The Old Days,Ngo Quyen As It Was
“Some things no one retells. Not because they deserve forgetting — but because they passed so quietly that no one kept anything beyond a few photographs.”
The tiled roofs have aged. The trees have grown taller. The buildings have been repainted a few times over. Some flower beds are no longer where they used to be. Some walls have vanished. Even some names — once carved hastily into desks — have been replaced by new ones.
But if you pause in the schoolyard on some afternoon, when the sun slants through the canopy and the closing bell rings out — you might hear something deeply familiar. Something your parents, your teachers, and the generations before them once heard too.
Humans of Ngo Quyen could not photograph those years. But we have recovered a few moments — in teachers’ old albums, in keepsake drawers, in the phones of alumni who left long ago.
The photographs below are nothing special. No grand event was captured. No famous figure appears. Only the schoolyard, the trees, the tiled roofs, and the very ordinary mornings of a school that has stood for a long, long time.
But it is precisely because they are ordinary that they deserve remembering.
The school has changed. The people have changed. Only the sunlight — stays the same.
These photographs were taken by Vo Ha Thao — back when he was a Ngo Quyen student, many years ago.
Now he is a mentor of Humans of Ngo Quyen. And perhaps, when he agreed to walk with us, he carried along a part of the very mornings captured in these photographs.
If you, or someone you know, holds an old photograph of Ngo Quyen — even just a corner of a hallway, a flag ceremony, a single lesson — please message Humans of Ngo Quyen.
— Humans of Ngo Quyen, 2024