What Tet Teaches You About Family When You Don’t Have One Tet is coming. You can feel it building in Sóc Trăng like a tide. The kids in my classes are vibrating with it—counting down the days until they get on the back of their parents’ motorbikes and head to their grandparents’ villages. The streets…
The Art of Stepping Aside If you missed Part 1 I usually fly back to South Africa every second year to see my parents. It’s the longest break I get, long enough to feel like time actually stretches instead of just pausing. Vietnam has public holidays scattered through the calendar, but most of them only…
Between two new years in Vietnam I woke up on January 1st with ”Xuân Đã Về”, a popular Tết song, playing at full blast in the coffee shop next to my house in Sóc Trăng, and for a moment I forgot what year it was. Not hungover. Stranger than that. As if the year itself…
