Suki update:

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When I left Hanoi at the end of February, 2020, I thought I would stay in South Korea for maybe a month, with perhaps two more weeks in Japan. I never thought the Covid mess would drag on this long, thus preventing my return to Vietnam.

Though being outside Vietnam during Covid has been invaluable for my thinking and writing, I miss my nephew terribly. I've seen Suki in countless dreams and talked to him while wandering foreign streets.

I'm happy to say, though, that four-year-old Suki is doing well. Before the recent lockdown in Saigon, he was in preschool, so made a bunch of friends, he's such a charmer. Rather surprisingly, Suki remembers me well, partly because he loves the toy cars I bought for him in Hong Kong!

I've sent Suki short videos, which he enjoys. Just like before, I use pretty much a full vocabulary, to teach him new words. Even as a one-year-old, Suki was very attentive to each word I taught him. He even knew how to joke with me, such as when he shouted "tôm" ["shrimp"], with a wicked grin, when I showed him a picture of a "cua" ["crab"]. If there was one animal Suki could always indentify, it was a crab. He just loved them. We often went to Saigon wet markets and supermarkets primarily to look at crabs, believe it or not.

In the below video, I tell Suki that though he has seen the ocean, he hasn't seen a mountain, so we'll go see a mountain after I get back to Vietnam. "In time, you'll see everything," I say. "Oceans, mountains, foreign countries." Children force us to be hopeful.

OK, enough of the personal stuff. Now, I get back to my article in progress. It's always a grind, I tell you...