have absolute beginners and almost fluent English-speakers. When I tried to talk to the director about reorganising the classes he pretended not to understand me even though his English had been excellent when heâd hired me. I lasted three weeks and was never paid a dong .
Matthew found me an editing job with the weekend magazine put out by the newspaper he worked for. That I had never worked on a magazine nor edited anything didnât matter. I could read and write English and that was enough. The office was on the second floor of a French-colonial mansion five minutes from Hoà nLake. The outside of the building was magnificent, if slightly faded, but the inside had been gutted and ârefurbishedâ in standard Stalinist grey. The editing department was on the second floor, furnished with twelve desks, every one of which would have been dumped on the nature strip for council collection back home. In the centre of the room was a shiny linoleum-topped table on which was placed the departmentâs sole English dictionary â a 1983 Abridged Oxford which was missing most of âPâ.
It turned out that âeditingâ meant rewriting whole articles that had been written in Vietnamese and translated very badly into English. âItâs hellishly frustrating, Iâm afraid,â the Canadian girl sitting beside me said on the first day, and it was, but I found I was good at it. Each story loaded onto my screen was a puzzle to solve. The meaning was in there and if I was persistent and creative, I could unlock it.
And the stories were almost always worth unlocking. Of course there were the typical propaganda pieces about new housing developments and immunisation schemes and silver medal winning athletes, but most of the stories were about ordinary Vietnamese people, their lives and traditions. It wasnât hard news, but it was important, I thought. Stories about Agent Orange victims growing up to be doctors, or elderly village women learning to read, or elephant hunters being retrained to work as wildlife rangers. Feel-good stuff, weâd call it back home, but when your history is as desperately sad as Vietnamâs, feel-good stuff is essential. People here believe in destiny and stories like the ones we published helped them to believe that theirs is not one of uninterrupted suffering.
Three years into the job I was made unofficial head of the editing department. Unofficial because only Vietnamese nationals were allowed to be managers. Still, I got a token pay rise and the authority to decide which of the four editors worked on any given story. I always chose the longest and most convoluted stories for myself. I loved the challenge and it saved me having to put up with too much bitching and moaning from the others.
I also got first pick of the âspecial projectsâ that came in from time to time. Special projects were books that would be sold or given away as magazine promotions. Vietnamese Traditional Music , North Vietnamese Cuisine ,: A Brief History of the Imperial Capital and so on. Most of them were slightly reworded Wikipedia articles spread out over fifty pages of glossy Vietnamese Tourism promotional photos, but the one I was working on around this time was different.
Women of Vietnam was a pet project of the directorâs wife, Mrs Lam. She had spent years collecting historical and mythical accounts of heroic Vietnamese women and had then commissioned journalists to interview hundreds of female war veterans and party members and street vendors. The result was three thousand pages of Vietnamâs history and culture as written and spoken by its women. Endless raw pages of Vietnamese to be turned into a few hundred publishable pages in English through the efforts of whatever translators Mrs Lam could bully into working on it, and me.
I did not need to be bullied. I would have dedicated all my waking hours to it, if I could have. The reluctance of the translators
Matthew found me an editing job with the weekend magazine put out by the newspaper he worked for. That I had never worked on a magazine nor edited anything didnât matter. I could read and write English and that was enough. The office was on the second floor of a French-colonial mansion five minutes from Hoà nLake. The outside of the building was magnificent, if slightly faded, but the inside had been gutted and ârefurbishedâ in standard Stalinist grey. The editing department was on the second floor, furnished with twelve desks, every one of which would have been dumped on the nature strip for council collection back home. In the centre of the room was a shiny linoleum-topped table on which was placed the departmentâs sole English dictionary â a 1983 Abridged Oxford which was missing most of âPâ.
It turned out that âeditingâ meant rewriting whole articles that had been written in Vietnamese and translated very badly into English. âItâs hellishly frustrating, Iâm afraid,â the Canadian girl sitting beside me said on the first day, and it was, but I found I was good at it. Each story loaded onto my screen was a puzzle to solve. The meaning was in there and if I was persistent and creative, I could unlock it.
And the stories were almost always worth unlocking. Of course there were the typical propaganda pieces about new housing developments and immunisation schemes and silver medal winning athletes, but most of the stories were about ordinary Vietnamese people, their lives and traditions. It wasnât hard news, but it was important, I thought. Stories about Agent Orange victims growing up to be doctors, or elderly village women learning to read, or elephant hunters being retrained to work as wildlife rangers. Feel-good stuff, weâd call it back home, but when your history is as desperately sad as Vietnamâs, feel-good stuff is essential. People here believe in destiny and stories like the ones we published helped them to believe that theirs is not one of uninterrupted suffering.
Three years into the job I was made unofficial head of the editing department. Unofficial because only Vietnamese nationals were allowed to be managers. Still, I got a token pay rise and the authority to decide which of the four editors worked on any given story. I always chose the longest and most convoluted stories for myself. I loved the challenge and it saved me having to put up with too much bitching and moaning from the others.
I also got first pick of the âspecial projectsâ that came in from time to time. Special projects were books that would be sold or given away as magazine promotions. Vietnamese Traditional Music , North Vietnamese Cuisine ,: A Brief History of the Imperial Capital and so on. Most of them were slightly reworded Wikipedia articles spread out over fifty pages of glossy Vietnamese Tourism promotional photos, but the one I was working on around this time was different.
Women of Vietnam was a pet project of the directorâs wife, Mrs Lam. She had spent years collecting historical and mythical accounts of heroic Vietnamese women and had then commissioned journalists to interview hundreds of female war veterans and party members and street vendors. The result was three thousand pages of Vietnamâs history and culture as written and spoken by its women. Endless raw pages of Vietnamese to be turned into a few hundred publishable pages in English through the efforts of whatever translators Mrs Lam could bully into working on it, and me.
I did not need to be bullied. I would have dedicated all my waking hours to it, if I could have. The reluctance of the translators
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