In the winter of 2020, I took the Reunification Express (Tàu Thống Nhất/ Bắc-Nam) from Sài Gòn, where I was attending college, to Vinh, a city about 90km from my paternal grandpa’s home village. I shared a sleeper room with grandma Ngân, a north-to-south Catholic migrant on her trip back to her hometown Hà Nội, and a young nun on the way to her monastery in Đà Nẵng. We developed an intimate bond—I accompanied grandma to the toilet, my nun-sister sat next to her and peeled oranges while she was reminiscing about her life, and she treated both of us as granddaughters. This is her waving goodbye to me when I got off at Vinh station. I have lost contact with grandma and my nun-sister. I hope they are healthy and happy in their own ways.

Whenever I’m back in my paternal grandpa’s rural village in Nghệ An, I love having bánh mướt (the white rolls) for breakfast. Usually, grandma Tình—married to grandpa Hương, one of my grandpa’s younger brothers—would walk to the pop-up market at the village gate after cockcrow and buy bánh mướt from a vendor lady, who also sells bánh cam and other local sweet treats. Or aunt Thảo—my favorite villager whom I believe is the coolest one—would do it, if she’s not busy in the rice paddies.

In the late summer of 2023, I took a trip to Lạng Sơn, a northern province bordering Guangxi (China), with my adventurous friend Billy. He rode me on a rented motorbike to Hữu Nghị international border gate, 17km from the city center where we stayed. Imagine this mise-en-scène: two Google Maps-dependent youngsters on a tiny motorbike, riding alongside mammoth container trucks on National Highway 1A, sometimes across bumpy mud-filled forest paths, in the evening amid the torrential rain. We were both wearing glasses, to make things worse. It was a one-of-a-kind adventure. This picture is not related to the border gate, though. I saw this chú xe ôm (motorbike-taxi rider) at the entrance to Đông Kinh market, a famous circuit for cross-border goods in Lạng Sơn. We spent that rainy afternoon chatting with market vendors—some of them migrants chasing after the lucrative cross-border trade.