Photocopies of Photocopies: On Bao Ninh
diaCRITICS occasionally features guest blogs and reprints. Originally published in Finding the Words, this essay by Madeleine Thien is about the casualties of war. But more than that, it is about the ghosts who still wander long after the fire has ceased, looking for their place in history. Most of us gaze upon photographs and stories of people trapped in war and fail to realize the most important detail: They were human beings.
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Bao Ninh, now living in Hanoi, became a novelist in the second half of his life. Until the age of forty, he served in the North Vietnamese Army, fighting the Americans for a decade along the Ho Chi Minh trail, then passing another decade as part of the NVA’s body-gathering team. Demobilized in , he began to write. Three years later, he published his first and only novel, The Sorrow of War. It is a slim book, so small that it would fit easily into a coat pocket.
My own copy, an English translation, came from a bookseller in Phnom Penh. The paper is thin and nearly transparent; dog-eared and worn,
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Bao Ninh is a Vietnamese novelist and essayist best known for his semi-autobiographical novel, The Sorrow of War.
Ninh was born Hiang Au Phuong on October 18, , in Nghe An province in what was, at the time, North Vietnam.
Ninh joined the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade when he was 17 years old. The Sorrow of War chronicles the terrible conditions of fighting and the extreme loss of life: of who went to war in , only ten survived.
One of Ninh’s first published works was Camp of the Seven Dwarves, issued in The Sorrow of War came out in , followed by a book of short fiction in and a book of essays in The Sorrow of War was lauded by critics and by many veterans, but it garnered scrutiny and criticism from the authorities. Ninh said in a rare interview with The Guardian, though, that now, things are different: “When I wrote the book, the emotions of the Vietnam war were very different, and the relationship was different between America and Vietnam. The Cold War was still on…The book came out 15 years after the war ended, but people were still entrenched in the war-like propaganda of the time, so no
An Interview with Bao Ninh: Part One
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By Marc Levy
(Continued in the Spring/Summer issue)
Ninh sat directly opposite me. He is a deceptively thin, wiry man in his late forties, standing perhaps 5' 6" tall. He sports an uncommonly bushy and tousled head of jet-black hair; a wispy black Fu Manchu mustache adorns the corners of his upper lip. Over the course of the afternoon his gaze varied from restless furtive eye contact to unblinking concentration. His general demeanor was outwardly calm and confident, even-keeled, but let the general reader, and the American combat veteran in particular, not be deceived. Bao Ninh spent six years of his life in the th Glorious Youth Brigade. Out of five hundred men and women in this unit, ten survived.
Unexpectedly, and not unlike Harrison Salisbury's experience thirty years ago in Hanoi when speaking with Premier Pham Von Dong, what followed was not the interview I had anticipated, but in some respects a lesson in mutual patience. Although my questions were direct and to the point, Ninh proved remarkably reticent, often sidestepping my queries about himself or the NVA in com
Who is Bao Ninh?
Hoàng Ấu Phương, pen name Bảo Ninh is a Vietnamese novelist, essayist and writer of short stories, best known for his first novel, published in English as The Sorrow of War.
During the Vietnam War, he served in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. Of the five hundred who went to war with the brigade in , he is one of ten who survived.
In Bao Ninh published Trại bảy chú lùn, a collection of short stories. He has also written a second novel, Steppe, but is said to be reluctant to publish it.
A short story by Bảo Ninh, "A Marker on the Side of the Boat", translated by Linh Dinh, is included in the anthology Night, Again.
Bao Ninh is also a successful essayist.
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