This essay marks my debut in Salmagundi. For decades, Salmagundi has been a proving ground for serious thought and unembarrassed ambition, publishing work by figures who taught me—often indirectly—what intellectual courage could look like on the page: Susan Sontag, Edward Said, Harold Bloom, George Steiner, Christopher Lasch, among many others. It is a magazine that has never confused urgency with trend, or seriousness with politeness.
To appear alongside that tradition is, frankly, disorienting. Gratifying, yes—but also bracing. It feels less like an initiation: an invitation to measure one’s sentences against voices that once seemed unreachably distant. This essay is written with that pressure fully felt—and welcomed.
I. The City That Thinks Through You
At dawn Hanoi is already awake. Motorbikes swarm beneath balconies before the light has quite broken, a mechanical chorus that carries the city into motion. From the window of my apartment overlooking Tây Hồ, the lake lies bruised with mist until the first glare of sun turns it to metal. On the street below, vendors set down baskets of fruit, incense burns outside a pagoda, and the smell of French bread mingles with diesel.
In the Vietnamese capital, even silence is crowded. Horns blare and drills hammer, and as, within the old, French-colonial styled cafés, students bend over notebooks, a young couple exchanges muted laughter, and one senses here a discipline of attention beneath the noise. Hanoi thrives on density, on each body finding rhythm within the mass of the whole.
This is not Ontario—not the Canada I was born into, where winter silences mean absence, where a child can walk for hours without encountering another soul, where a man can freeze to death just for being outside too long. Silence, in Hanoi, is suspension rather than vacancy: a pause inside intensity. To write and teach here is to live against a double register—abundance and estrangement, presence and dislocation.
What seemed temporary has become habit; what felt like detour has hardened into a path. I married here, worked here, suffered and recovered here. There are mornings when the city’s beauty feels sentient, as if it were studying me in return. The lake below reflects nothing faithfully. It flickers, absorbs, then offers back an image slightly altered, as though to test my recognition. It is like Tarkovsky’s Solaris—the planet that mirrors human memory until the living can no longer tell what is real. Hanoi also exerts that pull. It remembers me in ways I do not consent to. It reconstruct what I thought I had left behind.
I wake to the sound of engines in the dark and feel them roaring inside my body, as if the city has rewritten my pulse to match its own. What began as fascination has become dependence; what was foreign now feels inevitable.
Hanoi has begun to live through me, the way the ocean in Solaris dreams through its visitors—returning what it touches, changed. The humidity, the noise, the flicker of light on the lake conspire toward a single sensation: that Hanoi is awake when I am not, that it dreams me as I dream it.
II. Two Grammars
In Hanoi I inhabit two grammars at once. One I learn daily—the grammar of deference, of softened refusals, of collective rhythm. Viet- namese, especially in the Northern accent, is a language of tact: silence is not omission but signal. It presumes context and intention; it trusts the listener to meet meaning halfway. The other grammar is inherited from the rural Ontario of my upbringing—a place of distance, stoicism, endurance. Sincerity there was measured by reticence, and solitude passed for moral strength. We learned to distrust excess, to equate a kind of silence and distance as dignity.
Between these grammars I move uneasily. That doubleness first declared itself at Queen’s University, where I studied English literature and began to sense the discipline turning against itself. The seminars no longer felt like invitations to greatness but rehearsals in suspicion. To admire style was to risk elitism; to discuss beauty was to court offence. What drew me to literature—its seriousness, its capacity for transcendence—was recast as an embarrassment, a symptom of privilege. The virtue was all procedural now, a righteousness of method. What passed for progress inside the institution was often resentment disguised as reform. The pursuit of mastery had been replaced by the bureaucratic management of grievance. By the time I finished, I no longer believed academia could sustain literature’s moral ambition. The classroom that once promised illumination had begun to police it. That disillusionment was my first real exile. What the academy had once promised—a fellowship of minds bound by the pursuit of greatness—had dissolved into performance, into an endless rehearsal of purity without faith. I wanted out, but not away from literature itself; I wanted to find where the stakes of language still felt real. I came to Hanoi by way of detours I once mistook for destinations. After my BA in English, my mother still hoped I’d study law, not literature. But I had already chosen what couldn’t be defended in court: the vocation of writing. When my father took his life, the argument ended. What remained was motion.
I drifted east—South Korea, Saigon, Jakarta, Beijing, Guangzhou—each city a fragment still listening for its verb. Hanoi was meant to be another clause, but it closed the paragraph. I met my wife here. Love decided what the intellect had postponed. My life now begins each morning on a motorbike. I ride through rain and exhaust to teach English to students who believe a test score will buy them passage to another country. The classroom hums with that wager. We practise precision not for beauty’s sake but for survival’s. In another room I teach Frankenstein and Blade Runner, tracing the origins of artificial intelligence; their questions remind me that machines are not the threat—people who stop reading are.
