Diva Hong Nhung brings light to song in the shadow of cancer

Any cursory listen to her repertoire reveals a performer with an extraordinary capacity for vocal colour, a voice that moulds rich, vibrant tones into delicately vulnerable flourishes, a distinctive timbre carrying warmth and ornamentation that seems, in a single moment, both studied and effortless. It’s also a voice that’s difficult to place—there are nuances to her sound that suggest distinctive Vietnamese techniques, but Hong Nhung has also taken conscious steps to draw on international vocal styles. The resulting vocal character reflects her natural proclivity to filter and fuse elements from all kinds of sources, in both singing and other areas of her life.

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“They all come together, like different dimensions,” says Hong Nhung of the various influences she has absorbed. “No one teaches me the same thing. But if I hadn’t met Miss Mary Hammond [of London’s Royal Academy of Music], I wouldn’t know how to amplify my voice in such a way, to use not only my vocal cords and my chest to make the sound, but also other parts of my body. I do tend to use my belly more than my ‘head voice’, because I’m not a big voice singer. You have three types of singers; the big voice, such as Whitney Houston or Celine Dion; the performing, entertaining type, such as Britney Spears or Kylie Minogue—who can sing and dance and entertain. But you also have the storyteller. This is where I belong.

“My voice is a moyen, a vehicle to carry the story. How to tell that story depends solely on how you control your voice.”

To demonstrate, Hong Nhung stands and takes a bold stance—“In Vietnam, they want us to be very strong here, from the knees to the waist. And you belt out the sound. But what I learnt in England is that everything can be loose, like spaghetti.” She draws in her knees and sways gently—“So when we sing, everything is relaxed. And so, the voice would be—” and she releases a tone that dances across her range, a scattering of notes at once deftly controlled and gracefully fluid.

“It’s not about singing low or high, loudly or quietly,” she explains. “It’s about control. When my children, my twins, were four years old, I asked my friends to take them for piano lessons, even though they told me that children shouldn’t start before five. I said, ‘No problem. You don’t have to teach them a note, but at four, begin.’ Why? Because I need them to learn four things: First, practice is everything. Second, discipline is key. Third, music is magic! And fourth, patience is needed, in life. It’s all about practice, and it’s all about discipline.”

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Hong Nhung’s approach to song makes perfect sense in that her earliest cultural influences came not from any musician, but from her father, a writer and translator noted, amongst other fine achievements, for bringing the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the Vietnamese language.

Born during the war era and raised in the time of the embargo, when life in the Vietnamese capital was marked by a total absence of material wealth, Hong Nhung’s early years in Hanoi were rich in culture.

“I never felt poor in my life,” says Hong Nhung, “I never once felt it. I don’t know how or why. Probably from being in a world that is shaped that way, so you don’t know the difference. I never felt poor.”

Her family home was set on Dien Bien Phu Street, where her father hosted daily fêtes for members of the Hanoi Intellectuals Club. Little Nhung would bask in the atmosphere of art and literature, washing great piles of dishes at the end of each day and listening to her father play vinyl recordings of Piaf and Shirley Bassey.

At the local youth centres, she was ultimately recognised as a vocal talent. By the age of 11, she was recording with Radio Vietnam; at 14, she was representing the country abroad and making studio recordings for release on cassette tapes. Before long, her recordings and multiple cultural exchange programmes made her the most connected Vietnamese artist to the rest of the world.

Can foreign listeners connect with Vietnam through her music? “I never had a dream of reaching an international market through my cassettes and CDs before the internet,” she says. “But for younger singers in Vietnam, they can connect with other musicians very easily, and go with international music trends. So even though the language is Vietnamese, the music you hear is more global. In many ways, they speak the same language as other young people. But not me. My generation is old school. What I have is different.

“In those days when I would be touring Vietnam, singing in small villages, without electricity, we would travel with generators. And we would sing in the middle of the field with just enough power for two lights, and the microphone, the band playing. As I would be singing, insects would sometimes fly into my mouth because they were attracted by the light. And at night, there were no guest houses or hotels, so we would scatter into people’s homes, sleeping on the floor. There would be a well where the girls would shower first before the boys took their turn, pulling up water in the moonlight. We’d bring little pillows to sleep on, but everything else would be given by the people, by the villagers.

“Four years ago, I was invited to stay in a castle in Denmark. I stayed for 24 hours in the princess suite, because I sang for the Queen. After Prince Frederik became King, I went back and sang for him at the Glyptotek, the oldest museum in the heart of Copenhagen.

“So if you’re concerned about the range of my voice, no matter how much I practice, it’s always going to be limited, because I’m just a human being—but if you think of the range of my experiences, then my journey as a singer has been pretty incredible.”

It was probably her encounter with iconic Vietnamese songwriter Trinh Cong Son, however, that cemented Hong Nhung’s enduring career as a singer destined to reshape the country’s musical landscape. At just 21 years old, she attended a musical gathering at the composer’s home, and immediately captured his attention. By then, Trinh Cong Son was already considered “Vietnam’s Bob Dylan”, a genius songsmith whose music drew inspiration from the anti-war acoustic folk music of America as much as the soulful pathos of French ballads. The singer who most poignantly captured the spirit of his music in those days was Khanh Ly.

