VISITING Dinh Le Street in Vietnam’s capital Hanoi, it is not difficult to find Chinese literature here. Numerous bookshops stand close together along the 200-meter-long street, making Dinh Le a “book street” in Hanoi.

    At a bookshop named Hoang on Dinh Le Street, Chinese books are seen displayed along a two-meter by three-story bookshelf near the entrance, featuring mainly classical literature and romantic novels. At other stores, Chinese books are also displayed in eye-catching areas.

    “Sales of ‘Shui Hu Zhuan’ (‘Heros of the Marshes’), ‘San Guo Yan Yi’ (‘The Romance of the Three Kingdoms’) and other Chinese classical literature are good. Readers are both youngsters and elders,” said Thanh, a shop employee.

    According to Thanh, Vietnamese readers like these kinds of books because they are interested in stories of heroic men who are brave and chivalrous. There are also elderly people who buy books they read years ago and now want to collect them.

    “Sales of works of Chinese contemporary and modern writers, including Mo Yan and Lu Xun, are also stable, unlike romantic novels that are ‘hot’ only when they are newly published,” a manager of Hoang bookstore said, adding that readers of Mo Yan and Lu Xun’s books and other Chinese classical works in Vietnam vary in ages while romantic novels attract mainly youngsters.

    After winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, Chinese writer Mo Yan becomes more popular in Vietnam while Lu Xun has a specific reputation in the country with two of his works being printed in Vietnamese literature textbooks.

    “I like reading Chinese novels, including those of Louis Cha, because I like stories of heroic men with superior martial arts skills,” a male reader in his 30s told Xinhua.

    Meanwhile, Linh, a Vietnamese student at a university in Hanoi, talked to Xinhua while she was choosing Chinese romantic novels. “I like Chinese romantic novels as they tell stories with attractive narration, which is closely related to daily life.”

    The popularity of Chinese literature in Vietnam is not only being seen in bookstores but also on online forums.

    “It can’t be denied that this novel is so good to read. I cried a lot while reading this,” a Vietnamese online reader named Hue Ngo commented on a forum on Chinese Internet novels in Vietnam.

    “I read this novel. I also watched this TV drama series and then read the novel again. I have read a lot of novels, but none of them haunted me like this,” another online reader commented. They are talking about “Bubu Jingxin,” a Chinese online novel about time travel.

    “Are there any other novels as good as this,” “This book is so good,” “It’s worth reading,” say some of the comments by Vietnamese readers about the online Chinese novel “Gui Chui Deng.”

    In recent years, a number of Chinese online literature sites have lured many Vietnamese online readers. For those who do not know the Chinese language, they use online translation tools to learn the content of the story then wait for translated editions of those publications to be released.

    According to statistics, from 2009-2013, as many as 841 Chinese books were translated and published in Vietnamese, of which 617 books were online literature.

    Most of the outstanding Chinese online literature has been translated into Vietnamese, including romantic novels by nearly 100 Chinese online writers. (Xinhua)