Vietnam Reportage 1930 - 1945 Through Tam Lang, Vu Trong Phung and Ngo Tat To

* People are miserable in poverty :

Within the mainstream artistic inspiration of an entire literary period (1930-1945), the reports of Tam Lang, Vu Trong Phung, and Ngo Tat To deeply expressed the tragedy and misery of small, “bottom-dwelling” people. Right from Vu Trong Phung’s first works, readers were haunted by the images of “old men” walking with canes, throwing themselves into the darkness; blind old women “blown into the fields by the wind”, “pecked to pieces by crows”; mothers with “leaden faces, disheveled hair”; newborn children “hunched over and crying, crying for hours, sobbing silently that they ran out of breath”; disabled children “floating, sinking, drifting, drifting, drifting like duckweed on the water surface, like foam in the middle of the river”; The old beggars with “two-colored hair, bleary eyes, ragged clothes like a beehive” died miserably in hunger and cold… It can be said that this is a whole world of “ragged clothes and tight clothes” oppressed, abandoned, chased away, and excluded from society. More and more, especially in the reportage form, with the genre’s own advantages, Vu Trong Phung is more and more determined to expose the cruel exploitation methods of the colonialists and feudalists, pushing people into poverty and misery. Looking from the back gate of the splendid Hanoi, Com Thay Com Co deeply reflects the miserable situation of the poor villagers, “thrown out” of their homeland, gradually coming to Hanoi, accepting a very humiliating job - working as a servant - to make a living. Those ragged, hard-working people were driven away from their homeland by all kinds of disasters: drought, flood, high taxes, exploitation and oppression by powerful mandarins, and countless other heavy customs. Like moths, they rushed to the "light of the Capital" hoping to find in that seemingly "paradise" a job that could earn them food and clothing. But the splendid Hanoi beckoned them to come during the day to "sit and display their goods at crossroads and human markets, waiting for the offers of extremely cunning female contractors hoping to sell their cheap labor for a few cents, and at night to "lie in a corner of the yard, smelling the smell of sewage, chicken shit and human shit, lying down hungry and looking up at the sky". Those who were luckier and found work were also miserable and miserable because they were "starved and worked to their fill", were mistreated, tortured and only received money.

cheap labor. Half dead in the countryside, those miserable people left their homes and came to Hanoi "to starve to death a second time".

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If Vu Trong Phung often wrote about the misery of the urban poor or farmers who were forced out of their hometowns and living off others in the "city", Ngo Tat To focused on the miserable life of the villagers "behind the green bamboo hedges". Having enough to eat during the flood is a tragedy for the villagers who have to endure all kinds of disasters at the same time, from hunger, exploitation, poverty to the bottom, to natural disasters, floods... In the middle of "the vast water area... how many thatched houses with mud walls, only the roofs can be seen", next to the herds of buffaloes "some standing, some lying down", occasionally "bellowing" because of "longing for rice, hungry for grass", are miserable people: "a man, emaciated, bald-headed, sitting huddled in a tattered overcoat", "several children wiping each other..." with "skinny, haggard faces", "sunken, lethargic, dull eyes". All are hopeless, without rice, potatoes, cassava, only knowing how to live on the land. Rice is made from the land, food is made from the land, even "gifts" are made from the land. To get to the stage of eating dirt, those miserable people had to eat from the tops of areca nuts to the “heart-wrenching” longan seeds, even fighting with flies for pieces of jackfruit peel… Except for Tet holidays, all year round, they had to slowly dig up the soil, turn over the grass, “invent” strange dishes to “trick their stomachs”. It can be said that “ Making full or what to eat during the days of flooding ” is a masterpiece on the art of making full or the art of tricking hunger. It is also a compassionate sharing by Ngo Tat To for the unfortunate, “gray” fates in the countryside and a strong denunciation of the feudal colonial government that exploited and exploited to the bone marrow, pushing farmers to the bottom of poverty, darkness, and destitution.

