Realism Mandated : Love Is Lost in Literature of Vietnam

As Hoang Nhu Mai sees it, the big problem with teaching Vietnamese literature is that love has been tagged as bourgeois.

Mai, a slightly rebellious professor of literature in a Communist state, loves a good love story. And while his compatriots may seem tough on the outside, they’re pushovers for romance, he insists.

“During wartime (which has marked most of Mai’s 72 years), we had to use literature to stimulate patriotism . . . to stimulate the will to fight,” the slender, silver-haired professor recalled over tea. But Vietnamese soldiers have not fought on their own soil for nearly a decade. And still, the only works approved for the classroom look at life from the standpoint of workers and peasants, the school of “critical realism.”

Mai’s battle is just beginning. The professor wants to teach today’s students the masterworks of Vietnam’s prewar romantic poets. Workers and peasants need love too, he notes.

Mai’s struggle for change in the official curriculum is but one bubble on the percolating fringe of the arts world here. Film makers have been testing the bounds of authoritarian doctrine for several years. Publishers are producing both Vietnamese and foreign works that would not have gone to press in wartime.

But with few exceptions, change is glacial. Government censors were schooled in the wartime ways. And even if some reform-minded Communist Party leaders in Hanoi are prepared to take off the wraps, hidebound or cautious provincial censors are often reluctant to take the first step. Vietnamese are fond of quoting the maxim: “The nation’s laws stop at the gates of the village.”

So bourgeois arts, old or new, have yet to make an appreciable dent in the gray world of critical realism. But there are some glimmers: a young man in Hanoi who designs wool sweaters and wears a diamond stud in his ear. And there is some overkill: the ubiquitous disco beat of Western pop music.

But Mai is not interested in disco. He wants to hear the early works of Xuan Dieu--”the poet of love”--read once more in his classroom.

Xuan Dieu, who died two years ago, was one of the few artists who made the transition from peacetime to wartime. After the Communists took over in the north in 1954, the poet turned out revolutionary pieces.

“They were really quite good,” Mai remarked, “but they cannot compare to his poems of love.” After the writer’s death, a publishing house in the south put out a book of his best poems. “They sold out in just a few days,” Mai noted, citing testimony to Vietnam’s abiding passion for the romantic school.

“What is being taught at school is not accepted by the students,” the professor said. The current college texts are what Mai and his colleagues in the reform movement call “pink work,” literature that paints Vietnamese life in a rosy hue.

Lobby for Change

In Ho Chi Minh City, Mai and a group of like-minded professors have formed a “professional organization” to lobby for change in the curriculum. “Because there’s an association of writers, we teachers decided to have one too,” Mai said. “When you want to renovate, you have to be strong.”

The two-month-old organization is holding seminars to teach young teachers a body of work they had never known. Meanwhile, they are preparing a 26-topic literature course that they hope eventually to present to the Education Ministry for adoption into the official curriculum, combining the revolutionary and bourgeois schools and others.

“It’s an emergency case now, the ignorance of our students,” Mai growled.

While Mai longs for the literature of Vietnam’s cultural past, other writers and teachers are fixed on the present and future, spurred by Communist Party leader Nguyen Van Linh’s exhortation to artists to “untie yourselves.”

“We need to enjoy everything--love, life, everything,” explained Lai Nguyen An, a journalist, art critic and official of Hanoi’s New World Publishing Co.

‘Novel Based on Reality’

As examples of the “new tendencies” in Vietnamese literature, An cites the works of Nguyen Manh Tuan and Xuan Cang, which he hails as “a revival of the fictional novel based on reality.” Tuan’s “Mangrove Island,” published in 1985, is the No. 1 best seller of the new literature.

Set in the Mekong Delta, the novel sharply criticizes the government’s efforts to collectivize southern farms in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It was promptly banned by party leaders in the delta provinces, but it has sold 1.1 million copies throughout the country.

“I have touched many sacred cows,” Tuan has said of the novel, “but these sacred cows must take responsibility for what they have done to this country.”

“The Ordinary Day Is Ablaze,” a novel by Cang, editor of a labor journal, is a fictional portrayal, based on a factual case, of the struggle of Vietnam’s newly untethered journalists against factory corruption.

“The tendency since the 6th Party Congress (in December, 1986, when Linh took over the party reins) has been to struggle on human rights and artistic rights,” publisher An noted. Some of the struggle includes the introduction of foreign works.

‘Catch-22’

While Jack London and Ernest Hemingway were found suitable for publication under the flag of critical realism, An’s editors are now at work on a translation of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” an unconventional addition to the list at New World Publishing. “I can identify with Yossarian,” one of the editors said, “but it’s Major Major Major who intrigues me.”

Access is a problem. “Most of our foreign information (literature) comes from the Soviet Union,” An said, “including translations of American ‘reactionary’ writers.”

Linh, inviting criticism to spur doi moi, the Vietnamese version of perestroika, declared last year that he would urge the Politburo to adopt a yet-unseen resolution to encourage artists to “take on wings and fly into the blue yonder just like a liberated bird.” Film makers beat him to the punch by several years.

Working with Vietnamese crews and small budgets, they have explored official arrogance, war and corruption. Two quasi-documentaries, “Kindness” and “Hanoi Through Someone Else’s Eyes,” jab at the perks of party officials and callous trends in society.

But both films have been restricted and are shown “by invitation only.” That means no access to the public, which makes do with Soviet Bloc dramas, Indian musicals and Hong Kong kung fu flicks.

The authorities have had less success in curtailing the video invasion. Smuggled cassettes are played in the remotest villages, An said. “Platoon” is making the rounds, along with a small dose of pornography, at which even Linh draws the line.