Nguyen Qui Duc
From: Paul Mooney <pjmooney@me.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 6, 2023 11:23 PM
To: VSG <Vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Vsg] Nguyen Qui Duc, Whose Salon Became a Hanoi Hub, Dies at 65 - The New York Times
Here’s a moving tribute to Nguyen Qui Duc in the New York Times. Paul
Nguyen Qui Duc, Whose Salon Became a Hanoi Hub, Dies at 65
A former refugee who found radio success in the U.S., he opened an exhibition space in his native Vietnam that drew artists and ambassadors. Anthony Bourdain dropped in.
Dec. 6, 2023
Nguyen Qui Duc in 2011. His salon “provided shelter and camaraderie for new creative voices in Vietnam that blossomed after the trauma of war,” a friend said.Justin Mott
Nguyen Qui Duc, the proprietor of a salon and exhibition space that became a Hanoi landmark, where both Vietnamese and foreigners gathered for music, poetry and long nights of drinks and sushi, died on Nov. 22 in a hospital in Hanoi. He was 65.
The cause was lung cancer, said his sister and sole survivor, Dieu-Ha Nguyen.
A war refugee as a teenager, Mr. Duc found success as a radio commentator in the United States before returning to Vietnam in 2006 to make a new life there. His magnetic personality drew a diverse clientele to the salon, from underground artists to ambassadors.
The salon “provided shelter and camaraderie for new creative voices in Vietnam that blossomed after the trauma of war,” Tom Miller, an American lawyer and longtime friend, wrote in an email.
The experimental art installations that Mr. Duc displayed tested official limits in that Communist-run country, but in what Mr. Miller called a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities, much like that of the artist Ai Weiwei in China, Mr. Duc found ways to continue.
He gave his salon a whimsical name drawn from Vietnamese schoolbooks: Tadioto, which means “we go by car.”
“It’s the first thing baby Duc learned to read,” said T.T. Nhu, a relative, “and when he returned to Vietnam, it was like learning to read again.”
Mr. Duc once described Tadioto as “a gallery, an event space, a meeting point for creative and unorthodox people and a comfort space for expats.”
As a refuge from the chaos of fast-modernizing Hanoi, Tadioto, complete with sushi-ramen and whiskey bars, was a mellow version of Rick’s Cafe Americain in the movie “Casablanca,” without its hard edge of hustle and intrigue.
Tadioto became an obligatory stop for journalists, diplomats and high-profile travelers, like the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, whom Mr. Duc escorted around Hanoi, and the singer Tom Waits, who performed there informally.
Tadioto embodied the two sides of a man who, like many refugees, continued to search for an identity long after being uprooted.
A partial view of the interior of Tadioto, Mr. Duc’s gathering spot in Hanoi.Justin Mott for The New York Times
“I no longer have a single identity,” he wrote in a 2008 essay titled “America Inside the Vietnamese Soul,” published on the website of the PBS documentary series “Frontline.”
“I’m split in two — parts of me still deeply Vietnamese, parts of me thoroughly American. There are times I can hardly explain myself to myself.”
In a Facebook tribute, Kim Ninh, a fellow former refugee who for many years represented the Asia Foundation in Hanoi, wrote of their shared sense of dislocation.
“Human pain and suffering colored his life,” she wrote, “part of the family history, part of the national history, part of the world he tried to make sense of. Or at least, to document. Until the end, we talked about our joint endeavor to find ‘home.’ We knew it was a futile effort, but it permeates everything: Duc’s work as a journalist and as a writer; his travels, that extraordinary sense of aesthetics where the love of shadows was always present.”
In addition to his work in radio — he was an announcer on KALW and KQED in San Francisco, contributed to NPR and then had his own NPR program, “Pacific Time” — Mr. Duc published poems and stories in a variety of magazines, including City Lights Review in San Francisco; wrote a play; produced a television documentary; and translated Vietnamese poetry and fiction for publication in English.
“Duc was a Renaissance man, made art, made robots, made sculptures, designed houses, designed everything,” Ms. Nhu said. “His quicksilver mind was always on to the next thing.”
But his life amounted to more than the sum of its parts; as a friend, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote on Facebook, “I think of his life as his most important work of art.”
