The Northeast is the country on the left bank of the Red River: Ha Giang, Cao Bang, Bac Kan, Lang Son, Tuyen Quang, Thai Nguyen and the provinces around them. It is the homeland of the Tay, Nung, Dao, Hmong, Bo Y, Lo Lo and Giay peoples — and it is where Ha Giang Experts works every day.
The literature of the Northeast differs from that of the Northwest in one important way: most of its major works were written by people from the region itself, rather than by lowlanders who came, looked and wrote it up afterwards. That is why it deserves a page of its own.
Do Bich Thuy — writing Ha Giang from the inside
If you read only one author before a Ha Giang trip, read Do Bich Thuy. She was born and grew up in Ha Giang, and the stone plateau in her writing is not scenery seen from a vehicle.
Her short story The Jew’s Harp Behind the Stone Fence — later filmed as The Story of Pao — tells a very particular Hmong family story in which everything that matters happens behind a stone wall and nobody says it out loud. Her later books, among them Silence Above the Abyss and Lord of the Land, go straight at what tourism tends to skip: bride-pulling, power inside a village, and what it means to be a woman living among rocks.
Read her, then ride through Sung La, and you will look at a dry-stone fence quite differently.
Cao Duy Son — Cao Bang and its border towns
Cao Duy Son is a Tay writer from Cao Bang. He writes about small border towns slowly and without melodrama, closer to the real rhythm of life than to any romantic idea of the mountains. His collection The Old House by the Stream won the S.E.A. Write Award. If your route crosses Cao Bang — Bao Lac, Bao Lam, the Ban Gioc falls — he is that country’s storyteller.
Three Tay poets every Vietnamese has studied at school
- Y Phuong (Cao Bang) — the poem Speaking to My Son, a father telling his child where he comes from. It is on the school syllabus and is probably the most widely read poem by an ethnic-minority writer in Vietnam.
- Nong Quoc Chan (Bac Kan) — Coming Home to the Village, about the day people returned after the war. He was among the first ethnic-minority poets to write in both Tay and Vietnamese.
- Vi Hong (Thai Nguyen) — a novelist of Tay life, and one of the writers who opened the way for ethnic-minority prose.
“Viet Bac”
To Huu’s poem Viet Bac, written in 1954, is about the resistance base area covering Cao Bang, Bac Kan, Lang Son, Ha Giang, Tuyen Quang and Thai Nguyen. For Vietnamese readers the two words “Viet Bac” carry almost the whole image of this region: mountains, mist, palm groves, tea hills and a parting. If you want to understand why Vietnamese speak about the Northeast in such a nostalgic register, that poem is where it starts.
The literature that was never printed
- Tay verse narratives in Nom script — long stories of love and fate, copied by hand and still kept in family chests in Cao Bang and Lang Son.
- Dao books in Nom Dao — ritual books, medical books and primers, hand-copied and passed down within a lineage. Some families in Ha Giang still hold a whole trunk of them.
- “Songs of the Bride” — the body of Hmong folk song about the fate of a girl married into another family; among the saddest and most truthful voices in highland oral literature.
- Luon, sli and coi — the call-and-response forms of the Tay and Nung: music and improvised poetry at the same time.
Writers working now
In Ha Giang and the neighbouring provinces, Tay, Hmong and Dao poets and novelists are still writing and publishing — mostly on a small scale, but this is the voice without an intermediary. If you read Vietnamese and have time in Ha Giang town, the provincial bookshop is a far better stop than the souvenir counter.
What to read before you come up to the plateau
A volume of Do Bich Thuy’s stories, Y Phuong’s Speaking to My Son, and if you have more time, a story by Cao Duy Son. That is enough to stop you seeing the karst plateau as a backdrop for photographs.
English translations are scarce; ask us before the trip and we will tell you honestly what exists. For the literature of the Northwest — Son La, Dien Bien, Lai Chau, Hoa Binh — we have a separate page.