Photo Essay: How I Fell in Love with Vietnam

Like other events that include deep emotion, the moment I first looked out on a world of Vietnamese women in conical hats is not difficult to recall. It was Christmas week, and I was in the Chinese border town of Hekou.

On this, my last morning in China, I had been roused from sleep by Celine Dion, her voice throttled high and careening wildly from a music shop located directly across from my hotel window. Having been jolted awake by the French Canadian saying something about how her heart would go on, I sat up in bed and peeked out the window. The hour was early, yet already Vietnamese women--I saw almost no men--were industriously at work in the streets, strapping sacks of broccoli and oranges to their bicycles and then pushing them toward the border post three blocks away. All of these women wore conical hats. The hats, however, were not merely hats; they were evidence that I was in a border town, where different worlds mingle and merge. I was still in China, but through the scene outside my window I was promptly falling head over heels for Vietnam. This was on account of both the hats and the women who wore them, and I would remain in this extraordinarily pleasant stupor for the next six weeks as I journeyed through the country.

Rarely had I been so excited to cross a border into a new landscape, and never had this feeling been prompted by hats.