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Hanoi. When student Nguyen Hong Nhung saw “Killer with a Festering Head” on someone’s smartphone, she wanted the banned comic book, too. Though Vietnam’s censors had yanked it from stores, finding a digital copy wasn’t exactly hard.

Nhung simply Googled the title, and with a few clicks was able to download a free bootleg copy of the book — a collection of one-panel cartoons illustrating the popular, sometimes-nonsensical rhyming phrases of Vietnamese youth slang.

Government censors had deemed some of the images violent or politically sensitive.

“The more the government tries to ban something, the more young people try to find out why,” the 20-year-old Nhung said.

Vietnam’s graying Communist Party is all about control. It censors all media, squashes protests and imprisons those who dare to speak out against its one-party system.

But today, as iPhone shops rub shoulders with Buddhist pagodas, cultural authorities are finding it increasingly difficult to promote their unified sense of Vietnamese culture and identity; especially among the country’s increasingly savvy youth.

“This is a key turning point for the younger generation,” said Thaveeporn Vasavakul, a Southeast Asia scholar who consults on public sector reform in Vietnam.

“Despite one-party rule, you see pluralism in the cultural and political thinking. And the younger generation is standing there, looking around and seeing a lot of options to choose from.”

Censors still review books, films and foreign newspapers for sensitive content while bureaucrats try to curb everything from popular online gaming programs to motorbike racing.

But a 2009 ban on late-night online gaming hasn’t stopped Vietnamese teens from patronizing Internet parlors where they sometimes play in the dark to avoid detection.

Fines on motorbike racing have not deterred young violators, prompting police in northern Thanh Hoa province to snag speeders with fishing nets. Loose Facebook restrictions also do not prevent users from logging on to the popular US-based social networking site.

The October ban of “Killer with a Festering Head” is another old-school censoring attempt that has failed.

Although a state-owned publisher recalled the book two weeks after its release, saying it broached sensitive topics, Vietnamese are still reading it online or buying pirated copies on the street.

The pocket-sized book (“Sat Thu Dau Mung Mu” in Vietnamese) features 120 illustrations satirizing contemporary Vietnamese life and social issues. Author Nguyen Thanh Phong takes aim at such hot topics as wildlife trafficking and domestic violence using playful, yet edgy, humor.

His rhyming one-liners mimic a street slang that is disliked by some older Vietnamese who see it as degrading to the country’s language and culture.

One page takes a cheeky swipe at the military, showing two soldiers kicking a grenade, soccer ball-style, under the caption “Soldiers must show off.” The military is exalted in Vietnamese society and normally is off-limits to criticism.

Phong, 25, who won a jury prize last year from the Asia-Pacific Animation and Comics Association, said he created the comic book to show that “artists can do whatever they want” and to help Vietnamese people “feel closer to contemporary issues.”

He shrugs off claims that it debases the language and says the decision to recall it was extreme.

“One of the things that hinders the creativeness of young artists is their invisible fear,” Phong said recently while sipping a latte in Hanoi. “They don’t know what could make the authorities unhappy, so they set their own limits on what they create.”

Associated Press