GreatFire was set up in 2011 by three anonymous individuals to counter the “Great Firewall of China”, the systematic blocking by the Chinese government of any website deemed controversial, including any that touch on news, human rights, democracy or religion.
“We know them as a mix of folks within China and outside of China who have a mix of activism and technological expertise,” said Dan Meredith of the Open Tech Fund, one of GreatFire’s financial backers.
“Their motivations are not regime change, but purely wanting to see progress for the Chinese people, and see more reforms happen in the Chinese government. They’re passion driven, but they also have this insider knowledge about how to circumvent some of these really sophisticated things that are happening in China,” he told Index.
“GreatFire is quite a mysterious organisation,” Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia told Index. “It’s, roughly speaking, five people, maybe it’s not quite five, maybe its more,” he said. “But it really is just a small group of people who have come together to do something important.”
The team started out collecting data about which sites were blocked in China, and now monitors over thousands of sites, domains and Google searches. “They have a network of computers in and outside of China, testing for whether websites that are generally available to the public here in the UK or the US or any other country that has unrestricted access to the whole internet, are available within China,” Meredith explains. Their site also shows how much of the time it has been blocked, and offers an explanation as to how.
GreatFire are also the makers of FreeWeibo, which was a shortlisted in 2015’s Index Awards and acts as a mirror to Weibo, the popular, but heavily censored, Chinese social network. As well as this they also run FreeBooks, allowing people in China read censored books.
“GreatFire are one of the organisations that are really fighting hard against censorship in China,” said Wales.
But last year GreatFire’s work went from being an annoyance to the Chinese authorities, to being something they couldn’t ignore, Meredith explained.
Using an idea called collateral freedom, GreatFire made blocked sites accessible to millions in China and around the world. The collateral freedom idea works by pinning banned websites to those of big corporations (such as Amazon, Microsoft or GitHub) which, in order to compete in the global marketplace, China cannot block. When organisations normally blocked in China – like the BBC or Reuters – use, for example, amazon.com as a host their sites can remain visible in China.
In February 2015, GreatFire used this technology to release an Android app, allowing anyone in China, or in other countries where the web is censored, to access these otherwise censored sites. Everything they do is open source, so their work can be replicated by others.
However, it was GreatFire’s work with Reporters Without Borders, Meredith says, that finally caused the Chinese government to retaliate.
“We know is that they are incredibly frustrated by this collateral freedom idea,” he said. “But what happened last year when Reporters Without Borders started employing this is…there became a very big press strategy, so what ended up being a thing that was quietly annoying the Chinese became a very public thing that was annoying the Chinese.”
The project was launched on World Press Freedom Day in March 2015, and used collateral freedom to unblock websites around the world, making previously censored sites available in Russia, Iran, Vietnam, Cuba and Saudi Arabia. The unblocked websites included Reuters Chinese, BBC on China and German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.
The response from the Chinese government, which became known as the “Great Cannon”, was a critical test for the idea of collateral freedom, says Meredith.
“They took all the Chinese traffic that was trying to come in, and put a mirror on it – so this is one billion people, a third of the internet – and instead of directing that to an internal website, they redirected all that traffic to GitHub, to Amazon, to Microsoft,” said Meredith. By directing this traffic to all the sites used by collateral freedom, the Chinese government were testing those service providers.
“It was just enough to raise all the flags and create a very public storm which created a further media event that said ‘China is blocking Amazon or blocking GitHub’ – at which point they stopped.”
The point of this, Meredith explains, is that the economic cost of blocking the big providers, this time, outweighed the Chinese government’s desire to censor the web. So if in the future, during a major election for example, the government might be tempted to block these sites. GreatFire showed the Chinese government, and the world, what it would cost.
“What it shows is possible is something GreatFire can really lay claim to. They showed that China could do this, would try to do it, that those companies could weather that storm, and that the balance is still there where millions of people are able to get online because of collateral freedom.”
Singapore’s founding father and long-serving Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who died in March. (Photo: “Lee Kuan Yew” by Robert D. Ward – Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)
Salil Tripathi has joined Index as an online columnist and will be contributing monthly
The golfing phrase “OB markers” has a special meaning in Singapore. Short-hand for what is “out-of-bound,” it lays out, informally, the limits of what can be said, and if you’ve lived long enough in Singapore, you are supposed to know what those markers are, and where they are.
