Sadec, Duras

I have long dreamed of traveling to Sadec to see the town where Marguerite Duras grew up and wrote about in her novel The Lover. This is the town where in real life she fell in love with an ethnic Chinese Vietnamese man, about whom she’d write in the novel. I had always imagined the town as a small and ramshackle, and the guidebook suggested that there was not much to see there. Sadec is a lively and beautiful city on the river. The main industry is flowers. Green houses abound, small and large, over tiny canals. One recently has the city identified Duras as a tourist attraction. They’ve partially restored a section of the lover’s home. His family was the wealthiest in town, and when the left during the revolution the land estate was parceled out and part of the home became a police station. The house is also the only place in Vietnam where it is legal to screen the film version of the The Lover, which is too racey for the censors here.

The tour guide in the museum/house of the Huynh Thuy Le focused less on Duras as an author and more on the beautiful love story between the young couple. Perhaps you’ve heard of the French author our guide asked us. We were also told that the family donated the property to the government after they left Vietnam. You can spend the night there and watch the film.