It's hot. It's my first day in Ho Chi Minh City, and the streets, normally packed, are today positively roiling with throngs celebrating Tết, the Vietnamese New Year. Motor scooters and the bicycle rickshaws called cyclos careen crazily around me, the scooters spitting exhaust that tents the tree-lined boulevards in gray haze. Construction cranes, stilled for the holiday, loom over the city like giant birds of prey, and the billboard  and shanty–lined river is choked with freighters, barges, and red-sailed sampans. I see limbless beggars on crutches and street urchins darting among camera-laden tourists, spoiling for trouble. All of the contradictions of third-world poverty and rapid development are swirling around me in this city, where even the name is in flux: I hear the old Saigon and the official postwar Ho Chi Minh City used almost interchangeably.
  

My guide, Trưươm sen (rice with lotus seeds, shrimp, and chicken, wrapped in lotus leaves and served with a lotus blossom), and bánh bèo (circles of steamed rice dough covered with pale pink ground shrimp), each in its own tiny dish. It is a tableau of such daintiness that my hands seem suddenly unwieldy and immense—but I take one of everything, and as we begin to eat, Nga and I talk about life and food in Vietnam.
  

"These dishes are from Hu   I

n food, this sensibility informs complex preparation, and elevates the act of eating. "Even in ph  

Nga herself is both delicate and diplomatic. When I ask about her life during the Vietnam War—which Nga refers to as the Civil War—she demurs, as if to speak of it might tear the fragile bond of a new friendship. But as we circle the edges of the issue, she tells me a bit about her family before the war and reunification, and her eyes fill with tears. In this tranquil restaurant, surrounded by the dishes of kings, it is the persistent memories of war that we can neither discuss nor avoid.

When I was given a chance to go to Vietnam, I had mixed feelings. No American could escape the shock of combat footage exploding across our TV screens 30 years ago. But as a young mother in Memphis, I was insulated from the carnage by the sheer dailiness of domestic duties. I remember a childhood friend, shot down over Nga's homeland, and listed as missing for over 20 years. And I remember my fury over Kent State, and late-night arguments with friends, as we moved from naïveté to world-weariness.
  

Years later, long after the war, when Vietnam began to reopen to tourism, popular images of the place suddenly became lush, oddly nostalgic. There was a wave of elegant, colonial-chic movies like Indochine and The Lover, and trendy, highly Frenchified Vietnamese restaurants like Le Colonial (in New York and now Los Angeles) proliferated. I, for one, was seduced. Yet to others of my generation, the words Vietnam and war cannot be separated. Memphis is a military town. When I told a friend at a cocktail party I was going to Vietnam, his face froze with anger and he said, only half joking, "I hope you don't step on a land mine."
  

What I discovered almost as soon as I got to Ho Chi Minh City, however, was that my cocktail companion was very wrong about Vietnam, and so was I. The country is emerging from years of diplomatic isolation and a long history of wars in which American involvement was just another painful but brief episode. From the street, Saigon exudes a sense of struggle and a kind of raffish innocence—like a streetwise kid swaggering into the millennium. But at the table, it displays the dignity and refinement of a people who—despite centuries of invasion and poverty—have carefully guarded the heart of their culture, adapting outside influences to their own distinctive sense of propriety.