The General was dressed in a tracksuit, his white hair styled in a neat comb-over. He looked fit and trim for someone of eighty-three. Next to him, as interpreter, sat his grandson, who’d just completed high school in Melbourne. Between us was a large coffee table carved from tropical hardwood. The customary tea cups rested on the protective glass top, under which was an assortment of photos, their colours faded with age. One was a picture taken in the very living room we were in, showing my host with his old friend Phạm Văn Đồng, the longest-serving prime minister of Vietnam and, like the General, born in Quảng Ngãi Province.

He was known as “the General” in my family even though he was actually a colonel. We also called him “Ông (grandfather)”. He’d been our landlord for a number of years: we rented the front building on his allotment while its regular occupants—his son and daughter-in-law, who were friends of ours, and their two children—lived in Melbourne. Ông and his wife, who we called “Bà (grandmother)”, lived in the back building, its entrance guarded by a chained-up, vicious dog named Bush, named after the American President. Our four-year-old daughter regularly tip-toed past Bush to visit Ông and Bà, not entirely for altruistic reasons. When she showed up Ông always gave up his wooden lounge chair in front of the TV, switching over to the cartoon channel—access to which was strictly controlled in our home—while his wife fed her lollies and biscuits.

• Tags: Andreas Pohl, Issue 39, Vietnam