Where is Trang-Daï?
Trang-Daï and friends, Saigon, 1988.
Where is Trang-Daï?
The year was 1988. Thirteen years after the last helicopter had left the roof of the American embassy, communist Vietnam was handing out its first visas to westerners. For the young photojournalist that I was, Saigon revealed itself like a frangipani bloom offering up heady perfumes of Indochina, of war, of nostalgia and mystery. Among the street children, a young girl selling chewing gum who thwarted a pickpocket’s attempt at robbing me. Trang-Daï was proud of her country and would have deemed it unbearable that a Vietnamese tarnish its image. Trang-Daï led me through a Saigon that I would never have discovered on my own. I was not the first foreigner with whom she had shared her love of her country ; she had hidden a suitcase containing letters from the world round. A dangerous treasure knowing that the police stopped and interrogated the Vietnamese who had contacts abroad. After my departure, we corresponded for a time, then nothing more, and no news at all for…gosh, thirty years now! Where is Trang-Daï?
