Nhất Linh

Biography

In the spring of 1946 a man who had spent ten years publishing satirical magazines was appointed foreign minister and put at the head of the Vietnamese delegation negotiating with the French at Dalat. This was Nguyễn Tường Tam, known to readers by the pen name Nhất Linh, which means “One Spirit” in Chinese.

He was born on 25 July 1906 in the town of Cẩm Giàng, in Hải Dương province in northern Vietnam; the family’s ancestral land was in Quảng Nam. His father died in 1918, when the boy was twelve, and the family lived modestly. Of the seven children, three became writers: Nhất Linh’s younger brothers published under the names Hoàng Đạo and Thạch Lam. He finished primary school in Cẩm Giàng and then studied at the Lycée du Protectorat, known in Hanoi as Trường Bưởi. At sixteen his poems appeared in a newspaper, and at eighteen he published in the journal Nam Phong an analysis of “The Tale of Kiều”. In 1924 he tried studying medicine and fine art but gave both up after a year. For a time he lived in Cambodia and earned his living by painting; according to some accounts, in 1926 he fled there after the arrest of acquaintances who had attended the funeral of Phan Chu Trinh. From those years survives his painting on silk, “Scene of an Indochinese Street Market”, dated to about 1926–1929. Under his drawings he seems to have used another pen name, Đông Sơn.

In 1927 he went to study in France, and in 1930 he took a degree in physics and chemistry. At the same time he studied journalism and publishing. On his return he waited a long time for permission to start a newspaper of his own, Tiếng Cười (“Laughter”), never received it, and took a teaching post at the private Thăng Long school. There he met a teacher of literature, Trần Khánh Giư, the future writer Khái Hưng.

In September 1932 he became director of the weekly Phong Hóa (“Customs”), which he had bought from its previous owners. Its laughter was aimed at feudal customs, and the magazine urged readers to “Europeanize” and put the individual above the family. That same year the Tự Lực Văn Đoàn (“Self-Strengthening Literary Group”) took shape around the magazine; its founding was officially announced on 2 March 1934. The group published books and magazines, among them Ngày Nay (“Today”). In June 1935 Phong Hóa was closed for three months for a series mocking the governor of Hà Đông province, and in 1936 it was closed for good. Ngày Nay took over from it.

Nhất Linh’s novels of this period include The Flower Seller and The Stormy Life (both written with Khái Hưng, 1934), Đoạn tuyệt (The End, 1934–1935), about a woman trapped in a loveless marriage, Two Friends and White Butterfly. Đoạn tuyệt was read and reissued for many years; it provoked controversy by sharply criticizing the traditional way of life, and in South Vietnam it was on the school curriculum until 1975. In 1935 came Going to the West (Đi Tây), a satirical travelogue about his time in France. In December 1936, in the pages of Ngày Nay, the group launched the Ánh Sáng (“Light”) movement, a charitable campaign to build hygienic housing for the rural poor.

From 1938 he turned to politics, founding a party that in 1939 took the name Đại Việt Dân Chính. In 1940 the French authorities arrested several of his associates, among them Hoàng Đạo and Khái Hưng, and exiled them to Sơn La. Nhất Linh himself went to China in 1942. In Guangzhou and Liuzhou he met Ho Chi Minh, and he was arrested on the orders of General Zhang Fakui and held for four months. In 1945 his party merged with the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (VNQDD), and he became its general secretary. These years are reflected in his late novel Giòng sông Thanh Thủy (Blue River).

In early 1946 he returned to Hanoi, and in March he joined the coalition government as foreign minister. As head of the delegation he took part in the preparatory conference at Dalat; according to Võ Nguyên Giáp, because of disagreements he hardly attended the sessions, while the historian David Marr judged him a capable spokesman. He was assigned to lead the delegation to the conference at Fontainebleau, but declined, citing illness, and in May 1946 left for China and then Hong Kong. The authorities declared that he had abandoned his post and embezzled the delegation’s funds; Marr considers this unlikely.

In 1947 he was among the founders of a united national front that supported the creation of a state under Bảo Đại; the front dissolved in 1950. In 1951 Nhất Linh returned, founded the publishing house Phượng Giang, reissued the group’s books and declared that he was leaving politics. He lived in Dalat, then from 1958 in Saigon, where he brought out eleven issues of the journal Văn Hóa Ngày Nay. He worked on the essay Writing and Reading Novels, on the novel New Bridge Hamlet, which remained unfinished, and on a translation of Wuthering Heights, made in 1960 and published in 1974.

In 1960 he founded a front in support of the attempted coup by the officers Nguyễn Chánh Thi and Vương Văn Đông. The coup failed, and the Ngô Đình Diệm regime placed him under house arrest. A trial was set for 8 July 1963. On the night of 7 July Nhất Linh took his own life at home; in a note he mentioned the monk who had set himself on fire shortly before, and wrote that he too was leaving as a warning to those “who are trampling on all freedom”. His family was made to bury him in haste, without waiting for his eldest son to come from France. In 1975 his remains were cremated, and in 2001 the family moved them to the ancestral tomb in Hội An.