With I Pull the Cart , Tam Lang reflected the hard and miserable life of the rickshaw drivers, the “human horses”. The hard work of “running

All day long, not enough to eat. The body is exposed to the rain and sun, but the wages are extremely cheap. Many passengers are mean, stingy with every penny, but arrogant, ready to "use physical force" to beat and scold the rickshaw drivers. Some people pull from noon to night for seven cents, pay tax of six cents, seven cents for food, two cents for lodging, one cent for a bowl of fresh tea, and one cent for the rest, not including matches and tobacco. They work all day but still cannot make ends meet. The rickshaw drivers who owe taxes are brutally beaten. Some people only have one cent left in their pockets, and when the rickshaw driver finds them, they are beaten until their mouths bleed. The work is hard, but their eating and living conditions are extremely poor. The dining area is extremely dirty and smelly; the food is all leftovers, "rotten eggs, rotten meat, rotten fish, rotten chickens... sick dogs" and even "leftover potatoes that they put in the rice water pot" that the rickshaw drivers dig up to eat. That food, eaten with “rice cooked with spoiled rice that has lost all its sap. Fish sauce is a kind of caramel sauce mixed with salty salt to save money”. Just looking at it makes you feel “disgusted”. Tam Lang sadly witnessed “tears dried like blood” of the “horse and human” lives. He sympathized with “thousands and fifty Hanoi rickshaw drivers at that time who only worked for a bowl of rice: No matter how cold or hot the weather was, whether it was pouring rain or scorching sun, putting their heads through two wooden shafts, the rickshaw drivers had to push their arms, hoofs, run until they were out of breath, their bodies drenched in sweat, their clothes soaked as if soaked with water”. They worked so hard just to earn “five or three cents, one dime, one hoe . Just the right amount of money to buy a little rice to put in their mouths, the kind of rice cooked with spoiled rice mixed with a little caramel sauce ”. They “ate to live… But how could they live in peace? They also had to listen to the vulgar words of the people sitting in the rickshaw, endure the policemen's hammers , and the rickshaw drivers' bolts to beat them..." With a specific, realistic, and vivid writing style, I pulled the rickshaw, helping readers deeply feel the miserable impoverishment of the urban poor in Vietnam in the first decades of the 20th century.

It can be said that, with their sharp realistic writing, the three writers Vu Trong Phung, Tam Lang, and Ngo Tat To have completed a sketch of the portrait of "miserable people" belonging to the lower classes in society who were impoverished for various reasons: "because of exploitation, because of natural disasters, because of unemployment, because of social turmoil".

* The tragic degeneration of the "bottom" class

As an inevitable consequence, poverty and destitution will inevitably lead to degeneration. This is a topic that realist writers from 1930 to 1945 have exploited and successfully exploited, leaving behind excellent works that have a lasting vitality in the history of national literature. Chí Phèo (in the work of the same name) by Nam Cao reflects the miserable degeneration of farmers. From an honest person who only wanted to do honest work, poverty turned Chí Phèo into a hooligan who "went in and out of jail", also knew how to scratch his face, beg for forgiveness, also knew how to curse, scream... and then culminated in being a "thug", carrying bottles into the house, demanding to "question Bá Kiến". Having lost all his personality, lost all his humanity, at the bottom, Chí Phèo, even if he wanted to, had no way back to being an honest person. Poor intellectuals like Ho, Dien, and Thu in Nam Cao's Song Mon and Trang Sang gradually became miserably corrupted in a deadlocked life of "not knowing what to do but to find food to put in their stomachs", which they could not even find. The life of struggling for food and clothing kept pressing them closer to the ground, causing their lives to "wear out and rust", gradually killing their desire to live. A series of characters in Nguyen Cong Hoan's works also suffered the same fate of materialization and gradual degeneration of humanity. From filial piety to unfilialness, from purity to filth, from honesty to deceit, from loyalty to betrayal... these were common degenerations in contemporary society. Just because of jealousy and selfish desires, because of the strange "grabbing" theory "if you don't get this benefit, why the hell would you do it all?", Mrs. Phan ( I would like to do it all ) tried to find a way to take over the beautiful hair of her poor sick girlfriend at all costs. A girl full of love, but with everyone

