The Cautious Researcher / Features / Untitled Books

"With Dương's novels, I came too close to reading something I wanted to achieve. I was influenced, both by the grim, oppressive portrait of the world she depicts, and by details I could not have otherwise imagined."

The Cautious Researcher

Camilla Gibb's novels have been translated into fourteen languages. Her latest, The Beauty of Humanity Movement, is set in contemporary Vietnam which required much reading of her own around the subject. She writes about the art of research and how to avoid falling under the influence of others...

Being open and porous are writerly assets, but they also leave one susceptible. There is a danger that what I read while researching a subject may be digested to the point that I believe it to be my own. I find it safer to read around a subject rather than read directly about it as a consequence. I want to avoid being influenced by anyone else's depiction of a place or state of being, particularly by the language they have used to portray it. In considering a place that has already been the subject of repeated investigation--Vietnam in this case--I've had to proceed with more than the usual amount of caution.

I went to Vietnam in 2007, and what was immediately apparent was that the vast majority of the population is too young to have had a direct encounter with the war. They refer to that war, furthermore, as the American War, which rather shifts the focus. The American War was a broader fight against communism, less a war against the Vietnamese people, and it lasted all of ten years. This is not to deny its devastating effects, but to say that compared to eighty years of French colonization and a thousand years of Chinese domination, the American War is better isolated and contained. This is particularly true in the north, where American soldiers were overhead, rather than on the ground.

I wanted to write about this new Vietnam, particularly the north. And in order to do so, I wanted to avoid reading anything about the war. But literature about Vietnam is overwhelmingly war-focused. The Vietnam War persists as a major Western preoccupation, a central conscience-altering moment in American history that continues to inform America's picture of itself. How to tell a different story? How to tell one more reflective of Vietnamese perspective? How to do the necessary research?

In the almost total absence of a contemporary Vietnamese literature, this becomes difficult. And in a country where publishing is primarily dedicated to communist propaganda and individual expression is largely censored, it becomes almost impossible.

Reading around the subject and doing research on the ground become critical. Ensuring that the knowledge acquired becomes embodied, in the form of character, is the essential challenge of doing research for purposes of informing fiction.

I began with a character, an old man, an itinerant pho seller in Vietnam. I wanted to know something of the decades through which he had lived in order to understand how history and politics had shaped him. Hung was born in 1922 and started work in his uncle's café when he was just nine years old, a café he would eventually come to inherit. The artists and intellectuals who frequented this café, though fiercely anti-colonial and pro-Communist, were heavily influenced by French art, literature and scholarship.

I turned to the French classics like Marguerite Duras' The Lover - in order to gain some feel for the colonial era. In literary fashion, the novel approaches the politics of the time obliquely. In colonial fashion, there is a sultry romanticism and exoticism of time and place. While reading French literature about Vietnam helped distance me from the pervasive association of the war, novels like this of course work within their own foreign trope, only really speaking to the French experience in Vietnam.

There are a couple of rare gems that offer some insight into a pre-War Vietnam from an ex-patriot Vietnamese perspective. Monique Truong's The Book of Salt is told from the novel point of view of an exiled Vietnamese cook working for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in 1930s Paris. As exquisite as the Parisian sections are, it is the flashbacks to Binh's life in Vietnam, his family history and the homosexual dalliances that sever him from his family and his country, that offer painful and privileged insight into the social mores of a culture.

Ex-patriot or diasporic literature has the benefit of a view with some objective distance and the freedom of having been created in an environment free of censorship. It is largely motivated, however, by familiar quests concerning notions of home, identity and belonging - not problematic or uninteresting in themselves, but less specifically evocative of a world I was trying to access and understand. Andrew Pham's memoir, Catfish and Mandala: A Two-wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam is a particularly good recent example of this, offering a view of Vietnam through the eyes of a young man returning for the first time since fleeing as a boy in the 1970s.

The contemporary novel set entirely in North Vietnam and told from a North Vietnamese perspective is a rarity. Dương Thu Hương, a Hanoin writer born in 1947, is considered something of a hero of the Đổi Mới era. Đổi Mới, an official platform adopted in the mid-1980s in order to liberalize a crippled economy, saw some degree of relaxation in social and political policing as well. At least for a time. Dương was imprisoned in 1991 after having published two novels openly critical of the Communist Party - The Other Side of the Illusion and Paradise of the Blind. She is an outspoken and vocal critic who continues to live and write in Hanoi, though her work is banned in Vietnam. Her subsequent novels, Novel Without a Name and Memories of a Pure Spring, have both only been published abroad in translation. All her works offer rare insight into post-war Vietnam, an era largely hidden from (and ignored by) Western eyes.

The danger here? With Dương's novels, I came too close to reading something I wanted to achieve. I was influenced, both by the grim, oppressive portrait of the world she depicts, and by details I could not have otherwise imagined.

When Hung, the old man at the heart of my novel loses his café with the abolition of private ownership, he is driven into poverty, taking up residence in a shack on the shore of a manky polluted, urban pond. He yearns to cook, but his monthly ration coupons offer him little more than turnip. So he is forced to be resourceful. I researched the flora and fauna of North Vietnam extensively, but I don't think I could have imagined making tea from the dried hearts of artichokes, unless I had read about it in a Dương novel. Hung finds his way back to making pho by making vermicelli from the white hearts of pond weeds. I cannot guarantee this is a product of my own imagination either. I simply do not know.

Details are not minor. Their specificity speaks volumes. In trying to recreate a soup, Hung is pursuing more than just sustenance. He is expressing culture, articulating identity, speaking to history and continuity and attempting to unify strangers into family and community. In "borrowing" a detail, I may have thieved an entire world.

By the end of a novel it becomes impossible to parse out the sources that have informed it. But those sources should be so fully digested that they are no longer in evidence. I like to do just enough research to ignite my imagination, no more. That is the point of departure--that glorious moment when things burst into flame.

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The Beauty of Humanity Movement by Camilla Gibb is published by Atlantic Books
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Thursday, 24 March, 2011