Vu Trong Phung

Vũ Trọng Phụng (Hanoi, 20 October 1912 – Hanoi, 13 October 1939) was a popular Vietnamese author and journalist, who is considered to be one of the most influential figures of 20th century Vietnamese literature. Today, several of his works are taught in Vietnamese schools.

's ancestral village was Hảo village, Mỹ Hào District, Hưng Yên Province, yet he was born, grew up, and died in Hanoi. The fact that his father died of tuberculosis when he was only seven months old resulted in 's being brought up mainly by his mother. After finishing primary school, 16-year-old was forced to stop schooling and earn his own living. In 1939, he died from tuberculosis at the age of 26 (27 by the Vietnamese system of age reckoning), a week before his 27th birthday.

wrote prolifically during the 1930s, and "produced a body of writing that", according to historian Peter B. Zinoman, "stands today as the single most remarkable individual achievement in modern Vietnamese literature." However, due to his "realistic" descriptions and heavy emphasis on sex, he was called to court by the French authorities in Hanoi for "outraging morality" . Later on, his works were prohibited from being published or read in North Vietnam because they were deemed "obscene publications" until the late 1980s.

Depictions of sex work

In 1937, wrote , a now-classic reportage on female sex work in colonial Hanoi. The work was originally published in a local newspaper in a serialized format, before it was published as a book later that year. It was based on his observations of the practice and regulation of sex work in the city, as well as his visits to the municipal dispensary where sex workers were treated for venereal diseases, which were only possible because municipal authorities wanted to showcase the city’s ostensible success in dealing with sex work to journalists and writers like .

was not ’s first foray into writing about sex work; it was part of ’s established interest in the topic. Before he wrote , he published a novel in 1936 . The novel contained a fictionalized account of how an upper-class woman becomes a sex worker, written in the style of social realism. Vũ Trọng Phụng, : Prostitution and Venereal Disease in Colonial Hanoi (translation by Shaun Kingsley Malarney: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011) Vũ Trọng Phụng, The Industry of Marrying Europeans (translation: Cornell South East Asian Program) Vũ Trọng Phụng, Making a Whore (translation by Đinh Ngọc Mai: Major Books, 2025)