Sometimes in travel you meet a local who shares his soul with you, who paints evocative images of a place and time and invites you to see it too, even if only through words on a page. In January 2004, thanks to a kid selling pirated books on the streets of Hanoi, Vietnam, this happened to me.
I would never meet Bao Ninh in person. But through his first novel, The Sorrow of War, I met him nonetheless. Born in 1952, Ninh served in the North Vietnamese army. Of the five hundred men in his brigade, only he and nine others survived the conflict.
"Che cosa hai mangiato per la prima colazione?" (What did you eat for breakfast?)
