Introduction
Vũ Trọng Phụng (1912 - 1939) was born in Mỹ Hào, Hưng Yên but grew up and lived in Hà Nội. His father died early, and his mother, bà Phạm Thị Khách, remained widowed and worked hard to raise her child and put him through school. He was one of the first Vietnamese young men to be educated in French and chữ Quốc ngữ.
Career and activities
After finishing primary school at Trường Hàng Vôi, Vũ Trọng Phụng had to leave school to work for a living at about the age of 14. After two years working at the Gôđa restaurant and the Viễn Đông printing house, he switched entirely to journalism and professional writing.
Vũ Trọng Phụng was one of the earliest and most outstanding writers and journalists to raise the genre of investigative reportage to the level of realistic journalistic art in Vietnam. In his short life, he left his mark in journalism with hundreds of sharp articles, among which the notable reportage works are: Kỹ nghệ lấy Tây (1934), Lục xì (1937), Cạm bẫy người (1933), Dân biểu và dân biểu (1935), along with Số đỏ (1936), which was initially a serialized story published in newspapers, deeply imbued with realistic reportage and social satire.
Investigative reportage
Among the typical journalistic reportage works, Kỹ nghệ lấy Tây (Đời Nay newspaper, 1934) exposes an "illegal industry", where many Vietnamese women deliberately pursued and married Western (French) men to change their lives. With a series of stories that make one laugh through tears, he not only exposed moral decline and the materialization of affection, but also criticized the colonial society that had created inverted values.
Lục xì (Hà Nội newspaper, 1937) is one of the most shocking reportage works of that period. Vũ Trọng Phụng conducted an in-depth investigation of maternity homes and abortion, describing horrifying, chaotic and bloody scenes, the things that society at that time deliberately kept hidden. The work Cạm bẫy người (Tiểu thuyết thứ bảy, 1933) is a reportage about prostitution, fraud, theft and domestic worker brokerage in urban areas at that time.
Novels
In 1936, Vũ Trọng Phụng achieved much success in novel writing. He successively released four very successful novels: Giông tố, Số đỏ, Vỡ đê, Làm đĩ. Among them, Số đỏ was the most outstanding, regarded as the work that recorded Vũ Trọng Phụng's mark in contemporary literature.
Style
A characteristic of Vũ Trọng Phụng's journalistic language is a reportage quality that is both truthful and coldly sharp, with strong attacking power. He used a writing style of "stripping the truth bare" to the utmost, without flowery language, calling things and phenomena by their direct names. He held the view: "Writing is holding a scalpel to dissect society". He also combined journalistic narrative with a novelistic tone, building character lines, dialogue and dramatic situations, making his journalistic articles like distinctive short stories.
Final years
The writer Vũ Trọng Phụng struggled and lived precariously by professional journalism and writing. Around 1937 - 1938, he contracted pulmonary tuberculosis but had no money for treatment. Vũ Trọng Phụng died on 13.10.1939 in Hà Nội, at the age of 27.