It was an intimate event in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh district last weekend where celebrated writers Vu Tu Nam and Thanh Huong launched their new book, an English language publication entitled Letters in Love and War, translated and edited by Metro Writers. The work is a translated collection of the love letters that the two writers exchanged as young journalists during the resistance wars of the last century, formerly released in Vietnamese as Hoi Uc Tinh Yeu. A matching re-release of

When my father passed away in 2010, he was about halfway through writing a memoir. I found the fragments on his old, failing PC hard drive, which miraculously survived just long enough for me to copy the files before it too blinked out of existence. Ironically, the documents concerned his attempts to deal with the death of his own father in the early 70s, and told the story of a trip he’d made to the Greek islands to claim a small plot of land that Granddad had left behind. I