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I was twenty-two (and a half) at the time and took all the photos on a Diana F+ “lomography” camera (think Instagram filter before Instagram was born) that I had absolutely no idea how to use. This is a good example of how most pictures came out: lots of feeling, zero focus. No wonder I liked it.

Obvs, I sported a hat just like fifteen and a half year-old Marguerite had done, although mine was not “a man’s flat-brimmed hat, a brownish-pink fedora with a broad black ribbon,” but a simple straw hat adorned with red plastic roses that I had bought on the beach in Mui Nei after passing my teaching course.

The river was the same, though. It was not black like the stagnant river I drove past on my motorbike every morning in Saigon, black and swollen, puffy, like dark chocolate toffee that’s just been poured out onto a baking sheet to cool. No, the Mekong River was huge and flat, light-brown like coffee with too much milk, the coffee of twelve year-olds, the coffee of people who really do not like coffee at all.

“My mother sometimes tells me that never in my whole life shall I ever again see rivers as beautiful and big and wild as these, the Mekong and its tributaries going down to the sea, the great regions of water soon to disappear into the caves of ocean. In the surrounding flatness stretching as far as the eye can see, the rivers flow as fast as if the earth sloped downwards.”

The Mekong was indeed beautiful and big and wild. Life was, too. I had come to Vietnam because I’d graduated from university in London and had heard (I shudder to think from whom) that only “failed novelists” became journalists. Naturally, I wouldn’t be that. I was twenty-two! And a half! I smoked pink cigarettes and read Marguerite Duras in French! Non, merci. Instead, I would teach and eat baby crocodiles and not come home until I’d finished my novel. (at The Past) https://www.instagram.com/p/CiFc9qAI-xL/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#MargueriteDuras #poetry #travel #Vietnam