I remember feeling free, wandering the streets of Hà Nội getting lost and found.

I moved there without a cell phone, in 2003, and stayed for four months with my friend Maya until SARS and the uncertainty of the Iraq War put so much stress on being out of communication with my family, save for occasional trips to the dial-up Internet cafe, that I decided to go home. I had gone because my job as a teaching fellow to two visiting Harvard professors ended (one was teaching Art & Feminism, the other, Art from 1960 on). Maya pointed out that she had a room opening in the house where she was staying, and I could be unemployed in expensive Cambridge, Massachusetts, or in Hà Nội, where a bowl of phở or a motorbike ride across town cost 5,000 đồng (about 30 cents at the time). My portion of our inflated foreigner rent was $140. I found freelance work writing English-language website content for a local restaurateur and a fashion designer. I did end up getting a cell phone, a Nokia flip phone with T9 predictive text messaging so that I could make plans with Maya and new friends, but mostly I wandered by myself. 

I can still map the route from our apartment near the train station south to Thống Nhất park, watching the badminton games and old ladies stretching, to “food street” for bún chả va nem cua – juicy grilled pork patties with rice noodles, herbs, and fish sauce, and crab spring rolls fried shatteringly crisp in their thin wrappers. I’d stop on the way home at a multi-story terraced cafe for a cà phê sữa nóng (hot drip coffee with sweetened condensed milk) or soda chanh muối (salty-sweet lime soda), toilet paper on the tables for napkins, and I’d watch the world go by.

I put those memories in a glass for my friends at a recent dinner party. We had mostly met in college, 25 years ago, and we’ve all wandered and expanded since then, now gathering over duck phở in Val and Nick’s Lower East Side apartment. I served the lime soda first, salty from limes I fermented a week ago, brightened with fresh lime and orange juices and rum and topped with fizzy soda water. With dessert I poured martinis: strong coffee, vodka and Mr. Black amaro, sweetened condensed milk whisked in, cacao bitters to finish. I don’t remember drinking much hard alcohol in Vietnam, mostly warm-ish beer, but tonight the spirits anchored the drinks in my memory. I feel free now like I did then, and happy to share that feeling with friends.