Writer Dạ Ngân Remembers What Will Be Lost as Thanh Đa Faces Redevelopment
To me, my trip to Cư xá Thanh Đa in summer 1982 was a serendipitous encounter. It was Saigon’s largest-scale residential complex in the first half of the 1970s, with nearly 4,000 separate units housing about 50,000 inhabitants. Cư xá refers to a residential quarter reserved for gainfully employed citizens, with a vision to establish a model community with high quality of life. Here, in their three-bedroom apartments, civil servants, professors, doctors, military leaders ranked major or higher lived in pride of being a part of a cư xá like that.