Among long-term expatriate teachers in Hanoi there is a stubborn kinship. In the early years we partied hard; now we share dinners, stories, the quiet proof that exile can ripen into belonging. Most nights end at a Bia Hơi—cheap beer in chipped glasses, cigarette smoke curling through the neon light. We sit on plastic stools and talk pedagogy, translation, the strange art of teaching English across languages while trying not to lose our own. The talk drifts between lesson plans and Dostoevsky, between the absurd and the sincere. Sometimes the night slips into karaoke with locals—someone shouting unironically into a reverbing mic while the rest of us keep time on the tables, laughing at the grandeur of it all. It feels like a parody of our vocation, and also its truest expression: the expatriate intellectuals who came to teach the world’s lingua franca in a city that never asked for it. Hanoi turns strangers into family the way it turns rain into steam.
Outside the university I run small clubs for (contraband) literature and creative writing—in rented rooms that smell of coffee and whiteboard markers, where students read aloud from notebooks still damp with courage. It’s there, more than in any lecture hall, that I remember why I stayed: not to escape Canada, but to learn what language can still do when stripped of inheritance.
To teach is to keep language awake. To live here is to learn how distance itself can instruct.
III. The Discipline of Distance
Perhaps, as Julia Kristeva writes, “the foreigner lives within us; he is the hidden face of our identity.” What I have learned here is that the foreigner is not elsewhere but within—the part of the self that refuses assimilation. Living abroad only makes him visible. Each day I translate between two voices: the reserve of my upbringing and the attentiveness that this entity or organism Hanoi demands.
This doubleness becomes a powerful instrument for the writer and the teacher. Distance sharpens focus; estrangement restores proportion. Tocqueville understood this when he sailed to America in the 1830s. He arrived to study its prisons but found himself measuring its soul. What fascinated him was not punishment but freedom—its intoxication, its excess. He saw that liberty unrestrained turns into appetite, that equality breeds both vitality and conformity:
“A stranger who has lived in the United States learns, in quitting it, what excesses they are capable of when they are free.”
His insight was spatial: vision requires distance.
After my evening classes still, I ride my motorbike on the dikes of the Red River. The air smells of iron and wet soil. Fishermen’s lamps bob on the water. The night hums with a private syntax: frogs, engines, the soft percussion of rain.
Writing is my way of resisting that mask. It is the only map that never quite fits the territory; each sentence is a form of exile pretending to return home. From Hanoi I’ve learned that the task is not to chart borders accurately but to stay lost with precision.
Distance is also a precondition for attention. From Hanoi I have watched the continent arrange itself like a constellation—a slow, unfolding dialogue of temperaments. The air here seems to carry the pressure of everything around it: the ancient eye of dynasties to the north, the shimmer of archipelagos to the south, the pulse of migration and memory that keeps the region awake. Asia is less a body than a field of tension: a single mind thinking in multiple directions at once.
I have seen that equilibrium tested. In Cambodia I rode a tuk-tuk through the killing fields, the air too quiet for what it contained; history there is not memory but residue, and the living move as though apologising for it. In Bali I played gamelan with locals who laughed when I missed the beat. In China a hostel owner once chased me through an alley with a baseball bat after my bank card failed—his fury less criminal than operatic, a reminder that survival here is still a personal art. And in Korea, at a baseball game where the crowd sang through every inning, I kissed a girl as fireworks rose behind the outfield—pure exuberance, though the baseball was terrible. My early adulthood is traced through years of grace learning to live in volatility.
China dreams in hierarchies, Singapore in blueprints, Japan in repetitions perfected to the edge of silence. Vietnam dreams in improvisations. Each nation conducts its own orchestra of order and accident. To travel among them is to feel modernity rehearsing its contradictions— discipline against desire, wealth against devotion. Asia’s unity, if it has one, is not ideological but tonal: a shared instinct to survive both beauty and disaster in the same breath.
Hanoi remains, for me, the moral centre of that experiment—the place where contradictions find momentary balance. It is not the geographic middle, but it is the most atmospheric Asian capital because it persists suspended between resignation and revolt. Seen from here, the continent resembles a single being learning to breathe through its own diversity—an ecology of dissonance sustained by endurance and grace.
