I first saw Cholon in the French film The Lover as the romantic backdrop for the young Jane March and her Chinese lover. It took me several visits to Saigon, however, until I broached the invisible barrier between District 1 and Di...

A wiser man than me once said, “To experience life to the fullest we sometimes have to pause and look up.” That’s a fine sentiment, but easier said than done in a city like Hanoi, when there is so much going on at street level that it can be near fatal to avert your eyes from where your next footfal...

Millions of people, from London to Manhattan to Sydney, regularly burn their fingers clinging to a chain brand throwaway cup as they endure the battle into work with ‘coffee to go.’ For those of us used to sampling coffee on the run, the Vietnamese coffee experience comes as a shock to the system. Time is on the side of coffee here, not against it. The beverage may provide the same quick hit as elsewhere, the use of the strong, homegrown Robusta bean makes sure of that, but the hit is where the similarities begin and end. You are now in the land of coffee ...

  As the biggest holiday of the year, Tet has its share of traditions, rituals, and delicacies. High on the list is banh chung, the green sticky rice cake, which has been immortalized in a popular Vietnamese poem: Rich meats, salty onions, red poems Tet tree, firecrackers, green banh chung Times change, however. Lucky neu trees have been replaced by kumquat trees, pink peach branches (in the north), and yellow apricot branches (in the south); firecrackers were banned in the 1990s. Fortunately, the legacy of banh chung...