From a Writer' s Diary by The Phong

asian morning western music / poems by the phong-
dai nam van hien books - this edition : 2012 - Ho Chi Minh city.

                                         from a writer's diary
                                                            by  the phong
      
                                                            translated from the vietnamese  by đàm xuân cận


Saigon 1963

            I started  writing in 1952 in Hanoi - in the first days of Vietminh - launched autumn winter offensive when the rumble of aritllery reached even the capital.   My mother was the last of the ĐỖ clan to be reported as lost after the fall of my native town Nghĩa Lộ.   I felt compelled to write in my lonely state.   Writing the brought me some solace.
              At the beginning of 1953 when I ceased to receive any money from my mother.  I was obliged to embark on journalism of the humblest sort.   I  was charged with the collecting news tips around the four districts of Hanoi and the courts as well.   I also assumed the duties of a proof-reader in the afternoon and evening.   Whereas my colleagues received one thousand five hundred piaster' s monthly, my boss Vũ Ngọc Các paid me one thousand only.   I had to earn my daily bread by the sweat of my brow.
              I came to the South Vietnam before Điện Biên Phủ and the subsequent Geneva Agreements .   Of the first ten years of my profession as a writer, I was an official on a contactual basis for eighteen months only.   I was known under the pen name The Phong coined by Lê Trọng Duật and myself at the foot of an electric pole in front of my aunt's villa in Chợ Đuổi Street. This magical name keeps ringing in my ears .
              In these days, there were very few Northerners and life  was pretty hard for me.   The highest price I emjoyed for a review was one hundred and fifty piaster's.   At the time, I had in store some memorial novels dealing with life of the montagnards in my homeland in the northernmost part of Vietnam.   They were Tình Sơn Nữ ( A  Highland Lass' Lover )  written in Hanoi, Đợi Ngày Chiến Thắng ( Waiting for Day of Victory) , and Cô Gái Nghĩa Lộ (A girl from Nghĩa Lộ ) ,  written in Saigon.   The royalties for each of this trio were thousand piasters for the first edition of two thousand  copies.   It was really great for an apprentice writer like me .   The public received my novels with much enthuisiasm.
             The charge  that I held many a critic in slight contempt was partly justified.  the so-called critics could not fail to acclaim any book by any influential man.   Take this case.   When a book by Phan Văn Tạo  was released  , lots of provincial cadres offered to sell it and some tens of newspapers were quick to comment on it favorably.   Even a minister  in Bảo Đại ' s era wrote  a partisan review in his extremely polished style in the Journal  d' Extrême Orient  the prominent  French language daily in Saigon.   I knew and I still believe he did not write it out of sincere admiration.   When Phan Văn Tạo presented his book to Nguyễn Đức Quỳnh writer, then adviser  to the Minister, the latter said, " You ' re only a writer with half of your being because you' re  only acquainted with the pink side of things. "
              To quote  Jan Kott,
              Uniformity  of opinion among intellectuals is always a bad thing.  The more complete it is, the worse the omen is.    Uniformity of poorly informed opinions are all the more.   We deplore conformity. 
It 's like witnessing a farce to hear a Minister of Cultural Affairs making a plea to writers to work harder while he did not believe in literature.
              Although the situation then  was not so bad as in Poland where writers commisioned by the government, we are heading towards such a course of things.   After the war many writers who could not put up with privation, hunger, and misery have dropped their sense of mission.   Here is another quotation by Jan Kott:
              What worries me is not  the fact that many Polish stories are badly written, but the fact that many Polish writers are standing around and telling lies.   As  a critic I feel it is my duty to scrutinize the artist's motivation, that is, real behavior or his attitude towards life.   I cannot praise a book it if does not reflect some concern about life.   I felt nauseous when literary awards were decided by government officials who had very little knowledge, if any, of literature .
              Can government officials become great writers ?  Perhaps, but only something like one out of million.   The majority of them  only uphold the order of the Town Hall clock.
               I was  never keen on behaving myself and writing as if I had my head in the clouds.   Only those
 to whom luxury and misery make no difference and who do not compromise with their conscience can understand me .   For this I wrote these words by Essenin in capitals :
      DRINK WITH ME, O SUFFERING FEMLAE DOG ! DO COME AND DRINK WITH ME !
              In alien Paris, after losing his money Mayakovsky asked  for help from friends and had to swear, shrugging his shoulders, " How could these lousy bastards dare to think of generosity ?"
              Those who insist on having a tasty breakfast with a gulp of delicious coffee, those who enjoy the wishful thinking of having contributed to national culture after attending functions held in luxurious hotels had better not read my books if they wish to avoid disappointment .   My sort of rugged literature is defintely not to your taste.   Don't torture me any more.   Stop giving me the fly-caused itchy sensation to a pussy wound..  You can go and pick up pretty girls, suits expertly tailored in cities as far as Paris, a set of weird buttons, a new pipe, a special imported tie or a top bottle of perfume.   Sophisticates, you are surely much smarter than I can afford to be.   Most of us writers wre lucky if we have enough for ourselves to eat, let alone feeding wives and kids.   We write simply because we cannot escape it, being victims of what we may call complexe d' obession .
             In the last  ten years of writing how  did I live ?   Time and again I faced hunger, humiliations of all sorts and committed such unsavory acts as theft and extortion of money from friends.   All sorts of queer things.   All my enemies can use these to discredit me if they want to ; there is no need for them to  forge any other accusations.   Or, they can just quote from  my published autobiography Nửa Đường Đi Xuống ( Midway in my Life' s Journey ), wherein the author is never evasive about any issue, however touchy it is.  I have never practiced blackmail and I am living victim of  blackmail; I have never been a vandal and I am branded a literary vandalist unhonourably.   I am just an agnostic - never an atheist.   I am condemned of being  A Judas, the traitor sold out Jeus Christ.   An innocent,  I was reported to be chief of the destructive committee.   All this happened to the simple writer that I was when the tempo of our literary activities was at an all time love.
