10 years since I was in Vietnam
Jesus Christ I am getting old…
For those who don’t know my story
I taught English in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam for a year in 2015.
I remember leaving Vietnam, crying with my friend Ngan in the taxi to the airport.
I needed to leave Vietnam, even though I still loved the place.
So how did I end up in vietnam?
At the end of my Junior year of college I realized that I didn’t want to be a therapist.
I majored in Psychology, and had dreamed of being a therapist since high school.
But I didn’t have the patience for it, working as an intern in a similar role, I fucking hated it.
I had one year to graduate, and zero plan on what’s next.
My summer trip to France was now over, and I had nothing else to look forward to.
A photo of me from my time in France – I had found a girlfriend in Paris so was able to afford to stay for about 3 months 😂
But I knew I liked traveling
So if I could find a way to work while traveling, I could travel longer
I was too intimidated by the idea of being a digital nomad
But I found out I could teach English with a college degree
So I looked for warm countries I could teach English and get paid decently
Vietnam kept popping up
Vietnam felt as different from the US as any other country I could imagine
It was perfect!
I started studying Vietnamese and trying to make VNese friends online
I now had clarity
- I had a goal
- I had an exotic destination
- and an impossible language to learn
A picture of a few buddies and me at my going away party, before heading to ‘Nam
Fast Forward Post Graduation
2 months after my graduation from College I left for ‘nam!
I got to Vietnam with zero plan, but a world of possibilities in front of me.
I had made a friend online, Ngan who was there to pick me up.
She took me to a restaurant so I could get right into living like a Vietnamese!
I’d love to paint Ngan as the purely innocent, loyal friend who never wanted anything from me but friendship.
But the truth is – I don’t know.
I never took the time to really get to know Ngan.
I didn’t really take the time to get to know anyone in Vietnam
I may have spent tons of time with them, but I was more focused on the Vietnamese I could learn from them, or what they could offer me
Rather than learning about who they were
So Why Did I Leave vietnam?
After about 8 months in Vietnam – I had nothing in front of me that excited me.
I was starting to build up my own English consulting, and getting steady leads – but I wasn’t passionate about teaching English.
I love learning languages, but I’m not as crazy about teaching them.
Regardless of the opportunities, if I’m not passionate about what’s in front of me – I will walk away.
I have the discipline to travel the world and balance a business; to have calls sometimes till 1 – 3am, to get up early and find a cafe to work from, to manage my own schedule amidst the chaos of international travel
But I don’t have the discipline of many of my friends.
I don’t have the discipline to sit in the same car and drive 30 – 75 minutes to a job I hate everyday.
I don’t have the discipline to live a Groundhog Day life waiting for the weekend / my 2 weeks of vacation a year.
I’d rather sleep outside, jobless, jumping trains than be forced to go to a job I have zero passion about.
My dad has this same mindset
I’m certain I got it from him
While he didn’t have the opportunities I have in 2025, he also didn’t have the discipline to stick to pretty much anything – except for ravenous consumption of conspiracy theories online.
But that’s a different story.
get to the point man – Why did you Leave Vietnam?
I was depressed man
I never had a doctor rattle off a list of symptoms and verify that I passed the limit to be labelled “depressed”
But I could feel it.
I could feel it in the struggle every morning to get out of bed.
I might as well have been 500 pounds and bed-ridden.
It was a challenge with myself every morning
To figure out why I should get out of bed and do anything at all.
Each morning I opened my eyes was a deception.
The world sucked, with a few fleeting moments of reprieve.
Sex with women, high-calorie food and alcohol.
The latter two always offered the sweetest escape.
If I could eat and drink enough, eventually I would return to peace.
To the dark abyss of dreamless sleep.
I would have periods where I focused on improving my Vietnamese, or studying Japanese
But toward the end of my time in Vietnam, the void of sleep was what I really craved.
The only reprieve from life.
Some may ask “Loren why didn’t you take your life?”
While struggling with these feelings before, I turned to some journal entries by Leo Tolstoy
He explained when he was younger he always believed that the next milestone would bring him happiness.
Then finally he had children – the greatest joy in life
But he still couldn’t shake the emptiness
While staring down his existence. He came to the conclusion
“I don’t have the courage to kill myself, so I better get on with it.”
– Paraphrased
That felt like something solid I could stand on. My very own cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am).
The foundational belief that allowed me to move on from existential concerns and get on with life.
I recall mentioning this to a university friend.
That these words helped me, they offered me a way out.
A way out of the death spiral of existential meaning and suicidal thoughts
I still remember the look on his face.
He was appalled.
Maybe it’s too nihilistic, but that sentence really sculpted the philosophy of my life, and it still does.
For this reason I don’t waste my time thinking about suicide
Because I know I won’t ever follow through with it.
Usually, this is enough to pull me out of the depressive episodes.
