Gone Astray

In the Autumn of 2007, I met the writer Nguyễn Mộng Giác in the United States. I proudly told him that I was writingmy memoirs. He said: "Writingmemoirs is rather like filming a wedding. Once the film is finished, the people who took part in the wedding sit down and watch it with great delight, but outsiders merely glance at it and walk away, because that wedding has nothing to do with them."

What he said made perfect sense.

Besides, I was hardly an important personage of any kind. I was merely an underground Viet Cong operative whom very few people had ever heard of.

Yet I believed that the memoir of that anonymous "Viet Cong" might well attract readers and, who knows, perhaps even make a considerable impact.

I began writing these memoirs in mid-2006. I had completed more than half of the manuscript when I went to America, and I finished it in the Autumn of 2007 in the city of Lake Forest.I decided to call it "Gone Astray".

At the beginning of 2008, I returned to Vietnam and gave the manuscript to a few friends. It was received with quite a stir. From just a handful of close friends, it quicklyspread among writers,journalists, and artists. Most surprising of all, lawyerswere among those who read it in great numbers.

Knowing that there was no way this autobiography could obtain official permission for publication, I sent it to the Talawas website. Ten days later, I received a

letter from its editor-in-chief, Phạm Thị Hoài. She wrote: "I will personally edit this work."

And then "Gone Astray" appeared on Talawas. Twenty-four hours later, Ms. Hoài wrote to me again: "There have already been 15,333 readers."

A few days later, one evening, I was lying on the couch watching television when I received a phone call from the BBC. Lê Hải was calling. He said: "I have just finished reading your autobiography Gone Astray, and I am deeply impressed. Let me congratulate you. Would you be willing to give the BBC an interview?"

It was a twenty-minute interview, broadcast a few days later and rebroadcast for a second time half a month afterward.

I am deeply grateful to Talawas and the BBC, because thanks to these media outlets, Gone Astray came to be known by tens of thousands of people. At the time, I received a great many letters every day from readers throughout Vietnam and from all over the world, sent to my email address. I knew that I had succeeded far beyond my expectations. And the concern expressed by Nguyễn Mộng Giác never came to pass.

For this reprint, I have corrected and supplemented a number of omissions. The stories told in this work are true, although at times, unable to restrain my own audacity, I have presented them as though they were part of a novel.

Dao Hieu