Singapore has laws regulating speech, some of which are inherited from the British era, while others were refined to suit Singapore’s governance model, which many have described as soft authoritarianism, associated with Lee, who died in March at 91, led his People’s Action Party to successive electoral victories since independence in 1965, and the party has remained in power since. Goh Chok Tong succeeded Lee as prime minister in 1990, and Lee’s son, Lee Hsien Loong, has been prime minister since 2004.
The genius of the principle of OB markers lies in its ambiguity – the markers are not clearly defined; it is incumbent on the journalist to figure out what can and cannot be said; it keeps everyone guessing. The model has suited Singapore well for the past five decades. The local media, much of it owned by companies close to the government, has little problem with it. Many international publications have also complied with the system. (Most foreign correspondents based in Singapore have regional responsibilities, and South-East Asia does offer a range of interesting stories. Unlike those countries, Singapore’s post-independence history has been far less dramatic.)
Besides, when foreign publications published stories or commentaries critical of Singapore, they faced lawsuits. Far Eastern Economic Review, where I worked for some of my eight years there, was combative; it not only lost lawsuits and its circulation was restricted, as was the case with some other publications.
This year marks a watershed – the republic celebrates its 50th anniversary, but the joy is clouded by Lee’s passing. Many have credited him with building modern Singapore; those who lament Singapore’s stunted politics say it is the result of his style of governance.
Is Singapore on the cusp of becoming different?
In four recent cases Singaporeans have tested the limits of freedoms they can take for granted. A video, a film, a blog and a graphic novel have pushed at the boundaries of what can be said, and the government realises that it cannot simply ban these, because banning is no longer that simple, and Singaporeans today are better-educated and more demanding than in the past. Singaporeans no longer watch films only in theatres or on television, nor buy books only in shops, and nor do they consume news and opinions only through newspapers and magazines. Furthermore, better-educated, articulate Singaporeans want to be treated as thinking adults who can make up their own minds. How Singapore deals with this change will determine what kind of society Singapore will become.
Amos Yee is a teenager with an attitude. In a controversial video he posted online within days of Lee’s passing, he made highly critical and disparaging remarks about Lee. Yee is precocious and strident, and doesn’t fit the image of the shy, polite, obedient Singaporean with a neat hair-cut that the republic has tried so hard to groom. With an accent that sounds North American and a vocabulary that would make his grandparents cringe, he attacked Lee’s political legacy and economic record, pointing out economic disparities and the silencing of the opposition.
But he also criticised Christianity, and for that, Yee was arrested and charged with showing “intention of wounding” religious feelings. To be sure, many ruling party supporters were incensed over his political criticisms. One man made crude physical threats online. (Making violent online threats is a crime in Singapore). Another man slapped Yee when he was on his way to court (the man was subsequently arrested, tried, and jailed). Yee’s attitude did not help; his lawyer was exasperated by Yee’s recalcitrant behaviour (including flouting bail conditions), and it was hard to figure out if he should be tried as an adult – and punished accordingly – or sent for psychiatric evaluation. In the end, he was sentenced, but as he had spent more time in remand than his sentence, he was released. The Wall Street Journal wrote the case showed Singapore’s struggle to adapt its tradition of censorship to the realities of the digital era.
Yee presented a unique dilemma for Singapore. The government is used to respond robustly to critics who are political rivals, academics, or foreign journalists. It has sued opposition politicians, some have become unemployable, and some have had to leave the country, as their visas are not renewed. But here was a boy, not yet an adult; he was not old enough to be part of the mandatory military service; and he was being deliberately provocative. But how could a state go after a teenager who has acted like a brat?
Roy Ngerng
Roy Ngerng is a blogger who has criticized the government’s handling of the mandatory Central Provident Fund in his blogs. As an activist, he has campaigned for greater equality through higher public spending. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong sued Ngerng for defamation, and during his recent trial to assess damages, Lee’s lawyer Davinder Singh sought aggravated damages. Ngerng described himself as a man of limited means and argued his own case, and said he had apologized; Lee’s lawyers said the apology was not sincere enough. At one point, Ngerng broke down in the court. In another case, Tan Shou Chen, who acts in an ongoing show, LKY: The Musical wrote a blog where he claimed that the government had interfered with the script. The government denied it, and Tan took down his post. The show is running till 16 August.
Tan Pin Pin has made a film called To Singapore With Love, which showcases the lives of left-leaning dissidents who had challenged Lee in the 1960s. In the years leading up to Singapore’s independence, Lee had initially allied with the left, but later parted company. It was a period of regional turmoil, with the war raging in Vietnam and spreading to Indo-China, and there were real fears of Communism spreading across South-East Asia. These dissidents left Singapore and went into exile; a few have since died, and others are not allowed to return to Singapore. Tan’s film gives voice to those individuals, portraying them sympathetically as nationalists who saw Singapore’s future differently.
