The scent of wet earth after rain struck me first. It wasn’t just the familiar tang of moisture on stone. It was something more profound. Embedded in that damp breath of the village were a thousand memories of a thousand lifetimes. The scent of my wife Diem’s childhood. The echo of ancestors’ footsteps. The humble acknowledgment that this entire valley once lay waste to the tides of war. But today, the smell of longing and return.
We had just arrived in An Lao by sleeper bus. We were stiff-legged and bleary-eyed after twelve rumbling hours. The journey blurred the spine of the Vietnamese coast into a single long breath, waiting to exhale. When the doors hissed open, the village came to life around us — or maybe it had always been awake. Waiting. A parade of motorbikes circled in like a scene from an old film. Cousins, uncles, and neighbors were riding tandem, weaving between bags and bodies. There were all grins, shouts, and outstretched hands. They had come to carry us — quite literally — back home. The stop was a few hundred yards from the entrance to the tiny hamlet. Down a small lane, over a seemingly ancient bridge, into the sleepy village of Thuan An.
Diem climbed on behind one of her sisters. Our daughters were already swept up and secured on another bike. I was handed a helmet and hoisted up like precious cargo. My backpack was wedged between my knees, with other bags dangling from my shoulders. No ceremony. No hesitation. Just the effortless choreography of a family who’ve done this a hundred times before. We rode out of town. We entered the folds of An Lao’s mountain-shadowed quiet. The wind peeled back the ache of the journey. The homes blurred past in colors softened by years: soft aqua, faded peach, dust-bitten white. And I thought about how strange it feels to return to a place. A place that remembers you better than you remember yourself.
It had been five years since we last came. It was five years of America, of Georgia’s red clay and big-box parking lots. We experienced post-pandemic peculiarities and family FaceTime calls that never quite filled the space we left behind. Now, here we were, back in the village, the same but not the same. Older. Changed. Grayer at the temples, maybe softer in the belly, but heavier with meaning. After re-acclimatizing to the insanity of U.S. pace and culture, I understood even more deeply how precious the ever-fading, bucolic countryside of Vietnam is. It truly is where heaven meets the earth.
Diem’s smile was different here. Less practiced. Less for show. When her helmet came off and her feet touched the steps of the family home, something in her body relaxed. You don’t always notice how much tension you carry until it leaves you.
The house looked a little newer, though the bones were the same. Polished granite steps and a fresh coat of blue-gray paint greeted us. I saw the familiar wooden shutters flung open to the breeze. The tin roof high above caught drops of rain still falling from a passing storm. Diem’s sister and a group of nieces, nephews, cousins, and neighbors came out to greet us. They were all smiles and noise. It was a sudden wave of emotion and embrace. It was a deeply touching moment of welcome.
I’m not used to being fussed over. But here, in An Lao, I’m a bit of a curiosity. I am the foreign husband who shows up every now and then. Who tries earnestly to speak a few words of Vietnamese. I do this while towering over everyone else. Yet, this last stretch was the longest since I first came here. I used to come several times a year. Now, it had been five long years. They laugh, I laugh, and somehow, real affection exists between the jokes and missed translations. My adopted brothers and sisters, of course, remember me. And they’re glad I’m home.
That first morning was slow and humid. It was the kind of day when the air wraps around your limbs. It coaxes sweat out of you like a confession. We ate simply — fresh pork skin spring rolls. Bun noodles with rich broth, scallions, and quail eggs. Fresh cucumber slices and mangosteens. And of course, the darkest, richest coffee over ice. But though it is often my focus, the food wasn’t the point. The point was presence. That we were here. That we were home.
After breakfast, we made our way to a nearby café. This wasn’t the kind of place TripAdvisor will tell you about. It had no craft foam art or hipster lighting. It was something far more magical. Set like a floating garden, this café had concrete booths set down into a moat of water, each hexagonal pod its own little island. We walked through the shop with our family in tow — nieces, daughters, sisters — who had all crammed into a motorbike convoy to get there. Our own little gang, I missed it so much.
The drinks arrived like bright offerings. Vietnamese iced coffee — cà phê sữa đá — thick, smoky, and punched up with sweet condensed milk. Lime and soda for the kids, in brilliant green. Jasmine tea in squat glass cups. There was laughter, a low hum of fans spinning overhead, and koi fish floating through the water around us like gliding dreams. I caught Diem’s eye. She smiled — wide and true — and I knew she felt the same thing I did: we’d made it back.
