Tales, sensitively told, of life in postwar Saigon.
A text elegant in its sobriety,
precious and delicate like oriental
paintings, which, with a vein of poetry that absorbs even the saddest
of private and collective memories, provides us with a picture of a
contemporary Vietnam little known, rare, even outside of everyday
thought. "The most pleasant and the most tragic country in the world",
writes the
authoress, who points out the peculiarities and the
contradictions with gentle irony, levity and able refinement.
The end of the war did not bring an end to all the eternal problems:
electricity and running water are still
precious commodities and it is
necessary to work very hard in order to survive taking on many rôles.
To cope with such a difficult daily life, the protagonist takes refuge
in music, making song her main raison d'être.
Singing is the most effective way of learning to breathe; breathing is
the best way to conquer fear, enabling a rising above human
limitations. Unforgettable the tender but strong, subtle and evanescent,
slight figure of the singing teacher, Fiore di Pesco, capable of
teaching the most sophisticated techniques to enable the mind to speak
with the heart.
The book was published in 2003 by Edizioni e/o. The authoress, Anna
Moï, once called Thien Nga ("Celestial Swan"), the same as the name of
a hotel in Saigon. She left Vietnam in 1973 (at eighteen) to flee the
horrors of the war and found refuge in Paris, where she worked as a
fashion designer. She has now returned to her native country: in the suburbs of
Ho-Chi-Min City, in a house on stilts.