Seen through Thuy Linh's eyes, the programme profiles a city in a period of dramatic change - emerging from colonialism and the still painful memories of the Vietnam war, through socialism to the current free market era where a younger generation is asserting itself as a force for change. Ha was a flower-growing village. Each house was separated with a garden surrounded with banana trees and hibiscus. Today houses stand next to one another and people even fight for the separating wall. Today there isn't even a metre of land left.
People fight for it and grab it all.
As in many other cities the world over, modern development has brought a faster pace of living, and traditional values have gone by the board. And in that lotus pond our grandparents made tea in a very fancy way. At night they opened lotus petals, put tea leaves inside and closed them. Then they used the dewdrops from the lotus leaves as water for their tea. That's how our grandparents drank tea.