Ho Chih Minh City

Another Rolleiflex portrait

St Joseph's Cathedral, Hanoi

Leica M6, 2004

Family on a Scooter

Water

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

From Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings, Faber & Faber Ltd, 1964

Larkin looks a little like Eric Morecambe.

Woman on a Scooter, Hanoi

An excellent article in Asymptote:

A Deluge of New Vietnamese Poetry by Hai Dan-Phang

"In the audio clip of Nguyen Quoc Chanh reading his poetry you can actually hear the sounds of a city: the drone of motorbikes gliding down avenues, stray horn beeps of taxis angling through congestion, an emphatic voice from the crowd rising and breaking like a lone cloud. To my ears, it sounds just like Ho Chi Minh City. The porousness of the echo-chamber that constitutes the studio for this recording is especially audible mid-way into the third-line of the first poem in Chanh's samizdat Hey, I'm Here (2005):

Saigon punctured, a corpse not yet buried, the capital sinks a few inches each day [...] words survive thanks to crossbreeding [...] A national secret is the feasts derived from the fortunes of poppies, to be human is to be humiliated, to be Vietnamese is to be super humiliated [...] Someone advertises on the Web: I need a sexual partner who's a vanguard in thoughts and actions…"

Mother & Child, Hanoi

Review by Annuska Derks in New Mandala of
It's a Living: Work and Life in Vietnam Today, ed. Gerard Sasges, NUS Press, 2013 

"Despite such obvious changes, the stories demonstrate the continued importance of the family, which on the one hand provides support for learning skills or finding a job and on the other hand needs support.  This latter need is often the prime motivator to endure long separations and sometimes hard, dirty, dangerous or tedious work"

Boy, Hanoi

Floating Sweet Dumpling

My body is powdery white and round
I sink and bob like a mountain in a pond
The hand that kneads me is hard and rough
You can't destroy my true red heart 

Ho Xuan Huong