Home Again

Written by Amy Lyon

I am still suffering from jet lag when I visit the Saigon Market in Wilmington, just days after our return. I am Vietnam-sick and need to smell rice and dried fish and see indecipherable Vietnamese letters. I breathe in deeply the salty starchy aromas as I meander the aisles, lingering in front of a display of clay pots that remind me of the cooking school in Hoi An, where we learned to cook eggplant. I walk past large bags of rice and wonder on what street in what village these kernels dried out and how many dogs, motor bikes and cyclists ran over them. I fill my basket with guava juice, lemon grass, Vietnamese chili sauce, greens and dried rice paper, resolving to work on a recipe that makes fresh rice wraps.

The owner, Lan, came to America soon after the war and settled in Wilmington with her American husband whom she met during the war. They have two children, a daughter who is soon to marry and a son who works in the store and remembers me, the crazy woman who planned to cycle Vietnam in the heat of the summer.

Lan smiles when I tell her I’ve just returned. She pulls photo album after photo album out from under the cash register and shows me pictures of her visits to Vietnam.
I admire the photos. They are taken by photographers that follow tourists around, snap dozens of shots, develop and deliver the finished photos to their hotels at night. Lan uses this method of picture taking on all her visits. It is cheap she says. I think she is also glad to employ them and share her American wealth.

There are pictures from Hue, the ancient capital, where a brother lives, along with nieces and nephews, their spouses and children, dozens of them dressed in their best clothes at weddings and restaurants. There are pictures taken in the old Forbidden City on the same steps where we took pictures just weeks ago. She shows me one picture of her mother dressed in a royal costume made of a rich red robe and stiff ornate hat, taken in a tourist restaurant; perhaps the same one in which we ate.

She always starts her Vietnam visits in her hometown; south of Saigon, where her mother lives in a house Lan built with money she earned in her store here in Wilmington. We saw numerous homes all across Vietnam financed by money sent home by Vietnamese living elsewhere. There is a special word for Vietnamese ex pats, who left under duress and like many refugees, on the one hand long to return to their homeland and on the other are happy living the American dream, possible in America. In a culture that honors ancestors and whose social structure is built on a backbone of family millions of dollars annually are sent back to Vietnam.

Her relatives tease her about her soft American ways. Lan installed air conditioning in one room in her Vietnamese home, finding the heat intolerable. Yet all her relatives fully appreciate the indoor plumbing she installed one year. On each trip home, Lan invites family members to vacation with her in Dalat, in the highlands north-west of Saigon, so they too can enjoy the cool mountain air and great green pine forests. She shows me pictures of her daughter dressed in multicolored indigenous tribal garments, her arms draped around her Vietnamese cousins. Both her children have visited Vietnam.

Lan’s trips are expensive since she is expected to host her extended family and spends upwards of $20,000 between meals, gifts, trips and home improvements. Her mother died last year and she has not felt well since her most recent visit. She doesn’t know when she’ll return next. I wonder if she has Malaria or some other foreign bug our American bodies are not accustomed to. I urge her to see an infectious disease doctor. She says others also have suggested that and maybe she will. Meanwhile, she is always cold and is on this hot day wrapped in a wool sweater.

I leave the shop promising to visit again soon. I’ll bring my photographs, digital images on a laptop, so she can see the similarities. I’ll also show her my pictures of Hanoi, a city she has never visited, but says she will on her next visit. I will too.