By By the time my family started arriving in Hue, the trip had taken on a completely different feeling.
Up until then, Vietnam had mostly been an adventure for me. I had spent days riding through Ha Giang, getting lost, dealing with broken parts, getting pulled over by police, and generally doing the things I apparently enjoy doing when I go on vacation. Now, suddenly, I was surrounded by family.
The first few days in Hue were a blur of reunions.
My brother Steven and I had arrived ahead of everyone else, so we had a little time to wander around, eat, drink coffee, and get our bearings. Then my parents arrived with my maternal aunt and uncle, and suddenly the Airbnb started filling up. I saw my stepsister, Thu, for the first time in almost twenty years. More family would arrive from California and Canada over the next few days, and before long there were people everywhere.
We even got some of the stereotypical Vietnam family activities out of the way immediately. Steven and I went to get fitted for suits while my sisters were getting áo dài made. We wandered around, grabbed drinks, sent waitresses on store missions, and tried to keep track of where everyone was supposed to be for dinner.
It was chaotic, but in a way that felt familiar.
That was probably the strangest part. I was meeting or reconnecting with people I hadn’t seen in years, sometimes decades, but there wasn’t much of that awkwardness I expected. It felt more like someone had temporarily hit pause on our family and then pressed play again.
We ate together. We went out for drinks. We walked around Hue. We got massages and hair washes. We took naps after huge family meals. We argued about when Cu, my nephew, was going to show up because apparently waiting for Cu is a recurring family activity.
It felt less like a vacation and more like being dropped into the middle of a family reunion that had been thirty years in the making.
One afternoon, Steven and I were walking around the old imperial grounds with Be Loan, our niece, Cu, and my sister, Le. We stopped for coffee and wandered through the palace grounds, taking pictures in the same general area where we’d taken pictures as kids. During our first visit back to Vietnam in the early 90s, my parents had an entire photoshoot in imperial garments because being extra was in. We still look fondly at those photos.
That one was different for me.
Those were core memories for my brothers and me. But I was now standing in the same place decades later, watching everyone recreate pieces of those memories was truly priceless.
Vietnam was slowly becoming less of a destination and more of a family scrapbook that I had somehow stepped inside.
Then came the reason we had all gathered in Hue in the first place.
We were going back to my dad’s village.
The morning we left, I found my dad sitting outside a coffee shop with my uncle. He was having a black coffee, and I joined him.
We didn’t talk much. It was one of those moments where we didn’t need to. We just sat there drinking coffee and watching people and life go by.
Eventually, everyone gathered, we ate some breakfast, loaded ourselves into a few cars, and headed toward the village.
The drive wasn’t particularly dramatic. Maybe thirty-five minutes, heading toward the coast and into what I learned later was their commune. But as soon as we arrived, the significance of where we were started to sink in.
My dad’s family had gathered there, and for the first time in roughly three decades, everyone was back in the village, together.
We went around visiting the family tombs and lighting incense. I found out we even had a family temple, which was news to me. There were all these physical reminders of people I had never known personally but whose lives were directly connected to mine.
Their names. Their graves. Their homes. Their family. People who existed long before I did.
I had spent the previous week traveling through Vietnam and seeing places that were completely new to me, but this felt different. I wasn’t sightseeing anymore. This was where my dad came from. And because of that, it was somehow where I came from too.
That realization was difficult to explain. I had never lived in this village. I didn’t have childhood memories of these roads or these houses. I didn’t know where the good food was or which neighbor you were supposed to avoid.
Yet there was something strangely familiar about being there.
Not the familiarity of remembering a place, but the familiarity of recognizing something that had always been part of your story.
While Steven and I were wandering around, we met a man who recognized our faces and helped us find our older brother, Anh Ly.
I had never met him.
Steven had met him years earlier, back in 2006, before an accident left him with a brain injury. His life had changed dramatically afterward. His wife and child eventually left, and our aunt became the person who looked after him. We were told he wandered around quite a bit, so finding him wasn’t exactly straightforward.
