The garden house at An Hiên

I had taken a month away from work in January and spent most of it in Huế. One of the days I walked out toward Thiên Mụ and stopped, on the way, at An Hiên, the old garden house that sits between the pagoda and the Imperial City. The staff brought me inside and sat me down with tea, and a guide stayed with me for a while and told me about the place, the family who had lived there, the trees in the garden, the way the house had survived what most houses had not. It is one of those places where the history is in the air around you. You don't have to be told. You feel it the moment you cross the threshold.

I was carrying a small Canon printer, the kind that fits in one hand and prints a photograph in about a minute. I had bought it not long before the trip and was still discovering what it could do. The idea was simple. Take a picture of someone, and then give it to them. It is a small gesture and costs almost nothing, but I have found that it opens doors that would otherwise stay closed.

When I went back out into the garden, a group of young women came in dressed in áo dài, the long flowing tunics worn over silk trousers, pale blue and pale rose, taking photographs of one another for Tết. I asked the first two if I could take their picture. They hesitated, the way anyone would. I held up my phone in one hand and the printer in the other and tried to explain. Something in the gesture made it clear. The first photograph came out of the printer warm, and they looked at it together, and then one of them turned and called to the others.

For the next while I was a small printing operation in the corner of a courtyard. They posed in pairs and in groups, the fan held open, the small pendant catching the light, and I handed each photograph over as it came out. They were patient with me. They laughed at the ones that did not flatter them and reached for the ones that did. At the end they would not let me leave without taking several selfies together, and I stood among them in my old cap, grinning, and they made the small peace signs that young women make in photographs everywhere.

I walked back out into the lane afterward and the heat had not changed and the light had not changed, but something was different. I had been let in.