Vietnamese Intent

The aircraft "Il-86" on the Moscow – Ho Chi Minh flight in the summer of 1994 flew for ten hours and made a stopover in Delhi. Thus begins Alexander Belyaev's story about his childhood and teenage years spent in Vietnam. The central market "Ben Thanh," known among the Soviets as "Saigon Bazaar," the market in "Thanh De," where you can buy tinctures made from snakes, geckos, and seahorses in huge glass bottles, street eateries that serve "pho soup," "lao soup," and "Saigon pancakes," evening discos where youth gathered on luxurious motorcycles like "Honda Steed" and "Yamaha Virago," dancing to Ace of Base and Dr. Alban... The author allows memory to filter out the unnecessary and leave only the most expressive details captured by the gaze of a bewildered child. At the same time, this gaze, conveyed by an already formed author, is equally focused on the surrounding adults of the narrator – Soviet people suddenly found themselves in a post-Soviet world. 

 Alexander Belyaev is a poet, translator, Japanologist, theorist and practitioner of Oriental writing, and the author of the books "Ginkgo Leaves" and "BUNGEIRON. A View on Japanese Writing".