TOKIDOKI (NOMAD)

Some weeks are about discovering cafés. Others are about discovering me.

This week was a little of both.

I wandered through the hems of Saigon, coffees in hand, notebook in my pocket, following no real itinerary except curiosity. One street coffee became another. Twenty thousand đồng here. Forty thousand there. A modern café tucked inside an alley. An old apartment converted into an espresso bar. A coffee cart shaded by buildings instead of umbrellas. Each stop became less about the drink and more about the pause.

At FARO Café on Cao Thắng, the presentation was almost too beautiful to disturb. It was polished, contemporary, and elegant. Proof that Vietnamese coffee culture can be as refined as any specialty café in the world while still feeling unmistakably local.

Another day I found myself back where I often feel most at home: sitting on a tiny plastic stool in a hem, drinking a 20,000 đồng cà phê sữa đá while life flowed around me. Motorbikes squeezed past. Someone watered plants. Someone else swept the alley as if it were an extension of their living room.

It’s amazing how quickly an alley can begin to feel familiar.

One stop this week carried a different kind of weight.

I bought a street coffee on Lý Tự Trọng, just below the rooftop of the Pittman Apartments-the building that is forever linked to one of the defining images of the end of the Vietnam War. From the street, it’s an ordinary city building. People walk past without looking up. Laundry dries from balconies. Coffee is poured into plastic cups. Yet, above it sits the rooftop where, on April 29, 1975, a helicopter landed during Operation Frequent Wind to evacuate CIA personnel and a number of South Vietnamese civilians.

History has a strange way of becoming ordinary. Especially in Ho Chi Minh City.

Sitting there with coffee in my hand, it struck me that places don’t remain frozen in time. They keep living. People move in. Cafés open. The extraordinary quietly becomes part of the everyday.

Maybe grief works that way too.

This was also the first full week after sharing the news of my dad’s passing with a much wider circle of friends, colleagues, and former students around the world. I wasn’t quite prepared for the sheer number of messages, comments, and little “grief” emojis that would appear. Hundreds of people took a moment to reach out.

I’ve found myself reading many of them more than once.

There’s something comforting about knowing your sadness is being witnessed by people spread across continents. Not because it makes the loss smaller. It doesn’t. But because it reminds you that kindness travels remarkably well.

As Fernando Pessoa writes in The Book of Disquiet, we carry entire inner worlds that rarely become visible. This week reminded me that, sometimes, they do.

The coffee continued.

An apartment café on Nguyen Van Trang celebrating vintage Saigon.

Three mildly indifferent cats at Nhà Chung who tolerated my presence just enough to make me smile.

More hidden alley coffees off Bùi Thị Xuân and Đề Thám, where weathered wooden doors and peeling paint somehow make the coffee taste even better.

The best cafés aren’t the expensive ones.

They’re the places that let me sit quietly for 20-30 minutes and let my thoughts catch up with my footsteps. They let me read the current novel I’m obsessed with. They let me write my field notes.

This week, the coffee was excellent.

The conversations were brief.

The streets continued to be endlessly interesting.

And somewhere between history, grief, and another glass of cà phê sữa đá, Saigon reminded me that healing rarely arrives all at once.

More often, it comes one cup at a time. One breath at a time.

August 2026