Singapore has banned the film from public screening because it “undermined national security”, but private screenings are allowed in Singapore. A week after its ban last September, more than a hundred Singaporeans took buses to Johor Baru, the Malaysian city across the causeway that links Singapore and Malaysia, and saw it there. Tan challenged the ban but she lost. The film has been shown at international festivals and while it can be bought online overseas, it cannot be shipped to a Singaporean address.
Finally in June, Singapore’s National Arts Council withdrew its grant made to artist-illustrator Sonny Liew, who had published a graphic novel called The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye. The council said the way the graphic novel retold Singapore’s history undermined public authority. Interestingly, it did not ban the book; the council wanted its money back. (The publisher complied; the graphic novel sold out instantly and reprints were ordered).
These cases show the constant tussle over where those OB markers lie in Singapore isn’t over. In the past, it was clear: there were bans, prosecutions, bankruptcies, fines and jail terms. In the post-LKY Singapore, rules are changing and those markers are shifting.
Singapore’s leaders lay great store in business school principles and terms, such as feedback loops. They will have to ensure that those loops are not shut, and listen to what Singaporeans are saying. That is possible in an environment where people are free to draw, write, and speak. There is an east Asian saying that “the bamboo shoot that grows tall gets chopped first.” Chopping that bamboo shoot is no longer an option. If the government listens more, Singapore will benefit. True, some teenagers will throw tantrums, but that’s part of growing up.
Index on Censorship magazine’s editor, Rachael Jolley, introduces a special issue on refugee camps, looking at how migrants’ stories get told across the world, from Syria and Eritrea to Italy and the UK
Nothing is national any more, everything and everyone is connected internationally: economies, communication systems, immigration patterns, wars and conflicts all map across networks of different kinds.
Those linking networks can leave the world better informed and more aware of its connections, or those networks can fail to acknowledge their intersections, while carrying as much misinformation as information.
Where people are living in fear a connected world can be frightening, it can carry gossip and information back to those who pursue them. Decades ago, when people escaped from their homes to make a new life across the world, they were not afraid that their words, criticising the government they had fled from, could instantly be broadcast in the land they had left behind.
It is no wonder that in this more connected world, those fleeing persecution are more afraid to tell the truth about what the regime that tortured or imprisoned them has been doing. While, on the one hand, it should be easier to find out about such horrors, the way that your words can fly around the world in seconds adds enormous pressures not to speak about, or criticise, the country you fled from.
That fear often produces silence, leaving the wider world confused about the situation in a conflict-riven country where people are being killed, threatened or imprisoned. The consequences of instant communication can be terrifyingly swift.
Yet a different side of those networks, new apps or free phone services such as Skype, can provide some help in getting messages back to families left behind, giving them some hope about their loved ones’ future. That is one aspect that those in decades and centuries past, who fled their homelands, could never do. In the late 19th century, someone who escaped torture in Russia and travelled thousands of miles to the United States, might never speak to the family they had left behind again.
Communication has been revolutionised in the last two decades – where once a creaky telephone line was the only way of speaking to a sister or father across a continent or two, now Skype, Viber, Googlechat, and others offer options to see and speak every day.
In this issue’s special report Across the Wires, our writers and artists examine the threats of free expression within refugee camps, and as refugees desperately flee from persecution. Sources estimate that there are between 15.5 and 16.7 million refugees in the world today. Some are forced to live in camps for decades, others are fleeing from new conflicts, such as three million who have already left Syria. Many of us may know someone who has been forced to flee from another regime, those that don’t may in the future, and have some understanding of what that journey is like.
In this issue, writer Jason DaPonte examines how those who have escaped remain worried that their words will be captured and used against their families, and the steps they take to try avoid this. He also looks at “new” technology’s ability to keep refugees in touch with the outside world and to help tell the story of the camps themselves.
Italian journalist Fabrizio Gatti spent four years undercover, discovering details of refugee escape routes and people trafficking. In an extract from his book, previously unpublished in English, he tells his story of assuming the identity of a Kurdish man Bilal escaping torture, and fleeing to Italy via the Lampedusa detention camp, and the treatment he encountered. He speaks only Arabic and English to camp officials, but is able to hear what they said to each other in Italian about those seeking asylum. He uncovers the inhumanity and lack of rights those around him experienced in this powerful piece of writing.
