As a writer, you would found there vietnamese literature worth exploring. Though I don’t know if much are translate to English.

http://www.papertigers.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/diary-of-a-cricket.jpg

This would be something I recommended to the 10 years old Z (4 years ago). It is about growing up.

“Bilingual Vietnamese-English Vietnamese children Literature by the famous writer To Hoai Story of the adventure of a criket who left his nest and traveled to different places. He grew up and learned by being with different “people” and in difficult situations. Black and white pages with color cover.”

Cricket fighting (maybe view as animal cruelty) is a part of Vietnamese culture. There was a section of the book about it from a Cricket’s perspective as the protagonist drunk with glory and hurt his fellow being for the sake of the humans.

To Hoai, I felt is pretty Mark Twain ish.

More for your size,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%AD_Ph%C3%A8o

It explored the various life experienced in those colonial times. It is creative writing as it best. Chi Pheo is a short story in a collective works of Nam Cao. One story was literally about an old lady who don’t have any relative around beside her grand daughter which she sort of sold to be a servant because she is too old to work to take of her grand daughter. The story is about how hungry she was, and visit the master of the girl just for a meal. She ate too much and die as a result.

I think the works had painted the depressing stories of the people who don’t have much of anything. And old man who holding on to his loving companion, a dog, who he rise for meat for when his son come back and marry. He love the dog as his own son. And the way he betray the dog once he got sick and had nothing thing left to sell for medicine. And about a teacher whose education didn’t bring home any money, but still value that his literature training at least let him enjoy objects like the moon.

Nam Cao was a communist. But as far as his work is concern, I see it as humanist work and not a communist ones.

He has posted it here: http://9yearold.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/rolling-thunder/. I find the darn quite old-fashioned. It’s the bitches mortaring the pisshole which really did it for me…

The line which really got me was: “The bitches mortared the piss hole and it didn’t blow up!” Quite effective, I thought.

I will post it once the final touches have been made. Seems rather odd to rate a blog about travelling with a child PG, or adult content, but that’s Z for you. And me, I guess. Great to hear from you, btw xxx