Saigon Central Post Office

Dương Văn Ngộ took a job at the post office when he was sixteen years old. He had various responsibilities while also taking multiple language courses before finally requesting a position as public writer in the dwindling letter-for-hire department. He retired in 2021, but his legacy remains alive and beloved within the building to which he devoted over seventy years of his life. Employees still relay stories of his makeshift “office” with its taped sign reading public writer (in Vietnamese, French,  and English), which hung next to his worn wooden desk.

Over the decades at his post, he wrote thousands of letters, translating customers’ correspondence into a new language, rendered in elegant, well-practiced calligraphy. Ngộ always carried the same black leather bag, filled with English and French dictionaries, pens, notebooks, and a magnifying glass—all the tools he needed.

The margins on the pages of his dictionaries were a palimpsest of meticulous notes, marking his own derived meanings alongside the words. Within those were fragments from letters he’d written, imparting stories of adventure, friendship, loss, and love. When taken together, those fragments merge to tell the people’s history of Saigon, delivered through the mind and trusted hand of Vietnam’s last public letter writer.

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