Richard

Was this in French or Vietnamese that he was writing in?

So when they got married, how did it go for your mum when she moved into the family home?

What was your dad doing for work in those years?

Still a married couple who are Catholic in Vietnam.

having petit fours and tea and everything else.

It feels a bit like St.

Petersburg just before the Russian Revolution.

It feels like... I know I just sort of feel the fragility of this as you're telling me this.

So 1976 is after the US has pulled out that dramatic scene of everyone climbing aboard the chopper on top of the US embassy in Saigon.

That's all been and gone and now the Communist Party has control of the entire country.

What did that mean for your Catholic, slightly Frenchified family under the new regime?

Was your family going to be a target of this regime, like I said, given the fact they're bourgeois Catholics?

How about the big house that your grandfather had?

What did the regime want to do with that?

Were your parents sent to re-education camps?

And how was he protected?

Did they have connections with the regime or was it just through, I don't know, paying off soldiers or how did it work?

And in that countryside, you're in one of the most beautiful places in the world too, aren't you, with all that color and scent and all those other things that are going on.

It is so beautiful, Vietnam, isn't it?

What do you mean?