River, Magic Lanterns - The Full Moon Festival of Hoi An, Vietnam

My grandfather spent much of my father’s childhood in Vietnam. He was a soldier, and he was good with languages. To this day I have heard him use phrases in Spanish, Vietnamese, and Korean - all accented with a Texas twang that coats the palate like sticky-sweet barbecue sauce. The story in my family goes that when grandpa finally returned from his years in Vietnam, my aunt asked my grandmother who this strange man was.

“That’s your father,” she said.

He’s never really talked about it much, and I’m not sure exactly what he did during his years of service in the US Military. I do know a soldier with a knack for picking up languages was most likely valued for his communication skills. He would have been able to ask questions and get information that would have proved useful. Interrogate.

On the phone on the way to the airport, my dad tells me that he remembers when grandpa left for the war. He tells me that he felt like he was never going to see him again. I have been living in South Korea for years, using my colonizer’s language to make money, clumsily learning handfuls of broken Korean along the way. In a few weeks, I am flying home. I can hear worry in my father’s carefully unaccented voice.

In my rucksack, I have packed a wedding dress that doesn’t fit me.

* * *

Mitchell and I arrive on a sweltering, jam-packed street corner in Hoi An, Vietnam. He’s got a better knack for languages than I do, so he haggles for rental bikes while my sensory overload kicks into overdrive and I absorb the vibrating chaos of the city through my skin. A year ago, near the ocean, he slipped a seashell onto my finger and asked me to spend the rest of my life with him. And now here we are, a few weeks out from the big day, getting lost together in the country that swallowed my grandfather and then spat him back out again. All I know about Vietnam at this point is this:

1. It makes my dad nervous as hell that I am here

2. Creedence Clearwater Revival always seems to be the soundtrack in American movies set in Vietnam (Fortunate Son intensifies)

3. I am already falling in love with this place.

The noise of the city is cacophonous, yet strangely musical. The language spoken by the locals sings, rising up and down with the mellifluous tonality of a steel tongue drum. Women selling food from kiosks call out in English as soon as they see my Western face, Mitchell’s blonde hair. I can smell lemongrass, river water, sizzling meat, jasmine. There are boys beating a drum, dancing a paper dragon down the street, winding ribbon-like in and out of shops while people clap and cheer. Someone sets off a whizzbang of popping fireworks.

Overall, the effect is like stepping through a doorway into fairyland. If I eat the food, will have to stay for one hundred years and one day, until the spell wears off? My stomach growls. I decide it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to be trapped here in this kaleidoscopic, glowing-lantern place.

Mitchell returns with our bikes and we mount up. The flood of honking scooters and the throng of foot traffic seems to be flowing mostly in one direction, towards the river. Always one to follow a place’s energy, Mitchell starts to cycle towards the water. I follow, standing on my pedals to see above the crowd.

I am shocked to see an old French quarter, a promenade along the river, and cobbled European-style streets. Whitewashed cafes, rooftop terraces, and balconies strung with lanterns in every color of the sunset, glowing like jewels. Old Town Hoi An, the city's historic district, is a chimera of indigenous aesthetic influences and foreign architecture.

In their essay “Tourists with Typewriters - Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing” authors Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan note the tension between expectation and reality at war within the travel writer. Part of my shock in this moment stems from ignorance, but also from what Huggan and Holland refer to as “the writers' compulsion to report the world they see and their often repressed desire to make the world conform to their preconception of it.” (Holland, Huggan, 10). Based on popular culture and my family’s tense history with Vietnam, I had been expecting to encounter wild jungle and simple villages. I know my father expected a dangerous place that would swallow me whole.

I was not expecting a gorgeously preserved 16th-century covered Japanese bridge spanning the Hoi An river. I dismount my bicycle and walk the bike across the bridge, and the tires thunk against the worn wooden planks. The entire bridge is made of wood, exquisitely carved with flowers, birds, and nameless figures. In the shadows, someone has placed a statue of a monkey. Further along, I encounter an alcove with the Buddha. Burning incense floats around his head in a sweet-smelling blue haze.

Hoi An used to be a town divided by the river, with a Japanese settlement across the bridge. Built by Japanese merchants, it still has a Buddhist temple attached to one side. In the 18th century, Chinese and Japanese merchants considered Hoi An to be the best port city for trade in all of Southeast Asia. The city became a vital trading nexus between Europe, China, India, and Japan, especially for ceramic goods. A shipwreck discovered off the coast of Hoi An has shown that Vietnamese and Asian ceramics were transported from here to as far as Egypt.

And it shows. The closer I look at the city, the more I understand about the people and cultures that overlap and intermingle in this magical place.