Some of our authors in this issue speak from personal experience of seeking refuge, not speaking the language of the land they are forced to move to, and the steps they go through to resettle and be accepted in another land. Kao Kalia Yang’s family fled Laos during the Vietnam war, moving first to Thailand and then to the United States. She remembers how the family struggled first without understanding or speaking in Thai, then the same battles with English once they settled in the United States.
Ismail Einashe, whose family fled from Somaliland, talks to those who have escaped from one of the most secretive countries in the world, Eritrea. Einashe talks to Eritreans, now living in the UK, who are still afraid to speak openly about the conditions at home for fear of retribution.
The report also examines how the global media portrays refugee stories, the accuracy of those portrayals and how projects such as a new Syrian soap opera, partly written by a refugee, are giving asylum seekers and camp dwellers more power to tell the stories themselves.
But when people are escaping danger, the natural inclination is to stay quiet and under the radar. Some bravely do not. They intend to alert the world to a situation that is unfolding, and to attempt to protect others. Our report shows how much easier it is for the world’s citizens to find out about terrible persecution than it was in other eras, but how those communication tools can be turned back on those that are persecuted themselves. The push and pull of global networks, to be used for freedom or to silence others, is an on-going battle and one that we can only become more aware of.
Order your digital version of the magazine from anywhere in the world here
Today Index on Censorship completes publishing Swamp of the Assassins by American academic and journalist Thomas Bass, who takes a detailed look at the Kafkaesque experience of publishing his biography of Pham Xuan An in Vietnam.
The first installment was published on Feb 2 and can be read here.
Cyberspace will be the only space in Vietnam free of censorship
About Swamp of the Assassins
Thomas Bass spent five years monitoring the publication of a Vietnamese translation of his book The Spy Who Loved Us. Swamp of the Assassins is the record of Bass’ interactions and interviews with editors, publishers, censors and silenced and exiled writers. Begun after a 2005 article in The New Yorker, Bass’ biography of Pham Xuan An provided an unflinching look at a key figure in Vietnam’s pantheon of communist heroes. Throughout the process of publication, successive editors strove to align Bass’ account of An’s life with the official narrative, requiring numerous cuts and changes to the language. Related: Vietnam’s concerted effort to keep control of its past
About Thomas Bass
Thomas Alden Bass is an American writer and professor in literature and history. Currently he is a professor of English at University at Albany, State University of New York.
About Pham Xuan An
Pham Xuan An was a South Vietnamese journalist, whose remarkable effectiveness and long-lived career as a spy for the North Vietnamese communists—from the 1940s until his death in 2006—made him one of the greatest spies of the 20th century.
A few weeks after talking to Duong Thu Huong, I arrange another meeting with a writer driven into exile by Vietnam’s censors. This time, I travel to Berlin to meet Pham Thi Hoai. Born in 1960 in Hai Duong, east of Hanoi, Hoai studied archival science at Humboldt University in the former East Berlin. Then she began to write stories and novels and translate into Vietnamese the works of Kafka, Brecht, Tanazaki, Amado, and other writers. Combining the fastidiousness of the Germans with the fastidiousness of the Vietnamese, Hoai has long presided over Vietnam’s intellectual community-in-exile. For thirteen years, as producer, editor, writer, and translator, she ran talawas and its successor pro&contra, two electronic journals of culture and politics that were the key sites for anyone interested in learning what was really happening in Vietnam. From her exile on the Spree, forbidden from returning home to Vietnam, Hoai became the Sybil known for delivering the final word on her country’s benighted fate. This work will end, she promises, at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 2014, when her websites will be closed. “I will return to being a writer, but perhaps not to fiction,” she says. “I am not really interested in fiction.”
We agree to meet at 6:00 p.m. on a Saturday night for dinner at her apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, in the former East Berlin. Hoai will be cooking. The menu, discussed in several emails, will blend East and West in a medley of flavors. Even before the first bite, I am impressed by the logic and rigor of her planning.
I ride the S train to Bornholmer Strasse and exit onto the bridge where thousands of East Berliners gathered on November 9, 1989 to demand entry to the West. This was the first border crossing to fall on that momentous night. Soon the Wall would come tumbling down and then all of East Germany and then the Soviet Union, as forty years of Cold War came to an end. Today the last vestige of this war can be found only in the few states like Vietnam that are still propped up by Marxist-Leninist ideology.
