Talawas Still Firewalled
From dduffy@email.unc.edu Fri Jun 18 16:30:33 2004
Date: Tue, 8 Jun 2004 13:15:42 -0400
From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Talawas still firewalled
I wrote to one of the Talawas organizers to ask for details about the firewall: does it block usage from homes or cafes; how does the "firewall" work; how do people get around it; is there a specific ruling by some regulatory agency or is the "firewall" some ad hoc nonsense like the bugs I get sent from addresses at Vietnamese servers?
The organizer promised a statement from the Talawas itself pretty soon. There are already statements and discussion on the forum website: www.talawas.org.
My friend once explained to me that "Talawas" means "Ta la was?" That is, the Vietnamese-language first person plural, inclusive, followed by the VN "to be", followed by the German-language indefinite pronoun. I'm guessing about the German. In English I'd gloss the phrase "We are what?" to emphasize puzzlement. But in English you miss the friendly VN word "ta" which means everyone in the conversation, not just a group among them. Two people in a larger group discussing where to go to dinner would use "chung toi", but if its "ta" everyone is going.
They don't draw a lot of distinctions about persons at Talawas, they are Vietnamese-speaking universalists. You have to work in ethnic studies in the United States to know how much I appreciate this. One of the most visible organizers is the author Pham Thi Hoai, still a Vietnamese citizen though she is leading the site from Germany. She couldn't do it in Viet Nam, obviously, and not that long ago there were raging debates in the international VN press about including writers from Viet Nam like her in discussion based in California.
The success of Talawas in creating an active and inclusive forum on Vietnamese issues is remarkable. Someone in Ha Noi really should give them a medal for fostering liberal discourse without threatening or defying anyone. I don't expect to see that. I do hope that the firewall proves to be an amateur effort by some local version of the Boston Red Squad, that it goes away soon, and that this fumbling oppression brings more participants from within and outside Viet Nam to this important project.
Dan Duffy
From Chung.Nguyen@umb.edu Fri Jun 18 16:35:07 2004
Date: Tue, 8 Jun 2004 14:11:53 -0400
From: Chung Nguyen <Chung.Nguyen@umb.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Talawas still firewalled
Yes, this is quite an unexpected turn of event. I understand that in the recent visit to VN, Pham Thi Hoai was invited to meet with Nguyen Khoa Diem, Head of the Ideology & Culture of the Polibureau. They had a very long chat, all very cordial.
Talawas has indeed become a place of meetings for *all* Vietnamese - whether expatriates in the US (from SVN), expatriates in Eastern Europe (from NVN), and most of all, writers from within Vietnam. This is a huge development, considering the fractiousness of the overseas Vietnamese communities, esp. the attitude of "anyone but those from VN" advocacy of the DCC (fanatic anti-communists). Talawas has, in a short time, made a remarkable acheivement - the restoration of the pre-war civility of intellectual discourse.
Nguyen Mong Giac, in a presentation at UMASS Boston, predicts that the center of gravity of the overseas intellectual activities will move from the U.S. to Europe. Talawas proves him right. One of the reasons he cited was the advantages of the East European expatriates: their unbroken connections with VN. They haved lived there, have always maintained contacts with their compatriots, and therefore have always undestood what the real issues are. Their feet are firmly planted on the ground and they know what to do to get things move along. Lots of the expatriates in the US have left the country for too long, and many have begun to solve imaginary problems.
-Nguyen Ba Chung
From jhannah@u.washington.edu Fri Jun 18 17:14:18 2004
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2004 08:17:41 -0700 (PDT)
From: Joe Hannah <jhannah@u.washington.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Talawas still firewalled
Dear all,
Coming late to this thread, I was assuming that when members said the Talawas site was firewalled, they meant firewalled in Vietnam, so people over here couldn't access the site. So, in the spirit of wishing Talawas every good fortune, I decided to see if I could access their site from here in Vietnam. Surprise! I can! So the site is not (or is no longer) firewalled from here.
So, for my own clarification, who is experiencing an inability to access the site? What service providers or networks are firewalling the site? And who has put such firewalls in place?
Thanks,
Joe Hannah