Dad mentioned it casually, the way he mentions most things that matter, somewhere between a sentence about the weather and what time we’d be leaving. “Bà nội năm nay không được khoẻ như mọi năm.” I nodded. He didn’t say more. Neither did I.
I landed in Hanoi about a week before heading home. No big plans. Just time.
I did the usual loop. Hồ Tây in the afternoon. The old streets around Hoàn Kiếm. And at some point, I found myself at the TCH on Hai Bà Trưng, the one I’ve been coming to for years. That café has seen a lot of versions of me. First days at new jobs. Last days at others. Conversations that changed things. Conversations I thought would change things and didn’t. I used to come back here on every Hanoi trip and feel something, a kind of warm static, like your chest recognizing a place before your brain catches up.
This time, I sat down, ordered the same thing, and waited.
Nothing came.
I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not. Maybe it just means I’ve stopped carrying those memories around like luggage. Or maybe it means something got quieter inside. I sat there a little longer than I needed to, just to check.
Still nothing. I paid and left.
—
I spent most of that week alone, or close to it. I met a few people, old friends, quick catch-ups, but not many. The rest of the time I just wandered.
Here’s the thing about Hanoi after ten years of living here: I know exactly where everything is, and none of it feels like mine anymore.
I’d walk down a street I used to walk every day and feel like I was watching a film I’d already seen. Familiar, yes. But the way a city is familiar to a well-traveled tourist, not the way it’s familiar to someone who grew up in it.
More than ten years. That’s not a short time. I made friends here, lost some, grew up here in the ways that count. And now I walk around feeling like a guest who once sublet the apartment and still remembers where the spare key was hidden.
I don’t think this is a bad thing. But it’s a strange one.
—
Every Tết, we do the same thing. First we go to my mom’s side, then to my dad’s. Ngoại side, nội side. Like clockwork. I’ve done this every single year of my life and somehow it never fully registered as a thing until this year.
Maybe because when something happens every year without fail, it stops being an event. It becomes weather.
But this year, I started noticing.
The moment we walked in, Bà Ngoại clapped her hands. Not a polite, composed clap — a happy, slightly uncontrolled one, like a kid who just got surprised. She does this every time she sees us, the grandkids who live far away and don’t come back nearly enough.
One, maybe two visits this year. Less than last year, if I’m being honest. That’s what living and working far from home looks like in practice. The distance doesn’t stay the same, it grows.
Working far from home sounds interesting when you’re young and restless. But it also means you miss the slow things. The things that change so gradually you don’t notice until you’re standing right in front of them, and they’ve already changed.
There’s something I kept coming back.
What I noticed this Tết, was how differently Ông Bà show their emotions compared to my parents. My parents show care through action: logistics, worry, questions. Ông Bà show it through something more immediate, almost unfiltered. The clapping. The way Ông Ngoại held onto my arm a little longer than necessary when asking me “Bao giờ lấy vợ?”
They also forget things now. Ông walks outside in his house slippers. Bà leaves objects in unexpected places and can’t remember why. Mom and the uncles notice this with the particular kind of stress that adult children carry when they start watching their parents age, the frustration that’s really just fear wearing a different mask.
I understand the fear. But I kept thinking: this is normal. Not normal the way it used to be, but normal for who they are now, at this age, in this chapter. There’s a version of care that says “let me protect you from yourself” and a version that says “I see you exactly as you are.” Both come from love. But one of them, I think, lands softer.
—
Bà Nội is weaker this year. Noticeably so.
She says things sometimes that don’t quite land the way they’re supposed to, a sentence that trails off into something half-remembered, a worry repeated twice, a thought that starts in one place and ends somewhere else entirely. Most people around her treat this as confusion, something to be gently corrected or redirected.
But sitting next to her, I kept having this feeling that she was saying exactly what she meant. That behind the non-linear sentences, there were real fears. Real thoughts about time, about what’s left, about what she still doesn’t know how to say out loud after a lifetime of not saying things out loud.
Dad doesn’t like it when she goes to those places. He wants her calm, wants her okay, wants her to stop circling whatever she’s circling. I know he means well, I know it completely.
But I recognized the instinct. The impulse to redirect someone away from the feeling because the feeling is hard to sit with. The belief that protecting someone means shielding them from their own thoughts.
I’ve done that. I still do it sometimes.
I saw it in him, and I recognized it in myself, and I didn’t say anything about either.
—
I slept in my old room. The bed on the second floor, the one I slept in for more than ten years before I moved out.
There’s something about that bed. When I was a kid, it was the safest place I knew. I’d climb up, open a volume of Conan, and every problem, school, social, whatever passes for stress when you’re twelve, would just pause. Not disappear. Just wait politely outside the door while I read.
That feeling is still there, a little. Home still means something. My parents still fuss over me in exactly the ways they always have, still worry, still make sure I’ve eaten.
But I’m not that kid anymore.
I’ve been to places they haven’t been. Lived in cities they’ve only heard me talk about. Had experiences I haven’t fully explained and probably won’t. While I’ve been out collecting all of that, they’ve been here — same house, same town, same rhythms. Not because they couldn’t leave, but because this is what they chose, or what life chose for them, or some combination of the two.
I don’t know what to do with that asymmetry. I don’t think you’re supposed to do anything with it. I think you’re just supposed to notice it.
—
There’s this thing I keep thinking about but haven’t figured out how to say cleanly, so I’ll just say it messy:
“When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. I’m never completely at home anywhere.”
It’s familiar, it’s warm, there are people who love you in it, and also it’s not the same. And then you leave again and you miss the other place.
You end up belonging to everywhere a little, and nowhere completely.
I don’t know if that’s loss or just what growing up actually looks like when you let yourself go far enough. But I do know that home isn’t home anymore, no matter how much I want it to be.
—–
It’s been a long time since I’ve lived this simply.
For a few days after Tết, before flying back, I was in Hanoi with basically nothing to do. One bed, a bathroom, wifi. Hanoi has been gray and drizzly all week, that specific kind of rain that makes everything feel slightly melancholic and also slightly cozy, sometimes both at once.
—
I set an alarm for 7:30. Came back at 6 AM. Opened my eyes at some point, squinted at my phone without my glasses. 10:30. Of course.
But lying in that bed, in that small room, with the rain outside and nowhere I had to be, I felt something closer to calm than I’d felt the whole trip.
Different city. Different bed. But somehow more familiar.
Maybe home isn’t a place you go back to. Maybe it’s just a feeling you have to keep finding, in whatever room you happen to be in.