“I’m always homesick for Vietnam. To write is to return home. That s why I had to bring Vietnam alive onto the pages. I had to hear the people speak, I had to listen to the music, to the language; I had to smell the food, see the landscape that s my way of returning home. Whenever I’m homesick, I just return home via my writing.”
While Remembering Water does devote careful attention to the catastrophic moments in Tuan and his family’s life, it gives equal space to smaller, more common experiences, whether it s the simple joys of teaching a childhood crush how to ride a bicycle or the visceral thrills of riding a motorbike during the city’s monsoon season.
A historic house in Hà Giang would not have been established as a tourism site if it were not for the movie Chuyện của Pao (The Story of Pao) which premiered in 2006 and won numerous awards including four Golden Kites and was introduced at the 2007 Cannes International Film Festival.