 Dương Thu Hương lived in Russia, and the protagonist of her most successful novel, "Những thiên đường mù ["Paradise of the Blind"], is a Vietnamese "guest worker" in the former Soviet Union.The gifted and highly touted Trần Vũ escaped Vietnam by boat at the age of 16 and was raised as an orphan in France.Published in California, Vũ's fiction, populated mostly by Vietnamese characters, living inside or outside of Vietnam, alternates between a crisp, no-nonsense prose and a perversely-wrought archaism, extending the language in contrary directions.