Day 1
After four years and a hundred lifetimes, we stepped back onto Vietnamese soil. It was a long-overdue return, one postponed by the inertia of American life and the sheer logistical gravity of distance. One doesn’t just hop over to Vietnam for a long weekend. It takes planning, money, time off, and a recalibration of your entire nervous system. But here we were, dazed from the journey, blinking into the blinding Saigon light like travelers stepping out of a dream.
Saigon hadn’t stood still, of course not. It never has, and it never will. The skyline was fuller, the scooters somehow louder, and the chaos was more choreographed than I remembered. Luan and Duyen, my brother and sister-in-law, had built some new additions, and their house is now vibrating with the energy of a growing family—one new baby girl added, and a boy is on the way. Next door, unfamiliar walls stood where open space once lived. But even with these shifts, the city felt less like it had changed and more like it had continued in our absence, carrying our stories forward in whispers and street dust.
I missed this. All of it. The sounds of morning—the low murmur of neighbors, the sizzle of oil, the perfumed incense that perpetually hung in the air, the distant bell of a bicycle vendor announcing his wares. “Bánh Bao, Bánh Bao Đây.” The scent of lemongrass and fish sauce that hung in the humid air like an invitation. The specific rhythm of life here is slower in its pace but louder in volume, and chaotic in a way that initially seems overwhelming. In the States, everything felt muted, wrapped in asphalt and obligation. Car insurance. Business licenses. Mortgage rates and scheduling apps. Let us not forget our quarterly tax bill. In Vietnam, daily life never pretended to be easy, but it didn’t apologize for itself either.
It had been hardest on Diem. The U.S. offered a different kind of freedom—one laced with restrictions, fine print, and invisible costs. We bore it all silently: the paperwork, the bills, the rules layered on top of rules. In Vietnam, she was light. In Georgia, she seemed to carry everything. Not as a burden, more of a kind of cost of doing business in the freest economy on earth. Or so we are taught. But now, walking through the streets of Vietnam again, trading smiles with old vendors and new mothers, I could see something ease in her shoulders. This wasn’t just a visit. It was a recalibration.
We came back for family, for reconnection, for something less tangible but no less urgent. We should’ve returned sooner. But life—messy, relentless life—always intervenes. Still, Vietnam had waited, maybe not waited, exactly, but held space for us. Like a table in a favorite restaurant that’s always open, always ready, no matter how long you’ve been gone.
And now we were back. All of us. Together.
The greeting at the airport was as usual, a small family reunion. It’s always a significant event when someone returns from the U.S., and it is treated as such. Everyone livestreaming our return for the Vietnamese masses. It often feels a little like being a celebrity when we return, and I often wonder what kind of status Diem may quietly evoke from being married to an American. For it seems every single person in Vietnam wants to be. I remember all of the posts in the old expat groups I was a part of, with young Vietnamese offering their qualities to any American, or European, for that matter, looking for a devoted mate.
It’s not the grand privilege it once was, at least not in my eyes, as the complexity of life in America has far outpaced any privilege and comfort it may bring. In America, life often dances on the edge of paradox. There is, undeniably, a privilege to possessing a blue passport—the doors it opens, the ease with which one moves through the world. It’s a kind of silent power that whispers “access” at border crossings and in emergency rooms. But with that privilege comes complexity. The American dream is riddled with fine print—student loans, fractured healthcare, social inequities, and a cultural obsession with productivity that too often mistakes burnout for success.
You can have a closet full of clothes and still feel threadbare. You can have a fridge packed with food and feel spiritually starved. Privilege, after all, is not immunity. It’s the beginning of a story, not the end.
Living in the U.S. can feel like having front-row seats to a show you helped pay for but don’t always understand. You’re told you’re lucky to be here—and maybe you are—but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The cost of that luck, at times, is isolation, anxiety, or a gnawing sense of restlessness. Privilege doesn’t cancel out struggle; it just changes its flavor. In the end, American complexity is its own kind of seasoning—rich, sometimes bitter, but unmistakably part of the meal.
