Why I Returned to Vietnam After 15 Years Away — and What's Changed Today

Right away, I notice the smells.

Jackfruit in the sun. The woody spice of cloves. Star anise in a pot of steaming pho. It’s springtime in Hanoi, and the flame trees are in fragrant, coral bloom. Vendors pile bushels of lotus flowers onto their three-wheeled rickshaws and motorcycles. I get a blast of cherry blossom, rice wine, and incense at the entrance to a temple. From a nearby food stall, the lurid tang of fish sauce and grilled, sweet-glazed meat hits me like a psychedelic. It feels like the dawn of a hallucination — complete with the thrill of not knowing quite how the experience will end. 

I am back in Vietnam, 15 years after I first came: up to my eyes in the country’s sensory carnival, immersed in a flood of memories. Revisiting this place, so central to the stories I tell about myself, makes me recognize how different everything is. How different I am from the 29-year-old who moved here to escape the life he was living, how different the world is. Of course, Vietnam has changed, too. All these fracturing realties, past and present, will take some getting used to. 

In 2007, when my life in Los Angeles had reached a dead end and I had nothing to lose, a friend invited me to move to Vietnam to act as a consultant on the Franco-Vietnamese restaurant he was opening in Ho Chi Minh City (to this day it’s more often called Saigon). As an aspiring writer, I had lots of experience working “day jobs” in restaurants and an affinity for the expat protagonists of mid-century novels. It may sound strange, but going to Vietnam is the thing in my life I’m most proud of — maybe because it was the kind of thing the “me” I wanted to be would do, a way to indulge all my linen-suit, Graham Greene, and Humphrey Bogart fantasies. 

But my memories of who I was back then haven’t been trapped in amber. They have been subject to the constant revisions the unconscious makes, the better to fit our histories with our ideals. My memories of Vietnam, too, have been edited over time. And, like an adult who returns to his elementary school and finds that everything seems smaller, the country is not quite how I remember it. Happily, it is even more vivid, wild, and intense, and…. Did I mention the smells?

For my return visit, I worked with the travel outfitter Remote Lands, whose advisors built my itinerary, booked guides, expedited transfers, and arranged for me to be spirited through customs and immigration — a godsend. They have booked me in to the Capella Hanoi, which, after 24 hours in coach, feels like a magical oasis. There is a 1930s Indochine–Art Deco theme to the hotel, which makes my stay feel like an Agatha Christie adventure. Every room on my floor is named for an opera figure; I am in Sarah Bernhardt. 

On the outskirts of Hanoi, new buildings seem to have proliferated like stucco mushrooms. But in the city’s leafy old town, things feel relatively unchanged. The colonial buildings in honeydew and cantaloupe colors — surrounded by banyan trees, strangler figs, and jacaranda and set off by the bright primaries and pastels of the clothes of passersby — make for a delicious street scene. All of that before I even get to the cha ca, the turmeric-grilled fish served with a side of rice vermicelli, and the Vietnamese coffee sweetened with condensed milk that rockets me right out of my jet lag. For years, I have been craving this food — the best in the world, to my mind — and I indulge myself without moderation. 

I meet my former boss, Minh, who grew up in Hanoi, for lunch under the whirling wicker fans of the Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi. In this whitewashed French-colonial property, with its wooden shutters and clubby lobby bar, I feel duty-bound to have a gin and tonic — or several. Minh and I are the same age, so when he arrives I am somewhat astonished that he seems not to have aged a day since I saw him 15 years ago. When I compliment him on this, he flashes the puckish smile I remember and tells me he has always felt a bit like Peter Pan, never really growing up, even though his kids are now in college. “Also, I run,” he says in a way that makes me wonder if he is joking. Running would not have fit with the lifestyle we once shared. 

Minh came of age during the so-called opening of Vietnam in the 1990s, when, nearly a generation after the war, the insular, Communist government began to welcome international trade and tourism. Like many people from well-to-do families of his era, Minh was educated outside of the country, then returned home with an idea of what Vietnam could do differently on the global stage — ideas like opening a restaurant with aspirations of appealing to the jet set and being listed in the Michelin guide. 

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When I ask how he thinks Vietnam has changed since we worked together, he immediately says that the country has become caught up with making and spending money. Like everywhere, I say, to make a joke. And maybe as another joke, or a kind of test, we order a massive lunch of shellfish and wine, goading one another to relive the excesses of our youth. As we talk, I think about the late nights when we would close the restaurant and stumble across the street to a chicken pho cart. We’d eat, sitting on plastic chairs, while a fortune teller made the rounds, regaling the patrons with stories of their fabulous futures. 

These days, Minh works on tourism projects in the north, and he encourages me to head that way — it’s a region I’ve never ventured into. When I moved to Vietnam, the town of Sa Pa, for example, near the Chinese border, seemed impossibly remote. But a new highway has dramatically reduced the travel time to the famous Jade Hills of the northwest. Now wedding parties frequently drive from Hanoi for the weekend to take photos in their finery, often months before the big day. 

