Memories Of A Pure Spring

Biographie de Thu Huong Duong

Memories of a Pure Spring is set amidst the tremendous and disorienting material and psychological changes the Vietnamese faced in the 1980s after three decades of war. While the central character, a talented composer who runs afoul of the Communist Party authorities, is fictional, the broad lines of his fate - disillusiomnent with the Party, imprisonment, and ultimately, internal exile - closely parallel the author's own life and current predicament in Vietnam. Like her hero, Duong Thu Huong is a veteran who spent ten years in the tunnels and air-raid shelters of central Vietnam, the most heavily bombarded front of her country's "American War." She too was the leader of an artistic troupe and youth brigade sent to "sing louder than die bombs." One of just three survivors of that brigade, Huong emerged after the war as one of the most talented and widely read novelists of her generation, her first novels selling hundreds of thousands of copies. But when her best-selling novel Paradise of the Blind scandalized the Party authorities in 1988 by depicting the disastrous Maoist-style 1953-1956 land reform, Huong was publicly criticized and the work suddenly withdrawn from circulation. Again, like her hero, Duong Thu Huong found herself transformed overnight from patriot to pariah: Expelled from the Party, out of a job as a screenwriter, and unable to find a publisher who would date to publish her novels, she became a kind of exile in her own land. In 1991, after sending abroad the manuscript of her Novel Without a Name - the first novel by a northern veteran to chronicle widespread disillusionment with the war effort and the Party leadership - Huong was imprisoned for seven months without trial on trumped up charges of "sending state secrets abroad." Though she has not been allowed to publish any of her novels in Vietnam since her release, almost ten years ago, she continues to live and write in Hanoi.