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Giáo Sư Đào Mộng Nam: Truyện Kiều Và Chữ Nho

9.11.2026

Two Accidental Archivists: Trần Hoài Thư, Võ Phi Hùng, and the Rebuilding of a Burned Library

Written by: Claude Sonnet AI.

Curator/Editor: Học Trò.

How a wounded infantry veteran in New Jersey and a retired electrical engineer in Virginia — neither one a librarian, an academic, or a Cornell affiliate — spent their retirements pulling a vanished literature back out of one American university's microfilm vaults.

A library that was supposed to disappear

After April 30, 1975, the printed record of South Vietnam was targeted for erasure. Bookstores were raided, private libraries were confiscated, and a formal “bài trừ văn hóa đồi trụy” (campaign against “decadent culture”) ordered the burning or pulping of books, magazines, and newspapers published under the Republic of Vietnam between 1954 and 1975. Within a few years, entire runs of newspapers and literary magazines that had once sold on every Saigon newsstand — dailies people had read that same morning — existed nowhere inside Vietnam in any complete form. Anyone who wanted to know what South Vietnamese literature had actually said, in its own words, on its own pages, had almost nowhere left to look.

Except, it turned out, in Ithaca, New York.

Cornell University Library — largely by accident of Cold War academic policy rather than any special sympathy for South Vietnam — had spent the 1950s through the 1970s building what is today the largest collection of Vietnamese-language print material outside Vietnam itself: the John M. Echols Collection on Southeast Asia, holding tens of thousands of Vietnamese books and periodicals, plus one of the only surviving runs of wartime Vietnamese newspapers on microfilm anywhere in the world. That collection sat there for a quarter century, cataloged but largely unread by the community whose memory it preserved, until two men — with no institutional funding, no grant, and no library degree between them — decided, separately, to go get it.

This is their story, and a practical account of how someone else could do the same thing today.

Trần Hoài Thư: the soldier who became his generation's librarian

Trần Hoài Thư — the pen name of Trần Quí Sách — was born in 1942 in Đà Lạt. In 1967 he entered the 24th class of the Thủ Đức Reserve Officers' School and was posted to Company 405, a reconnaissance (“thám kích”) unit of the 22nd Infantry Division, where he served four years and was wounded three times. He spent two further years as a war correspondent in the Mekong Delta's Quân Khu IV. He was, in other words, a combatant and a working writer before he was ever a preservationist — his own wartime short-story collection, Những Vì Sao Vĩnh Biệt, had already made his name in Saigon's literary pages by the time the war ended.

After 1975 he spent more than four years in a communist reeducation camp. In 1980 he escaped Vietnam by boat and resettled in the United States, where he built a second career in applied mathematics and project management at IBM. He retired in 2004 — and it was only then, in his sixties, that the project that would define the rest of his life actually began.

That same year, with his friend Phạm Văn Nhàn, he founded a small publishing operation, Thư Ấn Quán, and a companion literary journal, Thư Quán Bản Thảo, which by the early 2020s had reached past its hundredth issue — a genuinely rare feat for a print magazine of Vietnamese letters produced entirely overseas, by volunteers, with no subscription base to speak of. But the journal was really a vehicle for something larger: a self-assigned, unfunded mission he called Di Sản Văn Chương Miền Nam — the literary heritage of the South, 1954–1975 — recovering, republishing, and simply keeping in print an entire national literature that the country of its origin had tried to make disappear.

He had learned, somehow, that Cornell held the material he needed. From his home in Plainfield, New Jersey, the drive to Ithaca was about five hours each way; he also made the roughly three-hour trip to Yale University's library for supplementary holdings the same era's Vietnamese-American diaspora had donated there. In an interview with fellow writer Trần Doãn Nho, published on his own blog tranhoaithu42.com, he described what he found in blunt, specific terms: of everything held at Cornell, the magazine Bách Khoa survived in the most complete run of any South Vietnamese periodical in the collection — but the shelves also held far more obscure material: internal school bulletins from Trưng Vương, Gia Long, and Chu Văn An, recruitment pamphlets, and dozens of small-circulation literary magazines that had never been reprinted anywhere.

His method was resolutely unglamorous. He drove up in bad weather, often starting before dawn, carrying a flatbed scanner and a laptop rather than paying for institutional photocopying — slower, he said, but affordable on a retiree's budget, and it let him control image quality himself. He drew on his IBM-honed technical background to modify secondhand scanning equipment for speed, brighten faded pages, and — a small, telling detail — build “flipbook” viewers for the material once it went online, adding background music so that readers paging through decades-old magazines on a screen would stay with it a little longer.

