I carried Saigon in my head for sixteen years like a photograph I never updated. The motorbikes were there. The heat was there. The French buildings and the coffee and the chaos were all there, perfectly preserved in the version of the city I left in 2010. I didn’t realize I’d been treating a living place like a souvenir.
When you leave somewhere, it stops. For you. The clock freezes on the last thing you saw, the last corner you turned, the last bowl of pho you ate before you got on the plane. And your brain files it away under “Saigon” and closes the drawer and every time you think about it, you open the same drawer and find the same city, unchanged, waiting.
I came back expecting reunion. What I got was introduction. This is not the city I left. This is a city that kept going after I stopped watching. The graffiti that didn’t exist before is everywhere now. The 7-Eleven that wasn’t here is struggling on the corner. The kids skating Dong Khoi weren’t born when I was last here. Notre Dame is wrapped in scaffolding. The backpacker street got louder and the alleys got tagged and the skyline got taller.
And the thing is, I did the same thing. I’m not the person who was here in 2010, either. I’ve lived in countries that didn’t exist on my radar back then. I’ve written books that weren’t even ideas. I’ve lost people and found people and become someone the 2010 version of me wouldn’t entirely recognize. I changed too. I just didn’t notice because I was inside the change.
That’s the trap of nostalgia. It’s not that you miss a place. It’s that you miss the version of yourself that was in it. You go back expecting to find both, and instead you find a stranger standing in a city full of strangers, all of whom have been busy living while you were busy remembering.
I get it now. Places are not museums. They don’t owe you the version you left behind. They don’t preserve themselves for your return. They keep building, keep painting, keep tearing down and starting over, because that’s what living things do. The Saigon I remembered doesn’t exist. But the Saigon that does exist is louder, messier, more complicated, and more alive than anything my memory could hold.
I didn’t lose the old city. I just finally showed up for the new one.
April 2026
