His name was Wanbi Tuấn Anh, but everyone in Vietnam just knows
him as Wanbi. The first song I saw of his was just a typical break-up song
about a Vietnamese couple who break up and the girl gets angry at her boy-
friend (played by Wanbi) and walks out of his life, leaving him devastated
and alone. The ending was interesting though, as a Korean girl turns up on
his doorstep responding to his room for rent advertisement, confusing him
by speaking only in Korean, and the clip ended with “To be continued…”
I got quite into the song because Yan TV played it so often and I
remem- ber going to so many CD stores and asking them if they had Wanbi.
None of them ever did, even when I showed them his name, but I was able
to get a lot of his music off YouTube although I really wanted to see the
conclusion to the story. Well, it turned out to be almost two years later, near
the end of 2012 before I finally got to see how it turned out when he
released “Tìm Thấy”, or “found”.
The song was brilliant because it was a cool R&B style unlike his pre-
vious song, and also because the video told a beautiful love story about how
the two of them overcame their differences and struggled to communicate
in the most unusual way – by printing out QR codes (2D bar codes) for each
other to scan into their phones. The video also showed how the girl would
draw funny faces on the lids of Wan- bi’s green tea bottles.
At the time I discovered the video I was in a relationship with a
Vietnam- ese girl (now my wife !) and we were struggling with our own
language dif- ferences so I showed it to her as a way of saying “Look !
Language is no barrier to true love !” She then began drawing similar faces
on my own green tea bot- tles and I have collected the caps and have them
stored away to this day, so the song really meant a lot to me.
By this time, I already knew that Wanbi was sick. I’d heard the whole
story from various people I had met in my travels. Wanbi had a brain tu-
mor and he was going to die, although naturally we didn’t know how long
he had since he kept such details private. I had heard about how many other
