In "Despre memoriile femeii si alti dragoni" [About a Woman's Memories and Other Dragons - editor's translation], her most recently published work, writer and anthropologist Raluca Nagy documents the two years she spent in Vietnam, where the health crisis caused by COVID-19 found her, forcing her to extend her stay there for much longer then initially planned.

With a subtitle reading "Cum sa-ti retraiesti copilaria dupa 30 de ani" [How to Relive Your Childhood 30 Years Later - editor's translation] and written in the form of an epistolary, this memoir is built around some parallels that the author draws between the Romania of the 1980s, that of her childhood, spent in two neighbourhoods in the peripheral areas of Cluj-Napoca, namely Manastur (an inter-ethnic neighbourhood, inhabited in equal measure by Romanians and Hungarians) and Ozana, and the Vietnam of today.

The first thing that Raluca Nagy notices in the exotic country she is visiting it's the lush green around, which she compares to that of her childhood years, even if there were no palm trees in her Manastur neighbourhood, and she did not use to eat dragon fruits in the 1980s, in Romania, either. She also speaks of a nation of very young people, just as Romania was back in the 1980s, as a result of the communist ruler Nicolae Ceausescu's famous decree of 1977 that prohibited abortion, as he was trying to force an increase in the birth rate. In 2020, the average age in Vietnam was 31 years old, explains Raluca Nagy, while in Romania it was 43 years, and in the European Union it was 42.

Also, Vietnam is currently a communist country, just as Romania was forty years ago, which is another factor that triggered this return to childhood for the author, once she arrived in Vietnam, plus the fact hat time seemed to slow down quite a lot there, almost standing still, dilating, much in the same way as we perceive it as children.

The author further explains that she had gone to Vietnam for a sabbatical semester [as she works at the University - editor's note], with an idea in mind to finish her second novel. "Basically, I was in my own literary residency, but I couldn't help but take out the anthropologist's kit during the two years I spent in Vietnam," the author told AGERPRES, reflecting on the time spent in this exotic country and on how she always tries to separate her literature from the academic writing she practices as an anthropologist.

"I didn't manage to learn the Vietnamese language at all. I only understood some words so that I was more inventing the surrounding reality, like a child does, than getting to know it in a realistic kind of way. This is, in general, what I mean by reliving childhood after 30 years in this book," added Raluca Nagy.

However, far from talking only about Vietnam, Raluca Nagy revisits, in this book, which was published in 2023, all the other countries where she lived and worked before, starting with Romania - where she lived first in Cluj and then in Bucharest - moving next to Belgium, where she continued to train as an anthropologist, and then England, Japan and, finally, Vietnam. Each time, she confessed, it was difficult for her to detach herself from the old country and equally difficult to adjust to the new environment.

Also, it is not very easy for her to keep up with the current dynamics of the Romanian literature, an environment she feels compelled to stay connected to, once she started writing literature herself. Therefore, she feels that she shares certain affinities with other contemporary authors who live and write abroad, such as, for example, Ruxandra Novac (Germany), Moni Stanila (Republic of Moldova), Maia Levantini (USA), Suzanica Tanase (Canada) or Daniela Hendea (who recently returned to Zalau, after living in the USA for many years).

"I read all these authors's work with admiration and in solidarity, and I feel close to some of them. For sure, we share some affinities and similarities, primarily related to the way we perceive Romania from a (small or large) distance, and related to our own different journeys since we left the country, but also related to the manner in which we understand but not always that much the contemporary literary field back in the country - we somehow stumble together, from a distance, in that sense. And, of course, sometimes we share the same favourite topics," said the author.

At the same time, distance complicates and changes the way these authors who live abroad work with the publishing houses, when proposing a new book for publication, as Raluca Nagy tells about how she collaborated with the publisher of this book and the other two published in Romania, Eli Badica, the coordinator of the n'autor collection from the Nemira publishing house.

"For almost seven years now, we have been working exclusively online, while in different time zones (as I moved from UK to Vietnam, Japan, and she stayed in Romania). It has also been advantageous for us: for the last almost five years, as I was staying in Asia, it was evening for me and morning for her, which was the ideal; we won many nights this way and we progressed quickly, but the distance sometimes messes with our nerves too," confessed Raluca Nagy.

Raluca Nagy (Cluj-Napoca, 1979) is currently an associate lecturer at the Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. Since 2005, she has published texts popularizing anthropology, essays and stories in most cultural magazines in Romania. She contributed with short prose to the short story collections "Scrisori din Cipangu. Povestiri Japoneze de autori romani" (2016), ''Nume de cod: Flash fiction. Antologie Literomania de proza scurta'' (2019), ''Izolare'' (2020), ''Perturbari în desfasurare. O antologie a prezentului'' (2021) and ''Retroversiuni. Antologie de proza scrisă de femei'' (2023).

"Un cal intr-o mare de lebede" [A horse in a Sea of Swans] (2018), her first novel, won the "Sofia Nadejde" and "Observator cultural" debut awards and got nominated at the Festival du Premier Roman de Chambery, France. Her second book, "Teo de la 16 la 18" [Teo from 16 to 18] (2021), was nominated for the "Sofia Nadejde" Awards (2021), the "Ziarul de Iasi" National Prose Award (2022), the "Observatorul cultural" award (2022) and the Leibniz Prize for Prose (2022). She was also a finalist from Romania at the 2022 European Union Prize for Literature.

Raluca Nagy is also the co-founder of the flash-fiction platform Laconic, which aims to revitalisze interest in contemporary Romanian literature. AGERPRES (RO - author: Cristina Zaharia, editor: Mariana Ionescu)