On Nov. 30, 1951, in the village of Dai Hoang in what is now the north of Vietnam, the writer Nam Cao was killed when his squadron was ambushed by French soldiers. Only 36, he was already one of the most important Vietnamese writers of his generation, whose short stories and novellas encapsulated the social problems of colonial Vietnam and the political mood that would bring the Viet Minh to prominence.
The political consciousness that led Nam Cao, via the Communist Party and the fight for independence, to his death, also underpins his best writing. In his work, people’s flaws result from social and economic forces: above all, the stress and inhumanity of life for the poor. Our individual impulses can be corrupted, but at bottom they are essentially good. The main theme of Nam Cao’s writing is the relationship between good and evil, and as he gravitated toward politics his life became defined by what he saw as the struggle between the two. The result was an author who never distinguished between his art and political activity, whose works are vivid and exciting while informed by an understanding of social forces that remains relevant. Until now, it has been difficult for English-language readers to appreciate him, but that is just beginning to change, with the appearance in 2024 of a new collection of Vietnamese stories, “‘Light Out’ and Modern Vietnamese Stories 1930-1954,” including two of Nam Cao’s. This may be the moment when more attention starts being paid to this chronicler of a major period of Vietnamese — and world — history.
Nam Cao’s writing can be broken into two phases. His work from the first phase has been associated with a movement of social realist writers who emerged in what was then French Indochina, particularly around Hanoi, in the lead-up to the August Revolution of 1945 and the war of independence known as the First Indochina War. The best-known of these works, “Chí Phèo,” appeared in 1941: Its titular main character is a rural village thug, alcoholic and destitute, who terrorizes those around him and earns a meager living by beating and threatening others on behalf of the local magnate, but the story explores how he is a product of political and social conditions. In the second phase, Nam Cao wrote from the front lines, and his work anticipates the more propagandistic direction of literature under the regime in the years to follow; still, it maintains the nuanced outlook on human nature that permeates his writing.
Vietnamese writers often used pen names: Nam Cao was born as Trần Hữu Tri in what was then the Ha Nam province of Tonkin, Indochina — today the Ninh Binh province of Vietnam. French Indochina was made up of five states, including Cambodia and Laos, while the other three compose present-day Vietnam. Cochinchina to the south was formally a colony under French control with its capital at Saigon, while the middle and north formed the French protectorates of Annam and Tonkin. Power in the protectorates was formally shared between the French governor-general and the Vietnamese Emperor of the Nguyen dynasty. But in practice, the French had full control, and the diminished status of Annam and Tonkin meant they had even fewer freedoms than Cochinchina.
Nam Cao grew up in exactly the sort of impoverished rural environment where many of his stories take place. His family was middle-class, and he was educated to a high standard for a Vietnamese person of the time. After school he worked as a secretary in Saigon, then moved north to become a teacher in Hanoi. He was published at a young age: His first stories appeared in 1934, when he was just 19 years old. But throughout these years he struggled financially, an experience he dramatizes in several of his stories.
At first, Nam Cao’s works were firmly social realist: They attempted to highlight the social and economic conditions of interwar Vietnam and show how people’s destinies were shaped by these surroundings. These stories were strongly influenced by the generation of Vietnamese writers, often very young and sometimes frighteningly productive, who, in the years before independence, developed a Vietnamese tradition of social realism that sometimes veered into memoir and investigative journalism. They wrote about tuk-tuk drivers, prostitutes, venereal disease clinics. What most distinguishes Nam Cao from these writers is the setting of his tales, which tend to take place in the countryside.
He offers a statement of his aesthetic ideas during this period at the end of the short story “Trang Sang” (1942), translated by Quan Manh Ha as “Bright Moon.” The main character, Ðiền, is a struggling writer and a teacher who earns little despite a rich education. At the end of the story, he realizes he must write to express the suffering of all those around him. The moonlight in the story’s title is a symbol for how our economic and social standing conditions the way we see the world. Ðiền focuses on the splendor of the bright moonlight, which was described by many of the authors he read at school; his wife, who has no education and bears the brunt of his family’s economic misery, sees only a chance to save money on candles. At the end of the story Ðiền realizes it is he, and not his wife, who is in the wrong: “What a lot of people were like him! This misery had scarred so many hearts. … Art could not and must not be this cheating moonlight. It must only be that cry of suffering, the cry of all these pariahs’ lives.” With this new aim, he sets to writing in earnest.
