At Vietnam’s Old Flames market, curious customers peruse love letters and pick through perfumes, candles and clothes — relics from failed relationships put on sale by forlorn lovers.
Entrepreneurial exes meet once a month, bringing their baggage — emotional and literal — to a converted cottage on a leafy Hanoi street to find a new home for items they can no longer bear to look at. It’s also a means of moving on.
“(After a breakup) I’m very sad, I can’t drink or eat... but after a while I pick myself up. The past is in the past,” said Phuc Thuy, 29, who was selling clothes, purses and even a tube of toothpaste she acquired during a former romance.
Photo: AFP
The market has steadily grown since it opened in February, especially among Vietnam’s social-media obsessed youth, unabashed about sharing intimate details of their everyday lives.
“Young people are more open-minded and they want to share deeply and widely to overcome pain, without suffering alone,” said founder Dinh Thang, as a visitor strummed love songs on a guitar nearby.
He started the market after a few bitter breakups left him with unwanted paraphernalia from a now extinguished passion. He proudly displays love letters, heart-strewn birthday cards and sentimental scrapbooks from his ex as a reminder that such memorabilia need not be painful forever.
Photo: AFP
He’s also opened the doors to vendors selling new items, and is planning to duplicate the concept in Vietnam’s commercial capital Ho Chi Minh City next year. For those who haven’t quite reached Thang’s stage of emotional post-breakup enlightenment, he’s set up a message board to pen notes to exes.
“To all my ex-lovers, I’m sorry because I feel like we never really knew each other,” read one remorse-tinged message. Another was more succinct: “I’M FINE!!!”
Thang hopes the market will make the topic of breakups less taboo in Vietnam, a conservative communist nation of 93 million where just a generation ago arranged marriages were more common.
Social attitudes have changed as the country has become increasingly globalized and as its vast young population — more than 50 percent of the country is under age 30 — embrace Western dating norms. That includes Internet dating.
“Many young people meet online, date online and break up online,” said Bui Manh Tien, Youth Programme Officer at United Nations Population Fund in Vietnam.
Today, men and women are waiting longer to get married and divorce rates are also ticking up, according to official figures.
“We don’t want to give up our freedom too early and get tied to family responsibility when we’re young, we want to enjoy life before getting married,” Tien, 25, added.
For some, the Old Flames market is simply a place to make new connections, romantic or otherwise.
“I came here to meet people and to see the goods, explore why they used to be a very beautiful memory,” said Tieu Khuy, before picking up a used copy of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s