Revisiting Vietnam's past through my parents' eyes

NINH BINH, Vietnam -- "Just look at this landscape!" my father exclaims to my mother. We are traveling by train from her ancestral village in Nghe An province, central Vietnam, to his ancestral village in Ninh Binh province, northern Vietnam. I gaze at my parents, now in their 80s, hair silver-white, yet with smiles as bright as children's as they admire the lush green rice fields, the misty mountains and the winding rivers sparkling in the morning sunlight.

I have featured the beauty of my homeland in my novels, poems, essays and short stories, and now I am admiring it through the eyes of my parents, who have lived in southern Vietnam, more than 1,000 kilometers away from their home villages, for the past 45 years.