Arts & Culture - Saigoneer

Strangevisuals Is an Archive of Daily Life on Postcards of Rice and Dó Papers

2025-08-28T10:00:00+07:00

What are our memories made of?

If we were to imagine them in physical form, childhood memories might resemble the sturdy heart of aged timber or solid stone. Firm and enduring, they are the very core of who we are. Romantic affairs, on the other hand, feel more like soft skeins of yarn, comforting when they keep us warm, but will unravel just as easily if we let go.

What about the everyday, adult ones? What shapes do they take? Thin and brittle, they often slip away unnoticed. Yet, as fleeting as they are, these everyday memories form the quiet backdrop of our lives.

Life is delicate, like rice paper.

For Jamie, the designer behind strangevisuals, these little fragments are quintessential. They carry their own weight and deserve to be kept on materials as distinctive as the moments themselves.

At its heart, strangevisuals is Jamie’s personal archive of memories, expressed through postcards made from dó paper and rice paper. Each postcard features photographs she captures on a whim — snippets of daily routines or scenes from her travels. Through them, viewers may find themselves wandering a produce market, befriending stray cats and dogs, or squinting at quirky details of an old building.

Postcards made out of dó paper and rice paper.

The idea first took root when Jamie watched a documentary about dó paper. In it, the filmmaker lamented that this craft was no longer “in fashion,” too slow and labor-intensive to keep pace with mass production. But Jamie was struck by its meticulousness and layered depth, a quality that mirrored her own perception of the world — to appreciate the beauty of the quotidian means slowing down and watching closely to see that even the most mundane contains multitudes.

Dó paper became Jamie's material of slowness.

“I like to keep my memories on a medium […] of the right size to fit in the palm of my hand,” she explained. By coincidence, the standard postcard size, 15 x 10 cm, turned out to be the perfect fit. She also liked the word postcard itself, as to her, post suggested something that comes afterward, which felt perfectly in tune with the project’s spirit of tucking memories away to revisit later.

The front bears a photograph while the back leaves space for a note.

Jamie explained that many printers initially refused to collaborate because her chosen materials were incompatible with mass-production processes designed for plain white paper. So, drawing on her design background, she put her own printer to work and tinkered until she developed a usable method: “At the time, I didn’t know if I could pull it off, or if anyone would even buy them. If the plan fell apart, I would have been so upset. Luckily, it didn’t.”

After experimenting with dó paper, Jamie’s curiosity led her to rice paper. One evening over bún đậu, she thought to herself, why not try this?

The many rice sheets that Jamie put through trials.

Different kinds of materials revealed different qualities: dó paper absorbs ink deeply, making images soft and dreamlike, while rice paper’s glossy surface sharpens details, giving a film-esque aesthetic. One material acts like a mirror to the past, the other opens a window toward the future.

Each texture tells a story differently.

Strange materials cause strange mix-ups. A parcel of rice-paper postcards once stalled at customs. “Is it food?” they asked. Jamie had to sign a waiver promising it wasn’t edible. “Please don’t eat those prints,” she quipped. “They’ll just make you sick.”

Handle with care, and do not eat.

Unlike some other postcards, those of strangevisuals aren’t intended to commemorate anything special. Viewers can feel the spontaneity in every frame and sometimes pause to wonder: “Why photograph this?” or “Is there a hidden message here?” Jamie insists she simply lifts the camera and clicks without overthinking, “as a gesture of gratitude to the moment itself.” Whether the image is visually impressive or carries any meaning isn’t the point. What matters is that particular moment will never return. Soon, the afternoon sunray will change its path across the leaves. The cat will move into another languid pose. Beauty lies in impermanence, and that’s what strangevisuals exists for.

Jamie hopes strangevisuals will bring her to different lands and cultures, where she can continue collecting and experimenting with new materials, recording the world in its own peculiar rhythm. When asked if she could send a postcard to her younger self, she said: “I’d pick one where I’m laughing like an idiot and write nothing. Past Jamie, present Jamie, and future Jamie, we would all agree that life is wonderful.”

Chợ Lớn on dó paper.

Hà Nội on rice paper from Tây Ninh.

Phú Yên on dó paper.

Photos courtesy of strangevisuals.

Within the Shocking Brutality of Queer Novel 'Parallels' Rests Poignant Poetry

2025-08-25T14:00:00+07:00

Parallels by Vũ Đình Giang shocked me. While I refrain from spoiling its plot, allow me to share my experience when reading this novel, as translated by Khải Q. Nguyễn, to better explain how the book jolted me from expectations and why the experience provides a unique and valuable addition to the array of Vietnamese novels translated into English.

Parallels, originally published in Vietnamese in 2007 under the name Song Song, follows the lives of three homosexual men in an unnamed Vietnamese city. As established from the onset, it shifts focus between H, a relatively stable design firm employee; and G.g, his artist boyfriend, who seems disturbed from the beginning. A third character, Kan, who works with H, eventually enters to create a love triangle. Told via alternating perspectives interspersed with epistolary moments, the story flirts with surrealism before establishing reality as more frightening than any hallucination.

Cover of the Vietnamese original Song Song. Photo via Tiki.

Each of Parallels’ numbered chapters begins without establishing whose perspective is being offered, causing initial challenges in orienting oneself, particularly early in the book when reader tries to become acquainted with the characters and settings. Upon adjusting to this style, I could focus on what I believed to be a novel content to dwell on stylized depictions of the men’s mundane lives, augmented by articulations of emotional and psychological upheaval. About one-third of the way through, I sensed the book had settled into its final form where, absent a plot, the described moods, feelings, and ideas about art and life would constitute its gravity. The experience, I expected, would be a bit like how chapter 26 opens, with G.g opining: “People often complain that a year goes by too quickly. But for me, it often feels too long. Throughout the past year, there were no significant incidents or events. After work, I didn’t say goodbye to my colleagues; I just got on my motorcycle and left. After leaving any group of people, I immediately reverted to my original position, the position of an individual object. That rapid qualitative change was the result of a metaphysical needle being inserted into my body, draining the blood, and then pumping air in. I’d become an empty shell, a lifeless corpse, a hollow carcass. I’d be nothing but an empty nylon bag dragged along by the wind.”

An acrid strangeness fills the space where a plot could fit early in the book. H and G.g fritter away their time with bizarre games, including filling a basin with a putrid mixture of household goods and ingredients so as to drown the sun via its reflection. They paint mushroom caps so H’s co-workers think he is consuming poisonous fungi. They even discuss plans to murder an adopted puppy upon its first birthday while G.g repeatedly fantasizes about murder: “I didn’t feel guilty when I thought about killing him. I thought it was a beautiful idea, very poetic. Fly. Fly. Fly. I wanted to see how humans fly. I was waiting for a chance, and I would do it.”

Initially, I took these bouts of imagined violence as the angsty ramblings of poetic young adults, intoxicated by their macabre posturing. When G.g calls H in the middle of the night to announce that he is surrounded by wild wolves, H’s rational response assured me that there was a clear line between fantastic derangement and reality, and at least one of the characters knew which side we stood upon: “Do you think you’re lost in some wild forest? Listen to me, this is the city, and wolves can only come out of the Discovery Channel.”

However, soon the violence ramps up, and along with it, enough clarity to remove any uncertainties that could have cloaked terrific carnage in the surreal daydreams as had been suggested by a quote attributed to the puppy that comes before the first chapter: “Don’t rush to trust anyone, don’t try to find meaning in actions; maybe they’re simply a game, maybe it’s all the product of madness.” While I will leave it vague enough so as not to ruin a reading of it, the actions are in line with a grisly Hollywood movie that would need scenes trimmed before it could be screened at the local CGV.

Along with the violence, the novel’s approach to sexuality undergoes a radical shift in the second half of the book. At first, I was struck by how commonplace the homosexual lifestyles were presented, and found myself reflecting on how this reveals a normalizing of gay relationships in society. Love between men was referenced with the casual respect paid to any routine aspect of life. For example, early on H remarks off-handedly when describing G.g’s home: “So many times I’ve had to discard used condoms that G.g left under the bed, and I always had to have a tube of lubricant available, for G.g didn’t care.”

Somewhat rapidly, this changes, and the novel becomes filled with lurid details and graphic descriptions of BDSM. This particularly occurs as the characters share stories of their pasts, including Kan who recounts a lover who enjoyed being beaten:

“Kneeling, arms bent forwards at the elbows, he tilted his head upwards at an angle of about fifteen degrees. His thighs were wide apart. With that posture and his white, naked body, he looked like a frog with its skin peeled, patiently waiting for its prey.
The bait was the lashing of the whip.
The frog’s face deformed with each convulsion. Its mouth opened wide; its tongue was filled with foam, it groaned incessantly, and it soon reached the climax of its orgasm, sending a strong stream of semen onto the bed.”

While not interested in discerning morality, these depictions, which include a predatory relationship between a young, possibly underage man and a much older man who becomes his "adoptive father,” seem to relish in their potential to unsettle polite society.

Much like the transition from daydreamed violence to horrific bloodshed, this move from blasé depictions of sex lives to graphic retellings upended what I had assumed Parallels was at its core. These surprising shifts, I realized, are rather unique to Vietnamese literature translated into English. Many translated novels offer familiar narrative arcs that at least follow the rules they set out for themselves at the onset. While some such as Nguyễn Ngọc Tư's Water: A Chronicle, deviate from conventional storytelling techniques, plot structures and movements, relishing in intentional mystery and lack of closure, and others, including Thuận's Chinatown, refuse to meet reader’s expectations for tension and meaning, I have yet to read one that so flagrently upends the expectations it establishes.

Having finished the novel, I will return to the beginning, re-reading with awareness of where it ends and suspicion that the slippage of angst into mayhem should have been obvious, and I merely glossed over the hints. Or maybe I misunderstood the reality of the ending. And if either of these is true, it’s of little importance, because while the plot and its consequences, which are both legally profound and emotionally wrought, provided the tension that carried me through the book’s final half, it’s the unique style, voices, and heart-wrenching anecdotes that will remain with me. These are present from the very beginning.

In juicy, metaphor-rich prose, readers are gifted access to the complex interiors of complete individuals. It’s unclear which moments within these minds frightened me most; those when I heard echoes of myself, or recognized that the full spectrum of humanity contains individuals with diametrically opposing experiences and philosophies: “People thought I was simple, and a bit unstable. I didn’t give a fuck. Caring about what people thought was a waste of time. I had my own goals and principles. I lived for myself and because of myself; I did what was needed to meet what I aspired, demanded, worshipped. I knew I was selfish, but I was happy that way. I only cared about what I wanted, and I took up all its ramifications. Norms belonged to another paradigm that had nothing to do with me. I had my own universe, my own satellites, and I revolved around my own orbit.”

‘129BPM’ Carries the Contemporary Hip-Hop Heartbeat From Vietnam to Malaysia

2025-08-24T10:00:00+07:00

Under the shared heartbeat of “129BPM,” the dancers channeled their emotions through movement, navigating between individuality and collectivity both on and off stage. Extending beyond Vietnamese audiences, the piece has now been presented on an international platform at George Town Festival 2025 in Penang, Malaysia, marking a significant milestone for Vietnamese contemporary hip-hop performance on the international stage.

After two successful performance nights in Saigon and Hanoi, the performers of H2Q Dance Company brought “129BPM” — a contemporary hip-hop dance theater work — to George Town Festival 2025 (GTF 2025) in Penang, Malaysia. Originally titled as “129BPM: Động Phách Tách Kén” and co-produced with the Goethe-Institut Hồ Chí Minh City in 2024, the new touring production took place at the historic Dewan Sri Pinang theater from August 4 to 5 2025, presented and managed by MORUA, with travel sponsored by AirAsia and partial support from Đối South. Directed and choreographed by Bùi Ngọc Quân, the performance featured dancers Nguyễn Duy Thành, Lâm Duy Phương (Kim), Lương Thái Sơn (Sơn Lương), Nguyễn Ngọc (Mini Phantom), Bùi Quang Huy (Snoop Gee), Nguyễn Đỗ Quốc Khanh (Nega), and Vũ Tiến Thọ (Joong), alongside stage design by Mara-Madeleine Pieler, and live music by Tiny Giant (LinhHafornow and Tomes) and Nguyễn Đan Dương.

“129BPM” performance at Dewan Sri Pinang. Photos courtesy of George Town Festival.

The journey of “129BPM” to Penang began when Producer Red Nguyễn Hải Yến attended a forum for stage producers in Asia through GTF 2024, which highlighted the dialogue between heritage spaces and contemporary performance practices. Recognizing the potential of staging works in Penang’s historic buildings, old alleyways, and theaters — an atmosphere unique to the festival — she decided to submit the 129BPM project to the festival organizers, and received an official invitation to perform at the festival.

“129BPM refers not only to the rhythm of music, but it’s also a heartbeat — a palpitating heartbeat that shows our body in agitation, anxiety, as well as in thrill and fervor,” shared Choreographer Assistant and Stage Manager Lyon Nguyễn. Setting against the backdrop of rapid social changes that Vietnamese youths are facing, this raises a central question on self-identity: “Who are we in the middle of these changes with regard to our past and heritage?” Using hip-hop dance as a shared “language,” performers from backgrounds came together to create a collective voice while maintaining their own uniqueness, and move under one beat of 129BPM.

“129BPM” performance at Dewan Sri Pinang. Photos courtesy of George Town Festival.

Hip-hop is often associated with dance battles, where dancers only have limited time to showcase their skills and charisma. However, “129BPM” shifted the audience’s focus to the raw emotions and vulnerability of dancers on stage, expressed with their strongest movements and synchronization with one another. Developed and performed over the span of 75 minutes, this work challenges the dancers’ endurance, physically and emotionally. Dancers are placed in conditions where they must let their inner feelings surface: from joy to pain, from happiness to sorrow. At the same time, this framework also opens up new opportunities for experimentation: expressing emotions through movements, and navigating between one’s self identity and collective creation. While audience reactions to “129BPM” are diverse in Vietnam, in Penang the response was especially vibrant, with the audience spontaneously joining the performers in a post-show cypher — a hip-hop term for the circle dancers form, taking turns stepping into the center to dance — which embodied the spirit of creating unity and shared rhythm across differences.

“129BPM” performance at Dewan Sri Pinang. Photos courtesy of George Town Festival.

“Puzzles” workshop, led by the performers under the guidance of Director and Choreographer Bùi Ngọc Quân and Lyon Nguyễn, took place a few days before the live performances. Designed as a guided jam session, it invited local participants to explore improvisation, physical storytelling, and collective rhythm. Extending beyond the collective work among the performers themselves, the workshop opened up to a wider community, bringing together participants from adolescent to 75 years old, both experienced dancers and beginners. More than just a workshop, it became a space for cultural exchange, interaction, also community building — the very spirit that 129BPM hoped to share.

“Puzzles” workshop in Penang, Malaysia (30 July 2025). Photos courtesy of Tilda61 Media.

Bùi Ngọc Quân, who returned to Vietnam after more than 25 years with Les Ballets C de la B in Belgium, “129BPM” did not look to direct references to Vietnamese heritage through sound or imagery. Instead, its identity emerges from the lived experience of being in Vietnam: working closely with the dancers, understanding their desires, and allowing individuality and creativity to shape the process. As he notes, the work carries a distinctly Vietnamese sensibility “because all of us are allowed to comfortably be Vietnamese.” This perspective highlights the significance not only of what appears on stage, but also of the collaborative process that unfolds behind the scenes.

Director and Choreographer Bùi Ngọc Quân at “Puzzles” workshop. Photo courtesy of Tilda61 Media.

All team members of 129BPM at George Town Festival 2025.

“For independent theater works without government funding or access to costly infrastructures for ticketed performances, participating in festivals has become a key strategy to sustain the life of the work, while also serving as an entry point to introduce new hip-hop performances and Vietnamese theater to the world,” Producer Red Nguyễn Hải Yến told Saigoneer in Vietnamese, when asked about the significance of presenting an independent Vietnamese piece on an festival stage to new audiences in a country with different social and political contexts. “Sustaining the practice of independent artist collectives plays an essential role in shaping and developing a nation’s theatrical landscape.”

“129BPM” performance at Dewan Sri Pinang. Photos courtesy of George Town Festival.

More information and recap of “129BPM” performance at George Town Festival 2025 (Penang, Malaysia) can be found here on this Facebook page.

Trần Dần, the Literary Maverick Teaching Us How We Should and Can Be an Artist

2025-08-14T10:00:00+07:00

In the mind of many Vietnamese readers, the name of writer Trần Dần has been inextricably linked with artistic experimentation and innovation. His poetic voice feels nothing like those of writers I learnt back in high school: there is something so different, refreshing and oddly contemporary about it. As I consider every page of his bulky posthumously published anthology Thơ (Poetry), I find his legacy remains inspirational even for contemporary readers — especially other young Vietnamese — on what it means to “be an artist.” This does not only entail one’s appreciation and production of Vietnamese art, but also their adoption of an artist’s mindset into daily life.

Good art confronts life in all its complexity and grittiness

Around 1954, Trần Dần joined the guerrilla forces to fight against the French in the Điện Biên Phủ battle, and was actively involved the artistic scene alongside his revolutionary peers. While they all adopted socialist realism as the ideological paradigm for their works, what set a writer like Trần Dần apart was his desire to confront the current affairs in all their complexity and grittiness.

Trần Dần as a young adult.

In comparison, most poets in this period still adhered to the lyricism of the sentimental pre-Điện Biên Phủ Thơ Mới (New Poetry) movement, and classical Vietnamese epics such as Truyện Kiều (The Tale of Kiều). Their depictions of battles were indirect at best, romanticized at worst, and mostly focused on uplifting, hard-working portrayals of a pastoral Vietnam, as opposed to the soldiers’ internal struggles. “Some people want poetry to be clear, enthusiastic, rosy, melodious,” Trần Dần wrote, “that is why, I instead want a kind of poetry where there’s the enthusiasm of teardrops, sweat, and crimson blood; the enthusiasm of dust, dirt sand, gunpowder, corpses, crematorium, [...]; the enthusiasm of disappointments, separations, disintegration, and failure. I want a dose of sweet medicine from earth’s most bitter and spicy tastes.”