I wasn’t expecting to encounter French or Japanese architecture, yet the evidence of colonialism is all around me, tangible, even edible. Mitchell and I stop at a pushcart selling banh mi, where we purchase two sandwiches. Hoi An is considered by many foodies as the banh mi capital of Vietnam, and I have been looking forward to trying this combination of French and Vietnamese cuisine almost as much as the strong, sweet coffee.

In the post-colonial world, on a street corner of previously French, Portuguese, and Japanese-occupied Vietnam, the granddaughter of a Vietnam and Korean War veteran bites into a French baguette layered with pâté, pork belly, jalapeno, and cilantro. Psychedelic swirls of lantern light ripple behind her closed eyelids as the flavors spark fresh green and savory orange on her tongue.

We make our way down to the river as the full moon rises. Locals and tourists alike purchase folded paper lanterns for a few coins, then set them afloat on the river that bisects the city, a flame nestled within the paper like a wish, or a prayer. I set my lantern on the water and think about the past. I think about the boy who thought his father would die in the jungles here. I think about the man who fought in a senseless war to support his family, a man unknown to his own children. I think about the future I have with the man standing next to me. About the vows I will say to him in a few weeks’ time.

I push my lantern into the water where it floats like a girl’s idea, like the luminous round eye of the moon above me.

* * *

In 2019, Hoi An was listed as one of Vietnam's busiest tourist areas, where unchecked tourism growth threatens the sustainability of the area. Excessive and detrimental tourism has also damaged the ecosystem of the Cham Islands and Hoi An Marine Protected Area. As a tourist, I participated in this erosion of the environment. Perhaps the sunscreen I wore on my skin contributed to the bleaching of coral. My presence disruptive to the harmony of other marine life. I think about my paper lantern, sunk to the bottom of the river, my wishes fluttering up into the salt-breeze to brush against the moon.

* * *

A woman on the beach tries to sell me trinkets. I tell her that I do not want to buy a bracelet, and she tells me that I am beautiful and that she wishes her skin was white like mine. I am dumbfounded. Stammering, I tell her that she is beautiful and she quickly corrects me. No, I am too dark, she says. She makes an emphatic hand gesture like she has swatted away my stupidity. I want to be beautiful, she says, white-skinned like you. My face burns and my ears flush hot. Mitchell buys a bracelet from her and slips it on my wrist as she walks away.

* * *

I bring my wedding dress to the textile district, where fast-talking and firm-handed seamstresses measure my body and show me bolt after bolt of fabric. Carefully, and skillfully, they reconfigure the dress so that it finally fits my body.

In her essay “Mapping the Territory” author Mary Suzanne Schriber discusses the historical functions of women’s clothing as an indicator of social status. “Woman's dress is an important sign of male status and pecuniary class. The more ornamental and cumbersome a woman's clothing, the more financially successful the male.” (Schriber, 28). I have never been more aware of the symbolic weight of a garment than in this moment when I see myself standing in my wedding dress for the first time.

Many Western women spend thousands of dollars on a white wedding dress. I order mine off a dubious Korean website for around $60 American (67,000 Korean Won), panic when it doesn’t fit over my more sizable Western frame, and then have the dress altered in the textile capital of Southeast Asia. When the dress is re-imagined by this mafia of creative Vietnamese seamstresses, the final result is a getup out of a strange and dark fairytale. It is not white. It is not intended to convey the fabulous wealth of either my father or my future husband and my status as their property. This dress is mine.

Too pleased with the result to haggle, I thank the women with a deep bow, pay them in Vietnamese dong, then stuff my bridal gown into my travel backpack and celebrate with another streetcart banh mi. The jalapenos are so hot they made my lips swell.

* * *

There are stories about the American presence in Vietnam during the war that my grandfather chooses not to tell. There is the story of my father’s fear that his father would be killed, and his pervasive, Liam-Neeson-in-Taken anxiety about my safety whenever I travel anywhere in this wide, beautiful world. And then there is this story. Which is possible for me to tell because of my privilege as a traveler in a land not my own. But with power comes responsibility, and so I offer you this story in my hope that it can bring balance and nuance to the many narratives about this place that are so deeply embedded within American cultural consciousness. As Chimamanda Adichie says in the conclusion of her TedTalk, The Danger of a Single Story “when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”

I can’t wait to see you again, Vietnam.

Works Cited:

Adichie, C. (2009). The Danger of a Single Story.

Bon Appétit."Traveling, Eating, and Cooking in Hoi An, Vietnam” Retrieved 2016-08-13.

Centre, UNESCO World Heritage. "Hoi An Ancient Town". UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Retrieved 2021-05-20.

Holland, P. and Huggan, G. (1998). Tourists with Typewriters - Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing University of Michigan Press.

Schriber, M. S. (1997). Writing home: American women abroad 1830-1920. University Press of Virginia.