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Thơ Cao Thoại Châu |  FOR U ONLY

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A Dickensian tale of provincial China

Yiyun Li's novel gives chilling insights into the mechanisms of totalitarianism
The counter-revolutionary's tale
Christopher Tayler applauds a first novel by a skilled storyteller
Yiyun Li's 2005 story collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers - which won four prizes, including the Guardian First Book award - was admired for taking a calm, Chekhovian look at a changing China and the lives of Chinese emigrants.
Chúng tôi hô khẩu hiệu khi đạn vô sọ anh ta.
Yiyun Li:  A thousand years of good prayers
Nhân nhắc tới Yiyun Li, Gấu lại nhớ tới cái cú chuyển dịch [ra tiếng] Vịt của eVăn.
Chuyển Dịch Vịt

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British author Geraldine Bedell banned from Dubai book festival
British author Geraldine Bedell has been banned from a book festival in Dubai because one of the characters in her new book is gay.
Sách gay của nữ văn sỡi Anh bị cấm tại Hội Sách
Atwood pulls out of Dubai festival in censorship protest
Atwood, phó trùm PEN, đếch thèm dự nữa!

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Quê hương tưởng tượng

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Kỷ niệm đẹp nhất trong đời viết văn

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Tổ Quỉ

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Cuộc Tình Bỏ Đi

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Phỏng vấn PHT

From:
To:
Tuesday, February 18, 2003 10:54 PM
Today's my birthday. U make me happy. Tks for nice message.
 ----- Original Message -----
From:
To:
Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2003 10:50 PM
Subject: Re:
Tks, I miss you, really, nqt
*
Happy Birthday to U,
NQT
18. 2.2009

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Đỉnh cao chói lọi
Uchronie?
Uchronie, theo từ điển Le Nouveau Larousse Illustré 1913: Danh từ giống cái. Không tưởng, utopie, áp dụng vào lịch sử; lịch sử làm lại một cách hợp lý như là nó có thể. Thí dụ: Cái mũi của Cléopatre: Nếu ngắn đi một tí, thì bộ mặt thế giới đã thay đổi.
Bằng thủ pháp uchronie, nhà văn thay đổi dòng chảy của lịch sử. Một ông Quang Trung của NHT ra Bắc nhét kít vô miệng sĩ phu Bắc Hà, và thế là lương tâm kẻ sĩ xuất hiện đè bẹp dí Cái Ác Bắc Kít, và thế là cuộc chiến giữa Mít Bắc và Mít Nam đổi khác!
Chỉ có những nhà văn mới có thể làm được điều trên đây.
Thời điểm thay đổi số mệnh của họ.
Với Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, tác giả Nửa kia của Hitler, La Part de l’autre: Phần của kẻ khác, đó là lúc ông cho Hitler thi đậu vô trường Mỹ Nghệ và trở thành họa sĩ.
Chúng ta cứ giả dụ, ông Hồ được Tây mũi lõ cho một chức quèn, thư ký thư kiếc gì đó, như ông đã từng làm đơn xin xỏ, thì biết đâu, lịch sử Mít đã khác?
Gấu chưa dám đọc Đỉnh Cao Chói Lọi, thành thử không hiểu thời điểm thay đổi số mệnh của Bác, theo DTH, là thời điểm nào?
VTH, trả lời diễn đàn X-Cà phe, phán về Bác:
Ông Hồ Chí Minh là một người đàn ông, chuyện vợ con của ông tôi không quan tâm. Nhưng trong câu chuyện bi thảm này, những người có lương tri đều lên án ông, ngay cả trong trường hợp ông không trực tiếp ra lệnh giết người phụ nữ bất hạnh, người đã “đầu gối tay ấp”, có con bồng con mang với mình. Ông biết, ông tất nhiên phải biết, nhưng ông đã im lặng, đã quay mặt đi trước tội ác. Người không nhân hậu với người thân của chính mình thì nhân hậu được với ai?
Liệu chúng ta có thể lấy thời điểm, “ông Hồ ôm lấy vợ con” này để thay đổi, modifier, dòng chảy lịch sử nước Mít chúng ta?
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He married nationalism to communism and perfected the deadly art of guerrilla warfare

