was divided into two shifting zones—French-occupied and liberated.
Hữu Ngọc was in the liberated zone. There, he took an examination with forty candidates to choose four who would become English teachers. He placed first. He laughs about this now: “The examiner for the verbal section asked about Wordsworth’s ‘The Daffodils,’ my favorite poem. I could be unusually fluent, and so I placed first. Wordsworth changed my life!”
He taught English in Yên Mô District, Ninh Bình Province and in the liberated zone of Nam Định Province, where he also served as chair of the Cultural Committee for the Nam Định Province Resistance. While in Nam Định, he created, wrote, and edited a French agitprop (agitation and propaganda) newspaper intended for troops in the French Far-East Expeditionary Corps. Only one known copy of the newspaper remains. Its red banner proclaims L’Etincelle (The Spark). That issue has an article about General Võ Nguyên Giáp, complete with a photograph.
Hữu Ngọc would tie his contraband newspapers to his bicycle’s luggage rack. He remembers passing through a Catholic village. He was biking down a narrow alley when he spotted several French-affiliated African troops, who had arrived for a mopping-up operation. They were on foot and heading toward him.
“Halt!” the soldiers shouted.
“I had to remain calm,” Hữu Ngọc says. “I ducked down an alley. I heard the click of gun triggers engaging. I was sure the soldiers would shoot me in the back. But I was lucky. I had just enough time to turn into another lane and disappear.”
In 1950, the DRVN government called up adult men in the liberated areas to join the army. By then, the French had re-occupied the liberated areas in the Red River Delta. Hữu Ngọc walked hundreds of kilometers out to the Việt Bắc Northern Liberated Zone in the mountains. As an army officer, he supervised the Section for Re-Education of European and African Prisoners of War (POWs). At that time, the DRVN kept the POWs at houses of local Tày and Nùng ethnic-minority people in “prisons without bars.” Hữu Ngọc remembers sitting with three POWs around a hearth in a house-on-stilts. “One POW was French,” he says, “one was an English former officer who’d served in the Royal Air Force, and one was German. We were chatting about anything and everything. I was speaking three foreign languages in the same conversation! I learned a great deal about foreign cultures from the POWs.”
Several thousand Germans had joined the French Foreign Legion, a French mercenary force, after World War II for assignments to Việt Nam. Some deserted to the Việt Minh side. “I worked closely with Chiến Sĩ (Militant, a.k.a. Erwin Borchers), an anti-Nazi German intellectual,” Hữu Ngọc says. “Chiến Sĩ had joined the French Foreign Legion and then deserted to the Việt Minh before our 1945 Revolution. He handled our agitprop among German POWs. We were close friends. That’s how I learned German.”
The Foreign Legion and the French Far-East Expeditionary Corps in Việt Nam had nearly twenty different nationalities. Many POWs had come from the French colonies in Northern and Central Africa. Hữu Ngọc and his colleagues organized lectures and printed training materials on nationalism to persuade POWs (particularly those from other French colonies) that they had been assisting the French in an unjust war.
Then the Vietnamese periodically released their “best students” back to the French side to organize within French ranks. The French soon caught onto the scheme and sent the newly released POWs back home. Once they were back home, many of these liberated African POWs began to organize for their own national revolutions. Perhaps it is no accident that some Algerians identify the beginning of their revolution as May 8, 1954, the day after the Vietnamese victory over the French at the famous Battle of Điện Biên Phủ.
Hữu Ngọc received a People’s Army Feat-of-Arms Award for his agitprop work. His assignments during the French War had taken him between POW camps-without-bars to staff headquarters and to other sites in liberated Việt Bắc. Like many other army officers, he hiked along mountain paths. One day, at an intersection between two trails, he met one of his former Nam Định students, a lovely young woman, who by then was an army nurse and who, before long, would become a pediatrician. The two courted in the mountains and married in a simple wedding with tea, cigarettes, and their friends’ congratulations. They shared three days off in the special honeymoon hut Hữu Ngọc’s colleagues had built. Then he and his wife returned to their assignments, seeing each other whenever possible. Their first child was born in the mountains.
After Hà Nội was liberated in October 1954, Hữu Ngọc and his family moved back to the capital. These days, he and his wife live with one of their sons and his family. Without fail, their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren gather each Sunday for lunch, rotating from one household to another. Over the years, foreigners from many countries have joined Hữu Ngọc’s family for Sunday lunch, formerly sitting in a circle on a reed floor mat but now sitting around a large, polished table, yet always conversing in many languages.
During the American War (the term Vietnamese use for what Americans call “the Vietnam War”), Hữu Ngọc was deputy director of Việt Nam’s Foreign Languages Publishing House. He and Nguyễn Khắc Viện, the publishing house director, edited and translated Vietnamese poetry and prose for their thousand-page Literature Vietnamienne (Vietnamese Literature, 1979). Publication of this work was a major cultural event. Le Monde (The World), the leading newspaper in France, noted: “Every day, a hundred American B-52s pummeled North Việt Nam. Nevertheless, the Vietnamese did the work to publish this major anthology of their literature in French.”
The Foreign Languages Publishing House (also known as Red River Press) printed books in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and other languages, including Esperanto (a constructed international language).
“The Esperanto period was so interesting!” Hữu Ngọc says. “Not many people knew Esperanto, but those who did were fanatical. They would translate from Esperanto into their own languages. Esperanto multiplied our efforts at the publishing house because Esperanto translators worked in both the communist and the capitalist blocs.”
Hữu Ngọc was director of the publishing house from 1980 until his retirement in 1989. When Việt Nam began to open, he changed the name to Thế Giới (World) Publishers because all countries in the communist/socialist bloc had a Foreign Languages Press. Hữu Ngọc wanted to signal that Việt Nam was not only unique but also open to the whole world, including the West.
During the American War, the publishing house had paid particular attention to English. Those books and Vietnamese Studies—a quarterly founded by Nguyễn Khắc Viện in 1964 and still published today—reached American activists and scholars.
Between the end of the American War in April 1975 and September 1989, Việt Nam faced war on two fronts: 1) the Khmer Rouge incursions into southern Việt Nam with the subsequent war in Cambodia and 2) the Chinese invasion into six Vietnamese border provinces. The then US government politically backed the genocidal Khmer Rouge and the Chinese invasion. Thus, although many say the American War ended in 1975, in truth, re-unified Việt Nam first enjoyed peace only in 1990.
The United States responded to the war in Cambodia by enforcing an even stricter embargo, which entangled all Western countries except Sweden. The embargo kept out not only Western goods and spare parts for any machine produced or patented in the West but also books, including medical journals. Việt Nam’s leadership had already instituted a rigorous, intensely collectivized socio-economic system, which stymied individual incentives in agriculture, trade, business, education, and scholarship. Although Việt Nam received military aid from the former Soviet Union, with the exception of Sweden, the country essentially had no outside assistance for food, medicines, and post-war reconstruction. Everything
