This memoir weaves together impressions of Vietnam in the early 1990s from several people. It was a time when huge economic changes were afoot with the opening up of the country to the outside world after years of isolation and everyone was trying to make sense of the new opportunities that the changes offered. One perspective is that of the author Jim Monan and his wife Tricia Parker who had moved to live and work in Vietnam for socio-economic development organisations. The other perspective is that of a young Vietnamese woman Minh who became the author s language teacher and who introduced them to so many aspects of Vietnamese life. Landmines and unexploded ordnance from the Vietnam-American war which had finished two decades earlier and their continuing legacy of death and injury in poor rural areas is an issue on which Jim Monan did pioneering work and which he describes here.