By STANLEY KARNOW

An emaciated, goateed figure in a threadbare bush jacket and frayed rubber sandals, Ho Chi Minh cultivated the image of a humble, benign "Uncle Ho." But he was a seasoned revolutionary and passionate nationalist obsessed by a single goal: independence for his country. Sharing his fervor, his tattered guerrillas vaulted daunting obstacles to crush France's desperate attempt to retrieve its empire in Indochina; later, built into a largely conventional army, they frustrated the massive U.S. effort to prevent Ho's communist followers from controlling Vietnam. For Americans, it was the longest war-and the first defeat-in their history, and it drastically changed the way they perceived their role in the world.

To Western eyes, it seemed inconceivable that Ho would make the tremendous sacrifices he did. But in 1946, as war with the French loomed, he cautioned them, "You can kill 10 of my men for every one I kill of yours, yet even at those odds, you will lose and I will win." The French, convinced of their superiority, ignored his warning and suffered grievously as a result. Senior American officers similarly nurtured the illusion that their sophisticated weapons would inevitably break enemy morale. But, as Ho's brilliant commander, General Vo Nguyen Giap, told me in Hanoi in 1990, his principal concern had been victory. When I asked him how long he would have resisted the U.S. onslaught, he thundered, "Twenty years, maybe 100 years-as long as it took to win, regardless of cost." The human toll was horrendous. An estimated 3 million North and South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians died. 

“France undervalued… the power  [Ho] wielded. There's no doubt that he aspired… to become the the Gandhi of Indochina.

JEAN SAINTENY, De Gaulles’s special emissary to Vietnam, 1953

1890 in Hoang Tru in rural Vietnam
1911 Sails to France to study and work
1941 Forms the Vietnam Independence League, or Viet Minh
1954 Defeats the French at Dien Bien Phu. Vietnam is divided,
and Ho becomes first President of North Vietnam
1959 Begins armed revolt against South Vietnam
1967 Tells L.B.J .. "We will never negotiate"

The youngest of three children, Ho was born Nguyen Sinh Cung in 1890 in a village in central Vietnam. The area was indirectly ruled by the French through ~ puppet emperor. Its impoverished peasants, traditional dissidents, opposed France's presence; and Ho's father, a functionary at the imperial court, manifested his sympathy for them by quitting his position and becoming an itinerant teacher. Inheriting his father's rebellious bent, Ho participated in a series of tax revolts, acquiring a reputation as a troublemaker. But he was familiar with the lofty French principles of liberté, égalité, fraternité and yearned to see them in practice in France. In 1911 he sailed for Marseilles as a galley boy aboard a passenger liner. His record of dissent had already earned him a file in the French police dossiers. It was scarcely flattering: "Appearance awkward ... mouth half-open."

In Paris, Ho worked as a photo retoucher. The city's fancy restaurants were beyond his means, but he indulged in one luxury American cigarettes, preferably Camels or Lucky Strikes. Occasionally he would drop into a music hall to listen to Maurice Chevalier, whose charming songs he would never forget.

In 1919, Woodrow Wilson arrived in France to sign the treaty ending World War I, and Ho, supposing that the President's doctrine of self-determination applied to Asia, donned a cutaway coat and tried to present Wilson with a lengthy list of French abuses in Vietnam. Rebuffed, Ho joined the newly created French Communist Party. "It was patriotism, not communism, that inspired me," he later explained.

Soon Ho was roaming the earth as a covert agent for Moscow. Disguised as a Chinese journalist or a Buddhist monk, he would surface in Canton, Rangoon or Calcutta - then vanish to nurse his tuberculosis and other chronic diseases. As befit a professional conspirator, he employed a baffling assortment of aliases. Again and again, he was reported dead, only to pop up in a new place. In 1929 he assembled a few militants in Hong Kong and formed the Indochinese Communist Party. He portrayed himself as a celibate, a pose calculated to epitomize his moral fiber, but he had at least two wives or perhaps concubines. One was a Chinese woman; the other was Giap's sister-in-law, who was guillotined by the French.