A soldier unit carrying the flag “Quyết chiến, quyết thắng” as they seize Mường Thanh Bridge in 1954.

Soldiers rowing against the stream of Mã River in Thanh Hoá to deliver rice as part of their war effort during the Điện Biên Phủ battle.

This was extracted from Trần Dần – Ghi 1954-1960 (Trần Dần – Writes 1954-1960), a published compilation of the writer’s personal notes. He further added: “I love current affairs poetry, following closely the anticipations and worries of my Party, my fellow citizens, millions and millions of hearts of civilians and army, soldiers and cadres, leaders and populus.” As evaluated by critic Đỗ Lai Thuý, Trần Dần was highly against superficial and clichéd tellings of contemporary life. Instead, he championed honest observations that demonstrated deep empathy for flawed, human experiences. As sentimental as this might sound, Trần Dần’s works actually embraced ambivalence with an astute eye, and via a more impactful and innovative poetic voice than his contemporaries': this was what poetry of the new, revolutionary era should be — as envisioned by Trần Dần and many writers supporting Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm.

Earlier publication of “Đi! Đây Việt Bắc” under a different name, “Bài thơ Việt Bắc.”

Trần Dần — Ghi 1954-1960.

His epic-poetry collection Đi! Đây Việt Bắc! (Go! Here’s Việt Bắc!), wrote during a brief peaceful era regarding his Điện Biện Phủ’s experiences, exemplified such a spirit — as seen in an excerpt of chapter III:

	[rough translation]
Ở đây manh áo vải chung nhau. Giấc ngủ cùng chung chiếu đất [...] Con muỗi độc chung nhau cơn sốt. Chiến trường chung dầu dãi đạn bom. Tới khi ngã lại chung nhau đất mẹ.	Here cloth shirts’ panels together. Our sleep together on ground's mat. [....] The poisonous mosquito together our fever. Battlefields together weathering bullets & bombs. Until fallen together yet mother earth.

[rough translation]

Ở đây

manh áo vải

chung nhau.

Giấc ngủ

cùng chung

chiếu đất

[...] Con muỗi độc

chung nhau

cơn sốt.

Chiến trường

chung

dầu dãi đạn bom.

Tới khi ngã

lại chung nhau

đất mẹ.

Here

cloth shirts’ panels

together.

Our sleep

together

on ground's mat.

[....] The poisonous mosquito

together

our fever.

Battlefields

together

weathering bullets & bombs.

Until fallen

together yet

mother earth.

The refrain “chung” employs togetherness to connote soldiers’ impoverished state — sharing mats, and even shirts; harsh life-risking conditions in battle, with its malaria-inflicting mosquitoes and deadly bombs. They are traumatic yet real experiences that the cultural zeitgeist would like to forget. However, togetherness also emphasizes the soldiers’ steadfast devotion to the cause amid the hardships. This goes to show Trần Dần’s ability to convey the soldiers’ complex experiences using the most succinct and impactful language, but also how encouraging socio-cultural amnesia risked erasing empathy and understanding towards the beauty that came along with and emerged from life’s ugliness.

Wounded soldiers at Điện Biên Phủ being taken care of.

Trần Dần ends the chapter with aplomb, finding new poetically interesting ways of using concepts “nợ” (debt) to convey the soldiers’ humility and gratefulness to everything, even if they were inanimate beings like the land, its flora and fauna, and of course, their fellow citizens:

	[rough translation]
Ta mắc nợ những rừng xim bát ngát. Nợ bản mường heo hút chiều sương. Nợ củ khoai môn nợ chim muông nương rẫy. [...] Dù quen tay vỗ nợ cũng chớ bao giờ vỗ nợ nhân dân !	We’re indebted to rose-myrtle forests immense. Indebted To indigenous villages, remote in evenings’ mist. Indebted to yams indebted to birds and beasts and highland fields. [...] Even if, for granted, we denied these debts, we would never deny our debts to the people !

[rough translation]

Ta mắc nợ

những rừng xim bát ngát.

Nợ

bản mường heo hút

chiều sương.

Nợ củ khoai môn

nợ

chim muông

nương rẫy.

[...] Dù quen tay vỗ nợ

cũng chớ bao giờ

vỗ nợ

nhân dân !

We’re indebted

to rose-myrtle forests immense.

Indebted

To indigenous villages, remote

in evenings’ mist.

Indebted to yams

indebted

to birds and beasts

and highland fields.

[...] Even if, for granted, we denied these debts,

we would never

deny our debts

to the people !

As such, Đi! Đây Việt Bắc! demonstrated Trần Dần’s socialist realist spirit, but also his rebellious creativity: not just in the idiosyncratic yet apt imageries, but also in the enjambed lines of the stair-case poetic form that he learnt from Russian poet Mayakovsky, whose “poetic form-and-function revolution” practice resonated much with Trần Dần, infusing an accelerating dynamism to the work.

Russian Dadaist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Unfortunately, despite the work’s merits in both craft and content, it didn’t come to light immediately: Trần Dần had been banned from publishing and served a brief jail sentence that was cut short by his suicide attempt. This was in part due to his involvement in Nhân Văn-Giai Phẩm, particularly his criticisms of ‘Việt Bắc,’ a poetry piece written on the same subject matter by Tố Hữu, his literary rival who oversaw the artistic activities at that time. He found Tố Hữu’s work, with its usage of traditional epic poetry’s register to focus on the region’s romantic beauty post-battle, had not dived deep enough into the soldiers’ perspectives, nor had it demonstrated new and strong employment of the Vietnamese language to convey so, thus lacking in power and zest necessary for a revolutionary poetic voice. It did not help that Trần Dần’s artistic approach meant he also decided to address the 1954 exodus of northerners in his poem ‘Nhất định thắng’ (Surefire Victory); this was the nail in the coffin to his literary career, alongside his decision to marry his wife Khuê, even as his peers disapproved because her relatives were among those who left to the south across the divided Vietnam.

Trần Dần (right) and his wife Ngọc Khuê (left).

Up until 1988, many public readers passionately stood by his works; he was even invited for literary talks with them in Huế, admitting: “I became very emotional because of the many direct and honest questions that were posed to me.” His contributions were ultimately formally recognized with a posthumous National Award for Arts and Literature in 2007.

Overall, Trần Dần’s incredible even if tumultuous, journey served as a bittersweet reminder of the difficult yet important endeavors of integrity and sensitivity in life. This wasn’t just a matter of making art, but also adopting in art-making the philosophy of being attuned to contemporary life’s undiscussed social aspects, neither by sugarcoating them nor being “a rebel without a cause.” Only by doing this can we inspire ourselves and others around us to critically reflect on our lives with honesty and acknowledgement.

Challenge yourself and the past, always — because you are alive.

If not for the Điện Biên Phủ Battle against the French, subsequent issues of Dạ Đài would have been produced. The magazine was established by 19-year-old Trần Dần and fellow poets of the Tượng Trưng (Symbolist) group, influenced by Symbolist poetry but also its following artisic movements, such as surrealism and Dadaism — hence the name “Dạ Đài.” “We’ve become tired with shallow poetry, chewing and referencing to death earthly sceneries, and worldly sentimentalism,” their Symbolist Manifesto declared, “we want to dive deep into extraneous bodies, into inner selves, and want to go further than heaven and earth.”

The front and back covers of Thơ.

Trần Dần had been a rebel ever since his formative years. Apart from Russian Dadaist Mayakovsky, in his interview with literary friends, Trần Dần named French Symbolist figures, such as Baudelaire and especially Rimbaud, as his early reads’ writers. This contrasted with the influences of his senior contemporaries, like Xuân Diệu or Thế Lữ, from Thơ Mới, taking cues from the Romanticism of Victor Hugo or Musset. They were thus deemed overly sentimental and melancholic by Trần Dần’s group, who sought to bring in a fresh poetry wave.

Even as Tượng Trưng was disbanded, its manifesto remained in Trần Dần’s core belief. He was determined to break away from previous generations’ established conventions on what was considered acceptable or unacceptable subject matter and aesthetics. Therefore, apart from embracing the country’s multi-faceted current affairs in poetry, and as part of his “all-encompassing revolution” ideal, Trần Dần also tackled subject matters such as sexual liberation and individualism with the same intensity and avant-garde techniques that had since become his signature style, at a time when socialist realism was solely privileged. “I also love Non-Current-Affairs Poetry,” he explained. “Poetry that encompasses the country and time, Poetry that spills over all centuries, and Poetry that even enters the immense dialectic of things.”

For instance, in ‘Đố ai chọc mắt các vì sao’ (Who here pierces the eyes of stars?), he combines quotidian images of the townscape and its flora (such as phố, mưa, lá, cành, nhà, and ngõ) with suggestive word choices (such as khoả thân, khe, toẻ, and xoạc) to create a surrealistic poetic tension:

	[rough translation]
Phố khoả thân mưa In hình võng mạc nước Lập lờ khe lá dọc Toẻ cành xanh nét móc Thẹm nhà đôi ngõ xoạc Khoả thân mưa…	Townstreet naked rained Imprinting shape in water retinae Leaf’s equivocal vertical slit Verdant hook-stroke branches split House front-porzh, with duo paths spread Naked rain…

[rough translation]

Phố khoả thân mưa

In hình võng mạc nước

Lập lờ khe lá dọc

Toẻ cành xanh nét móc

Thẹm nhà đôi ngõ xoạc

Khoả thân mưa…

Townstreet naked rained

Imprinting shape in water retinae

Leaf’s equivocal vertical slit

Verdant hook-stroke branches split

House front-porzh, with duo paths spread

Naked rain…

By juxtaposing the two registers, he invites readers to reframe their perceptions of sexuality from something generally considered taboo into something deserving of normalization, for the presence of such terminologies prevailed among most mundane and natural phenomena. Using this technique, Trần Dần further espoused a world washed clean by the rain, returning to a primordial and arguably pure, “naked” state of being, with rules yet to be placed on it.

In fact, Trần Dần’s exploration is comparable to French philosopher Michel Foucault’s 1976 study The History of Sexuality. In it, Foucault argues that repressive moral values and pathologizing scientific frameworks both exist to control sexuality’s discourse in society. Similarly, many of Trần Dần’s writings frequently disrupt boundaries demarcating certain language uses as inappropriate, thus liberating our modes of expression from their preconceived definitions and social connotations. Furthermore, while Trần Dần is not the first Vietnamese writer to explore sexuality, the fact that such a topic was tackled in folk literature or Hồ Xuân Hương’s poems spoke to the timeless and ever-contemporary nature Trần Dần’s experimentations, especially considering how talks on sexuality have become even more open in contemporary artistic and daily realms.

Various drawings by Trần Dần.

Trần Dần also pushes himself further by exploring the individual’s place within society, playing with spelling rules and other “extended techniques” to visually position words on a page. This can be seen in this extract from ‘Con I’ (Unit I), whereby the letter “i” itself is the subject matter — a letter Trần Dần seemingly considers as the simplest sound particle, and basic visual symbol and building block:

	[rough translation]
NGƯỜI Đi. NGÀY Đi. LỆ KÌA ici Cie i i i i i mọi đồng hồ vẫn khóc như ri ĐỒNG HỒ QUẢ ĐẤT mọi đồng hồ thế jới (nếu đồng hồ) đều tham ja mưa rả ríc .. i CHẠY NHƯ Ri i i [...] THẾ JỚI VẪN KHÓC NHƯ Ri ici i i i i i i i i i i ici KHÔNG i KHÔNG THÍC NGi .	HUMANS FLi. DAYS FLi. TEARS THERE ici Cie i i i i i everi clock still cries like ri THE EARTH CLOCK everi vvorld clock (if clocks) all zhoin rain driz zlin .. i RUNS LIKE Ri i i [...] THE VVORLD STILL CRIES LIKE Ri ici i i i i i i i i i i ici NO i NO ADAP ABiLYTi .

[rough translation]

NGƯỜI Đi. NGÀY Đi. LỆ KÌA

ici Cie i i i i i mọi đồng hồ vẫn khóc như ri

ĐỒNG HỒ QUẢ ĐẤT

mọi đồng hồ thế jới (nếu đồng hồ) đều tham ja mưa rả ríc .. i

CHẠY NHƯ Ri i i

[...]

THẾ JỚI VẪN KHÓC NHƯ Ri

ici i i i i i i i i i i ici

KHÔNG i KHÔNG THÍC NGi .

HUMANS FLi. DAYS FLi. TEARS THERE

ici Cie i i i i i everi clock still cries like ri

THE EARTH CLOCK

everi vvorld clock (if clocks) all zhoin rain driz zlin .. i

RUNS LIKE Ri i i

[...]

THE VVORLD STILL CRIES LIKE Ri

ici i i i i i i i i i i ici

NO i NO ADAP ABiLYTi .

According to researcher Nguyễn Thuỳ Dương, “i”’s shape is evocative of a human icon, thus representing an individual person; while I also find it interestingly resonant as the English first-person pronoun “I.” Just like how phonetically similar letters are replaced to produce idiosyncratic spellings (such as j replacing gi in “jới”), “i” morphed in and out of its upper and lower cases, trying out personas and placements in words, as if to find its belonging. “i” becomes part of words like “Đi” or “NGi”, often with deviating case and spelling rules, before joining the ever-present row of “i i i i i” that conjures sonically drone-like raindrops, or visually a line of humans, etc. — and the cycle continues.

Is Trần Dần trying to convey how the Self constantly fluctuated (and won’t settle: “KHÔNG i KHÔNG THÍC NGi”) between a larger homogenous society symbolized by the line-up of “i” figures, and imperfect even if individualistic cliques symbolized by the differently spelled words? In which case, Trần Dần argues against viewing the concept “us” as an equivocal singularity, and instead calls for the recognition of the individual “I”s that fosters a collective whole. Uncannily, this very conclusion is uttered a decade later in Lưu Quang Vũ’s play ‘Tôi và Chúng ta’ (I and We), in light of Vietnam’s tense zeitgeist towards adopting a socialist-oriented market economy that eventually led to Đổi Mới.

“Trần Dần’s decision to stretch his artistic practice in both form and function, using ways that challenge its pre-established aesthetic conventions, breaks new ground for fellow Vietnamese on what our human experiences could look and feel like, and what subject matters art could and should address.”

It is easy to dismiss any avant-garde experimentations as alienating and pointless art for others. Nevertheless, “all values of Truth, Kindness, and Beauty are difficult to understand — even artistic ice-skating is difficult to understand (!)” Trần Dần expressed. He added: “What’s known is a meaning, what’s not yet known is a word. What’s not known is deep and profound. Your recitation of a beautiful saying like Confucius’s is yet poetry, of a paradox like Lao-tsu’s is also yet poetry. To jump over your shadow is poetry. One’s yet to understand poetry, because they face difficulty jumping over their own shadow.” As such, Trần Dần’s decision to stretch his artistic practice in both form and function, using ways that challenge its pre-established aesthetic conventions, breaks new grounds for fellow Vietnamese on what our human experiences could look and feel like, and what subject matters art could and should address.

In the same interview, Trần Dần commented on ca dao, an antecedent folk literary form: “That’s our national heritage, a teacher must place it at the same level as Nguyễn Du’s, or Cao Bá Quát’s. Must learn it to bury it.” Breaking rules and challenging predecessors were what Trần Dần called for, and he anticipated that the younger Vietnamese at that time would eventually rise to the challenge as well: “The younger generation? I’m still waiting and waiting. They were still being contained in the trap of regal literature. I’m anxiously waiting for the young cohort to gather enough strength, grow up, and bury us, just like how we have buried the pre-war generation.”

Trần Dần (second from left) and Trần Trọng Vũ (second from right) and friends.

It can be safe to say that Trần Dần would be pleasantly surprised to learn about the many independent writing communities in Vietnam nowdays. Even without systematic government support, they host spaces for young Vietnamese willing to experiment with the national language and critically engage with our contemporary experiences. Perhaps this is Trần Dần’s greatest hope for his readers: to live and love life like an artist, in ways that are even more passionate than whatever he had done.

In 1920s–1940s Paris, Vietnamese Artists Painted Through the Interwar Period as the 'Others'

2025-08-01T11:00:00+07:00

How did Vietnamese artists navigate the complex tides of social and political changes, and mark their own position in the art world as the “Others” during interwar Paris — which was celebrated as the “City of Lights,” yet also a stage for both colonial propaganda and a ground for anti-colonial resistance?

In the 1920s-1940s, despite the looming threats of war and the rise of fascism, Paris remained as the world capital of art. Artists from across the globe flocked into the city in search for recognition with breakthroughs in their careers. Vietnamese artists were no exception, as they also arrived in the city with hope and ambition. Today, romanticized Vietnamese scenes painted in silk or oil by artists trained from École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine (EBAI) are widely recognized among the Vietnamese public, especially as such works increasingly appear in international auction houses at record prices. Yet, their stories, artistic contributions and positions within the peak of the French colonial empire were often overlooked in the broader narrative of global art histories.

Works by notable Vietnamese artists, along other renowned Asian artists, are presented in “City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s” at National Gallery Singapore; this is the first major exhibition in Southeast Asia to feature Asian artists, their artistic contributions and influences as the center of focus within the vibrant Parisian art scene during the interwar period. Other than highlighting how artists navigated through the western art world while incorporating their own cultural identities into their art, the exhibition also offers a critical view towards Paris, not only as a vibrant hub of artistic innovation, but also the heart of the French colonial empire. In the case of Vietnamese artists, their arrival and exposure in France were the result of the colonial system and hierarchy, which shaped their experiences differently from their Japanese or Chinese counterparts at the time.

Installation view of “Theatre of the Colonies” in “City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s”, National Gallery Singapore.

