On a rainy Autumn day, a golden-haired woman quietly walks in Huong Dien Cemetery in Thua Thien–Hue city. She’s looking for the grave of her father, who died during the war 40 years ago.

She suddenly bends her knees in frond of a grave with the name Nguyen Van Dinh engraved upon it. She cries, and her tears flow down her cheeks and onto her father’s final resting place.

Bo oi! (Daddy!) is the only Vietnamese word that Vera Nguyen, a Vietnamese-Russian girl, remembers. Her father left her family for the battlefields of South Viet Nam in 1967, and shortly afterward her mother made the only decision that made sense to her at the time: she brought her children to Russia.

Vera says that her father died in 1972, but her family received his death notice from the Vietnamese Embassy two years later.

Twenty-two years later, thanks to support from the Viet Nam Ministry of National Defence, her mother went back to the country with her brother, Alexei Nguyen. At that time, Vera was still busy with her studies, and could not follow her mother and brother.

The gift the mother brought to Vera after the trip was a photo of her father’s grave in Viet Nam. Since then, Vera has nurtured a desire to visit her father’s homeland to cry on his grave and meet her Vietnamese relatives.

However, over the following years, her uncle died while her other relatives moved to other places. The number of Vietnamese who could speak Russian was few and far between, and all contact with her relatives in Viet Nam was eventually lost.

Since that time, the family has tried its best to get in touch and has asked for help from many people, but they have yet to find any valuable information about their Vietnamese relatives.

“I decided to join a tour group to Viet Nam in an effort to look for my father’s grave. The only thing I took was a photo of his grave and my uncle’s telephone number,” says Vera.

Vera vaguely remembered the old image of her father’s homeland – a Ha Noi in the Autumn months. In 1967, after seeing Vera and her mother and brother off at the airport, Dinh left with the army to South Viet Nam. Five years later, he died.

“My father is a martyr with alias Dang Quy. He died on May 28, 1972 on Battlefield B [in South Viet Nam],” says Vera. “That is the last thing I know about him, through the death notice we received in 1974.”

She says that her mother, Zoya Grigoryevna Ermokova, always dreamt of bringing her son and daughter to Viet Nam to burn incense on their father’s grave and discover Ha Noi. But they had no opportunities.

In the turbulent Russia of the 1990s, like many other Russians, her family was faced with economic difficulties, and their plan to come back to Viet Nam had to be postponed.

“My mother usually told us about our father’s homeland through her experiences during her short-lived time in Ha Noi and through the letters she received from my father from the battlefields,” says Vera.

“The image of my father’s homeland in my mind was a land of suffering, with both woeful and majestic tales from the war. My mother said that there were millions of Vietnamese wives who had lost husbands like her, and millions of children had lost their fathers, just like us.”

At this time of year, when autumn comes to Russia and all the leaves turn golden, Vera’s nostalgia for her father becomes almost overwhelming. “The yellows of autumn remind me of so much. I remember my childhood in Ha Noi, where my father took me to the Botanical Garden. We would pick up fallen leaves and make boats from them to sail along the waters.”

“I bought a tour to Viet Nam, even though my hope of finding my father’s grave was very faint. Still, I wanted to feel autumn in Ha Noi again, and see those yellows that I remembered so well,” says Vera.

Viet Nam after 40 years

Taking a seat near the plane’s window, Vera remembers the final letter her father sent to her mother in May 1972, which read: “Ha Noi is under attack. The war has entered a critical phase. But I believe it will end soon. Viet Nam will see peace and our family will be reunited…”

Although Vera learned much about Viet Nam before her trip, she could only imagine the changes that Ha Noi had seen in the last 40 years. She followed the addresses written in her father’s and uncle’s old letters, but she only received puzzled looks and sad eyes when she came to the houses, as the homes’ new owners knew nothing about who used to live in them.

Vera finally went to the Russian Embassy in Ha Noi, and after many failed attempts and misleading clues, one lucky day they contacted one of Vera’s cousins.

Vera’s cousin is Nguyen Van Kim, son of painter Nguyen Van Da, who is her father’s brother. It was Kim who showed her the final resting place of her father in Hue.

Moscow love story

Nguyen Van Dinh was a distinguished young man in Viet Nam, and he was one of the Vietnamese representatives at a global festival for youths in Moscow in 1957. As chance would have it, Vera’s mother was also part of a Russian delegation at the festival.

In a meeting between Vietnamese and Russian youths, Quy fell in love with the Russian beauty at first sight.

It was a match made in heaven. Three years later Dinh was sent to Russia by the Defence Ministry to study at the Moscow-based Frunze Military Academy. He lived in the academy’s hostel, near the Roza Textile and Garment Factory, where Ermokova was working at the time.

In 1961, they got married when their son, Alexei Nguyen, was one year old. Two years later, Vera was born.

When Dinh’s studies ended in 1964, Dinh came back home and Ermokova voluntarily followed him back to Ha Noi. In the capital city, she worked for the March 8 Textile Factory. Alexei was nicknamed Viet and Vera was called Lien, as a reminder of the cross-border love between a Vietnamese man and a Russian woman.

“My aunt-in-law loved my uncle and their children very much. Even when Ha Noi was facing many difficulties, I never heard her complain. Everyday, she rode her bicycle to the factory to work, just like everyone else,” says Vera’s cousin Kim.

Their family life lasted for three years until 1967, when the realities of the war finally reached their home. Dinh decided to join the army while his wife and children went back to Russia.

In the letters he sent to his wife and children, Dinh never talked about the horrors and death that he saw, only about peace and his wish to see his family again. When Ermokova received her husband’s death notice, Alexei was 14 and Vera was 11.

“It’s a day that I would like to forget. It has followed my family like a shadow for so long,” says Vera.

Back in Russia, the gift Vera likes most is a collection of photographs of Tay Tien (March to the West) soldiers. In the photo album, there are pictures of her father, her uncle and her cousin.

Vera Nguyen remembers picking up fallen leaves in the Botanical Gardens in Ha Noi with her father.

VNN/VNS