Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

What appealed to me most about Hue was not its royal connection and its Indochinese hauteur or any of its temples, but rather the simple fact of its visible kitchens, the way—because of the heat, but also because it was a tranquil city—I could see people, women usually, cooking the evening meal, noodles in a big pot, or grilled meat, dumplings in a wok, and the families sitting down to eat on low wooden stools. Nothing was more indicative of peace than people unhurriedly eating and having plenty of food: domestic life being lived partly in the open, old women and small children sitting in doorways, watching the rain come down.

There was hardly any distinction between a private kitchen and a public restaurant. The open platform of a shophouse served as both: the woman shredding noodles into a soup pot with vegetables was chatting to her friends, minding her children, and serving customers, all at the same time.

Remembering the anxiety I had felt here in wartime, when I had never walked anywhere—I'd been driven fast to every destination—I strolled across the river to the north bank and Dong Ba market to look upon the great piles of fruit and vegetables, the towers of pots and pans, the tea stalls, the slabs of catfish and eels and tuna, the spice bazaar, the stalls selling herbal medications, the shelves of snake wine (each bottle with a coiled cobra pickled inside), the stacks of clothes. Outside, where the market backed onto the river, a willowy girl in a conical straw hat was poling a sampan, standing in the stern and working her steering oar like a gondolier. At the embankment a woman was washing clothes in the river, some men were loading bales onto a barge, and families were settling into big boats for the long river journey to their villages. The boats moved over the river like water bugs, passing the old brewery, the decaying temples, the masses of bamboo lining the banks, the houseboats that were moored in clusters to create a floating village.

All that represented the vitality, richness, and color of old Asia. But along with the snake wine and the powdered antlers for aphrodisiacs and the fragrant bricks of tea was the new Asia of ingenious piracy: knockoff Nikes, fake Tag Heuer watches for $15, Lacoste polo shirts, Zippo lighters, and mountains of bootleg CDs. And maybe a new Asia in the way Vietnamese traders incessantly badgered passersby, often screaming "Buy it!" at me the way the cyclo drivers howled "Massage!"—persistent to the point of being pests. But who could blame them?

"I worked for the Americans," one old hawker said. And an elderly cyclo driver told me, "I was a soldier with the Americans." I heard this often in Hue.

On a back street, I stopped to rest at an open-fronted shop, sitting on a stool out of the rain, and a woman appeared with a bowl of fish soup and a dish of hard-boiled quail eggs. I drank tea, and soon after the woman's teenage daughter came home from school and translated the woman's questions: Was I married? Did I have children? Did I like the fish soup (which the daughter called banh canh ca loc)?

And where did I come from?

Ah, yes, American! Welcome! Have some more fish soup!

One thing struck me more than anything else in Hue. Never mind for the moment my memory of the lifelessness and apprehension, the weirdness of war: frenzy one minute and boredom the next, the bureaucracy and clumsy formality, the suspense that was also part of the terror. The difference was so great as almost to erase the memory.

I had been conscious of it since entering the country, though I had not remarked on it or made a note. It was the people's clothes—the whiteness of the white dresses, the starched collars, the decorous

ao dais, many men in shirtsleeves or in suits, the daintiness of children's tidy outfits, and not their newness but their cleanliness, a crisp and well-turned-out population that spoke with confidence and self-respect; even in the muddiest districts of Hue, the clothes were freshly laundered.

All this was new to me, the Hue of peacetime that did not in the least resemble the Hue of the war. The Vietcong gun emplacements and pillboxes on the old city walls looked more like antiquated follies than leftovers of battle. Apart from the citadel, it was not a rebuilt or restored place but rather a reincarnation, like much else in Vietnam, a whole city risen from the ashes of war.

I was praising the fish soup to a man in Hue who said, "You should try the eel soup."

Looking for eel soup, I found Mr. Son, whose shophouse, on a corner in the southeast part of the city, was another open kitchen that could have been a family's kitchen, because it contained only two tables and some stools. A hand-lettered sign said Chao Luon—eel soup. He had no other customers. He also sold beer, whiskey, canned meat, and dry noodles; his wife took in laundry. He had fish soup but no eel soup.

"Business is slow," Mr. Son said. "If I get more customers, I'll find another table."