When his health began to fail — a stroke, arthritis, and later a cancer diagnosis — the trips stopped, but the project didn't: Cornell staff began mailing him materials directly instead. His wife, Nguyễn Ngọc Yến, had driven him on nearly every one of those Ithaca trips across more than a decade and shared the work throughout; friends Phạm Văn Nhàn, Trần Bang Thạch, and Cao Vị Khanh built out the publishing side with him. Over roughly twelve years the group produced, among much else, a four-volume anthology of Southern Vietnamese prose, two volumes of wartime Southern poetry, and full facsimile reprints of entire vanished journals — Sáng Tạo, Khởi Hành, Vấn Đề — each running into the hundreds of pages. A doctoral student in Taiwan later completed a dissertation built in part on material from his Văn Học magazine archive, an early, concrete sign of the project's academic value beyond the diaspora community it was written for.

Trần Hoài Thư died on May 27, 2024, in New Jersey, at eighty-two. By any accounting, he had spent the last twenty years of his life as an entire literature's one-man national library.

Võ Phi Hùng: the engineer with a library card

If Trần Hoài Thư is the movement's best-known name, Võ Phi Hùng represents something just as important and much less visible: the parallel, independent effort of an ordinary reader with no writer's reputation at all, working the interlibrary-loan system rather than driving to Ithaca in person.

Võ Phi Hùng is a graduate of Petrus Ký high school in Saigon, class of 1967–74. He came to the United States in early 1975 — narrowly ahead of the collapse he would spend the rest of his life trying to document — to study electrical engineering, and he now lives in Virginia. By his own account, his motive for the project he later took on was neither professional nor literary but personal: he wanted, in his words, “to better understand Vietnam's modern history and the failure of the VNCH government,” and to make what he found available to others who wanted the same thing.

His route into Cornell's holdings did not require a single trip to Ithaca. Instead, he borrowed seven reels of 35mm microfilm — the complete surviving run of the newspaper Sóng Thần — through Cornell's interlibrary loan service, requested via his own local library system in Fairfax, Virginia. He scanned the reels on the library's own microform reader, an older “Uscan” unit at first and later a newer ScanPro 3000 after the branch upgraded its equipment, converting each newspaper page into PDF and reassembling entire issues — eventually publishing something close to a thousand issues of Sóng Thần in usable digital form, a newspaper that before his work existed almost nowhere else outside that one microfilm reel in upstate New York.

He didn't stop there. He went on to digitize the newspapers Phụ Nữ Tân Văn, Tiếng Dân, Thần Chung, and An Hà Nhật Báo, and worked on Chính Luận, Đông Pháp Thời Báo, and Đuốc Nhà Nam. In a separate project reconstructing the short-lived 1965–68 literary monthly Đồng Nai Văn Tập, he combined Cornell's microfilm of the first eight issues with volumes he tracked down separately at Harvard's Harvard-Yenching Library to assemble something close to a complete run — scanning roughly 148-page bound volumes on a flatbed scanner issue by issue.

The credit line embedded in the finished PDFs — legible watermarked into scan after scan on ndclnh-mytho-usa.org, the site that now hosts them — reads, in full: “Do anh Võ Phi Hùng, Cựu HS Petrus Ký (67–74), tặng Kho Sách Xưa, Quán Ven Đường (từ microfilm Thư viện Đại học Cornell)” — “Donated by Võ Phi Hùng, Petrus Ký alumnus ('67–'74), to the Old Book Repository at Quán Ven Đường (from Cornell University Library microfilm).” (See, for one example among dozens, this scanned page of Chính Luận, số 1777, or the same credit line on Chính Luận, số 1946, mirrored at the Internet Archive.) It is a small, self-effacing credit for what amounts to the single-handed digital resurrection of newspapers that no library anywhere had bothered, or dared, to make readable again.

The network around them

Neither man worked in a vacuum, and naming the people around them matters, because the whole enterprise is a case study in what distributed, unfunded volunteer preservation actually looks like in practice.

Huỳnh Chiếu Đẳng operates Kho Sách Xưa (“Old Book Repository”), the site at ndclnh-mytho-usa.org, which serves as the effective clearinghouse for this entire body of work — a plain, deliberately un-modernized website with no search function, organized by newspaper title and issue date, where Võ Phi Hùng's scans (and material from several other contributors) are simply posted as downloadable PDFs. Because the site has no search index, the accepted way to find something specific is still to email Huỳnh Chiếu Đẳng directly and ask — a genuinely grassroots arrangement that has nonetheless kept the archive alive and growing for years.

