Of War and Remembrance : Culture: Memoirs and military histories are among the most popular works emerging from the small but thriving Vietnamese-American publishing world.

Ask Khoi Nguyen, an Anaheim medical technician, if he’s read any good books lately, and he mentions one you won’t find on the bestseller lists.

It’s “Thien Duong Mu” (“Blind Heaven”) by Duong Thu Huong, a now-imprisoned dissident novelist in Vietnam whose books are reprinted in the United States and France.

“It means the (communist) government built up a heaven for the people to look forward to, but actually it’s a blind heaven--nobody sees it,” Nguyen said as he browsed recently in a Vietnamese bookstore in Orange County’s Little Saigon.

“Right now we’re interested in reading books written by Vietnamese authors during the communist regime,” said Nguyen, 38, who was a university student when he escaped on the American airlift out of Saigon in 1975. “I have an interest in seeing the life of my brother and father, the suffering they had to go through during the transition of an independent country to communism.”

“People would like to know about the kinds of struggle for survival in the hardest time,” said Orange County author Pham Quoc Bao, 50, whose first book chronicles his five years in a communist prison.

Memoirs and autobiographies by former political prisoners of the communists and histories by former North Vietnamese military officials are among the most popular titles emerging from small but thriving Vietnamese publishers in the United States.

Despite the rapid assimilation of the younger generation to MTV and Bart Simpson, Vietnamese publishers say they will continue to flourish by catering to older readers and new immigrants.

At Tu Luc 3, a Vietnamese bookstore in Garden Grove, owner Don Dao said fiction, English-Vietnamese dictionaries, cookbooks, self-help, psychology and exercise books and translations of U.S. bestsellers are also popular with his mostly 30-and-older customers.

Keeping the shelves stocked are about 20 Vietnamese publishing companies in the United States, each turning out from two to 20 new titles a year by Vietnamese immigrants, plus reprints of books originally published in Vietnam and self-published works, such as memoirs and poetry and essay collections.

To keep costs down, the companies usually publish modest first printings of 1,000 to 1,500 copies, in paperback.

The books are sold in about 36 Vietnamese bookstores nationwide as well as in outlets such as video and record shops, restaurants and grocery stores. Not surprisingly, Orange County--home to more than 10% of the 700,000 Vietnamese in the United States--has five such bookstores.

Yen Do, editor and publisher of Nguoi Viet, the oldest and largest Vietnamese daily newspaper in the United States, said the current crop of Vietnamese nonfiction particularly appeals to those who arrived here just after 1975.

“The books explain a little bit why South Vietnam fell and what’s happened to the victorious communists--how they were corrupted by their victory,” said Do, whose Westminster-based Nguoi Viet Publishing has issued 25 books.

For recent arrivals to the United States, the books take on a great importance.

“It’s like opening up a new horizon for them,” said Viet Dung, a book publisher who also manages Number One Printing in Garden Grove. “The first thing they do is find some books to read and get some information and open their minds again.”

Indeed, buying and reading books represents the return of a freedom lost after the communist victory. In the months after the fall of Saigon, Do said, the communists “organized the militant youth movement to go into every home and bring books to the street and burn them.

“They tried to destroy the collective memory of the whole people. But fortunately, a lot of people tried to hide their books because they knew that they could later sell them” on the black market.

After a brief movement toward freedom of expression that peaked two years ago--a time Do calls glasnost-- censorship returned in Vietnam and some writers were jailed. Another recent easing of censorship has resulted in “an effort to reprint those books in Vietnam and overseas too,” Do said.

In the past two years, said Do, works written in Vietnam by former North Vietnam military leaders have been popular with publishers because after years of reading the government line, readers welcome books that attack the communist regime.

“Basically, those books were not focused on propaganda anymore,” said Do. “This is the book of the glasnost time: they criticize each other. “

Many of the Vietnamese publishing companies here started up by reprinting books published in Vietnam before 1975, and they continue to do so today, Do said.

“They have made a positive contribution because it helped the Vietnamese here (to) have material for the study of their language,” he said. On the negative side, he added, Vietnamese writers do not receive royalties because Vietnamese copyright laws do not apply in this country.

Although Vietnamese immigrants “enjoy the freedom of publishing and keeping books, the irony is, once they are here, they must spend most of their time on their economic survival,” Do said.

Time spent learning English and pursuing other leisure-time activities like TV-watching takes away from reading, particularly among young people. Indeed, Vietnamese book publishing in this country appears to have stabilized because of them.

“It’s not growing at all because the younger generation is reading English,” Dung said. “But there’s a need for it, and we’re filling it.”

Do is more bullish about the future market for Vietnamese books. Practical books on U.S. laws, taxes, business practices, investments, electronics and health care help new immigrants adjust to American life, he said. And he predicted that Vietnamese publishers in this country would one day sell their books in Vietnam--an untapped market of 69 million people--and vice versa. “People (in Vietnam) want to reach the overseas market, so we’ll have a cross-cultural (exchange).”

Publishers also look to Vietnamese parents such as Khoi and Hang Bui Nguyen to boost their sales.

The couple is seeing to it that their American-born children learn to read and write Vietnamese. They sit down three evenings a week with their 7-year-old son, Brian, for reading and writing lessons, and plan to do the same with their two younger children.

“It will give them the advantage of (knowing) an additional language when they grow up. And . . . they will learn their mother language so they can enjoy literature from their motherland,” Khoi Nguyen said.