Interview with Trương Huy San (Huy Đức)

To begin, please tell us your name, birthdate, and birthplace.

My mother and father named me Trương Huy San.

I was born in 1962, but my parents had many children and the government of the north in those days did not keep thorough birth records. As a result, I don’t know the precise day of my birth. In my official family background file [lý lịch¹], I once declared that I was born on August 20, 1961, but the real year of my birth is 1962.

I was born on the Thạch Ngọc Collective Farm, in Thạch Hà District, Hà Tĩnh Province. This state-run collective farm was once an important symbol of the virtues of socialist economics for North Vietnam.

Can you share a bit about your parents and your class background?

My father, Trương Huy Dưỡng, was born in 1913. This August [August 2013] he will be 100 years old. My mother, Nguyễn Thị Tám, was born in 1926. She died in 2010 at the age of 85. My mother and father were originally peasants. During the August Revolution in 1945, my father joined the Việt Minh and later enlisted in its army. My mother became a volunteer laborer [dân công] for the Việt Minh during the anti-French resistance. After the war, my father returned to his native place and became an original member of the Thạch Ngọc Collective Farm. To be selected to join a state-run collective farm was a great honor in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

How many siblings do you have and where are they now?

My parents had seven children. I have three older brothers, one older sister, and two younger sisters.

The whole family lives in Sài Gòn. After April 30, 1975, my oldest brother left the army, enrolled in the Gia Định Fine Arts College, and settled in Sài Gòn. I had another brother in the army at that time and one studying in East Germany. The brother in the army was assigned to Tân Sơn Nhất Airport after 1975. One younger sister attended a school of military technology and got a job repairing missiles thanks to my brother who worked in the repair shop for Division 367, which guarded Tân Sơn Nhất Airport.

I joined the army as well, spent time in Cambodia, and moved to Sài Gòn when I demobilized in 1987. After graduating from the Teacher Training College in Vinh, my older sister accepted a teaching post there as well. Although members of my family bear strong traces of our native place, all of us eventually settled in Hồ Chí Minh City.

Can you tell us a bit about your childhood and your experience growing up on the collective farm?

My family joined the farm the day it was founded in the late 1950s. By the time I was born, it had been around for several years and had many members. I don’t know much about it before my birth in 1962, and my earliest memories start several years later. It disbanded itself in the 1990s when Vietnam abandoned the economic model of state-led agriculture. We started to leave in the mid-1980s, as more and more members left.

I grew up in a poor area, but I was extremely fortunate to have been born on a state-run collective farm. It was the only place in the region that periodically ran a generator so that houses could light a sixty-watt bulb, making them the brightest homes around. It seemed like a miracle to us at the time. A second lucky thing was that we sometimes got to watch films screened outdoors. The narrators of such films left a big impression on us. In those days, each province had only one or two large collective farms. My home province of Hà Tĩnh had three collective farms, and they were advanced compared to other places. We tilled the soil, but in addition to our own labor and water buffaloes, we used tractors and mechanical plows.

I grew up in a poor region, but because we were the children of collective farm cadres, we enjoyed higher-than-normal rations: four meters of cloth per year and 250–300 grams of meat per month. Rice rations followed the size and age composition of one’s family. I think we received fifteen kilograms of rice per month. To supplement our rations, my siblings and I would scavenge firewood in the forest.

What was your schooling like, and how long were you in school?

I have vivid memories of primary school. Collective farms maintained good schools because the government wanted to cast socialism in the most positive light possible. Hence, our schools were better than those in surrounding areas. Nevertheless, our classrooms only had thatched roofs. I remember during second grade in 1969 hearing news that Hồ Chí Minh had died, and a commemoration was carried out in a hut. Later, we studied in that hut. Periodically, we had to bring stools from home to use while we studied.

I studied at the Thạch Ngọc Collective Farm from the start of primary school to the end of secondary school in grade seven.² In those days, every district had only a few high schools and there were just two in my district. I recall that although many students took the entrance exams, only a handful of middle school graduates were accepted into high school. In those days, it was hard to get into high school, harder than getting into college today. My siblings and I were lucky that we all passed the high school entrance exams. But we had to travel far to a district school. It was about ten kilometers from the collective farm to the high school, and we commuted by foot.

As mentioned, my father was a cadre of the collective farm, and he was such a good worker that for four straight years he won the official honorific “Emulation Fighter for North Vietnam.” In those days, being an emulation fighter meant something special. When the labor hero Hồ Giáo earned this title, he was invited to join the National Assembly.³ My father, too, was offered a position in Hà Nội, but he declined because he wanted to stay home and help raise his children. In those days, a ministry might invite someone from the provinces to take a post in Hà Nội, but you were not allowed to bring your family, and you could only return home occasionally. We felt grateful that my father made this difficult decision.

When my siblings and I started high school, my father woke up early so that we could get extra sleep. He prepared breakfast and packets of rice for us to take to school. When everything was ready, only then would he wake us up to eat. The boys walked by themselves to school, but my father accompanied my older sister seven or eight kilometers to attend a separate high school. Only when the sun was up, and the road was crowded with pedestrians heading in the same direction, did he return home to go to work. All of this was done on foot.

Can you recount for us any particularly sad or happy memories from your childhood?

My earliest memories date from when I was about four or five years old and coincide with that period of the war when the Americans bombed North Vietnam. My house and the collective farm were located near a branch of a road that led to the Hồ Chí Minh Trail into the south. There was a crossroads near me known as Khe Giao that lay along a common axis with the Đồng Lộc Crossroads. The latter was famous because ten girls had once been martyred there, but Khe Giao saw its share of carnage as well.

Many youth shock troop units were stationed there, including lots of girls in their late teens. Each unit was composed of hundreds of female troops led by one or two male commanders. When the roads were bombed, they were tasked with fixing the damaged sections.

I recall troop convoys traveling through this area and American planes firing flares at them, lighting up the whole region. These were strange flares; I still have no idea how they worked, but when they burst, they lit up a massive section of the sky, turning night into day and allowing the planes to attack targets moving along the road. Afterward, we gathered parachutes and aluminum pipes that descended from the sky with these flares. Children, including small ones age nine or ten, would hammer aluminum bowls and pots from the recovered flares.

Sometimes we saw an American plane plummet like a flaming torch. Next to my house is a hill that people still call “pilot hill” because a plane was once shot down there and an American pilot died. People from the area buried him on that hill. Nearby was an airplane engine that fell from the sky and landed on the ground at an entry point to a forest where we collected firewood. We used to climb atop the engine and play.

I’m not sure if these stories are happy or sad, but I grew up with them, and they remain moving to me. My village was located at a place through which infantry units marched on their way from the north to the south. Soldiers often stopped here for several weeks to rest and perform drills. There are hills, mountains, and rivers in the region, so it was a good place to drill before moving into similar terrain in the south. The soldiers who passed through often left behind some romantic relationships, but none of them ever returned.

I recall the story of a female neighbor named Lan born in 1950—so, twelve years my senior and sharing the same birth animal.⁴ She was beautiful, and several unit commanders who passed through fell in love with her. But they all died in the south. Finally, at the age of 40, she married a driver from our collective farm. In those days, drivers were high-status workers in North Vietnam.

A few more questions about the collective farm where you grew up: How big was it and how was it organized?

The collective farm provided my first understanding of socialist economics. The workers at the collective farm worked in the fields every day just like other farmers. But collective farm workers felt proud because they were viewed as cadres. When neighboring villagers saw workers heading to the collective farm, they’d say, “There go the cadres!” In other words, they were clearly differentiated from other farmers, including those who joined cooperatives [hợp tác xã] or tilled their own private plots.⁵

So, what did the collective farms do? Some grew oranges, others grew pineapples, and still others, like my collective farm, grew lemongrass. At the time, the oil produced from lemongrass was valuable. Lemongrass, as I’m sure Nguyệt Cầm knows, grows in immense fields. Once cut and harvested, it is boiled in large cauldrons, like in a steam bath, but these cauldrons are half the size of a house and are heated using coal.

As steam from the boiling lemongrass evaporates, a residue is produced that forms the oil. In those days, folks believed that if you massaged the oil vigorously into a wound, it would heal quickly. We heard that it was exported to the Soviet Union, but we never knew its true medicinal benefit or economic value. We only knew that workers who produced it received a stable monthly salary. And the size of the salary followed a fixed scale. Whatever quality of work you did, you earned the same salary every month. As children of cadres, we received fifteen kilograms of rice and five đồng per month.

Did children do work on the collective farm?

No. Children at that time lived under a true socialist regime. We enjoyed a much better life than farmers in the surrounding areas. We didn’t work. As children of cadres, we received fifteen kilograms of rice and five đồng each month. At that time, you could buy a bowl of phở for two hào and a kilo of rice for 2.5 hào, and so five đồng was a lot of money. Looking back now, I realize that workers on the collective farm could grow and harvest whatever they liked. But no matter how much they harvested, the amount of work credit that they received remained the same.

A normal starting salary was thirty-six đồng per month. Then it rose to forty-five and then fifty-four. Very few reached the level of sixty đồng per month or higher. To earn a full salary, all you had to do was to show up for work twenty-six days per month. You could go out to the field and just hang out and you would still receive the same salary.

I recall that when workers on the farm had nothing to do, cadres like my father had to invent make-work to keep them busy. For example, my father would tell them to go cut enough grass in one day to make bales that measured one cubic meter. Following the older men in the collective, I’d help arrange the grass into even cubes with clean corners on the outside. But inside the bales, there was often nothing; they could be empty so long as they appeared on the outside to form one cubic meter.

And once we made the bales, we had no idea what to do with them; they remained strewn around the farm. But this make-work was necessary for workers to log twenty-six working days per month and earn their salaries. The fate of this collective farm was tied to the government. After it stopped receiving state subsidies, it disbanded itself because it was impossible to make a living working in this way.

How did one become a cadre or a worker on a collective farm?

This followed the basic norms of the system. When I was growing up, the period when the collectives were founded had passed. When the farm was founded, members of my father’s generation were already in their 40s and 50s. They earned prestige for participating in the resistance, enlisting in the army, or joining the revolution at an early phase. My father could have been promoted to a higher position in the bureaucracy, but he chose to move to the collective farm. My mother followed him. There were others who joined the collective in their late teens. But after a while, I noticed that recruitment of new members ceased.

After 1975 and especially after 1976 when Lê Duẩn issued resolutions at the Fourth Party Congress to “move quickly, strongly, and resolutely toward socialism,” a wave of 18- or 19-year-olds from the surrounding region was recruited into the collective.⁶ At its peak, it had around one thousand workers, but I believe that this was during the final stage—or, at least, the final push to build socialism in 1977 or ’78. Afterward, the recruitment of new members ceased and the collective disbanded.

Did all members have houses on the collective farm? Did they eat communally?

It didn’t rise to that level. There were two kinds of households on the collective farms. There were nuclear families, led by a husband and wife, and there were unmarried people. Although it was called a collective, families had to build their own homes by going into the forest, cutting down trees, and chopping bamboo to build walls and roofs. There was also a popular way to construct private homes using a mixture of bamboo, dirt, and straw. However, unmarried workers often banded together to build group homes with individual rooms separated by bamboo walls. Each person received a room big enough for one bed made simply by laying a platform across two chairs. Every worker in the collective received a mat and a blanket.

When I was 11 or 12, my father built a new house, and I helped him cut trees in the forest and chop bamboo. The house was pretty. After 1977 or 1978, the government made special provisions for cadres like my father. He was granted a permit to enter the forest and cut down trees for the wood. I was 14 or 15 at that time, and I followed him into the forest where we cut down big trees and carved them into beams to make columns for a new wooden house. Prior to this, and prior to 1975 in general, all the houses were much more primitive. Hence, it was easy for us to poke a hole in the bamboo and spy on married couples living in those huts.

Those who lived alone had access to a communal kitchen. All single people in the collective farm received a rice ration, which they could cook as they pleased; they were not forced to eat communally. My sense is that socialism in North Vietnam, despite its excesses, was more tolerant of private life than socialism in Mao’s China.

Among the thousand members of your collective farm, how many were also Communist Party members?

Many. I remember that every production team needed to establish one party cell. The director of the farm was a bigwig for this locality. For party-related issues, he worked with the province. But for work-related issues, he corresponded directly with the Ministry of Collectives in Hà Nội. The collective farm was one of the only places where the leaders and their children could ride in cars reserved for the party elite (such as the Gaz-69⁷) to travel from Hà Tĩnh to attend meetings in Hà Nội.

