AS TIME GOES BY

A decade and a half after a life-changing sojourn in Vietnam, a writer returns to track the country's transformations-and his own.

- Chris Wallace

RIGHT AWAY. I NOTICE THE SMELLS.

Jackfruit in the sun. The woody spice of cloves. Star anise in a pot of steaming pho. It's springtime in Hanoi, and the flame trees are in fragrant, coral bloom. Vendors pile bushels of lotus flowers onto their three-wheeled rickshaws and motorcycles. I get a blast of cherry blossom, rice wine, and incense at the entrance to a temple. From a nearby food stall, the lurid tang of fish sauce and grilled, sweet-glazed meat hits me like a psychedelic. It feels like the dawn of a hallucination-complete with the thrill of not knowing quite how the experience will end.

I am back in Vietnam, 15 years after I first came: up to my eyes in the country's sensory carnival, immersed in a flood of memories. Revisiting this place, so central to the stories I tell about myself, makes me recognize how different everything is. How different I am from the 29-year-old who moved here to escape the life he was living, how different the world is. Of course, Vietnam has changed, too. All these fracturing realties, past and present, will take some getting used to.

In 2007, when my life in Los Angeles had reached a dead end and I had nothing to lose, a friend invited me to move to Vietnam to act as a consultant on the Franco-Vietnamese restaurant he was opening in Ho Chi Minh City (to this day it's more often called Saigon). As an aspiring writer, I had lots of experience working "day jobs" in restaurants and an affinity for the expat protagonists of mid-century novels. It may sound strange, but going to Vietnam is the thing in my life I'm most proud of-maybe because it was the kind of thing the "me" I wanted to be would do, a way to indulge all my linen-suit, Graham Greene, and Humphrey Bogart fantasies.