The exhibition features works by the first Vietnamese artists who built their careers in Paris in the 1930s: Lê Phổ (1907–2001), Mai Trung Thứ (1906–1980) and Vũ Cao Đàm (1908–2000), alongside a rare work by Lê Thị Lựu (1911–1988). Together, they were regarded as the pioneers of Vietnamese modern art abroad. Also included are works by other EBAI graduates, such as Phạm Hậu (1905–1994), Nguyễn Phan Chánh (1892–1984), Tô Ngọc Vân (1906–1954), Lê Văn Đệ (1906–1966), etc. Importantly, the exhibition expands its narratives beyond well-known artists by featuring unnamed and uncredited Vietnamese artisans and lacquer workers in Paris by the 1930s, whose contributions have been overshadowed in art historical records.

Preface

The “Preface” of the exhibition opens with a series of self-portraits by Asian artists, including works by Mai Trung Thứ and Lê Phổ. Mai Trung Thứ lights a cigarette and gazes directly at the viewer, while Lê Phổ returns the same direct stare, though in a more formal manner. Albeit not a dominant genre in Vietnamese art at the time, self-portraiture offered a rare expression of self-awareness and artistic assertion. Rendered with watercolor on Asian silk and pencil sketches on paper, the two portraits employ fine brushwork in a western realist style. These mediums and techniques reflect the cultural hybridity shaped by the EBAI, which introduced French academic training while embracing Vietnamese local traditions. Although personal in appearance, these portraits subtly project the reality of colonial intervention, shaped by an institution under the French administration, and hint at the layered identities formed under the colonial system.

Left: Mai Trung Thứ. Autoportrait à la cigarette (Self Portrait with Cigarette), 1940. Colors on silk. Collection of Mai Lan Phuong.
Right: Lê Phổ. Sketch for a Self Portrait, 1938. Pencil on paper. Collection of Alain le Kim.

Workshop to the World

In Paris, the taste for Asian art was already well established before the 1920s. Lacquer was considered a luxurious material, prized for its refined surface despite its demanding and labor-intensive production process. The rise of Art Déco in the 1920s — a modern, streamlined and popular aesthetic in art and design — further fueled French interest in the “exotic” imagined visions of Asia. This appetite shaped the way Asian art was received, consumed, and displayed in the west. Lacquer work ‘Paysage tonkinois’ (Tonkinese Landscape, c. 1930) by Lê Phổ, which is rarely seen today as he is better known for his silk paintings; and ‘Family in a Forest’ (c. 1940) by Phạm Hậu, whose compositions often feature meticulously rendered details in gold leaf, reflect the mutual influence between the Art Déco movement in Paris and the emerging modern lacquer movement in Vietnam.

Left: Lê Phổ. Paysage tonkinois (Tonkinese Landscape), c. 1930. Lacquer on wood, 5 hinged panel screen; mounted on wooden panel with gold leaf design (likely later). Private American collection
Middle: Historical records of Vietnamese artisans who worked at Jean Dunand’s studio (up until 1930).
Right: Phạm Hậu. Family in a Forest, c. 1940. Lacquer on wood; 3 panels. Collection of Sunseal Asia Limited.

The exhibition also brings attention to uncredited Vietnamese artisans and lacquer workers living in Paris up until the 1930s, many of whom worked in the studio of renowned Art Deco designer Jean Dunand (1877–1942). During this time, several lacquerers were placed under surveillance due to suspected political activity. A list documenting these artisans — including their names, places of origin, and Parisian addresses — were found in the Archives nationales d’outre-mer (the French national archives concerning the colonies), which oversaw the migrants from French colonies, offering rare insight into the overlooked lives and labor behind the flourishing lacquer demand in Paris.

Jean Dunand. La forêt (Forest), 1930. Gold and silver lacquer and hinges; 12 panels, total 300 x 600 cm. Collection of Mobilier National. Image courtesy of Mobilier National; photo by Isabelle Bideau, GME-7196-000.

Theatre of the Colonies

“Theatre of the Colonies” further highlights Vietnamese artists’ first exposure to the art world during the 1931 International Colonial Exposition, where an enormous replica of Angkor Wat was constructed and pavilions were built for the French empire to showcase its achievements and benefits from the colonies at that time. Works by Vietnamese artists, mostly graduates from the EBAI, were exhibited at the pavilions.

Installation view of “Theatre of the Colonies” at “City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s”, National Gallery Singapore.

The works were highly regarded during the Colonial Exposition and other exhibitions in France at the time, and they were not painted in a deliberately “exotic” manner to serve the aesthetic demands for an “Asian” taste. Instead, we see refined depictions of daily life in earthy color tones, of women and villagers in their everyday activities through Nguyễn Phan Chánh’s works, which were rooted in his own rural upbringing, capturing the essence of the Vietnamese countryside. Meanwhile, Lê Phổ’s ‘L'Âge heureux’ (The Happy Age, 1930) suggests a nostalgia for a “golden age” of the Vietnamese past, showing children and women by the riverbank, most with their eyes cast downward, except for one young woman who stares directly at the viewer with an enigmatic gaze.

Lê Phổ. L'Âge heureux (The Happy Age), 1930. Oil on canvas, 126 x 177 cm. Private American collection.

Silk paintings by Nguyễn Phan Chánh and Nguyễn Khang.

France was at the peak of its empire with colonial propaganda in the early 20^th century, but it was also a ground for anti-colonial movements and revolutionaries. The exhibition includes materials from this resistance, such as cartoon sketches by Nguyễn Ái Quốc (Hồ Chí Minh), produced during his time working with the Parti communiste français (PCF, French Communist Party), which exposed the exploitative and oppressive realities of colonialism. These are shown alongside anti-colonial slogans, protest leaflets, and newspaper headlines, including one that reads: “Do not visit the Colonial Exposition.” According to the exhibition text, artists from the Surrealist group collaborated with the PCF to organize a counter-exhibition titled “The truth about the colonies,” although it attracted only around 4,000 visitors — a small number compared to the 8 million who attended the official Colonial Exposition.

Cartoon sketches, slogans, protest leaflets, and newspaper headlines by anti-colonial activists, including Nguyễn Ái Quốc (Hồ Chí Minh) at “City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s.”

Sites of Exhibition

“Sites of Exhibition” explores the career peaks by Asian artists, in which they were seeking critical exposure and career advancement. Through time, artists adapted into the mainstream culture and continued developing their distinctive styles, while navigating expectations from both institutions and the market. A highlight is Lê Văn Đệ’s ‘L'Intérieur familial au Tonkin’ (The Family Interior in Tonkin, 1933), a post-impressionist portrayal of a traditional Vietnamese household rendered in a dreamy yet rustic tone. The painting was a success and later acquired by the French state.

Lê Văn Đệ. L'Intérieur familial au Tonkin (The Family Interior in Tonkin), 1933. Oil on canvas.

Vũ Cao Đàm’s double-sided painting: one side is the silk painting ‘The Mandarin’ (1946), a formal ancestral portrait of an unidentified scholar; on the reverse, the gouache-on-paper painting ‘A Study of Two Young Women’ (1946) with contrasting image. This reveals his working process of reusing a previous sketch on paper for backing support of the silk painting.

Vũ Cao Đàm. Le Mandarin (The Mandarin), 1946. Ink and colour on silk. Private American collection.

Vũ Cao Đàm. A study of two young women, 1946. Gouache on paper. Private American collection.

Also on view are Lê Phổ’s luminous watercolor-on-silk paintings, including ‘Harmony in Green: The Two Sisters’ (1938). Compared to earlier works from the 1931 Colonial Exposition, these later pieces still depict daily life but carry a more romanticized tone, featuring idealized images of Vietnam through the main subjects of women and flowers. While it's difficult to confirm whether this shift was deliberate, it prompts reflection on how these artists negotiated personal expression and cultural identity under the pressure of a western market drawn to the “exotic.”

Lê Phổ. Harmony in Green: The Two Sisters, 1938. Ink and gouache on silk, 54 x 45 cm. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Image courtesy of National Heritage Board, Singapore.

Aftermaths

In the “Aftermaths” section, the timeline moves toward the end of World War II and beyond, as France grappled with the trauma of war while anti-colonial and independence movements were sweeping across the world. Mai Trung Thứ’s film Documentaire sur la Conférence de Fontainebleau (Documentary of the Fontainebleau Conference, 1946), which documents Hồ Chí Minh’s visit to France that year when came to support the Vietnamese delegation negotiating for independence, prior to the outbreak of the First Indochina War. During his visit, Hồ Chí Minh met with many Vietnamese emigrants, including artists, some of whom were later viewed with suspicion because of their association with him.

Installation view of “Aftermaths” in “City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s”, National Gallery Singapore.

Mai Trung Thứ. Documentaire sur la Conférence de Fontainebleau (Documentary of the Fontainebleau Conference), 1946. Film, transferred to digitised video, single-channel, black-and-white, 7 min 48 sec excerpt. Original, 42 min. Collection of Mai Lan Phuong.

Amidst an exhibition largely centered on works from the 1920s to 1940s, two contemporary pieces by Thảo Nguyên Phan engage in a quiet dialogue with the past. ‘Magical Bows (Lacquered Time),’ made in 2019, appears throughout the galleries, paying homage to the Vietnamese workers brought to France during World War I to lacquer airplane propellers for combat. Her other video work, ‘Reincarnations of Shadows (moving-image-poem),’ created in 2023 and still ongoing, is placed at the conclusion of the exhibition. It features Vietnamese sculptor Điềm Phùng Thị (1920–2002), who migrated to France in 1948 and later built her artistic career in the 1960s. The piece reflects on the migrant experience — not only the anxiety of arrival, but also, as the exhibition text notes, “the agonising complexity of return.”

Thảo Nguyên Phan & Đinh Văn Sơn (Lacquerer). Magical Bows (Lacquered Time), 2019. Lacquer, gold and silver leaf, eggshell and mother-of-pearl on wood. Collection of National Gallery Singapore.

Thảo Nguyên Phan. Reincarnations of Shadows (moving-image-poem), 2023-ongoing. Video, three-channels, each aspect ratio: 9:16, colour and sound (stereo), 16 min 50 sec. Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Galerie Zink.

After 1945, artists continued to migrate to Paris, though the city no longer held the same prestige it once did. For many Vietnamese and other Asian artists who remained, life was marked by displacement; caught between a distant homeland they could not easily return to and an environment where they faced marginalization and financial hardship. Being the “Others” in the so-called glamorous “City of Lights” came at the cost of uncertainty: a shifting sense of identity and belonging amid changing social and political tides. Yet their efforts and artistic contributions left a lasting imprint on the Parisian art scene and continue to shape a more interconnected global art history.

Photos courtesy of National Gallery Singapore.

“City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s” is now on view until August 17, 2025 at Level 3, City Hall Wing of National Gallery Singapore. More information on the exhibition and admission can be found on this website.

Vietnam's Colonial Histories Reimagined as Fictional Adventure Tale in ‘The Year Is XXXX’

2025-07-27T10:00:00+07:00

We often encounter adventure tales in books and through adaptations of films or television. But what if a newly imagined adventure tale can also be written as an exhibition — one that maps strange-yet-familiar landscapes with a colonial history of exploration and exploitation?

Organized by Nguyen Art Foundation and curated by Thái Hà, “The year is XXXX” is an exhibition featuring works by Quỳnh Đồng, Nguyễn Phương Linh, Thảo Nguyên Phan and Danh Võ. Taking place at EMASI Nam Long and EMASI Vạn Phúc as two sequences of a curatorial narrative, the exhibition essay was written in the form of an adventure tale that follows a girl’s journey as she navigates different realities each time she wakes and sleeps. The audience steps into this imaginary adventure, through the lens of travel writings by missionaries and explorers in colonial Indochina, where places that we once thought were familiar become almost unrecognizable today.

According to the curatorial text, the exhibition “explores how adventure is used to invent fantastical fictions of foreign lands, but also as a strategy of escape from colonial subjugation.” Every six weeks, EMASI Vạn Phúc venue features rotating curations by different guest curators and guest artists, offering new alternative realities of the evolving curatorial narrative of the exhibition.

Installation view of “The year is XXXX” at Nguyen Art Foundation: EMASI Nam Long (left) and EMASI Vạn Phúc (right).

Upon arrival at EMASI Nam Long, audiences will encounter the first section titled Trùng mù (Endless, sightless), where Nguyễn Phương Linh’s single-channel video ‘Memory of the blind elephant’ (2016) appears under the dim red light, with black rubber mats laid down on the floor for the audience to sit on. Shifting the camera’s point of view between the perspectives of a human, animal, or machine, her work offers different views of the landscape and former colonial rubber plantation in Central Vietnam — a region that has been, and still continues to be, exploited.

The artist retraced the colonial-era travels of bacteriologist and explorer Alexandre Yersin (1863–1943), whose writings documented his expedition to the Central Highlands and his introduction of rubber plantations in Indochina. Elephants, culturally significant to daily life in Central Highlands, are believed to be colorblind, and the blindness mentioned here acts as a metaphor for the blindness to the destructive consequences of rapid urbanization and industrialization.

Nguyễn Phương Linh. Memory of the blind elephant, 2016. Single-channel video, color, sound. 00:14:00, loop.

Meanwhile, under the piercing brightness that cuts through our vision in a different room, ‘The Last Ride’ (2017) resembles the deconstructed elephant saddle in a minimalist form, made of industrial materials such as aluminium and steel. Here, the elephant was considered as a commodity, a mode of transportation, and a subject of exploitation that carried the weight of colonial ambition.

Nguyễn Phương Linh. The Last Ride, 2017. Aluminium pieces, plastic perspex, lights, glass and MDF pedestal. Installation dimensions variable.

Thảo Nguyên Phan’s ‘Voyages de Rhodes’ (2014–2017) presents a series of watercolor paintings attached to the wall by a single edge, allowing them to stand outwards in space. The artist painted directly over ancient pages of a 17^th-century text by Alexandre de Rhodes (1591–1660) on his 35 years of travel and missionary work, including in Indochina. At first glance, the images first appear to be from a colorful tropical paradise, with innocent children wearing school uniforms playing together, and their dreamy eyes remain half-opened.

Thảo Nguyên Phan. Voyages de Rhodes, 2014-2017. Watercolor on found book pages. Dimensions variable.

However, upon closer observation, the child's play starts turning into horror scenes: children playing “jump rope” over another child’s lifeless body, disembodied heads stuck on floating drums, a child standing on top of a ladder next to a tree while his head detached, etc. As the line between fiction and reality begins to blur, what appears as a dream of childhood innocence slowly reveals itself as something haunting, while the French text lying underneath remains obscure. This also prompts the question: are these beautifully fluid brushstrokes, yet disturbing images, meant to simply reflect the foreign gaze towards Vietnamese subjects, or to critique the cruelty of colonialism? De Rhodes’ writings resemble some remnants echoing from the past, while Thảo Nguyên Phan’s works unfold like some haunting fictional tales of colonial histories, ones that feel both long forgotten and completely detached from the histories that we were taught and our realities in the present.

Thảo Nguyên Phan. Voyages de Rhodes, 2014-2017. Watercolor on found book pages. Dimensions variable.

Towards the end of the first venue, visitors encounter Nguyễn Phương Linh’s work once again. ‘The Light’ (2018) is made of wooden fragments that appear to float, each carrying the dim lights in a dense fog filling up the room. The fragmented woods were collected from a Catholic church in Northern Vietnam; these physical remains and memories of a sacred place have turned into a new form and narrative. According to the exhibition text, these wooden panels have crossed continents before arriving at this exhibition, which traces “the routes once taken by missionaries whose journeys ended in martyrdom on this land.”

Nguyễn Phương Linh. The Light, 2018. Lights, wood panelling from a Catholic church in Northern Vietnam, smoke, clear perspex. Dimensions variable.

Danh Võ’s ‘2.2.1861’ (2009) stands quietly at the end of a corridor. The work itself is a handwritten letter, repeatedly written by the artist’s father Phụng Võ, several times a week. Despite not being fluent in French, he meticulously copied out the heartfelt farewell letter from Saint Jean-Théophane Vénard (1829–1861), a French catholic martyr, to his own father. The original letter was penned during Vénard’s final days before his execution in Northern Vietnam in 1861, under Emperor Tự Đức’s harsh campaign of anti-Christian persecution. One of the last lines reads: “Father and son will meet again in heaven. I, a small transient being, aim to leave first. Farewell.” The act of copying and repeating words through calligraphy in a language that he was not familiar with had become a form of prayer and a personal expression of commitment between the father and son.

Danh Võ. 2.2.1861, 2009. Handwritten letter by Phụng Võ. 29.85 x 20.96 cm.

Moving on to the exhibition venue at EMASI Vạn Phúc, we enter the next part of the adventure titled Gently Floating Away (Nhẹ nhàng trôi đi), into the utopia of hyper-real video works by Quỳnh Đồng. The artist borrowed from the art of painters trained from the l’École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine (Indochina School of Fine Arts), and projected them onto large-scale moving images. The lotus is often regarded as Vietnam’s national flower and is deeply embedded in folklore and visual culture. However, in ‘Lotus pond’ (2017), the lotuses now appear in oversized and independent entities, standing still under the rain and its soundscape, where time and space have become an infinite loop.

Quỳnh Đồng. Lotus pond, 2017. 3-channel video installation, 1920 x 1080 HD, color, sound. 00:50:00, loop.

Visitors will find themselves immersed in another landscape — this time, beneath the surface of dark water — through ‘Black sea and gold fish’ (2021). The work takes direct reference from Phạm Hậu’s lacquer painting ‘Nine carps in the Water’ (1939), with images and its practice deeply rooted in local tradition, yet formalized through a colonial gaze. In Quỳnh Đồng’s reimagined work, the fish and sea waves are no longer decorative motifs, but are now turned into bodies of Butoh dancers whose strange movements navigate through the darkness. Originating in post-war Japan, Butoh emerged as a rebellion against westernized ideals of performance. Here, the human figure is not considered as ornamental, but as a resistant presence.

Quỳnh Đồng. Black sea and gold fish, 2021. 3-channel video installation, 1920 x 1080 HD, color, sound. 00:08:13, loop.