I walk down a wide boulevard with a trolley running down the middle of it. The street is lined with modest five-story buildings, a few small cafes and billiard parlors, a bookshop, and some stores selling vegetables, beer, and coffee. I ring the bell and walk upstairs to the apartment that Hoai shares with her German partner. I am greeted at the door by a trim woman with a round face, pixie haircut, and lustrous smile. The first thing I notice on entering Hoai’s apartment is a blinking array of lights and switches—an industrial strength security system that Hoai installed after death threats and attacks on her computers.
Walking down a hallway, we pass a bathroom with a Japanese soaking tub and a modern kitchen to arrive at a large room that opens onto bedrooms and studies and yet more doors, hidden behind Japanese sliding screens. Hoai tells me that the unusual layout is due to the fact that she and her partner recently knocked down the walls and put together two separate apartments. The room holds a dining room table, decorated with a bouquet of freshly cut daisies, and a bookshelf filled floor-to-ceiling with a neatly archived collection. In Hoai’s office next door, more shelves are filled with clasp binders in serried ranks.
Seated at the table are Andreas, Hoai’s companion, and Dan, her son from her former marriage. A handsome man in a blue work shirt, Andreas runs a ten-person electrical engineering firm that specializes, among other things, in installing alarm systems. The apartment is his handiwork, and so, too, is the security system at the front door. With an ironic tug to his smile, he is the kind of solid fellow one would want to consult after receiving death threats.
Dan, nineteen, is a slender young man who will be studying applied computation and mathematics at Jacobs University in Bremen in the fall. He lives nearby with Hoai’s former husband, a German whom she married in 1991. Hoai speaks English quite well, but Dan is fluent, and he is being pressed into service tonight as his mother’s translator.
Hoai explains that the meal will be running from spicy to not-so-spicy, from hot to cold, “the opposite direction from normal,” she says. The thought enters my mind that the meal will be retracing her steps into exile, moving from the spicy East to the temperate West. While Hoai busies herself in the kitchen, I chat with Andreas about Prenzlauer Berg, the bohemian enclave that is rapidly being gentrified. “In this building we have Italians, Argentineans, Russians, Americans, and Vietnamese,” he says. “I am the only German.”
“The reason this part of the city still exists is because the East Germans had no money to destroy it,” he says. “The area is full of artists. The poor ones live in the basement. The rich ones live on top.” Bemused by Berlin’s new-found prosperity, Andreas for kicks spends his weekends cycling pedicabs full of tourists around the city.
The table is set with a full assortment of crystal glasses, a fish knife, and three forks for each upcoming course. We start drinking a Gewürztraminer Riesling and later switch to a Spanish Rioja. During our first course—papaya salad with shrimp, a Thai dish—I get a closer look at my hostess. Nam, as she is known to her friends (her full name is Pham Thi Hoai Nam) has the classic features, flat nose, golden skin, high cheekbones, of a north Vietnamese. Dressed in jeans, a white blouse, and a light wool sweater, also white, she wears wire-rim spectacles with tortoise shell highlights and a pair of silver earrings holding a dark stone, maybe an emerald. The conversation flows through English, German, French, and Vietnamese—whichever is the sharpest tool for the concept at hand.
“I am not sure of my exact birth date,” Hoai says, when I ask about her family. “It was sometime in 1960, during the war, when people didn’t register births until weeks or months after they occurred.”
“During Ho Chi Minh’s version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in the 1950s, my parents were sent from Hanoi to the countryside, to work as school teachers,” she says. “My grandfather had been Minister of Education in Thanh Hoa province, but my father, revolting against his bourgeois background, had left at the age of twelve to fight with the Viet Minh. His big dream was to become a Party member, but he was never allowed to join.”
Her father’s uncle was Pham Quynh, a journalist and publisher of the largest Vietnamese newspaper in the French colony. Quynh was minister of education and then minister of the interior in the government of the last Vietnamese emperor, before he was kidnapped and killed by the communists in 1945.
“The first generation of communist leaders all came from bourgeois families,” she says. “But after the Party was formed, they closed the door behind them. No one else from the bourgeoisie could rise into the ranks. They needed followers, not leaders. They needed useful idiots.
“Ho Chi Minh is the perfect example. He eliminated all the intellectuals around him, thereby removing the competition. Since then, the idiots have reproduced themselves so successfully that in the present government not a single official speaks a foreign language, and this is in spite of the fact that eighty percent of them have Ph.D. in their title.”