Ngy Thanh, a former Sóng Thần journalist himself, later contributed higher-resolution replacement scans of the newspaper's earliest issues, improving on the original microfilm-derived images. Trùng Dương, Sóng Thần's founding editor from 1971–75, has written the fullest public account of this whole preservation network, in a two-part essay for the Journal of Vietnamese and American Studies (published by the University of Oregon; see phần 2 as well) — the single best English-adjacent overview of how these pieces fit together. On the Thư Quán Bản Thảo side, Phạm Văn Nhàn, Trần Bang Thạch, Cao Vị Khanh, and Trần Hoài Thư's wife Nguyễn Ngọc Yến carried the publishing and logistics load for two decades.

Trần Hoài Thư kept his own blog, tranhoaithu42.com, running for over a decade, functioning simultaneously as a running journal of the Thư Quán Bản Thảo project, an archive of his own essays and short fiction, and — read carefully — a kind of open field notebook of the Cornell research itself: one post, on the “golden age” of North Vietnamese literature, casually mentions pulling up Cornell's own library catalog mid-argument to verify a literary-history claim; others describe a specific drive north in specific weather to retrieve a specific run of a specific magazine. Read together, the blog and the Kho Sách Xưa site amount to the most complete record that exists anywhere of what “doing this yourself” actually looked like, week to week, for twenty years.

What they actually saved

It is worth being concrete about the scale of what two unfunded individuals accomplished, because it is easy to let “cultural preservation” stay abstract:

  • Sóng Thần, a major Saigon daily newspaper (1971–75) whose editorial staff was harassed and prosecuted by the Thiệu government for its anti-corruption reporting — restored to roughly a thousand digitized issues from seven borrowed microfilm reels.
  • Phổ Thông, the literary-general-interest magazine founded by writer Nguyễn Vỹ — a complete run supplied to Trần Hoài Thư directly by Cornell.
  • Bách Khoa, the long-running intellectual biweekly — the single most complete South Vietnamese periodical run held anywhere at Cornell, per Trần Hoài Thư's own account.
  • Sáng Tạo, Khởi Hành, Vấn Đề — three influential literary journals reprinted in full facsimile by Thư Ấn Quán after being reconstructed from Cornell and Yale holdings.
  • Đồng Nai Văn Tập (1965–68), a short-lived provincial literary monthly, reassembled from a combination of Cornell and Harvard-Yenching microfilm — the kind of narrow, easily-overlooked title that a large institution would never prioritize digitizing on its own, but that mattered enormously to the specific literary-history question Võ Phi Hùng happened to be chasing.
  • Phụ Nữ Tân Văn, Tiếng Dân, Thần Chung, An Hà Nhật Báo, Chính Luận, Đông Pháp Thời Báo, Đuốc Nhà Nam — a growing list of additional newspaper titles, several dating to the 1910s–1930s rather than the war era, digitized from the same Cornell microfilm pipeline.

None of this required a grant, a university appointment, or permission from any government. It required knowing that Cornell had the material, knowing how to get a library card and a microfilm loan, and being willing to spend retirement years, a basement scanner, and considerable patience on the work.

How to follow their footsteps

The practical good news is that almost none of what made this possible was specific to Trần Hoài Thư or Võ Phi Hùng personally. The access mechanisms they used are ordinary library services, open today to essentially anyone.

1. Visiting Cornell in person

Cornell's Vietnamese holdings live in the John M. Echols Collection on Southeast Asia, housed in Kroch Library on Cornell's Ithaca campus, with less-frequently-used material at the off-campus Library Annex (retrievable with about a day's notice). As of a policy change in late 2024, Cornell issues a free “Borrow on Site!” library card to any visitor — not just alumni or New York State residents — after a short online application or an in-person request at the Olin Library service desk. Even without that card, any visitor may walk in and use materials on-site: open stacks, special collections (with advance arrangement), licensed databases, wireless internet, and — critically, for anyone planning to do what these two men did — public scanners.

Contact points for planning a visit: asiaref@cornell.edu or (607) 255-8199 for general Asia Collections reference help; the current Vietnam-subject curator can be reached through the same address for questions about specific holdings before making the trip.

