“Two dolls”

On 17.2 every year, Vietnam commemorates the day when the Chinese army crossed hundreds of kilometres of our northern border, thus declaring war. The main conflict lasted a month, but in reality it was a war, described as the ‘3rd Indochina War’, which lasted around ten years, causing the deaths of tens of thousands of people. 

In this song, a little girl sings ‘I have a brown doll, my friend has a blonde one, but we're going to share one to play with, the other we'll send to the border for the children over there’.

Once again, Hoàng Vân's work puts the eyes of women and children at the heart of the war in two songs that we are presenting here today. He also wrote the music for the film ‘Đất mẹ’ (Mother Earth), which recounts this bloody conflict in Vietnam, which had just emerged from the 30 years of the 1st and 2nd Indochina wars.