In 1940, Japan's legions swept into Indochina and French officials in Vietnam, loyal to the pro German Vichy administration in France, collaborated with them. Nationalists in the region greeted the Japanese as liberators, but to Ho they were no better than the French. Slipping across the Chinese frontier into Vietnam-his first return home in three decades she urged his disciples to fight both the Japanese and the French. There, in a remote camp, he founded the Viet Minh, an acronym for the Vietnam Independence League, from which he derived his nom de guerre, Ho Chi Minh roughly "Bringer of Light."
What he brought was a spirit of rebellion-against first the French and later the Americans. As Ho's war escalated in the mid-1960s, it became clear to Lyndon Johnson that Vietnam would imperil his presidency. In 1965, Johnson tried a diplomatic approach. Accustomed to dispensing patronage to recalcitrant Congressmen, he was confident that the tactic would work. "Old Ho can't turn me down," L.B.J. said. But Ho did. Any settlement, he realized, would mean accepting a permanent partition and forfeiting his dream to unify Vietnam under his flag.
There was no flexibility in Ho's beliefs, no bending of his will. Even as the war increasingly destroyed the country, he remained committed to Vietnam's independence. And millions of Vietnamese fought and died to attain the same goal.
Ho died on Sept. 2, 1969, at the age of 79, some six years before his battalions surged into Saigon. spiring to bask in the reflected glory of his posthumous triumph, his heirs put his embalmed body on display in a hideous granite mausoleum copied from Lenin's tomb in Moscow. They violated his final wishes. In his will he specified that his ashes be buried in urns on three hilltops in Vietnam, saying, "Not only is cremation good from the point of view of hygiene, but it also saves farmland." • 

Stanley Kamow, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines, is the author of Vietnam: A History
Time April 13 1998, Special Issue Leaders and Revolutionaries of the 20th century

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Người bạn của nhân dân:
Trùm Mật Vụ Yezhov, "Quả đấm bằng sắt" của Stalin.
"He was liquidated because he had come to suspect even Stalin of treason"
 Ông Trùm bị hành quyết vì dám nghi ngờ đồng chí Stalin phạm tội phản quốc!
BIOGRAPHIE
A friend of the people
VLADIMIR TISMANEANU
J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov
YEZHOV
The rise of Stalin's "Iron Fist"
283pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $35). 978 0 300 09205 9

V. Naumov, authors of The Road to Terror (1999), here offer provocative and illuminating analysis of the way Yezhov rose to become the second most influential man in the Soviet Union. This study adds significantly to the previous Yezhov biography by Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov, Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Yezhov (2002), which focused on his role as the main architect of terror.

Certainly, the intensity of the terror, its the amplitude and recklessness were directly linked to Yezhov's paranoid mentality. Nonetheless, for most of his career he was a dull, unobtrusive, disciplined party apparatchik. Strikingly short in stature, unflinchingly dedicated to the Bolshevik cause, Yezhov did not reveal, early on, any sadistic proclivities. On the contrary, he appeared to be relatively balanced in dealing with his comrades' real or imaginary sins.
As Getty and Naumov show, this relatively unimportant apparatchik made it to the top by clever use of the bureaucratic machinery. An industrial worker from Petrograd, he had joined the party a few months before the October Revolution, so he could claim, like other Stalinist magnates, Old Guard credentials.
After working in the provinces and Central Asia, Yezhov went to Moscow, studied the basics of Leninism, and was recruited by the chief of the party's cadres department Ivan Moskvin as an instructor in that crucially important sector. Under Moskvin's protection, he cultivated relations with Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich. It appears that he did not establish personal connections with Stalin until the late 1920s or early 30s. Yet Stalin was certainly aware - of the young functionary's impeccable credentials as an organizer. Yezhov symbolized the ascent of the provincial cadres in the Soviet hierarchy. He owed everything to Stalin and his camarilla and knew how to exploit the increasingly fierce struggle for power in the dictator's inner circle.
The murder of Sergei Kirov by a disgruntled militant in December 1934 was a godsend for Yezhov. He accompanied Stalin to Leningrad and conducted the investigation of those suspected of having organized the assassination of the Leningrad party leader (and Stalin's presumed rival). In the meantime, Yezhov had become the head of the Party Control Commission, a decisive instrument used to discipline and supervise the apparatus. Moreover, he was a Central Committee  Secretary and head of the party's Organizational Bureau. Altogether, he had amassed