swear to live and die to remain chaste with that person, to eventually give birth to a "rock-and-evil" breed. The Law scholars, doctors, engineers, literature scholars, district magistrates, and corrupt officials, who "studied abroad for years" to be "civilized" and escape the situation where "everything in our country is inferior", ended up using the mean habit of picking each other's wallets ( Whose wallet is that ). The Mandarins and Madams "set up odds", "pick on each other" to push each other into difficult situations to satisfy their own private matters ( Who is smart, Women are the weak species ...). Even characters who seem to be truly honest and pitiful, like the "human horse", in a desperate situation, are forced to find a way to trick the "human horse" to pull them to find customers ( The horse man and the human horse ). A beggar boy who no one gives him is forced to climb a tree, knock himself down, and deceive himself into being disabled in order to gain sympathy from people and give him alms and have "capital to make a living" ( Capital to make a living ). The children who were originally gentle, just because they were too hungry, just because of a “full meal”, had to reluctantly risk their lives to steal and become miserable thieves ( The thief, A full meal…beaten ). Considered a “writer of the miserable classes”, Nguyen Hong wrote with all his love for the people “at the bottom”. Not only reflecting the poverty and hunger of the class of people belonging to the “working world at the bottom of urban society”, Nguyen Hong’s writings denounced to the end how society had corrupted people. The deception pushed Tam Binh from an innocent, pure girl into the terrifying, horrible situation of a “vile shell” and a tragic ending: “in a flash, Binh saw all the dark despair from now on that would never stop tearing at Binh’s heart and Binh would live an endlessly miserable life”.

The feudal colonial society created an inhumane, evil, cruel, unjust social environment that seriously degraded people. In Com Thay Com Co , Vu Trong Phung sharply pointed out the reality of Ha Thanh at the beginning of the century. The "Ha Thanh has no organization...", polite people thought Ha Thanh was polite, but sociologists - also thought Ha Thanh had no organization.

“tragic” story. But “in fact, it is very tragic”. “It has called the villagers to leave the dry and withered fields to come here to starve to death a second time after leaving their homes. It has made the price of human beings equal to the price of animals”. Along with the writers Nam Cao, Nguyen Hong, Nguyen Cong Hoan, Nguyen Dinh Lap and the contemporary critical realist writers, with their talent, painful hearts and sharpness, through the reportage Tam Lang, Vu Trong Phung, Ngo Tat To has shown: more than exploitation, impoverishment, the process of degeneration and the degeneration that transforms people - is the most disgusting and condemnable crime in the contemporary “dog-like”, “senseless” society.

The life of “teacher’s rice, co-ed” has caused terrible degeneration and change in people. “It has made a group of young boys go to the furnace house with a group of young girls who work as prostitutes”. A series of villagers who were previously gentle and simple, only knowing how to work hard and endure hardships, have become hooligans and thugs “there are maids who are more precious to the boss than his wife. There are young boys who put poison and intend to kill the boss’s whole family. There are kitchen boys who spit phlegm into the fish pot. There are boys who sleep in Hong Kong beds with the boss. There are people who burn down the boss’s house”. A typical example of this degeneration is the girl Duoi ( Teacher’s rice, co-ed ). Originally a gentle country girl, after being raped, “after suffering the misfortune of Uncle Oan”, Duoi hated life and took revenge on life “becoming a skilled woman in pornography and prostitution” and always wanted to become a geisha, Mrs. Ky, Mrs. Phan to enter the upper class. In I Pull the Cart , Tam Lang also denounced the injustice and dishonesty of colonial society, pushing the poor rickshaw drivers to a miserable degradation. Anh Tu - a poor rickshaw driver, because of not having enough money to pay the tax, was brutally beaten by the rickshaw drivers. After that beating, he realized that he was surrounded by a "scumbag" society, all for money "besides money there is nothing more. Virtue, courtesy... thrown away, thrown away everything". He went deep into the path of degradation, "using his hands" to do even the things that are not right.