            In France  the great playwight Jean Anouilh  he would never  write for dailies.    I cannot but thoroughly agree with him, knowing what rubbish Vietnamese dailies are.   As a former journalist, I cannot believe my eyes when I read all the rubbish  in the newspapers.  Fortunately I am no longer a journalist.  I was once a contractual official of my lack of courage .   Afterwards , I served again as an official for six months .   According to the contract I was received five thousand piaster's  a month.   After two months, I was given four thousand only , due to the budget squeeze.    I was forced to resign when I learnt there would be a further cut in my salary.   And it took me unbelievable patience to realize a claim for the salary I was entitled  to.   At last I was convinced that I could  not hang on to the govermnet payroll as long as I wanted to write.   Independence of thought is the sine qua non of any conscientious writer.
            In my ten years of writing, there are at least three memorable events concerning three of my readers and myself.   I am going to relate them one by one.   I did not know the  first reader, a Quang Trung Training Center  Canteen  salegirl .   Nguyễn Quốc  Toàn , who had fed    me for some time came to the center as a national serviceman.    He took some of my books there to read and lent  her my autobiography
Nửa Đường  Đi Xuống ( Midway in  my Life' Journey ) .   Upon returning it to him he said, " I think  I should lodge a complaint against you.   I was so absorbed in reading the The Phong you lent me I forgot to watch  the customers.   As a result, I lost a couple of fountain pen " .   Nguyễn Quốc Toàn  also said he was allowed to buy on credit.   I felt immensely proud of having such as a keen reader.   The second reader was a Faculty of Letters student from Central Vietnam who met me in the strret .   He stopped to say " Hello there " and then continued,  " I know you beause I've read your book  Nửa Đường Đi Xuống which my brother bought.   I can recognize you from your photo on the jacket ".
           Hesistanly, he asked me  whether I had lunch.  It was around three in the afternoon then.  I was deeply moved, knowing my account of hunger in the autobiography was very convincing.   I have not seen him since and do not even recall his name.    But I would  still recognize him if I saw him again  and I remember the address he gave me , 66 Phó Đức Chính St.   I did not  go there.
         The third  event occured during a visit I paid in 1963 to Dalat, the settlement area reserved for the Thais of Lai Châu, Sơn La and Nghĩa Lộ.  I had brought a camera with  the intention of taking snapshots of the sweet Thai girls  - the beautiful flowers of my hometown Nghĩa Lộ.    I was a bit disappointed because I did  not see any girl in the traditional dress.   When my friend and I stopped in front of  a house next to a well I struck up a conservation with a Thai woman.   When her daughter of about seventeen or eighteen overheard me speaking in Thai she came out to join us although she was ill at the time.   I asked her in Vietnamese whether she was  Thai.  She nodded and very graciously she invited us in.   We sat around a table made of rough unplanned wood.  She asked us where we came from and what we were doing.   Before I could reply my friend hastily declared I was a writer.   She put out her tongue and frankly confessed she was very much afraid of journalists.   Then he asked me about my job .   She let me know that she erad  a " forest" story about  highland and had enjoyed it very much.   I enquired about  the title of the book and the name of the author.   I also asked her if she had kept it.   She went in  and brought it out.   The cover of the book was torn and covered with signatures of all sizes and descriptions and in all sorts of ink.   The student accompanying  me was very young and did nor know much about me except that I was a writer.   Looking at the jacket, he said in surprise, " Here he is, the author of this book ".
          I was deeply touched that my book was appreciated by a girl in this solated place - a girl from my hometown.   I told her I wrote it a long time ago.   She praised and criticized me at the same time.   According to her, the description of life in highland was accurate : but  I had made a mistake in using the word
 koóng khảu for kóm khảu .   I learned  that her name is Lò Lệ Thu or La Lệ Thu if it is Vietnamese .   But I prefer the first.   Later  I wrote a dedication to her at the beginning of my book of poetry  Trước Mắt Nhìn Thi Sĩ ( Under the Poet's Eyes) written  in Dalat in this period.   Those who cared for me most were poor people.
          Let's stop wandering about  the innumerable manifestations of hypocrisy in a society like Vietnam .  Let's not forget Vietnam has been under a process of disintegration for eighty years French domination and twenty years of grinding war.
          When  I come to these lines it is eleven in the morning.   People are battling which other right next to my boarding house.   The cause of it all ?   The rubbish from foreign-operated trucks stationed near the rubber plantation.   They hope and so do I.   But my hope is only that I would be able to write a story about their hard life, their relentless struggle for life in this hard- core prostitute-infested area.   After probing deeper into their motives.  I no longer feel nauseous.   They are just human beings.   Let us struggle for life, no matter how much sweat we will have to shed.   I wrote them in Khu  Rác Ngoại Thành ( The Rubbish Tip Outside the City ) *.
          How to sum up  my experience  in ten eyars of writing ?   What makes m so bitter was just the sheer lack of courage on the part of the so-called intellectuals, writers, artists, engineers of the masses' soul - in short the backbone of any viable society - those who were ready to do anything, no matter how degrading it was, to achieve a sort of petty satisfaction .    They knew this damn well .   What makes me still hate them like hell is simply their hypocritical preaching about humanity's love and so on.   And I wrote ,