more power in his hands than any other of Stalin's associates (except perhaps Molotov).
Getty and Naumov see Yezhov as instrumental in playing on Stalin's anxieties, fears and phobias. He appeared convinced that the "enemy" was conspiring everywhere, that the "Fatherland of socialism" was in mortal danger and that terror was morally justified. His mindset was typically Bolshevik: the world was divided into friends and foes, and the latter needed to be weeded out mercilessly. In his correspondence with Stalin, Yezhov used precisely the same terms about the "enemies of the people" as in his public utterances. In this respect, there was no real difference between the Stalinists and the Nazis: they meant what they said, and ideology was not just a smokescreen. As the authors put it: "The Stalinists said the same thing to each other behind closed doors that to they said to the public: in this regard their 'hidden transcripts' differed little from their public ones .... Small political deviations were portrayed, and sincerely understood, as attacks by enemy forces". Still, one wonders whether Stalin himself ever considered someone like Nikolai Bukharin a genuine enemy of the people, or whether he accepted Yezhov's convenient scenario in order to eliminate a major figure in the Leninist tradition.
A consummate schemer, the austere, self-effacing Yezhov managed to slander and replace Genrikh Yagoda as head of the secret police. He pursued his career fully convinced that the party and society as a whole needed to be continuously purged. There are no indications of personal viciousness. Like many Nazi criminals, Yezhov appeared calm, quiet, approachable, even dispassionate.
By the end of 1938, Stalin had got what he wanted from the Great Terror, and had no use for the hysterically unpredictable Yezhov. The time of frantic mobilization had passed and Yezhov had become an embarrassment. In 1939, Lavrenty Beria replaced him as head of the NKVD and a few months later Yezhov was arrested. He was executed in 1940 under surreal charges of moral decay and treason. When my parents arrived in the USSR in late 1940 (they had both fought with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War), they asked a veteran Comintern executive what had happened to Yezhov. The old man whispered: "He was liquidated because he had come to suspect even Stalin of treason".
TLS 12 Tháng Hai 2009

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Văn chương và siêu hình: Về cuốn Linh Sơn

Tôi nhận thấy, thứ ngôn ngữ Trung Quốc Âu Châu hóa, không thể chịu nổi.

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Thư giãn cuối tuần

Một người làm trong ủy ban Kế hoạch Hóa gia đình người Kinh công tác trên miền núi.

Gặp vợ chồng A Pó mới 25 tuổi, nhưng đã có 6 đứa con. 

Anh ta chê:  "Chúng mày kém, nghèo mà đẻ lắm.  Chả bằng một góc người Kinh."

Bị chạm tự ái, A Pó bảo vợ:  "Tao với mày tối nay phải đến nhà thằng giáo viên người Kinh xem nó "ấy" vợ nó thế nào mà thằng kia bảo mình không bằng một góc của nó".

Tối đến, A Pó cùng vợ rình nhà giáo viên người Kinh. 

Nhà sàn nên hơi cao, A Pó không nhìn thấy gì bèn bảo vợ đứng lên trên lưng mình để xem. 

Vài phút sau, vợ A Pó trèo xuống, mặt hơi đỏ.

A Pó hỏi:  "Thế nào?  Mày thấy gì không?"

Chị vợ thèn thẹn lắc đầu:  "Vợ chồng ông giáo 'ấy' cũng thế..  Chả khác gì lúc mình ‘ấy’ tôi cả".

A Pó tức lắm, lầm bầm:  "Thằng kia đã bảo khác là khác.  Để ông đứng trên vai mày ông xem".

5 phút sau, A Pó trèo xuống đất, mặt xanh mét, chân tay run lẩy bẩy.

Vợ lấy làm lạ lắm, nhưng không dám hỏi.

Trên đường về, A Pó rỉ tai vợ:  "Thôi mình nghèo cũng được, đẻ nhiều cũng được, chứ tao không bắt chước bọn người Kinh đâu. Chúng nó 'ấy' nhau xong... lột da "thằng nhỏ" vứt vào sọt rác. Đau lắm, tao chịu thua".