An Irishman’s Love Letter to Saigon

Mary Kay Magistad investigates Connla Stokes’s “Falling for Saigon.”

By Mary Kay MagistadMay 2, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• Cultural Studies

SAIGON LOOMS IN THE imagination of many Americans as a moment frozen in amber, with images of girls in flowing white ao dais, soldiers in khaki, street vendors in slanted straw hats, bicycles, and imported American cars. Even for the ever-growing population of Americans who didn’t live through what Americans call the Vietnam War, books and films abound that relive, relitigate, or commemorate the decade from when the first US ground troops deployed in March 1965 to when the last helicopter took off from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon on April 30, 1975.

Throughout that decade, the war came home for Americans in myriad ways—sons, fathers, and husbands lost, blood and treasure spent, streets and campuses filled with protesters, beliefs in the United States as a positive force in the world shaken by grim reports of burned villages and stark images, such as an injured young girl running in terror from a napalm attack. Troops were there, the American public was told, to save Southeast Asian countries from falling like dominoes to global communism. But the Vietnamese people knew that this was really a civil war, and they all made their own decisions about whose side they were on, the communist North or the nominally democratic but in practice authoritarian and corrupt South, knowing that neither was perfect.

In the end, after 58,220 US combat deaths and almost three million Vietnamese killed, up to two million of them civilians, Vietnam’s communist government took over, hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese spent years in reeducation camps, and hundreds of thousands more fled by boat at high risk of death at sea, while those who stayed lived through two decades of international isolation imposed by the United States, China, and many of Vietnam’s Southeast Asian neighbors, especially after Vietnamese troops invaded neighboring Cambodia in 1978, drove the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge from power, and stayed to occupy the country for more than a decade.

But all this is ancient history to most Vietnamese, who weren’t even alive when the war ended. They learn in school about what is called “The American War”— one of three times in the 20th century when Vietnam bested great powers, including also the French and the Chinese. These days, Vietnamese live their lives in a modern country with a booming economy, open to and connected with the world. The war that ended in 1975, whatever you want to call it, is simply not the framing reference for their lives.

For too long, outsiders have defined Vietnam on their own terms, in ways the Vietnamese do not define themselves. China controlled Vietnam for 1,000 years, but the way Vietnamese tell the story, they were a colony, absorbing what worked for them from Chinese culture while seeking opportunities to break free. When they were colonized again by the French in the late 19th century, they embraced the coffee and baguettes and elegant architecture but delivered a humiliating defeat to French troops at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954, effectively ending 60 years of French colonial rule. The American War was brief by comparison, and when that war was over, few Vietnamese seemed interested in holding a grudge against the enemy (though the communist government certainly held one against Vietnamese who had fought against it).

And yet, even today, an American searching online for books in English about Vietnam will find a long list of titles about the war and its aftermath, or by Vietnamese who now live elsewhere, with far too few written from Vietnam about Vietnam—about the rich, dynamic, complex place and culture it is, and long has been.

Stepping into that breach is Connla Stokes, an Irish travel writer, longtime Vietnam resident, and former Vietnam editor for Time Out. His brief new book Falling for Saigon has the breezy tone of a letter home, filed with vivid descriptions on topics such as Vietnamese cuisine and conviviality, the joys of the monsoon season, and how the Vietnamese view ghosts—both of people and of old Saigon. Don’t look here for granular political analysis or deep historical context, although there are smatterings of each. For those, try former BBC correspondent Bill Hayton’s A Brief History of Vietnam: Colonialism, War and Renewal; The Story of a Nation Transformed (2022) or, almost three decades old but still worth reading, Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam (1998) by Robert Templer, who served as AFP bureau chief in Hanoi from 1994 to 1997, just as Vietnam was reestablishing diplomatic relations with the United States and accelerating its reengagement with the world.

Falling for Saigon is a different kind of book, as the title suggests. From the first pages, Stokes makes clear that this is his personal—informed but impressionistic—take on a city he’s come to love, in a country where he’s lived for 25 years. The legacy of war comes up in passing but does not take center stage, nor, Stokes implies, should it. “Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City, whichever name you call it, contradicts itself. For it is large and contains multitudes,” he writes.

