On a spring afternoon, at a cafe on the bustling Kim Ma street, Travellive reporter had the opportunity to chat with young female writer Hien Trang and listen to her share more about femininity in literature. Let's watch her express her femininity!
Women's literature reduces "ego"
Hien Trang is a female writer of the 9x generation. She was born in 1993 and currently lives in Hanoi. Sharing with the magazine, she said that she started writing her first book at the age of 22, with all the innocence and comfort of a young person entering a field that seemed to be only for men: “When I was young, reading textbooks, I often saw that the writers were all men. That made me wonder, do women write? Of course, I learned about female writers somewhere. But they often wrote about very small, even trivial issues for me at that time, while men's literature often dealt with big topics.”
Writer Hien Trang and her confessions about femininity in literature.
“It wasn’t until later, when I started reading Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, and actually JK Rowling, that I realized that women’s literature is just as challenging as men’s,” Hien Trang believes that women have their own approach to the above issues. Unlike men, women delve into every detail, every nook and cranny, exploring even the most “trivial” things while still maintaining the effectiveness of the literature. The way they convey messages to readers has a charm that men may not have: “Their natural femininity allows them not to have to scream about their big, great ego. I like the sensitivity of women's literature, they have a different language structure, men look vertically while women look horizontally. For example, with Annie Ernaux, I remember when I read a piece of Ernaux's diary, she wrote about dropping a contact lens on her lover's body. I think that these kinds of details, invisible but haunting, only women can write.”
Women's literature tells the story of their lives
Hien Trang believes that every woman has her own story and the storytelling style of female writers is different: “There are many types of women and there is no limit to femininity. Screenwriter Binh Bong Bot once told me something like, your writing has a lot of masculinity, while his writing has a lot of femininity, when you write, you are a man and he is a woman. That does not make me not a female writer and Binh not a male writer. I think that if a woman tells the story she wants to tell, that is already a story about femininity. Femininity leaves its fingerprints on everything it goes through.”
She also believes that women's literature is not necessarily just about women: “I think for every writer there is only one principle: we want to tell this story because we cannot bear not to tell it. We are ourselves and we do not need to try to be anyone else, whether a man or another woman. For example, Rowling, she tells a story about a boy who becomes a hero, that does not make her literature not women's literature. We just need to be the woman we are, that is feminism.”
Hien Trang has many new and unique perspectives when talking about literature.
Men have anima (female in men) and women have animus (male in women). Men may have clear, concise logical thinking, while women have more circuitous thinking, but perhaps because they go in circles, they tend to see things that others easily overlook. Both ways of thinking are good, and can even go together.
“A woman who wants to write must have a room of her own.”
Hien Trang confided more about her writing process. She loves reading and inherited her love of literature from her family, especially her grandmother. She always writes books with the mindset that "this is the first and last book" but somehow her literary journey has reached the eight-year mark: "Life has given me many seniors in the profession, people who have given me many new opportunities that I never imagined. If it weren't for them, I might have been doing something more boring. Now I write all kinds of things, short stories, novels, essays, even poetry. I try not to write just for fun like before, but to consider writing as a profession. When you work in this profession, you have to be more serious, you can't be like a snake eating its own tail, you have to study more so as not to depend on inspiration. You always have to have inspiration, just sit at the table and you have to have it."
Continuing the story about literature, Hien Trang mentioned female writer Virginia Woolf and her famous saying: "A woman who wants to write must have a room of her own."
Every woman needs a room of her own, not necessarily a writer.
Indeed, for every female writer, having a comfortable writing space as well as a place dedicated to writing is of utmost importance. Hien Trang shares more about this: “Having a private room means two things: one is privacy and two is basic financial conditions. People say that literature is a difficult path, although up to now I have not found it too difficult, but anyway, I think, having such conveniences will be like a soft pillow for us to lean on whenever we want to give up our profession.”
Putting aside the opinions about women in general and femininity in literature in particular, Travellive hopes that this article can bring new breezes to readers and at the same time help us understand more about women in contemporary literary life.