Excelling in school, Hoai in 1977 was chosen as one of a hundred and thirty students sent to the Eastern Bloc to be trained as archivists by the Stasi and other communist police agencies. “This was paradise for us,” she says, about leaving war-torn Vietnam for Europe. The war had been present for the first fifteen years of her life “like clouds in the sky,” and then after the war came the “reign of hardline ideology,” a period of “poverty, backwardness, and repression.”
One day, one of her professors at Humboldt University saw her waiting at a bus stop reading a book. Another day, he cracked a joke in class about Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities. “I was the only one who laughed, because I was the only one who had read the book,” she says.
“He sent me on an internship, first to the Goethe archives, then to the Schiller and Brecht archives, where I wrote my master’s thesis. These were happy days for me, spent reading and living among the papers of these great writers. My professor did me a big favor,” she says.
After six years in Germany Hoai moved back to Vietnam in 1983, where she worked as an archivist at the Institute of History and began, in her spare time, to write short stories and novels. “When I was twelve, I thought I was born to be a writer. Now, I think I may not have been correct. One is not born to be anything. One chooses what to do.”
“I went back to Vietnam because I was disappointed by life in East Germany,” she says. “It was just like Vietnam. There was no freedom or human rights, and the East German food was horrible.”
“I thought I had a debt to Vietnam, for having sent me here to be trained,” she says. “But on my return, I was classified as ‘untrustworthy,’ because of the time I had spent abroad.”
In 1988 Hoai published The Crystal Messenger, the novel that made her famous in Vietnam and pushed her to the forefront of doi moi writers. It also got her censored and eventually banished from the country. Vietnamese censors, with what Hoai describes as “a twinge of idiocy,” will block books from publication, if there is too much interest in them, or ban books that have already been published, if they become too successful. This is what happened with The Crystal Messenger. It was pulled from the shelves after selling fifty thousand copies and winning the LiBeraturpreis for the best foreign novel at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Told through the interweaving stories of several young women, one of them a Vietnamese Amerasian who comes of age in a country corrupted by careerism and consumerism, The Crystal Messenger is an allegory about the reunification of north and south Vietnam. It tells a wry tale about how a beautiful Vietnamese Amerasian with Texan blood can conquer the hearts of all the uptight men in Hanoi. In their banning order, the censors charged Hoai with “salacious” writing, an “excessively pessimistic view” of Vietnam, and of abusing the “sacred mission of a writer.”
Hoai went on to publish literary essays, two collections of short stories, Me Lo (1989) and Man Nuong (1995), and another novel, Marie Sen (1996). At the same time, she was producing numerous translations from German into Vietnamese. After publication of The Crystal Messenger, nothing written by Hoai has been published in Vietnam, except for a few things that appeared in print and were quickly suppressed. “The censors never tell you when a book is withdrawn from circulation. I consider myself lucky if I even learn that something has been published in the first place.”
“The same thing happened all the time in East Germany,” says Andreas. “Here we had lots of films that were made, and then the censors got scared and never released them.”
“One day I received in the mail an article that I had written,” says Hoai. “It had been heavily censored, and it even had someone else’s name on it. Everyone in Vietnam accepts this level of corruption. It doesn’t even surprise me anymore.”
Now Hoai posts all her writing online. “I’m not writing books for money,” she says. “I write to make myself happy.”
“Every author I deem important is publishing his or her works online, rather than allowing them to be censored. Some let their work be published in hard copy—censored—and then send it to Talawas to be published in its original form.” She suggests that I do the same thing with The Spy Who Loved Us, and I tell her that I will be pleased to accept her offer.
Moving on to a German recipe, our next course is celery-apple soup. Dan is working hard as his mother’s amanuensis, while Andreas sits listening, sometimes offering a humorous quip or story of his own.
In 1993 Hoai returned to Berlin, where she had lived as a student a decade earlier. The city had been transformed in her absence, with the Wall coming down and Westerners flooding into the ramshackle neighborhoods of the former East Berlin. Hoai settled in the city and married. “I made several trips back to Vietnam when Dan was small, but since 2004, I have been banned from traveling to Vietnam,” she says.
In 2001 she had begun publishing the censored news out of Vietnam on her Talawas web site. “Talawas is a Dadaist name,” she says. “It was created by putting ‘Ta la’ (we are) together with ‘was,’ as in ‘Was ist los?’ (‘What’s up?’), which gives you a double entendre meaning either, ‘What are we?’ or ‘We are something.’” Her “journal of culture” became a target for government hackers who tried for years to close the site with denial-of-service and other electronic attacks. Hoai kept outsmarting them behind ever-more-elaborate firewalls, and she is proud of the fact that Talawas was only briefly closed twice. Electronically, she was following in the footsteps of her great uncle Pham Quynh.