Returning to your question, the party members in the collective, like everyone who joined the party, received a lot of glory—perhaps because they had earned a special commendation for labor productivity. For example, you might cut two cubic meters of grass per day instead of the assigned quota of one cubic meter per day. And if the work team head poked a hole in the middle of the bale of grass and found it solid and not empty, as I mentioned before, the workers could earn praise immediately. They might be admitted to the party there and then.

As for ideology, everyone at that time was following the path of socialism. On the collective farm, the form of the work force was socialist, and the only question was whether you might secure an invitation to become a Communist Party member.

You are known today as someone who holds unconventional views on Vietnamese history and politics. Was there anything special about you as a child that foreshadowed your original frame of mind as an adult? Or do you feel that you were just like everyone else around you?

It’s hard to say because I never knew what my peers were thinking. We played together as equals. Just like other kids, I rode buffaloes, hunted, climbed hills, and gathered fruit from the forest. Today I’m still close to friends from that era, including many who remained in their home villages after secondary school. When I go out and drink with them today, I feel really at ease, much more so than with professors like Peter Zinoman!

Perhaps one difference is that I read everything that I could get my hands on in those days—any paper with words that I found in my village. Books were hard to come by, and, of course, we could only read what was published by the government. Many were translations from Russian—How Steel Is Tempered, for example—or popular revolutionary works like The Gadfly or the Chinese novel Tracks in the Snowy Forest.⁸ I’m not sure if Nguyệt Cầm remembers Tracks in the Snowy Forest. There were also many books that were forbidden during that era—for example, books about romantic love during the resistance war like The Early Longan Crop [Nhãn đầu mùa].⁹ Ever heard of it?

One lucky thing about living on the collective farm was that its members came from all over the country, and so I came to recognize that my accent was a little different from a pure Hà Tĩnh provincial accent. There were southern regroupees from Quảng Nam and Quảng Ngãi and folks who had migrated from Hà Nội or Lai Châu or Sơn La. People from all over lived on the collective farm and they spoke Vietnamese in very different ways. Folks from different regions brought with them their own book collections. I borrowed a lot of books from people like this.

Did your parents have a book collection?

They did. My father loved to read. And although I love my mother, when I recall who lulled my siblings and me to sleep by reciting ca dao [folk poetry] or traditional lục bát [six-eight] verse, it was always my father, never my mother. When I was six or seven or eight, I started to notice that it was always my father—even though he was old by then—who recited ca dao to my younger sisters. In addition to reading, he liked to compose poetry, although it tended to be a certain kind of “cadre poetry” that praised the party, the government, and Chairman Hồ. He rarely wrote lyrical poetry and when he did, it was the kind of verse you find in school notebooks. Today, at almost 100 years old, he still jots down a few lines of poetry every day, in very neat penmanship.

Among books that you read during this period, were any published before 1954 or during the French colonial era?

No. Such books were extremely rare.

Did the library carry them?

The collective farm had no library. I don’t think the capital of Hà Tĩnh Province had one either. It was about fifteen kilometers from my house, and I don’t believe I ever saw a library there. Indeed, I never once saw a library during my childhood.

But didn’t neighbors have books that were published before 1945?

Remember that the collective farm was founded after the land reform and after our cultural revolution. Although Vietnam’s cultural revolution was relatively mild, I witnessed folks destroying temples and traditional communal houses. In my village, I once saw a regroupee from Quảng Ngãi who had been resettled on our collective farm sawing open wooden statues of the Buddha, trying to find gold hidden inside. I don’t know if he ever found gold, but he destroyed a lot of Buddhas. I tell this story to explain why books published under the old regime were hard to come by when I was growing up, at least in the area around our collective farm. After 1975, natives from my village who returned home after serving in the south brought with them books published under the southern regime. Hence, my exposure to reading material from outside of the socialist system started only after 1975, not before.

And you were only 13 or 14 at that time, correct?

Yes, I was 13. You might say that the most romantic book I read before then was Early Longan Crop.

Were there any other writers that influenced you in those days (other than the author of Early Longan Crop)?

I’m honestly not sure who wrote Early Longan Crop. Outside of titles such as How Steel Is Tempered, I only started to pay attention to the identity of writers much later. Hence, more than any book or author, what inspired my love of literature were my literature teachers. For example, I studied with one teacher from Nghi Xuân Village, the same native place as the poet Nguyễn Du. His name was Teacher Cẩn. I probably haven’t seen him for thirty or forty years, but I still recall the way that he taught The Tale of Kiều.

Love for The Tale of Kiều among Vietnamese has perhaps become a cliché, but it is real. It was not thanks to this poem that I developed a love for literature, however, but to the way that my teacher from Nghi Xuân taught it. The fact is that I was always better at math. Every year in school, I got selected to take the math exam, never the literature exam. And I occasionally won prizes for math, never for literature. It was only when I studied with Teacher Cẩn, around grade eight, that I began to write poetry. I’m grateful, however, that none of my early poetry has survived; I’m sure I’d find it extremely embarrassing.

Before we move on, are there any other memories from your childhood that you care to share?

My biggest dream as a teenager was to travel beyond my village and away from the collective farm. The first time I tried to realize this dream, I hid myself in a truck from the collective farm without telling my parents. It drove to the city of Vinh, about fifty kilometers from my home. On the way, there was a huge flood, and the truck got stuck in Bến Thủy. The truck and I did not return home until two days later.

Thinking back on it, I feel bad for my parents since they had no idea where I was. But luckily, someone saw me and told my parents that I was safe in Vinh and not to worry. That was the first time I visited a city. There, I saw a two-story house for the first time. Back then, most houses were made of thatch, and second floors were rare. When I went to Vinh a second time in 1978 or 1979, I saw the five-floor Quang Trung Apartment Building. It was like a picture from a dream.

I also mentioned how impressed I was by the mobile cinemas that came through our areas every month or two. I remember that before screening a Chinese or Soviet film, they would show a short Vietnamese documentary, often set in Hà Nội. One man from our farm often traveled to the Ministry of Collective Farms in Hà Nội to collect supplies, such as tires and gas. He knew Hà Nội well. During the film, he would constantly interject—“There’s West Lake!” or “That’s the city museum!” We were in awe of him.

Do you remember some of the other films you in saw those days?

Days and Nights at the 17th Parallel [Vĩ tuyến 17 ngày và đêm], The Rising Storm [Nổi gió], the Chinese film The White-Haired Girl [Bạch mao nữ], the Soviet film The Elusive Avengers [Những người báo thù không bao giờ bị bắt]. But movies were scarce. Most of them screened between 1973 and 1978; I don’t think I saw any before.

I also remember the first time I saw actors and actresses in person. I think it was during the performance of a Soviet play, Kremlin Chimes.¹⁰ Among the performers were Nguyệt Quế and Thế Anh. A makeshift theater had been set up outdoors. There was a roof over the stage but not over the audience, and there was a terrible, torrential rain that day. But the show went on, and no one in the audience left, despite the wind and heavy rain. It showed how hungry we were for spiritual food.

I remember a lot of movie characters from those days. I still know by heart the soundtrack of A Phủ and His Wife [Vợ chồng A Phủ], with lines such as “there were only two people atop the mountain, two people in love” [núi chỉ có hai người, hai người yêu nhau].¹¹

What were you doing on April 30, 1975?

I was 13, and I can never forget that day. Around that time, my older brother in [East] Germany had sent home a few bicycle accessories. My father was among a handful of people at the collective farm who was allowed to buy a Chinese Forever [Vĩnh Cửu] brand bike at a subsidized price. Our Forever bike with German accessories was quite fancy, and I was only allowed to use it from time to time. My father, my brothers, and I took turns using the bike.

On April 30, 1975, I rode the bike to school. I left my house very early so I could horseplay with my friends on a nearby hill. And during the horseplay, I lost the bike key. That afternoon, we heard the news of the fall of Sài Gòn over a loudspeaker. My sadness at the loss of the bike key was soon forgotten. But because I dared not break the lock to be able to ride the bike, I carried that heavy Forever bike home from school (it must have weighed more than a dozen kilograms). My mother punished me with a few lashes.

I had been following news about the war for several days. In my village, a few cadres used to listen to BBC radio news. It differed from the news that was being broadcast from Hà Nội, and I always eavesdropped, starting from when I was seven or eight. I don’t think other children followed news of the war the way I did. The moment we heard that the south had been liberated, everyone stopped playing; we stood in shock.

As I mentioned in the foreword to my book The Winning Side [Bên thắng cuộc], there was something burning inside me in those days. At school in the north, we learned about the misery and suffering of the south. After April 30, 1975, I felt that I must go south to educate the young people there, to help them to overcome their misery, and to teach them to be good people. I believed that they had been brainwashed by the schools of the Americans and the puppet regime. I wonder if North Korean youth today dream of liberating and educating the youth in South Korea in the way that I did in those days. I felt that this passionate ambition of mine was beautiful.

When and where did you finish high school? And what did you do afterward?

I did not have a chance to finish school. I completed grades eight and nine at the Lý Tự Trọng school in Thạch Hà District. I was in grade ten at the Phan Đình Phùng high school in Hà Tĩnh when the border war with China broke out, on February 17, 1979. I heard from broadcasts over the village loudspeakers that the “expansionist” Chinese army had opened fire and invaded across the Vietnamese border at 5:30 that morning. Hearing this news, I left my class and walked more than fifteen kilometers from Hà Tĩnh Town back to the collective farm. There, I went straight to the Farm Town Committee, a local administrative unit, and enlisted in the army.

As I mentioned earlier, my birth certificate lists my date of birth as August 20, 1961. Hence, although I was only 17, my official age was 18—old enough to join the army. A general mobilization order, allowing 17-year-olds to enlist, was issued on March 5. But I volunteered before that order came into effect. I joined the army at the beginning of March 1979.

At that time, two of my older brothers were in the army already; I was the third member of the family to enlist.

You joined the army without consulting your family? How did they take it?

I did not consult my family; rather, I notified them after the fact. My father did not say anything, but he saw me off. When my unit was stationed briefly in the district, my father biked to visit me twice, before my unit left for the northern border.

How was life in the army?

It was not quite as beautiful as I had imagined at the outset. After a period of training, which culminated in learning how to shoot live bullets, the army staged a swearing-in ceremony to award new soldiers the rank of private. Raising my hand to salute Senior Major Nguyễn Hữu Bá, the commander of Division 306, my body felt like it had been jolted by an electric shock. As on April 30th, when I had fantasized about educating young people in the south, I dreamed, at that moment, of becoming a general.

But after the oath-swearing ceremony, because I was good at math, I was sent to serve in an artillery scout squad. Our task was to determine the coordinates of targets. Later, I was assigned to the command platoon of Division 306, which supervised the artillery section of the division.

My work was not as difficult as the work of other soldiers. We would drive by jeep to elevated points in the border areas, get out, and climb to the top of hills. From there, we took measurements regarding targets and determined how best to aim the artillery. When battles broke out, we were already trained on our targets and simply ordered the artillery to open fire. Afterward, we remained on the top of the hills to observe outcomes. If we missed our target, we would recalculate and readjust the equipment to improve accuracy. That was my work. I was on the battlefield, but I never actually faced the enemy in the flesh.

Shortly after, I was sent to an officer training school. I wanted to study at the officer school for artillery units, but I was assigned to the chemical weapons division. There, we studied what to do if the enemy used weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear bombs or chemical weapons. Serious stuff! We studied chemistry and did lab work in hazmat suits. Once again, my knowledge of math was helpful in this work.

The time I spent at officer training school played a crucial role in my subsequent writing career. Like the collective farm, the officer training school attracted young people from different places—different battlefields, in this case. Some came from the Cambodian theater. Others had fought before 1975. And some, like me, arrived from the northern border. These soldiers possessed many talents. Some could play musical instruments. Others could really sing. And some wrote fiction and poetry. In general, officer training schools received the best soldiers from different units. Among them was Trần Ngọc Phong, who became a dear friend.

