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 Äá»ng cĂ phĂȘ sữa ÄĂĄ 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.
Itâs 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 LĂœ Tá»± Trá»ng, 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, itâs 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.
(Hubert van Es/Corbis)
History has a strange way of becoming ordinary. Especially in Ho Chi Minh City.
This was also the first full week after sharing the news of my dadâs passing with a much wider circle of friends, colleagues, and former students around the world. I wasnât quite prepared for the sheer number of messages, comments, and little âgriefâ emojis that would appear. Hundreds of people took a moment to reach out.
Iâve found myself reading many of them more than once.
Thereâs something comforting about knowing your sadness is being witnessed by people spread across continents. Not because it makes the loss smaller. It doesnât. 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.
Three mildly indifferent cats at NhĂ Chung who tolerated my presence just enough to make me smile.
TráșĄm on CĂŽng Quỳnh
More hidden alley coffees off BĂči Thá» XuĂąn and Äá» ThĂĄm, where weathered wooden doors and peeling paint somehow make the coffee taste even better.
Theyâre 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 cĂ phĂȘ sữa ÄĂĄ, Saigon reminded me that healing rarely arrives all at once.
More often, it comes one cup at a time. One breath at a time.
In the heart of Phnom Penh, the Independence Monument (Vimean Ekareach) marks the moment Cambodia reclaimed its sovereignty from France in 1953.
Designed by the visionary Cambodian architect Vann Molyvann and completed in 1958, its lotus-shaped tower rises in the style of a Khmer temple stupa, echoing the spires of Angkor.
By day it anchors one of the cityâs busiest roundabouts. By night it glows red, blue, and gold, lit in the colors of the national flag. More than a landmark, it is a quiet reminder of a nation that chose to define itself on its own terms. đ°đ
Norodom Sihanouk Memorial
The Norodom Sihanouk Memorial (also called the Statue of King Father Norodom Sihanouk), honoring the man Cambodians call the âFather King.â
The statue is painted gold. This memorial cost about 1.2 million USD and it took about eight months to build.
Sihanouk is a towering figure in modern Cambodian history. Heâs credited for his efforts in liberating the country from French colonization, and he reigned as the king under whom Cambodia gained independence from France in 1953.
Constitution Monument (also called the Monument to the Constitution) – completes the trifecta of monuments
Walking out of my homestay quite early, the sky was hanging low over Saigon, dark enough to promise rain sooner rather than later.
I knew immediately the weather would decide where I drank my first coffee.
Not me.
The first heavy drops fell just as I ducked beneath the umbrella of a tiny street stand. Twenty thousand Äá»ng. Less than a dollar. A cup of cĂ phĂȘ sữa ÄĂĄ and another reminder that some of lifeâs best decisions are made by the weather.
âAll I need is gratitude and coffee in my hand.âA hidden gem in a narrow hem
A woman abandoned her broom to serve me because everyone in the alley looks after one anotherâs customers. She laughed in disbelief when I ordered black coffee without sugar, repeating khĂŽng ÄÆ°á»ng over and over as though I couldnât possibly mean it. But. I did.
Took the Metro đ for the first time! From Ben Thanh to Thao Dien and had a coffee on Xuan Thuy Street
Before dawn on Thursday morning, my phone vibrated.
A message from my former stepmother.
They had been divorced for decades.
âSorry to tell you like thisâŠâ
My father had died.
I stared at the screen without moving.
No racing heartbeat.
No tears.
Only the strange stillness that sometimes arrives before emotion catches up with fact.
I closed my eyes, hoping sleep might return.
Instead, memories arrived.
I remember his laugh.
The glint in his blue eyes.
The laugh I inherited.
He laughed easily. Loudly. Sometimes until tears formed in the corners of his eyes.
I know I was responsible for many of those laughs and Iâll gladly own that for the rest of my time on earth.
For all the complicated years that followedâfor the distance, the absences, the estrangementâthat is not how Iâm going to remember him.
Iâm going to remember the beautiful laughing boy he once was.
The seventeen-year-old who had no idea what life would ask of him. The father I adored.
The young soldier who would find himself stationed in Germany and Korea.
The father who loved olives enough that I ate them too, despite not liking them.
The young man who sat beside me with a jar of Marshmallow Fluff and weâd eat spoonfuls as we watched tv, while my mom was out.
Memory is generous that way.
It edits.
Not by deceiving, but by deciding which moments deserve to survive.
Mine chose his mischievous smile.
R. I. P. Dad
Sitting across from Ben Thanh Market with straight black iced coffee as I read âOnce There Were Wolvesâ by Charlotte McConaghy
I have spent over twenty years teaching people to speak English. Not type it into a box and let a machine rearrange it. Speak it. Out loud. With their mouths. With the wrong conjugation and the misplaced emphasis and the accent that makes “beach” sound like something else entirely and the laughter that follows when everyone in the room realizes what just happened. That laughter is where language lives. And I am watching it die.
Translation apps are killing language learning. I don’t mean they’re making it less popular. I mean they’re removing the reason to try. Why would you spend two years learning Vietnamese when you can hold up your phone and have the sentence appear in half a second? Why would you stumble through tones and embarrass yourself at a coffee stall when Google will do it for you, perfectly, silently, without the risk of looking stupid? I’ll tell you why. Because looking stupid is the whole point. When you try to speak someone’s language and you get it wrong, something happens that no app can replicate. The other person sees you trying. They see the effort. They see a human being who cared enough to sound like a fool in their language instead of staying comfortable in their own. And something opens. A door, a smile, a willingness to meet you halfway that didn’t exist thirty seconds ago. You didn’t say the sentence correctly. You said something better. You said, “I see you. Your language matters. You matter enough for me to embarrass myself.” A phone says none of that. A phone says: I need information from you and here is the most efficient way to get it. I’ve traveled to more than fifty countries. I don’t speak fifty languages. I don’t even speak five that well. But in every country I’ve ever been, I’ve learned something. The word for “thank you.” The word for “delicious.” The word for “coffee,” which is almost always some version of the same Arabic root, which means every time you order coffee in any language, you’re participating in a thousand-year-old chain of human trade and migration and you don’t even know it unless you bothered to learn the word.