As this is an evolving exhibition, there are rotating curations by guest curators and guest artists to be revealed every six weeks, until November 2025. Previously, the first one to be featured was Diane Severin Nguyen’s video installation ‘Tyrant Star’ (2019), curated by Bill Nguyễn. The work reflects on the construction of Vietnamese identity across past and present, shifting through the landscapes of the Southwest and Hồ Chí Minh City metropolitan with echoing folk verses (ca dao), the digital realm of a Vietnamese YouTuber singing ‘The Sound of Silence,’ to images of children in an orphanage.

Diane Severin Nguyen. Tyrant Star, 2019. Single-channel video, color, sound. 00:15:00, loop.

Meanwhile, the ongoing curation ‘Letters to the Cadres,’ curated by Joud Al-Tamimi, features photography works by Võ An Khánh, paintings by Trương Công Tùng, and installation by Tuấn Mami. Under the purple light, the space evokes an imagined “laboratory” — where soil, substances from a defunct military pharmaceutical factory, cactus, tree saps, micro-organisms, and human bodies converge. Here, the land bears witness to everyday resistance and war remnants, holding within it memories and unfinished stories shaped by colonial legacies and the enduring presence of the dead.

Installation view of “Letters to the Cadres” in “The year is XXXX” at Nguyen Art Foundation.

When one reads the exhibition title, perhaps the first questions that come to mind are “What year was XXXX?” and “What exactly happened?”. The unrevealed year might seem ambiguous, yet it opens up multiple possibilities of historical events and fictional stories that extend beyond the constraints of a certain chronological order. The exhibition text is presented in different paper stacks placed on the floor, which includes a timeline of Vietnamese history spanning from the year of 1640 to 1925, marking significant events from the imperial to colonial periods, many of which are reflected in the works on view.

Installation view of “The year is XXXX” at Nguyen Art Foundation.

Two parallel exhibition spaces: one is elusive, mysterious, and filled with ghostly presence; the other is where creatures are immediately present and ready to overwhelm and prey on any traveler who enters. Within realms that we once believed to be familiar, a deep sense of unfamiliarity emerges. Through language barriers, the distance between the past events and present-day realities, between the colonial gaze and cultural memory arrives. Histories that once seemed close now appear strange, distant and somehow forgotten in a newly imagined form of an adventure tale.

Photos courtesy of Nguyen Art Foundation.

“The year is XXXX” is now on view until November 2025 at Nguyen Art Foundation’s two venues EMASI Van Phuc and EMASI Nam Long. More information about the exhibition, opening hours and public programs can be found on the website.

Contemporary Hip-Hop Dance '129BPM' to Perform at Art Festival in Malaysia in August

2025-07-24T12:00:00+07:00

After two successful nights in Saigon last year, a mesmerizing contemporary hip-hop dance performance is bringing its raw energy abroad.

In December last year, H2Q Dance Company performed “129BPM: Động Phách Tách Kén” at the Southern Military Theatre, making choreographer Bùi Ngọc Quân’s first (proper) independent production in Vietnam after over two decades with Les Ballets C de la B in Belgium, one of Europe’s most renowned dance companies.

The show blended dynamic live music by the duo Tiny Giant and drummer Đan Dương, evocative stage design by German artist Mara Madeleine Pieler, and captivating choreography performed by eight talented street dancers.

The official poster of the performance.

This year, the creative collaboration is bringing “129BPM” abroad to Malaysia as part of the George Town Festival 2025, the first time that a performance art piece from Vietnam is included in the Malaysian art event. Viewers will be able to enjoy “129BPM” for two nights on August 4 and 5 at the historic Dewan Sri Pinang concert hall in George Town, Penang.

First created in 2010, George Town Festival is an annual art festival held in Penang, Malaysia to commemorate the UNESCO World Heritage Site status of the island town, awarded in 2008. Throughout the event, programs are often organized at different historic venues across George Town, from heritage buildings, amphitheaters to quaint alleys.

“‘129BPM: Động Phách Tách Kén’ is not your usual hip-hop breakdance battle, but a contemporary dance performance combining live music with Vietnamese folk elements. It is a journey that requires your full presence and attention to appreciate its fleeting and transformative moments,” writes An Trần in Saigoneer’s review of last year's show. Read the full piece here.

In 2024, “129BPM” was co-produced by H2Q Dance Company and the Hồ Chí Minh City Goethe-Institut. In 2025, the performances at George Town Festival 2025 are presented and run by MORUA Co. Ltd with transportation partner AirAsia.

Images courtesy of H2Q Dance Company.

Visit the official “129BPM” page on the George Town Festival website for more information and ticket booking.

The Surprising Japanese Origin Behind the Vietnamese Term 'Ô Sin'

2025-07-21T13:00:00+07:00

It’s not uncommon to come across words in everyday conversations that have roots in the French language. Albeit less frequently, a handful of Russian and English loan words have also made their way into our lives at times, but for a term of Japanese origin to have taken root deep in the collective psyche of Vietnamese, that’s rare.

Ô sin is a common term used to describe domestic helpers in Vietnam, in addition to other words like người giúp việc, người ở, con sen, etc. — each with different degrees of respect. The term originated from a television soap opera that Japanese national broadcaster NHK aired in 1983–1984 by the same name, おしん (Oshin). The series was an epic chronicling the life of the main character Tanokura Shin from when she was born in the late Meiji period to the early 1980s. It was screened in Vietnam for the first time in 1994 on VTV1 and later in 2012 on HTV3.

Oshin is portrayed by three actresses, one for each life stage: Nobuko Otoba (middle-aged to elderly), Yuko Tanaka (adult), and Ayako Kobayashi (adolescent).

Throughout the 297 episodes of the series, Oshin’s life was marked by extreme hardships and poverty, especially during her childhood when she worked as a servant for two different families. These rather traumatizing events contributed greatly to the adaptation of her name in Vietnamese as a shorthand for servitude. During a decade with scant entertainment options, whatever was shown on state TV would inevitably become a national phenomenon, so Oshin became ô sin.

It’s interesting to note the differences in cultural impact Oshin had on two countries, though the series was widely popular in both. The Japanese practice of adding o (お) to a person’s name started from the Muromachi period (1336–1573) to show respect and politeness, so right from the series name, Oshin is already established to be a revered figure. In Japan, Oshin is often seen as a symbol of resilience and courage, and the “Oshin diet” refers to a period of economic downturn in the 1980s, when Japanese had to make do with eating rice with daikon. In Vietnam, however, the connotation of “ô sin” has gradually skewed negative over time, and is most often used in either humorous or derogatory contexts today.

Top photo via Sankei.

Remembering Thuy Trang, the First Vietnamese Power Ranger

2025-07-17T11:00:00+07:00

It was the late 1990s, and I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror of our childhood home, holding my dad’s solid-metal belt buckle up with a pseudo-serious expression on my baby face. Fortunately, I wasn’t doing a YouTuber-style makeup review, but was in fact mirroring the transformation sequence of my favorite TV idols, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

Power Rangers are known in Vietnamese as “Siêu nhân,” and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (5 Anh Em Siêu Nhân) was the first-ever English-language iteration of the long-enduring franchise that spawned numerous sequels from east to west. It was also my first and only brush with Siêu nhân, as Pokémon and Disney would arrive soon after, taking over my entire childhood and leaving little time for intergalactic crime fighting.

Created by a pair of Israeli entertainment producers after they came across its Japanese predecessor, Mighty Morphin premiered in 1993 with a cast of relatively unknown newcomers and a lot of doubts that America would take well to the violent nature of spacefaring fights. According to the plot, five high schoolers in California were given the ability to transform into Power Rangers, a team of superhuman soldiers tasked with protecting Earth against alien villains. Apart from a few racially insensitive casting decisions — Thuy Trang, of Asian descent, was given the role of the Yellow Ranger, while Walter Emanuel Jones, who is African American, plays the Black Ranger — the series was an instant hit across North America and even internationally.

The opening sequence of the first season of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, released in 1993.

Thuy Trang was born in 1973 in Saigon, but migrated to the US with her mother when she was five or six on a cargo ship via Hong Kong. It’s also important to note that Trang was her surname and Thuy (diacritic unknown) was her first name. The family eventually reunited with her father and resettled in California in 1980. After graduating from high school, she got a scholarship to study civil engineering in college, but was spotted by a talent scout while hanging out with friends and switched her focus to acting, at least for a while.

Thuy Trang as Trini Kwan, the Yellow Ranger. Photo via BuzzFeed.

Thuy was officially cast as Trini Kwan, the Yellow Ranger in Mighty Morphin in 1993, from a pool of 500 other actresses. The casting process wasn’t race-specific, as Thuy recalled seeing hopeful Trinis from all ethnicities in the room, but little did the production or Thuy Trang know at that point that her role as Trini would turn out to be a groundbreaking role model for millennial Asian Americans during their formative years. The reception of Thuy’s portrayal of Trini was very positive, as she learnt over the course of her tenure at Mighty Morphin that an Asian superhero was an unprecedented point of pride.

“Asians are not portrayed in the media very well, and there are not many roles for Asian people except for the stereotypes — gangsters, hookers, things like that,” Thuy Trang shared in an interview in 1993. “A lot of older Asian people come up to me and say that I'm doing a service to the Asian community.”

Admittedly, primary school me didn’t even realize that she was Vietnamese, or Asian for that matter. The real name of the actress appeared for all of three seconds in the opening sequence, and, as an ethnic Vietnamese born in Vietnam, it wasn’t extraordinary to see an Asian person on screen, because, well, everybody else is Vietnamese on local TV. This undoubtedly wasn’t the case for millennials of Asian, and especially Vietnamese, descent in the US, as they could instantly connect with Thuy Trang’s Yellow Ranger and even her own personal background as a refugee in the US.

A fan art of Trini Kwan by Chris Jones. Image via Reddit/Instagram user @theoriginalmistajonz.

One of them is Chi-Hung Ta, who founded the Thuy Trang Tribute website in 1997. The site, still operational 28 years later, remains the most comprehensive multimedia resource on her to date, even though new materials are understandably scant, considering Thuy Trang had passed away for over 20 years now. “When Mighty Morphin Power Rangers debuted in 1993, I was slightly older than the target audience. But, I watched because of Thuy Trang's portrayal of Trini Kwan, the Yellow Ranger. I recognized Thuy as being Vietnamese, whose immigrant story matched my own,” Chi-Hung writes in the site’s About Us section.

Thuy Trang took over the role from actress Audri Dubois, who played the Yellow Ranger in the pilot, but over the course of 80 episodes of Mighty Morphin across two seasons, she made the role of Trini Kwan her own. Thuy Trang was also an avid athlete and martial artist, having taken up Shaolin Kung Fu since she arrived in the US, and even got a black belt. She was also a forthright young woman who wasn’t afraid to speak out against injustice, and perhaps, it was this bluntness that didn’t sit well with the network executives behind Mighty Morphin.

The original cast in a Japanese promo poster. From top to bottom, clockwise: Jason David Frank (green), David Yost (blue), Austin St. John (red), Amy Jo Johnson (pink), Thuy Trang (yellow), and Walter Emanuel Jones (black). Photo via Henshin Grid.

In 1995, in the middle of the second season of Mighty Morphin, it was announced that Thuy Trang was leaving the show, alongside Austin St. John and Walter Emanuel Jones, who played the Red and Black Rangers, respectively. The reasons given were contract disputes, though we have recently learnt that there were more behind the scenes, thanks to an episode of the docuseries Hollywood Demons, which delved into the seedy underbellying of the film industry.

According to the episode, titled “Dark Side of the Power Rangers,” merely a year after its premiere, Mighty Morphin was already shaping up to be a lucrative cash cow, earning its creators over a billion dollars in just toy sales. The actors, who were relative unknowns at the time of its launch, didn’t see a dime of the merchandise money. The jobs were non-union, and they were reportedly making just US$60,000 per year each, so when their first contract was up mid-season, the three joined forces to negotiate for better pay, a percentage of the toy earnings, and union recognition. “We were broke,” St. John said, detailing the financial pressures of having to take a second job on top of being on a demanding TV production, which was raking in big bucks for the execs.

The transformation sequence of Mighty Morphin.

The disputes reached the climax at a major presentation of FOX, with many of the network’s stakeholders present. Thuy Trang took the stage to deliver a blistering speech, chastising the show owners for failing to fairly compensate the actors while they were the ones anchoring the ratings. The network response was swift and straightforward: all three were fired from the show and instantly replaced. In the Mighty Morphin world, the reason given for the characters’ exit was that the three teens were chosen as representatives in an international “Peace Conference” in Switzerland, and their powers and colored uniforms were passed on to new faces.

One can’t help but wonder if things would have turned out differently had all the actors banded together to foot the demands, something Amy Jo Johnson, who played the Pink Ranger, also regretted not doing. The cast of Friends, another smash hit to have come out of the early 1990s, successfully negotiated increased and equal pay for the six friends, once the show became a household name.

Following Thuy Trang's departure from Mighty Morphin, she only appeared in two other film projects in 1996, and expressed struggles finding roles as an Asian American actress. Those wishful Hollywood aspirations would be shelved forever just a few years later. In 2001, she was in a car with actress Angela Rockwood and another friend, Steffiana de la Cruz, driving between San Jose and Los Angeles. The two girls were to be bridesmaids for Rockwood’s upcoming wedding with Dustin Nguyen. Cruz, the driver, struck some loose gravel and lost control of the car. The accident injured Cruz and rendered Rockwood paraplegic, while Thuy Trang succumbed to fatal injuries on the way to the hospital. She was 28 years old.

Thuy Trang in a promotional shoot for the first season.

Power Rangers have continued to put out successful iterations and introduced new batches of rangers since then, to the point where you can probably guess a new friend’s age by the generation of Power Rangers that they were obsessed with as a child. This ever-churning cycle might be what Thuy Trang and her colleagues didn’t realize at the time when they naively, but rightfully, stuck their neck out to ask for fair pay back then: Power Rangers are replaceable and kids abandon old toys for shiny new ones faster than you can shout “Saber-tooth Tiger! Transform!”

On Thuy Trang’s part, Hollywood might have been quick to replace her for fighting for her deserved compensation, but Vietnamese never forget. She was the first, and for 30 years, only Vietnamese Power Ranger — that is a pretty badass legacy to leave behind. Spoiler alert: the 2023 Netflix special Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once & Always revealed that Trini had a daughter, Minh Kwan, who took over the family business by becoming the Yellow Ranger.

Still, I wish Thuy Trang could be around now to see the 2020s, when the political and social climate, at least in Hollywood, has improved to the point when Asian-led rom-coms and all-Asian ensembles are much more prevalent. Perhaps she could have been the steely mother in Crazy Rich Asians instead of Michelle Yeoh, or the lovestruck sport writer in Set It Up in place of Lucy Liu? Wake me up before I subsume into the reverie of a Thuy Trang renaissance à la Ke Huy Quan's. Thuy Trang was an icon, and may she rest in peace.

In 'Vietnam Retropunk,' a Young Illustrator Dreams of a Cyberpunk Hanoi

2025-07-15T13:00:00+07:00

To Đặng Thái Tuấn, the talent behind illustration project “Vietnam Retropunk,” whimsical depictions of robots and animatronics sprouting out from everyday objects and activities embody the space in between the ancient and the futuristic.

If Vietnam had advanced significantly in machinery and technology since the 1970s, what would it look like? Tuấn explores this question in “Vietnam Retropunk,” an ongoing series consisting of 16 total illustrations making up two books (so far). Woven throughout the series is a sense of nostalgia for Vietnam’s recent past, including important historical episodes like the subsidy era in Hanoi.

Everyday scenes with just a little sprinkle of cyberpunk.

Using a bright color palette and blending pop art, pen art, vintage, and futuristic style elements, Tuấn depicts quintessential Vietnamese everyday objects and activities such as bánh chưng, xe xích lô, street vendors, and mothers on a groceries run, with the addition of robots and animatronics: a cheeky little girl sits eagerly awaiting her robot to stuff, wrap, cook, assemble, and steam her bánh chưng; a mother with grey-streaked hair in floral pajamas is carried by a diligent cart-robot hybrid on the way to get groceries. “I love and wish to depict things that seem simple yet, upon closer observation, express unique stories and qualities of Vietnam,” Tuấn tells me in Vietnamese during our virtual chat.

The North-South Express reimagined as a robotic dragon.

The series is heavily imaginative. Tuấn calls upon childhood through commonplace motifs that are sure to resonate with many Vietnamese readers: toys, traditional food, street snacks, daily commute vehicles, and female figures — the mother, the aunt, the student in áo dài. “I hope that the motifs used evoke in audiences both feelings of familiarity and novelty,” Tuấn explains. “Most of what I depict, the everyday subject matter, feels familiar, but here and there, certain aspects feel altered or standout in a way that may surprise and make audiences think.”

Our childhood toys in mecha form.

In ‘Cảnh Phố’ or ‘Random Streets,’ for example, Tuấn points out how it might seem like your average train on first glances, but the precise inspiration is Hanoi's “tàu điện leng keng,” a network of old tramway criss-crossing in the capital from 1901 to 1991. This is one example of an element of a time Tuấn, having been born in 2000, barely experienced. “These images and way of life mainly exist through stories told to me by my parents and other adults in repetition, [details] that I relish on online archives such as Ảnh Hà Nội Xưa,” says Tuấn. This balance between familiarity and novelty, doused with imagination and recollection, encourages audiences to hold dear the smaller things that make up the Vietnamese way of life in past decades.

New ways to đi chợ!

“Vietnam Retropunk” is therefore a blend of classic (retro) and futuristic (punk) — the punkness here is from cyberpunk, a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting. Art that is cyberpunk often uses a combination of lowlife and high tech juxtaposed with societal collapse to highlight the detrimental impact of drug culture, technology, and the sexual revolution. Tuấn cited Akira from Katsuhiro Otomo, Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow, Cyberpunk 2077, The Blade Runner franchise, and Akira Toriyama as inspirations and personal heroes.

I also offered The Matrix trilogy, to which he agreed. We realized that there was a universality to the cyberpunk subgenre, especially its aesthetics — the doubtful yet eager reception of industrialization and technological revolution in the face of tradition and normalcy. Yet unlike most referenced cyberpunk inspirations, Tuấn’s work is anything but gloomy or nihilistic. With “Vietnam Retropunk” specifically, he wanted to connect with his roots — Hanoi specifically, and Vietnam at large — and embrace his love for where he came from in a way that was authentic to him.