Mr. Duc in 2013 at Tadioto. He drew upon his Vietnamese schoolbooks for the whimsical name, which means “we go by car.”Vincent Baumont
Nguyen Qui Duc (pronounced nwin-kwee-dook) was born in Dalat, South Vietnam, on Sept. 16, 1958, to aristocratic parents. His father, Nguyen Van Dai, was the civilian governor of Hue City, and his mother, born Nguyen-Khoa Dieu-Lieu, was a school principal who lost her job after the Communist victory in 1975; she was reduced to selling noodles to support herself.
Mr. Duc tells the family’s story of separation and endurance in an intimate 2009 memoir, “Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family.”
He was 10 years old when the North Vietnamese captured his father during a military campaign in 1968 known as the Tet offensive and imprisoned him for more than a decade. When the war ended, Mr. Duc, at 17, managed to flee on his own by ship to the United States and then made his way to Ohio, where he joined a brother and sister who had already relocated there.
His mother remained in Vietnam with another sister, Nguyen Thi Dieu-Quynh,who died of kidney failure in 1979 after a lifelong struggle with mental illness.
Mr. Duc completed his high school education in Virginia and became a United States citizen in 1981. He then spent a year in Indonesia working in a refugee camp helping the so-called Vietnamese boat people who had landed there.
In 1984, after his father’s release, he was reunited with his parents in San Francisco, where he had already begun his radio career as a reporter and commentator.
For a man of uncertain identity, Mr. Duc said he found radio an ideal medium. “I like the fact that you’re faceless, almost nameless, and are just a voice,” he told an online magazine, And of Other Things, in 2015. “You can get intimate, authoritative, friendly, heard but not seen … a nameless, faceless voice allows people an imagination.”
While in San Francisco he married a British woman, but they divorced amicably shortly afterward.
Mr. Duc returned to Vietnam for the first time in 1989 to record a report for National Public Radio. While he was there he recovered his sister’s ashes from a Buddhist temple and surreptitiously carried them back to San Francisco, symbolically reuniting his family.
He moved permanently to Vietnam in 2006, bringing with him his widowed mother (his father died in 2000), who had dementia, and settling her in a retreat outside Hanoi until her death in 2011.
He decided to stay, he told NPR in 2015, to “finish the man that I was meant to be,” having been “disrupted, interrupted to go to America and become somebody else.”
A correction was made on
Dec. 6, 2023
:
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the year Mr. Duc’s father died. It was 2000, not 2001.
Seth Mydans reported as a foreign and national correspondent for The New York Times and its sister publication, The International Herald Tribune, from 1983 to 2012. He continues to contribute to The Times. More about Seth Mydans
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 7, 2023, Section B, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Nguyen Qui Duc, 65, Whose Salon Became a Hanoi Hub of Diversity. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
How The Times decides who gets an obituary. There is no formula, scoring system or checklist in determining the news value of a life. We investigate, research and ask around before settling on our subjects. Suggest an obituary for consideration by writing to obits@nytimes.com
From: greg nagle <gnagle2000@yahoo.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 6, 2023 11:11 AM
To: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nguyen Qui Duc
This is a gift article from NYT so you can open it.
Nguyen Qui Duc, Whose Salon Became a Hanoi Hub, Dies at 65
A former refugee who found radio success in the U.S., he opened an exhibition space in his native Vietnam that drew artists and ambassadors. Anthony Bourdain dropped in.
From: greg nagle <gnagle2000@yahoo.com>
Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2023 10:07 AM
To: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>; Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nguyen Qui Duc
Judith,
Since you seem to be one of those who knew Duc the best, perhaps you could expand that and publish it in Mekong Review. Or maybe in the NYT?
I think I have much of his writing but just saw this.
Q&A: Nguyễn Quí Đức on Tadioto, Zone 9, and How He Fell for Hanoi's Charms | Saigoneer
Q&A: Nguyễn Quí Đức on Tadioto, Zone 9, and How He Fell for Hanoi's Char...
Countless are the number of hours Hanoi creatives have spent sipping whisky and contemplating the world at the f...
FRONTLINE/WORLD . Vietnam - Looking for Home . The Story | PBS
Nguyen Qui Duc - Wikipedia
https://vietcetera.com/en/nguyen-qui-duc-on-returning-home-to-vietnam
Whose Vietnam War?