Bui Vien Street on a Monday morning
In Saigon I’ve learned how to order variations of different coffees, for example: cĂ phĂȘ sữa ÄĂĄ (iced condensed milk coffee) and cáșŁm ÆĄn (thank you) and ngon (delicious) and xin chĂ o (literally ‘please hello’) and how to tell a xe om driver I’d like to walk, and that may not seem like much, but it’s mine. I earned it. I said it wrong and got corrected and said it wrong again and got corrected again and now when I say ‘ngon’ to the coffee lady she nods like I’ve passed a small test and the coffee tastes better for it. Not because the word changed the flavor. Because the effort changed the relationship.
The proponents of translation apps will tell you they’re democratizing communication. Making travel accessible. Breaking down barriers. And they’re not wrong. A person who doesn’t speak a word of Vietnamese can now navigate Saigon, order food, get a cab, check into a hotel, and handle a medical emergency without learning a single syllable. That’s remarkable. That’s useful. That even saves lives in some cases.
But here’s what it costs. It costs the cab ride where you learn that the driver has three kids and his favorite food is Bun Bo Hue and he was a tank driver on the day Saigon fell in 1975 and he laughs when you try to say his name correctly. You don’t get that through a screen. You get the destination. You don’t get the journey. (And the journey is what matters in the end…)
It costs the market interaction where the woman selling bananas teaches you the word for ripe (chĂn) and you teach her the English word and she repeats it back and you both stand there in the heat holding bananas and laughing at each other’s pronunciation and neither of you will remember the other’s name but both of you will remember that moment because it was real and human.
It costs the slow, cumulative, irreplaceable process of your brain rewiring itself to think in patterns that are not your own. That’s what language learning actually is. It’s not vocabulary and grammar. It’s the act of stepping outside your own cognitive framework and trying on someone else’s. It’s learning that Vietnamese has six tones and each one changes the meaning of a word and suddenly you understand something about precision and music and attention that you could never have understood from inside English alone. It’s learning that there’s no direct equivalent for “I” in Vietnamese because the pronoun changes depending on your age, gender, and relationship to the person you’re speaking to, and suddenly you understand something about Vietnamese social structure that no Wikipedia article could teach you. TĂŽi ~ neutral, formal, safe for strangers. MĂŹnh ~ casual, warm, among friends. Em ~ when speaking to someone older, shows respect Anh ~ used by an older male speaking to someone younger. Chá» ~ used by an older female speaking to someone younger.
That’s what gets lost when the app does it for you. Not the words. The understanding.
I’m an ESL teacher watching the ground shift under my profession. I see a future where my students’ children don’t learn English because their earbuds translate in real time. I see a future where a CELTA certification means as much as a telegraph operator’s license. I see a future where the phrase “Do you speak English?” is replaced by the gesture of holding up a phone, which is not a question at all, but a statement: I don’t need to speak your language and you don’t need to speak mine and we can both pretend this is progress. Maybe it is progress. Maybe the time people spent learning languages can now be spent curing diseases or writing poetry or solving climate change. Maybe freeing humanity from the burden of multilingualism is a net good. Maybe efficiency was always the goal and I’m just a woman on a plastic stool in Saigon who doesn’t want to accept that the world moved on.
But I don’t think so. I think language is the last handmade thing. In a world of automation and algorithms and AI (and yes, I see the irony, I’m a creator of an ever-evolving book series about AI in education), language remains the one skill that requires you to be fully present, fully vulnerable, fully human in front of another fully human person. You cannot automate vulnerability. You cannot outsource the courage it takes to open your mouth and say something badly in someone else’s language and wait to see if they understand.
The apps give us the words. They don’t give us the trying. And the trying was always the part that mattered. I sat in a cafe in Saigon last week and felt the presence of a young woman hovering at my table for thirty seconds composing a sentence on her phone before showing me the screen. She never spoke. I never spoke. The transaction was completed. The receipt was returned. Nothing was lost except everything that makes two strangers in a room more than just two strangers in a room. She didn’t learn the English for “May I take your receipt?” She’ll never need to. The app said it for her. And I’ll never really understand why she needed it back, LOL. And next week it’ll say something else. And the week after that. And eventually the idea that you would spend years building another language inside your brain, storing it in your mouth and your muscle memory and your dreams, will seem as quaint as writing letters by hand. I’m still a postcard writer, though. I will keep resisting for as long as possible.
I used my Vietnamese to get patches sewn onto my backpack, and in return, I was gifted with laughter and an Asian sweet potato.
I teach people to speak. That’s my life’s work. Not to communicate. To speak. There’s a difference, and the difference is the sound of your own voice doing something brave in a language that doesn’t belong to you, and the face of the person across from you softening when they realize you tried. No app has ever made a face soften. No screen has ever laughed at a mispronunciation and then poured you more coffee because the effort was enough. Or, given you a sweet potato for nothing, just that their eyes smiled when I attempted Vietnamese. Or so much free tea. “Sit here all day,” their eyes smile…because you respect me enough to attempt my language. My DIFFICULT language.
Learn the language. Any language. Even badly. Especially badly. The mistakes are where the magic lives, and the magic is disappearing one translated screen at a time.