Get your gas the futuristic way.

Given his current high demand, as seen in a thriving freelance portfolio encompassing well-known names such as TiredCity and Uniqlo, one would not have guessed that Tuấn recently graduated with a degree in IT. His journey to illustration has not been linear. “Having always had a knack for design, I had applied to design school at the end of my secondary years, failed short of that, made a pivot, only to find my way back through part time design jobs," Tuấn both bashfully and blissfully recalls.

He went through a period of assembling an amateurish CV and portfolio sparse with nothing but hobby-based drawings and secondary school projects, and getting rejected by all part-time positions except one, a graphic designer job at Memolas, a yearbook design and manufacturing company. It was here where the idea for ‘Bánh Chưng’ or ‘Banh Chung Making Machine,’ the first of “Vietnam Retropunk”’s illustrations, was conceived and realized on a shabby, off-brand tablet bought off of Shopee. As his designs gained traction, Tuấn rewarded himself with a second-hand iPad where the rest of “Vietnam Retropunk” came to be.

The first-ever illustration that started it all.

Having graduated from the simplistic short stories, Tuấn’s portfolio now boasts mesmerizingly detailed, larger-scale illustrations like ‘Hà Nội Rong’ or ‘Moving Hanoi’ that won him a design competition hosted by TiredCity. Looking forward, Tuấn plans to continue with “Vietnam Retropunk” and freelance commissions. He is slowly but steadily working on the first illustration for Book 3 of “Vietnam Retropunk,” as he believes there is still more ground to be covered with the series’ purpose, message, and central themes.

Tuấn's award-winning entry.

For now, through Vietnam Retropunk 1 and 2, Tuấn inspires his audience to not only remember but appreciate and hold dear the slower-paced, analogous way of life that is so enjoyably Vietnamese in this age of rapid technologization; to maintain focus on the small things of value; and to use advanced technology to serve the things that matter.

This article was originally published in 2024.

A Story of Personal, Political Reckoning in a Singaporean Writer's Fictional Wartime Vietnam

2025-07-14T10:00:00+07:00

The Immolation first came to me as a bewildering surprise: at a now-relocated bookshop in Singapore, the book caught the eyes of the 17-year-old me. It was not so much the cover’s pale blue background, or the expression of ennui on the author’s post-impressionist portrait, but rather its dealing with the American War. After all, the title directly referenced the iconic protest by the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức, who set himself on fire on the street of Saigon.

Written by Chinese Singaporean writer Goh Poh Seng, The Immolation was first published in 1977, and republished in 2011 by Epigram Books. A note on the its setting: even though the country name is never mentioned once in the book, the proper nouns’ orthography, as well as mentionings of US presence amidst jungle battlefields and bars in the city-capital, etc. are ostensible nods to real-life Vietnam as the novel’s (unnamed) Southeast Asian country setting.

Francis Khoo (left), a lawyer, was among 150 people who staged a demonstration outside the US Embassy at Hill Street, Singapore in 1973. Together with Professor Daniel Green (hidden) from Nanyang University and Lap Choo Lin (center), a University of Singapore graduate, they presented individual petitions to US President Nixon. They were protesting against the bombing of North Vietnam by the US. Image via National Archive Singapore.

The Immolation centers around Thanh, a doctor-turned-wannabe-poet who returns to Saigon after having studied abroad in Paris. He joins the guerilla National Liberation Front (NLF) with his diverse cast of peers, while being haunted by the sight of a monk smiling as he sets himself ablaze, and his relationships with friends, particularly his love interest, My. Through the course of the story, Thanh questions what it means to live and die for a political cause. Henceforth, the novel is a bildungsroman — a literary work focusing on a character’s journey to maturity, and an ambitious one at that — as it demonstrates Goh’s attempt at tackling postcolonial issues set in a country different from his own, while also articulating existential concerns through the eyes of relatively young, idealistic people.

Sensitivity to Vietnamese culture and historical details

I am pleasantly surprised to see Goh approaching Vietnamese culture and historical details with much sensitivity, amidst the host of English-language media at the time centering the western perspectives towards the American War. One can’t help but wonder what specific research processes Goh has taken to write a novel with empathetic engagements with Vietnamese elements.

Through his characters, Goh waxes lyrical about tangerines in the Central Market evoking the festivities of an incoming Lunar New Year, “black, broad-backed” water buffaloes having a bath alongside squealing children in the countryside, or fish sauce: “its heavy, tangy taste was something so age-old, so familiar as to be part of the people of his country […] Without it, no local meal could be considered complete.” He focuses on the struggles of the Vietnamese in wartime, writing about simple spears and booby traps, but also the Vietnamese landscape. “We sometimes forget how beautiful our country is,” My comments. “[We] only remember the fighting; we only see the suffering, […] the beastliness and the evil. [Some] day, after the victory, our people will inherit peace and this beautiful country again.”

Thích Quảng Đức self-immolates in Saigon to protest religious discrimination in 1963. Photo by Malcolm Browne.

A number of historical details are thoughtfully inspired and embedded into the novel. History lovers might recognize Goh’s vivid references to the 1960s student demonstrations against the regime’s dictatorship and US interventions, the 1968 Tet Offensive that includes a brief attack on the Presidential Palace in Saigon, and of course the Buddhist crisis that peaks at Abbott Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation. Particularly memorable is a scene where the characters hide inside a bomb shelter: “Thanh huddled in the darkness, his body flexed, his chin resting on his knees, foetal in the womb of earth. The earth smelt of dampness. Even with all that noise, he thought he could hear water trickling, like lilliputian drumming.”

“Thanh huddled in the darkness, his body flexed, his chin resting on his knees, foetal in the womb of earth. The earth smelt of dampness. Even with all that noise, he thought he could hear water trickling, like lilliputian drumming.”

Some historical facts and names of certain characters and locations are, however, imperfect. For instance, it can’t be fully verified if NLF fighters ever conducted espionage in bars, nor the extent to which some of them would elope from their missions. One also wonders whether the spellings are changed in service of Singaporean readers more familiar with the Latin orthography of English and Malay; some names are spelled “Kao” and “Thing Hoai Pagoda,” words that don't exist in Vietnamese. These inaccuracies nevertheless, should not be interpreted as defects in and of themselves. Instead, taken as a whole, I recognize Goh’s respect for and desire to understand more about Vietnamese people and happenings. It seems that his characters, especially Thanh, act as vessels for Goh himself, or any non-Vietnamese readers, to acculturate into the Vietnamese setting — observing first-hand, being amazed by the Vietnamese scenes, while empathizing with Vietnamese guerilla fighters’ experiences.

Nuanced characterizations and the irony of ideological wars

Literature professor Dr. Ismail S. Talib, who wrote the preface to the edition, discusses Vietnam’s geo-political importance as an iconic battleground for post-colonial ideologies and its relative distance from Singapore, and how they are possible reasons why Goh decided to implicitly set his novel there, while exploring themes concerning post-colonial Southeast Asia at large. His cast of Vietnamese characters is diverse and nuanced, exemplifying the different kinds of people with their own reactions and rationalizations to wartime political causes.

Goh Poh Seng was a Singaporean novelist and physician. Photo via Wordpress.

In contrast to Thanh’s brooding uncertainty, his best friend Quang Tuyen is a pragmatic and optimistic journalist with a c’est la vie attitude towards wars and their dilemmas. Meanwhile, his love interest My is a fellow student whose personal sufferings become the catalyst for her idealistic and dogged support for the guerilla’s efforts — she even often chastises Thanh for his constant doubts. It is lovely to read about the cheeky and sincere dynamic between the two friends, and, likewise, the lovers’ earnest yet tricky relationship from Goh’s beautifully crafted dialogues. There are also those like Kao, a peer whose words twisted ideologies in his selfish favors against Thanh himself; Thanh’s father Monsieur Vo, who wanted to shelter his son from joining the guerrilla despite being aware of the government’s corruption; or fellow sympathizer Xuan, who's facing doubts on whether to support the cause fully or protect his family. By constructing characters as diverse individuals across backgrounds, characteristics, and degrees of involvement in a political cause, he rebukes views of revolutionaries as one fanatical monolith blindly devoted to a movement, or those harboring doubts towards it as cowards. Ultimately, perhaps Quang Tuyen says it best: “Just because I am joining the Cause, doesn't mean that I agree with everything […] One reason I'm fighting is that I want the right afterwards for more of our people to be human beings.”

Students march to decry US involvement in Vietnam in 1965. Photo by AP.

It then might be difficult to classify the book as either in support of or against communist guerrilla warfare in Vietnam. Vietnamese readers should not be expected to find a concrete unwavering message of devotion, from frustratingly transient character arcs to an ending that leaves them at an ambiguous cliffhanger with none of the senses of triumph, and a reflective yet indecisive main character with arguably bourgeois and defeatist tendencies: “After the bloodshed, would anything be written on that page?” Thanh ponders. “No, there will be nothing. […] This battle would not even make it to the footnotes of any future history written about their time. No one would know. Probably no one would care either…”

Nonetheless, a great number of examples of Vietnam’s war literature, notably those produced post-reunification, are not too different. From Lê Lựu’s satirical A Time Far Past to the famous The Sorrow of War by Bảo Ninh, these works, while different in their tonalities, strip away the need to reinforce reunification’s feelings of triumph, and instead focus on war traumas and systemic post-war struggles. The Immolation exemplifies Goh’s sensitive foresight to the human condition, acknowledging the desolation of war, but also larger existential themes, such as the ironic freewill that might liberate us from one suffering… to another, yet remains the part and parcel of life.

The Immolation exemplifies Goh’s sensitive foresight to the human condition, acknowledging the desolation of war, but also larger existential themes, such as the ironic freewill that might liberate us from one suffering… to another.

All in all, with such ambivalence and bittersweetness, The Immolation will not attempt to offer readers a definite view of the American War nor a solution through a tumultuous socio-political landscape. “Words. They do not expiate. Nothing can do that,” Goh wrote self-insertingly. “But they make you a little healed, whatever you’re suffering from, or rather the real thing you’re suffering from: man disease.” At this point, it has been my second time reading the novel. Compared to his previous debut novel, If We Dream Too Long, The Immolation has unfortunately not garnered much attention in Singapore or Vietnam.

Maybe I’ve been waxing poetic over this book. I am aware that I might have put the book on a pedestal as a Vietnamese person residing in Singapore, a country already without much overt historical or cultural relations with where I originally come from, compared to its more immediate neighbors. The Immolation, as a novel dealing with political strifes that come with nation-building in Southeast Asia at the time, now becomes, to this reader, a sentimental emblem of shared regional concerns, characterized by empathetic appreciation, and a vision towards an interconnected and, even if idealistic, universal human experience. Perhaps by writing with each other, and reading for each other, a book is no longer a Singaporean novel, nor a Vietnamese one, but a novel we can call ours.

Under the Sky, Above the Water: Into the Heat at Ninh Thuận's Salt Fields

2025-07-06T15:00:00+07:00

A 3,000-kilometer coastline is one of nature’s best gifts to Vietnam, bringing about not just ample seafood, but also a motherlode of sea salt.

Salt fields in Cà Ná, Ninh Thuận, whose salinity is highest in Vietnam.

For centuries, salt has entered Vietnam’s collective memory as a cultural symbol that’s both familiar and profound. In our folklore, salt often represents deep affection: “Muối ba năm muối đang còn mặn / Gừng chín tháng gừng hãy còn cay” (The salt remains salty even after three years / Gingers are just as spicy nine months later). Besides, “đầu năm mua muối, cuối năm mua vôi” (buy salt when the year begins, buy lime when the year ends) is a tradition that reflects ancient Vietnamese’s belief in salt as a token of luck, because the pureness of salt can dispel the bad mojo of an unfortunate year.

Vietnam’s coastal communities have made full use of seawater to produce salt for hundreds of years. Along the length of the country, salt farming exists in 19 provinces across all three regions. Amongst those, Ninh Thuận is the “salt capital” of the central region thanks to ideal geographical conditions allowing it to put out nearly 50% of the national yield.

Salt is an indispensable part of life and a symbolic icon in Vietnamese culture.

Mother Nature bestowed on Ninh Thuận breathtaking landscapes, but also a type of acrid climate that will deter even the most enduring visitors. Luckily, it is this constantly dry and hot weather with low humidity and precipitation that makes the province the holy ground for salt farming. Moreover, Ninh Thuận’s 100-kilometer long coastline gives it ample access to saltwater to produce tasty salt grains. Here, salt production concentrates in communes like Phương Hải, Tri Hải, Nhơn Hải (Ninh Hải District) and Cà Ná, Phước Diêm, and Phước Minh (Thuận Nam District). Salt farms, in total, account for almost 3,000 hectares of the province’s area.

Harvesting salt in Tri Hải.

Only by driving past Ninh Thuận during July and August did I finally understand why this place is nicknamed the land of razor-sharp wind and blistering sun. Spectacular hills flow through the foreground while in the distance, mountain ranges stretch straight into the emerald ocean. Each blow of the wind carries that distinctive maritime brackish taste. Once the hills are gone, you’ll immediately be greeted by patches of fields full of mounds of stark white salt. Some squares have been irrigated recently, looking like a placid lake. Others are sparkling with salt crystals, as white as fresh snow. Here and there, conical hats bobble as farmers move about to rake in salt. A sense of urgency lingers in the hot air of August. The more intense the sun is, the more evaporation takes place, so working outdoors in extreme heat is a built-in part of the job. The hotter the day, the busier the work.

Bùi Trọng Hòa, a salt farmer in Phương Cựu, rakes salt into a mound.

I dropped by a salt farm in Phương Cựu, Ninh Hải District, one of the central region’s oldest and largest salt co-opts. I met Bùi Trọng Hòa as he was collecting salt crystals. “The salt trade is mainly active from December to August of the next year. July and August are peak months as the heat is the strongest in the year. It rains very rarely in Ninh Thuận, but when it does, it can destroy an entire [salt] field that’s drying,” the uncle told me as he continued raking. Hòa shared that, if weather permits, his two sào (500 square meters each) of farmland can produce 4 tons of salt after one harvest. Usually, salt crystals will form after 7–10 days of drying. If the sun is consistent and there’s no rain, it only takes 5–6 days from when the field is irrigated with seawater until the first batch can be collected.

Under the searing summer sun, Hòa’s shirt was soaked with sweat. His hands gripped the rake tightly. He deftly moved the salt from one field to another. Pyramids of salt started piling up on the water surface in neat rows. The field surface became a giant mirror reflecting the scenery; the symmetry was astounding. In the middle of everything, salt farmers were like artists painting white brushstrokes on the canvas of Ninh Thuận.

Võ Văn Lâu, another farmer in Phương Cựu, harvests salt.

On the field, everyone has their own task. One rakes salt into mounds while another shovels the final product onto wheelbarrows, each transporting outside into a larger pile. Võ Văn Lâu couldn’t give me the exact number of trips he takes every day because there were just so many: “Salt farmers like me sell our bodies to the trade. If nature blesses us, we have salt. When it’s time to harvest, we rake and transport countless fields until there’s no more salt to collect. There are times in the middle of the day when dark clouds start forming everywhere. We’re very nervous because if it rains, the past few days of waiting are wasted.” He then slowly pushed the heavy wheelbarrow down the field paths to a gathering point just outside. From there, wholesalers will take the salt to distributors and refiners.

The collected salt is moved from the fields to a central gathering point.

Salt farming requires not just strength, health, and endurance, but also ample folk knowledge and experience, as farmers need to observe the working conditions and make adjustments accordingly. The process might involve several steps, but overall, the two main ones are prepping the field surface and salt crystallization.

According to Hòa, around the lunar October every year, farmers will begin treating the field surface before irrigation takes place. The fields are cleaned to remove trash, weeds, and moss, then the ground surface is flattened. After that, farmers form the raised edges of the fields before drying out the earth's surface in the sun to minimize water seepage. Long before, salt production followed the sand-drying method, but over time, this has shifted to industrial-scale methods. Farmers also make use of tarps to cover the field surface to retain seawater. Salt created this way is cleaner and purer, containing fewer contaminants. At the moment, around 2,400 hectares of fields in Ninh Thuận use tarps and around 630 hectares follow the naked ground method.

There are two main ways to produce salt: sand-drying and tarp-drying.

Once the field surface has been treated, farmers irrigate the fields using seawater through a custom system of pipes. In the first stage, the fields are referred to as “ruộng phơi” (drying field). After some of the water has evaporated, the remaining saltwater is channeled to another field, “ruộng ăn,” to promote crystallization. Whether evaporation is fast or slow depends on several factors such as field surface area, the ground’s thermal absorption, and weather conditions. After 7–10 days, white salt crystals would appear like snow.

The rate of crystallization depends on field surface area, the ground’s thermal absorption, and weather conditions.

Salt-making is a physically demanding job that hinges a lot of weather patterns. During wetter months, the salt fields must rest. But as the farmers told me, “each trade has its own joys.” If fishermen are delighted to see boatloads of fish every morning, the happiness of salt farmers lies in the white flakes of salt that glimmer in the sunlight. Thanks to the tireless work of farmers in Ninh Thuận, the distinctive flavors of the central ocean are enjoyed by Vietnamese from every corner of the country, encapsulated in tiny grains of sparkling salt.

Enter the Dreamy Tales Told by the Works of Young Illustrator Thố Đầu • Hổ Vĩ

2025-07-02T09:00:00+07:00

Being born at the cusp of the Year of the Rabbit (cat) and the Year of the Tiger offers the literal meaning for Hoàng Phúc's artist name, thố đầu • hổ vĩ, but he hopes it carries a metaphorical one, as well: “a humble beginning but a positive end,” he explained to Saigoneer. thố đầu • hổ vĩ’s origins may be humble — he started seriously focusing on illustrations just four years ago when he started university — but he has already reached remarkable achievements, as evidenced by three projects he shared with us.

‘Chapter 4: Chaos’ from the “Trăm hoa đua sắc” project.

