(Herald Tribune) -An online sex video featuring a popular young TV star has riveted the nation for more than a week now, much as Hilton's notorious clip seized worldwide attention when it hit the Internet a few years ago.
But unlike the American celebrity, the 19-year-old woman at the center of Vietnam's sex scandal had cultivated a good-girl image. And unlike Hilton, Hoang Thuy Linh will not be able to capitalize on her newfound notoriety.
Thuy Linh's show has been canceled and her career is over, capped by a tearful farewell on national television during which she apologized for disgracing her family and disappointing her fans, most of them high-school girls.
Her fall from grace has highlighted the generational fault lines in Vietnam, a sexually conservative culture within which women have been taught to remain chaste until marriage and stay true to one man - no matter how many times he cheats.
Like everything else in this booming country, ideas about sex and gender roles are quickly changing as satellite TV and the Internet bring Western influences to a society long cut off by war and economic isolation.
But for many in Communist Vietnam, new ideas about free love are much harder to accept than the free market. And unlike men, women who break the old sexual taboos are not easily forgiven.
"Kids today are crazy," said Nguyen Thi Khanh, 49, a Hanoi junior high school teacher. "They often exceed the limits of morality. They have sex and fall in love when they're much too young."
In the old days, Khanh said, a woman who had sex before marriage would be ostracized - and rightfully so.
"A good girl must keep herself clean until she is married," Khanh said. "Thuy Linh should be condemned. If I ever see her again on TV, I will turn it off."
In "Vang Anh's Diaries," Thuy Linh portrayed an earnest high school girl, modern and stylish but determined to uphold the traditional virtues of "cong," "dung," "ngon" and "hanh," which promote women as tidy, charming, soft-spoken and chaste.
Then the 16-minute video hit the Internet on Oct. 15 featuring Thuy Linh in bed with her former boyfriend, both apparently aware that they were on camera.
Ever since, the video has been the talk of Vietnam, where people secretly watch it at work, e-mail the Internet link to their friends and talk about it in the country's ubiquitous sidewalk cafes.
"Have you seen the clip yet?" has become a common greeting, to which the answer is almost invariably, "Yes."
Members of Vietnam's National Assembly were overheard gossiping about it last week at the opening of the new legislative session.
Vietnam's state-owned television station VTV-3 promptly canceled "Vang Anh's Diaries" after broadcasting Thuy Linh's humiliating farewell on Oct. 15.
"I made a mistake, a terrible mistake," said the doe-faced teen, confessing that she had not been able to sleep because of the scandal.