Coffee in the ration-book cafe

The cafe in the lane near Hoan Kiem has chipped enamel mugs, a wall of old ration coupons and a menu that offers 'subsidy-era coffee' for a price that no one in the subsidy era would have believed. Its customers are mostly in their twenties. They take photographs of the stools, sip from the mugs and leave, a little puzzled, perhaps, that the coffee is excellent. Nobody in the room remembers the time that the decor celebrates, the years before the Doi Moi reforms of 1986, when food, cloth and sugar were handed out by coupon and the shops were more often empty than not.

It is tempting to be sniffy about this. The older generation remembers queues, shortages and the dull anxiety of never quite having enough, and it is a little rich, they say, to turn that into a backdrop for a selfie. Yet nostalgia has never required its subjects to have been there. The word itself was coined in 1688 by a Swiss medical student, Johannes Hofer, who thought it a disease: a deadly longing for home suffered by soldiers abroad. Doctors prescribed leeches and opium, and some patients, we are told, were sent home to recover.

The modern view is rather kinder. Psychologists who have studied nostalgia, notably Constantine Sedikides and his colleagues, find that it tends to raise people's mood, strengthen their sense of belonging and make life feel more meaningful. It is a way of reaching for continuity when the world is changing fast. Hanoi has changed faster than most cities, in a generation, from bicycles and ration books to shopping malls and apps. A young person in that city has good reason to want a little of the past to hold on to.

What nostalgia does badly is remember. It edits. The queues vanish and the warm, slow neighbourliness remains; the hunger fades, and the enamel mug stays. That is not a harmless trick, because a selective past can be used to argue that things were simpler, or that people were better, in a way the historical record does not support. A cafe that sells the mug without the coupon, so to speak, is selling a flavour, not a fact.

There is a commercial logic at work too, and it would be naive to ignore it. Heritage sells. A cafe owner who puts a coupon on the wall is not recovering a memory; she is building a brand, and the more convincing the stage set, the higher the price of the coffee. In that sense the subsidy-era cafe has more in common with a theme restaurant than with a museum, and its customers, who are not stupid, know it. They are buying a mood, and are happy to pay for it, which does not make the mood any less real.

Older visitors complicate the picture. A retired teacher I met there, who lived through the coupons, said she came for the tea, then admitted that the mug made her laugh because her family had owned an identical one. She did not want the hardship back, she said, only the feeling that a family could be small and quarrel over a single flask. That is perhaps as honest an account of nostalgia as any psychologist has given.

The sensible response is not to scorn the cafe but to ask what its customers are after. Perhaps they are not longing for the scarcity at all, only for the sense of a shared world in which everybody had roughly the same cup. If so, the coffee is an answer to a present loneliness more than to a past one, which is a good deal more interesting than a selfie. The owner, asked if she minds the criticism, laughs and says that the older customers come on weekday mornings, and they always ask for the same table.