Trần Ngọc Phong is currently a film director. He is not very well-known, but his films are good. He is the son of the writer Trần Công Tấn.¹² His family is special. Two of his sisters studied at the music conservatory. One studied Tchaikovsky. The other went on to enroll at the Royal Academy of Music in London. As for Trần Ngọc Phong, he never studied music, but he could play any instrument beautifully. He used to play so we could sing. It was during this time that I came to know the songs of Trịnh Công Sơn, who happened to be a friend of Trần Ngọc Phong’s father.¹³ I was also exposed to many songs, including tunes written for soldiers from the Republic of Vietnam, such as “A Rainy Afternoon at the Border” [Chiều mưa biên giới].¹⁴

As a boy from the countryside, this world of artists and writers was very foreign to me. Trần Ngọc Phong maintained a thick scrapbook that dated from the Chinese border war. In it were inscribed words of encouragement from friends, including many famous writers and artists from the south. There were photos and prose from well-known figures like Tô Nhuận Vỹ, Hoàng Phủ Ngọc Tường, and Trịnh Công Sơn.¹⁵ I admired Trần Ngọc Phong and began to try to write a few short stories myself. I asked him to send them to his father and his father’s literary friends. Many of them kindly sent me comments and constructive criticism about my work. I hoped that they would send my stories to magazines for publication, but that never happened. My writing in those days had some literary value, but it was limited.

I finished officer training school in three years, from 1980 to 1983. All graduates from the chemical weapons officer training school got promoted to the rank of second lieutenant or lieutenant. I became a lieutenant and was sent to Sài Gòn for one additional year of schooling. Between August 1983 and August 1984, I studied the Khmer language and learned how to work with Cambodian people. Then, I was assigned to a military unit in Cambodia.

Let me talk a bit about my time in Cambodia. Two colleagues and I were sent there to “assist our Cambodian friends”—a euphemism that referred to helping them build a battalion. The three of us had to train everyone—including cooks, nurses, and drivers—and teach battalion heads how to organize a military unit and fight. We were given six months to train this unit. Cambodia was intense in those days. We were not in the hottest combat zones, but it was still not easy. Vietnamese soldiers faced all manner of attacks from Pol Pot’s forces. We lived together with Khmer people but feared that they were two-faced and susceptible to infiltration by Khmer Rouge agents. As a result, we were constantly on high alert. Many nights, for example, we covered our beds with blankets and mosquito netting but slept elsewhere. That’s what it was like to live in Cambodia in those days.

The year I spent in Sài Gòn, prior to the Cambodia assignment, was probably more important to me. I remained in close touch with members of Trần Ngọc Phong’s family that year. It was then that I first accessed their rich and diverse family library, which included all sorts of books that I had never encountered before. Once a week I visited the house, ate a meal there, and borrowed a few books. If I could not make it there the following week, Trần Ngọc Phong’s younger sisters biked to my school, retrieved the books that I had borrowed, and lent me new ones. I read many books that year. Sometimes, Trần Ngọc Phong’s sisters took me to their conservatory where I listened to genres of music that were unfamiliar to me—classical music and opera, for example.

During the rest of my free time, I roamed about Sài Gòn. It was 1983–1984 and many ex-RVN people were returning home from reeducation camps. This left a big impression on me. At virtually every intersection in Sài Gòn in those days, you would see an army of cyclo drivers and informal motorbike taxis. There were many more of them than customers—something like three to four drivers per passenger. Perhaps because supply exceeded demand by so much, underemployed drivers could often be seen reading books while waiting for business. Some read books in English. Some read in French. Some read thick tomes like The Brothers Karamazov and many other books that I had never heard of before.

I began speaking with them, and this is when I started to learn about the Sài Gòn intelligentsia as well as former officers from the old regime. Having just returned from reeducation camp, most of these guys had no idea about their futures. But I also noticed that their store of knowledge was quite different from comparable figures that I knew in the socialist system.

Were you living in an army camp?

Yes. I lived at the Military Specialist School, also known as School 481. It was smack in the center of Sài Gòn, at the intersection that connected Lê Văn Duyệt Street, February 3 Road, and August Revolution Road. My current house is still near there. As officers who were about to leave for Cambodia but living in the center of Sài Gòn, we enjoyed a lot of freedom to leave and enter the school grounds, unlike at other army camps.

Did you wear a uniform?

Outside of the school grounds, we wore civilian clothes. As officers, we were not required to wear uniforms during our free time.

How old were you then?

I was 21.

Did you get to know other people in Sài Gòn besides cyclo and motorbike taxi drivers? Did you meet any women?

Using a common northern saying, at the time I had “no shred of love to shroud my shoulders.” I liked several girls in high school and had a serious crush on one in a class below me. Later, she attended the Maritime College in Hải Phòng. (Or was it a school for aquaculture? I don’t recall exactly.)

We met once or twice when I was at the officer training school in Sơn Tây. But our bond did not blossom into love. I’m not sure if it was because I was an ugly young man, or it was just her. By the time I left Vietnam for Cambodia, I had never even held the hand of a woman.

During my time in Sài Gòn, to tell you the truth, I spent all my time reading books and talking to cyclo drivers. I did not have the courage to court Sài Gòn women.

Did you have many friends in Sài Gòn?

Most of my friends at the time were soldiers. Two of my best friends were classmates from the Sơn Tây school. One of them was Trương Minh Hoàng, the son of Colonel Trương Văn Đàng, the deputy chief of staff of Military Region 7. Their house was in Sài Gòn. My other close friend was Trần Ngọc Phong. I spent a lot of time at both Trần Ngọc Phong’s house and Trương Minh Hoàng’s house during that year. Their families were different; one was more cultural, the other more military. I met most of my friends through them; almost all had some connection to the current regime. At the time, I had not established close ties with any genuine Sài Gòn people.

How many years did you stay in Cambodia?

I was in Cambodia from 1984 until late 1987. Then I left the army and moved straight from Cambodia to a civil service post in Sài Gòn.

For various reasons, Vietnamese soldiers started withdrawing gradually from Cambodia in 1987 and 1988. Pol Pot’s army was weakened. China and the United States gradually reduced their support for anti-Vietnamese forces in Cambodia, including Pol Pot’s. Vietnam was tired of pouring resources into Cambodia and was looking for a gradual way out. It planned to withdraw combat units first and military experts thereafter. But Vietnamese leaders misunderstood their neighbor. The Cambodians wanted the protection provided by our combat troops, but they did not want so-called experts like me to remain.

We tried to help Cambodia, but they did not want us embedded in their army. Cambodian soldiers knew that real power lay in the hands of Vietnamese experts, not their Cambodian commanders. Thus, we were not welcomed as much by the Cambodians as we had expected. Finally, the Cambodian government requested a reduction in the number of our military experts stationed there. This provided me with an opportunity to leave the army.

As I mentioned earlier, the army was not as great as I had imagined it would be. When I volunteered, I wanted to become a soldier defending my country. But those were years when public trust in the regime hit rock bottom. Soldiers suffered hunger and hardship. Many gave their lives fighting at the northern border and in Cambodia. Meanwhile, political officials and military generals squabbled with one another. Factions multiplied and corruption grew. Corruption was especially bad within the families of high-ranking military officials, and the army’s public reputation plummeted.

As a result, I no longer dreamed of becoming a general like when I had saluted my division commander in 1979. Instead, I wanted to leave the army. But officers like me could not simply resign. I had received many years of training and was seen as a valuable resource for the regime. Given this, one way to leave the army was to first secure a transfer to a civilian government office. In a stroke of luck, I was able to land a job at the Party Office at Nhà Bè District in Sài Gòn. I submitted the paperwork and returned in August 1987 to Sài Gòn, where I became a cadre in the Communist Party Office of Nhà Bè District.

Before moving forward, let’s go back a bit to your time at the border during the Sino-Vietnamese war of 1979–1980. What was your attitude toward China? What did you think of the war between Vietnam and China?

My perspective on China started to form when I was still in high school. Views that I expressed in The Winning Side emerged much later, after I had absorbed a lot more information. But when I was a high school student, everything I knew came from official radio broadcasts and newspapers. If you read the Vietnamese Báo Nhân Dân [People’s Daily] from those days, you’d find many anti-China articles—which was a major change from a just a few years earlier when students like me studied Chinese.

I still remember how to say “Wo shi ba nien zhi xue sheng” [I’m an eighth grader]—which I learned in grade eight. Two teachers taught Chinese in my school, one man and one woman. After 1978, the school cut Chinese-language instruction. The male teacher became a translator in the army. The female teacher was Sino-Vietnamese; she lost her teaching post and was assigned odd jobs around the school.

I did not read every editorial in Báo Nhân Dân, but every day the loudspeaker broadcast anti-Chinese commentaries by Hoàng Tùng.¹⁶ Through their booming voices, the announcers on Vietnam Radio kindled a burning fire of hatred for China in our hearts. But when I arrived at the northern border, the Chinese army had withdrawn. China announced the withdrawal on March 5, and they pulled out all their troops by March 16. By the time I got there around March 20, combat had ceased. But it remained tense and scary. Both sides still sent small platoons across the border and low-level combat simmered there for many years. When the war spiked again in 1983–1984, I had been transferred to officer training school and then sent south.

What about the period around 1976–1977? Was coverage of China in Vietnamese newspapers still positive?

We were still reading glossy Chinese photo magazines in 1977. I recall photos of Mao Zedong with Jiang Qing in one of those magazines, as well as head shots of gorgeous Chinese female helicopter pilots. But in 1978, negative articles about China began to appear in Vietnamese newspapers.

Were readers shocked by this abrupt change?

We were shocked. We were also stunned by the news in February 1978 that Pol Pot’s forces had attacked Vietnam’s southwest borders. We learned afterward that China was behind Pol Pot’s attacks. On the collective farm, we received more news than those in the surrounding villages. And we received the news about China slightly before it was published in newspapers. Although Pol Pot’s army began to cause trouble along the Vietnam border as early as May 1, 1975, news of this only appeared in newspapers around February 1978. The anti-bourgeois / anti–ethnic Chinese campaign was launched the following month. And at the same time, news about the conflict with China appeared around March or April 1978.

Did you understand why China supported Pol Pot in its conflict with Vietnam?

I did not. Newspapers did not explain the root of this betrayal. But propaganda cadres fanned out to the collective farms, including ours, to denounce China’s treachery. The Vietnamese propaganda system was very sophisticated. Cadres would speak directly to us, providing information beyond what appeared in the press. They explained that China was bitter and jealous about Vietnam’s victory over America. China also fought America, but it did not win. China helped North Korea to fight against America, but it could not take over South Korea. But because Vietnam succeeded where China failed, China grew bitter and betrayed Vietnam.

So, did you believe everything that you read and heard at the time?

Before joining the army in 1978, I naively placed absolute trust in state media. I believed almost 100 percent of what it reported both about China and about the building of socialism in the north. Our propaganda system was as at its peak in those days. State development projects were the subject of popular songs—such as “The Canal We Dug” [Con kênh ta đào] or “Đáy River My Homeland” [Dòng sông Đáy quê em]—about the Đà River hydroelectric power plant or “The People Who Built the Kẻ Gỗ Lake” [Người đi xây hồ Kẻ Gỗ] about a project in my home province of Hà Tĩnh. Newspapers such as Tiền Phong [Avant-Garde] celebrated the Định Công Cooperative, praising the fact that it provided modern showers to its members. You must understand that for country boys like me who bathed in a local stream, a shower faucet sounded majestic and ultramodern. Naturally this kind of propaganda fed our belief in socialism, the state, and the Communist Party and, eventually, our resolute conviction that China was our enemy.

What explains the durability of public confidence in Vietnamese state media during that era?

I know now that older people back then knew about things like the Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm affair and the land reform. But these controversial episodes were never discussed openly in state newspapers, and so teenagers like me knew nothing about them.

Every time I visited my home village, I noticed that my aunt lived in a big, beautiful house, with tile floors and massive wooden pillars. Marble blocks adorned the base of each pillar. In those days, I was led to believe that my aunt received the house thanks to the revolution. In fact, the house had been seized from a landlord and assigned to her. The landlord, the mother of a friend of mine, lived nearby in a small thatched hut.

This family never complained about it because, in those days, members of the old landlord class never dared to talk about their backgrounds. I never once heard them mention that this big house used to be theirs or complain that it was now occupied by a former tenant. Hence, to the extent that I knew anything about the land reform, I understood it as a revolutionary achievement that benefited my aunt. Unlike today, it was seen in a purely positive light back then. As for the Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm affair, I knew nothing about it. Later, I learned that older people did know but dared not say anything.

How about your parents? Did they know?

My father benefited from the revolution. He participated in it and reaped its rewards. He was not one of its victims. But as mentioned earlier, victims of the revolution dared not utter a peep even to their kids and grandkids. My parents didn’t discuss it either. They saw the land reform as an achievement and not a disaster or a crime as we understand it today. I cannot speak on behalf of my generation, and I don’t even know what others really think. All I can say is that, until I joined the army, socialism was a brilliant and beautiful world in my eyes. I volunteered to join the army not just to defend my country but also to defend the regime.

