Nguyen Huy Thiep was born in Hanoi on 29 April 1950, midway through the First Indochina War, and raised by a mother who had evacuated when he was a baby to Viet Minh-controlled zones. Because his only brother had enlisted in the army during the Second Indochina War, Thiep managed to avoid military service and to enrol in the Hanoi Teachers’ Training College after finishing high school in 1967. Graduating with a degree in history, he moved to the Tay Bac mountains, where he was assigned a teaching position in a school for cadres serving Thai and Hmong ethnic minority communities. He remained in Tay Bac for ten years. Conditions there were marked by deprivation and extreme isolation, but Thiep was able to pursue a regime of self-study after gaining access to the book collection of the library of Son La province.

The end of the war in 1975 brought jubilation but also anxiety about what was to come. ‘Not only were my students, colleagues and I all thrilled, but the whole population of North Vietnam thought that the end of the war would bring happiness, would change our lives and our world,’ he recalled decades later. ‘Soon, however, we came to realise that despite the end of the war, we still had to continue along a new road—a road perhaps beset by even greater difficulties than those we had faced during the war.’ He remained in Tay Bac until 1980, when he finally returned to Hanoi.

• Tags: Issue 23, Nguyen Huy Thiep, Peter Zinoman, Vietman