We spent our first day back at Luan’s house, where the welcome was less fanfare and more a feast—durian split open on the ground like prehistoric eggs, Vietnamese chicken salad mounded in ceramic bowls, meatballs made of fermented pork and fish cake, fresh vegetables and greens arranged with the precision of love. Duyen had set the table low and placed the pot of chao at the end, dishes for nước chấm, towers of fresh herbs, and laughter from every corner of the room. It was a kind of welcome no embassy could replicate.
After the meal, full of fermented funk and citrus tang, we wandered down to the local massage shop—tiled walls, plastic stools, and the ever-present reflexology chart like a roadmap to health. We melted under the pressure of fingers that knew every muscle by name and every knot by ancestry. It included an intense “coining” session, and by the time it was over, my back was streaked in the unmistakable blood red ribbons of a sort of physical exorcism of pain and discomfort.
Cạo gió, or “scraping wind,” is more than a folk remedy—it’s a ritual of release, both physical and emotional. Using the edge of a coin or spoon, practitioners draw dark, purposeful lines across the skin to coax illness out, to summon relief where language may fail. It’s a therapy of touch, of familial care, of cultural memory passed hand to hand. The bruises it leaves behind are not wounds but echoes of healing, proof that pain has been met and moved. In Vietnamese households, cạo gió is comfort—where the body is listened to, where suffering is named, and then gently scraped away. I would have slept entirely through the process, but the occasional spikes of pain always brought me back to the realm of the living. Though, as seemingly quickly as it began, it concluded. With Massage session complete, there could be only one thing left to do.
Coffee. Real cà phê sữa đá, strong enough to punch through time zones. It had worn into late afternoon, which in Vietnam means the sun is not long for this part of the world. We sat overlooking the river, framed in bamboo and fairy lights, with a red ribbon like an altar to our return. The girls snapped pictures. Diem leaned into me. For a moment, the weight of the past four years dissolved into the swirl of sweetened condensed milk and crushed ice. The sun set behind the water, soft and slow, and the sky didn’t ask us where we’d been. It was Lisa’s 13th birthday, and we celebrated under the new moon, at the river’s edge.
We wandered the streets of Saigon deep into the night, and not long before the clock struck a new day, we found ourselves hunched over mismatched stools in the golden haze of a roadside grill, the looming silhouette of Landmark 81 casting its electric afterglow across the makeshift plastic tables. We had arrived just before midnight, bodies adrift in the quiet whiplash of jet lag, but the city, like a loyal conspirator, was beginning its second wind.
The air shimmered with motorbike exhaust and charcoal smoke, and every inch of the narrow alley was alive with the theater of late-night hunger. Vendors worked their stations like old jazzmen—graceful, improvisational—flipping marinated pork skewers over open flame, the fat crackling in approval. A boy with a tray of cold Tiger beers threaded his way through the crowd, balancing history and condensation in every bottle.
Diem ordered in a voice so casual it sounded like music—gà nướng, bắp xào, hủ tiếu—and within minutes, our table glowed with amber-lit plates. Sticky rice with meatballs and quail eggs, Hu Tieu with thin strips of deliciously marinated pork. And of course, what late-night snack would be complete without banh mi? Around us, locals leaned in close, whispering through mouthfuls, their laughter punctuated by the clink of glass and scooter horns.
Across the street, a dog slept belly-up beneath a tree wrapped in LED light vines, dreaming perhaps of grilled meat and cool tiles. We didn’t speak much. We didn’t need to. It was all there: the heat, the scent, the pulse of a city that had waited for us—and knew exactly how to say welcome home.
Day one had already fed us, healed us, and caffeinated us. But more than that, it reminded us what we came for—not just the people, or the food, or the city. But the version of ourselves we left behind, now waiting patiently to be remembered. The story picks up again, not from where it left off, but from where it had always meant to continue.
For more articles on Saigon and southern Vietnam, check out the links below.