Afterward, we slipped our helmets on and rode back through the village, past the homes Diem used to visit as a girl, past roadside altars with incense curling upward like prayers with no timetable. The roads were still impossibly narrow, still hugged by walls of banana trees and dangling electric lines. I’ve always said these lanes, their tidiness, remind me more of an English hamlet more so than Southeast Asia — that is, until the whiff of durian or the sight of a water buffalo and palm trees yanks the comparison back into place.
Later, we sat on the front steps of the house. The kids played barefoot in the yard. Motorbikes buzzed occasionally in the distance, more like bees than traffic. I watched Diem — the way she leaned back on her elbows, face up to the clouds like she was soaking in the memory of sky. I felt lucky to witness it. To be here, not just as a visitor, but as a thread in this fabric, even if I’ll never quite speak the language.
Homecomings are strange. They’re not about going back to what was — that’s never quite possible — but about reconnecting with who you were in that place. Or maybe, who you’ve always been underneath the noise of modern life. In An Lao, there is quiet. Not silence, but a quietude of soul. A space where stories don’t have to be shouted to be heard. A place where, for me, every step is a kind of adventure. It really is a compelling thing.
A Wedding
We arrived in An Lão under a sky that couldn’t quite decide whether to bless or blister us. By afternoon, I was informed my presence was requested for an event. Something big at the village parade ground. I loaded on a bike with a brother-in-law, Tao, and off we went. The village had transformed within a couple of hundred yards down the lanes.
The sleepy hush of the afternoon siestas ended. A sensory riot took over as electric blue tarps snapped overhead. Oversized loudspeakers screeched and warbled. They competed with a live band that was finishing a sound check. Wave after wave of family and neighbors poured into the tent, beset upon the parade grounds like a human tide. Stuffing envelopes of cash into a large golden chest at its entrance. A classic Vietnamese wedding tradition, one I had seen before.
Metal stools scraped across the grass. Aluminum tables sprang up like mushrooms after a rainstorm. Crew in dusty sandals, conical hats, and collared shirts directed the action. They gestured traffic with folding stools and cases of beer. Hot pots hissed steam as they were set down. Decorative vines were being strung through the rafters of the massive tent. Somewhere, a generator coughed to life. The transformation was total.
We were ushered in with the kind of exuberance that doesn’t ask permission. My brother-in-law Tao had already claimed a table around the middle. A few grinning friends, or family, whose names I never caught, were there too. A cheerful stranger with a bottle of rice wine joined them. The stranger poured a beer into my glass before I’d even sat down. I recognized the gesture immediately: welcome. For the next hour or so, I was captive to the moment. But I don’t mind, it is always a ton of fun.
“Một, hai, ba, dô!” went the cry.
And again.
And again.
Vietnam’s version of “cheers” is not a toast. It’s a rhythm, a ritual, a dare. My glass never stayed empty. Neither did anyone else’s. Somewhere between the hotpot and the second case of beer, I realized the entire tent was in sync. Everyone was eating, laughing, toasting, shouting, and sweating. People wiped their brows with napkins that wilted on contact. It was a full-body immersion.
First came the chả sampler. Grilled pork paste was wrapped around lemongrass stalks. Fermented pink slices of pork were wrapped in guava leaves. Soft steamed patties in banana leaf tasted like memory. Each bite a different angle on pork, each with its own flavor logic. The nem lụi was dipped in a neon green sauce so electric it could revive the dead.
Then: pigeon porridge. Richer than you’d expect. Thick with rice. It is dotted with mushrooms, lotus seeds, and bits of pigeon. The occasional quail egg turns every spoonful into a treasure hunt. Ancestral food. Recovery food. The kind of thing your grandmother might give you when the world has been unkind.
And it kept coming.
Veal salad—a delicious offering of banana flower, bitter melon, herbs, and thin slices of veal, dressed in a vinaigrette that burned and kissed in equal measure. Grouper hotpot, rolling and bubbling like a cauldron of generosity, crowned with fresh herbs, tomato, and mushroom. Steamed chicken with sticky rice, humble and quiet, like the reliable friend who shows up after the chaos. Shrimp in young coconut water, pink and glistening, sweet with the essence of sea and tree. And squid with scallion oil, no char, no fire, just purity.
The band, such as it was, had evolved from a duet to a motley orchestra. Guitars, drums, vocals, a flute. At one point, a child joined with a kazoo. It felt less like music and more like a fever dream scored in real-time. The groom looked dazed. The bride was radiant. Everyone else? Half-soused and fully alive.
