“I grow my beard because of my daugh­ter. She used to work for an air­line. Then she had an acci­dent. She passed away. After that, I decid­ed to grow my beard in mem­o­ry of her. It has been more than 20 years.”

“I have been liv­ing here for 85 years. I was a math teacher start­ing in 1961 and retired when I was 60 years old. I was born and grew up in Hội An.”

“In the past, there was no An Hội island (Now An Hội Island has many restau­rants and hotels as well as the famous Night Mar­ket). It was under the water. When I was a kid, I used to swim from this side to An Hội Island. It was deep at the riv­er, but when I swam to the area where An Hội island is now, I could see that it was­n’t deep over there. I swam to that place and hung out there. After 1945, the island start­ed to appear and peo­ple start­ed to move there.”

“The riv­er (Thu Bồn) used to be very deep. I saw the boats of peo­ple from dif­fer­ent coun­tries com­ing here. There were many boats and it was busy. Now the port here is closed. The boats can­not come in. ‘Cửa Đại’ means ‘Big Estu­ary’. ‘Đại’ means big. We name Hội An ‘Hội An’ because when the boats came here, they are safe and pro­tect­ed from the storms. ‘Hội’ means ‘Gath­er­ing’ and ‘An’ means ‘Safe’. When there were any storms on the sea, they all came here to avoid the storms.”

Hoành, 85 years old
Hoi An, Vietnam