FAMILY, MEET MY OLD LOVE: SAIGON

ALMOST as soon as we landed in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, I set out to make my family miserable. This was not difficult. It was late August, nearing 32°C and humid. All I had to do was propose we walk through the streets of the former Saigon to a restaurant for lunch.

At first, my wife, Jean, and our daughters Sasha, 7½, and Sandy, almost 4, were game. The road outside our Airbnb — an air-conditioned two-bedroom, with tile floors and brick walls, carved into a crusty ochre Art Deco building in central District 1 — was oddly calm. Shade trees spindled past skeins of electrical wire, while the low plastic chairs of an open-air cafe sat neatly in the shade of a long, blank wall. When we came to a busy avenue, we all held hands and stepped bravely into traffic, trusting that motorbikes would swerve around us with unthinking grace. (And they did!)

Soon, though, the sun bore down, and we sweated our way along a market street. The rough pavement was at once dusty and damp, the din of shoppers and small trucks inescapable, the ripe scents of fruits and vegetables, fish and pork, as unrestrained as their vivid hues. All about was action, noise, aroma, drama — the kind of whirling vortex of energy I feed on.

Not so the ladies. There was whining, dawdling, worry. One child had to be carried. (I bore that burden.) It is entirely possible that someone asked, “Are we there yet?” Finally, after 15 endless minutes, we reached a fluorescent-lit restaurant, Chi Tuyen, where we sat on blue plastic stools at a lightweight metal table and ordered bun thit nuong, nubs of pork grilled to caramelised sweetness, on a tangle of cool rice noodles, shredded lettuce and herbs like mint and perilla. The kids ate and calmed down, and Sandy played adorably with one of the kittens roaming the restaurant. Outside, rain began to fall, harder and harder, and then even harder. We were trapped, but there was nowhere else in the world I wanted to be. At Chi Tuyen restaurant, bun thit nuong, nubs of pork grilled to caramelised sweetness, on a tangle of cool rice noodles, shredded lettuce and herbs. Twenty years earlier, almost to the day, I had moved here to live. Vietnam and the United States had only recently re-established diplomatic relations, and I was a fresh college grad embarking on an adult life of adventure in an unknown land. Over the course of a year, I fell in love with the city everyone still called Saigon — with the seething chaos of its streets, the head-spinning variety of its flavours, the boundless outgoing enthusiasm of its people. In a lifetime of constant travel, Vietnam was my first, truest, deepest love.

And yet, though I’d been back to visit a dozen times or more since 1997, I’d never brought my wife and kids, primarily because Jean’s family lived in Taiwan, so that island always took precedence on trips to Asia. In the summer of 2016, however, we found ourselves in Taipei for an extended period — long enough, I decided, to make a weeklong trip to Vietnam. First we would hit Ho Chi Minh City, then spend two days at a beach resort near Nha Trang — nothing overly ambitious, just enough for my family to begin to understand the place that made me who I am. Still, I worried: Would the people I love most love the land I love most?

How could they not? All around were visceral pleasures. At the entrance to our building sprawled a sidewalk restaurant, and every morning they’d send up breakfastonatray:bowlsof bun bo hue, a spicy beef-and-pork noodle soup, or banh mi op la, fried eggs with baguettes as light as air. From the next-door cafe, I would fetch tall glasses of Vietnamese iced coffee, made from house-roasted beans and thick with condensed milk, plus pastries from Tous Les Jours, a Korean franchise bakery (not my pick, but the kids adored it). We would eat in our cosy little apartment, and I’d sigh with contentment: This was just like my old life here — but now I had people to share it with.

From there, we’d venture out to see friends I’d long wanted my wife to meet. We visited Quynh Anh Pham, a thin, elegant video producer — known as QA — who had reinvented herself as Ho Chi Minh City’s premiere modern florist. Her shop and cafe, Padma de Fleur, lay down a stillunfinished alley; its courtyard was draped with dangling mokara orchids, watering cans painted blue and pastel pink, and weathered metal saucer lamps. The lemonades that QA served my daughters came garnished with pale roses, and there was yet another kitten for Sandy to play with. This was classic Saigon — an oasis of sophisticated beauty that a casual visitor might never glimpse. Every excursion was an opportunity to compare the Vietnam I remembered with the Vietnam it now was, mostly to my delight, occasionally with disappointment. A road along the Ben Nghe Canal, for example, had been widened and landscaped into sunny modernity, but the project had wiped out old buildings, including an auto garage that, at night, turned into a secret shellfish restaurant.

Sasha, however, approved. “I like this part of Vietnam,” she said, gazing out the window of our taxi, “because it looks well trained. Nice and clean and it looks good — like it works. The other parts.”

She trailed off, and I knew why: Vietnam was not a hit with my family. The heat was rough. (What did they expect during summer in Asia?) They were not fans of the dirt, the chaos, the insects. The kids kvetched about being bored. (Just like at home!) Jean remarked, “I don’t think Southeast Asia is for families.”

I didn’t know quite how to take that. For decades, I’d seen foreign families all over Southeast Asia — a major reason I’d wanted to bring my own family here. On the other hand, I understood: Like New York, Ho Chi Minh City exists not for tourists but for its own lively populace; this metropolis