Nơi sinh

(birthplace)

Yellow, my what-do-I-do-after-Mekong Review magazine, was launched this weekend. I know I should devote my first post here to that august occasion, but I’m not going to. Instead, I want to tell you about a cafe in Saigon.

It’s called ten.coffee and it sits at the bottom of a U-shaped lane a short motorbike ride from the city centre. There are two features about this outdoor cafe that will stop you immediately in your tracks: a wooden bench wrapped around a tree and a cloistered serenity emanating from the place. Here, the clock stops. And you stop, for 30 minutes, an hour, sometimes longer, and you’ll come back the next day.

And this is where Yellow was born. In the early hours of one morning.

At the time (late last year) I wasn’t looking to create another literary magazine (I’m done with niche). I was in fact thinking of something journalistic, even gossipy. Cooped up in my apartment-cage in Tan Dinh, I created, with scissors and glue, dummy after dummy of a cosmopolitan rag positively pumping with scandals and half-truths. I was having a lot of fun dreaming of a magazine that I would never be able to do. And buried somewhere in that detritus on the floor—advertising cutouts and newspaper clippings—was Yellow.

Now, the curious thing about all of this is the name. Once I knew I had the name, the magazine more or less made itself, as though the name determined the rest, ie, form and content. This was the same with Mekong Review; once the name was settled, the rest was history.

After Yellow was launched in Kuala Lumpur, I quietly slipped into Saigon one morning and rode to ten.coffee. I nabbed my favourite spot (see pic) and contemplated Yellow’s parents: was it the light filtering through the pot plants on the balcony, the arabica coursing through my bloodstreams, or this beautiful country with all its beautiful people?