One of Nam Cao’s best-known stories from this period is “Lão Hạc” (‘Old Hạc’), published in 1943 and adapted for the screen in 1982 and 2020. The story is about an aged widower who attempts to hold on to the land intended as an inheritance for his absent son while falling into deeper and deeper poverty. He is reduced to eating snails and leaves; midway through the story, he is forced to sell his beloved companion dog to a butcher. The pathos of Hạc’s decline frames a moral analysis of how poverty strips people’s humanity away. At the beginning of the story, the narrator, a local teacher, foreshadows the end by describing how, when his child was sick, he had to sell the most precious thing in the world to him, his books. “Oh no, Old Hạc,” he says, “we are not allowed to keep anything for ourselves!” At the close, a neighbor tells the narrator that Hạc has been trying to poison a dog that regularly visits his garden in order to eat it. “Old Hạc is pretending to be honest! In fact he is a hypocrite; he is very cunning.” Poverty transforms Hạc from someone who treats dogs as companions into someone willing to poison them for food. The story also carries a submerged critique of how the colonial system of wage labor and resource extraction disrupted the forms of life that preceded it. Hạc’s son, from whom he has not heard for years at the beginning of the story, originally left to take up a contract working in a rubber plantation. Hạc struggles to preserve an inheritance for him that colonial society may have made almost worthless.
In Vietnam, Nam Cao is famous above all for “Chí Phèo” (1941), a novella-length story and a staple of the country’s high school syllabus. The titular character’s life begins when “early one morning, a catcher of eels found him naked and purplish blue, wrapped in a patched-up skirt near a deserted brick kiln.” His early life is told in a few sentences: The eel-catcher sells him to a “sterile mill maker,” after whose death he hires himself out as a servant, where he is sexually abused by the village magnate’s wife. Afterward, for unknown reasons (perhaps the husband’s jealousy, or theft), Chí Phèo is sent to prison. When he returns, he has become the repulsive main character of the story. He threatens the village magnate, Honorable Kiến, who decides it is better not to punish Chí Phèo and instead manipulates him into acting as his enforcer. In exchange, he receives a home and regular money, which he spends mostly on alcohol. “Clever is he,” writes Nam Cao, “who could give [Chí Phèo] an age. 38 or 39? 40 or more. Outwardly he is neither young nor old. His face looks like that of an animal. To look at a beast, who could guess its age?”
The story portrays Chí Phèo as a product of circumstance: not only the traumatic events of his early life, but the complete absence of love. Its gear shifts when he stumbles across and tries to rape Thị Nở, who is 30 and unmarried, living with her aunt. She and Chí Phèo develop a relationship that softens his character. When she offers him soup, he cries: “It was the first time that a woman offered him something. He had been given nothing so far. All that he had got, he had to snatch it by threat, violence or any awe-inspiring means.”
When this love is spoiled, it proves too much for him to bear. Chí Phèo invites Thị Nở to live with him and get married; her aunt ridicules the idea, and when she returns to Chí Phèo he has gotten drunk again. He insults her, and she runs away. Chí Phèo, grief-stricken and angry, full of despair, decides to take revenge on the magnate Honorable Kiến and murders him, then commits suicide. In the story’s closing lines, Thị Nở realizes she is pregnant with his child: “‘If I am pregnant, now he is dead, what is to be done?’ And in her mind’s eye appeared suddenly a deserted brickyard, far from the houses and the road…”
The return of the brick kiln at the end of the story makes a loop with its beginning: Chí Phèo’s child, like him, will be abandoned to suffer the same fate. The social forces that brought him into existence are cyclical. In murdering the Honorable Kiến, Chí Phèo expresses class rage and exacts personal revenge, but changes nothing in society. After his death, the narrator tells us, “The wisest people contented themselves with a smack of the lips: ‘When the bamboo-tree gets old, shoots sprout. A dirty fellow dies, another will come. That matters little to us…’”
As the 1940s went on, Nam Cao’s activity became more political in response to events. The French colonial system collapsed with the Japanese invasion during World War II, and then the August Revolution of 1945, in which the Viet Minh overthrew the emperor and declared independence from France. The eventual result was a war that would last until 1954. In the aftermath of the August Revolution, Nam Cao was elected to the local government in the district of Ly Nhan. In 1947, he traveled with a fighting column as a journalist and kept a diary which was published in a party newspaper. In 1948, he joined the Communist Party. It was while joining a squadron behind enemy lines to research a novel that he was killed.