And none of your friends thought any differently?

Folks from landlord families were not permitted to join collective farms. Most people from my hometown of Hà Tĩnh were poor. My father, I learned later, cherished beautiful memories from the pre-1954 period, but he never talked about them. He sometimes recited poems about landlords who had been helpful to others, not just those who committed crimes.

I recall that we once walked by a beautiful farm that we called “Brother Quỳnh Slope.” We knew that it used to belong to a great landlord named Quỳnh, but nothing else. My friend’s mother, formerly a landlord, had once been my father’s lover. But my father left home and joined the army. After becoming a cadre, he was no longer permitted to marry a girl from a landlord family. Instead, he married his ex-girlfriend’s friend, my mother. His ex-girlfriend’s son later became my friend. Much later, when my friend grew up, and the political atmosphere eased, he finally learned about the persecution of his family for the crime of landlordism. But he knew nothing about it when he was small.

Did your friend suffer discrimination?

No. He was born in 1959. By the time he took his university entrance exams, discrimination against the children of landlords had diminished, after peaking in the 1960s.

Let’s return to the period starting in 1987, when you left the army and settled in Sài Gòn. Please tell us about your work at the District Party Office in Nhà Bè.

I worked at that office from August 1987 to December 1988. I served there initially as a general cadre. The tasks of a general cadre included attending meetings of both the District Party Standing Committee and the Executive Committee and writing reports about what transpired. I also helped to draft circulars and directives for the office, which were then signed by the relevant authorities.

This was not an easy job, but I was good at it because I wrote quickly and easily. I was also tasked with visiting party cells at the grassroots level and producing short reports about what I learned. I wrote the reports by hand, and a secretary would type them up. There were many secretaries at the office, and later when I started to write fiction, they helped to type my work as well. I also had a lot of free time, and so I started to do my own freelance writing on the side.

There was a lot of news to collect in the district. For example, when I visited party cells, I often came across broken bridges or damaged schools in need of repair. I started taking photos and crafting short articles about them, which I sent to newspapers in Sài Gòn. In 1988, I tried my hand at writing fiction and was published in the Hồ Chí Minh City magazine Văn [Literature], and the Hà Nội magazine Văn Nghệ [Arts and Literature], edited by Nguyên Ngọc.¹⁷ I wrote the stories “Dead-End River” [Dòng sông cụt] and “He Will Return” [Anh ấy sẽ trở về] during this period.

After my articles and short stories began appearing in newspapers and magazines, especially in the very influential Văn Nghệ, many newspapers invited me to work for them. This was the era when Party General Secretary Nguyễn Văn Linh famously “untied” [cởi trói] the hands of journalists and writers and allowed newspapers to develop in different ways.¹⁸

The district office where I worked published a weekly news bulletin and ran an FM radio channel that broadcast music, stories, and reportage. When the district party secretary learned of my newspaper work, he put me in charge of the radio channel and the weekly bulletin. With a decent budget to spend on this work, I grew intrigued by the assignment. After I published my first news bulletin, the deputy director of the District Culture and Information Bureau stopped by our office to learn who was responsible for producing such a professional-looking bulletin. I had hired a graphic designer to help with the layout and the offset printing. The bulletin sold at newsstands throughout the district. At the radio station, I supervised a large staff and produced high-quality programming.

After the radio channel and news bulletin earned positive notices throughout the city, newspapers started to offer me positions. Several months after starting this work, in December 1988, I left the Nhà Bè District Party Office for Tuổi Trẻ [Youth] newspaper.

This was a real turning point for me. Had I remained at the District Party Office, I would have followed an official career path, starting in the district-level party bureaucracy. My old boss, the party secretary of Nhà Bè District, later headed the city party’s Organizational Committee, a position that gave him the power to promote people within the system. At the time, he really liked me. I was a cadre in the office. I was from the army, had completed officer training, and was a Communist Party member.

Thus, it would have been easy for me to climb the official ladder at the time. But I did not want to follow that path. When still in the army, striving to become a general, my promotion rate was also quite fast. I became a sub-lieutenant at age 21 and a lieutenant at 23. I was about to be promoted to the rank of captain in 1987, but I decided to leave the army instead. I could have followed a smooth path within the party bureaucracy, but I chose a writing career instead. Once I started writing for Tuổi Trẻ, I knew journalism would become my career. But I did not aspire to be an editor in chief. All I wanted was to write and publish.

You mentioned being a Communist Party member. Can you talk a little bit about that?

I was admitted to the party in 1982, when I was in the officer training school. At the time, party membership was a standard prerequisite for becoming a military officer. I stopped participating in party activities in 2006.

Were you expelled from the party?

No, I was not. When I received the Humphrey Fellowship to study in Maryland, the editor in chief at Thời Báo Kinh Tế Sài Gòn [Sài Gòn Economic Times], where I worked, told me that the municipal party cell would not allow me to go. He told me that one solution would be for me to leave the state payroll system [biên chế].¹⁹

At the time, I was a journalist on the state payroll. There were journalists who were not on the state payroll, like Tâm Chánh, the editor in chief of the newspaper. Even though I was a lowly journalist, I was on the state payroll because of my military service. I left the system in 2006. Upon returning to Vietnam from the United States, I did not feel it necessary to continue to join party activities, and thus I did not complete the paperwork to be transferred to a new party cell. I quietly let go instead of making a fuss. I simply did not feel that I should continue to be active in the party.

Can you explain briefly the difference between the district party office [huyện ủy] and the People’s Committee [ủy ban nhân dân] at the district level?

In a system of one-party rule like Vietnam’s, most decisions came from the party office. In many instances, the party’s resolutions are applied directly to the country.

In The Winning Side, I try to explain how this works. For example, when the party issues a resolution about food prices such as one kilogram of rice will cost 3.6 hào, or one kilogram of manure will cost 4 hào, such prices are adopted immediately. This manner of direct party leadership was applied until the early 1990s. But after the reforms of the late 1980s and the 1992 Constitution, the party no longer employed such a direct and heavy-handed method. Now, party resolutions need to go through state offices for implementation as policy.

In other words, party decisions were implemented in the form of decrees promulgated by the state or laws passed by the National Assembly. Party offices are organized in parallel with various state offices. The task of the state is to provide “a righteous name and favorable language” [danh chính ngôn thuận] for the practice of party leadership. A People’s Committee chairman [a state position] can only become chairman with the approval of the party.

But the party office cannot sign the decision. According to the law, the party chairman can only be elected by the People’s Council. But the People’s Council can only vote for people nominated by the party. In short, the Party Committee is a party office that makes decisions, but it does not execute those decisions directly. Alongside the state bureaucracies at the local to central levels are party offices, also from local to central levels. For example, only the Politburo and the Party Central Executive Committee can decide who becomes the prime minister and the president. Such persons can only officially become the prime minister or the president after the votes in the National Assembly.

So, the Party Committee and the People’s Committee exist in parallel to each other. Are their headquarters at the same place?

In the past, both offices were located at the same place to cut costs. But today, their headquarters are at different locations. This also serves to amplify a sense of separation between the two systems: the party leads, the state manages.

Please tell us a little more about your time working at Tuổi Trẻ newspaper.

My career as a journalist both started and blossomed at Tuổi Trẻ. A few months after I moved there, between March and June 1989, I wrote several pathbreaking pieces of investigative reportage. My background as an ex-army officer helped me break these stories and make a name for myself. Normally, you had to work at a newspaper for three years before you could be issued a press card. But I got my first press card very quickly, as soon as I started at Tuổi Trẻ. Later I had trouble renewing my card when the Ministry of Information, the Bureau of Culture and Information, or the Municipal Propaganda Committee held up my request for renewal. I worked for one long period without a press card.

For how long was each press card valid?

Five years. After my second renewal, subsequent applications were always delayed for twelve to eighteen months. But despite this hassle, the period during which I worked in the press was among the most open in recent history. When researching The Winning Side, I read back issues of many Vietnamese newspapers, starting from 1945. This experience confirmed to me that had I become a journalist prior to Đổi Mới [Renovation], I would have only written articles that praised the party and the state. I would have had to write in praise of so-called “model citizens” such as Lý Mỹ, who zealously supported the anti-bourgeois campaign and the cooperative movement.²⁰ My colleagues at Tuổi Trẻ wrote many articles praising Lý Mỹ back in the day.

If I had been a journalist prior to the opening of the late 1980s, I would have followed the same path. I’m not going to boast that I would have been a different kind of journalist had I been in their shoes. I was just lucky. But once my eyes were opened, I could not return to the old journalism. I could not become a journalist who simply showers praise on the government. I could not become a journalist who writes things I do not believe. My journalistic career began in a different era.

As I already mentioned, I wrote and published two short stories during this period, but few people know about them. The first short story—“Dead-End River”—was about the construction of socialism in my home province of Hà Tĩnh during a campaign known as “changing heaven and earth and reordering the country” [thay trời đổi đất, sắp xếp lại giang sơn].²¹

At this time, the government was merging Hà Tĩnh and Nghệ An Provinces. Officials ordered the digging of many canals to spur economic growth. But part of the irrigation system collapsed during the project, killing hundreds of people. Many of the new canals were abandoned because they had been built for political and not scientific reasons. “Dead-End River” shed a beam of light on the “dead end” of top-down, heavily politicized socialist development projects.

Where did you publish “Dead-End River”?

It was published in the first issue of Tạp Chí Văn [Literature Magazine] in Sài Gòn. In addition, that issue featured a piece of reportage by Võ Đắc Danh entitled “There and Now” [Nơi ấy bây giờ] about an irrigation project in the south. In those days, I knew no writers or artists in the north. But after my story came out in Văn, Nguyên Ngọc reprinted it in Văn Nghệ in Hà Nội. It was also republished in the Parisian journal Diễn Đàn [Forum], and the Voice of Vietnam broadcast it on the radio. Vietnamese television aired a short play adapted from it.

My second short story, “I Will Return,” was published in 1988 in Văn Nghệ Quân Đội [Army Arts and Literature]. The story concerned soldiers who never returned from the war. It was fiction, but I knew plenty of true stories like it—stories of missing soldiers who left behind wives, children, and lovers. Even today, I quite like my stories from this era. I wonder where a life writing literature would have taken me had I chosen that path instead of becoming a journalist for Tuổi Trẻ.

In any case, I began my writing career with these short stories, not journalism. I published other stories, but I did not like them much. They all came out before I moved to Tuổi Trẻ. As I said before, I began my journalism career amid an unprecedented liberalization of media culture that coincided with the onset of Đổi Mới. I was extremely fortunate to be a journalist when Vietnam transitioned from a centralized, planned, heavily subsidized economic system to a market economy.

An entire system of laws that remains in force in Vietnam today was crafted during that time: the 1983 Land Law, the Penal Code, the 1992 Constitution, and the 1995 Civil Code. I was lucky to be able to interview lawmakers during this era, listen to their ideas, and follow their debates in the newly energized National Assembly. I wrote hundreds of articles, contributing ideas for drafting the Constitution, the Land Law, the Penal Code, and the Civil Code. I learned a lot through direct observation of the political and legislative process. I attended hundreds of trials, big and small all over the country. I was at the trial of “Đinh the Cripple,” a smuggler from Kiên Giang Province. I witnessed the notorious trials of Nguyễn Văn Mười Hai and Minh Phụng Epco. I learned how laws got drafted, modified in the National Assembly, and applied to real cases.

It was my great good fortune to work for Tuổi Trẻ during this transformative era, from December 1988 until 1997. My first editor-in-chief, Kim Hạnh, lost her job in a high-profile sacking in 1991.²² She was replaced by Lê Văn Nuôi.²³ After various conflicts, Lê Văn Nuôi asked me to leave Tuổi Trẻ, and I moved to Thanh Niên [Youth] newspaper. But Tuổi Trẻ and the journalistic vibe that it cultivated remained my first love, and I never really warmed up to Thanh Niên. Even though Thanh Niên was good to me, I never felt at home and worked there only for a few months.

I stopped writing for Tuổi Trẻ at the request of Mr. Lê Văn Nuôi; I retained my staff position there even though I was forbidden from publishing. But the infamous Minh Phụng Epco scandal broke out, which included the arrest of Minh Phụng and the suicide of Minh Phụng’s deputy director.²⁴ The journalistic blood in my veins compelled me to write about it. So, I asked the editorial committee of Thanh Niên to allow me to cover it for their newspaper. Six months later, Mr. Lê Văn Nuôi asked me to return to Tuổi Trẻ before I moved my employment file officially to Thanh Niên. I accepted his offer and wrote for Tuổi Trẻ again until the end of 1999. Then I realized that I could no longer continue to work there.

