Dương thu hương

Duong thu huong biography
Nguyễn huy thiệp
Thiep was raised by a Buddhist mother, a maternal grandfather who introduced him to Chinese literature, and other teachers, including a Catholic.

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Nguyễn Huy Thiệp, one of Vietnam's most talented and influential post-war authors, passed away on March 20 at the age of 71.

Best known for his short stories, Thiệp also penned poems, novels, literary essays, novels and plays. His works often focused on the tensions between urban and rural life as well as the changing cultures and economics the country experienced during the Đổi Mới period. His style is praised for its short and deft sentences, quick pace, nuanced characters, and startling metaphors.

Born in Hanoi, as a young man, Thiệp made a living in rural areas via various jobs including teacher, salesman, physical laborer, painter and restaurateur. Despite falling in love with literature at a young age, he didn't publish his first stories until the age of 36. One year later, in 1987, his story 'Tướng Về Hưu' (The General Retires) caused a scandal for its criticisms of socialist systems that were undergoing drastic renovations. Yet, his unflinching portrayals of society in flux resonated with readers while inspiring generations of writers who followed in his footst

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Nguyễn Huy Thiệp

Nguyen Huy Thiep was born in 1950 in the Thai Nguyen province northeast of Hanoi. At the age of ten he moved with his family to the capital. There he went to school and then to a college of education, completing his teacher’s exam in 1970. For ten years he worked as a village teacher in the mountainous region of the province of Tay Bac in the northwest of the country, where he lived a simple peasant life. Along with his historical studies, these experiences became the background for his literary works. From 1980 on he lived in a village near Hanoi that became suburbanized during the growth of the capital without losing its old structures. In his works the distance and tension between city and village lifestyles is a central theme. Intermediary characters often break into the rural milieu, which is characterized by traditions and superstitions. Afterwards there is a confrontation with the urban world, which usually appears as morally condemned and materialistic. These intermediaries may be village teachers, pupils, students, or poets, characters that embody

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Thiep and I

I first encountered Nguyen Huy Thiep, who died on 20 March at the age of seventy-one, while working as an English teacher at the University of Hanoi in the summer of 1990 during the thick of the Doi Moi (Renovation) era. While my salary was paid by the Stanford service programme, Volunteers in Asia, the university contributed additional renumeration in the form of free Vietnamese lessons taught by a junior cadre from the International Relations Office. To my great good fortune, I was assigned Phan Quang Minh, an intense and idealistic returnee from the Soviet Union in his early twenties who used our class to introduce me to his many Doi Moi-era passions including the writing of a relatively new writer.

Perhaps because he knew that I was also a History PhD student, Minh taught an early lesson on ‘Vang Lua’ (Fired Gold), Nguyen Huy Thiep’s scandalous historical story that had provoked a flurry of harsh attacks and ardent defences in the local press. As fascinating to me as the story’s revisionist history, blunt language and structural eccentricity (it features t