“Vô công,” “Hội,” and “Trăm hoa đua sắc” each reveal Hoàng Phúc’s unique style that blends cultural materials, images, and indigenous symbols from Vietnam and East Asia to tell contemporary stories concerned with existential issues, including freedom, loneliness, and feelings of uselessness. Notably, he concerns himself with multi-piece projects as opposed to one-off illustrations, due to his belief that artwork operates best when several images come together to tell a concise, if not always obvious, story. Whether his own work or that of others, he explained: “Many single paintings with the same concept that complete a story together satisfy me more.”

‘Chapter 1: Leisured’ from the “Trăm hoa đua sắc” project.

“Trăm hoa đua sắc,” (100 Blooming Flowers), for example, is a 2023 project that captures his experience of visiting art exhibitions and museums. He observed that other patrons were not there to enjoy the art, but rather to take photos and videos of themselves for social media, with the artwork simply serving as a trendy backdrop.

‘Chapter 2: Wandering’ (left) and ‘Chapter 3: Witnessing’ (right) from “Trăm hoa đua sắc.”

He proceeded to his experiences with visual references from Vietnamese paintings, photography, architecture and traditional crafts. The small details, such as stone lion statues, lacquer textures, and rounded railing pillars, all connect the works with cherished traditions of visual identity. However, the characters, seen posing and playing but never admiring the work, offer criticism about the younger generation and its relationship to art. “Trăm hoa đua sắc,” was released in 2023, and Phúc said that, on further reflection, he believed “maybe it is a different form of experience for them. They are not really interested in exhibitions, but are spending time to care about themselves in an art space.”

A work from the “Hội” project.

Meanwhile, a newer project takes a more lighthearted tone, underscoring his thematic versatility. “Hội” concerns ítself with moments of childhood play and nostalgic merriments. Vibrant colors and bold lines complement the begone fashions and festival activities.

Two untitled pieces from “Hội.”

In addition to the children occupied with carefree games, “Hội” contains striking depictions of slightly surreal roosters. While not overtly addressing the project’s theme, within the context, the bird’s throat feathers call to mind exuberant confetti or firecrackers, while the looping legs tipped by graceful talons suggest the sleek seriousness of play. But this is just the way it makes me feel. Such room for interpretation is intentional. As thố đầu • hổ vĩ explained: “I often use metaphors and metonymies to develop a story. A second layer of meaning lies beneath the stories, the eye-catching images will always be a gift to me every time I watch and create works.”

Texture, color and details flirt with metaphors in this work from “Hội.”

“Hội” suggests a sense of lurking danger amidst the play.

Select teaser images from Hội have been appearing on his social media alongside some from “Vô Công” (No Work), another project set for release soon. The series of illustrations seeks to capture the feeling of helplessness and emptiness a person feels when unemployed, when the world’s economy is struggling or more broadly when a person simply feels useless in their lives, the artist explains.

Modern emotional states acquire traditional aesthetics in “Vô Công.”

Taken side-by-side, these sister images from “Vô Công” reveal Thọ đầu Hổ Vĩ's interest in textures and patterns.

This story, perhaps immediate and relatable to many people in 2025, borrows imagery from the past. Ceramic pots, imperial-era headware, a pagoda, and a quang gánh carrying an individual remind viewers that ennui is a timeless element of the human experience. One of thố đầu • hổ vĩ's favorite works to date, it serves as a good introduction to his work and his overarching interest in works that contain “a realistic theme expressed in a romantic form.”

Internal turmoil seems to create a setting of celestial lastitude.

thố đầu • hổ vĩ. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Only 26 years old, Phúc likely has a long career ahead that will be filled with surprising developments and beautiful fascinations. Pressed about his future plans, he told us: “Right now I'm interested in telling a long stories with concepts (courage, love, adulthood, etc.) and specific, touching stories the way [a] mangaka does; not exactly manga-like artwork, but maybe a more narrative and long-term project.” Regardless of what lies ahead, his work will be very worth keeping an eye on.

Altered colors and textures for the same images result in radically different moods.

Perhaps there is jubilation to be felt in the absence of work.

To view more artworks by Phúc, visit his Instagram account @thodauhovi.

[Top image: An untitled work from “Hội”]

Summer Nostalgia by the Sea: La Veranda Resort – MGallery Unveils a Golden Escape

2025-07-01T15:48:00+07:00

Summer travelers are invited to step into barefoot elegance on Phú Quốc’s storied shores.

Cozied up against a sun-lavished beach on Phú Quốc Island, La Veranda Resort – MGallery invites travelers to relive the slow, romantic summers of the 1950s. Recognized with the 2024 World Luxury Spa Awards and celebrated among Vietnam’s Top 10 Best Resorts in the 2025 DestinAsian Readers' Choice Awards, La Veranda offers a rare blend of French Indochine grandeur and barefoot tropical ease.

Built as a French colonial-style seaside mansion, La Veranda evokes an era where summers stretched endlessly and life moved with grace. Shaded verandas, handwritten postcards, soft jazz on the breeze — every corner of the resort transmits a timeless charm designed for today's discerning traveler.

For the 2025 summer season, from now until the end of September, La Veranda is offering two carefully designed offers that invite guests to rediscover the elegance of slow living by the sea.

The Holiday Saver

Crafted for seekers of an all-encompassing escape, the Holiday Saver package aims to give guests a full and extended embrace of the many things La Veranda does best. It includes a stay, cocktails, spa experience, and luxury dining. Guests can luxuriate in a four-day, three-night stay that includes buffet breakfasts, two leisurely lunches, and two candlelit dinners at the award-winning fine dining destination, The Peppertree, a tropical cocktail experience, as well as a full-body treatment. Taken together, the entire summer stay will capture the slow, sunlit pleasures of a tropical Indochine summer.

Wellness Hers & His

La Veranda is well known for its health and beauty treatments and the Wellness Hers & His caters to travelers who want to look and feel better than ever after a vacation. The package for two offers a three-day, two-night stay paired with a full-day holistic wellness journey at the resort’s award-winning TĨNH Wellness Sanctuary. Couples can choose between a Detox or Burnout Recovery program, each thoughtfully designed to restore both body and mind.

Whether lounging by the saltwater pool, indulging in award-winning spa therapies, or savoring gourmet French-Vietnamese cuisine overlooking the Gulf of Thailand, every moment at La Veranda feels like stepping into a postcard sent from a romantic version of the past.

Escape into a barefoot summer dream at La Veranda — where the past lingers sweetly and new memories are waiting to be written:

See full summer offer details here.

La Veranda's website

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La Veranda's Email

Phone Number: +84 (0) 297 3982 988

La Veranda | Tran Hung Dao Street, Duong Dong Beach, Phu Quoc

More Than Just Prosperity, Ông Địa Is My Personal Patron Saint of Misplaced Things

2025-06-28T15:00:00+07:00

I was maybe seven when I first clasped my hands and whispered a plea to Ông Địa.

I had lost a cheap red plastic ring, which was a treasure in my childhood world. I searched everywhere, crawling under the bed, shaking out my schoolbag, and suspecting the dog. Still nothing. Teary-eyed, I turned to my grandmother. She didn’t scold me, only smiled and said gently: “Pray to Ông Địa, honey. He’s very fond of little ones.”

So I did it awkwardly. I folded my hands and muttered a promise to eat my vegetables and stop hiding report cards. Minutes later, I found the ring on the lowest step of the stairs, somewhere I was sure I had already checked. It felt like a wink from the universe.

From then on, every time I lost something: a pencil, a chair tie, a wallet; I turned to Ông Địa. Not in ceremony, but in habit. A whisper under my breath. A pause. A breath of hope.

We never talked much about faith in my family, but folk spirituality was everywhere: altars tucked into corners, rice offerings on ancestor days, bowed heads, and burning incense. These weren’t rules we followed, they were rhythms we lived. Folk beliefs weren’t taught so much as absorbed, like steam from a simmering pot.

To others, Ông Địa is the plump, smiling figure perched beside Thần Tài at storefronts, guardian of wealth and luck. But to me, he was something quieter: the gentle keeper of misplaced things, the listener of small requests. He was a presence that lived in the cracks of daily life: in the kitchen corner, beside the potted plant, and inside the quiet act of asking.

As I grew older, I sometimes wondered if praying to him was silly. I didn’t always believe he’d help. And yet, the ritual remained. Not because I thought someone was listening, but because it gave shape to my worry. In the small chaos of losing something, the act of pausing to ask made the world feel kinder. Less random.

I’ve come to realize that my little prayers weren’t just about finding things. In whispering his name, I wasn’t just asking for help. I was recalling my grandmother’s voice, the warmth of home, the belief that unseen things still matter.

Even now, when I misplace my keys or phone, I find myself stopping to issue that quiet plea. And sometimes, the missing thing shows up. Sometimes it doesn’t. But always, I feel a little steadier.

Maybe that’s the gift folk beliefs offer: not answers, but companionship. Not certainty, but care.

The Charming 1990s Nostalgia in the Phim Mì Ăn Liền Cinematic Universe

2025-06-27T11:00:00+07:00

If you lurk around online discussions of Vietnamese cinema, you probably have stumbled upon the term phim mì ăn liền, or “instant noodles films.” This popular Vietnamese expression describes local motion pictures with low-effort production value. But the term is not merely a common moniker. It dates back to the 1990s, when a specific type of commercial flick got audiences flocking to the cinema.

Introduction to phim mì ăn liền

Since initiating economic reforms in 1986, Vietnam experienced major political, societal and cultural changes. This transformation extended to the film industry and Vietnamese cinema. Prior to this era, the state fully subsidized the production and distribution of motion pictures, but state funding for film production declined during the Đổi Mới era, so many film studios struggled to produce feature films with the resources available. More production companies therefore started seeking private investment to stay afloat. This privatization ushered in a new era dominated by commercial films made to generate profits.

In the modern lexicon, “phim mì ăn liền” is often used derogatorily to describe slapdash filmmaking efforts.

Concurrently, technology innovations led to a change in filmmaking methods. After the introduction of VHS tapes, film studios began making shot-on-video films using camcorders, which were cheaper, faster, and easier to produce than traditional film stock recordings.

Đổi Mới also exposed young audience members to foreign pop culture via Hollywood blockbusters, Hong Kong martial arts films and South Korean soap operas. This presented a new challenge for local cinema, as the new generation’s taste in films had changed, and the average watcher's choices were no longer limited to the often war-centric narratives offered during the previous era.

Việt Trinh

Diễm Hương

Lý Hùng

These factors contributed to the emergence of the phim mì ăn liền era of Vietnamese cinema. These 1990s films were made to appeal to the masses, and thus sell more tickets. They were usually made quickly on a small budget and shot on video. The nickname “instant noodles film” was derived from the commonalities between the movies of this era and instant noodles: they were cheap and could be made quickly; they were easy-to-digest and lastly, instant noodles are seen as an affordable meal for when you’re hungry, which parallels how 1990s commercial films came about when audiences were hungry for a newer approach in cinema.

The stratospheric rise and fall of phim mì ăn liền

Moviegoers responded positively to some of the earliest instant noodles films, and many achieved box-office success. An average of 50 feature films were produced every year by the start of the 1990s, giving rise to Vietnam's first generation of movie stars. Thu Hà, one of the rare names from the northern region to find success in mì ăn liền, discusses the popularity of noodle flicks in an interview with VTV: “This type of film was everywhere in theaters. At that time, everywhere we went, the public always knew about it.”

Many photos taken of these actors were printed on calendars, notebook covers, and postcards. These are old artifacts preserved by collector Nguyễn Văn Đương. Photo via Thương Mái Trường Xưa Facebook page.

But the era was short-lived, and by 1994, the genre began to decline with no definitive causes identified. Some theories suggest it was the rapid, negligent filmmaking methods focused on cash-grabbing and the rise of television series that turned watchers' attention elsewhere. Film critic and researcher Ngô Phương Lan noted that the instant noodles flicks “oversaturated” theaters and the audience eventually lost interest due to “the lack of quality in terms of narrative and artistic values.”

After the heyday of phim mì ăn liền, the genre gave way to arthouse films and the resurgence of state-ordered war movies in the 1990s. In retrospect, this era of Vietnamese cinema evoked both negative and positive perceptions. Even today, every once in a while when there is a streak of low-quality domestic releases, the media would use the reference the term “mì ăn liền” to reiterate how the swift production of 1990s noodle films led to their downfall, as a warning to filmmakers.

Still, modern audiences cherish these films and are able to look past their production flaws. Perhaps, the nostalgic feeling of revisiting the A-list actors that they once loved and an increased understanding of the industry’s restraints at the time can make the low-budget craftiness of phim mì ăn liền seem charming to today's viewers.

This era is often credited with introducing fresh narratives and techniques, marking an important stage in the development of the nation's film industry. The 17^th Vietnam Film Festival in 2011 paid tribute to instant noodles cinema in its opening ceremony by including the era’s popular titles in the showcase of Vietnamese Cinema History.

Older Vietnamese might have vague memories of watching these movies, but it has been more than thirty years since the peak of instant noodles cinema. Luckily, thanks to the advent of YouTube, plenty of these 1990s flicks are available online. Given the sheer variety in both number and quality, I thought it would be helpful to look at a few pioneering works, some popular subgenres, a prominent filmmaker along with some wildcards.

1. The pioneers

The foundations of phim mì ăn liền can be attributed to two films. These two works achieved major box office success, and helped inspire and define the genres, tropes, styles, acting and overall feel of the works that followed.

Vị Đắng Tình Yêu (The Bitter Taste of Love, 1990)

This was arguably the most popular film of this era, the Mì Hảo Hảo of instant noodles film. Vị Đắng Tình Yêu is a bittersweet love story between Quang, a humble, nerdy medical student, and Phương, a passionate piano artist named. Phương experiences a downward spiral after a doctor finds a bullet fragment stuck in her brain, forcing her to give up her music career, because thinking too deeply about music could be the death of her.

This was the first instant noodles film that I watched, and I was initially distracted by minor issues. The transitions between scenes feel harsh and disconnected due to the lack of establishing shots. At many pivotal points in the narrative, the film resorts to quick and lazy expositions as opposed to more engaging scenes.

But when I look past these flaws and just accept them as the film’s outdated characteristics, the film turns out to be quite decent. The narrative explores Phương’s need to choose between following her passion or survival. Also, Quang’s gang of six friends has strong chemistry with one another. The actors’ authentic portrayal of energetic schoolboys balances the heavy tones of the film with comedic and wholesome moments. So while there are annoying craft and technical flaws throughout, it’s still worth a watch for its authentic and intriguing humanistic story.

Vinh Quang Cinema (formerly named Casino Cinema) displaying the poster of Vị Đắng Tình Yêu (left), one of the most popular phim mì ăn liền. Photographed by Raymond Depardon in 1992. Photo via Flickr user manhhai.

Representative of the genre: An iconic phim mì ăn liền starring the era’s most popular actors, and the abundance of technical flaws was probably the result of the rapid filmmaking methods. [10/10]
Overall quality: A decent story that needs to improve its filmic language. [6.5/10]
How it holds up today: The narrative and acting performances would still resonate, but the film’s weaknesses would create some irritation. [5/10]

Watch Vị Đắng Tình Yêu here.

Phạm Công - Cúc Hoa (1989)

This is a live-action adaptation of a popular poem by the same name. While not as well-known as Vị Đắng Tình Yêu, Phạm Công - Cúc Hoa was a box office success. It follows the life of Phạm Công, from the day he falls for Cúc Hoa and later marries her, to when they have children. Phạm Công must leave for the capital to serve in the army and encounters many difficulties, while Cúc Hoa struggles to raise their two children on her own.

While in the capital, Phạm Công is forced into marrying the daughter of authority personnel as his second wife. The film thus explores the themes of fidelity and family values, while critiquing the polygynous practices among the aristocrats of the old society. It’s a well thought-out narrative, but unfortunately, the issues lie in how the story is told. During the 2 hours and 35-minute runtime, it overuses prolonged musical montages with neither interesting visuals nor relevance to the plot.

From a technical standpoint, the film has a large amount of combat scenes that are hard to look past. The actors are very slow in their movements as if they are play-fighting. Overall, this film feels outdated, and would be better if it were shorter and more concise in its storytelling.

Representative of the genre: The only standout characteristic of this film compared to other mì ăn liền flicks is the duration, as most films of the era were usually 90 minutes long. [9/10]
Overall quality: A film with a good story, but too slow to get through. [5/10]
How it holds up today: It’s an attempt to make a historical epic that fails to either hide or overcome technical limitations. [2/10]

Watch Phạm Công - Cúc Hoa here.

2. The popular subgenres

There are two major themes in phim mì ăn liền: adolescent romance and historical drama. The former is the most dominant genre of the era, as these youthful love stories were accessible to young audiences, and filmmaking-wise, their contemporary narratives and settings make them easier to produce. For a closer look of this genre, the 1992 film Vĩnh Biệt Mùa Hè (Farewell, Summer) is my pick of choice, because it was not only a major box office hit, but also commonly regarded as a classic adolescent romance of Vietnamese cinema.

The second theme is historical drama. Prior to this era, the genre faced many ups and downs, but experienced a revival during the phim mì ăn liền period with multiple historical films gaining box office success. The 1991 box office hit Tráng Sĩ Bồ Đề (Bồ Đề, Man of Vigor), is considered one of the most impressive Vietnamese historical films in terms of technical quality.

Vĩnh Biệt Mùa Hè (Farewell, Summer, 1992)

Vĩnh Biệt Mùa Hè focuses on best friends Hằng and Hạ, as they navigate romantic relationships during their last year of high school. Hạ, the wealthier of the pair, falls for a humble guy from an impoverished background. Meanwhile, Hằng pursues a taboo love affair with a lecturer in her school.

This film is considered a classic for a good reason. It elevates itself above the familiar tropes of the “poor boy with rich girl” relationship and the teacher-student love affair via its storytelling devices. It begins as a conventional tale about young love, but moves beyond will-they-won’t-they tensions to explore the meaning of true happiness. It’s a very relatable coming-of-age story featuring carefully presented and fully fleshed-out characters.