Can you tell us more about your investigative reporting when you first started working for Tuổi Trẻ?

I covered several important stories between March and June 1989. First, there was an explosion at the Quang Trung military base, located in Hóc Môn District, a suburb of Hồ Chí Minh City. It turned out that members of the military unit stationed at the base took money in exchange for allowing civilians to try to extract valuable material from the unexploded bombs that were stored there. But they were careless, and a bomb exploded, killing four people on the site as well as two children of a lieutenant colonel who lived nearby. The army tried to cover it up.

As someone recently demobilized, I had many military connections, and so I was able to gain access to the base and investigate. It was difficult to report on this incident at that time because the war with China was not over and the army remained powerful. But I was able to complete an investigation that led to a legal case that was tried in court.

A few months later, I uncovered another scandal. It came to light that military officers were getting grants of land to build residential housing inside the airbase that housed Tân Sơn Nhất Airport. Simultaneously, a black market for pornographic films was discovered on the airbase. It was a strange situation. Military officers had secured land, but they lacked sufficient resources to build houses. To make money, they bought video projectors and Cambodian sex films that they screened for paying customers during daylight hours at the site. Because this scandal involved the military, neither the police nor journalists dared to pursue it. But I was able to collect evidence of the scheme that I laid out in an exposé called “A Hamlet of Black Videos” [Xóm video đen]. I covered other topics, but those two stories made my name as a journalist.

Can you tell us more about the highs and lows of working as journalist for Tuổi Trẻ for ten years?

Two huge advantages helped my career. First were the new conditions for journalism that emerged after Party General Secretary Nguyễn Văn Linh initiated Đổi Mới. Second, Tuổi Trẻ had a great staff. In addition to employing journalists like Kim Hạnh and Huỳnh Xuân Phước, who had recently served in the communist shock brigades or the youth league, Tuổi Trẻ hired reporters who had worked under the pre-1975 Sài Gòn regime. After 1975, members of this interesting cohort were briefly allowed to publish a newspaper called Tin Sáng [Morning News] before it was shut down in 1981. But Mr. Võ Văn Kiệt decided to send the newly out-of-work employees from Tin Sáng to various newspapers in Sài Gòn, including Sài Gòn Giải Phóng [Liberated Sài Gòn].²⁵

Tuổi Trẻ also took on some of these southern journalists, including Mr. Võ Văn Điểm, Mr. Trần Trọng Thức, and Mr. Lý Quí Chung (later known by the pen name Chánh Trinh).²⁶ These seasoned newspapermen did not give formal lessons, but they were like teachers to me. I learned a lot from them.

Owing to the scoops I secured during my first few months working at Tuổi Trẻ, and perhaps because I was a former military officer, Tuổi Trẻ assigned me to cover the most critical events of the day, such as National Assembly sessions and party congresses. I traveled widely, covered a broad range of issues, and did my job well. I earned a reputation for breaking hot news stories and became well-known as a widely read journalist for the best-selling newspaper in southern Vietnam.

In the early 1990s, my colleagues and I broke another big story, the Đường Sơn Quán scandal.²⁷ In many cases, journalists were tipped off about possible stories to investigate through leaks from police investigations. But for the Đường Sơn Quán case, we initiated the investigation ourselves and revealed the case to the police. Our work boosted sales for Tuổi Trẻ. When I started there, they printed 35,000 copies per issue. But following our coverage of famous cases like Đường Sơn Quán or Nguyễn Văn Mười Hai and the Thanh Hương Perfume Company, our circulation surged to 140,000 copies per issue.²⁸

I was also one of the first journalists to employ a new narrative style to cover the National Assembly’s meetings. I used the same style to write The Winning Side. Why did I like this mode of writing? Journalistic norms in Vietnam prevented me from directly expressing my views about domestic politics or institutions like the National Assembly. I could not write, for example, that the National Assembly was little more than a puppet of more powerful forces. But the way I narrated stories about the National Assembly signaled indirectly to readers where real power lay within our political system. My reporting on National Assembly meetings had an unprecedented impact for political reporting in Vietnam: it boosted sales for the paper! Later, other journalists covered the National Assembly in the same way, which drew even more attention to the pioneering character of our newspaper. Journalists attending National Assembly meetings and party congresses in the past covered them in an old-fashioned style and no one paid attention. In contrast, my coverage dwelled on all sorts of details, and readers seemed to really appreciate this approach. In those days, Tuổi Trẻ came out once every two days. My articles were short—only 1,500–2,000 words—but they covered every aspect of the National Assembly. In those days, the prestige of Tuổi Trẻ and my growing fame as a journalist made it easy for me to meet with leaders from the party and the state. Interview targets rarely turned down my requests.

But this started to change as my writing gradually revealed more of my independent thinking. Also, due to reading many books from the pre-1975 regime, including works of Western political science, I came to grasp concepts such as the separation of powers, an independent legislature, and impartial law enforcement. Even though my articles featured neutral narratives of events unadorned by editorial commentary, they still revealed my political tendencies.

In those days, the National Assembly met regularly to debate how its own form and function should be described in the 1992 Constitution. It also considered how to craft laws intended to shape its own operations such as the Law on the Organization of the National Assembly or the Law on Government Organizations. I was among a small group of journalists who favored a more professionalized National Assembly in which members worked full-time instead of a National Assembly made up of part-time delegates who met only seasonally (as in the past).

Some of my articles were quite passionate, and they were criticized for voicing “deviant political views.” I still retain many of the threatening letters that I received from leading figures in the Ministry of Culture and Information, the Central Propaganda and Training Committee, the Municipal Propaganda and Training Committee, and the Municipal Party Office. They depict me as politically problematic, someone “to keep a close eye on” [hết sức lưu ý].

In 1992, the People’s Committee of Hồ Chí Minh City issued a directive instructing Tuổi Trẻ not to let me cover potentially sensitive sociopolitical issues. Threats of prosecution followed some of my investigative reporting, such as the article: “Voters Continue to Hope for a Renovated National Assembly” [Một Quốc Hội đổi mới vẫn còn là mong ước của cử tri]. I was nearly prosecuted under Article 205a of the old penal code for “abusing the rights to freedom and democracy in order to infringe upon the interests of the state” (this became Article 258 of the amended penal code). I was lucky to dodge the bullet at that moment, but I don’t know if I’ll be so lucky in the future.

After leaving Tuổi Trẻ in 1999, what did you do?

During my final years there, I felt that I was being subjected to tightened control, not only by the government, but also by the editorial boards. To ease the pressure, several colleagues and I decided to try to run a newspaper of our own. Our first effort was to take over the established Nông Thôn Ngày Nay [The Countryside Today] and turn it into a daily political newspaper. But this effort failed. We then opened a new paper called Diễn Đàn Doanh Nghiệp Cuối Tuần [Weekend Enterprise Forum], which created a buzz and sold well. But it was shut down by the authorities after only three issues. These failures made me realize that it would not be easy for me to run a newspaper or serve on an editorial board in Vietnam’s repressive environment. With limited options, I gave up pursuing a conventional career in journalism and decided to focus my efforts on writing.

During President Clinton’s visit to Vietnam in 2000, I realized that I needed to learn English. At the time, Võ Như Lanh, formerly the head of Tuổi Trẻ, was the editor in chief of Thời Báo Kinh Tế Sài Gòn.²⁹ He liked me a lot and asked me to join his newspaper. I told him that I would, with one condition: he agree not to ask me to shoulder too heavy a burden, because I needed time to learn English. Võ Như Lanh understood my request and supported me. In 2005 I received a Humphrey Fellowship to study in the United States for one year. The scholarship provided me access to an academic environment, but mostly it improved my English.

Please tell us about your study in the United States on the Humphrey Fellowship.

I studied public policy at the University of Maryland in College Park, near Washington, DC. It was a very interesting year for me. In addition to coursework, I held an internship at the Washington Times. After a few meetings in the newsroom, they allowed me to follow their reporter for Capitol Hill. This was a great position from which to observe how the US political system worked. In short, the fellowship allowed me to observe and study US politics. I studied at the University of Maryland from August 2005 to May 2006. Afterward, I spent two months in Santa Cruz to study more English.

What did you do when you returned from the United States?

In July 2006, I returned to Vietnam. After weighing my options, I decided to work for Sài Gòn Tiếp Thị [Sài Gòn Marketing]. My friend Tâm Chánh was still on its editorial board at the time and played a decisive role at the newspaper, which was at a peak in popularity.³⁰ I worked for Sài Gòn Tiếp Thị until August 2009 and wrote many articles during those years.

But Sài Gòn Tiếp Thị also got into trouble. It was disciplined because of one hundred “problematic” articles; two-thirds of which featured my byline. But my most problematic article was not even on the list. Entitled “Big Sister of the Prime Minister” [Chị Hai thủ tướng], this article exposed a lucrative business deal of Prime Minister Nguyễn Tấn Dũng’s oldest sister.³¹ She had bought 185 hectares of rubber plants from Bình Dương Province at the price of 45–50 million đồng per hectare. The receipt said that the province sold her rubber trees. But a few years later, she produced a receipt that showed that the province had sold her both the land and the rubber trees on it. Bình Dương Province wanted to get the land back to turn it into an industrial zone and offered to buy it at the price of 1 billion đồng per hectare. But Nguyễn Tấn Dũng’s mother and sister rejected the offer, causing a conflict between Bình Dương Province and the prime minister’s family. My article covered this scandal.

My initial plan was to post it on my blog, but I showed it to Tâm Chánh first because I was still a journalist of Sài Gòn Tiếp Thị and did not want to cause more trouble for the newspaper. After reading my article, Tâm Chánh consulted Ms. Thế Thanh and Ms. Minh Hiền, two former editors in chief of newspapers in Sài Gòn. They both said, “Publish it!” As devoted journalists, they wanted to publish a good article, and thus mine came out in Sài Gòn Tiếp Thị. While researching the article, security agents started following me around. As soon as it was published, things got worse.

The police set up a makeshift surveillance station outside the headquarters of Sài Gòn Tiếp Thị. Two security agents would sit outside Nguyễn Đình Chiểu Film Studio on Ngô Thời Nhiệm Street, across from the newspaper office. Their only task was to observe when I arrived at the office, when I left, and which direction I headed. Other security agents followed me from there. I discussed this situation with Tâm Chánh. I had not violated any law, but the fact that security agents set up surveillance right outside Sài Gòn Tiếp Thị placed a lot of pressure on other journalists at the paper, even those sympathetic to me. I felt bad for them and thought about leaving the newspaper.

This level of surveillance lasted seventeen months, placing me under intense pressure. My blog post “The Berlin Wall” was the final straw. Sài Gòn Tiếp Thị and I agreed to part ways, and my career as an official journalist ended on August 23, 2009.

An important question: When did you begin to use the pen name Huy Đức?

I signed Huy Đức on my very first article published in Tuổi Trẻ, as soon as I became a journalist on the newspaper’s payroll. My ex-wife’s name is Văn Thị Mỹ Đức. My name is Trương Huy San. In my opinion, San does not sound strong. I wanted a name with an uneven tone [thanh trắc]. My marriage was great at the time, and I also wanted to express love for my wife. Hence, I took the pen name Huy Đức.

In addition to Huy Đức, did you use other pen names?

When I wrote for the Small Talk column of Tuổi Trẻ Cười [Young Laughter] or the Things Seen column managed by Cung Văn at Sài Gòn Giải Phóng, I signed as Trương Ngộ. When I wrote fiction, I signed my real name, Trương Huy San. And for my blog, I signed “Osin.”³² That’s all. I published no anonymous articles or blog posts. Thus, whenever anonymous articles or posts circulated on the internet and people thought I might be the author, it was never true. I always write under my name, Huy Đức, even if it might get me in trouble.

When did you start blogging?

I began my blog in late 2006. Yahoo! 360˚ arrived in Vietnam in 2005, and a handful of Vietnamese began to blog. When I was in the United States on the Humphrey Fellowship, I attended a conference at Columbia University where I met an Indian researcher whose name I forget. He talked about the future of citizen journalism. I became aware of its importance and thought about choosing it as a vehicle for my writing.

