The Story

My family first set foot in Vietnam in 1994, the year the United States lifted its trade embargo and the country opened fully to the world again. My uncle had a contract to help build agricultural processing plants for the government. I was still in high school back home, but I fell in love with the country years before I ever saw it, through the stories my uncle told and through my mother’s stories after her own visits to see him.

I arrived myself in 2006, in my early twenties, and it didn’t take long before Vietnam had hold of me too: the people, the history, and above all the determination of a nation writing its own next chapter, on its own terms, after a century of being told by someone else whose terms they were.

Between 2006 and 2012, I spent my weekends the same way: riding an old cherry-red 1967 Honda 49cc around the city, turning down streets I hadn’t been down before, looking for old books.

One afternoon my phone rang while I was riding through the city, and I pulled over to take the call. At the back of the shop where I’d stopped, a small place selling calendars and Japanese manga translated into Vietnamese, I got talking to the young man behind the counter, maybe in his early thirties. I asked if he had any English books. He walked me through to a room at the back of his parents’ house, no bigger than four metres by four metres, stacked floor to ceiling, all of it under a thick layer of dust. It was the first hidden collection I ever found.

Through him, and through the xe ôm drivers who knew every street and every family on their patch of the city (this was years before Grab or any ride-hailing app, just an informal network of motorbike drivers who moved people and knew everyone), I was slowly introduced to five or six more collections like it, scattered across District 1, District 3, District 4, District 5 and District 10. Each neighbourhood had its own character back then, and each collection told a slightly different version of the same story: someone, before 1975, had built a private library, and someone else had spent decades since making sure it survived.

Vietnam had lived under more than a century of outside rule by the time these books were shelved: French colonial administrators and planters, a brief but brutal Japanese occupation during the Second World War, and later the American military and civilian presence during the war years. All of them left libraries behind, private collections in the homes of colonists, traders, and officers, and public reading rooms set up to bring their own languages and their own view of the world into Vietnamese life.

When Saigon fell in April 1975 and the country was reunified, all of that had to be abandoned almost overnight. What followed was one of the harder chapters in Vietnam’s long effort to reclaim its own culture after a hundred years of foreign control. In the weeks after reunification, the new authorities ordered all books and newspapers printed before 30 April 1975 to be handed in; in a single district of Saigon alone, more than 480,000 books were confiscated within a week, along with three tons of newspapers.¹ The library at the Alexandre de Rhodes Education Center in Saigon lost most of its roughly 80,000 volumes to burning between 1975 and 1977, part of a campaign to eliminate what the new authorities called “bourgeois culture.”² It wasn’t an isolated moment, either. As late as 2002, city authorities in Ho Chi Minh City were still incinerating tonnes of books labelled “culturally poisonous.”³

Seen from a distance of a hundred years of colonization and war, it isn’t hard to understand the impulse behind that campaign, even where the methods were severe: a country trying, at enormous cost, to clear a path back to its own identity after a century of being told, by one occupier or another, whose books belonged on its shelves.

It also meant that anyone who wanted to keep these books had no choice but to hide them, quietly, without ceremony, often for decades, in exactly the kind of dusty back room I found riding around the city forty years later. The families I met rarely explained why they’d kept them. Most of them, as far as I could tell, simply couldn’t bring themselves to burn what had once belonged to their own parents or grandparents, whatever language it happened to be written in.

Every plate on this site is a single page, cut from one of these surviving books. It was saved a second time: first by the families who hid it, and now by being kept as exactly what it is, a fragment of a book that made it through a century that tried, more than once, to erase it.

— Shaz Tzu