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Every now and then, whenever I have accumulated sufficient airline points, I go to Southeast Asia, for though it is changing so rapidly as to make one dizzy, it is also a place where the past is never hard to find. On two of these trips, I had it in mind to see what remained of French influence and culture in France’s three former colonies in the region: Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. The objective seemed most obtainable on one of the journeys when I was travelling with my friend M, who speaks French with complete ease and fluency and no discernible English accent. We had a wonderful long stay there, traipsing about by foot, car, subway, rail, cyclo, longtail boat, and, in one brief instance, elephant. But despite all our persistent and sometimes ingenious field research, we found little evidence of what Vietnamese call “the French Time” or at least none that was extraordinary or even surprising. The nadir of our hopeful expectation came when M discovered that the corporate head office of Peugeot Auto (Asie) Ltée, or whatever it’s called, seemed to shelter no one who has even as little of the French language as I do.

On another trip I will also recall in these pages, one undertaken a few years later when I happened to be travelling alone, I had a strange little low-level epiphany. I was in a building in Hanoi, in the area of Old Quarter called the Thirty-Six Streets (because in earlier times each one was home to a particular type of shop). Some of the buildings are quite old indeed, though dating them precisely is difficult, as until fairly recently architectural styles changed very slowly. What the structure I was in may once have been, I didn’t know. At the moment, it was a bar. As time wore on, I found myself alone in the gents’ loo with another foreigner: an American, I thought at once, and one who was looking a bit grizzled and unshaven. I was about to wash my hands at one of two adjoining basins; he was bending over the other one to splash water on his face. The spigots were ancient. He turned on the one marked C and muttered a foul Midwestern oath. He had expected cold water to come out.

The lesson was that only a few traces of the French imperial mission survived the destruction of a French army in 1954 at the remote town of Dien Bien Phu in the far northwest of Vietnam, near the Lao border: a defeat that opened the way for the U.S. misadventure in Vietnam the following decade. But now the latter war too is much less a fact of living memory than it is a subject for patriotic schoolroom recitation. This change speaks to the high birth rate in Asia and the low one in the West. But of course it also speaks to the very nature of time itself.