             Be assured , intellectual worms who cling to the vegetable tops
             when you die, you'll occupy three-meter-long tombs
             and these bitter lines of poetry :
             suddenly I was dumb-struck by the fact my country was in full plight
             I live in Saigon the year round without a warm coat
             witnessing my people searching for food
                           around the foreigner-operated rubbish dump
             I am standing pensively at the  Bẩy Hiền crossroads
                       watching kids growing on bread scattered on the earth
                        and the older boy presenting his brother with a piece 
                        of chocolate picked up  from the roadside
            I cannot contain my anger ...
            why on earth did they dare consisder art as mere ornament
            the white-collared students by day turned artists by night
            the visiting- card supported poets are so numerous
           the printers cannot promptly carry out the orders
                         all of them are using literature the same way as
                                                      bar hostesses look !
             the millionnaire' s poet son is expressing his pity for beggars 
             the ex-sub prefecture chief is expounding a new way of life
            can  we believe in the love for humanity expressed in his book
            with  a fervid tone which can be matched by a judge's voice
            while he keeps giving his dog a daily ration better than a Viet's .
            when  I visitd Thai settlers in Dalat
            I was struck by this scene :
            Thai kids have water in their mouths, carving for sticky rice
                      and they cry because this Têt  they won't have firecrackers .
            when their parents share their sadness, who is in  a position
                      to tell them to be cheerful
          thinking of what the future holds for them, I give this conclusion
          ... And this society, this life, this sun is still as dark as night itself ...
                     I believe my same statements scattered here and there will shed
                     light on  reality, and consequently will help politicians to do
                     something about this shocking state of affairs.
         O the people who have lived  through so many years of ordeal due
                    to the communists and colonialists and the Fanoti rulers
                    the million square meters of cultivated land
                                belong to my countrymen
                    the million lines of poetry which can become
                                directives for this nation in the future
                   should be preceded by the million lines of poetry
                              cataloguing the hardships of today  ...

