Le minh chau hai my biography

History without biography would be something like rest without relaxation, food with no taste, and a bit like a history of love without love.

Victor Albjerg1

1The world of the new hero is steeped in both myth and reality. The heroes at Tuyên Quang were real people, endowed with omnipotence by an authoritarian and internationalist political rhetoric. In the Vietnam of the 1950s, the new hero represents the slow and progressive disappearance of individual memory in the face of the propaganda apparatus of the State. The new Vietnamese hero differed from the emulation fighter because of his close bond with the central government. Although this close collaboration was sometimes fictitious, the heroic figure was designed to be the incarnation of a value; he was an absolute in flesh and blood presented to society as the conduit of an ideal. The new hero was a transmitter, the alchemist of a new transformation between the government and its people. He alone ushered in the acceptance of a new idea and gave life to an immaterial temporal power bearing the weight of national tradition. Since 1950, the DRV conformed to the dictates of an internationalist framework and the hero was always clad in modern-day dress, either as Catholic peasant in 1952, val

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