Thinking of Vietnam from abroad

Distance as a lens

Since 2024 I have been doing my doctorate in Tainan, in the south of Taiwan. Before that, my working years were spent in the north of Vietnam, and my student years at Foreign Trade University. Living abroad has not made Vietnam feel smaller or further away. It has made it clearer, the way a word in your own language suddenly sounds strange when you hear it in a foreign sentence.

What becomes visible

At home, many things are simply background: the shape of the seasons, the sound of motorbikes, the habit of offering tea to anyone who comes through the door. From a distance they turn into things worth describing. Writing these place profiles has been partly an exercise in that. The Old Quarter, the rice terraces, the karst of the far north, the fishing coast, the sidewalks of Saigon: each is familiar in name, yet each has a history and a logic I did not fully stop to think about while living close to them.

Calendars that travel

Some things travel with you. The lunar calendar still marks the year, and Tết still feels like the real new year, even when it falls in the middle of a semester. The taste of lotus tea, the idea of a family altar, the expectation that a meal is shared: these carry over easily. Others do not. The particular grey of a northern winter, or the smell of rice straw after harvest, cannot be reproduced anywhere else.

Looking with care

Pictures can show a Vietnam that is beautiful, but the more useful lesson for me is in looking carefully: knowing why a field is terraced, why a port declined, why a village dries incense in the sun. Understanding a place, I think, is a way of staying close to it, even from another island.

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Photos: nohtnongdan, phamkhanhquynhtrang, ghostw1997 on Pixabay, used under the Pixabay Content License. These are not my photographs.