The Renovation (x) and Đổi Mới (i)

from Do Hoang Ngoc Anh and Đô Hoàng Ngọc Ánh

I have written more often about the novel The Renovation than any other single work. I started in our first month, the second work covered, the third author.

The first chapters unstuck something in me. They recalled the memories of the 1980s shared by younger friends from Ha Noi in the 1990s so vividly that I wondered if 1 of them had written it.

The friend I had in mind visited with me from April 1994 through March 1996 the writers whom the Vietnamese Communist Party had asked to criticize their society in 1986 as part of đổi mới, renovation. Then the party had shut them down.

1945 through 1985 was a hard past for anyone who had lived it or watched to digest. The authors, older than me, loved to see my younger friend rocketing forward into a more free and prosperous future.

Then last year I was fascinated to read the author Do Hoang Ngoc Anh, my friend’s younger contemporary, looking back from now at that trajectory. It loosened me up to start writing 3 of these studies each week of some single log in the jam of my life in Viet Nam.

I feel warmly towards The Renovation for that effect. It was lovely to read in the author’s inscription to Đổi Mới that my letters here reading his English version played some positive role in his then publishing the Vietnamese one.

Can’t wait to read it.

This was the first and only Viet Nam letter so far about Đổi Mới by Đô Hoàng Ngọc Ánh. It was the tenth of 10 so far about The Renovation by Do Hoang Ngoc Anh.

The first appeared on February 16, 2022, the second on February 23, 2022, the third on March 12, 2022,

the fourth on April 2, 2022, the fifth on May 2, 2022, the sixth on June 4, 2022,

the seventh on July 16, 2022, the eighth on September 10, 2022, and the ninth on September 14, 2022.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.