Across a verdurous field of sweet potatoes, Saeko Ando sits on a porch chatting with elderly neighbor Nguyen Thi Son, whose blackened teeth age her to a time in Vietnam's history when customs were somewhat different than today.
Vietnam's younger generation, she tells Ando, are forgetting the country's past, its horrific war of the 1960s and '70s, but also its traditional culture.
"I told her that in my country, too, we experienced such change long before the Vietnam War," says Ando, switching effortlessly from Vietnamese to English. "You can find many similarities between our cultures," she adds, drawing another convivial smile from her host.