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Time passed. I had returned to Southeast Asia, alone once again. M’s fluency in French hadn’t got us terribly far. The search for Frenchness in Indochina, and Vietnam in particular, had become increasingly ridiculous: an endless cycle of half-baked inference. I had sought out the places where the concept of French Indochina originated. I had poked among the fragile ruins of French culture in the places where it once had flourished. The narrative I was seeking didn’t really seem to exist; there was nothing but its highly dramatic ending.

So I got in touch with Christopher Moore and asked if he wanted to travel with me to Dien Bien Phu where the French were driven out of Asia once and for all. I didn’t have to use much persuasion, as I knew that this was one of the few places in the region he hadn’t visited. What’s more, he had always wanted to talk with the so-called Black Thai, a distinct cultural group who have lived near the Lao border for uncounted generations, remote from the Thais of Thailand from whom they descend. They speak an odd variant of the standard Thai that Christopher was eager to see if he could understand. Emails flew between his base in Bangkok and mine in Vancouver as we ironed out the details. I would go to Hanoi and settle in there for a while, waiting for his arrival when he had an opening in his writing schedule.

Hanoi has serious traffic and pollution problems and some truly ugly suburbs — which megalopolis does not? — but at its centre, frequent wars notwithstanding, remains the stately and refined city it has so long proclaimed itself to be. To put the matter in Western terms, Hanoi is to Saigon as Montreal is to Toronto and Melbourne is to Sydney: less brash and materialistic and certainly more cultured — and sensitive about its loss of power. For heaven’s sake, it has a Temple of Literature.

Travelling light and solo, I went straight from the airport to the northern part of the city and holed up there with pleasure, shifting from one small hotel to another as the rates rose or fell according to the occupancy levels. I did a good deal of walking in the Thirty-Six Streets, an area I imagine probably reminds American visitors of Greenwich Village, though it’s both more charming and more alive. The old guild system that assigned silk merchants, salt sellers, and birdcage makers to particular streets is long gone, and the artisanal proportion of the population is always shrinking. Yet among the temples with swallow-tail roofs and all the clubs, bars, restaurants, and souvenir stands (the nearly instantaneous result of the doi moi, the economic liberalization that began in 1986), it’s still possible to pick up the tinware one might need in Hang Thiec Street and shop in Hang Ma for all manner of paper goods, including those used as votive offerings. On one walk, when I had only my reading glasses, not my distance ones, I looked up to see a richly colourful outdoor flower market in the distance. When I got closer I realized that, no, those weren’t flowers, but rather motorbike helmets of every conceivable shade and finish, hundreds and hundreds of them, possibly a thousand or two, hanging on pegboards affixed to a shop front.

For exercise I walked everyday round Hoan Kiem Lake, with its graceful little bridge leading to a temple in the middle. One day I was resting from these mild cardio exertions by Hoa Phong Tower. This is a squat two-storey brick affair with its name in traditional Chinese characters. It is open on the sides and the interior walls are covered over in lovers’ graffiti. Suddenly I was nuzzled by a Great Dane — a Harlequin, the largest of that breed. The dog’s owner was a pleasant American woman in her thirties. As Great Danes (and old men such as myself) require a great deal of exercise, she, I, and the dog kept running into one another, and sometimes sat on a bench, chatting. She had been living in Hanoi for a year and had two more to go before being rotated home. “My husband works at the embassy,” she explained. I dearly wanted to ask a simple factual question about American diplomacy in Vietnam, but didn’t know how to do so without running the risk of appearing impolite. I wanted to ask: Where are embassy personnel down in Saigon put up, given that the Pittman Building was torn down long ago, as though to erase a shameful memory? The Pittman was the apartment block on the embassy grounds from whose rooftop people were rescued by helicopter and ferried to naval vessels offshore on April 30, 1975, the day the Americans lost the war.

A common observation about Hanoi is that it shows so few traces of the American War. Few physical traces at any rate, rather than psychic ones. The cliché is rendered all the truer by a handful of vivid exceptions. The centre section of the city’s magnificent nineteenth-century railway station was destroyed in the infamous Christmas Day Bombing of 1972, a fact made unforgettable even to tourists by the way that the missing part was rebuilt in the Soviet brutalist style. But what’s most remarkable is not the amount of evidence of the American War, but the nearly complete absence of any from the long war against the French. Although northern Vietnam was fed largely by the labour of southern Vietnam, Hanoi was the administrative seat of all French Indochina. It was at the centre of a textbook closed-market system, in which the colonies were obliged to sell the French their crops and minerals cheaply while being forced to pay dearly for the mandatory importation of French manufactured goods. Not coincidentally, Hanoi and the north more generally were also the scene of most of the unrest that often broke out as insurgency.

Throughout the 1930s, young radical intellectuals engaged in subtle acts of sabotage — and other acts not so subtle. The Second World War left the situation confused and even more complicated, but once it was over, the nationalist movement surged. Looking today at the Hanoi Opera House, on whose steps newlyweds are often photographed, one has no sense of the fighting that took place there. At the former governor general’s residence, there are only a few pockmarks in an iron railing to remind people of the pitched battle fought there in August 1945 — the month before Ho stood in Ba Dinh Square (a space long since Sovietized in appearance) and read aloud the new republic’s founding document, which he had drafted in a house at 48 Hang Ngang. He called this instrument the Declaration of Independence, and plagiarized liberally from the American one of the same name.

But Hanoi was still at war, and the French were able to bring it to the threshold of starvation by cutting it off from the south. In 1947, the French recaptured the city, and people’s suffering became deeper and more widespread as the urban warfare grew more intense and deadly. Natives pointed me to traffic-choked intersections, places without commemorative markers, where ambushes and bombings had once taken place. There are said to have been spies and counter-spies in every neighbourhood; in some neighbourhoods, in every street; in some streets, on every block. Citizens who could do so fled to the countryside, which was the Viet Minh’s base of support. Some suggest that by 1948 or 1949 there were only about ten thousand civilians still living in Hanoi. Following Dien Bien Phu, the Viet Minh retook the city — easily, as the French were taking flight — and in a few years the population had climbed to four hundred thousand. But it was a fundamentally different place, not merely bigger. In what seemed to the twentieth-century West a practical way to behave, the United Nations partitioned Vietnam. There would now be two Vietnams just as there were two Germanys and two Koreas: the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north, the capitalist Republic of Vietnam in the south. Slowly but steadily, the south, which possessed most of the agriculture and most of the industry, became a client of the United States. For its part, the north became dependent on China and the Soviet Union as models of collectivism. Many in the West saw the coming struggle as one between ideologies. Others saw it as the perfect prelude to a Vietnamese civil war.