On the anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, a returning Vietnamese refugee sees the citadel city of Hue not as the site of the great battle, but the place he realizes one true outcome of the century's conflicts: the creation of global villagers -- refugees -- who long to be rooted in place. PNS associate editor Andrew Lam is a journalist and short story writer.

HUE, VIETNAM -- The old woman with blackened teeth told me she'd never crossed the Perfume River to see Hue, the imperial city of Vietnam. "Well, actually I did once," she said, her eyes staring at a distant point, "When I was a little girl I went to see the emperor on his throne. That must have been 70 years ago."

"But it's only two kilometers away," I said.

She shrugged. She looked toward her dirt-smeared great grandchildren playing by the bamboo grove in the garden and the flock of chickens near their thatched hut as if to answer, "whatever for?"

Even the celebration in the Imperial city left the woman unmoved. It's an early commemoration marking 25 years since the war ended -- this will take place nationwide on April 30 but Hue fell early. "I've seen too many wars," was all she said, as if to dismiss it.

And so, alas, have I. I once lived here when my father, an officer in the South Vietnamese Army, was stationed in the imperial city near the end of the Vietnam war. Nine years old, I rode my bicycle with my older siblings across the river daily, playing hide and seek in empty chambers of an ancient palace where concubines once lived and where mandarins and kings wrote their poetry.

I remember drifting down the Perfume river in a bamboo boat some starry nights, with my father telling stories about America and me listening in my mother's arms. I remember wishing for America with all my heart then, wishing for wings or for the boat to drift on and on away from the bloody war until it ended under the Golden Gate Bridge.

Be careful what you wish for. At the end of the war, I fled to America with my family and became an American. Then I became a writer who travels back and forth over the Pacific Ocean for a living.

The world is made up of those who move and those who do not and increasingly it's populated by the former. For the old lady, crossing the nearby river is a journey, whereas for me Paris or Bangkok or New York are a simple matter of scheduling.

And I am not alone. The Cold War and its aftermath has given birth to a race of children born "elsewhere," of transnationals whose memories are layered and whose biographies transgress the borders.

They are simultaneously aware of two or three different cultures, and they move restlessly from one language to another, from one civilization to the next. The constant flux make some grow to resent those who hold steadfastly to identities anchored to one geographical location.

The greatest phenomenon in this century, I am now convinced, has little to do with the World Wars but the dispossessed whom they sent fleeing, a world awash with people whose displaced lives mock the idea of borders -- the prophets of migration. We refugees became the first global villagers by default. Displacement -- movement -- seems the ongoing contemporary narrative.

If nationalism has been washed from my blood and replaced by cosmopolitanism, I must confess that I am unreasonably envious of the old woman. Wars have been waged, generations come and go, the emperor is long gone, yet the old woman stays in her garden.

I am envious of the ease with which she feels connected to the tiny plot of land whereas I, as in Thomas Wolfe's curse, cannot go home again. These days I visit Vietnam often as a journalist but I long for another Vietnam, the one I grew up in, the one in a distant past where the borders were not yet crossed.

Alas, to be able to reshape oneself, to be able to cross the borders, is to lose forever a singular way of looking at the world, and to suffer a certain disconnect. For me, as for many of those who were forced to leave, the sentimental garden has long been trampled underfoot.

A few weeks ago a little boy on a train in Hanoi sang a riddle. "Two roads lead to my home," he sang, "one long, yet very short, the other short, yet long."

I cannot think of the answer. Perhaps there are no singular answer to such a riddle these days.

Between the old woman and me, perhaps there's only a river of words.