Many of the sellers on Saigon’s Dong Khoi St have been on the job for decades. The street has seen huge change, including the demolition of landmark heritage buildings. But these faces have stayed the same. This is the city’s historic main street and Ms Lan (pictured) has been selling books outside the Union Square building (formerly the Eden Centre) for three decades. Her Vietnam version of the pop-up bookshop, fittingly built around the motorbike, looks out at the Continental Hotel, the Opera House and the Caravelle Hotel, three city landmarks. Ms Lan is deaf but is excellent at lip reading - even a foreigner’s imperfect Vietnamese. She also manages to convey messages back with great skill. She held up a copy of Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" for me and remembered the days back in 2001, when the main square was closed off for Phillip Noyce's film adaptation of Greene’s prescient 1950s novel. The thing that struck me as I looked through her book selection, is how little it’s changed since I first started looking through it more than 20 years ago. The books about Vietnam are either guidebooks or pre-1975 war histories. While Vietnam has opened its doors to foreign capital, luxury products and investment, writing books about the country has proven an almost impossible task. Despite a huge amount of international interest, there have only been a handful of non-fiction works of substance written for the general reader, about post-war Vietnam. It’s all too hard. Foreign investment is welcome. Foreign historical and political interest less so. So if you’re travelling through Vietnam and hoping to pick up a book to bring you up to speed on the country’s post war history, good luck. The authors of two of the better known post-war books, "Shadows and Wind" by Robert Templer (1999) and "Vietnam: Rising Dragon" (2010) by Bill Hayton, were subsequently banned from re-entering. Ms Lan, like other streetside book sellers around the city, sells Shadows and Wind, arguably the more harsh of the two books. These books won’t be sold in any of the city’s official bookshops, where shelves of English language titles focus on business, computing, language learning, cooking, picture books and a selection of 19th century literature. Vietnam is a nation of incredible stories. Like any country, there are positive and negative stories. There's bucketloads of inspiration and character - as well as misery. Very little of either sees the light of day. That was most vividly rammed home during the country’s recent 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War back in April. Journalists from around the world descended, churning out stories that were mostly the same as those written in 1995, 2000 or 2005 - missing a treasure trove of new material about the modern nation, its accomplishments and its blemishes. Watching the city from here for 30 years, Ms Lan probably has her fair share of amazing, untold stories too. At the end of our chat, and since I didn't buy a book, I offered to give her some money for her time. She graciously refused.