“It lasted nine years, as long as Vietnam’s war with the French,” she says about her decision to close the site. “It took an entire day to put it out. It was updated several times a day. No one was volunteering to do the work; so I decided to put an end to it.”
“Ten years ago I stopped writing fiction,” she says. “Now, in two years’ time, I plan to write fiction again.” In the meantime, she has begun publishing a blog called pro&contra. “I want to use the next two years, via the blog, to return to writing. I want to get an inventory of what I am able to do and my strengths. This is a transitional phase for me to learn to walk again.”
“When I get back to writing, I will be writing a combination of fiction and nonfiction,” she says. “Pure fiction is too boring. The Vietnamese reality is more interesting than any fiction I could imagine.”
While running her web sites, Hoai has supported herself as a simultaneous translator—rejecting only the most odious clients. “I watch the delegations of high Vietnamese officials,” she says. “They come to Germany to learn, but they learn nothing. They are people with no education. This is why they hire me. They don’t even know who I am.”
“She is seldom at home,” says Dan, of his mother’s busy schedule as an interpreter.
After a salad of radish sprouts, tomatoes, and carrots, our next course is a baked codfish served with rice. “While talking, I forgot to turn on the oven,” Hoai apologizes. “Cooking is like prose writing, not poetry. It takes the same attention to creative detail.”
We return to talking about censorship. “The governments of China and Vietnam are not afraid of anything,” she says. “This is linked to U.S. tolerance of their oppression. The U.S. does nothing to oppose them; so they have nothing to be afraid of.”
“Before their economies boomed, they weren’t sure of the Western response, but now they know,” she says. “If business is booming, then they have nothing to fear from the West. Whenever I criticize human rights in Vietnam, the government refers to the prisoners in Guantánamo. ‘If the Americans can do it, why can’t we? We aren’t doing anything different.’ Whenever I criticize corruption, they start talking about Lehman Brothers. Whenever I criticize the economy, they say, ‘Look at Spain or Greece.’ The pool of bad examples they draw from is just too large.”
“The government in Hanoi was lucky,” she says. “During the Cold War they had a lot of support from Western countries, especially from leftist movements. Now they have the support of the global capitalists. Standing in this good light, they don’t need to fear anybody. They have always found support in the West, whether during the Cold War or now.”
Andreas opens another bottle wine for our next course, a fruit and cheese tray, and Hoai excuses herself to go smoke a cigarette.
“When I first started writing, I had no money for cigarettes,” she says, on her return. “A friend said, ‘I will give you one cigarette per page.’ As time went on, to fill up the pages faster, my letters got bigger and bigger. I still write for cigarettes,” she says. “But now, I allow myself to smoke after every line.”
Hoai tells me a story about how censorship destroys even successful writers. “One day in Vietnam a writer came to me, asking for my advice. ‘How can I write about the war?’ he said. He had written books about the war, but they were not working anymore, and now he had no clue what to write.
“This is a story about a writer who has died as a writer, who has been eliminated. A serious writer would not consider what people wanted to read. He would look at his own perception of the war. This writer had been writing in a style approved by the government. He had voluntarily adopted this style, which made the work of the censors superfluous. It also made him susceptible to every new way of being censored, including censorship through the market, which allows you to write only what you’re expected to write, and which is happening more and more.”
She tells me the Vietnamese are borrowing their approach to censorship from the Chinese. “We always look to the Chinese and copy them, but when we copy them, we do it even worse than the Chinese, several orders of magnitude worse and in even more minute detail.”
“It is mandatory for every high Vietnamese official to get training in China once a year, just as it was in the time of the Cold War,” she says. “It is no accident that every campaign and law in China a half year later is introduced into Vietnam. Right now the press is filled with the Bo Xi Lai scandal—a high official accused of corruption. In Vietnam the sides are set for a similar struggle for power. I am certain that a Vietnamese official will soon be suffering the same fate.”
“Your story about the writer who came to visit you reminds me of Bao Ninh,” I say. “Without consulting anyone, he wrote the great novel about the war.”
“I don’t think it’s a great novel,” she says. “I am not fond of the Romantic style, and the way it’s written in Vietnamese is very Romantic. The English translation is different from the original, and perhaps this explains why the book is more popular for English readers than Vietnamese. The English translation was inevitably—because of the nature of English—more direct.”
