There are people you meet at literary festivals and then there are those who remain long after the banners are taken down and the microphones fall quiet. 2nd International Poetry Festival at Artists’ Hill in the North of Vietnam was meant to be a gathering of voices, but for me, it became the beginning of a quiet, enduring friendship with Gassanee Thaisonthi.
We travelled together across provinces, roads winding through mountains, conversations after conversations. She is the kind of person who does not rush through a place. She arrives. Fully. Gassanee values presence the way poets rhythm, essential, invisible, and life-giving. In every village, every roadside tea, every fast encounter, she embraced a gentle attentiveness as if the world itself were a manuscript she was carefully reading.
There is something profoundly disarming about her humility. Despite being a seasoned writer, translator, and simultaneous interpreter with around ten published books spanning fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, she wears her accomplishments lightly. Her stories are told with sincerity. Her laughter comes easily. Her curiosity, even more so.
As a columnist and globetrotter, Gassanee writes from movement. Travel is is a method of understanding. Whether reflecting on distant lands like Portugal or capturing the textures of everyday life, her writing holds the imprint of lived experience. She sees culture as something intimate, woven into gestures, food, language, and memory.
And yet, what I cherish most is not her résumé, but her presence beside me in those northern days. We shared moments that cannot be archived: the way she paused to observe a passing scene, the quiet joy she found in simple things, the unspoken companionship of two writers absorbing the same horizon differently, yet together.
She is, in many ways, “out there”, open to the world, embracing each moment with a kind of fearless softness. There is no pretence in her. Only a sincere engagement with life as it reveals. Perhaps that is why people are drawn to her as a writer and as a human being who reminds us how to be present.
Some friendships are written in long letters. Ours was written in footsteps, in shared landscapes, in the gentle rhythm of literary journeys. If literature is a gift, then meeting Gassanee was one of mine.
And somewhere between mountains and verses, I realised
some people don’t just travel the world.
They illuminate it.
