Tam had been twenty-three, she was seventeen. His sister brought her home from school one day.

"I fell in love with her at first sight," Tam said, leaning forward at the memory, his fingers wrapped around his coffee cup. "It's the only way. If you have to see someone many times before you like them then it's not real love. True love is instant."

He had asked his sister to invite her on a date and the three of them went out for coffee. After determining that she had good character he took her out often, but only during the day and in the presence of friends or family. A few weeks later he gathered his courage and went to meet her parents, to tell them that he loved their daughter and wanted to marry her.

Permission was given and his family bought gifts - earrings, a wedding ring and a necklace with a ruby - to present to her parents. The young couple decided on a Christmas wedding and he began preparing for the big event. Gifts poured in. "A good friend of mine from my unit, an American, he gave me a huge stereo," Tam said with awe in his voice.

But there was a fly in the ointment. She had been seeing a young man before she met Tam. He tackled the subject squarely. "I told her that if she really loved me then she must, at the moment we decide to marry, absolutely forget him, not wish to see him or even think about him anymore." She agreed.

Shortly before the wedding he was posted to a barracks nearly four hundred kilometers away. Undeterred by distance, he wrote often and even came home once to check on final plans. It was during this visit that disaster struck. His fiancee's cousin took Tam aside and informed him that his beloved had been seen talking to her ex-boyfriend in the marketplace, where she kept a stall. Tam said not a word to his future bride about the painful. He returned to his unit and wrote to her, asking her to tell him if she had had a change of heart and admitting that he still wanted to go ahead and get married.

He tried to put aside his worries through the interminable weeks that it took the letter to wend its way through war-torn Vietnam. At last he received the long-awaited reply. It was not what he had hoped for. She suggested, delicately, that they put off the wedding for another year. His reply was instantaneous - he wanted no postponements, no change of heart. They should get married right away. The letter went out with the next post. He waited. No reply came and he refused to write again. "I didn't want her to think I was desperate," he told me. But he was. He sank into a depression, barely able to haul himself out of bed to report for duty. Christmas came and went.

Eventually he was given leave and made his way to her parents' house, laden with gifts. He made no mention of the expensive prenuptial jewelry from his family that should rightfully be returned. In all ways he showed the respect and behavior of a future son-in-law. Initially the family was angry with him, accusing him of not appearing for his own wedding. He whipped out the letter from his ex-fiancee. They read it and turned their wrath on her. He stayed at their house for three days while they pressed her to change her mind. At last his leave was up and her answer was still no. He left, inconsolably sad. "For many months I didn't want to go out, drink, or play music with my friends."

Within a year he had met his wife and wed her. A letter arrived from his old fiancee, informing him she was finally ready to get married. His reply was short and to the point.

And now Tam the Suitor had become Tam the Father, with a lovely sixteen-year-old daughter. Would he allow her out on a date?

"If a fellow really loves her he can wait a few years to marry her. True love can wait forever," he told me earnestly.

But if she insisted, I asked gently.

"I wouldn't wait for an invitation to see the young man's parents," Tam said and put both fists firmly on the table. "I would just go over right away to find out about the boy." If he didn't like what he saw, if the father drank or played cards, he would sit down with his daughter and explain why she shouldn't see her beloved anymore. "That should be enough to make her send him away," he told me confidently. He finished his drink and stood. I remembered my own teenage years, and kept discreetly silent.

LIFE AS A MARKETPLACE LOADER · MARRIAGE