard people in Vietnam’s central highlands, won South Vietnam’s 1971 National Prize for Literature. His other pre-1975 novels were Storm Clouds (Mây bão; 1963), Night Shadows (Bóng đêm; 1964) and Gusty Weather (Gió Mưa; 1965). After 1975, he was imprisoned in different communist reeducation camps for three years, a period that he used to improve his acquaintance with the Chinese language. He arrived in the United States in 1983, where, as a student at the State University of New York in downstate New York, he became a medical intern, then a resident, and finally a physician. He currently resides in Southern California, where he is a staff physician at the Long Beach Medical Center. He has continued to be active as a writer, having produced two works concerned with the ecological consequences of Chinese-built dams on the Mekong River, and two Vietnamese language books devoted to articles on South Vietnamese cultural figures from which the items in this issue of Rising Asia are chosen.
Eric Henry was born in 1943. He obtained a PhD in Chinese Literature at Yale University in 1979, and subsequently taught at Dartmouth from 1980 to 1982, and at the University of North Carolina from 1982 to 2011. He was employed as a freelance keyboard musician from 1961 to 1980 and was in the United States Army from 1968 to 1971. His army service included a one-year intensive course in Vietnamese at the Defense Language Institute at Fort Bliss, Texas, and a one-year tour of duty in Vietnam (1970–71). His publications include: Chinese Amusement: The Lively Plays of Li Yu (Archon Books, 1980), In Whose Eyes, a translation of the memoirs of the film director Trần Văn Thủy, and The Garden of Eloquence (Shuoyuan 說苑), a bilingual version of a Chinese Han dynasty compendium of historical anecdotes. He has prepared for publication a bilingual edition of another ancient Chinese work, Tales from the Principalities (Guoyu 國語). He has published various articles on early Chinese history and culture in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies and other journals, and articles on Vietnamese literature and historical legend in Vietnam Forum, Crossroads, and the Michigan Quarterly. He has been retired since 2011.