The fans cut out halfway through the hotpot. The air went thick. A collective pause. Then someone ripped a Tiger beer box into a makeshift fan, and others followed suit. A cardboard hurricane of relief swept the tent. Improvisation was the rule, not the exception. This wasn’t a wedding. It was a survival sport with a buffet.
And I? I was the foreigner. Not a foreigner. The foreigner. One of the few to pass through this district in decades. This meant my presence came with obligations. There were selfies and babies handed to me. There were relentless toasts. At one unforgettable moment an elder gestured at me, then to the bride and groom, and said something that made the whole table erupt in laughter. I laughed too. What else could I do?
By late afternoon, the party began to tilt toward entropy. Plates emptied. The noise softened. Women in hats began the great cleanup, squatting beside buckets under the mango trees. The ground beneath our feet was a battlefield of shrimp shells, beer cans, and chicken bones. A slow collapse. The beautiful kind.
Then came the doggy bag. My brother-in-law pressed a plastic sack into my hands. Inside: cabbage, okra, carrot, pineapple, and the remains of the hotpot-like edible sediment. A final gift. A benediction.
We stepped out through the wreckage, past the last holdouts clinking glasses, past the sudsy washbasins and mango trees. The tent still flapped in the breeze, like a lung exhaling its final breath of celebration.
The wedding had ended.
But the story—and the week—was only just beginning.
Dinner With the Family
After a much-needed nap after the wedding festivities, the family began to gather for dinner. At An Phú Quán, a restaurant in An Lao where our nephew works, we’d filled ourselves on hotpot, beef salad, and laughter. The kind of dinner that’s less a meal and more a prolonged communion — with food, yes, but more importantly, with one another. The kids had played with a balloon beneath the fairy lights. They bounced and shrieked in Vietnamese and English. Their Crocs slapped against the concrete. Adults moved more slowly. We drank beer. Talked in clusters. We picked at shrimp and greens with chopsticks. No one rushed. No one checked the time.
The food had arrived in waves, like the rolling hills behind the restaurant — each dish both an offering and a punctuation. There was the bò tái chanh — tender beef tossed with papaya, mint, peanuts, and a rain of fried shallots, ringed with crispy prawn crackers like a crown. The pickled mustard greens in the stir-fried noodles carried the tang of preservation, sharp and familiar. A raw shrimp dish, bright with chili, fish sauce, and lime, demanded we abandon restraint and lean into the brine.
But the hotpot stole the show. Carried out steaming, the pot was half broth, half possibility. Pineapple and tomato bobbed beside fish chunks, while leafy greens and enoki mushrooms waited their turn on bamboo trays. Hands moved instinctively: adding, stirring, retrieving. Everyone had their role. Everyone shared.
There’s a quiet generosity to meals like this, a kind of ceremony—not grand or formal, but woven through small, repeated acts of care. Passing herbs. Refilling a glass. Peeling shrimp for a child too young to manage alone.
By the time we left, night had fully fallen. You don’t notice it happen here—no golden hour, no theatrical shift—just a soft dimming, until the world slips from light to blue to black. We became a loose parade: family, visitors, cousins from the city, Americans by association. Strangers, now kin, bound by chopsticks and hot broth.
We rode home through the dark. No streetlamps, just the hush of rubber on concrete and the occasional flicker of a headlight. My arms rested loosely on the back of the bike, body leaning in with ease—like a child half-asleep in the backseat, trusting the rhythm of motion to carry me home.
We floated, really. Like dragonflies skating over the surface of a flooded rice field—smooth and silent, suspended in twilight. The road traced the curve of the An Lão River, a black ribbon glinting with starlight between coconut palms and rambutan. The air still held the scent of dinner—lemongrass, woodsmoke, and the briny ghost of fish sauce in my nose.
We passed familiar houses, idle dogs, the same fields—but under the spell of night, they shimmered with memory more than sight. The silence of the countryside speaks in its own voice—not an absence, but the presence of stillness.
When we reached the house, the metal gate groaned open like an old uncle rousing from sleep. Night-blooming flowers hung thick in the air near the porch. The concrete still radiated the day’s warmth, but the fans stirred just enough breeze to puzzle the mosquitoes. We ducked under the netting that cascaded over the raised bed with a bamboo tile bedmat. Limbs tangled, bellies full, minds drifting with the day.
I don’t remember falling asleep. Only that when I woke, the dream lingered. Only it wasn’t a dream. And in the morning, the lemongrass still stirred in the air.