The film also enjoys a unique visual style thanks to the consistent use of close-up shots which give the actors the chance to communicate their characters’ emotions through facial expressions. The actors’ deliveries of their lines, however, is cheesy, and their speaking is monotone. Even so, the narrative is strong enough to outshine these flaws.

Representative of the genre: The film has common traits of phim mì ăn liền in terms of technical quality and genre. The narrative is excellent when compared to its peers. [8/10]
Overall quality: An exceptional melancholy tale about adolescent love. [8/10]
How it holds up today: Even though the monotone dialogue might be a turn-off to some people, the coming-of-age story is good enough to remind you of your own teenage years. [7/10]

Watch Vĩnh Biệt Mùa Hè here.

Tráng Sĩ Bồ Đề (Bồ Đề, the Man of Vigor, 1991)

In the 10th-century of Vietnam, during the last years of the Đinh Dynasty, the royal family experienced internal disputes. The protagonist, a knight named Bồ Đề, is tasked with taking down a secret group conspiring to overthrow the throne.

This film showcases how instant noodle films often drew inspiration from wuxia movies. Tráng Sĩ Bồ Đề, like wuxia films, includes fast-paced, choppy sword fights, a skilled martial arts warrior living by specific code, and a story that takes place in the midst of a political conflict.

One would expect it to be a historical epic with large-scale combat scenes, but the film turned out to be more of a thriller focused on clandestine political activities in gloomy, secretive forests. This atmosphere creates impressive tension and intrigue. Still, the film’s historical setting and dependence on alter egos make the narrative hard to follow.

In terms of the martial arts elements, the choreography is quite well-done with combat mostly happening in the dark, probably to hide technical limitations. The fights thus come across as realistic. Overall, it’s a gripping historical thriller, with entertaining sword-fighting scenes that don’t feel outdated in any way, even though this film was made in 1991.

Representative of the genre: It has tropes of historical dramas of this era, but it’s more competent in hiding the technical limitations. [8/10]
Overall quality: A film that keeps you on the edge of your seat from start to end. [7.5/10]
How it holds up today: Excellent choreography that is still fun to watch 32 years later. [8/10]

Watch Tráng Sĩ Bồ Đề here.

3. The works of Trần Cảnh Đôn

The director’s chair for instant noodles films was graced by both established filmmakers and new faces. A remarkable personality among them, for me, is Trần Cảnh Đôn, one of the era’s most productive directors, with eight feature films made during the prime of his career from 1990 to 1994. Nearly all of them achieved commercial success, and due to his preference for casting emerging actors, many of his films became the launching pad for some of the decade's biggest names.

Director Trần Cảnh Đôn on set. Photo via Dân Việt.

Two works by Trần Cảnh Đôn are great examples of phim mì ăn liền. First, the 1991 romantic comedy Cô Thủ Môn Tội Nghiệp (The Pitiful Female Goalkeeper), Đôn’s first award-winning film, represents his early success during the instant noodles era. Second, the 1992 film Ngôi Sao Cô Đơn (The Lonely Star) is regarded as one of Đôn’s best works and the film that “sets the standard” for 1990s commercial films.

Cô Thủ Môn Tội Nghiệp (The Pitiful Female Goalkeeper, 1991)

Even today, the subject of women's professional football is rarely explored on film. It was even more niche in 1991 when Trần Cảnh Đôn took on the topic for this film. The story revolves around Thục Hiền, a girl obsessed with football. She has the opportunity to become the goalkeeper for a semi-professional team. Though, it results in a rejection by her would-be fiancé, his parents, and even her own mother.

The antagonists in this film are well-crafted and multi-faceted. Logical motives were established regarding why these three characters are adamant in their rejection of Hiền, as well as how they slowly evolve and grow. Unfortunately, the movie fails at the midpoint when it adds more characters including the football team’s coach and several of Huyền’s teammates.

From a technical standpoint, there is a glaring issue in the film’s usage of dubbed audio. The actors’ audio is too isolated and does not blend harmoniously with the environmental sounds. Unfortunately, this flaw is present throughout the film, making the watching experience less enjoyable. All in all, compared to other instant noodles films, it shares similarities in terms of technical and storytelling shortcomings, but the progressive narrative focusing on women’s football feels like a breath of fresh air.

Representative of the genre: Aside from the unique, niche topic, this film is your average phim mì ăn liền. [9/10]
Overall quality: Too ambitious in its character building, but it examines women in sports in an interesting way. [6.5/10]
How it holds up today: The progressive story might be interesting for modern audiences, but the audio issue is nearly impossible to look past. [4/10]

Watch Cô Thủ Môn Tội Nghiệp here.

Ngôi Sao Cô Đơn (The Lonely Star, 1992)

With Ngôi Sao Cô Đơn, once again Trần Cảnh Đôn brought something new to the table: a rare detective plot in the phim mì ăn liền landscape. The film starts with investigator Quốc in his office with some colleagues, admiring a musical performance by a singer named Mỹ Nhung on TV. A phone call drops the breaking news that Mỹ Nhung has been found dead in her own bedroom. Quốc embarks on a quest to solve her murder and soon uncovers the secret life behind the glamorous facade of the famous musician.

Just like the previous entry, Đôn attempts to showcase numerous characters as nuanced and complete individuals, and this time he succeeds. The chronicling of Mỹ Nhung’s life involves exploring more mature themes of women in the patriarchal music industry.

Beyond rich character development, it’s a stylistically strong film too. Suspenseful music, dark settings, a stern investigator who lights smoke at every chance he gets; it calls to mind a classic 1950s Hollywood detective movie. I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment that this film “set the standard” for 1990s commercial films, as this is my favorite in the list.

Representative of the genre: The only similarity this film shared with others is the starring of popular actors in the instant-noodle era. Otherwise, the narrative, genre and overall production value is done too well to group it among its peers. [3/10]
Overall quality: My personal favorite film in this list. [9/10]
How it holds up today: It’s prolific in both storytelling and technical quality, it definitely will hold up if released today. [10/10]

Watch Ngôi Sao Cô Đơn here.

An Homage to the Sounds of Saigon Past That Are Going Extinct

2025-06-19T11:00:00+07:00

After someone or something reaches the end of their days, which aspects of their existence in the minds of those who remain would be the first to succumb to the erosive brush of time? Is it sight, smell, touch, taste, or sound?

Sight is perhaps the most enduring of all. I keep a small passport photo of my late father in the inner pocket of my wallet. The wallpaper of my sister’s phone remains a picture of him beaming over a cake and candles we took on his last birthday we celebrated together. If I close my eyes right this moment, I can immediately transport myself to the days of my scrawny past, walking out the school gate at sunset and seeing his face there, strands of his curly, unwielding hair poking out from underneath a white helmet. There are visual reminders of his time with us safely stored in stacks of albums in our attics at home.

But these days, with every daybreak, it’s getting harder and harder to remember what he sounded like. He was a boisterous northern man whose every phone exchange would echo across whichever public space that was unfortunate enough to host us at the moment, so I remember the volume, but try as I might, I’ve lost the ability to conjure up the texture of his laughter, the timber of his reprimand, the twang of his call for me every time I step out of the school gate. He passed away in 2015, just a few months before I got my first phone with video recording capability, so to me, his existence today is purely confined to static poses in printed photos and soundless technicolor moments that my memory could retain. The voice of my late father, in the grand scheme of Saigon’s audio ecosystem, is entirely extinct.

Museums are there to slow down the decay of visual artworks; libraries are the archivists safekeeping the sanctity of knowledge past; and when it comes to sounds, perhaps our biggest ally in sound conservation is the internet, because, as the old adage goes, “the internet is forever.” My existence in Vietnam somewhat overlaps that bizarre timeline spanning the two extremes from “what is the inter-web?” to “every minutia of life is online,” so of the multitudes of sounds that I miss from my formative years, many have fortunately been documented, even though their original sources are no longer around. Amongst these functionally extinct audios include the theme song of comedic variety show Gặp Nhau Cuối Tuần, the jingle of ice-cream brand Wall’s, and the diverse meows of my orange cat Taxi, who passed away in 2020.

The opening sequence of Gặp Nhau Cuối Tuần. VTV has blocked embedding so you can listen to the theme song again here.

There was nothing particularly evocative of humor in the 30-second opening sequence of Gặp Nhau Cuối Tuần (Weekend Hang), but for a generation of millennials, that bass-heavy, bouncy tune was the prelude to the weekend. The show used to air on national channel VTV3 every Saturday at 10 am, so it often stretched over that magical weekly moment when I woke up realizing that I didn’t have to go to school, followed by an hour of lazing around in bed watching the show until my mother called me down to have lunch. Gặp Nhau Cuối Tuần only ran from 2000 to 2006, and even though it was recently rebooted this year, the new season didn’t revive the old theme song, which, for all intents and purposes, now only exists on old YouTube accounts.

The Wall's mobile cart jingle.

At times, I wonder if Wall’s was so culturally significant to me just because I was a child born into an era when we didn’t have many options in terms of entertainment, or because its jingle was truly a timeless earworm. It was only 10 music notes, rendered in rudimentary MIDI and broadcast by scratchy speakers attached to mobile vendors traversing every alley of Saigon to dish out refreshing popsicles with flavors like Dâu Rừng (Jungle Berries), Khoai Môn (Taro), and Sô-cô-la Chuối (Banana Chocolate). And yet, nothing could perk up a prepubescent Saigoneer the way those 10 notes did. We learnt them by heart and even invented childish lyrics to sing along, like “kem đến rồi, kem đến rồi, không có tiền thì không có kem / ice cream is here, ice cream is here, no money no ice cream.” In 2003, Wall’s was bought out by local F&B group KIDO, which rebranded the ice cream branch and phased out mobile vending. Those magical 10 notes were also gone from the sonic landscape of Saigon.

Jingles and theme songs often suffer the same tragic but simple fate: ceasing to exist the moment the creations they’re supposed to promote cease operation. But tracing the extinction of some other sounds is less straightforward.

The iconic cân sức khỏe as seen on a reality TV show.

I remember my first-ever visit to the supermarket with my parents vividly, when I was still in primary school, not because of the variety of colorful snacks or the smorgasbord of sights and sounds, but because the cân sức khỏe điện tử (electronic scale) that were parked outside of it. These scales towered over me back then, comprising an metallic disc above to measure one’s height while they stood on the scale, both functions were rather basic, but what made these scales so out-of-this-world to me was the fact that after a turn on the height-weight measure, the scale would deliver a health assessment and give blunt recommendations based on your stature, like “you’re 2 kilograms underweight, please nourish yourself” or “you’re slightly obese, please exercise and pay attention to your health.” Everything, from the promotional recording to the body weight commentary, was delivered in a distinctive northern female accent — which was strangely foreign to a southern child’s ears.

From a fairly recent interview with a mobile laminator, I’ve since learnt that this cân điện tử didn’t appear out of thin air. In the early 2000s, entire villages in the north where she lived were producing them and moved to Saigon to make a living weighing strangers. The music, promotional lines, and health assessments were all recorded there. However, this trade was not sustainable so scale vendors have gradually moved on over the years, her included. It’s impossible for me to tell if cân điện tử, and its idiosyncratic sounds, has been lost forever in the city, but I haven’t seen one for over 15 years, and finding a complete recording of its soundtrack online has proven to be a herculean feat.

Sticky traps might not be the most effective way to catch mice, but they might have the most memorable promotional material.

The audio of cân điện tử is just one artefact amongst thousands of street calls that are all extremely challenging to keep track of as, at times, they’re often considered not culturally significant enough to warrant documentation. The calls that come from tapes — like that of cân điện tử, mice sticky traps, bánh mì Sài Gòn, and hột vịt lộn — might be more accessible thanks to their uniformity and prevalence. Alas, the unique ones that hail from the dialect, creativity, and distinctive tonal qualities of their vendors will be gone for good once the vendors stop hitting the streets, be it due to a change in career, relocation, or worse, death. I’m still convinced that the COVID-19 pandemic has taken from us more than economic growth and citizens: when the people are gone, so are their culture, community, and lived experience.

I Grew up With Print Newspapers and Magazines. Now, They're Disappearing.

2025-06-17T14:00:00+07:00

Print media was a crucial part of my childhood and a friend that opened a window into a vivid world of knowledge that was fascinatingly strange in the eyes of young me. But right at this moment when I hit the streets as an adult, the newspaper vendors of those days seem to have vanished, their colorful spread of magazines gone amid the busyness of today. A quiet transformation and farewell has begun.

Facing the pressures of time, print media is increasingly absent in our daily life: disappeared from the backpacks of students and office workers, rarely seen at morning coffee tables both in- and outside the house, and retreated to the tiny kiosks at street corners to continue catering to a handful of loyal readers.

A brief history of print media in Vietnam

News production in Vietnam has been on an arduous journey with numerous changes and upheavals. Before 1975, news agencies mainly served the state, transmitting official dispatches, propaganda, and public service announcements to the people. During this era, print media was limited in its quantity and reach. After 1975, it flourished into one of the main media channels connecting Vietnamese from all regions of the country. Newspapers like Tuổi Trẻ (Youth), Thanh Niên (Young Adult), Phụ Nữ (Women), Công An Nhân Dân (The People’s Police) are not just sources of information, but also lively forums for cultural and societal discussions.

A newsstand at the corner of Tự Do-Nguyễn Văn Thinh (now Đồng Khởi-Mạc Thị Bưởi) streets in 1969. Photo by Brian Wickham.

Once upon a time, print media seeped into every nook and cranny of the country alongside the rucksacks of news sellers. Every morning, Vietnamese of all ages pored over still-warm pages in pavement cafes or even on their bikes parked right next to newsstands.

Alas, with the arrival of the 2010s during the explosion of the internet, print’s reign was gradually chipped away, until only a few news kiosks and vendors remained.

Print media in my memory

My formative years were the 2000s, when print was still the predominant source of information, especially in far-flung provinces like Bạc Liêu, my hometown. In a locality where life was generally slower, media platforms like TV, radio, print, and the internet coexisted, but print still played an important role in bringing current affairs to locals.

The newspapers that I bought back then all undertook an extended trip of nearly 300 kilometers from Saigon to Bạc Liêu by coach every early morning. They would first arrive at a wholesaler’s, who matched the front cover with the inside pages, before being distributed by mobile vendors all over town. This was why readers where I lived could only get their daily paper fix at noon or early afternoon.

Traditional newspaper wholesales start sorting before sunrise, and each newspaper must be matched by hand. Photo via Lao Động.

At the time, my brother often bought Mực Tím (Purple Ink), a weekly magazine for teens, from an elderly vendor. He used to teach before 1975, and switched to doing admin tasks for a co-op after. Once the co-op was disbanded, he started making a living by selling lottery tickets and newspapers on his bike. Every day, he carried a huge bag on his chest and biked for 30 kilometers to deliver newspapers to regular customers.

Once, when he stopped by our home to deliver the weekly Mực Tím, I spotted an issue of Nhi Đồng (Children) in his bag, standing out thanks to a colorful cover. Since then, I would wait by our door every Monday for the sound of his bike, looking forward to his figure appearing in our yard to deliver our weekly reads.

Colorful teen magazine of the 2000s. Photo via Phụ nữ Việt Nam.

I was beyond elated the first time I got my hands on that issue of Nhi Đồng. In front of me were cheerful child models and stylized headlines, prompting me to quickly leaf through the magazine for the week’s most fascinating columns, like short stories and quizzes. It felt like having a fresh secret to uncover every week — a new sense of anticipation to be fulfilled. And sometimes, I would sneakily smash my face into the pages and breathe in a lungful of that inviting scent of paper and ink, even though my mother had explicitly forbidden me many times before in fear of germs from the printer.

Over the years, I managed to convince my parents to let me subscribe to a slew of other publications like the daily Tuổi Trẻ and Thanh Niên, the weekly Tuổi Trẻ Cuối Tuần and Tuổi Trẻ Cười, and the special editions of Nhi Đồng and Mực Tím, etc. These less frequent publications often explored specific topics in a deeper way, while the daily versions usually arrived in my hands too late, after I had already learnt about the day’s news on TV.

I enjoyed buying and reading print media. On free afternoons at home, I would sit at my desk with an issue of Tuổi Trẻ in front of me and start reading out loud one article after another, while trying to mimic the diction of TV news anchors as if I were leading the evening news.

After a while, my connection with print newspapers was severed as our news vendor stopped delivering due to poor health. His adult children all settled elsewhere in the country, so there wasn’t anyone in his household to take over the family trade.

A reunion with an old friend

While in university, buying newspapers was no longer something I did often, even though they remained in my life — on the hands of our campus security guard or right on the wooden hangers of our library. I was always drawn to them whenever we crossed paths; I would pick one up and marvel at the pretty pictures and neat blocks of text on the glossy paper surface.

When I started working, I got a Wave motorbike, which opened up ample opportunities to explore Saigon by myself. Here and there, during my trips meandering the city alleys, I would come across a streetside magazine stand with its mosaic of covers, just as enthralling to me as ever. One time after I got off work, I stopped by the small stand on Phạm Ngọc Thạch Street, right in front of the HCMC University of Economics. That was where chú Hùng made a living.

Chú Hùng’s kiosk on Phạm Ngọc Thạch Street. Photo via Phụ Nữ.

Chú Hùng’s newsstand is not terribly large, made up of just a few stacks of magazines pushed together. Still, its display — a kaleidoscope of newspaper covers and his measured, relaxed manner — had an inexplicable charm in the eyes of passersby. Perhaps it was the way it was a placid foil to its hectic environs: a clamorous main street filled with hurried people and lined by flashy shopfronts.

He told me that Phạm Ngọc Thạch was once bustling with numerous newsstands catering to endless throngs of customers. Gradually, after 25 years in the trade, he was the only one left. His income also deflated due to dwindling readership, but he held fast to the kiosk as he has gotten used to the freedom and flexibility it afforded him. Luckily, even though the fate of print media is grim now, he’s still serving a number of regulars from different age groups. A few senior customers still stop by in the early morning to grab their favorite newspapers. A plethora of students from nearby universities like the HCMC University of Architecture would seek him out to buy magazines on fashion, design or visual arts for their academic needs. Others rely on him for certain rarer specialist publications.

