Quang Trung is like my first love.

(Baonghean.vn) - Near midnight, I received a phone call from my friend, the Editor-in-Chief of Baonghean Newspaper, informing me: "The place filled with memories of us all is about to be demolished. Write something down, preserve something..."

I know nothing lasts forever, but hearing that the city was starting to demolish the Quang Trung high-rise building and rebuild a new one made it impossible for me to sleep that night. Simply put, the years I spent there were an unforgettable part of my life.

I'm from the first generation (F1) of the Quang Trung apartment complex, dating back to April 1976. At that time, only buildings A1 to A4 had been constructed, A5 and A6 were nearing completion, and building B1 was four stories high. Besides those four buildings, the entire Quang Trung area was just sand, with no trees, no streetlights, only a few open-air garbage pits and some public water taps. Buildings A1 and A4 were allocated to the customs staff and guesthouse. Building A2 was for the staff and workers of the Vinh Garment and Mechanical Company, and building A3 was for construction workers and teachers… In my building, A3, the fifth floor was for the engineering platoon specializing in bomb and mine clearance, while the first floor housed the city library.

The buildings in the Quang Trung area are arranged in the shape of the Chinese character "Chi". Photo: Author's personal archives.

My house is home to quite a few teachers from Vinh University of Education and high schools. These include Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hoang Ky, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyen Quy Dy (Mathematics Department), Assoc. Prof. Le Ba Han, Assoc. Prof. Nguyen Van Tru, Assoc. Prof. Dau Van Ngo, Assoc. Prof. Le Van Khiem (Literature Department), Mr. Canh, Vice Principal of Vinh 2 High School, Ms. Nhan, Head of the Chemistry Department at Vinh 1 High School…

This place also includes the late poet Bá Dũng - Deputy Secretary of the Vinh City Party Committee (at one time he served as Vice Chairman of the City People's Committee); poet Dương Huy - Chairman of the Nghe An Association of Literature and Arts, Editor-in-Chief of Song Lam Magazine; the late painter Nguyễn Năng Đắc (Nghe An Newspaper)...

The building consists of two units; the unit I live in is numbered from 2 to 40, and is mostly occupied by young families. The older generation, including our predecessors, are now successful, such as Associate Professor Dr. Le Quang Hung, Head of the Department of Vietnamese Studies (Hanoi Pedagogical University), Hoang Khoi, former Assistant to the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Song Hong Construction Corporation, Dr. Hoai Chau (Mathematics), Dr. Hoai An (Mathematics)...

My family of six is ​​crammed into a 28-square-meter space.²Each house consisted of two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The largest house was only 40 square meters, located at the end of the row… Within that space, every house had to be divided into different areas: one for storing jars and barrels to hold water for daily use; another for storing rice husks, sawdust, charcoal, and firewood for cooking fuel; and another for storing rice, corn, and peanuts… so that on the third or eighth day of the lunar month, if the government couldn't sell rice in time, there would still be something to eat.

The K11 Math class from Phan Boi Chau High School for the Gifted visited a friend at their apartment building. Photo: Author's personal archive.

A unique feature of my neighborhood is the abundance of books; almost every house is like a mini-library, and the design even includes bookshelves to divide rooms – how wonderful! We A3 students were born into a library environment, so we excelled academically. My family must have hundreds of Russian-language math textbooks piled around the house. At that time, the Vice Chairman of the City, Nguyen Ba Dung, proudly declared: "If you divide the number of students admitted to university by the area of ​​our house, we'd be the best in the whole country!"

Back then, many families in the A3 building had already completed university education, some even earning doctorates. More broadly, those living in apartment buildings were considered academically successful, mostly because they were children of civil servants and employees who didn't have to struggle too much to make a living and therefore had better opportunities for education. The City's Gifted High School and Phan Boi Chau Specialized High School had quite a few students from Quang Trung High School.

Later, as we grew up, we realized we had experienced the harshest years of life, and we truly understood the hardships our parents endured to ensure their families didn't go hungry. Professors and teachers took advantage of every opportunity to give extra lessons, roll cigarettes, shell peanuts, and knit for hire so that their families could have more rice and less corn or noodles for meals.

My parents were renowned university lecturers. Besides translating books and writing textbooks for the department, they also took on experimental farmland from the university to grow rice, and even built a makeshift toilet area to raise pigs. I vividly remember my mother sitting at the table, watching her four children, all of different ages, scrambling to eat; at the end of the meal, she would quickly pour some thin soup over the last grains of rice in the pot to make it to class on time.

Children from Zone A (photo taken at the flower garden near the slide). Photo: Author's personal archives.

But what remains in my memory of Quang Trung is not poverty, but an abundance of human kindness. At night, in the dim light of oil lamps, families spread mats on the verandas, chatting animatedly about the neighborhood and their children's schooling. There was the bowl of water spinach soup that my neighbor, Mrs. Ky, prepared for me every summer afternoon. There were the tins of rice that families shared at the end of the month, the bunches of water spinach split in half with neighbors on the same floor. It was where my friend, 11 years old, died tragically from an unexploded American cluster bomb. And there was my younger brother, Khanh, who never came home from the water tank (at the gable end of building A1) after going swimming with his friends at noon…

For me, Quang Trung is intertwined with cherished memories of our school days. We shared every good reference book, every copy of the weekend edition of the Thiếu niên Tiền phong (Young Pioneers) newspaper. I specialized in mathematics, but I often listened to poets Hồng Nhu, Thạch Quỳ, Duy Phương, and Bá Dũng commenting on poetry, and literary critic Lê Bá Hán lecturing on the Tale of Kiều and the Lament of the Warrior's Wife. Those literary discussions by these scholars from Nghệ An province led me into the world of literature without me even realizing it…

I still love Quang Trung, even if he's gone tomorrow. He was like everyone's first love back then.

An Thanh