Duy Nguyán, co-founder of Du Bút Books, was born and raised in the South-West of Vietnam. He had always thought he knew this region well. But by traveling through it, meeting artisans, farmers, boatmen and elders throughout its provinces, he realized everything he had never really seen.
“Even within the same cultural region, the differences between provinces can be surprisingly surprising and significant,” remembers Duy Nguyá. “I had forgotten them, or perhaps never really noticed them.”
It is this awareness that is at the heart of Du Bút’s new illustrated work devoted to the culture and traditions of the Mekong Delta:Visit Nam PhiÃu Long (Travel in the Mekong Delta: an illustrated guide). The project benefited from financial support from the SOVICO Corporate Social Responsibility Fund, created within the framework of the UNESCO-SOVICO Strategic Partnership.
The idea of a book on the Mekong Delta had been brewing for almost a decade. Since 2017, foreign friends passing through Việt Nam have asked Nguyễn the same disconcerting question: if they wanted to understand Vietnamese culture, what book should they read? In his eyes, many existing cultural titles, as rigorous as they were, were not easy to recommend to someone who was curious but in a hurry. Over the years and small experiments, he gradually understood what the project required.
“I had to move from the distant to the near, from the big to the small, from the unknown to the familiar.” This change in perspective brought him home.Â