The image that returns most often is from Solaris: a sentient sea dreaming through its own confusion mirroring those who study it. The forces that course through Asia—money, devotion, power—seem less historical than tidal, each nation a fleeting reflection on the same moving surface. What persists is not order, but the poise to survive disorder.
At closing time the Bia Hơi shutters its metal door. The owner hoses down the pavement, the smell of wet limes and spilled beer rising into the rain. Across the street, a shopkeeper hums an old love song through static. The street glistens like a page half-erased. I think of the morning that will follow—of students, of sentences, of all the small systems that keep meaning awake.
IV. The Privilege of Distance
In the years since leaving Canada, I have traced this region as though mapping my own displacement. Each journey began as travel and ended as a kind of diagnosis—an attempt to understand how civilizations negotiate their bargains with time. The flights between these cities are short, yet each arrival feels like a shift in moral weather.
To move among these places is effectively to watch modernity argue with itself. Some Hanoians wear progress as faith, others as a mask; all improvise between memory and desire. What struck me most was not their difference from the West but their resemblance to it—the same fever for renewal, the same temptation to mistake motion for change. Yet unlike the West, most of these societies still live close to the memory of deprivation; their vitality is borrowed from the edge of collapse.
Decade after decade, the Vietnamese have renewed the terms of their nation’s endurance. Its modernity is weary and unastonished; its chaos deliberate; its survival instinctive, rallied with propaganda billboards. From Hanoi that distance is not escape but calibration—the necessary space through which comparison becomes perception.
The privilege of distance is not freedom but awareness. To live beyond one’s country is to live among mirrors. Each city reflects a different version of civilization’s wager with itself. I have seen that progress and fatigue share the same face; that history, wherever you stand, is not a line but a loop.
V. The Long Ride North
In 2016, a friend proposed we ride motorbikes from Saigon to Hanoi—three weeks on secondhand Hondas, following the spine of the country. I agreed without hesitation. I was twenty-five and still believed movement could dissolve confusion, that the road might offer its own philosophy.
We left in late April, when the rains begin to gather. The air felt electric, the scent of wet asphalt mingling with the exhaust. Vietnam was still new to me then, its name still a kind of abstraction, inherited from film and footnotes. I wanted to see it unmediated, to test whether a place could be understood directly, without the scaffolding of interpretation, westward mountain and eastern coast converging until the journey itself became personal.
Each kilometre burned off another layer of theory. By noon the heat turned metallic. The road unspooled through fields of flooded rice and low villages of tin and concrete. At night we stopped in guesthouses that smelled of mildew and petrol. The fan blades ticked like metronomes over the sound of rain. We drank rice liquor and listened to the frogs echo through the jungled dark.
Somewhere outside Đà Lạt, fog rose from the pines like breath from the earth itself—slow, deliberate, undecided between mercy and concealment. The mountains had that moral gravity Emerson admired: their beauty was a test. Each switchback demanded faith, and the road vanished into mist. We rode by instinct, trusting that the motion itself would suffice.
Near Mũi Né, we ran out of gas along a stretch of coast so bare it might have been lunar. My phone was dead; my friend’s passport had gotten soaked. From the dunes emerged a barefooted man (red-eyed and looking he’d never been told the war(s) had ended) carrying a plastic bottle of petrol. He said nothing. He crouched and drew a number in the sand—the price—and waited. We paid. He smiled once and disappeared into the light.
The further we continued North past Hà Tĩnh, the more our bikes were coughing metal. The chains rusted, the tires were soft. That night the guesthouse had only cold water—a bucket under a pipe that hissed and spat, and somewhere along that road North, The Deer Hunter returned to me—the last film I’d ever watched with my father before his suicide, neither of us knowing I would one day live in the country that haunted it. Movement does not cure despair. It renders it visible—frames it like a shot held too long, until what’s unbearable becomes, against reason, beautiful.
VI. Hanoi After Midnight
Although the Communist capital was still under curfew when I first arrived in 2016, it was—and remains—the most “transgressive” and “underground” city I have known. Beneath its official order, a nocturnal energy thrives, half-celebration, half-refusal. The cafés and bars are dimly lit and perpetually smoky; everyone seems to be performing the act of staying awake, as if wakefulness itself were a small defiance. Yet the same city that refuses sleep at night perfects it by day. Hanoians can be seen falling asleep everywhere: rows of plastic chairs outside cafés, slumped over steering wheels, stretched across motorbikes balanced on their kickstands. It isn’t fatigue but confidence: a public claim to space. In the West, sleep in public usually reads as poverty or failure; in the labyrinth of Hanoi, to doze in the open is to say: this street is mine too.
