A: Welcome to VOV’s Letter Box. This feature airs every Wednesday. One of the happiest things we do on the Letter Box is to mention new listeners. Did you know it meant so much to us?
B: This week, we welcome Shahanoaz Parvin Ripa, President of the Sonali Badhon Fan Club in the Naogaon district of Bangladesh. We’re pleased to learnthat your club is for female listeners and has 85 members, quite an impressive figure! We’re even more pleased to hear that you regularly visit our website.
A: We hope in your next letter or email you’ll provide more details about the club’s members and activities and tell us which features of our daily program you like most and maybe your comments about each broadcast. Any comments or suggestions from our listeners are useful to us to improve the quality of our programs.
B: This week we received a number of emails from Richard Lemke of Alberta, Canada, who tuned in to our English programs on April 4th, 8th, 9th, and 11th. All these broadcasts were on either 12005 kHz or 6175 kHz with relatively good signals and clear sound.
A: It’s great to know that your reception was excellent without any interference. We always hope that, apart from getting information from our programs, listening to our shortwave broadcasts provides entertainment to all of our listeners. Checking the previous letters and emails Richard has sent us, we found that he’s particularly interested in our cultural and tourism features.
B: Sometimes I think, whether or not it’s true, that cultural and artistic information helps us feel at ease and temporarily forget our current economic difficulties. Yoshihiro Kusanagi of Ota-ko, Tokyo, Japan, liked the program broadcast on March 20th about a festival of Vietnam’s Khmer ethnic group. He found it colourful.
A: Vietnam’s 54 ethnic groups give it a rich and diverse culture with an unending series of colourful festivals. Right now the Khmer people of the Mekong River Delta are celebrating their traditional New Year festival which they call Chol Chnam Thmay.
B: The 3-day culture, sports, and tourism festival began last Sunday in Châu Lăng commune, Tri Ton district in An Giang province. This year the culture festival and the Khmer New Year festival are taking place at the same time, with lots of art performances, a traditional fashion show, a food festival, exhibitions, and folk games.
A: Other Vietnamese people are jubilantly celebrating the 2013 Hung Kings Temple festival, one of the biggest and most important events of the year. The Hung Kings are considered the founders of the nation. This year’s festival is extra special because the Hung Kings worship ritual was recently honoured by UNESCO as a world intangible cultural heritage.
B: Although the Hung Kings Temple Festival opened last Saturday, the official anniversary day is the 10th day of the third lunar month which this year will fall on Friday, April 19th. VOV will have a special broadcast on that day. We hope you’ll tune in as we’ll have some features you may find interesting.
A: Let’s continue with more letters and emails. Another Bangladeshi listener, Dewan Rafiqul Islam, President of the Friends Radio Club, emailed us and wanted to know the ‘
name of a modern prose writer in Vietnam.’
B: That’s an interesting question. Before mentioning a few names, we must clarify the concept of modern prose, which in Vietnam is understood to begin from 1925. Vietnam’s modern prose has risen and fallen with the rise and fall of the country.
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| Writer Nguyen Huy Thiep (Photo: Internet) |
A: It would be hard for us to cover all the changes in detail. We’ll just give you a brief introduction restricted to short stories and novels since 1975. Although this period is quite short - about 35 years - it witnessed many changes.
B: The 35-year period can be divided into two phases. From 1975 to 1990, modern Vietnamese prose was closely linked to the country’s reunification and renewal process. From 1990 until now, it has been influenced by the collapse of socialist countries while Vietnam began to open its door and integrate into the world.
A: From this period, a number of writers can be mentioned. Nguyen Huy Thiep is famous for short stories with a new and daring approach. Most of Thiep’s stories are about rural issues and workers.
B: Vietnam’s renewal process provided Thiep with an opportunity to showcase his talent. His 1987 short story "The General Retires", generated hundreds of articles, some heatedly denouncing its author on moral grounds. It also established him as a major force in Vietnamese literature.
A: Another name we would like to mention is Ho Anh Thai, who worked as a diplomat and journalist in India and now works at Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry and serves as president of the Hanoi Writers’ Association.
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| Writer Ho Anh Thai (Photo: Internet) |
B: Thai’s books have always been best-sellers. He has a large readership in spite of the way he has eschewed formulaic writing and strives for freshness and originality in form and language. His fiction has been published abroad, translated into a dozen languages, including English, French, and Swedish.
A: Dear Dewan, we hope we’ve encouraged you to look for further information about Vietnam’s contemporary writers. The clock is running down here on VOV’s Letter Box. Before we go, we’d like to remind you of our address:
The English program,
Overseas Service, Radio Voice of Vietnam,
45 Ba Trieu Street, Hanoi, Vietnam
B: Or you can email us at: englishsection@vov.org.vn. If you miss any of our programs, you can always catch up by logging onto our website at: www.vovworld.vn, where you can hear both live broadcasts and previously recorded programs.
Bao Tram