Vietnamese lit conference

Today went to a conference on Vietnamese literature which you can read the abstracts of in my previous post. It was very interesting- and as usual the conversations around it were more interesting still. Pham Thi Hoai is officially banned from publishing in Vietnam but was mentioned in three papers at this conference which was hosted by the Institute of Social Science (a government department). They were quite open about the fact that major writers and artists from Vietnam are in exile and even had conversations about homosexuality which I thought was a taboo topic here! I have made a couple of new friends including Lian who is taking me to the museum of ethnology tomorrow and is doing a masters in festivals. There were two papers about archetypes in Vietnamese folklore which were very interesting and directly feeding into my work. It seems that my work comes from a long line of using folklore as allegory, parody or pastiche- it is considered very postmodern in Vietnam.
I met an american Karen Turner who has done a book and a film on Vietnamese women who fought on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. She had some interesting insights to add on Vietnam. She has a Vietnamese collaborator- and she informed me that the book came out in the US and then the Gioi published it in Vietnam without informing her!?! One of her contacts is initiating a law against domestic violence which she cynically says the National Assembly will pass it because they want to join the WTO. She said that now is probably the best time to be in Hanoi because of APEC, Hanoi will be more open than usual etc etc. She mentioned that most of her work is done unofficially because if you ask for permission to do anything it takes forever!