A silk fabric shop in Hà Nội.

One city casts a spell of identity crisis shared throughout Asia, a complicated emulsion of external anguish married to secret admiration. In visiting Asia over the last decade, to fall in love with Việt Nam, Cambodia, Laos, Japan or the French Concession in Shanghai, I’ve had to acknowledge the ghosts of Paris and France. Over time, my intuition, married to serious study, helped me piece together the terrible results of extractive colonialism juxtaposed with the persistent Asian fascination for, in most cases, a former brutal oppressor.  In order to begin a new chapter making “something wonderful happen,” as I had promised Loi Trinh Le, I knew a great deal of effort would be needed to make sense of the cultural possibilities of the 21st century. But things could not get worse than the horrors of the 20th century wars.

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