The last time we kept up this blog, we wrote it more or less as a diary, a sequential log of the things we were experiencing. It was harder for me to write it that way this time around. Partly, it was tactical - traveling with kids this year meant there was less unstructured downtime compared to our honeymoon trip in 2008. But mostly, I think it was because there was more to make sense of on this trip and it took the sum total of our different experiences in Vietnam to put the puzzle together.
Our trip in 2008 was our first trip to Vietnam, and so everything was new, and it was at a particular time in the country’s trajectory that now seems unique. In Hoi An, we found a Lonely Planet guide for Vietnam that was published in 2009 - essentially providing a time capsule of our prior time here. The authors urged the reader of sixteen years ago to visit Vietnam before it became another Indonesia or Thailand, shorthand for a country so completely oriented to appealing to foreign tourists that it had lost a sense of itself.
Being in the Vietnam of 2024, having visited 16 years before, is about reckoning with change. What happened to the places and people we got to know in our seven weeks here in 2008? Had it become another Indonesia or Thailand? Answering these questions took more time and more thinking than I expected, to see the shape of the weave that started with our time in Ha Noi and threaded through the close of our time here in Da Nang.
Of course, this is meant to be more than just an amateur ethnography, so I’ll try to capture the fun, frustrating, and joyful experiences we had. If for no other reason than to have something to compare to when we return, because this trip has made us commit to coming back, aspirationally every other year. Being in Vietnam with our kids has sharpened things about what we want for ourselves, too - the language we want to be able to speak, the relationships we want to have both here and at home, the foods we want to eat.
Our trip was also deeply shaped by two losses that occurred early in our time here. My sister Winnie lost her husband Aaron in Richmond VA, and our sister-in-law, Tam, lost her brother Kyle in Durban South Africa. We are so grateful that 16 years of technological progress allowed us to connect and share our grief, yet so sad to be a world apart from them during this time of immense pain. Their lives were a blessing to the people they knew, even though their time was too short on this earth. They were both people who lived life to the very fullest, and we think they would have found many kindred spirits here in Viet Nam.
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