The scent of wet earth after rain struck me first. It was the familiar tang of moisture on stone, and something more besides. In that damp breath of the village were a thousand memories, the scent of my wife Diem’s childhood and the echo of ancestors’ footsteps, and the humble acknowledgment that this entire valley once lay waste to the tides of war. But today it was the smell of longing and return.
We had just arrived in An Lao by sleeper bus, stiff-legged and bleary-eyed after twelve rumbling hours along the Vietnamese coast. When the doors hissed open, the village came to life around us, or maybe it had always been awake and waiting. A parade of motorbikes circled in like a scene from an old film, with cousins, uncles and neighbors riding tandem and weaving between bags and bodies, all grins and 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 and over a seemingly ancient bridge into the sleepy village of Thuan An.
Diem climbed on behind one of her sisters, and our daughters were already swept up and secured on another bike. I was handed a helmet and hoisted up like precious cargo, with my backpack wedged between my knees and other bags dangling from my shoulders. There was no ceremony and no hesitation, just the effortless choreography of a family who’ve done this a hundred times before. We rode out of town and into the mountain-shadowed quiet of An Lao, and the wind peeled back the ache of the journey. The homes blurred past in colors softened by years, soft aqua, faded peach and dust-bitten white. And I thought about how strange it feels to return to 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, of 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. We were older and changed, grayer at the temples and 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 and 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, and 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, all smiles and noise. It was a sudden wave of emotion and embrace, and 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 and tries earnestly to speak a few words of Vietnamese, 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, and 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, the kind of day when the air wraps around your limbs and coaxes sweat out of you like a confession. We ate simply. There were fresh pork skin spring rolls, bún 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 and 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 and 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. There was Vietnamese iced coffee, cà phê sữa đá, thick and smoky and punched up with sweet condensed milk. There was lime and soda for the kids in brilliant green and jasmine tea in squat glass cups. There was laughter and a low hum of fans spinning overhead, and koi fish floating through the water around us. I caught Diem’s eye and she smiled wide and true, and I knew she felt the same thing I did, that 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 and past roadside altars with incense curling upward. 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 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, and motorbikes buzzed occasionally in the distance, more like bees than traffic. I watched Diem, the way she leaned back on her elbows with her face up to the clouds like she was soaking in the memory of sky. I felt lucky to witness it, and to be here as a thread in this fabric and not only as a visitor, even if I’ll never quite speak the language.
Homecomings are strange. They’re about something other than going back to what was, which is never quite possible. They’re 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, which is not silence but a quietude of soul, a space where stories don’t have to be shouted to be heard and a place where, for me, every step is a kind of adventure. It really is a compelling thing.
A Wedding
We arrived in An Lao 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 as electric blue tarps snapped overhead. Oversized loudspeakers screeched and warbled and competed with a live band that was finishing a sound check. Wave after wave of family and neighbors poured into the tent on the parade grounds, stuffing envelopes of cash into a large golden chest at its entrance. It is a classic Vietnamese wedding tradition, and one I had seen before.
Metal stools scraped across the grass, and aluminum tables sprang up like mushrooms after a rainstorm. Crew in dusty sandals, conical hats and collared shirts directed the action and 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, and 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, and 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, and I recognized the gesture immediately as a 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, and neither did anyone else's. Somewhere between the hotpot and the second case of beer I realized the entire tent was in sync, everyone 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. There was grilled pork paste wrapped around lemongrass stalks, fermented pink slices of pork wrapped in guava leaves, and soft steamed patties in banana leaf. Each bite was 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 came pigeon porridge, richer than you’d expect and thick with rice. It is dotted with mushrooms, lotus seeds and bits of pigeon, and the occasional quail egg turns every spoonful into a treasure hunt. It is ancestral food and recovery food, the kind of thing your grandmother might give you when the world has been unkind.
And it kept coming. There was a 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. There was a grouper hotpot, rolling and bubbling and crowned with fresh herbs, tomato and mushroom. There was steamed chicken with sticky rice, humble and quiet. There was shrimp in young coconut water, pink and glistening and sweet. And there was squid with scallion oil, no char and no fire, just purity.
The band, such as it was, had evolved from a duet to a motley orchestra of guitars, drums, vocals and a flute. At one point a child joined with a kazoo. The groom looked dazed and the bride was radiant. Everyone else was half-soused and fully alive. The fans cut out halfway through the hotpot, and the air went thick. Then someone ripped a Tiger beer box into a makeshift fan, and others followed suit. 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, and relentless toasts. At one point 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 wind down. Plates emptied and 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.
Then came the doggy bag. My brother-in-law pressed a plastic sack into my hands. Inside were cabbage, okra, carrot, pineapple and the remains of the hotpot. It was a final gift.
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. The wedding had ended, but the story and the week were 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. It was less a meal than a prolonged communion, with food, yes, but more importantly with one another. The kids had played with a balloon beneath the fairy lights, bouncing and shrieking in Vietnamese and English, their Crocs slapping against the concrete. Adults moved more slowly. We drank beer, talked in clusters and picked at shrimp and greens with chopsticks. No one rushed and no one checked the time.
The kids had played with a balloon beneath the fairy lights, bouncing and shrieking in Vietnamese and English, their Crocs slapping against the concrete.
The food had arrived in waves, like the rolling hills behind the restaurant. 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 and 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 and retrieving. Everyone had their role and everyone shared.
There’s a quiet generosity to meals like this, a kind of ceremony that is not grand or formal but made of small, repeated acts of care, like passing herbs, refilling a glass or 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. There is no golden hour, just a soft dimming, until the world slips from light to blue to black. We became a loose parade of family, visitors, cousins from the city and Americans by association, strangers now kin.
We rode home through the dark. There were 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, my body leaning in with ease like a child half-asleep in the backseat. The road traced the curve of the An Lao River, a black ribbon glinting with starlight between coconut palms and rambutan. The air still held the scent of dinner, lemongrass and woodsmoke and the briny fish sauce in my nose. We passed familiar houses, idle dogs and the same fields, but under the spell of night they shimmered with memory more than sight.
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 and 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.
