Bookish Saigonese

It’s in a park. Penguin, Cambridge, and Oxford titles were available.

And the English schools. Lots of them.

Young Saigonese read and buy everything in print: Korean-Vietnamese dictionaries, and Almanach (French spelling) of Vietnamese Women History.

It’s the 6th Annual Book Fair in Vietnam. I don’t feel much different from the UCLA book fair I frequently attended.

I remembered the Logos ship came to the harbor roughly 40 years ago: floating International bookstore, selling Longman dictionaries. Wisdom from abroad, now here at home. WTO and the satellite, Wimax and Wiki.

We are in. In the next few years, E book will sweep the nation and the world. I will miss occasions such as this Book Fair. I will miss even more the young idealists who float the salty seas to far away shores.

I was both the recipient and giver of that very same service: sharing the pages and the encoding of human endeavor to make sense of their environment. That environment is ever-changing: Hot, flat and crowded.

Friedman and the Clinton’s bios are still popular here.

But I must admit, everyone wants to learn about the Future of Management, the latest and greatest in Marketing know-how and how to sell.

I hope they are well-trained. Because when the Fair strikes, I would hate to work for one of those vendors: loading and unloading of heavy books in tropical heat is quite an unpleasant task.

But while the Fair is still going on, it’s good to see young students browse.

Some of them even look up a word here and there. I did. I just want to make sure the French spelling of Almanac is indeed Almanach. They made a splash with a huge volume dedicating to Vietnamese women. And rightly so. The only regret I have is it’s still being written, the last chapter that is.

Thanks Mom, for teaching to pay for my language fee. Nothing is for free, much less books and prints.