“If you listen to Khanh Ly, she represents that generation,” says Hong Nhung, “and more importantly, the circumstance of an older Vietnam. She reflected the Vietnamese life of that moment, beautifully sad. It wins everybody’s heart because it’s so real. But when I sang, I didn’t mean to change it, I didn’t plan for the music to be that way. I was too young. I was 21! So, I just sang the song without thinking.”

Without intending to reinterpret Khanh Ly’s gold standard for Trinh Con Son’s ballads, Hong Nhung did what has always come naturally to her—bathe music in light. Her rendering of the master’s music was bright where it had been soulful, spacious where it had sat tightly around the heart, lilting where it had weighed heavy, delightful where it was once dolorous.

“I just sang it naturally, like a bird,” Hong Nhung says. “And Trinh Cong Son picked my voice, my personality, me. Not just as a singer, but also as a person—immediately. We met that night, and by the next day, he had all the people from the associations of musicians look for me. By 7pm, they got me. And from then on, I would see him almost every day. I just sang, and he would tell me stories. He would answer my questions. And I was too young to even plan my way.”

A true maestro, Trinh Cong Son had seen in Hong Nhung what a generation of Vietnamese audiences would soon discover—that this was a performer who represented the future of her country’s musical tradition, a Vietnamese oeuvre no longer languishing in melancholy, but joyous, confident, and free. In Hong Nhung, Trinh Cong Son saw his own musical immortality—a fresh reimagining of his timeless songs performed forever young, freeing him from becoming a footnote in songwriting history and securing an enduring legacy.

For Hong Nhung, the association with a masterful songwriter brought her voice to new prominence.

“You’re familiar with yin and yang,” says Hong Nhung. “Fifty percent of the people in Vietnam loved it, and the rest did not. There was a famous article written when I started to sing his songs by a professor of art, and she said, ‘Hong Nhung has brought into Trinh Cong Son’s music a yang element, which it never had before.’ They believed I had a strategy of making it unique, my way, or different than before. But of course, I had put no thought into it. I learnt so much. So I will forever be grateful for that, for knowing Trinh Cong Son. For having learnt so much from him.”

It is this lightbringer who stunned the Vietnamese community this year with the news of her unexpected illness that now opens a new chapter of her life. In her brief and moving statement, the beloved performer revealed that she had undergone a surgical procedure the previous day. Initially intending to keep her condition private, she awoke from a troubled sleep with a new resolve: to speak out to women everywhere, encouraging them to protect themselves from this disease, to take pre-emptive tests and pay more attention to the risks of cancer.

“I did not want others to know,” says Hong Nhung. “That is my character; even Trinh Cong Son used to tell me, ‘I’ve never met someone as alone as you’. When I went to Singapore for treatment, I was the only woman in the waiting room without someone beside me. But I made my decision after an old friend in Singapore reminded me that I did have the opportunity to help other women like me. I had the choice to help them, or to stay silent. So I chose to use my voice.”

In her statement, Hong Nhung offered solidarity with fellow women suffering from the illness, reminding them that early detection greatly increases the chances of survival. She also indicated to the Vietnamese administration that she is willing to devote herself to coordinated efforts targeting awareness and prevention activities in support of public health.

It would be easy, and perhaps a little naïve, to suggest that Hong Nhung has “summoned strength from a wellspring of great courage within to do battle with her cancer,” but that would be just half the truth. During her private interview with Tatler Vietnam, Hong Nhung confessed how deeply she was hurt by the diagnosis.

“I didn’t take it that bravely,” she admits. “I was surprised. I’m not a woman who cries easily. I have seldom cried in my life, not even when I was a baby, so crying is not my thing. However, that first day when I was diagnosed… for the first time, I felt so stupid. Because, and I realise that it’s the same problem with all women, we think it will never happen to us.”

Perhaps it’s characteristic of a woman of Hong Nhung’s character that during those moments of vulnerability, overwhelmed and in tears, her instinct wasn’t so much to summon up the courage to fight the disease. It was rather to gather the energy to sing. Cancer is a dark moment in the life of a woman who brings light to music, and there is perhaps no more fitting way for her to resist the disease than by projecting her voice on the stage.

“At that time, I was scheduled to perform at the Ho Guom Theater in November, and the tickets were already sold out,” she says. “So I faced the question of whether or not I would be able to do it. So yes, I made the decision to go ahead, with my doctor’s permission, even though I would be learning every day—not only singing, but practicing with the orchestra and also dancing.”

On November 30, Hong Nhung stood before her audience and performed with a mote of darkness in her chest that no one could see.

“We started with the Hanoi song, and we ended it with the same song. The same song they used to broadcast to wake the city, every morning. Who would have that blessing—to sing the same song since the age of 17?

“But it’s this cancer that is a wake up call, that marks a new chapter in my life. Different priorities. I have the time, now, in the hospital and so on, to think about these new priorities. To write things down, think about them, and go deep inside. I’m still working on it, to understand the new chapter, to make peace with it. But after all my thinking, which I haven’t finished yet, I realise that the top priority is that I need to be—vui.”

Vui is a Vietnamese word that doesn’t translate well to English. Various dictionaries suggest “fun” or “happy”, but what Hong Nhung expresses here is something more of a simple joy. A light in the dark.

“Happiness is a big word,” she says, “I just need to be content. I need to be vui”.

This article is adapted from the original published in the print edition of Tatler Vietnam, March 2025.

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