Maybe it is the thinner, crisper air, but as soon as I arrive in Sa Pa I am filled with childlike exuberance, racing a few steps ahead of my grown-up cynicism. The place feels like something out of the Star Wars saga: a frontier town nestled in the knuckles of high, knobbly forested hills, with the kind of wooden inns where you might gather a team for an expedition. 

The Black Hmong and Red Dao hill tribes who live here wear beautifully embroidered fabrics in styles that would not look out of place in Mongolia or the Himalayas. On a walk in the hills outside Sa Pa, these villagers and I do a lot of laughing, communicating through my guide from Remote Lands, while I try not to think of the massive reef of new hotels under construction — built at a seemingly frantic pace, to accommodate the incoming crush of domestic, regional, and international travelers — on the ridges above us. Is it cynical to worry about the impact on these tender farming landscapes? About the bridge that further shrinks the travel time for weekenders from Hanoi and caravans of coaches from China and beyond? To be concerned about the pressure that development is putting on this fragile, singular place?

It is wonderfully chilly in the north, so it makes for quite a contrast when, after a couple of days, we make our way to the area south of Hanoi, near Ninh Bình, that has always been on my wish list and where there are (as of yet) few international visitors. At the ancient imperial capital grounds of Hoa Lu, a handful of domestic travelers are taking selfies in traditional ao dai in front of the 10th-century temples. The famous karst formations of the region rise up from the flat rice fields with the abruptness of paper cutouts in a pop-up book. 

On what may be the hottest, most humid day I’ve ever known, I walk on wooden footpaths raised above the crop at a lotus farm, make a weary pilgrimage up hundreds of steps carved into a mountain to visit a pagoda, and look out on a landscape at once intensely familiar and comfortingly alien — the blue-tinged limestone mountains rolling into the distance like a mythical serpent. I will later learn that this was the setting for a King Kong movie, which may be the source of my analogy, and my déjà vu. 

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Does a memory have to originate with personal experience to be genuine? Are my memories of Vietnam from Graham Greene’s Quiet American and Oliver Stone movies any less real than the ones I made myself? Are any of the memories from my life in Vietnam representative of reality? I am in a place that looks perfectly like the country of popular imagination. And I am nevertheless elated, as well as overwrought and clearly unraveling. I have no memory of Hue, though I once spent a week in the city, and I am overwhelmed by it now, in love with the imperial-era structures and with my hotel, the Ancient Hue Garden Houses. At Hoa Lu, I lose myself thinking about how each of the zillions of leaves on the massive banyan trees might represent a single self, and how those endlessly forking branches symbolize the decisions and experiences that lead us to inhabit one leaf rather than another. Maybe the heat has gotten to me. 

After I moved to Vietnam in 2007, I worked almost seven days a week consulting for the restaurant, planning the wine list, helping to design the bar, and training the staff, until, after six months of this, I nearly collapsed. Shortly after we opened, I thanked Minh for the opportunity and gave my notice. 

I wandered around the country, and I wrote. For a few months, toward the end of my stay, I moved to the ancient town of Hoi An, near what was once known as China Beach, where American GIs would go for their R&R during the war. Returning to Hoi An and its magical old town, some of which dates back to the 15th century, packs a heavy dose of nostalgia. When I arrive, the brilliant yellow hoa giay flowers are in bloom, and the syrupy summer light glints off the river and settles on the French-colonial buildings. It’s still one of the most enchanting sights I know. 

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Friends who still live in the city tell me how much things have changed: the floods of backpackers turning the unesco-protected old town into a kind of Bourbon Street East; the new luxury resorts walling off parcels of beach behind barbed wire; the dwindling rice paddies. Still, walking through the old markets in the early morning, listening to the ladies in their matching suits — which look like boldly printed ER scrubs — gossip and laugh in the late afternoon, it feels like no time has gone by.

Throughout the country there is a palpable pride in the resistance to American invasion and in a national identity that survived hundreds of years of Chinese occupation even before the French and the Americans arrived. This pops up in both beautiful and weird ways. I was kicked out of my first apartment here after nearly six months for “having a colonist’s face.” 

Back then I found it touching, and telling, to see American veterans in Hoi An, many of them wearing old camo army hats festooned with ribbons and badges, taking their sons and daughters around the country. Many of those returning vets are evangelical about the beauty of Vietnam’s land and people. I think about how they must be reexperiencing their memories but also seeing Vietnam anew through the eyes of their children. 

I wonder if I, too, am overwriting my own memories, doubling them, refreshing them, or muddling them all up. In 2007, I intentionally didn’t bring a camera to Vietnam. If I couldn’t rely on photos, I thought, I would have to learn to write well enough to transmit the experience to those back home — those from whom I felt so remote back then, in a world before smartphones (before I had one, at least). As lost and lonely as I was, though, it may have been the last time I felt whole, integrated, present — before social media made my position in time and space feel provisional, my focus as jumpy as an old TV set. 

