Two Photographs, Forty-Seven Years Apart Look at the first photograph — 1947, somewhere in Bắc Giang province, northern Vietnam. The image is black and white, slightly worn at the edges, photographed through glass that catches the light, leaving a ghostly reflection across the faces of the people within. Yet they remain visible: two young women seated in front, each holding a small child. Behind them, standing in the back row from left to right, are the District Principal's s

I have my mother’s beauty on good authority. It was not a quiet beauty — not the kind that waits to be noticed. People who were there, people who remembered the resistance zone and the makeshift classrooms of Việt Bắc, remembered her the way you remember something that interrupted what you were doing. A face you looked at twice. A presence that rearranged a room. The other thing people remembered was that she chose him. Not the other way around. In a room full of young women

There were only a few things I knew about my father growing up. One was a photograph — grainy, black and white, the image worn at its edges as though time itself had been pressing against it for decades. In the picture, my grandfather sits in a sparsely furnished living room somewhere in Hà Nội, Vietnam, probably taken around 1975. Beside him are my three uncles, my father the oldest among them. His four younger sisters are absent from the frame. I used to study that photogra

Viet Nam was created by this beautiful story of the dragon meeting this beautiful water maiden who realized that they no longer could be together (after she had borne him 100 eggs) and became separated with the dragon going back to the mountains and she returning to the sea leaving the eldest to be the first King of Viet Nam (Âu Cơ - Wikipedia) Viet Nam is always about a story of separation and creation thru wars and peace, of sadness and happiness, of fighting and forgivenes