Vũ Trọng Phụng

Hanoi, Vietnam

Vũ Trọng Phụng (Hanoi, 20 October 1912 – Hanoi, 13 October 1939) was a popular Vietnamese author and journalist, who is considered to be one of the most influential figures of 20th century Vietnamese literature.

Phụng's ancestral village was in Hưng Yên Province, yet he was born and lived the rest of his life in Hanoi. He wrote prolifically during the 1930s, although only for a short span of time, with his first work being the short story "Chống nạng lên đường" (Set off with crutches) on the newspaper Ngọ Báo (Horse News) in 1930. Some excerpts from his subsequent publications, for example the novel "Dumb Luck" (Vietnamese: Số Đỏ) and "The Storm" (Vietnamese: Giông Tố), became part of Vietnamese literature textbooks.

Famous for the satire in his works, Phụng was compared to Balzac by some critics. His realistic descriptions of colonial influences causing destructive decadence, alongside thoughtful, heavy emphasis on the topics of sex (i.e. sexual behavior, sex education and sex work), were controversial, ahead of his time and subject to prohibition under French rule. Later on, his works were also prohibited in North Vietnam, deemed to be "obscene publications" until the late 1980s. Struggling with severe poverty by the end of his life, in 1939, Vũ Trọng Phụng died of tuberculosis a week before his 27th birthday, leaving behind an impressive body of literature: over 30 short stories, 9 novels, 9 reports, 7 plays, along with a translated French play, some literature reviews and pieces of literary critique, and hundreds of articles on matters of politics, society, and culture. Three of his works have been translated to be introduced into international literature: "Dumb Luck", 1936 (translation: University of Michigan Press, 2002); "Lục Xì: Prostitution and Venereal Disease in Colonial Hanoi" (translation by Shaun Kingsley Malarney: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011); and "The Industry of Marrying Europeans" (translation: Cornell South East Asian Program).