The Taste of Silence
Following Taste, Finding More
Reaching Out Teahouse Place Setting
Reaching Out Teahouse | Hoi An, Vietnam
I took my first trip to Vietnam right after the Christmas holiday in 2024. It was my most ambitious solo endeavor at the time, spanning two countries across three weeks, starting in Hanoi and wrapping in Hong Kong. I arrived in Vietnam at a time in my life when I was just feeling my way around what it meant to be truly untethered. The timing was perfect.
I was a month into unemployment, feeling fresh, free and fearless. As luck would have it, I couldn’t have picked a better country when I booked the journey six months before my layoff. Vietnam stimulated my senses, cracked my heart and mind wide open and revitalized my tastebuds with unforgettable and relentless zeal. I fell in love.
After the non-stop frenetic energy of Hanoi, I took a few come-down days in magical Hoi An. Even then, Hoi An, with only 2% of Hanoi’s eight-million-strong population, still felt at times like it was just too much. It could feel especially swarmed in the evenings when the lantern festivities around the river drew large crowds, noise and congestion. Overwhelming or not, Hoi An quickly became one of my favorite places on earth.
I suppose that’s why, when I found Reaching Out Teahouse in Hoi An’s old town, I felt as though I had found a spectacular sanctuary. Reaching Out describe themselves as a tranquil oasis. I found them the afternoon I took tea there to be that and then some.
Their concept was simple; the teahouse only employed the speech and hearing impaired, and out of respect for their impairments, Reaching Out asked its guests to sip in silence. All communication was done using small wooden blocks with simple words and phrases like bill, hot water, and ice engraved on them. Reaching Out was part Vietnamese teahouse, part workshop and part artisan boutique. Everything was created and served by this local community.
With one of my five senses muted, the taste of the tea, the sun through skylights, the touch of the wooden blocks in my hand – all felt sharper and more magnified. The silence that softly coated the room, and more importantly, why we, who could hear and speak, chose to remain silent, made for one of the more beautiful and communal tasting experiences I have ever had while traveling.
It was true, I had been hopelessly charmed by the bright, colorful lanterns and rowboats that lit up the river at night. I had been enchanted by the sound of bingo games being played in the pavilion in the middle of old town, the calls of market vendors and food stall operators, the whizzing past of motorbikes. I had become smitten by the taste of Hoi An’s legendary White Rose Dumplings and its Cao Lầu. But most of all, I had been struck deeply in this special, ancient place by the taste of its silence.
