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I looked up, alarmed. I had been sitting on a bench in the dusk, watching as young Vietnamese men and women chatted and ambled slowly around Hanoi's Hoan Kiem Lake. A startlingly handsome young man with a bicycle stood above me, smiling down. He was wearing a paper-thin white shirt that looked like it had been washed countless times, black slacks and rubber sandals like everyone else.

Not another one, I thought. People were always asking me to speak English or French with them, when all I wanted to do was practice my Vietnamese. The result was always a frustrating conversational impasse.

"Oui, je parle un peu." I told him that I wasn't French but that I spoke a bit, then I told him in Vietnamese that I was an American graduate student, in town for a month to do some research. My tongue tripped over the difficult vowels. "My name is Wendy."

Also Visit our Vietnam: 25 Years Later site for more articles like this one.

"Ahhhh!" He smiled, pleased. "My name is Tuyen. I am studying to be a lawyer. May I sit down?" He looked so sincere, so young and pleasant, that I moved over and made space for him. He sat down and we spoke innocently for a while in pidgin French and English about the lake, the city, his job, the weather. At one point he stopped his cheerful, almost incomprehensible patter to ask me, "Why did you come to Vietnam? There is nothing here for someone like you."

How could I describe to him why? The first time I had visited in 1993, the year before, I felt like crying as the plane swooped down low over the quilt of neon green rice fields. I was filled with conflicted images and emotions about finally seeing a place that carried such a heavy weight back home. I had been warned by Vietnamese and American friends alike to "watch out for the commies," but on my first trip I had been welcomed with giddy joy by nearly everyone.

"I am here because it is a very beautiful place," I said stupidly. I thought for a second about the irony of my words as my mind flooded with images from the old Life magazines I had scoured as a child, war photos that had been my template for understanding the country for years.

A peasant woman with a shoulder pole and two dangling baskets of fruit and candy squatted in front of us. Tuyen bought an orange and she moved away like a shadow. I watched him peel the tiny green orange. It sat in his palm, small and webbed in white, and he offered it to me. I hated these green Vietnamese oranges, but his look was so pleading that I took half and suffered through each stringy, sour bite, letting the warm juice ooze down my throat.

By this time, twilight had fallen, and headlights swarmed around the lake like fireflies. It was a Friday night in late summer, and couples on dates darted by on bicycles and mopeds. Tuyen looked at his watch. "Can you meet me here again?"

I was speechless for a minute; there were no familiar handholds here, nothing against which to measure his question or my proper response. What if he was a spy? He did work for the Ministry of Law part-time, after all.

Because he had no phone, I gave him my number and pedaled back to the house I was staying at, a huge empty structure rented by an American friend now in Bangkok. My heart was beating quickly in my chest and throat, even though I was moving in slow motion through the thick jam of bicycles.

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