                                                          ( Trước Mắt Nhìn Thi Sĩ
                                                                               Under the Poet's Eyes )

               After  a full breakfast consisting of steak and casse-crou^te a friend  of mine, aged 50 gave me this" advice"  reassuringly :
               " ... Go one like  this for sometime, man .   After you get married it w'ont be long before you understand us better and then it's entirely up to you to hate or pity us ."
               I was  really upset, although for a very brief moment only.
              A lot  indecent intellectuals who used to be very keen on doing good to the public in pre-war period.  And their famous ecxuse was that they did such and such thing because of wives and kids.  What a shame for them.   And what a pity for the women who are their wives and the boys who are their children !   Unsuccessful wiriters have the potential to become efficient censors or alert informers .
              I think I will get married.  This year I am thirty -two.   According  to Shin Nai Am who wrote  that masterpiece of Chinese fiction , All Men Are Brothers , I should  not get married at this late age.   But if I do, I will strive to feed my wife and children by the sweat of my brow.   I am no different from you, nor do I want to because I still cannot afford another thing than red rice, dried fish, chilly and pepper.   But I'm a bit difference from you because I have the guts to say that I have been a bloody liar or I have robbed a needy friend.   I am not a coward and I know what I am doing for my country's literature.   And this is the reason; I could not help writing this short account of my life as a writer.   I am not simply a man beset by narcissisms.
              In 1959 writer Thiên Giang  wrote an open letter  to Nguiễn-Ngu-Í  discussing my case.  Mr Í has shown me the letter.   He also expressed his desire to see me in his residence at Xóm Chuồng Ngựa, Gia Định Province  to have the opportunity to praise my efforts in promoting the national literary output.   That is enough for me.
              I want to say thanks to the journalists who jokingly,
             " Never  think that there are such words as  The Phong in Vietnaamese language.  Never mention them ". 

[]

THEPHONG  

------
*  The Phong / Khu Rác Ngoại Thành / The Rubbish Tip Outside the City  ( bilingual) -
     Dai Nam Van Hien Books, Saigon, South Vietnam ( 1963, 2006 ).

       ( p. 52 t0 57 )
       TENGGARA,  Oct. . 1968 Vol 2. No 2 .
       University of  Malaya - MALAYSIA )

( from  ASIAN MORNING WESTERN MUSIC /  poems by THE PHONG -
         First published by DAI NAM VAN HIEN BOOKS, South Vietnam, 1971-
         This Edition: January 2012 -  Ho Chi Minh City )