Stop feeling sorry for yourself dude, you’re not going to kill yourself – move on and figure out a way out of this.
however, it doesn’t always work
There are times where I over-indulge in those feelings.
There’s a bittersweetness to depression and melancholy
To walking through life in slow-motion
Completely ensnared by your own story
Thinking nothing about others
And offering nothing to anyone else, but an emotional drain.
On top of this, complaining about life is great
There’s such a certitude to complaining
The certainty of complaining about something always feels better than the incertainty of trying to fix it.
Introducing Larry
I actually have a name for the aspect of my personality that wants to stay at home eating, drinking and sexing my way to heaven.
His name is Larry
This is named after an uncle of mine who’s quite overweight and only really seems to enjoy eating and sitting on his lazyboy watching TV.
Larry is an aspect of who I am
To be fair, there are times where it is best to lay around watching netflix and eating snacks.
Hell, I did it yesterday, and I feel re-energized enough today to finally write this article.
However, Larry needs to be managed
While a bit of Larry once in a while is good
If I’m not mindful, he will literally eat me alive.
He has the same solution to every problem, and most of the time it’s the wrong solution.
So To Recap why I left
- I had nothing exciting in my life to look forward to, to build toward
- I also had little emotional support while in Vietnam – my goal was to learn Vietnamese and live an “authentic” Vietnamese experience – not build deep relationships and emotional support – I had no time for that.
- So Larry was harder and harder to control, and eventually took the drivers wheel and absolutely wrecked my mental health (and physical health)
The Tightrope Walker
For most of my young adulthood, I felt like a tightrope walker.
Cautiously pacing toward whatever goal I had in front of me all the while the slightest misstep would plunge me into eternal darkness.
The Darkness, where it’s harder for me to say no to Larry.
While he tries to get me out of the darkness, he only makes it worse.
In Vietnam, I fell off the tightrope
Plunged into the darkness, and allowed Larry to take the steering wheel.
The darkness still looms today, but as I’ve gotten older and understood myself better, that tightrope has widened to a foot path.
So I sleptwalked through life for the last few months in Vietnam
I chased after as much pleasure as I could
Then I remember one day arguing with a girl that I was seeing, Trang.
Trang was by far the prettiest girl I was talking to, she had a slender build, silky long jet black hair that almost looked fake it was so beautiful.
Even after hours of driving in the dirt and smog-laced air of Ho Chi Minh City it shimmered the moment she took off her helmet and swung it from side to side.
I recall kissing her and noticing a faint taste of Fish Sauce in her breathe. Something that would normally turn me off, but in her case, it didn’t.
She embodied the perfect Vietnamese woman
I recall the way she would call me “annnggg” with this long drawn-out twang at the end that drove me crazy. (“Anh” – is the term for “you” when speaking to a man who is 1 – ~15 years older than you, women also use it in relationships with their boyfriends).
It was a whirlwind of a relationship
We would spend a ton of time together for a month or two – we’d fight over me talking to other women – she’d leave – but before doing so, she would look through my phone, sending venomous messages to all the women.
We’d be apart for a few weeks, I’d build up a new bench of women, and she’d come back in my life and the circus would start all over again.
Relationships like this always have the best sexual connection.
In the bedroom, you get this whirlwind of excitement, anger, resentment, and desperation.
She was like a venomous spider, a beautiful, slender spider who had me ensnared in her web.
Crawling over to devour chunks of my soul until she had her fill, then leaving the rest of me for later.
In the words of my previous therapist
It takes two to tango
I’d love to play the victim, and pretend it was all her fault
But I enjoyed the emotional hurricane as much as she did – I was a very willing and excited victim.
After one of these blow-ups
She went back to her hometown for the weekend.
I saw this as my opportunity
My opportunity to finally find something stable in my life, to find a goal to work toward, a reason to get out of bed.
I needed a relationship!
That was obviously it; it was there in front of me the whole time.
A relationship with someone I could trust.
A relationship that would give me some direction
A relationship that would deliver me out of darkness and back onto the tightrope.
And Trang Was Obviously Perfect
She offered all the emotional stability and dependability in the world
She would save me!
I know what you’re thinking – Great plan Loren
Right! It was too perfect
So I sent her a long message telling her that I was done with fooling around with other women.
That I wanted to be serious with her.
That I was ready to build something serious.
And did she save me from my depression?
Did we figure out our differences and build a healthy relationship?
Did she give me the stability I so desperately needed?
Did that stability allow me to turn my consulting into a business in Vietnam?
Nope
I haven’t heard from her since
Not a call
Not a message
Not a single word
She just disappeared
I was now fully willing to let her devour my soul
And crickets…
Come to find out she had a fiancé in Australia.
