Hoang Nguyen Vu's "Phố xưa người cũ" is a gentle yet profound work of prose. The work is about sobbing and confiding about the first love, about past stories, about the loss of being separated from a young love in Hanoi, about the unrelenting broken feeling when love is happy. When you lose someone you care about, your happiness turns to ashes.
There is no love like the first love, the most haunting is when the love is the most beautiful, one person leaves, the other person lives with torments. People sometimes keep everything, such as an old shirt, in the closet because they are afraid of it fading. They not sure why they did it, but sometimes their mind cannot overcome their heart. Who doesn't have their own space, somewhere to hide their sadness and pain? In the end, time always heals us all, as long as you know how to open your heart. Because you live to be happy, but you can't deceive yourself that being sad with the beautiful things in the past, even though it's gone, is a kind of happiness. Love is sometimes something that makes us nostalgic, sometimes happy and not free from the sadness that surrounds us, that's what love is.