Returning To Vietnam Years After Fleeing War, A Man Finally Feels At Home
https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/11/28/greathomesanddestinations/1130-vietnam_index.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ak0.PBRl.aOmuuVQypGOB&smid=url-share
Greg Nagle
Hanoi
PhD Forest and Watershed Science
Cornell University
From: Cort, Louise <CORTLO@si.edu>
Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2023 8:26 AM
To: Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>; VSG <Vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nguyen Qui Duc
Thank you all for your introductions to this inspiring man. I also found this YouTube interview in, as you say, impeccable BBC English:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JumZ-3dVhAs
Louise Cort
From: Ngo Thanh Nhan <nhan@temple.edu>
Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2023 5:02 AM
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Cc: jae.tran@vietleft.org
Subject: [Vsg] Fwd: [External] Re: Nguyen Qui Duc
Dear all,
I met Nguyen Qui Duc briefly when performing with Peeling the Banana, and reading with John Balaban on Ho Xuan Huong,
although we never met when I was living in Berkeley, when he lived and worked in San Francisco,
I've known him for his point of view in the press...
I thought he was very brave to come to live in Vietnam... I thought he looked impressive.
Best,
Nhan
From: Vuong Vu-Duc <vuduc.vuong@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2023 2:21 AM
To: Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>; Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nguyen Qui Duc
RIP, old friend and comrade.
VDV.
https://www.nguoi-viet.com/little-saigon/nha-bao-nguyen-qui-duc-qua-doi/
From: Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2023 10:21 PM
To: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nguyen Qui Duc
I first met Duc shortly after he started working as volunteer coordinator for the US Catholic Conference refugee resettlement office in San Francisco. A friend of mine, who was at the time a stringer for the New York Times, was writing a story about anti-communist Vietnamese extortion rackets in the Bay Area, and I was working on something similar with the Southeast Asia Resource Center, then based in Berkeley. My friend introduced me to Duc and USCC staff as the most credible sources for leads on the story. Duc was then, as he always was, the interpreter for the Vietnamese community in his newly adopted land. Our lives then seemed to become entwined, as he lived with us for some time in San Francsico. I remember that he and my then partner would sneak into an abandoned theater on Market Street in the evenings and would tinker on the concert grand there. I recall him creating a musical work to accompany the rhythmic tapping of the apartment’s heating system – it was a piece for piano, radiator, and probably some fantastical instrument that Duc had concocted from something lying around the house. Such was his creativity. It wasn’t long after that time that his open-minded reflections on the war – despite his own family’s history (so poignantly described in Where the Ashes Are) that would have driven lesser souls to bitterness and hatred – earned him the dangerous label of “communist.” He was never cowed by these threats and could only see the human worth, not the ideology in people.
I don’t recall clearly the trajectory of his career, but I do recall the anxiety and excitement of his father’s release from reeducation camp, and his eventual resettlement in the US. I believe it was in order to take up his post working in the Galang refugee camp in Indonesia that he was invited to apply for expedited US citizenship. He told us after his citizenship interview that when asked who was second in command should the president be incapacitated that he had quipped, “Alexander Haig,” a reference, of course, to Haig’s bloviating assertion that he was in charge after the assassination attempt on Reagan. It seemed that with his impeccable BBC English he had even charmed his way to US citizenship!
When he was stationed in Galang, Duc regularly passed through Singapore and the USCC office there on his weeks of leave from the Indonesian camp, and he became a frequent guest at our old colonial house in Hume Heights. Our paths continued to cross through the years, in San Francisco, and in London, where he worked for the BBC World Service, Vietnamese service. This entry into journalism launched him into a career as an occasional commentator for NPR and as an essayist. But it was no surprise to most of us that as soon as it became feasible, he was one of the first overseas Vietnamese to return. He had described himself once as feeling as if he inhabited the “scaffolding on the outside of the world,” as if he knew that Vietnam was the only place he could call home. In Hanoi he became engaged in a range of artistic and literary projects – he complained that he was always busy, but never had a job that paid him a cent. Despite this lack of success, his world became a nexus for the Vietnamese avant garde, the ex-pat cultural community and a constant flow of transient scholars. His Tadioto bar finally brought him success, so much success in fact that the government was constantly hounding him out of his premises. For anyone who visited the bar, it was clear what a creative force Duc was – in fact he finally found commercial success in the design business, a passion he shared with his partner Phuong.
