Vietnam

A journey between past and future, through a millenary culture daily declined and revisited to keep alive, in an ever more forward-looking present, the values, the traditions, the uses that have made the Vietnamese people a timeless Goliath.

The charm and strength of the people born from the meeting of a “phoenix” goddess (Au Co) and a Dragon God is all in these images: in the smiles full of hope of the young whose joyful determination shines through in every gesture, in those of women, true pillars of a community that entrusts to them the sometimes harder jobs and the management of business, and even more in those of the elderly, one of the architraves of society, who lived indelible moments in the collective memory and that also look ahead with granitic confidence.

Dualism is one of the most evident and exciting characteristics of the flow of life in the country, in large metropolises as in rural areas that are often still uncontaminated, ancient practices – linked to the millenary rural tradition – and representations of a modernity among the most advanced coexist giving rise to scenes that are sometimes “metaphysical”: water buffaloes that today, as always, are entrusted with the task of assisting man in working in the fields, original productions of rice noodles standing out against a background of skyscrapers, “barcarole” who paddle with their feet like their ancestors and talk on their cell phones! And above all, once again it is symbolically the role of women to summarize the sense, contradictions and virtues of the country and of the Vietnamese people: in a community that still suffers from the limits of a clear male chauvinism is the woman who monocratically governs the family, which manages the family business intelligently and stubbornly (but which is also increasingly present in public life), which tirelessly works to improve their own status and their children according to the dictates of Confucianism. The faces of the women encountered in the most traditional markets of Hanoi, that of the flowers of Au Co and that of the fruit of Long Bien, express all this and recall ancestral feelings open a window on a future that is only they and their children!

Cecilia Dr. Piccioni

Ambassador of Italy
in Hanoi 2015-2018