“I prefer Franz Kafka to Thomas Mann,” she says. “I prefer a clear, crisp intelligent use of language, which dispenses with any decoration or superfluous elements.”
“This is the language she uses to boss me around,” says Dan. All of us, including his mother, laugh at the joke.
I ask about the two novels Bao Ninh wrote after The Sorrow of War. “He has retreated because of censorship, gone into internal exile,” she says. “Everybody who hasn’t migrated from Vietnam suffers from this.”
“The best thing for Bao Ninh would be live his life, after writing his one book,” she says. “At the end of his life he can publish his last, best work. Then he will have two books in his life, one at the beginning and one at the end. This is the best thing for a writer.”
She explains how it is getting rarer for artists to leave Vietnam for the West. “Artists and writers live better than ever before in Vietnam,” she says. “With today’s media, the people who can write, who can create things for radio, TV, and the internet are at a premium. Intellectuals and artists who have spent time abroad find that life is so expensive that they are not able to create anything. You can’t be creative and write under these circumstances, so you return.”
“I am no longer a Vietnamese citizen,” Hoai says. “I have a German passport. It is my trauma to be Vietnamese. My son has been spared this trauma. Why am I still confronted by Vietnamese problems? They stopped worrying about human rights and losing the support of the West when they realized that all the West cares about is making money.”
The major exception to the banalization of Vietnamese literature is Duong Thu Huong. She is a throwback to the days when exiled authors were politically potent. When I mention her name, I can tell from Andreas’s and Dan’s raised eyebrows that Huong has already been a subject of conversation. “I admire her courage and bravery,” Hoai says. “She can be very disagreeable, but that’s alright. She is very honest and frank.
“I am not fond of her work, though. Her writing is tendentious. When she claims something is bad she tries to prove it in her writing. When you read her books, you won’t find any surprises. You know what’s going to happen. You know in advance who are the good guys and the bad guys, and that’s pretty boring.
“The structure of her work is also boring, which is too bad, because she is a good observer of details, and her narrative skills are pretty good. When she’s not drifting into propaganda, her use of language can be very beautiful, as well. If she could get beyond propaganda and make use of her skills, she could be a fine writer.”
Pham Thi Hoai is the polar opposite of Duong Thu Huong. Her writing is concise and elegant. Her stories are deftly crafted. She is conducting an intellectual conversation, not with the ghosts of dead combatants, but with Kafka and the other writers whom she has translated into Vietnamese.
In other ways, though, Pham Thi Hoai is very much like Duong Thu Huong. Both decided to place the fight against Vietnam’s authoritarian government above their work as writers. Both are committed militants, fearless opponents of a regime they consider corrupt and oppressive. While Hoai runs the most important websites for Vietnamese dissidents, her writing is required reading for tens of thousands of Vietnamese, both inside and outside the country. She is one of the axes around which Vietnam’s artistic community turns, a commander leading the attack on Vietnam’s censors.
When I ask Hoai about Duong Thu Huong’s Novel Without a Name, she says, “I read only twenty pages and put it down.” So who is she reading today? Hoai mentions Mo Mieng, the Open Your Mouth poets, who have not been translated into English, since their writing is “difficult.” Mo Mieng began as a quartet of poets who set out in the early 2000s to shock the niceties of Vietnam’s Confucian norms. They use the language people speak on the street and publish their work in samizdat xeroxes passed from hand-to-hand. “We want to avoid the state censorship that often cuts the life out of literary works,” Open Your Mouth poet Ly Doi told the BBC in 2004. Since then a dozen other Vietnamese artists have begun writing “dirty” poetry, and Hoai recently released on her website the dirtiest of Vietnamese literary transgressions, a work called “Di Thui” (“Stinking Whore”) by Nguyen Vien, which retells Vietnam’s national epic, The Tale of Kieu, as an attack on the Communist Party.
I ask Hoai if she sees any signs of hope for things getting better in Vietnam.
She clears her throat for an oracular pronouncement, and Andreas laughs. “Twenty years from now the ocean will be much higher than it is today, so the coastal area won’t exist anymore,” she says. “If the coastal people are gone, the mountainous people will remain. If Vietnamese literature succeeds in moving from the coastal areas to the mountains, it will survive. It might also learn to swim.”
“The internet does not know the flooding of oceans, so the internet is a space where one can survive,” she says. “Maybe Vietnam will become the first cyberspace country—a country that exists only in cyberspace.”
By then Vietnam’s literature and culture, maybe all of Vietnam itself, will be updated daily and living online, and cyberspace will be the only space in Vietnam free of censorship.
