At the age of twenty, when she was a student at Vietnamese Ministry of Culture’s Arts College, Dương Thu Hương volunteered to serve in a women’s youth brigade on the front lines of "The War Against the Americans".

Her mission was to "sing louder than the bombs" and to give theatrical performances for the North Vietnamese troops, but also to tend to the wounded, bury the dead, and accompany the soldiers along.

[3] Of her next three books — Novel Without a Name (Tiểu thuyết vô đề, 1991),[4] Memories of a Pure Spring (2000),[5] and No Man's Land (Chốn vắng, 2002)[6] — only the last remains unpublished in the United States.

This is not unusual in contemporary Vietnam; Linh Dinh, in his introduction to the collection Night, Again, details the government’s extreme response to certain subjects in writing – for example, in 1956, the poet Tran Dan was arrested for capitalizing "He" in a brief passage of a poem cataloging social despair, since such a designation was reserved for Ho Chi Minh.

She believes in struggling to gain democracy; while unable to run for political office or organize a competing party, she now uses writing in order to articulate that message.

She is critiquing a contemporary society where beauty is prized over intellect and money over kindness, and calling attention to how the optimism of youth, when it fades, can be so devastating that it drives people to despair.

In other words, their writing must reflect the individual and the masses at large in a way that's approved by the party; Dương finds that most writers in contemporary Vietnam get caught up in the group thinking mentality.