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In my twenties, I had yet to hear the term wellness. Luxury hotels were beyond my imagination, let alone my financial reach. So, in 2007, when I heard about the Six Senses Ninh Van Bay resort, my brain grabbed hold of it and turned it into a kind of grail. I remember poring over pictures of royals and celebrities on vacation there and thinking that never in a million years would I go. On this trip,
I was determined to see it. 

The Ninh Van Bay resort is extraordinary — a series of thatched-roof villas scattered along a turquoise bay, surrounded by massive Flintstones-esque boulders on a barely inhabited peninsula accessible only by boat. Padding around my dark-wood villa, flopping in the massive tub overlooking the boulders and the bay, or stepping out onto the wooden deck to lounge by my personal infinity pool, I realize that there is a world of difference between traveling alone and being on vacation alone.

When, after two weeks in Vietnam, I finally make it to what I think of as my former hometown, I am physically and emotionally destroyed. Thanks to 15 years of development, Saigon is almost unrecognizable. Again, I wonder to what extent I have rewritten this city in my imagination, shrunk it to a backdrop for the drama of my life there. But in any case it is difficult to be dispassionate about the changes I see. 

The dizzying metropolis that I knew has been supersized. Colonial mansions are dwarfed by massive malls and apartment blocks. I am overwhelmed by the city’s scale, the sheer concentration of its stimuli. And whereas in my youth that feeling would have compelled me to explore and learn about the city as quickly as I could, now I only want to retreat from it and lie by a pool. So I plan to take it easy, to take some photos by the opera house and around Ben Thành Market. 

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But sitting at a café on Dong Khoi Street, a block from where our restaurant used to be, I succumb to the sensory overload. I think about my daily commute back then, lost in the deafening daze of Saigon’s streets, feeling like a dust mote in a mad stream of cyclos spilling up onto sidewalks and over every navigable surface, endlessly whirling in the haze. I try to remember my mornings at a different café (now replaced by a Circle K mini-mart) where I would order spring rolls. Sometimes I’d get a foot massage at the little spa upstairs. I used to haunt the swank, neon-tinted Q Bar beneath the opera house or ramble Ben Thành in search of bánh bèo — slurp-sized rice flour cakes seasoned with crisp pork skin and dried shrimp. I remember the youthful revving of my brain as I wrote in my journals back then, trying to will myself toward profundity, wit, or skill. 

On this return trip, it takes me a day or two to adjust to Saigon, but slowly, curiosity and excitement creep back in, breaking up the fug, and I begin to see this city again, not exactly anew, but as it is now. I delight in hearing the trap music blasting from the coffee chain Katinat Coffee & Tea House (after the Rue Catinat, a kind of Rodeo Drive during the French occupation, now renamed Dong Khoi). It is almost reassuring to see that the sleazy Apocalypse Now nightclub has survived, but no heartbreak at all to find the wasteland around the corner, once the domain of pimps on mopeds, has been absorbed into the forecourt of
a luxury hotel.

Things change. We change. I’m not going to be the fuddy-duddy who insists that everything was better 15 years ago, just as I would never in a million years want to go back to being the person I was at 29. You can never go home again, nor can you return to the setting of your greatest youthful adventure. But maybe that just means there is more to see, to taste, and to write about. 

The New Vietnam

Hanoi

Capella Hanoi: Opened in 2021 in the heart of old town, the Capella has 47 opera-inspired rooms and suites, an inviting pool, and a gym. The Hudson Rooms bar and restaurant on the top floor makes for a nice perch if you’re looking to escape the bustle and heat.

Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi: This grand hotel in a whitewashed French-colonial building from 1901 is my idea of heaven. Lunch at Le Club Bar is a must, as is a drink at the poolside Bamboo Bar.

Ho Chi Minh City

Bach Suites Saigon: A member of the Design Hotels consortium, this property was a great discovery. The 36 guest rooms are cozy, and the location near the city center is ideal.

Hoi An

Little Riverside, a Luxury Hotel & Spa Hoi An: There are a number of guesthouses and B&Bs along the Thu Bon River, near Hoi An’s old town. This one stands out thanks to its stylish rooms, waterfront restaurant, and excellent spa.

Hue

Ancient Hue Garden Houses: This collection of cottages and villas is a fantasyland in miniature — manicured gardens, with a wooden bridge over a pond, and two dark-wood dining rooms, with décor inspired by the old imperial capital.

Ninh Van Bay

Six SensesNinh Van Bay: Situated at the end of a peninsula on a secluded bay, this 62-villa resort is only accessible by speedboat. Keep an eye out for the rare monkeys that live in the surrounding hills.

Sa Pa

Hotel de la Coupole: Designer Bill Bensley captured the spirit of Indochine style for this soaring 249-key hotel in the remote hill town. The rooftop bar has fantastic views.

How to Book

Remote Lands: This travel planner, which specializes in Asia, can build a custom Vietnam itinerary that surveys the country from north to south, with the support of superb local guides.

A version of this story first appeared in the April 2024 ssue of Travel + Leisure under the headline "As Time Goes By."