This second phase of his work comes from this period of direct political involvement. It is perhaps best encapsulated by the story “Doi Mat,” translated into English as “The Eyes.” The narrator, a reporter traveling across the country for the propaganda service during the war, arrives as a guest at the home of the Hoangs; Mr. Hoang is a writer and old acquaintance of the narrator. Due to the conflict, the Hoangs have been forced to move from Hanoi to a village in the countryside. They despise and ridicule the local rural people, preferring to socialize with others from the town, although these include a corrupt former judge and a teacher who was fired for raping a student.
The story is designed to draw a contrast between Mr. Hoang’s disengagement from the war, with his dismissal of all the ordinary people who take part in it, and, in the narrator’s words, “how his friends (other writers and artists) were engaging themselves in the lives of the common people — to learn from and teach these working, country people, while gaining inspiration for their art.” Its satirical depiction of the Hoangs is a way of criticizing those who believe in a separation between art and politics. For Nam Cao, a humanist art worth the name is in every sense linked with ordinary people: Their daily lives should be its inspiration, and an artist should share people’s struggles and experiences. This notion would prove influential in providing cover for the socialist realist aesthetic of official Vietnam in the years after Nam Cao’s death.
But what makes “The Eyes” more than a piece of political satire is its multilayered ending. In the story’s final scene, before going to sleep, the narrator joins the Hoangs in their nightly routine of reading a section from the classic Chinese novel “Romance of the Three Kingdoms.” On one level, it works as just one more instance of the couple’s disengagement as they bury themselves in a centuries-old text. The narrator participates grudgingly, out of politeness. But the scene is also a humanist portrayal of the Hoangs as more than mere degenerate products of the educated circles in Hanoi. Like a Caravaggio painting, it uses dark surroundings to frame a portrayal of the experience of literature as a connection between human beings across time and place.
Just as the titular character of “Chí Phèo” ultimately desires love and recognition, in “The Eyes” the Hoangs seek that shared experience. From the narrator’s point of view, in the Hoangs this impulse has taken a corrupted form. But in that way the closing scene of “The Eyes” encapsulates a central aspect of Nam Cao’s work: the juxtaposition of evil social forces with individual goodness, however deeply buried:
She put the lamp back at the head of the bed, took off her áo dài [tunic], and lay next to her son, who had lain down there first. She asked, “Where were we last night? Did we…?”
“No need to worry about it. Reread the section in which Cao Cao cajoles Dong Zhuo. Do you think Cao Cao is talented, Do?”
I answered perfunctorily, “He is, indeed.”
“Yes. He’s very smart—the smartest character in Three Kingdoms. How in the world did he get that smart?”
Mrs. Hoang found the episode and began to read it aloud. Hoang smoked while listening. He slapped his thighs whenever he heard a good passage and uttered, “So clever! So clever! Damn! Only Cao Cao can do that.”
Despite his reputation in Vietnam, little of Nam Cao’s work is available in English. Translations of two of his stories are published in “‘Light Out’ and Modern Vietnamese Stories 1930-1954”: “Bright Moon” and “The Eyes.” In 1961, the Vietnamese state’s propaganda publishing house published an English translation of selected stories and his 1947 war diary with a propagandistic introduction. The book, titled “Chí Phèo and Other Stories,” is out of print but available online. Several of his stories, including “Chí Phèo” and “Old Hạc,” were adapted together in the 1982 film “Lang Vu Dai Ngay Ay” (“Once Upon a Time in Vu Dai Village”), watchable with English subtitles on YouTube. The paucity of translations in English has contributed to Nam Cao’s obscurity in the West. That deserves to change.
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