Nguyen Qui Duc, whose salon became a center of Hanoi, dies at the age of 65

Nguyen Qui Duc, the owner of a salon and exhibition space that became a landmark in Hanoi, where both Vietnamese and foreigners gathered for music, poetry and long nights of drinks and sushi, died on November 22 in a Hanoi hospital. He was 65.

The cause was lung cancer, said his sister and only survivor, Dieu-Ha Nguyen.

A war refugee as a teenager, Mr. Duc found success as a radio commentator in the United States before returning to Vietnam in 2006 to start a new life. His magnetic personality attracted a diverse clientele to the salon, from underground artists to ambassadors.

The salon “provided shelter and camaraderie for new creative voices in Vietnam who were blossoming after the trauma of war,” Tom Miller, an American lawyer and longtime friend, wrote in an email.

The experimental art installations that Mr. Duc exhibited tested official boundaries in that communist-run country, but in what Mr. Miller called a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities, similar to that of the artist Ai Weiwei in China, Mr. Miller was called a cat-and-mouse game. Duc found ways to keep going.

He gave his salon a playful name, taken from Vietnamese schoolbooks: Tadioto, which means ‘we go by car’.

“It’s the first thing baby Duc learned to read,” said TT Nhu, a relative, “and when he returned to Vietnam, it was like learning to read again.”

Mr. Duc once described Tadioto as “a gallery, an event space, a meeting place for creative and unorthodox people and a comfort space for expats.”

A refuge from the chaos of rapidly modernizing Hanoi, Tadioto, complete with sushi ramen and whiskey bars, was a low-key version of Rick’s Cafe Americain in the movie “Casablanca,” without the hard edge of bustle and intrigue.

Tadioto became a mandatory stop for journalists, diplomats and high-profile travelers, such as celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, who was escorted around Hanoi by Duc, and singer Tom Waits, who performed informally there.

Tadioto embodied the two sides of a man who, like many refugees, continued to search for an identity long after his uprooting.

“I no longer have a single identity,” he wrote in 2008 in an essay titled “America Inside the Vietnamese Soul,” published on the website of the PBS documentary series “Frontline.”

“I’m split in two: parts of me are still deeply Vietnamese, parts of me are still deeply American. There are times when I can barely explain myself to myself.”

In a Facebook tribute, Kim Ninh, a fellow former refugee who represented the Asia Foundation in Hanoi for years, wrote of their shared sense of dislocation.

“Human pain and suffering colored his life,” she wrote, “a part of family history, part of national history, part of the world he tried to make meaning of. Or at least: document. Until the end, we talked about our shared quest to find ‘home’. We knew it was a futile attempt, but it permeates everything: Duc’s work as a journalist and as a writer; his travels, that extraordinary sense of aesthetics where the love of shadows was always present.”

In addition to his work in radio — he was a host at KALW and KQED in San Francisco, contributed to NPR and then had his own NPR program, “Pacific Time” — Mr. Duc published poems and stories in several magazines, including City Lights San Francisco review; wrote a play; produced a television documentary; and translated Vietnamese poetry and fiction for publication in English.

“Duc was a renaissance man, made art, made robots, made sculptures, designed houses, designed everything,” Ms Nhu said. “His quicksilver mind was always looking for the next thing.”

But his life was more than the sum of its parts; as a friend, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote on Facebook: “I consider his life his most important work of art.”

Nguyen Qui Duc (pronounced nwin-kwee-dook) was born on September 16, 1958 in Dalat, South Vietnam, to aristocratic parents. His father, Nguyen Van Dai, was the civilian governor of Hue City, and his mother, born Nguyen-Khoa Dieu-Lieu, was a school principal who lost her job after the communist victory in 1975; she was reduced to selling noodles to earn a living.

Mr. Duc tells the family’s story of separation and endurance in an intimate 2009 memoir, “Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family.”

He was 10 years old when the North Vietnamese captured his father during a 1968 military campaign known as the Tet Offensive and held him captive for more than a decade. When the war ended, at the age of 17, Mr. Duc managed to flee by ship to the United States on his own and then went to Ohio, where he joined a brother and sister who had already moved there .

His mother remained in Vietnam with another sister, Nguyen Thi Dieu-Quynh, who died of kidney failure in 1979 after a lifelong battle with mental illness.

Mr. Duc completed his high school education in Virginia and became a U.S. citizen in 1981. He then spent a year in Indonesia, where he worked in a refugee camp and helped the so-called Vietnamese boat people who had landed there.

In 1984, after his father’s release, he was reunited with his parents in San Francisco, where he had already begun his radio career as a reporter and commentator.

For a man with an uncertain identity, Mr. Duc said he thought radio was an ideal medium. “I like that you are faceless, almost nameless, and just a voice,” he told an online magazine And of Other Things in 2015. “You can be intimate, authoritative, friendly, heard but not seen… a nameless, faceless voice gives people imagination.”

While in San Francisco, he married a British woman, but they divorced amicably soon after.

Mr. Duc first returned to Vietnam in 1989 to record a report for National Public Radio. While there, he retrieved his sister’s ashes from a Buddhist temple and secretly carried them back to San Francisco, symbolically reuniting his family.

He moved permanently to Vietnam in 2006, bringing with him his widowed mother (his father died in 2001), who suffered from dementia, and settling her in a retreat outside Hanoi until her death in 2011.

He decided to stay, he told NPR in 2015, to “finish the man I was meant to be” after being “disrupted and interrupted to go to America and become someone else.”