When I started working for Sài Gòn Tiếp Thị, I simultaneously launched my blog. A young female intern who was good with technology helped me create my blog. I named it Osin. In late 2007, I moved my blog from Yahoo! 360˚ to WordPress and had it redesigned to look more professional. In August 2009, I left Sài Gòn Tiếp Thị but continued blogging. I published at least one post a week on my Osin blog, which drew hundreds of thousands of hits daily. Some entries received more than a thousand comments. It was a very popular blog. I even had to restrict the comments section because there were too many to vet effectively.

Police continued to subject me to intrusive surveillance. I had a persistent feeling during this time that I was being set up by the police, but I was able to stay out of trouble. In February 2010, my blog and my Facebook and Gmail accounts were hacked, and I lost access to all three. Also in 2010, I was discreetly working on The Winning Side. Security agents knew nothing about it, nor did my friends.

Running a blog took a lot of time. If I created a new blog, I feared I would be hacked again, and this would cost me a lot more time. Thus, I decided to stop blogging. I opened another Facebook account so that I could post whenever it felt necessary. Thus, from February 2010 until now, I haven’t had a blog.

Working as a state journalist from 1988 to 2009, you must have observed many changes in Vietnamese journalism, positive and negative.

Today, many people complain about state newspapers, which former Minister of Information and Communications Lê Doãn Hợp calls “right-side-of-the-road newspapers” [báo lề phải]. If you compare right-side-of-the-road newspapers today with newspapers from twenty years ago, things have clearly gotten better. But you should not compare today’s newspapers with ones from twenty years ago. You should compare them with alternative sources of news today.

In the past, information came from a single source: the state. But today, there are many different sources of news. Today, there is more free space for information compared to twenty years ago. A common phrase in English is “pushing the envelope.” But my motto is “push the limit but never cross it.” I’ve always pushed for the liberalization of journalistic space, but I try to avoid stepping over the line.

And it’s not just me. Thousands of journalists in Vietnam behave in this way. The space for journalism in Vietnam has, indeed, expanded. In the late 1980s, there were articles published by Thông Tấn Xã Việt Nam [Vietnam News Agency], Tuần Tin Tức [News Weekly], or Văn Nghệ that criticized local leaders, such as Party Secretary Hà Trọng Hòa of Thanh Hóa Province. The space for journalism and the tasks assigned to it grew in the 1990s, which enabled newspapers to launch anti-corruption campaigns and to call for reforms and policy changes. Unfortunately, from 2006 until now, the state has further tightened its control of the mainstream press.

We see this push and pull at Tuổi Trẻ and at other newspapers as well. The state first fired Editor in Chief Nguyên Ngọc of Văn Nghệ. Next, it terminated the liberal Editor in Chief Tô Hòa of Sài Gòn Giải Phóng. Soon after in 1991, Tuổi Trẻ’s Editor in Chief Vũ Kim Hạnh was let go. Kim Hạnh’s successor Lê Văn Nuôi was an active cadre in the municipal communist youth league before 1975. As a former student activist imprisoned by the old regime, he still had passion for a fight despite his hands being tied.

But back then, only the editor in chief would be replaced when a journal ran afoul of the authorities. The rest of the staff of Tuổi Trẻ, including me and fellow journalists like Ngọc Vinh, Bùi Thanh, and Tâm Chánh, stayed in place. These journalists had attended universities in the late 1980s when democratic struggles grew among students. They inherited this democratic spirit and brought it to newspapers. They helped shape the direction of newspapers as much as the editors in chief. Sài Gòn Giải Phóng and a few other newspapers did not share this precise history of struggle, but many newspapers in Sài Gòn did.

For example, when Ms. Thế Thanh was sacked from the editor in chief position at Phụ Nữ [Women], her successors tried to maintain a reasoned voice for the newspaper. Ms. Minh Hiền was forced to leave Phụ Nữ, but when she moved to Doanh Nhân Sài Gòn [Sài Gòn Businesspeople], she tried to bring new energy to it. Ditto for Thời Báo Kinh Tế Sài Gòn.

But the state has become shrewder in the way it controls newspapers. In my opinion, one person partially responsible for this worsening trend is Mr. Lê Văn Nuôi. After becoming the editor in chief of Tuổi Trẻ, he brought with him many cadres from the Communist Youth League. Lê Văn Nuôi himself had been the party secretary of the league.

This move created a bad precedent. The government recognized that the leader of a newspaper did not need to be a journalist, that they could assign cadres from management offices to run newspapers. The authorities applied this model to Người Lao Động [Laborers] when they assigned a cadre from the General Confederation of Labor to be its leader. Similarly, they assigned the deputy chairman of the Vietnamese Women’s Union to lead Phụ Nữ newspaper. These cadres were not journalists. They brought with them little more than their experience as state employees.

At Tuổi Trẻ, there emerged an intense conflict between journalists committed to good journalism on one side and leaders from other fields who managed newspapers but prioritized politics on the other. The conflict raged for a while. But now, at Tuổi Trẻ for example, cadres from the Communist Youth League have taken over all key positions, and the committed journalists maintain almost no voice at the newspaper. The government has subjugated newspapers, especially in Hồ Chí Minh City, so they now no longer have the kind of voice that they had in the 1990s.

But that’s just the situation for state journalism. Conditions in the broader information ecosphere are different. The internet, with its many web pages and blogs, has hugely influenced readers. Of course, it suffers from predictable shortcomings that often plague nonmainstream media, but it helps meet the demand for information and independent voices. The blogosphere does not always provide complete and accurate information, but it helps people express their opinions and diminishes public reliance on state media.

You mentioned that the level of control over newspapers changed around 2006. What happened?

The Tenth Party Congress was held in 2006, right before the PMU 18 scandal broke.³³ In this case, police manipulated newspapers by leaking information to them to generate a specific public or political sentiment that served police interests. Newspapers published unverified news without double-checking its origin or veracity.

I was in the United States at that time. It’s generally believed that newspapers have a huge amount of power. But this is not true. Newspapers do not wield much power; they are naive and easily manipulated by the police. Newspapers paid a price with the arrests of two journalists in May 2008 followed by a sweeping crackdown. Many journalists had their press cards revoked, including Hoàng Hải Vân, the general managing editor of Thanh Niên, and Bùi Thanh, the deputy editor in chief of Tuổi Trẻ. Two veteran, respected editors in chief of Thanh Niên and Tuổi Trẻ—Lê Hoàng and Nguyễn Công Khế—were also sacked. Newspapers moved into a new period after this. They became more cautious and wary of being duped by the police. But they also grew increasingly timid in their approach to sensitive topics.

Prior to the Eleventh Party Congress, newspapers tried to regain their pre-2006 initiative through coverage of the Vinashin scandal.³⁴ But once the editor in chief of Tiền Phong was hauled before the authorities and Tâm Chánh—the editor in chief of Sài Gòn Tiếp Thị—was sacked in 2011, morale plummeted in our profession.

Everybody knows there’s censorship in Vietnam. Can you tell us a bit about how it works?

If Vietnam wants to pursue real democratic reforms along the lines of Myanmar, it will not be so easy. Myanmar disbanded its censorship office, but Vietnam does not have a single censorship office.³⁵ Rather, a will to censor permeates the system, including the minds of journalists. Many journalists won’t investigate certain things. They tell themselves that even if an investigation were to be authorized, they would not be permitted to write about it. And if they dared to write about it, their work could not be published. And if the writing managed to get published, the journalist would likely lose their job.

In other words, the censorship process begins with subtle acts of self-censorship, when journalists deliberately avoid certain topics. Even when writing about less sensitive issues, journalists cut provocative sentences before submitting articles to editors. A second round of self-censorship is handled by the editors, who cut any material that they think the censors will reject. Perhaps there is no other press system in the world quite like Vietnam’s.

The famous mathematician Phan Đình Diệu went to the United States early in the postwar era, in 1980.³⁶ Upon returning to Vietnam, he wrote an article for Nhân Dân. But Nhân Dân added a sentence criticizing the United States without asking his permission. This made him unhappy, but there was nothing he could do about it. It was just the normal, disrespectful way that big Vietnamese newspapers dealt with famous intellectuals. Journalists are also mistreated. Editors or members of editorial boards routinely cut or embellish our articles without checking with us. They even add “personal” opinions to our work. An article signed by Huy Đức might include praise for the government that was not actually written by Huy Đức.

In short, the mechanisms for censoring the Vietnamese press may be found in the heads of journalists and in the press organs themselves. There is no centralized state censorship office. Vietnamese newspapers must submit copies of new issues to the authorities, but not for censorship. Of course, you cannot totally deny the role played by the Vietnamese state in censoring local journalism through the meddling of the propaganda offices. These bureaucracies hold weekly meetings with press organs where they provide “briefings.” The Central Propaganda Office will meet with the central press organs and local propaganda offices will meet local press organs. The Municipal Communist Party Propaganda Office meets with newspapers in Sài Gòn. The Central Propaganda Office’s branch in Sài Gòn meets with authorities that supervise the central press.

They do not need to tell newspapers what to do. Instead, they criticize sensitive articles and label certain trends unacceptable. Newspapers strive to avoid receiving the same criticism over and over. During briefings, propaganda offices remind members of the press about upcoming events and advise them about which stories to cover. After briefings, editors in chief return to their newspapers and brief their journalists. Some editors in chief share the propaganda office’s “advice” with their editorial boards, while others brief editors and journalists directly. Newspapers in Sài Gòn, including Tuổi Trẻ, appoint cadres to attend high-level briefings in Hà Nội. After such briefings, cadres report to their headquarters in Sài Gòn. And then the editorial office disseminates the briefings to editors, division heads, and representatives of newspapers in local offices so that everybody understands the thrust of the meeting.

This is how censorship functions in Vietnam. It’s invisible, but it acts like a golden helmet that can crush your skull at any time. The old Sài Gòn regime had a censorship system, but it allowed Sài Gòn newspapers to publish blank sections captioned with the phrase “voluntarily cut” [tự ý đục bỏ], to show that they had been censored. In this way, members of the Sài Gòn press could protest censorship indirectly. But when you are censored in Vietnam today, you not only can’t complain, but you must praise the propaganda office. The only person who dared to protest censorship was Mr. Tô Hòa. In 1988, when farmers from Bình Thuận Province protested in Sài Gòn, he reported their demands for the return of their land seized by local officials. When party officials ordered him to stop covering these protests, he published a note informing readers that yesterday, when farmers took to the street to protest, the Party Secretariat dubbed this development “sensitive information” and ordered news of it suppressed. Sài Gòn Giải Phóng obeyed the order, the note continued, and, therefore, did not publish any news about it.

The way he exposed efforts to suppress information was even better than publishing the news. But it was one of very few efforts undertaken within the Vietnamese press to protest censorship. Shortly afterward, Tô Hòa was fired from his position and editors in chief have never again risked a similar provocation.

What happens to an editor in chief who does not attend weekly briefings or who takes issue with the content of a briefing?

During the Đổi Mới era of the ’80s and ’90s, editors in chief such as Ms. Kim Hạnh and Mr. Võ Như Lanh dared to openly challenge the diktats of propaganda committees. But this didn’t last long. In terms of the weekly briefings, editors in chief know that they cannot be missed. If they can’t attend for some reason, a replacement must be sent.

Another effective method employed by propaganda committees is to simply instruct editors in chief to avoid publishing news on certain issues. After receiving such instructions, newspapers won’t touch the issue. For example, whenever a delegate criticizes the prime minister at a National Assembly meeting, propaganda committees send messages to all editors in chief instructing them not to report on it. During the more liberal era in which I worked as a state journalist, the prime minister would never directly order editors in chief not to publish this or that. But today, even mid-ranking cadres feel comfortable giving such orders to editors in chief.

You argued earlier that the machinery of censorship in Vietnam is invisible or grounded in habits of self-censorship. But these stories make the machinery of censorship seem more concrete.

What I meant is that there is not a single centralized censorship office. And propaganda committees never admit that they impose censorship. They say that they provide journalists with an “orientation”; they don’t tie journalists’ hands. But if you stray from the orientation that they promote, you get into trouble. And the danger is that you do not know for sure where the lines of acceptable discourse are located.

Of course, there is also hands-on censorship. I’ve mentioned that officials routinely warn newspapers not to publish this or that. But sometimes articles get released online anyway. In such cases, orders come within hours or even minutes that sensitive material must be taken down. For example, on February 17, 2009, I published an article titled “The Border in February” about the thirtieth anniversary of the border war with China. The article was posted on the Sài Gòn Tiếp Thị web page for two hours before we were forced to take it down. If the editor in chief had not obeyed the order from above, he risked being disciplined or replaced.

