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Looking for Duong Thu Huong

By John Conroy

A harsh wind was blowing from the Chinese mountains in the North. It swept through Hanoi, driving an icy-like rain going straight to the bone. I should have gotten used to it, coming from just below the border south of Montreal, but I had just left Saigon that morning...sweltering Saigon...same as in the old days. And it still is Saigon, not Ho Chi Minh City...not yet. No GIs in jungle fatigues, though some old ones are here, mostly invisible as they pass through. Some of them stay…those who can't leave.

Anh was with me. As a kid, He left on the boats years ago but had returned to Saigon for a fresh start. We were looking for the writer Duong Thu Huong, Vietnam's best-known political dissident...and its most popular author. Her novels Paradise of the Blind and Novel Without a Name have been translated into French and English and are known worldwide. She has had trouble with the authorities for sending them abroad for publication.

Duong Thu Huong had gone south on the Ho Chi Minh Trail as a young woman of twenty. She'd spent seven years under the guns and bombs of the US military, living in the mountains northwest of Da Nang and Hue. Her job was entertaining, singing, and dancing for the troops who fought and the army of young volunteers who maintained the trail south. The communist youth brigade that she led began with a troupe of forty. She was among only three survivors who emerged from the jungle in that spring of 1975 when the North was finally victorious.

During the Chinese-Vietnam border conflict in 1978, she was the first woman correspondent at the Front to record the hostilities. When her books were published abroad, first in French, she began having trouble with the government. An anti-war position was less appreciated by her government than ours. I asked Anh how we could find her.

"All I need's a phone, and I'll come through," he said.

I'd spent enough time in this country to know that he would. Nothing goes undetected in Vietnam. An old Saigon hand in the US Foreign Service once remarked that the Vietnamese grapevine is the fastest form of communication known to humanity. In my experience, it still was.

Quan, the protagonist of Huong's book Novel Without a Name grows tired and disillusioned after ten years in the field. At one point, while thinking over those years, he says to himself. "I was a coward. I have known both glory and humiliation and lived through all of these years with their sordid games. The eighteen-year-old boy who had thrown himself into army life was still just a boy, wandering lost somewhere just beyond the horizon. I had been defeated from the beginning, for I had never really committed myself to this war."

Anh was off the phone. "She's down in her home village of Thai Binh for the weekend. If you want, we can rent a car and go looking." After much conversation, we found a driver willing to make the trip.

Thai Binh is 100 kilometers southeast of Hanoi in the Red River Delta. It's rice country known as the "breadbasket" of the North. The area has historically been a hotbed of revolution and nationalism, both of which were harnessed by the Indochinese Communist Party in the '30s and '40s. More recently, dissent toward the present government has surfaced again in this area, and unbeknownst to us, foreigners were banned.

The most famous war photographer of all time, Robert Capa, was killed by a mine on the highway to Thai Binh after the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. It seemed likely that no American had been in the area since the last pilot from the Sixth Fleet was shot down here in the 1970s.

Along this road, we were traveling the same path Duong Thu Huong, the protagonist from Novel Without a Name, the North Vietnamese Army Sergeant Quan, had traveled as he returned home for a visit during the waning days of the war. This surrealistic journey back to the scene of his youth and first love makes up a key narrative of the book.

The village of Thai Binh looked to be a pleasing and prosperous little town despite the grey skies and the dampness of the wind. We stopped to speak with some local people, and in no time, Anh came up with an address. At the time, I had no way of knowing that the building flying the national flag across the street was the police station and local lockup.

We wandered the usual maze leading to local housing once off the main streets in Vietnam and practically bumped into our author having tea with friends and relatives on her back porch. From their expressions, I surmised they hadn't seen a "long nose" here in years. Anh and I were invited for tea, and since Huong, like most of the intellectual crowd in the North of Vietnam, spoke French, not English, Anh translated from Vietnamese for me. She seemed to know that I was the guy from America who wanted to have a movie made from her book. I'd been in touch by fax a couple of times and through friends on the phone...and the conversation began.

"As a youth my interest was music, however the schools did not offer a great deal so you might say that I was mostly self-taught. When the war heated up and all the other young people were participating in one way or another, I too had to do my part. I volunteered for the front lines and stayed there for seven years. I was in a theatrical group that entertained the fighters and the transport people as well as the native supporters in the bombed-out areas. We were morale boosters, and we tried to sing so loud that no one could hear the bombs. Only three of my troupe out of our original forty survived."

I asked her about the character Quan in Novel Without a Name...his origins or if he was based on a particular person. "He was the friend of my uncle's son. He was the man I loved, but he did not survive the war."

Huong insisted that she finish her work in the fields of her ancestor's graves before nightfall, so farewells were made, and she walked us back to the car. As we approached our vehicle, we found it surrounded by police.

We approached the police. They requested passports and, in due time, began their questioning. "Who are you?" and "Why are you here? Are you journalists? This is only a tourist visa. Why are you here?" and on and on. Anh tried to explain that we were only interested in their neighbor as an author, not as a political person. Then, the policeman motioned us toward the back seat. We obliged and then drove the short distance to the station. Since not a soul in the world knew where we were, the thought of being locked up wasn't that appealing.

Anh said they wanted to call the Interior Police, a combination of the FBI and the CIA, which we objected to. I told him that we'd done nothing wrong and that they had to let us go. The policeman began waving my passport at Anh, who grabbed it from his hand. The cop went ballistic, and I yelled at Anh to watch himself.

"They don't scare me. I am boat people. I left this county in a leaking tub at fourteen and nearly died a dozen times before reaching safety in Malaysia. We haven't done anything wrong." The cop started screaming at us once more. I stood up and again tried to explain things. The officer finally listened.

Anh took over, and after a moment, the officer smiled. They resumed a quiet conversation in their language and decided that if I would sign a statement concerning our presence in Thai Binh, we could both leave.

Eventually, they produced a prepared statement, which Anh read through and I signed. Smiles returned, and another of the officers passed cigarettes around, as is customary in Vietnam. It was a peace pipe in this instance. After a few puffs, handshakes, and smiles, we bid farewell to our interrogators and hit the road for Hanoi.

We decided to head directly to the No Bai Airport and catch the last flight back to Saigon. The driver agreed. I think he wanted to be rid of us for good. We managed to catch that last plane to Ho Chi Minh City.

I acquired an option for her book's film rights and adapted a screenplay from Novel Without a Name. However, I could not move this project forward in the film business. The response invariably was...you can't get a movie made in this town without a white man lead...and that's where that project was left.

John W. Conroy was embedded with the US Army six times in Iraq and five times in Afghanistan. He was a soldier in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967. Since returning to Vietnam in 1989, he has written numerous articles concerning the country, some of which focused on veterans of the conflict. His published novel is The Girl from Tam Hiep. The Embedded Ones and The Disillusioned are in progress.

Doung Thu Huong and John Conroy.