"People's Bookstore" - four large letters always stood out prominently in the centers of districts and cities... this was where we high school students during the subsidy era often went. In Nha Trang, the People's Bookstore (belonging to the Phu Khanh State-owned Book Publishing Company) occupied a prominent corner at the bustling intersection of Thong Nhat - Phan Boi Chau and Phuong Cau - Sinh Trung streets.
My friend Binh Li and I (stubborn in everything but obsessed with books) would often hang around there, reading "secretly" for hours without buying anything (because we didn't have the money). Feeling like we were bothering the bookseller too much, I suggested, "Let's just come once a week, it's embarrassing to keep coming without buying anything..." Unexpectedly, he brushed it off: "Embarrassed? The lady knows we're just here to read... secretly, so she takes pity on us and lets us read. Otherwise, she would have kicked us out a long time ago."
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| This used to be the People's Bookstore. Photo: VX |
Back then, many families' living rooms typically had bookshelves or bookcases. Officials' homes had many political books, intellectuals' homes had many specialized books, and teachers' homes had many textbooks… Whether it was because so many people loved books or because books were only sold at state-run stores, the People's Bookstore was so crowded that few paid attention to the schoolchildren wandering around reading books there.
Binh Li and I frequented bookstores so much that we knew the titles by heart: from thick complete works to thin volumes of poetry, from political theory books to books on rice cultivation and pig farming techniques… It was here that we emptied our savings accumulated over many months to buy the first editions of anthologies by Xuan Dieu, The Lu, Che Lan Vien… Turning the pages, fragrant with ink, and encountering romantic pre-war poems printed for the first time after 1975 (before that, we had only heard older people read them or seen them copied in notebooks), felt like a gift from heaven.
Besides the People's Bookstore, back then in Nha Trang, books were also sold at the book stalls in the General Department Store, on the second floor of the Dam Tron Market. Occasionally, we could also find cheaper books at the book stalls in the 2-4 Cultural and Exhibition Center (the grounds of the Children's House at the six-way intersection now) during fairs and exhibitions. But the most impressive was the two-story Foreign Language Bookstore with its gleaming glass windows located at the intersection of Thong Nhat and Quang Trung streets.
The books here were all printed in the Soviet Union, with glossy white paper, sharp lettering, and vibrant, colorful illustrations. Most notably, the covers were hardcovers, often wrapped in a luxurious, shiny outer layer. Unfortunately, they were all in Russian. We had only just started learning Russian in the beginning of 10th grade, barely knowing a few words, and could only stare in amazement. "Oh my God, how many people in this whole city are even proficient enough to read Russian books? Why import so many?" Bình Lì said. But one day, unexpectedly, he brought home a whole stack of hardcover books from the Foreign Language Bookstore. "They're so cheap, man. I've figured out a way to use them," he said, and then he showed me how to pry open the pages, take the covers, and use them to make notebooks. Back then, notebooks for students didn't have covers like they do now; they were just lined notebooks for students to sew together. Bình Lì's "innovation" was copied by many of us.
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| Used books from the Foreign Language Bookstore in Nha Trang. |
Then, unexpectedly, the Foreign Language Bookstore imported a large number of Vietnamese books printed in the Soviet Union. It was something unimaginable, something one could only dream of buying here: Pushkin's Anthology of Prose, Leo Tolstoy's Selected Stories, Mikhail Sholokhov's Virgin Soil (2 volumes), Anattoli Ivanov's The Eternal Call (2 volumes) ... These books were published by the Rainbow Publishing House and the Progress Publishing House (in Moscow) as part of an aid program to Vietnam, which is why they were sold at such low prices. In those years, books from other countries weren't widely translated, so these famous Russian-Soviet works nurtured a love of literature for a time.
The day I left for university, Binh Li laboriously brought over several heavy, hardcover notebooks that he had "made" from Russian books, chuckling, "Hey friend, bring these along to produce some... anthologies." Those "anthologies" of Binh Li, along with some books from the Foreign Language Bookstore, accompanied me throughout my student years. Later, when I worked in many places in South Central Vietnam and the Central Highlands, those old books gradually disappeared, I can't remember where they all went. Some were left behind at a guesthouse after a trip, some were borrowed and forgotten... After nearly 40 years, only the book "A Hard Childhood" that Binh Li gave me and the two volumes of "My Dagestan" remain, which I often read over many long years.
As for Binh Li, after his dream of attending the Polytechnic University was shattered, he spent many years working in construction, wandering around the Southeast region, before becoming a successful businessman in Saigon. Every time he returned to Nha Trang, before having a few drinks with friends, Binh Li would often ask me to drive him around to familiar places. We would reminisce about how life had changed. We would recall the beginning of the market economy, when publishing houses sprung up everywhere, books and newspapers were sold all over the place, and the People's Bookstore system gradually lost its role, eventually giving up its prime locations to other shops… The once magnificent People's Bookstore in Nha Trang is now quite old and dilapidated, thankfully still retaining a small counter of the Ponagar Bookstore. The Foreign Language Bookstore seems to have become a general store for a long time, before becoming the Lotteria fried chicken restaurant it is today.
"Oh, 'A Hard Childhood'!" - Binh Li exclaimed, but also mentioning the title of Iamin Muxtaphin's book. That story tells of a boy named Iamin in a remote village on the edge of the taiga forest in Siberia, yet it so vividly reminds me and Binh Li of our high school years in Nha Trang, when we lacked books and resources.
NGUYEN VINH XUONG
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