Have there been any significant differences in the norms enforced for Vietnamese journalism under different individual leaders?

In the old days, the Communist Party was the single dominant influence on journalism. In the 1990s, we often felt that there were two forces within the party, one conservative and one “renovated.” The renovated forces were usually linked with the state sector in some way and included those who supported the development of a market economy and democratic reforms to the political system. Conservative forces were linked to the party exclusively and included those who supported a socialist orientation and opposed so-called “peaceful evolution” (or political reform).

Back then, many newspapers supported the government’s more progressive tendencies, such as those of the late Võ Văn Kiệt, but the propaganda committees always resisted. In the past, such resistance was grounded in the political will of the party. But today, things are different with both political and economic forces at play. Both state and private economic groups have a lot of money and can influence the propaganda committees. They can also exert direct influence on editors in chief. Journalism today is under pressure from many forces. The orders issued by the propaganda committees no longer only come from the party. They may also come from powerful new economic interests aligned with it.

To wrap up our discussion of your newspaper career, can you share with us any more memories from this period?

When I produced the news bulletin for the district party office in Nhà Bè, I was responsible for every aspect of the journalistic process, from A to Z. Sometimes I did typesetting; sometimes I did developmental editing. In those days, we simply didn’t have sufficient resources to hire proper staff. I also spent a lot of the time at the printer, observing that process closely. With the technology of web-based publishing today, there’s no need for typesetters or for visits to the print shop. You can now sit in one place and control all aspects of news production. I’m struck that for my current book, the cover artist lives in Florida, the editor is in Buffalo, I’m in Boston, and the book will be published in California. I feel lucky that I’ve been able to observe both news-gathering cultures, the old one where you must visit typesetters, typists, and printers in person and the new one in which everything gets done in a single editorial office. Both systems have their virtues.

I also liked the adventure of getting out of the office to find, develop, and submit stories. I once covered a trial in a part of Kiên Giang Province that had several photocopy shops but not a single fax machine to forward drafts to Sài Gòn. Some reporters waited until the end of the trial, wrote up their reporting, and hand carried it back to their home offices in the city. But I worked differently. I scribbled the article by hand and photocopied it several times. After sealing them in envelopes, I sent multiple copies back to the home office, each on a different bus from Rạch Giá to Sài Gòn. I wrote the address and phone number of Tuổi Trẻ on each envelope to increase the likelihood that my office would receive at least one copy. Nowadays, no one needs to work in this way, but it’s interesting, I think, to reflect on how we practiced journalism in those days.

In 2009, after you stopped working for Sài Gòn Tiếp Thị, what happened to your press card?

During the period that I worked for Sài Gòn Tiếp Thị, from 2006 to 2009, I was never once issued a press card. After many requests, they finally sent me a card, but it arrived just as I published my blog post about the Berlin Wall. I was forced out of Sài Gòn Tiếp Thị after that and had to return my press card to the Ministry of Information. Only regular employees of state newspapers are allowed to hold press cards.

In 2012, you studied in the United States on a Nieman Fellowship. Can you tell us about that?

Both times I applied for fellowships to study in the United States, I wrote in my application [in English]: “I want to study in an academic environment to learn how to place my knowledge into an academic framework.” Although limited English hampered my ability to follow lectures by American professors, I learned a lot during both trips.

Prior to my first US trip in 2005, I had written five hundred pages of The Winning Side, but I discarded that draft when I returned home. I did not acquire new material in the United States, but I learned new journalistic and scholarly methods of research and analysis.

My second trip to the United States in 2012 was different. I knew that I had nearly finished the book, and I was looking to publish it abroad. I had accepted, at that point, that it could not be published in Vietnam.

After I received the scholarship, I brought the manuscript and my research materials to the United States. I arrived in July 2012 and started working on the book at a friend’s house. Since I was now in the United States, I was able to share parts of the manuscript with friends, including you, Peter, and also Shawn McHale and Đinh Quang Anh Thái.³⁷ I asked for feedback and some readers gave extensive notes, while others offered only a few comments. The feedback shaped my revisions. If you compare early drafts to the final published manuscript, you will recognize that I revised quite a bit. While the source material remained the same, I strove to express my ideas and tell the story in a clearer and more coherent way. I even changed the sequence of some chapters.

Obviously, I could not do any of this had I remained in Vietnam. I could not share the manuscript with anyone and ask for feedback. And I certainly could not publish there. Thus, my main reason for going to the United States in 2012 was to publish my book.

But your fellowship was for studying, correct?

Yes. But I was a fellow, not a student. I was eager to learn, so I audited many classes. But I was only required to attend lectures, read books, and join class discussions. I did not have to turn in essays or take exams.

In my Neiman Fellows cohort, there were twelve American journalists (from outlets like the Washington Post, the New York Times, TIME magazine, NPR, and the Associated Press) and another twelve from other countries, including Germans and Brits who worked for American newspapers. Others worked for newspapers in France, Spain, China, and South Korea. I learned a lot from my fellow journalists.

The Nieman Fellowship is divided into two parts. During the first part, all fellows and their family members can take regular classes at MIT, Harvard College, Harvard Law School, Harvard Business School, the Kennedy School, and Tufts University. For the second part, Nieman invites famous professors from these same schools to give lectures or to teach a short course. For example, if you, Peter, had an interesting one-semester course, Nieman would ask you to condense it and teach what you considered to be its most essential content in one week. I learned a lot in this program. My year at Harvard was more interesting than my year in Maryland.

You’ve mentioned your book The Winning Side [Bên thắng cuộc]. Please tell us about it. When did you first conceive it? How did you collect material for it?

As mentioned earlier, before joining the army, my understanding of the world came from school and state newspapers. My mindset began to change after I joined the army, especially during the three years I spent in officer training school. During this period, my confidence in the regime bottomed out. Conditions were so poor in those days that military students like me often went hungry. Of course, hunger was not the only thing that changed my frame of mind, but I do believe that it made me more objective about the state of the country. I no longer saw the party, the state, and President Hồ Chí Minh as idols, as I had when I was a student in school.

As early as my first years in the army, I was interested in politics. I wanted to observe and understand our political system. While serving in Cambodia, I was invited to attend a party meeting for Vietnamese military advisors. One purpose of the meeting was to elect delegates to attend the upcoming Party Congress in Hà Nội. There, I delivered a strong speech about how young military officers viewed the party, the state, and the army. I compared their views to young people outside the army and reflected on the future of the country.

When was this?

1986. I was a second lieutenant at the time. A few leaders, including Trần Trọng Tân who was with me in Cambodia, also attended that party meeting.

Before the 1986 Party Congress, I witnessed an incident that some later described as a kind of coup within the military. At a pre-congress meeting for military officers, two generals who served on the politburo—Văn Tiến Dũng, minister of defense, and Chu Huy Mân, the chairman of the General Political Department [Chủ Nhiệm Tổng Cục Chính Trị]—were not elected by military delegates to represent the army at the Party Congress.³⁸ This outcome was unprecedented and the humiliation of it forced these generals to withdraw from the political arena.

This event left a deep impression on me.

It was also around this time that I first got to know some important military leaders, including General Võ Nguyên Giáp. I met him through the head of the Military Advisory Team for Division 478, Major General Mai Xuân Tần. He once served as Võ Nguyên Giáp’s secretary, during the Điện Biên Phủ campaign. These connections provided a good vantage point from which to observe the workings of power. I no longer drew exclusively on my socialist education to make sense of things. Instead, I developed my own vision based on observation and reading.

I was also lucky to gain the trust of many veteran leaders of the party. In my book The Winning Side, I used many documents sent to me by high-level figures. In 1989, for instance, I received a copy of a report on Plan 2, which outlined a process to appropriate gold (and other forms of money) from Chinese Vietnamese fleeing the country by boat.³⁹ A member of the Party Central Committee sent it to me; it seemed he wanted the document known to later generations. Several other journalists received copies of the report from him. But no one, to my knowledge, has ever released it. I don’t know if they kept their copies or not. I moved house many times after 1989 and jumped from job to job, but I never misplaced this precious document. I kept it in my possession until I published my book.

I did not plan to write the book in 1989, but I began to take notes and collect documents around that year. To be honest, I was not sure what I would do with all the material that I was collecting.

In 1997, when I left Tuổi Trẻ for the first time amid a wave of similar layoffs, I wondered, like many new ex-journalists, what I should do. The musician Tuấn Khanh, a colleague at Tuổi Trẻ, suggested that I try to become a historian. I had never wanted to be a historian, but my 1988 short story “Dead-End River” revealed a certain historical sensibility. Although fiction, “Dead-End River” recreated the politics and lifestyle of a different time.

Around 1997, I started to interview people for my book. My first interview subject was Mr. Hà Nghiệp, who had served as Trường Chinh’s personal assistant during the 1980s, prior to the onset of Đổi Mới.⁴⁰ Another early interviewee was Mr. Đinh Văn Niệm, the personal assistant to Võ Chí Công.⁴¹ Đinh Văn Niệm had helped craft new agricultural policies relating to “production contracts” [khoán sản phẩm], and he had worked on “Contract 10” [Khoán 10]. The latter is another name for the Politburo’s famous Resolution 10 issued in 1988, which allocated land to farmers for what was, effectively, private production. I was also able to interview General Võ Nguyên Giáp and members of his entourage during that time.

I began to focus on the book in 2003. Even though I was still a working journalist, my priority in those days was to finish the book.

In 2004, Trẻ Publishing House wanted to publish a memoir by Võ Văn Kiệt. It pitched him the idea, and he agreed. Editors at Trẻ asked me to help with the writing. I respected Võ Văn Kiệt, but I turned down the offer because I did not want to work as a ghostwriter. I suggested two other writers who could do the job, but Mr. Võ Văn Kiệt rejected them. He told the publishing house that he wanted his memoir penned by Huy Đức, the former journalist from Tuổi Trẻ. I had not been in touch with Võ Văn Kiệt since his retirement because, as a journalist, my focus was on persons active in the political area. But when I heard that Mr. Võ Văn Kiệt asked for me by name, I did not have the heart to turn him down. I also saw an opportunity to collect material for my book while working on his memoir.

Between 2004 and 2005, I met with Mr. Võ Văn Kiệt many times, and he told me many stories. Mr. Võ Văn Kiệt cared little about the memoir and never pushed me to finish it. Instead, he asked me to write various things for him. He tried to campaign for political reforms in Vietnam. He proposed that the party general secretary should be elected at the next Party Congress. Late in 2005, Mr. Võ Văn Kiệt gave an interview to a foreign newspaper, part of which went viral. There, he said that April 30th was an event that “made millions of people happy, but millions of people sad as well” [có hàng triệu người vui thì cũng có hàng triệu người buồn]. This statement became very popular with Vietnamese both in and outside the country.

I went to study in the United States in 2005, and while there, I contemplated trying to establish a Võ Văn Kiệt Foundation. Upon returning to Vietnam in 2006, I discussed the idea with him, and he supported it. He hoped that the current crop of leaders, including Nguyễn Tấn Dũng, Trương Tấn Sang, and Nguyễn Minh Triết, would welcome him as an advisor.⁴² But he also feared that the formation of a Võ Văn Kiệt Foundation would pave the way for more conservative former leaders such as Đỗ Mười and Lê Đức Anh to try to set up their own foundations.⁴³ Mr. Võ Văn Kiệt feared that bad ideas promoted by conservative ex-leaders might hinder the work of the administration. Thus, in the end, he abandoned the idea.

At the same time, a Vietnamese American figure, Dr. Phùng Liên Đoàn, proposed the formation of VN21, an institute to study Vietnam in the twenty-first century. Mr. Phùng Liên Đoàn sent Prof. Lê Xuân Khoa to Vietnam to explore this initiative. I had come to know Prof. Lê Xuân Khoa when I was in Maryland.⁴⁴

When Mr. Võ Văn Kiệt heard about this, he supported Phùng Liên Đoàn’s idea to form VN21. I did not like the plan, but I went along with Mr. Võ Văn Kiệt’s decision. I escorted Professor Lê Xuân Khoa around Hà Nội and accompanied him twice to meet with Prime Minister Nguyễn Tấn Dũng. He asked Nguyễn Tấn Dũng to support the project. During this trip, we also met with staff from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Education. We met Phạm Bình Minh, who later became minister of Foreign Affairs. During these meetings, we tried, without success, to build support for the VN21 project.