In the past, he considered himself a “bastard” and became a pimp, leading girls for the tattoo shop owner: “At night, I picked up some bad guys and flirted with them and took them away, so I ate both the girls’ and their backs.” And when he had money, he threw himself into debauchery, smoking opium, drinking alcohol, and satisfying himself. “ If I caught two groups in one night, I was already drunk, drinking bottles of alcohol, smoking opium freely ” [26; 57]. But, to be a pimp, Tu also had to use all kinds of tricks and deception. “Not only did he have to be cunning and deceitful ; he also had to know many casinos and brothels - and he had to know how to trick and entice them to go. If someone didn’t listen, he had to threaten them to listen; if someone was thirsty for money , he had to use the story of the pimp to scare them” [26; 58]. Also, depending on the type of girl, there must be an effective way to "treat" her: You must know how to flirt with the bad-mannered street girls; be gentle with the street girls; and be careful with the country girls... which means that Mr. Tu has become a "sly fox", reaching the bottom of depravity and dishonesty.

The “Western women” in Vu Trong Phung’s The Art of Marrying Westerners were also gradually corrupted by that “devilish” profession, blatantly turning into commodities in dirty barter contracts. There, women only think about money, they only consider Western husbands as “money chests”. Men, on the contrary, “only think about lust”, marrying wives only because of a practical calculation “raising servants, they are afraid that they will steal, it is better to marry a wife who can both order them around and do…other things”. The marriages - in essence, are just contractual encounters, just “dog fights”, therefore, they have corrupted and degenerated many poor people. In the fierce competition of the “profession” of marrying Westerners, each person must also be bold in their cruel and dirty tricks, must know how to “slander”, “devalue”, “cheat” and “snatch” each other. And so, behind that Westernized Industry is not only the decline of culture but also the degeneration of conscience, morality and human dignity; the exhaustion of humanity of an entire class of miserable people. The indifferent face of

Mrs. Kiem Lam on her wedding night is a horrifying example of the alarming decline in human dignity: "her face was so calm that I saw it as hard as stone, as steady as bronze...as "a brave general, like Tu Hai's face when he was standing dead", not showing the slightest "feeling" [27; 722].

Rolling around in the gambling industry, for money, the gamblers in Vu Trong Phung's Human Trap are also badly corrupted. Vu Trong Phung's talented pen has penetrated every corner of the gambling village, exposing all the deceitful and dirty tricks of that gambling "profession". The writer has also gone to the end and shown a heartbreaking paradox: The more experienced one is in the "profession", the more depleted one's humanity and nature are, the more serious the degeneration of people is. Ironically and bitterly, Vu Trong Phung has exposed the heartlessness of those who practice gambling. To have money to gamble and debauch, they do not hesitate to turn their own blood relatives into "gulls", bringing the swindlers home to "strip" their biological fathers, "flesh" their uncles; There are people who “strip” off your shirt to pawn it for money to get the money back, “burn” all the money that the neighbors have asked to buy a coffin on gambling… Even more terrible is the impatience of “common sense” right in the swindler village. The swindlers themselves bitterly realize that “swindling is not a moral profession, and the way the swindlers treat each other is also not humane, if there is any humanity, it is only the humanity of bandits”. Therefore, the acts of turning against friends, embezzling from each other, old swindlers bullying young swindlers, “cannibalizing each other”, stabbing each other “until their intestines come out”… have become “common” scenes in the swindler village. It can be said that these densely set traps have killed human dignity, degraded, and miserably degraded human personality.

Delving into the degeneration of the "bottom" class, highlighting their miserable degeneration, and at the same time investigating the causes leading to their degeneration: due to the injustice and brutality of the masters and exploiters; due to

Vietnam Reportage 1930 - 1945 Through Tam Lang, Vu Trong Phung and Ngo Tat To - 11

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