Vietnamese Colonial Republican: The Political Vision of Vu Trong Phung by Peter Zinoman (review)

Peter Zinoman has written a splendid and thought-provoking biography of a profoundly influential Vietnamese novelist, essayist, journalist and satirist. Vũ Trọng Phụng’s appeal is manifest: as an expressly anti-Stalinist adept of realism, he has been compared to George Orwell, Emile Zola and Honoré de Balzac. Raised from humble origins, he formulated a critical vision of the society in which he lived, a vision based on tenets of anti-materialism, anti-communism and a fundamental critique of bourgeois society, tastes, sensitivities, injustices and inequalities. Despite the tragic brevity of his life (1912–39), Vũ Trọng Phụng’s work opens windows for his readers. Writing from within Vietnam’s urban fabric as it was transformed, he offers extraordinary insight onto a changing society.

Zinoman’s book avoids the pitfalls of teleology and rises well above the “partisan camps” (p. 13) that rendered Vietnamese politics Manichean in the post-colonial era. Zinoman shows how Vũ Trọng Phụng deftly navigated the waters of the 1930s, thriving in the “fluid ambiguity” (ibid.) of the era. While working as a clerk in a department store, he rubbed shoulders with Ký Con, who was leading a double life as a revolutionary. Early in his journalism career, Vũ Trọng Phụng was accused of obscenity and faced several showdowns with the authorities. He was also gaining insight from a number of sources both at home and abroad, including the reportage genre as it was being honed by the likes of Albert Londres. He was further influenced by a wide range of social scientists and Freudians of different stripes, some of whom reappear as caricatures in his novels and stories.

In a truly fascinating final chapter, Zinoman guides the reader through Vũ Trọng Phụng’s complex afterlives. As the novelist’s body of work had focused more on prostitutes, servants and con artists than on proletarians per se, he was suspect to some within the Vietnamese Communist Party. His malleability was accentuated by the fact that he perished before the August 1945 revolution and that his stance on the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was therefore open to interpretation. A reformist movement embraced Vũ Trọng Phụng’s works in the 1950s, only for a 1958 backlash eventually to blacklist Vũ Trọng Phụng until the 1980s.

On a personal note, I am especially delighted that this biography has appeared, for I regularly teach a course on French Indochina, using English translations of two of Vũ Trọng Phụng’s books, Dumb Luck (2002) and Lục Xì (2011). Students have long asked me for a biography that would explain how a single author could pen these two titles in different genres — one a piece of biting satirical fiction, the other an engaged reportage on Hanoi’s main brothel.

I did find some ground on which to differ with this ambitious and lively book. Was Vũ Trọng Phụng as progressive as Zinoman suggests? Does he really fit the category of “late colonial republican” in which Zinoman carefully casts him? Let me begin with the second question and then move on to the first. French republicanism can and did mean many things to many people: in the late nineteenth century, its ideals were embraced by Communards and by their bitter opponents, a story with colonial consequences of its own in the form of overseas political deportations. Although Zinoman is certainly correct to write that ardent anti-communism marked Albert Sarraut’s brand of republicanism (p. 22), republicanism’s contours nevertheless remained in flux in the era that concerns us. After all in Paris radicals, communists and socialists entered government as part of a vast coalition known as the Popular Front, in power from 1936 to 1938. Indeed, the main menace that propelled them into power was the threat of fascism and Nazism rather than communism. While Zinoman rightly restores the anti...