By night, the city’s young turn to The Old Quarter. Girls in thrifted skirts and torn denim, hair dyed grey-blonde or tangerine, moving through the alleys like apparitions from another era—half K-Wave polish, half ’90s grunge. Their style feels improvised yet deliberate, an assertion of autonomy in a city where speech is still measured. Saigon dresses brighter; Đà Nẵng is neater. Hanoi cultivates a subtler language of dissent, built from gestures and surfaces.
To dye one’s hair, to tattoo one’s forearm, to ignore the direction of traffic—these local acts of anarchy choreograph the everyday freedom still their own. Freedom, in Vietnam, is not structural but stylistic—a poise, a look, a refusal to appear impressed.
In my classrooms, their students’ humour is precise, unsentimental:
—“Karl Marx ruined my wardrobe.”
—“I don’t trust any revolution that still needs a logo.”
—“The rush hour traffic here proves that socialism was wrong.”
Hanoi may appear poorer than Saigon, but that impression is carefully maintained. What greets the traveler on arrival is a deliberate austerity—a performance of socialist virtue meant to preserve the image of the capital as the nation’s conscience, the authentic worker’s city. By quiet design, the South has been cast as its complement: a sanctioned zone of accumulation and display, where Northern wealth may be spent but not flaunted at home. The policy is never stated, only enacted—a moral geography in which virtue resides in the North and appetite finds its release in the South.
A Hanoian of some importance once told me he had built four illegal floors beneath his refurbished French colonial Hanoi residence because he had “run out of places to spend the money in the South.” He confessed this while showing me his cellar of French cheeses and imported wines.
Hanoi, for most teachers, appears too abrasive, too unreconciled to its own dissonance. During a brief stint in quasi-administration, I found my main task was managing the steady migration of foreign instructors from the North to the South of Vietnam. Those who leave for Saigon tend to seek ease: cleaner air, smoother manners, a cosmopolitan rhythm that flatters one’s sense of purpose; those who stay in Hanoi tend to belong to a different order of sensibility: alert, ironic, drawn to the city’s tension. You see them in torn denim, black nail polish, market-bought band shirts for groups they’ve never heard of—gestures of private resistance that conceal not apathy but vigilance, the quiet instinct to preserve a margin of freedom inside the ordinary.
Walking home through the narrow streets after midnight, I often feel the city breathing through its contradictions: ancient alleys filled with Bluetooth speakers, monks crossing through cigarette smoke, girls in combat boots lighting incense. The scene feels at once anarchic and devotional. It is not rebellion precisely—but equilibrium—the delicate art of seeming to yield while quietly refusing.
VII. Hanoi as Lens
If exile sharpens vision, Hanoi is the lens through which that vision passes. The city does not offer abstraction; it offers density—history pressed against daily life until meaning becomes tactile. To walk through its streets is to move through overlapping centuries: French villas sagging under neon billboards, Soviet housing blocks beside glass towers, courtyards where incense rises through the scaffolding and rain. Every street corner is a palimpsest, the past never erased—only repurposed. On one in Ba Đình I often stop: a police station beside a Circle K where I buy a can of Highlands Coffee before campus. The officers drift in and out in green Soviet-style uniforms with red epaulets and yellow stars, garments meant to convey authority but shadowed by memory. Across the road, an alley recedes into another century—patched concrete, cables hanging low, the smell of damp and exhaust. The buildings look slapped together from leftover eras—French trim, Soviet brick, wartime cement—less rebuilt than endured, a city remade each day simply to keep standing.
The city teaches compression. In the alleys, two motorbikes pass with just inches to spare. Shopfronts double as kitchens and bedrooms. Speech economizes to gesture, gesture to inference. Writing here demands the same discipline: each paragraph must carry its own crowd. The sprawl of Canadian landscape has given way to the geometry of this place, where no detail can be wasted.
I have learned to think in proximity. A sentence here must brace for collision—between faith and fatigue, abundance and loss. The page becomes a street where rival energies negotiate their right of way. The noise outside—drills, chanting vendors, the hammer of construction—enters the prose as rhythm, as pulse, and as propulsion.
Other writers have turned their cities into crucibles. Dickens made London a laboratory of the Victorian conscience; in The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño transformed Mexico City into a fever dream of literary pursuit; and Cormac McCarthy’s borderlands—across Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy—became a moral landscape of violence and grace. Hanoi occupies that same space for me. It is a condition, and a city that refuses reduction to metaphor. Its abundance compels attention. To write here is to accept the obligation of density, to believe that every surface might still conceal an inward life.
When I write of Canada from this vantage, the silence of its fields and the emptiness of its winters return with new gravity. One place makes the other legible. The foreign clarifies the familiar. Hanoi does not erase my origins; it resets the optics I bring in, often mercilessly. It insists that every clarity must pay for itself in concentration.
