I was accustomed to being censored as an editor, but not as a writer. It pained me that Lam was the one to do it.

Lam was a senior editor at the Vietnam Investment Review, the most liberal paper in Vietnam’s media world, which is entirely government-controlled. In a year and a half as an editor in Hanoi, I didn’t meet a Vietnamese journalist as smart and curious as Lam. Whenever I traveled outside of Vietnam, he asked that I bring back copies of The New Yorker and other western magazines that were unavailable there. He often spoke wistfully of a journalism conference he had attended several years before at Columbia University. “Lam gets it. He’s not like all of the others,” said Emma, a fellow editor from New Zealand, over beers one night at a dingy backpacker bar.

The article in question was a profile I had written of a Vietnamese musician named Minh. Because he incorporated European styles into his work, Minh was in controversial territory with the country’s cultural authorities, who insisted that art be as “Vietnamese”—and free of foreign influence—as possible. To me this was censorship disguised as national pride. I chose to write about Minh precisely because he was so unconcerned with tailoring his music to fit Vietnam’s musical traditions. The problem with my story, however, was not the subject matter. Lam was worried about one word.

“You cannot say ‘Communist,’” he said. “It is too sensitive. The authorities will not like it.”

I paused, caught off guard and feeling a little precious about my writing. “But this is how the musician explained things,” I said. It was true. The sentence—“Minh learned music the Communist way, through repetition and emulation”—described his time in Vietnam’s state-run conservatories. It was important to the story.

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