Now a sprawling and rapidly developing megacity [of 10 million people], it has always been a meeting point for traders and a magnet for migrants, even when it was just a muddy settlement in the early eighteenth century. Since then everyone who was born here, or has come to live here, has had their own experience, their own interpretation, and their own story. This one is mine.

Truth be told, Stokes says, he had been quite happy living for 13 years farther north, in Hanoi, with “a motley crew of wonderful friends; a steady job as the editor of a magazine; great relationships with [his] local colleagues; and a deep attachment to that city’s dreamy aesthetics—those drowsy lakes, crumbling villas, century-old trees, centuries-old pagodas.” Like many other Hanoi residents, he then thought of Ho Chi Minh City as a place that was “nice to visit, wouldn’t want to live there”—finding its food too sweet, its weather too steamy, and its loud streets and muscular entrepreneurial spirit jarring compared to Hanoi’s poets, parks, and the past embedded in its centuries-old winding lanes. “In other words, I was a snooty northerner,” Stokes writes. “But I once read a whimsical observation that for every five Hanoians that look down their nose at Ho Chi Minh City, four will move there anyway.”

Stokes became such a statistic. When he moved, he says, he faced razzing all around. A Hanoi-based expat sent him an excerpt from a novel by Vietnamese American writer Linh Dinh that read: “A hodgepodge of incoherence, Saigon thrives on pastiche. Sly, crass, infatuated with all things foreign, it caricatures everyone yet proclaims itself an original.” In Ho Chi Minh City, locals good-naturedly poked fun at Stokes’s northern Vietnamese accent. Eventually, Stokes writes, he fell into the rhythms of life and speech in his new home, and also fell for what he came to see as “the intangible, infectious and ineradicable charm” of the city and its people.

Indeed, Stokes describes, it reminded him of his old home in Ireland. “I have often thought that the Saigonese are quite like the Irish—they love to gather and tell stories, sing songs, laugh, cry, and drink more beer than any GP would recommend, and the more spontaneous the occasion, the happier everyone seems to be,” he writes. Even his chapter about ghosts—about the Wandering Souls Festival and how the Vietnamese remember and celebrate the life of the recently deceased—sounds an awful lot like an Irish wake.

In fact, woven through Falling for Saigon is a meditation familiar to many an expat, on what it means to feel at home, and how, once you’ve learned and embraced the rhythms of a different culture and place, it’s a challenge—though in the end a fulfilling one—to bridge old home with new, the person you were with the one you have become. Stokes writes amusingly about how his father once tried to connect his son’s old home and new by making gỏi cuốn—fresh Vietnamese spring rolls—with mackerel and salmon. Those certainly aren’t the usual ingredients in gỏi cuốn, but a Vietnamese friend to whom Stokes later told the tale said he liked the improvisation and the fact that Vietnamese cuisine had inspired it.

And in a reciprocal experience, back in Saigon, Stokes found an emotional fragment from his old home drifting into the new, when he walked down a narrow lane and into a cozy café. “When I stepped inside,” he writes,

I was surprised to hear the crooning voice of Leonard Cohen, whose music always reminds me of my mother pottering around the family kitchen in Dublin and humming along (because she can’t hold a note) to “So Long, Marianne,” and so, in this colossal city, I sat down in a little café that felt like home.

With a light touch and an empathetic eye, Stokes brings readers into his home in Saigon in a way that, for Americans who still think of Vietnam as a war and not a country, offers a refreshing corrective, like a cold drink on a hot day. It’s hard to other a place and its people, much less see them as enemies, when you see yourself in them.

Falling for Saigon’s collage of characters, sights, and sounds, and its charming hand-drawn illustrations, whet a reader’s appetite for more of the countless stories in this big city, with hope that more young Vietnamese writers will draw from the country’s long, rich literary tradition and add their voices, and their perspectives, to how the world sees Vietnam.