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, Phạm Thị Khách, remained widowed and worked hard to raise and educate him. He was one of the first young Vietnamese to be educated in French and the Vietnamese national script.
Career
After finishing primary school at Trường Hàng Vôi, Vũ Trọng Phụng had to leave school to work around the age of 14. After two years at the Gôđa restaurant and the Viễn Đông printing house, he turned to journalism and professional writing.
Vũ Trọng Phụng was one of the earliest and most outstanding writers and journalists to elevate investigative reportage to the level of a realistic journalistic art in Vietnam. In his short life, he left a mark on journalism with hundreds of sharp articles, notably the reportages Kỹ nghệ lấy Tây (1934), Lục xì (1937), Cạm bẫy người (1933), Dân biểu và dân biểu (1935), and Số đỏ (1936), which began as a serialized story in a newspaper, deeply imbued with realistic reportage and social satire.
Investigative reportage
Among his representative journalistic reportages, Kỹ nghệ lấy Tây (Đời Nay newspaper, 1934) exposed an 'illegal industry' in which many Vietnamese women deliberately pursued and married French men to change their lives. With a series of laughable yet tearful stories, he not only exposed moral decline and the materialization of affection but also criticized the colonial society that created inverted values.
Lục xì (Hà Nội báo, 1937) was one of the most shocking reportages of that period. Vũ Trọng Phụng investigated maternity homes and abortion, describing gruesome, chaotic, and bloody scenes that society at the time tried to hide. Cạm bẫy người (Tiểu thuyết thứ bảy, 1933) was a reportage about prostitution, fraud, theft, and domestic worker brokerage in urban areas at the time.
Novels
In 1936, Vũ Trọng Phụng achieved much success in novel writing. He successively published four very successful novels: Giông tố, Số đỏ, Vỡ đê, and Làm đĩ. Among them, Số đỏ was the most outstanding, regarded as the work that marked Vũ Trọng Phụng's imprint in contemporary literature.
Style
His journalistic language was characterized by reportage that was both truthful and coldly sharp, with a strong impact. He used a 'bare-all truth' approach, without flowery language, calling things and phenomena by their names. He held the view: 'Writing is holding a knife 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
Vũ Trọng Phụng struggled to make a living precariously through professional journalism and writing. Around 1937 - 1938, he contracted pulmonary tuberculosis but had no money for treatment. Vũ Trọng Phụng died on October 13, 1939, in Hà Nội, at the age of 27.