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Promotional copy:

I married someone who could have written this book. I don't think she did, or any of her friends. But it recalls them all to mind vividly, children born with the unification of Viet Nam in 1976

who entered precocious adulthood just when in 1986 the Secretary General of the Communist Party declared the renovation and opening of the society that brought me there almost 10 years later.

That all is now a Time Far Past (Thời xa vắng) as a novelist of 1986 wrote about his own childhood before the war, married off when Lê Lựu was a small boy. I love that book as I do Do Hoang Ngoc Anh's novel.

Here is a ditty about some time spent reading The Renovation a couple months ago, fourth of the half dozen I have written so far of maybe a dozen total to come. I love the time far past the story conjures

and I love the diction. That woman I married wrote like that. I did light rewrite on her work at her demand until she too could write English with metropolitan authority.

If I brought this book to a publisher for another edition that is what I would have to do. That is, by the way, what people like me do at American publishers for all our native speakers including journalists and professors of English,

because because none of us enjoy world-standard elementary educations. In France the author writes the book and god help any publisher who messes with it over matters of style and taste.

So I don't do that kind of thing. Never, as I love to hear a Vietnamese speaker say in English because it reminds me of my grandmere speaking, never.

Edit the English of a Vietnamese who has been using it in Malaysia through adult life? Why? Do you want to lose the way to a time far past?

Hey, if you like reading me write about the authors of Viet Nam as, you know, people who read and write, please consider signing up for free to say so. It is the one thing I can do

for these people, to read them and write about them such that you read about their work. If it means something to you it means something to them.

Please consider patronizing all this reading at $50/year or subsidizing the whole project at $250/year. The war machine of the United States encourages you by deducting your gift from your income before tax.

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