We eventually made our way to his house anyway. Inside were pictures of our mother. That was one of those moments where everything suddenly became very real.
I was standing in a house in my father’s village, looking at pictures of my mother, while trying to find a brother I had never met. It was hard not to feel like I was walking through pieces of a family history that had existed long before I did.
We couldn’t find him that day.
But we would.
The next day was the big ceremony.
My dad had arranged for something like 200 people to come together for lunch. We all piled into a few cars and headed back toward the commune. People kept arriving at my uncle’s house, and eventually the whole place became a massive gathering of relatives, friends, and people connected to my dad’s life.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, we finally found Anh Ly. Our aunt pulled him over to us and asked him to talk to us. I honestly had no idea what I was supposed to feel. I was 37 years old and meeting my older brother for the first time.
He was scruffy, with slicked-back hair, sweatpants, rocking sandals, and he was wearing an Encore Boston shirt. He had a great smile, which apparently runs in the family. He didn’t say much, but he remembered Steven and knew that I was his brother.
I kept looking at his face.
I could see our mother in him.
That part hit me harder than I expected. Seeing him was, in some strange way, like seeing her. There was a connection there that didn’t require us to have shared a childhood or even a lifetime of memories. We had the same mother. We were brothers.
That was enough. We stood there for a while without saying much. Then we hugged. And kept hugging.
There were a lot of emotions packed into those few minutes. Too many to sort through in the moment. I didn’t know what the appropriate reaction was to meeting someone who had been my brother for my entire life but whom I had never actually known.
So I didn’t try to figure it out.
I just let myself feel it.
My dad had arranged a hall and catered lunch for everyone, with tables filling the space and food coming out as people settled in. Beers started pouring, conversations were happening everywhere, and somehow this enormous event felt both completely foreign and incredibly familiar. Oh, this was happening before noon, I should add.
Then my dad got up to give a speech.
He became emotional talking about the people he had left behind. Watching him, I started thinking about how different my sisters’ relationship with this place was from mine. They had actually been there when my dad left. They had memories of growing up in Vietnam and of the people he had to leave behind.
I didn’t have any of that.
I was born later, as a refugee, in another country.
My sisters had a childhood here. My dad had a life here. I’ve only heard stories about it.
Vietnam was something I inherited.
And yet, standing there surrounded by all these people, I realized that maybe that didn’t make it any less mine.
I had never lived in this village, but it had been part of my story before I was even born.
After my dad finished speaking, my sisters went up to stand beside him. I wanted them to have that moment. They were the ones who had been there when he left, and watching them stand next to him felt incredibly heavy and beautiful at the same moment.
Everyone was taking pictures. A ton of pictures.
Eventually the food started coming out, and the ceremony continued, but the weight of that moment stayed with me.
At some point Steven stepped away. I could tell he was feeling everything too. When he came back, there was a little red around his eyes, although he wasn’t fooling me.
I looked over toward Anh Ly. I didn’t want our first meeting to be over already. So Steven and I went over and sat with him.
We made sure he had food and that he was eating. He drank orange soda. I picked some fluff out of his hair and rubbed his back. It was a strange thing to do with someone I had literally met that day, but it also felt completely natural.
In my head, I kept thinking:
I’m sorry I wasn’t there for all these years.
But I’m here now, big bro.
There wasn’t much conversation between us, but there didn’t need to be.
Family came over and talked to us, including our aunt, who explained more about what had happened to him after the accident and how his life had been since. She told us about the challenges he had faced and the people who had taken care of him.
Eventually Anh Ly wanted to leave, so Steven and I walked him and our aunt back to the house. We ended up sitting there talking for much longer than I expected.
In a short amount of time, we tried to catch up on decades of family history. We learned more about our mother’s side of the family, including another aunt who lived in the Mekong Delta, and we talked about what had happened to Anh Ly after the accident.
