…the union of the dragon Lạc Long Quân and the immortal Âu Cơ: they had a hundred children together, but because they were so different (he was a dragon from the deep seas, she was an immortal and only felt at home in the mountains), they ended up separating. Lạc Long Quân, summoned home by his mother, took half the children and went towards the sea; and Âu Cơ took the other half into the mountains. This was the origin of the Vietnamese people. I…

…events them from tipping into outright silliness. Not by much, admittedly). My Vietnamese progresses; I can now get *some* words recognised by my mother when I say them (don’t laugh. The potential for screwing up words in this language is oh-so-boundless). And this weekend is going to be busy busy, as I’ll be at Rencontres de L’Imaginaire in Sèvres with the H, hopefully signing a number of books greater than zero… Also, this: awesome xkcd comic. I…

…City of Silence” by Ma Boyong (translated by Ken Liu): part 1, part 2. Incidentally, the blog is also looking for fiction they could showcase–preferably set outside the US/UK, or by authors from outside the US/UK (note that this overlaps with, but is not *quite* the same thing as fiction by US/UK PoCs). No payment, unfortunately–everyone’s a volunteer and the website runs on a shoestring, but you’d be contributing to a worthy cause; and they take…

…in until midnight on the 24th of December). So, basically, they’re going round the “underworld” rock before getting there. A detail of the crib characters (the santons). One of the reasons we picked those over other choices was that the Virgin Mary isn’t standing up, but is resting, and we both felt this was a more realistic position for someone who’s just finished labour. I wish we had more space for putting in more characters, but, as said befor…

“Có công mài sắt, có ngày nên kim”: “If you work hard enough at sharpening iron, one day you’ll have a needle” (literally “Put effort [into] sharpen[ing] iron, have one day in the end [a] needle”). Basically, insofar as I can tell, the closest equivalent would be that nothing is obtained without hard work. Again, I’m pretty sure of my translation, a lot less sure about my reading of the proverb. Progress continues apace; I’m turning to vocabulary…

…uite effectively. So far, so good. Trouble is… I haven’t been able to find this particular tea here. I’m therefore hunting for a substitute. Am I right in thinking a good grade of Sencha tea from Japan would taste about the same, or am I completely off-base? I haven’t been very impressed with the one variety of Sencha that I bought, but it was definitely the cheap kind (google tells me that Yabukita is a particular category of sencha, but I haven’…

…ere mindmaps after I started using them. I have downloaded Freemind on the computer (neat cross-platform tool), but for some reasons mindmaps work better for me on paper–one of the rare things that still does. So I take a huge A4, and draw little circles and little arrows, et voilà! Suddenly all my problems vanish. Ha, I wish. But what usually happens is that I get past whatever had me stumped (in this particular, a troublesome reveal halfway thro…

…fferent just aren’t explained: the various kinds of uncles just get lumped under the same English word (yes, there are four words to describe uncles in Vietnamese: cậu, bác, chú, dượng respectively brother of mother, elder brother of father, younger brother of father, and any uncles that have married into the family rather than being linked to it by blood). So not quite what I want to be studying intensively… In other news, work has started again…

…numbers instead of letters as prompts: we have stories based on pi, the golden ratio, the speed of light… We wrote twelve of them all in all; and we sold the resulting compendium to Daily Science Fiction, where the pieces will appear, starting in January (one piece every week, 12 in all). Mine form a loose trilogy of pieces set in Việt Nam’s three great cities (Hà Nội, Huế, Sài Gòn, from North to South, and inspired respectively by Euler’s number…

…o write a story about poetry and language and decolonisation and national identity. It took me four years to find the words, and I ended up throwing a lot of personal stuff in it (much more than really makes me comfortable); but I’m proud of it, though a little fearful that it’s not going to be up to scratch. We shall see… The revised snippet from the beginning (didn’t do much beyond touching it up) I grieve to think of the stars Our ancestors our…