After our chat, I decided to get a few issues to support him, all from familiar titles whose print editions I haven’t touched for years — some are kids’ magazines, a satirical comic, and one weekly magazine that I’ve never seen before, Phụ Nữ Chủ Nhật.

Though the market for print media is no longer as lucrative, chú Hùng is still hanging on. Photo via Thanh Niên.

At chú Hùng’s kiosk, my “childhood friends” still wear the same outfit, so I could recognize them immediately. The logos, paper dimensions, and color palettes are still the same after all these years, but inside, things have changed a lot: the children’s magazines used to print only a few pages in color, but now are all colored; the satirical magazine was once printed on thin, flaky paper, but has now changed to a glossy stock. The columns are still presented and arranged neatly, but their content now seems strangely distant to me.

The last magazine in my haul was a weekly special edition of Phụ Nữ newspaper, released on Sundays. Reading through every article, I could sense the authors’ progressiveness and dynamism, and their passion for building a home for in-depth, meaningful discussions. Every publication has its own tone of voice, and that of Phụ Nữ Chủ Nhật is assertive, open-minded, and steely in the face of societal hurdles and dated norms as it advocates for the pursuit of happiness and equality in our community.

I was on cloud nine thinking that I'd found a fantastic read with a distinctive voice, enough to draw me to chú Hùng’s kiosk every week — until I arrived at the penultimate page. There was an announcement that the publication would cease from January 2025. The letter from the editorial team didn’t go into specifics as to why they decided to stop after 28 years in the business and reaching 50,000 copies per issue.

Many long-enduring magazines have stopped enduring. Photo via Phụ Nữ Chủ Nhật.

At that moment, I realized that our encounter had happened too late; before I could celebrate, it had already gone.

In remembrance of newspapers past

Two weeks later, I showed up at chú Hùng’s again to get for myself that last-ever Phụ Nữ Chủ Nhật issue, but he regretfully told me that he stopped stocking the title after the announcement. I called the distributor and was directed to the paper’s headquarters on Điện Biên Phủ Street. Fortunately, there were still a few left. The editorial team dedicated page 3 of the last issue for the goodbye letter, written very affectionately and assertively:

“It was inevitable. How could any of us escape from the cycle of the universe? To reduce ourselves to cinders to return with a new self that’s fresher, better is a feat worth undergoing. Isn’t our most challenging task, especially us women, to leave behind bad habits and overcome hurdles? [...] We’d like to say goodbye with the sincerest gratitude to our beloved readers and hardworking collaborators, who have brought to the table so many interesting, meaningful, and thoughtful articles. We firmly believe that we will meet again, just to recognize and love one another as we used to.”

Once in print, papers can’t immediately change their content, so they serve an important role as witnesses of history. Photo via Lao Động.

That farewell letter reminded me of how I first started reading print media. To a child of a provincial town, newspapers and magazines were the most valuable source of information I could get my hands on. They were my windows to the big wild world out there, unveiling the events happening beyond my tiny town, things that at times I couldn’t quite fully understand, but have helped me learn about the interesting complexities of our society. Those papers nurtured my soul, and have no doubt inspired me in my own endeavors in writing today.

In print, once the newspapers have appeared in the flesh, it’s impossible to modify what’s on the page like the way online media can. This limitation, however, contributes to the invaluable role of print media as a witness to the historical episodes taking place at the time it was printed.

“I don’t think the newspapers will vanish right away,” chú Hùng shared with me. “But they will slowly dwindle.” A river will not evaporate in the blink of an eye, because the water will find ways to fit into tiny creeks. Print media is perhaps similar to that drying river. It will keep at that flow, telling stories to the few regular readers, and perhaps, gaining new readers like me and Phụ Nữ Chủ Nhật.

A xe ôm driver reads a newspaper in the morning in Mỹ Tho City. Photo via Báo Ấp Bắc.

While many newspaper vendors might feel a sense of inevitable sadness and acceptance about our state of print publication, some magazines are returning and changing to adapt to the conditions of today. Tomorrow is a mystery, but there’s one thing I am sure of: whenever I pass by chú Hùng or any other news kiosk on the street, I will make sure to stop by to get a copy for myself.

In Tây Hồ, an Artisan Community Holds Fast to Their Lotus Tea Traditions

2025-06-16T14:00:00+07:00

Every sip of lotus tea encapsulates all the essences of the natural landscapes of Tây Hồ.

The arrival of lotus season in Quảng An Ward, Tây Hồ every year ushers in a flurry of activities for local tea dryers. Venerated by many as “the best tea of the ancient eras,” Tây Hồ’s lotus tea is not just flavorful, it also represents the essences of heaven and earth, and the dedication of Quảng An residents over the past centuries.

Tây Hồ’s lotus is of the Bách Diệp cultivar.

The cultivar that Quảng An tea artisans use to perfume the leaves is Bách Diệp lotus. The flower is a rare local breed characterized by its numerous petals in a bright shade of pink — “bách diệp” means a thousand leaves. The outer petals are broad and graceful, and their sizes get smaller closer to the core. The land near Hồ Tây is blessed with the ideal climate to produce lotus blossoms that are exquisite and capable of producing ample lotus rice (flower anthers).

Starting from 4am every morning when the flowers have barely bloomed, Quảng An artisans sail their boats into the lake to pick lotus blossoms, their oars slicing in between verdant swaying leaves. Their fingers pluck the stalks with care and then arrange the flowers into piles on the boats. Male members of the family are often in charge of harvesting flowers. The harvest ends around the time when the earliest sun rays hit the water's surface. Bundles of hoa sen are transported back to their home workshops to be processed.

Flower harvest must be done early in the morning to minimize scent loss.

Lotus buds collected from before sunrise are the most fragrant.

Phương Huy, a tea maker in Quảng An, told me: “We have to pick the flowers as early as possible when the sun hasn’t shown up, because the flowers haven’t fully bloomed yet and can retain their scent. The longer they are exposed to the sun, the more the scent will fade.” After the flowers are harvested, workers will extract lotus rice grains to infuse with tea leaves.

I arrived at the village on Đặng Thai Mai Street in Tây Hồ at 7am. It was very obvious which households were traditional tea artisans. During that time of the year, their homes are inundated by thousands of lotus blossoms. The entire family gathers in a common space to de-petal the flowers, package tea leaves, and harvest lotus rice.

Lotus tea artisan Phương Huy.

Pink petals take over tea-making families in the morning.

As the flowering season of lotus is very short, Quảng An is only busy with tea operations for around three months of the year. How many lotus blossoms are harvested also depends on the day and month. Commonly, the beginning of the season in May will yield fewer flowers than in mid-season (June, July).

After walking along Đặng Thai Mai’s many lotus ponds, I stopped by the homestead of Ngô Văn Xiêm and Lưu Thị Hiền, both famous tea artisans in the area. Their household is among the handful of families still producing lotus tea this way in Hanoi. Xiêm shared: “I don’t remember when this tea-making trade became a thing here, but even when I was a little boy, I grew up with lotus. Every May comes a busy time when we pluck lotus, remove lotus rice, and scent our tea.” Over the years, his fondness for the family trade swells. He’s always toiled over how to maintain the aroma of tea in the household, as to him, lotus tea is not just a beverage, it’s a cultural space with enduring longevity. Xiêm has passed down the family trade to his children — the fifth generation of tea makers.

Ngô Văn Xiêm, one of a handful of Tây Hồ residents who continue to make traditional tea today.

From a humble but elegant treat for visitors in one’s home, Tây Hồ’s lotus tea has earned a reputation as one of Vietnam’s most valuable teas. While dismantling the petals from a lotus flower, Xiêm explained to me: “It takes 100 flowers to produce 100 grams of lotus rice. So to scent one kilogram of tea leaves, 1,000–1,500 flowers are needed. There are many steps involved in making a batch of high-quality tea. That’s why Tây Hồ’s lotus tea is so expensive.”

Lotus blossoms from the pond are dismantled carefully.

During the height of the harvest season, Xiêm’s family could pick up to 10,000 lotus flowers per day. Arriving from the lake, the flowers are de-petalled and the lotus rice grains are extracted and filtered to select the purest grains. The work must be done in the morning to prevent aroma loss, so even the petal removal involves several workers. One person plucks out the outer petals while another removes the inner petals to leave behind only the pistil. Finally, the final person painstakingly picks out the rice and shakes off the dirt. “Lotus rice removal might look simple, but it’s actually quite finicky,” Xiêm commented while showing me the steps. “A tea maker can’t hurry. This is a test of patience and meticulousness.”

"Lotus rice" refers to the white-colored anthers in the middle of the flower.

It takes 100 flowers to scent 100 grams of tea, so a kilogram of lotus tea might require up to 1,000–1,500 flowers.

Next, grains of lotus rice are used to infuse tea, a type of high-quality leaves grown in Thái Nguyên, dried completely, and packed with tiny lotus petals for preliminary scenting before the rice enters the picture. The final product goes through seven rounds of scenting, each spanning three days and followed by one round of one-night drying. From the moment the lotus flowers are harvested, 21 days of scenting, infusion, and drying are needed to arrive at the final lotus tea. “Tea scenting needs someone with years of experience,” Xiêm shared. Currently he’s the only person in the family who’s qualified to do this step.

Besides tea leaves scented with lotus rice, there's also a "lite" version (ướp xổi) in which the leaves are poured into the lotus bud and wrapped tightly using lotus leaves.

As this method doesn't require long infusion sessions, the lotus fragrance is not as strong.

Because of this level of complexity in the making and scenting of Tây Hồ lotus tea, drinkers should practice care and respect when offered lotus tea. To make lotus tea, naked, unglazed earthen pots are often used, in addition to small ceramic cups. “To enjoy lotus tea, you must be patient too, because hot-headed drinkers can’t fully relish the flavor of the tea,” he cautioned. A sip of Tây Hồ lotus tea yields complex notes of flavors, from the floral fragrance to the tannic, bitter notes of the tea to a faintly sweet aftertaste that lingers on your palate. More than that, what's special about lotus tea is that even before taking that sip, just bring the tea cup close to your nostrils, and you can already smell the tender aroma of lotus buds — an evocation of the sky, earth, water of Hồ Tây and swaths of blooming lotus unfurling right before your eyes.

Driking lotus tea means drinking in the essences of summer and flavors of nature in Tây Hồ.

New Tarot Deck Uses Traditional Motifs, Legends and Folk Wisdom to 'Speak Vietnamese'

2025-06-15T09:49:00+07:00

Tarot decks can feel written in a foreign language.

The cards’ images, typically drawing from Renaissance Europe, Christian mysticism, and Greco-Roman allegories, can feel alien, even to those of us who speak the symbols fluently. U Linh Tarot was the first time I saw cards that could “speak Vietnamese.”

Illustrated by artist Trần Nguyễn Anh Minh, also known as Chú Mèo Kì Diệu, U Linh is a Tarot deck rooted in Vietnamese folk spirituality, inspired by motifs as varied as Đông Hồ woodcuts, Việt Điện U Linh Tập, imperial robes, and village legends. For Anh Minh, the deck is more than a passion project.

Trần Nguyễn Anh Minh, also known as Chú Mèo Kì Diệu.

“From 2009 to 2021, there wasn’t a single Tarot deck from Vietnam. We kept using foreign decks, and it felt disheartening. Vietnam doesn’t lack culture, so why don’t we have our own voice in the Tarot world?” Anh Minh explained when I interviewed him at his home last month. That question became the seed for U Linh Tarot. And from that seed bloomed a vivid cosmology: one that’s not only Vietnamese in content but Vietnamese in structure, rhythm, and soul.

Before U Linh, there was Thiên Địa Nhân. Anh Minh’s first deck, his undergraduate thesis at Văn Lang University, was a travel-inspired journey through Vietnam’s landscapes and temples. While Thiên Địa Nhân celebrated beauty rooted in the physical world and specific places, Anh Minh was drawn to portraying beings of the spirit realm.

Thiên Địa Nhân, Anh Minh's first deck. Photo via Comicola

“U Linh actually came first, as an idea,” he confessed. “But it had a harder birth. Thiên Địa Nhân was like the strong older brother while U Linh is the little sibling that needed protection.”

The delay was strategic. He needed time. And he needed help, especially from his university friend, an Lang Hoàng Thủ Thư, whom he credited as indispensable: “Without her, there wouldn’t be this deck. She’s the one who helped me connect with culture, spirituality, and our roots.”

That collaboration allowed U Linh to become one of collective resonance. The U Linh Tarot is not a literal translation of the popular Rider-Waite deck from 1909. Instead, Anh Minh treats each card as a question: “What is this card’s soul? And where in Vietnamese culture does that soul live?”

In traditional Western decks, the Three of Pentacles card is often illustrated through the building of a cathedral, symbolizing cooperation and shared vision. In U Linh, this concept is reimagined through the Đông Hồ painting Hứng Dừa (Catching Coconuts), where three figures embody the essence of teamwork: one climbs the tree, another catches the coconuts, and a third stabilizes the base. Their coordinated effort becomes a living metaphor for harmony and mutual support in any collaboration.

The Three of Pentacles card (left) and the Nine of Cups (right). Photos via Anh Minh.

Known as the “wish card,” the Nine of Cups represents emotional satisfaction and fulfilled desires. U Linh interprets this archetype through the joyful figure of Ông Địa, the Southern guardian deity in Vietnamese folk tradition. With his cheerful demeanor and round belly, Ông Địa symbolizes abundance, ease, and benevolence. People often pray to him for the return of lost items or blessings, making him a natural embodiment of the card’s spirit: relaxed joy and the quiet confidence that good things will come.

Meanwhile, The Star card traditionally represents spiritual clarity, guidance, and a sense of renewed purpose. To design his version of it, Anh Minh faced the challenge of finding a Vietnamese symbol that captured this radiance, as five-pointed stars are not commonly used in traditional sacred imagery. The turning point came with the discovery of embroidered star motifs on the ceremonial robes of the Nguyễn dynasty. Drawing from this imperial heritage, U Linh’s Star card shines with cultural depth, affirming the deck’s ability to bridge past and present with luminous hope.

Anh Minh chose images with ritual care. The Tower is reimagined through a culturally resonant symbol: a coconut tree struck by lightning. Rather than depicting a European-style tower crumbling in chaos, the image evokes a distinctly Vietnamese belief that lightning is a form of divine punishment, striking down where evil resides. Here, the Tower becomes Thiên Ách, or "Heaven's Judgment." When it appears, the card speaks not just of sudden upheaval, but of spiritual reckoning. It may signal a necessary and forceful intervention – an act of justice, sweeping away hidden corruption or false foundations.

The Star card (left), Tower card (center) and Three of Swords (right). Photos via Anh Minh.

Even the Three of Swords, a card synonymous with heartbreak, was reinterpreted for the deck. Rather than focusing solely on emotional pain, this version emphasizes reason triumphing over emotion. A sword pierces a book, not a heart, signaling the clarity that comes from difficult but necessary decisions. It reflects the kind of heartbreak that stems from doing what is right, such as leaving a harmful relationship or letting go of an illusion. The card honors the quiet strength it takes to choose wisdom over attachment, even when it hurts.

Though spiritually inspired, U Linh required relentless design discipline. Anh Minh drew all 78 cards between Tết and April; just over three months. “My iPad didn’t have any games. When it ran out of battery, I slept. When it was full, I got up and drew. If I didn’t finish two cards a day, I wouldn’t let myself sleep.”

Matching this maniacal pace was a near-obsessive attention to symbolic structure. As a trained designer, he approached each Tarot card not as an illustration, but as semiotics. “Tarot isn’t just illustration; it’s language. Why is the hand raised instead of lowered? Why hold a cup and not a wand? Everything must have a reason.”

Anh Minh consulted Lang Hoàng Thủ Thư, sketched, rejected, revised, and repeated. Along the way, he introduced extra cards and alternate versions of traditional archetypes to reflect Vietnamese dualities. The Fool, which marks the beginning of the Tarot journey – a symbol of innocence, freedom, and stepping into the unknown – appears in two forms: Cậu Ấm and Cô Chiêu, representing parallel masculine and feminine paths.

The Cậu Ấm card (left) and the Cô Chiêu card (right). Photos via Anh Minh.

At the journey’s end is The World, the final chapter in the Fool’s arc, symbolizing fulfillment, integration, and wholeness. Anh Minh offers two interpretations: one depicts Cậu Ấm transformed into a grounded farmer: mature, self-reliant, and committed to the labor of everyday life after completing his quest. The other portrays Cô Chiêu as a radiant goddess having completed her inner journey of healing and self-realization and now embodying spiritual harmony and grace.

The Cô Chiêu World card (left) and the Cậu Ấm World card (right) Photos via Anh Minh.

“This deck strays a bit from the standard, but that’s the Vietnamese yin-yang philosophy. If there’s a man, there must be a woman. If there’s a path of reason, there must be one of spirit.”

Many assume U Linh concerns itself with nostalgic touchpoints, but that’s not accurate. It is interested in metaphysics. “This isn’t memory,” Anh Minh said. “These are spirits who haven’t yet reincarnated. We call it memory only because we can’t see them.”

To him, the deck is not a memory book but a channel. It reveals how Vietnamese ancestors encoded ethics and cosmology in stories, and how they interpreted suffering as imbalance and harmony as sacred. In his words: “Tarot is a philosophical book. It may have only 78 cards, but each card is a chapter on human nature.”

Though the first print run sold out quickly, Anh Minh is already preparing a reprint and a companion website, where he plans to elaborate on symbols too controversial or complex for the booklet included with the deck. He’s also mentoring new artists working on folk-inspired decks, collaborating on projects like Sông Núi Nước Nam, and joining group exhibitions that present Vietnamese spiritual art in contemporary formats.

“We must know who we are,” he told me at the end. “U Linh is an excuse to explore Vietnamese culture for those who don’t know it yet, who’ve never heard of it.”

As a reader, a Vietnamese, and a seeker, I know this deck is not merely about fortune. It is about becoming fluent in our own sacred language.