Word: ngoc
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...Tran Van Ngoc was walking to school the first time he saw the planes trailing clouds of white fog. The 16-year-old stopped to watch as the American aircraft circled his village and the mist settled to earth. "It smelled sweet, like ripe guava," he recalls. It was a routine repeated every morning for a year, and soon the village got used to it?just as they got used to a barren landscape, with tree leaves turning black and branches withering...
...More than 30 years later, Ngoc thinks of those shriveled trees as he watches his two-year-old daughter crying on a straw mat, waving her crippled limbs. Unable to sit up by herself, Trang is one of dozens of malformed babies born in Bien Hoa, where birth defects occur three to four times more often than in other parts of the country, according to a leading Vietnamese researcher. The prime suspect is Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant sprayed for nine years by U.S. warplanes over southern Vietnam. Nicknamed for the orange stripes on its storage barrels, Agent Orange contains...
...There's no doubt in Ngoc's mind that his daughter's deformity was caused by Agent Orange. Scientists are less certain. A groundbreaking conference this week could help change that and may open the door for billions of dollars in aid for Vietnamese victims. Dozens of researchers and medical experts gathering in Hanoi will work together to study Agent Orange's aftermath, seeking hard evidence of a connection between the chemical and illness among Vietnamese citizens...
...only pity the high-minded critics who can't bask in the giddy happiness and joy exuded by the film's sweet innocence, enthusiastic cast and homage to a world long lost. Branagh is our greatest living Shakespearean. Any talk of his decline is just much ado about nothing. NGOC VU San Jose, Calif...
Snapshot parables from today's Saigon: a young woman (Nguyen Ngoc Hiep) befriends a leprous poet; a pedicab driver idolizes a bitter whore; an American visitor (Harvey Keitel), who sired a child back in the war days, returns to search for his daughter. Writer-director Bui, who left Vietnam when he was two, returns to graft these daintily sentimental tales onto rapturous vistas, photogenic faces and a long history of colonial hurt. Alas, Three Seasons, a Sundance prizewinner, shows little more than Bui's fondness for visual and narrative cliches. A better director will have to make the definitive "post...