I was born in 1946 in the northwestern part of Vietnam, in a small place called Lạc Sơn. My father was a tailor. He had a little wooden shack that hugged the side of one of the market streets; its walls were always adorned with all manner of clothes. A humid mist hung perpetually in the air, much like the entrance to a public bath-house. This was where I was born. This was my home. My very first memory was a ‘zsst, zsst’ sound. It was the ever-present sound of the steam iron being used on clothes. When I was ten, we moved house. We left our quiet two-room shack on North Street and moved to the hubbub of South Street; under a neon glare we rented a two-storey stone-built house, strong and sturdy. I think this demonstrates that Father attained certain advantages from being a tailor. But father didn’t want us – me and my older sister, Vĩ Nạ – to follow in his footsteps – to spend our lives with a pair of scissors in one hand and a measuring tape in the other. He would always say, ‘Given that I’ve made enough clothes for you, your children and grandchildren to wear, you two need to find your own path in life.’

Later on, Vĩ Nạ moved a bit further south to Cửu Long for work, and I entered the University of Hanoi. Before I left for university my father gave me a beautiful velvet-covered Chinese notebook, the size of a regular paperback, embroidered in gold with a four-clawed dragon. On the title page he inscribed: ‘When the music and legends go silent, the architecture of a city still sings.’