I was right. It took me quite a while to persuade her to accept an interview. “Don’t think I am too proud. I just don’t want to talk about bad memories,” she said.

Looking back, Hien does not think her becoming famous when she was very young, was a good thing. It robbed her off a happy childhood, she feels.

At 14, she participated in an international competition for the first time in her life and won a gold medal, the first of dozens that followed.

No other Vietnamese athlete has been able to win as many gold medals as Hien in international, Asian and Southeast Asian competitions.

The 30-year-old mother retired after the last gold medal she took on home soil at the 22nd Southeast Asian Games in 2003.

There’s no denying that Hien is talented and beautiful. The divorced mother of two daughters still looks brilliant, but a bit hardy as though the sparkle of happiness has been missing for a long time.

Even when she was famous, Hien had told me that she was very lonely. She has an elder sister but they live different lives. Her parents got divorced when she was young, and neither was a reliable parent.

She is not an outgoing person, so there was no one to really share her sorrows. Then she got married to singer Anh Tu, a well-known person himself. So their love and marriage became well-known affairs.

Then, one day I heard they had divorced and Hien had been awarded custody of the two daughters.

She told a magazine that she was the one who had ended the marriage after four years, and that she felt sometimes she’d lost all her hopes for a better future.

“I thought I had tried my best and wondered why I didn’t have a happy life and how I could find a reliable man.”

New lease on happiness

“What is happiness? What is love?” Hien says she asked herself many times. “But then I had to stand up after falling. I thought I should live the way I choose to and would get what I deserved and find a man who would understand me.”

I phoned and asked if she’d found such a man. Hien laughed and said, “It’s hard to describe, but I am very happy now because I have two daughters and have found an understanding and reliable man.

“I don’t know if I should get married again, but I completely trust the man I have now.”

I asked her if she felt she lacked something, like money for example. She laughed again and said, “It’s hard to say how much of something is enough. If we have only money, it’s not enough; but if we have love and don’t have money, that wouldn’t be enough, either. We need both in our lives.”

Hien says she has to work hard now, teaching martial arts and doing extra work to raise her children; but she has the love she needs.

“I don’t want to look back at the past, but I couldn’t imagine my marriage would be broken.”

Coming from a broken family, she did not want it to happen to her, but it was unavoidable. When something bad actually happens, we have to face it, she says.

Hien now lives with her mother who looks after the children when she is at work. Her father died of liver cancer in 2003.

Her voice breaks. “It’s a pity my father died before he could see my children.”

Reported by Lan Phuong