At one point, he started talking about love and insisted that you needed money to find it. I told him those weren’t the people he wanted to be with anyway. We laughed.
It was a small conversation, but I remember it because it felt normal.
For a few minutes, I wasn’t sitting there trying to make up for years of lost time. I was sitting with my brother.
Eventually our cousin came looking for us because everyone else had already left and we were apparently the last ones there. I didn’t want to say goodbye.
We had just met. It felt wrong to walk away after such a short amount of time.
Our aunt told us that money wasn’t the important thing. What mattered was knowing we had a brother.
She was right.
There was no way to make up for the years. No way to suddenly create the childhood memories we never had or fill in all the years we had missed.
But we had something we hadn’t had before: a relationship that could actually start.
We had the rest of our lives to know each other.
The funny thing about a trip like this is that after moments that feel enormous, life just keeps going.
We went back into Hue and finished up our tailoring. Our suits and áo dài were finally ready, and everyone was excited to see how everything came out. We went out for seafood with my parents and sisters, ate way too much, and spent another evening together.
The next morning I got up and went for coffee with Pratap at the same place where I had previously gone with my dad.
I introduced him to salt coffee. He was immediately hooked.
We talked about the rest of the trip, our plans, and everything that had happened so far. It was one of those mornings where nothing particularly important happened, and that was exactly why it was nice. After so many days of constantly moving, seeing family, and trying to process everything, it felt good to just sit around and hang out with a friend.
Later, Pratap sent us to a craft beer place. He was late and had somehow managed to send us to the wrong location, which was very much on brand for the trip. Eventually he showed up, we had a few beers and spent the afternoon drinking, talking, and wandering around Hue.
Eventually Pratap and I ended up back at his hotel having drinks and talking about whether our younger selves would be proud of who we had become.
That conversation stuck with me.
Because sitting there in Vietnam, after everything that had happened over the previous few days, I realized how much had changed.
My dad had left this place decades ago. My sisters had grown up here. My brother had lived here his entire life.
And I had grown up thousands of miles away, carrying pieces of this place with me without really understanding where they came from.
Now I was here.
And I was sitting with family members I had barely known, meeting a brother I had never met, drinking coffee with my dad, eating meals with relatives from across the world, and walking around a village that had existed in my family’s story long before I was born.
The next day, Hannah arrived in Hanoi.
I was supposed to be getting ready for the next part of the trip, but instead I was exhausted and still trying to recover from everything the previous few days had thrown at me. I watched her flight tracker, arranged her ride, and waited downstairs for her to arrive.
When she finally walked through the door, it had been almost three weeks since we’d seen each other.
We hugged, kissed, went upstairs and caught up.
It was another reunion, just a very different one.
And I think that was the rhythm of this entire part of the trip: people arriving, people leaving, family coming together, then scattering again. Aunts and uncles I hadn’t seen in years. Sisters who had shared a childhood in Vietnam that I never had. A brother I had somehow gone my entire life without meeting. My parents returning to a place that had once been their entire world.
It all made me think about what home actually means.
I had spent my life thinking of Vietnam as the country my parents came from. I knew it through their stories, their food, their language, their habits, and the pieces of culture they carried with them after leaving. But standing in my dad’s village changed something for me.
Home doesn’t necessarily have to be somewhere you grew up.
Sometimes it’s somewhere your parents grew up. Sometimes it’s a place you’ve only ever heard about. Sometimes it’s a village where you don’t recognize the roads but recognize the faces. Sometimes it’s a family temple you didn’t even know existed until you walked through the door.
And sometimes it’s meeting an older brother for the first time in your life and realizing that the connection between you existed long before either of you had the chance to know it.
I was born somewhere else. I grew up somewhere else. My life happened somewhere else.
But this place was part of me before I was born.
I think that’s what I finally understood in Vietnam. I wasn’t returning to a home I remembered. I was discovering a home that had been waiting for me long before I knew I was looking for it.