VIII. The Distance of Home
Each time I return to Canada, the environment feels too clean, too measured, as if everything has been filtered of consequence. The streets are quiet, the lawns trimmed to the same obedience. Even in summer, the silence has the quality of snow. The light seems bureaucratic—white, polite, without density. What strikes me each visit is how little sound there is that isn’t engineered: the hum of air-conditioners, the mechanical calm of traffic, the faint murmur of television through drywall. I once mistook that stillness for peace. Now it feels like absence rehearsed to perfection. One visit, I rent a small apartment near Kingston, along the St. Lawrence River. I’m there to see a few old friends from Queen’s—former graduate students who have since finished their doctorates and now orbit the university in various ways, some with temporary appointments, others already pushed outside the profession.
I unpack my books and tell myself I can begin writing again, but the air feels administrative, the conversation managerial. Everything turns around mortgages, commutes, fatigue. No one has the time to read in the West. When I travel home, I see the exhaustion of a society and an intellectual class that no longer believes in its mission.
On another return, I stay only a few weeks, moving through the same neighbourhoods as if through an exhibit of my upbringing. Curtains glow with the blue of television; faces flicker in the light of other rooms. The silence that once felt dignified has become defensive. Much of it, I realize, is circumstantial—Canada’s long winters drive people indoors, into the privacy of heated rooms and digital company. What once gathered around fireplaces now gathers behind screens. The cold that once shaped endurance now enforces isolation. Social media completes the enclosure, allowing everyone to curate their own version of contact. The country’s vastness—though still a source of stoic pride—has become a metaphor for its new solitude: each life sealed off by weather, distance, and the soft tyranny of connection without presence. Contrast this to Hanoi’s mornings—the woman setting up her bánh mì cart, the old veteran wheeling his cauldron of phở through the alley, the children sweeping the storefront before school. I feel something shift on first recollection of that “second life”: the first traces of homesickness because it was the comfort of a life that never pretended to be separate from its own continuance.
The air smells of cedar smoke and permanence and the snow still compresses under my boot soles, a muffled hymn. But permanence is the illusion I come back to measure. Home is no longer the place that made me, but the place that reminds me I remain unfinished.
IX. Writer as Exile
Exile is not incidental to literature; it is one of its generative conditions. Joyce fled Ireland to reinvent Dublin from abroad. Nabokov turned loss into precision, building his second language as if chiselling glass. Baldwin, in Paris, learned to see America as both wound and inheritance, and Conrad—the Polish sailor who wrote him into English literary celebrity— discovered that displacement could become conscience—that to write in another man’s tongue was to live inside perpetual translation.
My exile is elective, not enforced, yet it entails the same double consciousness. To live at a remove from Canada is also to stand apart from the West itself, which has grown uncertain of its own legitimacy. Where Conrad watched the moral scaffolding of empire collapse from within, one now sees its democratic successors hollowed by self-suspicion. Freedom ossifies into process, compassion into regulation, the university into a ministry of reassurance. The decay is procedural, almost polite, and therefore more absolute.
From Hanoi, this unraveling is visible as daylight. The moral fatigue that Conrad traced to the tropics has migrated north, disguised as tolerance, institutionalized as guilt. In the United States, as in Canada, one finds a civilization rehearsing remorse as public ritual, mistaking self-reproach for renewal. Exile offers no cure, only perspective—the cold privilege of distance, the capacity to see what still flickers within the ruins, and to go on loving it, if only for the dignity of its former light. To endure that tension is the writer’s discipline.
Exile is also method. It teaches attention as the last form of allegiance. To pay attention—to a sentence, to a city, to the inner life of another—is to resist the corrosion of thought.
With every return, I carry back to Hanoi what fragments of seriousness and beauty I can that still survive in the West, the remnants of a culture once convinced that clarity was a moral act. What can still be borne, I bear forward—not as inheritance, but as obligation.
The lake below, at the base of my apartment in Tây Hồ, glows faintly under the last construction light. Somewhere across the water, a crane lowers its arm, ending the day’s work. I stand at the window thinking of the classroom, of the page—both spaces where meaning must be rebuilt daily from what remains. To teach is to keep language awake; to write is to test whether truth can still travel. Exile grants no closure, only this: the duty to go on making the world legible for as long as one can speak.
Thank you for reading, and for the compliment. Ugresic will be a huge influence on many upcoming works. There seems to be a real demand for travel essays and fiction today.
Incredible writing. Gives me those inspiring butterflies only good writing can