By Tay Bac — the Northwest — we mean what Vietnamese usually mean: Hoa Binh, Son La, Dien Bien, Lai Chau, Yen Bai and Lao Cai, the country on the right bank of the Red River, with the Da River, the Hoang Lien Son range and the Muong Thanh basin. Ha Giang, Cao Bang, Bac Kan and Lang Son belong to the Northeast and have a literature of their own; we write about that on a separate page.
This is not a bibliography. These are the books our guides bring up while riding through Son La, Dien Bien or Lai Chau, and why they are worth reading before you come.
“Tay Tien” — the poem that named a region in Vietnamese memory
Quang Dung wrote Tay Tien in 1948, remembering the regiment he had served in as it marched through the mountains of Hoa Binh and Son La and on into Laos. The poem builds a Northwest of mist, gradient, jungle rain and fever, seen with a romanticism so strong that generations of Vietnamese schoolchildren knew it by heart before they had seen a real mountain.
If you ride the Moc Chau – Song Ma – Sop Cop route, you are riding through the exact country of that poem.
To Hoai and “Tales of the Northwest”
The collection Tales of the Northwest, published in the early 1950s, contains A Phu and His Wife, Muong Gion and Saving the Land. The best known of them is set at Hong Ngai — a real place in Bac Yen district, Son La, directly below Ta Xua, the ridge that riders climb today to sit above the clouds. The question the story asks still holds as you ride through the villages: what keeps a person in a place they do not want to be?
Nguyen Tuan and the Da River
The Da River Boatman, from the 1960 collection Song Da, is a completely different kind of writing: almost technical in its detail, reading the river the way you read an opponent, whirlpool by whirlpool. Most of the rapids described in it now lie under the reservoirs of the Hoa Binh and Son La dams. Reading the essay while standing beside that flat water is a strange experience: you are looking at a river changed for good, through the eyes of a man who saw it while it was still wild.
Che Lan Vien, Nguyen Huy Thiep, Ma Van Khang
Che Lan Vien’s Song of the Train records the mood of an era: going up to the Northwest as if going towards something larger than oneself. Thirty years later, Nguyen Huy Thiep wrote The Winds of Hua Tat — ten short stories shaped like folk tales, set in a Thai village in Son La — in a voice markedly colder and more merciless than the generation before him.
Ma Van Khang lived and taught in Lao Cai for more than twenty years before writing Silver Coins and The Border Country. That is the writing of someone who stayed, not of someone passing through.
Sa Pa, and a story every Vietnamese has studied
Quiet Sa Pa by Nguyen Thanh Long, written after a trip to Lao Cai in the early 1970s, is about a young weatherman living alone on a mountain top. If you go up to Sa Pa today and find a crowded town, remember that fifty years ago it was quiet enough for the word to become a story’s title.
The literature of the Northwest’s own peoples
Long before there was Vietnamese-language writing about this region, its peoples had a literature of their own, and it is far larger than most visitors imagine.
- “Xong chu xon xao” (Farewell, My Love) — a long Thai verse narrative about a couple forced apart. It is among the greatest works of Vietnam’s ethnic-minority literature, written in the old Thai script and passed down for centuries.
- “Tay pu xac” — the Thai book of how villages and domains were founded: literature and history at once.
- “Birth of the Earth and Water” — the epic of the Muong people of Hoa Binh, an account of the creation of the world, chanted at funerals and capable of running for several nights.
The Thai have their own script and a tradition of hand-copied books. If you visit the provincial museum in Son La or Dien Bien, look for the display of old Thai manuscripts — it says more than any landscape photograph.
The poet behind “Love Song of the Northwest”
The song you will hear in every roadside restaurant along National Road 6 began as a poem by Cam Giang, a writer who spent much of his life among Thai communities, later set to music by Bui Duc Hanh. Cam Giang’s poems were among the earliest bridges between the Thai way of seeing and the Vietnamese language.
What to read before you leave home
If you have a week: the poem Tay Tien, the story A Phu and His Wife, and a few of the Hua Tat tales. Those are enough to stop you seeing the Northwest as a backdrop for photographs. Our guides supply the rest on the road, somewhere between two passes. English translations are scarce and uneven — ask us before the trip and we will tell you honestly what exists in your language.