Dinner was a feast, a smorgasbord of meats and cabbage, rice and noodles, broth and field greens. Afterwards I brushed Lu's long black hair, as beautiful and shiny as her mother's, and drank whisky with her father and his five-year-old son. Family members wandered in and out, sat for a while or simply nodded greeting. Through the complicated introductions an extended village lineage gradually took shape. Although there were only four children in Lu's immediate family, her mother had nine siblings and her father eleven, all grown and raising families of their own. There must have been well over a hundred relatives living within a mile of the hut with several branching lines extending outwards from the grandparents. I wondered what it must be like to live in a place where the entire world might be greeted with the prefix "uncle" or "cousin".

Little did I know that word had got back to the police, who called Hanoi, who notified their foreign visa office, who called the Son La extension office, who radioed back who I was. The police came to visit early the next morning. I snuck out the back door...

I waited until dark, hiked back out to the village and crept up the stairs to the terrace. I was surprised at their joyous greetings. They wondered where I had been, insisted that I once again stay the night and dismissed my questions about the police with assurances of powerful family ties within the village. Tonight they had planned a real feast and both sets of venerable grandparents were invited. No one would dare interfere.

Relieved and childishly happy to be allowed another evening with my new family, I gathered up my clothes and set off for the river to bathe and make myself presentable to the elders. A dozen children followed me and immediately stripped, to splash and play in the milky brown water and watch with fascination as I shaved the stubble from my legs. It was half an hour before I made my way, dripping wet, back to the hut. I found Lu's mother in tears and Lu looking bewildered. "You can't stay," her mother told me. "The police came again while you were swimming." She begged me to at least share their meal before I left. Even her husband wept in shame at the right of hospitality that had been taken from him. The elders arrived and we had a sad supper, which gradually turned merry over promises of letters and toast after toast to the wonders of Vietnamese-American friendship. My unborn children's children were blessed with a dozen offspring apiece and I with a wedding that boasted six fat pigs and a hundred-kilo sack of rice.

They walked me to the edge of the village and I continued on alone to Son La. They waved frantic good-byes and I promised insincerely to return, for I could not risk the trouble they might face if they saw me again.

Perhaps it was their lovely smiles, or the way they offered me their home, but walking in the moonlight I suddenly I felt as lonely and forlorn as the day I had left my own family to come to Vietnam.