Duc was a courageous spokesperson for the Vietnamese community while he lived here, and he didn’t flinch from critiquing of the government from within after his return.
I will greatly miss my visits to Tadioto and my evening chats catching up with gossip. Vietnam and Vietnam scholarship have lost a faithful friend, as have I.
Judith
Judith Henchy, Ph.D., MLIS
Head, Southeast Asia Section
Special Assistant to the Dean of University Libraries for International Programs
Affiliate Faculty, Jackson School of International Studies
From: Chung Nguyen <Chung.Nguyen@umb.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2023 8:59 PM
To: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nguyen Qui Duc
I knew Đức when he was translating Hữu Thỉnh's poems (The Time Tree). After that I didn't have a chance to meet him again. He was a writer of great distinction. It's a shock to learn that he had passed away.
Chung Nguyen
From: greg nagle <gnagle2000@yahoo.com>
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2023 12:36 PM
To: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nguyen Qui Duc
I never really knew Duc since as usual, I could not communicate or listen well at Tadioto with the background noise, I regret that. I wish there had been another place to connect with him.
We talked a bit online, I wish he had written more after his first book but he seemed to step carefully about conditions in VN. That would have been a great book.
I assume he has a unpublished pieces that could be published now that he does not have to fear the censors. He mentioned that he had been working on a book about his grandfather's time on a French island in the South Pacific,
It seems time for a good piece on Duc in the Mekong Times, Quite a few people could contribute but best combine that with some of his unpublished writing
Greg Nagle
Hanoi
PhD Forest and Watershed Science
Cornell University
From: Diane Fox <dnfox70@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2023 11:15 AM
To: John Phan <jdp49@cornell.edu>
Cc: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nguyen Qui Duc
Noooooooo!!! Is really all I have to say. My heart goes out to us all for this loss, and in thanks for this life
Thanks to each of you who have shared memories, and to all who will
Diane
Diane Fox, retired
From: John Phan <jdp49@cornell.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2023 10:27 AM
To: Hue-Tam Tai <huetamtai@gmail.com>
Cc: Vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nguyen Qui Duc
Duc was a singular man, a great architect of Hanoi society, a creator of community, a poetic soul, and someone who fought fiercely for the Vietnamese community, both overseas in the wake of the wars, as well as in Hanoi, to rebuild bridges and heal a fractured community. He blessed younger generations with a vision of a Vietnam healed by art and style, and he created a true salon in everywhere he went. I will miss his quizzical face, his mild tone, and his ceaseless search for the beautiful. Yên giấc ngàn thu, anh Đức.
John
From: Hue-Tam Tai <huetamtai@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2023 10:21 AM
To: bill@billhayton.com; pjmooney@me.com
Cc: Vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nguyen Qui Duc
I recall dropping by Tadioto one evening and found an international crowd dancing, drinking or just chatting. There were some graduate students who are now tenured professors.
I assigned Duc's memoir, Where the Ashes Are,to my class on Asian biographies. The students focused on his father's arrest after Tet Mau Than and were also impressed by the different perspectives of Duc and of his father that reflected their different life experiences. Reading that memoir, I could understand why Duc chose to return to Vietnam, but not his father. What stood out the most among Duc's memories of growing up in Vietnam was his friendships with boys his age. Friendship and friendliness were a hallmark of Duc's character.
He is now Where the Ashes Are. RIP Duc.
Hue Tam Ho Tai
Harvard University emerita
From: billhayton <bill@billhayton.com>
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2023 9:33 AM
To: Paul Mooney <pjmooney@me.com>
Cc: VSG <Vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nguyen Qui Duc
Terribly sad. He was unique.
Bill Hayton
From: Paul Mooney <pjmooney@me.com>
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2023 9:29 AM
To: VSG <Vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Vsg] Nguyen Qui Duc
Dear Friends,
I’m sure many of you knew Nguyen Qui Duc in Hanoi. I just got news that he has passed away. I’m very saddened by this news. During my three years in Hanoi, I was a regular visitor to his landmark Tadioto. The city will not be the same without him there.
Best regards,
Paul Mooney