my mother went out to the mass graves when they were discovered and she saw the bodies in there, and she was like, i can t go there and look for him. anthony: a lot of people died here. nguyen qui duc: you can t help thinking about these people, who died when they re young, who died for no reason, who just got caught in the firefights. we have the day of the dead here, the day of the wandering souls, and we honor those who are not buried within their home village and not taken care of, their spirits not taken care of. there are families here who don t have a death date, which is huge. a death anniversary in vietnamese is when you do the ceremonies, you pay attention to the dead. you can t do that if you don t know when they really died. you just assume those people are just never liberated spiritually. that they re stuck in that space. it was like that for my father.
of a 9-year-old boy. the son of a high-ranking south vietnamese civil servant caught up in the nightmare of war. where were you in 1968? nguyen qui duc: i was at the place where it s now a hotel. my parents were staying there. we were staying there. it was surrounded during the night, we didn t even know. my father looked out the window, just thought it was south vietnamese soldiers. everybody was surprised, and in those days we thought of the war as something happening out in the battlefields in the mountains, out in the countryside. and, all of a sudden you come here and there s the flag of the national liberation front. and to see that was a complete shock. so we stayed for a week, in the basement. when the american soldiers came, by that time they had marched my father away, the north vietnamese soldiers. we didn t know where he was taken to, and we had no idea whether he was alive or not.
casual observer, that you can pretty much survive anything. nguyen qui duc: that s what my brother reminds me when i used to get all upset about things happening in vietnam. he said, look, it survived 4,000 years. it will do okay. and when you ask me to be hopeful, i m hopeful because it s a young country. it a young population that s energetic. and that drives me, that gives me hope, that makes me young, that makes me want to believe in this country. and this town. such a wonderful place to be.
the menus of the 19th century imperial palaces boasted new dishes every night. small, flavorful, and beautifully presented. and that culinary tradition which gave hue its reputation as a food capital continues today. how much of that persists, those imperial roots, that uh, need for variety? nguyen qui duc: yes, the tradition has stayed and will stay forever here, to cook all these different things all the time. anthony: we start with bird s nest soup, a delicacy to which i am usually immune. this one is unusually flavorful. these are swallow s nests from high up on cliffs, near nha trang. they re soaked in water, cooked in chicken stock, and served with crabmeat. lotus seeds, a symbol of purity, nobility, and patience from a nearby lake. steam. crab roe is mixed with red onion, pepper, and seasoning and added to the soup.
unbelievable. it s very cold and wet. that s why we have chili to keep us warm. anthony: boi tran spoils all of us with a succession of dishes. but the past, as it often does in a place like this, intrudes. nguyen qui duc: hue, it s dealt with a lot of suffering. the people in hue are very withdrawn in some ways. jean-francoi hubert: smiling, but of course they remember everything. they have to remember the war in 1968. nguyen qui duc: i was visiting my grandfather s house, and i got goosebumps. because i knew during the war in 1968 lots of people were killed, and they were buried on all the sidewalks there. and i walk around there and i feel it. it s dark, it s somber. and the history is there.