2. Getting materials without traveling: interlibrary loan

This is the route Võ Phi Hùng actually used, and it is the more realistic option for most people. Cornell lends heavily through interlibrary loan (ILL), including most microform — but a private individual cannot email or call Cornell directly to request a loan. Instead:

  1. Go to your own local public or university library and ask its interlibrary loan office to request the specific item from Cornell.
  2. Cornell is registered in the OCLC lending network under the symbol COO; virtually any library in the United States can route a request to Cornell through this system at little or no cost to the requester.
  3. Specify that you need the microfilm reel, not a photocopy, if the material is a pre-1975 newspaper — most Vietnamese-language newspaper holdings exist only on microfilm, and Cornell's stated lending policy explicitly includes “most microform.”
  4. Once the reel arrives at your local library, use that library's own microform reader (many public and university libraries, including small regional branches, have one) to scan pages to PDF — exactly what Võ Phi Hùng did on Fairfax County's public-library equipment, first on an older Uscan unit and later a ScanPro 3000.

No Cornell affiliation, academic appointment, or special permission is required for any step in this chain — only a public library card at your own local branch and the patience to wait for interlibrary loan turnaround times.

3. Newspaper microfilm specifically: the SEAM/CRL network

Many of Cornell's Vietnamese-newspaper microfilm reels were produced under the Southeast Asia Microform Project (SEAM), run by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) in Chicago since 1970. If a specific title isn't available directly from Cornell, CRL's own catalog is worth searching separately — SEAM film can be borrowed by any CRL member library, and many large public and university library systems already hold that membership even if their patrons don't realize it.

4. Equipment: it really is this modest

Neither man used anything beyond what a well-equipped public library or a determined hobbyist already owns: a flatbed scanner (upgraded and modified by Trần Hoài Thư from secondhand parts), a laptop, and — for the microfilm work — a standard library microform reader like a Uscan or ScanPro. No specialized grant-funded digitization lab, archival-standard equipment, or institutional partnership was involved at any point. The limiting factor for both men was time and patience, not money or technology.

5. Where to put what you find

A recurring, quietly important lesson from both men's work is that the hosting side matters as much as the scanning side, and it can be just as informal. Huỳnh Chiếu Đẳng's ndclnh-mytho-usa.org is a bare-bones static website with no database or search engine — and it has nonetheless functioned as a durable, findable public archive for years, because it stayed simple and stayed online. Trần Hoài Thư's own tranhoaithu42.com blog served the same purpose for his side of the project. Anyone repeating this work today has far better free options for the hosting step alone — a WordPress blog, a static site, or a shared drive with a public link — but the underlying lesson holds: post it somewhere stable and tell people where, rather than waiting for an institution to build a proper platform first.

6. Other libraries worth knowing about

Cornell is the deepest single well for this material, but not the only one:

  • Yale University Library, roughly three hours from Trần Hoài Thư's home in New Jersey, holds a complementary set of South Vietnamese diaspora-donated material; unlike Cornell's current free visitor policy, Yale has at times charged outside researchers a modest monthly access fee.
  • Harvard-Yenching Library supplied the volumes of Đồng Nai Văn Tập that Cornell's own holdings were missing — a reminder that no single library, even Cornell, has everything, and that persistence sometimes means checking a second or third institution for the same title.
  • UC Berkeley's Do Đình Tuấn Collection of Vietnamese Periodicals specializes specifically in post-1975 overseas diaspora publications, a complementary period to Cornell and Yale's pre-1975 strength.
  • The Library of Congress holds parallel and sometimes complementary runs of the same wartime Vietnamese newspaper titles Cornell filmed, and the two institutions have at times combined their incomplete holdings into single complete microfilm runs.

Why it matters that it was them, and not an institution

There is a specific, almost paradoxical dignity in how this archive got rebuilt: not by a government cultural ministry, not by a well-funded university digitization grant, not even primarily by Cornell itself reaching outward — but by two private individuals, one a decorated and imprisoned war veteran turned IBM engineer, the other a Petrus Ký alumnus turned Virginia electrical engineer, each independently deciding that a public library card and a lot of patience were sufficient tools for the job.

Institutions preserve what falls inside their mandate and their budget cycle. Trần Hoài Thư and Võ Phi Hùng preserved what they personally could not bear to see disappear a second time — a newspaper the government had once tried to silence, a magazine no one else remembered existed, a school bulletin that would otherwise have been microfilm and nothing else forever. Cornell built the well. It took two ordinary readers, working alone and mostly for free, to actually go draw the water and carry it home for everyone else.

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