READERS GUIDE

Questions and Topics for Discussion

INTRODUCTION

“Humanity has been through Communism. May the gods spare us from falling prey to yet another illusion.” (Memories of a Pure Spring)

Youthful ideals can provide guidance, inspiration, and resilience, but once betrayed or corrupted they linger as bitter reminders of past glories and present failures. In Duong thu Huong’s novel, during Vietnam’s “American war,” a well-known composer named Hung leads a performing troupe through jungles bloodied by war. The troupe’s mission is one of artistic inspiration: to revive the revolutionary fire in the soldiers’ flagging spirits—to inspire with art. Not actually raising any weapons or contributing directly to the fratricidal carnage of the war, the performing troupe by its very nature is an embodiment of high-minded ideals and a reminder of the war’s purpose. The performers’ song is an uplifting response to the eternal question: Why are we fighting?

While thus employed in a war-torn Vietnam, Hung meets a beautiful young peasant girl with an exquisite voice, Suong, who incites his passion and becomes both his wife and the star of the troupe. As the long years of the war draw to a close on April 29th, 1975, when the last Americans leave Saigon, we find Hung and Suong in love and ennobled by their struggles, both famous for their talents and both full of promise.

However, as the postwar regime consolidates its power, cynical compromises and petty acts of revenge proliferate the political landscape. The noble ideals of the war have vanished all too quickly, persisting only in memories that harshly illuminate the current state of affairs. And it is, now, in their nation’s victorious mundaneness that Hung and Suong must suffer—and they do suffer.

In a Vietnam richly brought to life with its flowers and fruits, cafés and teahouses, pho and chè, Duong Thu Huong uses dramatic external events—imprisonment, suicide attempts, love affairs, blackmail, opium addiction—to set the stage for the sensitive ruminations that form the lyrical core of Memories of a Pure Spring. Through the many artists that populate the book she explores artistic creation—its fragile preconditions, its awesome powers, and its frightening demands—as well as its soul-numbing substitutes. Through the book’s central lovers she charts the Janus face of a love that is simultaneously ephemeral and eternal. Through the many deprivations and compulsions that shape her characters’ lives she ponders sexual desire with its blinding drives and seductive pleasures. Through filial and familial relationships she investigates both the tender empowerment and the oppressive rigidity of family. Through the apparatchiks and officers of the Communist Party she illustrates the ignorant cruelty of the doctrinaire and the petty parochialism of the self-serving.

Throughout the novel, the memories of the past serve as the characters’ touchstone as they attempt to navigate safely the shoals of success and flattery, chaos and desolation, love and desire, disillusionment and despair. Reading Memories of a Pure Spring forces unanswerable questions upon the reader: Is memory enriching or poisonous? A “pure spring” inspiration or an albatross?

Duong Thu Huong, one of Vietnam’s most popular writers, was born in 1947 and raised in a loyal Communist household. In 1967 she—like Hung, the protagonist of Memories of a Pure Spring—volunteered to lead the Communist Youth Brigade, a troupe of singers and actors who traveled the country entertaining North Vietnamese troops at the front in jungle camps. She experienced first-hand the horrors of war: out of the volunteer group of forty, she was one of only three survivors. During China’s 1979 attack on Vietnam, she became the first woman combatant present at the front to chronicle the conflict.

After the North Vietnamese victory in 1975, a journey to Saigon brought her face to face with the distortions of Communist propaganda: rather than the official North Vietnamese image of a Saigon oppressed and crying out for liberation, she found instead an affluent city full of laughing citizens and well-stocked bookshops. Thus began her disappointment in and reappraisal of Communist ideals as well as her long and vocal advocacy for human rights and democratic political reform. Though she had won several state prizes for her screenwriting work with the Vietnam Film Co., Duong Thu Huong lost her job there for speaking out against censorship. Undaunted, she continued to critique the social injustices of postwar Vietnam and began to write the novels for which she is justly famous both abroad and at home including Paradise of the Blind, which was the first Vietnamese novel ever translated from Vietnamese into English and published in the United States and shortlisted for the Prix Femina; and Novel Without a Name, which was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She was expelled from the Communist Party in 1989, imprisoned for seven months without trial in 1991 for sending the manuscript of Novel Without a Name abroad, and had her passport revoked by the government in 1995. All of her writings are effectively banned in Vietnam, where she continues to reside.

Penguin wishes to thank and credit the following article for information on the life of Duong Thu Huong: David Liebhold, “Lives Reshaped by History,” TIME Asia. April 17th, 2000, Vol. 155 No. 15.