Maybe that wasn’t fish sauce on her breath…
Damn…
Swing….. and a miss
I stayed maybe 1 – 2 months after this
Feeling sorry for myself
Larry really loved this
Now I had a solid justification for laying around, eating, sleeping and fucking all day.
I was heart-broken for heavens sakes.
I recall explaining the situation to a friend and her telling me
“why don’t you chase after her then, if you really care for her why don’t you do everything you can to get her back?”
I didn’t have a good answer for that then
But I think I know now
The paradise I envisioned with her was better kept in my head than realized.
Deep down, I knew she would never offer me what I needed.
The Blue Beach And White Sand Phenomenon
I recall a family friend of ours
She always said that once her son was out of the house she was going to a place “with white sand and clear blue water”
He’s now 33 and out of the house
She never did that
I think she lives in Idaho
Far away from any Caribbean beaches.
Her dream of the white sand and blue waters was just that, a dream.
While I’m sure she has her justifications for why she isn’t in the Caribbean, I think I know why.
When she’s by herself late at night, unable to sleep, and bored stiff with the entertainment on her phone
She knows
She knows that life really doesn’t get any better than this
That her beach will offer 1 – 2 weeks of reprieve from the inherent reality of life.
That life will never be more than what it is.
No matter where she is, what she does, or what she accomplishes.
So it’s better to keep it a dream
Better to find an excuse than land in “paradise” and realize very quickly that it didn’t work either.
That her entire life’s dream was a farce
The reason she got out of bed every morning, and struggled forward through all the bullshit, was in fact bullshit itself.
Better to turn to religion
No one can come back from heaven and report the truth
The afterlife is always the last stop for these types.
It’s a paradise that can never be proven false.
Jesus christ man, get off your soap box and back to the story
Okay
Where was I?
Now we return to me being in that taxi next to Ngan
The friend who had been there since the day I arrived in Vietnam.
Now 12 months later, it was time for me to leave, and Ngan hugged me as I cried – I didn’t want to leave but I had to.
My Return
Now 10 years later I’m back in Vietnam.
How does it feel?
Similar to how I felt returning to Levallois-Perret in Paris (the neighborhood I had lived in that summer between Junior and Senior year of College)
I didn’t feel much of anything.
I felt I was lacking, actually
Lacking the moments of nostalgia I wanted
I wanted to remember things
I wanted to feel some of the excitement I had when I first arrived in 2015
I didn’t really feel any of that
I did feel excited to return to Vietnam
My Vietnamese was returning, so I could order in Vietnamese and have very basic conversations fairly easily.
I remembered a lot of the food, and drinks.
But I rarely got hit with any waves of nostalgia
The city has changed a lot
Driving down the road, every once in a while, I see a familiar building or roundabout and a flash of memory comes back to me.
I drove past a park, a park where I had taken a photo of Trang
In the photo, she had this huge smile on her face and her long beautiful hair laying gently behind her ears.
I didn’t remember that night, but I remembered the photo from that night.
At that moment, she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
The flash of nostalgia came, quickly followed by the reality of where I am today.
I’m in the best relationship of my life now, with someone who offers me 10x more than she ever could.
A couple of small, fleeting memories like that would arise and fall.
Maybe I’ve changed too much to be swept away again like I did when I was younger…
I found myself wanting to chase after those flashes of nostalgia
Wanting to prove to myself that time wasn’t moving on, that the city did really care about me, that I did something here, that I left some sort of impact on this place.
That someone here remembered me
As the days passed, I reluctantly accepted what was so obvious
Life kept moving forward after I left, and no one seemed to notice or even care that I left.
That I didn’t care enough about others for them to care about me.
That I’m getting older, and time isn’t slowing down
That I can’t even rely on nostalgia to distract me from the reality
The reality that I’m getting older
I may never be as excited about anything like I was about Vietnam in my early 20’s
I have ZERO control over the movement of time
Larry Still Calls
Even recognizing the disaster Larry can have on my life
I still hear him whispering in my ear
To start chasing after women, to start drinking alcohol daily, to eat as many baked goods and delicious food as I can.
Larry’s trying to figure out why the hell we are in Vietnam with a girlfriend; it makes no fucking sense to him.
Sober Comedian Jim Jeffries worded it best
Drugs and partying are a lot of fun
To pretend that chasing after women and drinking alcohol all the time isn’t fun is a lie, it’s fun as hell.
However, I am more conscious of Larry
And I’m more aware of where that path leads.
I’d like to say it’s due to therapy, or some unique insights I’ve gained from traveling
But I’m fairly certain it’s mostly from getting older.
So How Do I Feel About Returning To Vietnam?
I feel a bit deceived, I was hoping for a flash of the excitement from my previous time here – and it’s nowhere to be found.
I still love it, for some of the same reasons I had before, and some new ones.
I hope I can try to be a bit less self-centered after realizing what I’ve realized writing this blog.