A cool hill station far from the bombing and guerrilla warfare in the southern part of the country, Da Lat was a resort during the Vietnam War and has remained a resort, with still-intact colonial villas designed at the turn of the last century by celebrated French architects. The Crazy House, built by the daughter of Ho Chi Minh's right-hand man, wriggles up amidst the surrounding architecture as a bizarre contrast. Bizarre for Vietnam. Bizarre for Southeast Asia. It is like a Disney animation of a Grimm's Brothers fairy tale sculpted by Salvador Dali on the grounds of a classic French colonial villa.
The modest villa serves as restaurant and reception area. The décor is unchanged in the half century since the tentacles of the French Empire lost their grip on Southeast Asia. The floors are dark varnished hardwood planks of uneven widths and the furniture is simple French colonial stock: heavy wood with aged red leatherette cushions. The woodwork is layered with chocolate enamel paint, high-lighting the tiny hairline cracks of age. "It's a tad creepy," said a Canadian guest, running her finger through the grime on a scalloped parchment lampshade.
The walls are covered with magazine clippings of articles and patchwork collages of photographs in large wooden frames: photographs of Madame Hang Nga -- born Dang Viêt Nga -- as one face in a children's classroom portrait; seated at a piano in a traditional Vietnamese ao doi;wearing a lacey white Bo Peep dress under a red parasol; and as an adolescent with her father and other famous politicians.
A faded Cosmopolitan clipping claims Hang Nga was bounced on the knees of Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and other famous revolutionaries. Born in 1940, she was probably too old for knee bouncing when she first met Uncle Ho and Fidel, but she knew them. As Ho Chi Minh's right-hand man and the first president of Vietnam after reunification, her father, Truong Chinh, was a revolutionary in his own right.
Children sometimes dream of becoming characters in fairy tales. Dang Viêt Nga made that dream and now lives in a concrete, revolutionary fairy tale -- she even made up a name for herself: Hang Nga (Sister of the Moon).
"My father is political man," she said, speaking slowly in English, "but he understands poetry and literature." After completing her primary education in China, Hang Nga eventually completed a PhD in architecture in Russia. "I like art and technique," she explained, "and architecture is art and technique together."
Like most Vietnamese professionals, she worked for the state. "I am very sad," she said, describing her relationship with the Da Lat People's Committee. "After working in government offices, I decide to do something for myself." That something was the Crazy House. "Now they see all the foreigners come here, and they ask: 'Why do all the foreigners come here? They are crazy. Madame Hang Nga is crazy.' But now some of them understand."
Beyond the curtain of shell necklaces covering the panes of the front window in Hang Nga's villa, a giant concrete "root" has grown up out of the porch. This is the beginning of one of the complex of "tree houses" she has sculpted in her garden. The tree to the East holds five rooms and seems to be complete. If anything here is complete. The entire complex is a work in progress, a cluttered tangle, remarkably organic in every sense.