Mr. Võ Văn Kiệt then put his support behind Nguyễn Quang A and his colleagues who founded the Institute of Development Studies (IDS).⁴⁵ It is not well known that IDS received support from Mr. Võ Văn Kiệt, who sent Prof. Tương Lai to Hà Nội to work with Nguyễn Quang A’s group.⁴⁶ This is one reason why Mr. Nguyễn Tấn Dũng pushed to dissolve IDS. He wanted to eliminate the lingering influence of Mr. Võ Văn Kiệt.

Under Prime Minister Nguyễn Tấn Dũng, there was a Prime Ministerial Research Committee [Ban Nghiên Cứu Thủ Tướng] that had been set up before he came to power. When members of the committee criticized some of Nguyễn Tấn Dũng’s policies, it was quickly disbanded. Later, members of this committee joined IDS, which was another reason that Nguyễn Tấn Dũng opposed it.

During the time I worked with Mr. Võ Văn Kiệt, I helped him prepare many documents, including an article opposing the expansion of Hà Nội. I did not write the article, but I helped him craft it. Because of these time-consuming projects, we abandoned the memoir, but I didn’t have time to work on my own book either. Mr. Võ Văn Kiệt passed away on June 11, 2008, without leaving a memoir.

I must admit that my connection to Võ Văn Kiệt helped me gain access to other former leaders, such as Đỗ Mười and Lê Đức Anh. Some of these connections became sources of information that I was able to include in my book. It’s unusual to get useful information from leaders in Vietnam; it’s a rare achievement.

What’s the most precious document that you’ve ever unearthed?

It’s probably the report about Plan 2, related to the persecution of the ethnic Chinese. The interviews were important, but this document was more valuable. I tended to verify interview data by cross-checking it with documents whenever possible. I checked what people said against minutes from Politburo meetings or articles from the official press. For example, if someone mentioned Zhou Enlai’s visit to Vietnam during an interview, I would check newspapers to make sure that the visit had taken place at that time. I verified my information using both official and unofficial sources. Only after comparing different sources and verifying their authenticity did I use them for my book. Sometimes an interviewee would tell a story featuring inaccurate dates or misidentified individuals. Some accounts were so sketchy that I had to discard them entirely.

I knew that errors were inevitable when writing the book. But I don’t think any of my errors are very serious. I might spell a last name wrong. But none of the concrete information in my book strays from the truth.

When you were writing the book, what kind of reception did you anticipate? Was the actual reception different than what you expected?

When writing the book, I believed it would attract many readers. But after it was published, I was surprised to hear stories about people sharing copies with each other. I did not expect my book to be that well received. Before flying to Berkeley, I met Nguyễn Anh Tuấn, former editor in chief of Việt Nam Net, who had just returned to Boston from Vietnam. During his trip, he met Lê Đức Anh, who told him that he had instructed his secretary to read my book aloud to him.

After I published volume 1, Mr. Trần Đức Nguyên, ex-head of the Prime Minister’s Research Committee under Phan Văn Khải and Võ Văn Kiệt, told me that Phan Văn Khải had finished reading volume 1 and wanted to share some comments about it.⁴⁷ I also heard that Nguyễn Văn An has read both volumes.⁴⁸ Vietnamese officials visiting the United States asked diplomats at the Vietnamese Embassy to obtain copies of my book for them. I know that the book is widely read among both active and retired officials.

I notice that there has been some criticism of your book in Vietnam, but no public praise yet. Is that correct?

Of course there’s been no public praise in Vietnam. Until significant political reform occurs, my book will prompt only criticism. And to tell you the truth, I was prepared for much fiercer attacks than I have received.

Have you received any feedback that might lead you to revise aspects of the book in a new edition in the future?

There are important items not sufficiently covered in my book. For example, as Đổi Mới swept over journalism, newspapers such Sông Hương [Perfume River] or Lang Biang played an important role in the liberalization of the press in the central region. But my book winds down with the onset of Đổi Mới, and these central Vietnamese magazines appeared a little later. Still, they deserve more attention. I also should have discussed some of the decisions made by Mr. Võ Văn Kiệt that I did not agree with. I addressed his policies regarding the Dung Quất Oil Refinery and the construction of the Hồ Chí Minh Highway in my book. But I did not really explore his decision to form national universities, a wrongheaded move, in my view, that I ignored in my book.

On the other hand, my book should not be seen as some kind of report card on government performance. My goal is to provide readers a picture of Vietnam after 1975, describing and explaining all its major turning points. I hope to provide a comprehensive understanding of the country during this historical era. Inevitably, I must leave some stuff out.

I did receive encouraging feedback from the daughter of a well-known friend who participated in the resistance war and married the son of a family from the south. They now live in France. For many years, she fought with her husband’s family about politics. She defended the northern regime while her husband’s family criticized it and waxed nostalgic about the RVN. After reading my book, she told me that she could not sleep for months because it forced her to reexamine her views. Many readers have shared similar sentiments. I’ve also heard from southern officers who were sent to reeducation camps and knew conditions there well. They said that when they were in prison, they longed for packages sent from families. But only after reading my book did they realize how much hardship and poverty their wives and children had endured in their absence.

Before I published my book, I told my friends that if everybody agreed with it, there would be no need to write it. I know that there remains a huge division within the Vietnamese community and that people lack information. My hope is that my book will be read and stimulate debate. It may take a long time for some people to accept what I have described in the book. It will not change minds overnight, but it should cause people to think.

Can you talk a bit about negative feedback?

Of course. Lê Đức Thọ’s secretary attacked my book for criticizing Lê Duẩn for only finishing fourth grade.⁴⁹ But in my book, while I state that Lê Duẩn finished only fourth grade, I do not disparage him for that. Lê Đức Thọ’s secretary probably wanted me to write about Lê Duẩn in the same way that his subordinates flattered him. When I wrote about Lê Đức Thọ going south or going to Paris, I used different sources to show that those trips were unnecessary. Others could have gone in his place. As head of the Party Organizational Committee, Lê Đức Thọ wanted to get credit for going on those trips. But his secretary cited official praise of Lê Đức Thọ’s trips to dismiss what I wrote.

In my book, sometimes I wrote short memorable phrases. For example, I described the decisive battle on April 30th as a fight in which “flesh and skin kill each another; the disaster and harm come from within” [da thịt tàn nhau, vạ trong tường vách]. Some people blame me for refusing to acknowledge that the conflict was, in fact, “a war of liberation against the Americans to save the country.” I do not wish to debate people who hold this view. They have their beliefs; I have mine. Some complained that I wrote critically about reeducation camps and boat people without expressing sympathy for Vietnam’s complex domestic situation at the time. I don’t think my book shows sympathy or a lack of sympathy. It criticizes almost nothing. All it does is try to relate what happened after 1975 and to explain why it happened the way that it did. That’s all. I try not to accuse anyone of anything.

Others oppose my book for a different reason. While they view Lê Duẩn as a despot, they complain that my book portrays his humane side. He experienced love. His errors came from a desire to do something positive.

Just a few days ago, at my friend Đinh Quang Anh Thái’s house, I met a reader for the first time. He said that he had planned to hug me. But when we met, he told me that he could not do it because I did not admit that the communists had sold out our country. I told him that I am not a prosecutor of the communists. I simply put what I know about the communists into my book. I leave conclusions about the communists totally up to the readers. In the end, he found me insufficiently revolutionary and left without giving me a hug. Those who hate the communists hoped that I would describe them as cold-blooded murderers who kill without remorse. But while communists have led the country into hell and committed many blunders, some had good intentions but were simply incompetent. Those who hate the communists do not accept this view. But my goal was not to satisfy either side.

Why did you name your book The Winning Side?

The title of the book was inspired by a famous verse by the poet Nguyễn Duy: “At the end, in every war / Whichever side wins, people suffer” [Nghĩ cho cùng / Mọi cuộc chiến tranh / Phe nào thắng thì nhân dân đều bại].⁵⁰ During the past four decades inside the country, April 30th is always celebrated as a day of victory. It was obviously a victory for the communists. My book is mainly about what happened within the communist regime—the true winning side. But, as Nguyễn Duy suggests, while the communists were victors, many people suffered horribly.

What do you know about your readership?

I cannot say for sure. However, through feedback I have received, I think that my readers are diverse. I can say that the vast majority live inside Vietnam. And, indeed, my main goal in writing the book was to provide insight and information to a domestic audience.

As you mentioned earlier, your goal was simply to write a narrative of one critical period in Vietnamese history. Why do you think your book has felt so threatening to some? Why does history provoke such fear?

First, if you look at the modern history of Vietnam, you notice that whenever a leader dies, no matter what his policies did to the country, he is praised as a brilliant talent and lauded for his devotion to the country.

Second, there are many events in the recent history of Vietnam that educated people do not know about unless they learn about them on the Internet much later. They do not know about boat people, reeducation camps, or what happened to the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. And even if they know a bit about these events, they don’t understand why the state carried out such policies. For example, what was behind the campaign to reeducate ethnic Chinese in 1978? What was behind the disastrous currency exchange in 1978? Many people do not know the whole story.

In my book, I want to show that just because a country gains independence, there is no guarantee that the people will enjoy a better economy or political system or more individual freedom. The Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) is a political organization that led the fight for independence. I do not take issue with that project. What I want to do now is examine the policies introduced by the VCP since it won independence and how those policies had created many ups and downs afterward. I want to provide a panoramic picture so readers can gain a comprehensive understanding.

These days, not only ordinary Vietnamese people, but many top leaders of the country do not know the history of the VCP. They do not learn it in school. What they learn, instead, is a history in which the VCP always wins. I want to paint a different picture. I want to warn them that if they continue down the current path without genuine reform, they may lead the country to ruin. I have no wish to incite a revolution. But I do want our current leaders to understand the dangerous path that we are on—a path that leads only to misery. Of course there is a lot more in my book, but I want to express my ideas here in a simple way. I want people to grasp the truth I present through evidence that I have collected and deployed about the history of Vietnam after 1975 under the leadership of the VCP. I hope we will not repeat old blunders.

What about the pre-1975 period? Any thoughts on that?

I touch upon the pre-1975 period in The Winning Side. For example, in the chapter about General Võ Nguyên Giáp, I write about the war that the North called “the anti-American-war-to-save-the-country.” I also wrote a few chapters that were ultimately not included in the book. For example, I wrote about the events of 1945 and discussed the communist seizure of power. I analyzed from where that power was taken and if the VCP was, indeed, the only force that could have won independence and freedom. I have not published these chapters.

Do you plan to write a second book about other periods? From 1954 to 1975 for example?

If I write another book, I may address topics left out of The Winning Side, but I also want to explore possible next steps for Vietnam after it understands the lessons from the past. I want to discuss the full range of problems facing Vietnamese society. Current and future leaders of the country need to understand critical issues, foresee future problems, and modify their policies accordingly. Take Yugoslavia, for example. It seemed prosperous under Tito, and no one predicted the severity of the ethnic conflict leading to the break-up of the country. Can we say for sure that the seeds of ethnic conflict do not exist in Vietnam? And how long can a society, with a high potential for ethnic conflict, maintain order if it is ruled by a totalitarian or authoritarian regime? A dictatorship can only secure stability temporarily. The seeds of conflict lay beneath the calm surface, waiting to burst. It laid quietly for fifty years under Tito before it exploded.

Can you share with us your next project?

The most important thing I have wanted to do is to expose dark corners of our history, and I’ve done so in my book. Now I plan to return to Vietnam and see if I will be able to enjoy freedom and continue to work. If I can maintain my freedom, I will think about what to do next. But I plan to carry only a small backpack during my trip back, just in case I am sent to a certain place.

Last question: Can you talk about the risk of going back to Vietnam now after publishing your book?

Friends both inside and outside Vietnam have advised me not to return. But my position is that I am a journalist who wields nothing more than a pen. I do not plan to be a hero. I will return to Vietnam for two reasons. First, I do not believe that I have done anything wrong. Second, I do not want to spend the rest of my life in exile.

But today, I do not want to remain in the United States. Do I face a serious risk returning to Vietnam? Probably. Yesterday, a friend asked why I insist on going back even though I might be jailed. He asked if my decision was wise (or foolish). I said that I had thought about it while writing the book. I told my children not to count on my book making any money. It will likely only bring you trouble. If anyone helps you, great. If not, please continue your studies. While writing this book, my plan was always to go abroad, publish it, and return to Vietnam. I never intended to stay abroad forever.

I recently told a friend that no free man would ever choose prison. But, in some cases, to defend a right to freedom, prison cannot be avoided. If everybody avoids prison, we will never achieve freedom.