‘Hanoi is the city where the past and present sit next to each other’ 

I’m an international student, and I didn’t grow up here in the States. My hometown is Hanoi, Vietnam, and Hanoi’s morning sounds like motorbikes and noisy street vendors. A sound that would bring me straight back home would be the sound of steamed-corn sellers. Every morning they would play from the radio: “Who wants corn? I sell corn.” That’s how my city wakes up.  

What tourists might not notice on their first visit to Hanoi would be how generations live under the same household. My family has 10 people. I grew up around my grandparents and great-grandparents, and I am greatly influenced by them and the overall generational spirit.  

Growing up in Hanoi taught me that the communities are tight-knit, and there are invisible strings connecting people of different generations. It’s in our culture to have altars to remember our ancestors, and to appreciate where we came from. Hanoi is the city where the past and present sit next to each other.  

Nowadays, there are more modern areas with apartments, and more people are moving toward those areas. Personally, I want an apartment too in my 20s. Overall, however, there still exists that spiritual connection between generations. 

This essay is one in a series of Columbia College students’ reflections on how class and race put a mark on where they grew up. They answered these questions: What should people know about the place where I grew up in? What are the stories I tell about my life there?