My mother slowly picks her way across our broken and toppled furniture, trying to absorb what Hurricane Katrina has cost us. The first floor of our two-story house is completely wiped out. The heavy kitchen table, carved out of a tree trunk and imported from Thailand, is piled on top of a mound of unrecognizable debris. Next to it lies the china cabinet. The glass chandelier hanging in the foyer is shattered.

For 15 years my family has lived in this house just outside New Orleans in Chalmette, La. We’ve been in this neighborhood in St. Bernard Parish for 25. It has been the only place we’ve called home since my parents fled Vietnam to this small town of oil refineries and drive-through daiquiri stands.

Mom doesn’t say much as we trudge through the mud that is still ankle-deep inside the house. Tears do not come easily to her. She has been through too much in her life to be a crier: Years of separation from my father during the war. Failed attempts to escape from Vietnam. Starting over in a strange new country.

Now, though, my mother’s eyes are tired. The mask that she brought to stifle the stench of the sludge hangs unused around her neck. I keep waiting for her to break down. But Mom just climbs to the second floor of the house in silence. Everything up here sits exactly where it was left, as if everyone’s life were simply on pause. Even my little brother’s dirty clothes and video games are still strewn across the floor of his room.

But what Mom really wants is downstairs in the muck. She tells me to find what she just calls “the picture” in Vietnamese. I know what she means.

It’s a large professional photograph that my parents had taken out in California a few years ago. They had the image imprinted onto canvas, almost like an oil painting. Dad wore a tuxedo, looking very much the distinguished doctor, with his wavy hair neatly combed to the side. Tall by Asian standards, he hovered protectively over my petite mother. She was in a low-cut lacy black number, and her jet-black hair fell to her shoulders. Mom is a former beauty queen and still has smooth porcelain skin and a Cindy Crawford-like beauty mark just above her chin. My parents were proud of that picture. It was the emblem of everything that they had worked all their lives to achieve. It hung in the living room next to the grand piano in an ornate gilded frame.

I head downstairs to look for it. But the sludge is so thick I can’t even get into the right room. Ceiling beams have fallen down, and hunks of furniture and shards of glass block my path. It’s as if all of our belongings have been thrown into a huge washing machine that spit everything out halfway through the spin cycle. I look at the wall where the portrait once hung. Empty.

“Did you find the picture?” Mom asks when I return upstairs empty-handed.

No, I tell her. It’s gone, along with everything else down there. Nothing is salvageable.

She doesn’t say anything, just keeps pacing the second floor looking for valuables. She doesn’t mention it again until we are back in our minivan, the trunk stuffed with whatever we could quickly carry out: computers, clothes, my brother’s Boston Red Sox plaque. But not the portrait.

“Did you find the picture?” she asks again.

I cut her off. No, I tell her. I am tired and depressed. I couldn’t get into the room, I say. It’s not going to be there. It’s been destroyed along with everything else on the first floor.

She lets it drop. But later that day, when we meet up with my father, he surveys our meager haul and immediately asks me, “Did you find the picture?”

No, Dad, I sigh. It’s gone. Everything is gone.

***

It is the last weekend in August, just before Katrina is scheduled to make landfall. My big sister, Vy, and I are bickering over whether Dad should buy a life vest.

Honestly? I think it’s a stupid idea. We both agree that our father, Dr. Bong Q. Mui, chief of staff at the hospital in St. Bernard, should have his own stash of water and food while he rides out the storm there. But my sister presses on over the phone from her home in Little Rock: He also needs a flashlight, batteries and emergency supplies, she says.

That sounds a bit excessive to me, as I listen from my distant perch in Washington. It’s a hurricane, I think, not a terrorist attack. Still, it’s easier to agree with my 32-year-old sister than to argue — until she adds a life vest to the list. I nearly laugh. I roll my eyes while she drones on about meteorologists predicting that Katrina could be the Big One. A direct hit on New Orleans. Storm surges could topple levees.

Whatever. I’m sure Dad will be fine, just like my family has always been fine through all the other hurricanes. Vy makes a last-ditch effort: Could I at least try to persuade Dad to bring a kickboard or one of the floaties from our pool in the back yard? Now I really do laugh. Whoever heard of a foam noodle saving someone in a hurricane?

I can’t even remember the names of all the storms our family has gone through. There was the one where we made big X’s on our windows with masking tape — only to spend months trying to scrape it off when our house once again was unscathed. Another time, we evacuated to Houston, where I happily ate at the Cheesecake Factory and shopped at the mall. When Hurricane Isabel was bearing down on Washington in 2003, I laughed at how scared everyone was. The worst hurricane I’d ever experienced was the alcoholic kind at Pat O’Brien’s off Bourbon Street.

But my sister won’t let up. She nags my parents until Mom finally agrees to evacuate to Houston on Saturday night along with my 16-year-old brother, my aunt and my maternal grandparents, Ong Ngoai and Ba Ngoai. Mom brings two outfits and some jewelry. My brother, Dan, packs one of his two laptops, an iPod and a T-shirt with the name of his high school, Jesuit, where he has just started his senior year.

The same day, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issues a mandatory evacuation of the city. St. Bernard officials follow suit. By Sunday, Katrina is upgraded to a Category 5 hurricane. News reports say that Lake Pontchartrain already is rising two inches every hour.

That afternoon, my father leaves his car in our garage because he thinks it will be safer there and catches a ride with a friend to the hospital — sans floatie, life vest and even food and water. I call his cell phone to check in. Don’t worry, he says. The hospital has plenty of supplies. He’ll be fine.

But Dad is not at full strength. A few months earlier, he learned he had rectal cancer. Chemotherapy was brutal. The medicine caused his hands and feet to crack and blister so badly that he couldn’t walk or touch anything. They were bleeding so much that he went through 40 to 50 bandages each day. All he could do was sit at the computer, typing out e-mails with his fingernails. Every time I opened my inbox, there seemed to be a letter from Dad.

My parents took it as a sign that they needed to slow down. Dad is almost 60, and Mom is 56. They were getting tired. Dad thought about traveling more — he’d heard New Zealand was nice. “Just live each day like it’s a bonus day,” I remember him telling me. He even talked about retirement.

But Dad couldn’t stay away from work. He got bored at home. Less than halfway through chemo, he decided to take a break from his treatments and return to work. His hands and feet had just healed as Katrina gathered steam in the Gulf.

We talk on the phone again Monday morning shortly before the storm makes landfall. Of the seven or eight doctors who were supposed to report for duty, only my father and two others have shown up at the hospital. Dad says the wind gusts are getting stronger. The roof of a nearby high school has blown off. Power at the hospital has gone out, so the building is running on generators. There are about 50 patients and staff, all safe and sound, he says. But he’s worried that water might get into our house and ruin his home theater equipment.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen over the next two hours,” he tells me.

I keep checking the news wires at the office. And the reports keep getting worse. The eye is headed straight for New Orleans. St. Bernard is flooding fast. The levee on the Industrial Canal, near where the parish meets New Orleans, is the first to break. Then cell phone service goes out. I try Dad’s number but can’t connect. I try again and again with no luck. I call my mother. I can’t get through. I call my brother, my aunt, my best friend from New Orleans — anybody. All lines are dead.

Now I am officially freaking out. The Superdome — New Orleans’ refuge of last resort — is leaking. Water in St. Bernard is so high that cars are floating down the street. The parish president, Henry “Junior” Rodriguez, issues a desperate open letter to President Bush: “Of our community of 67,000 citizens, many are surrounded by water and have no place to go. We have NO food, NO water, NO sanitation, NO power, and NO communication. We have no way to rescue or recover our citizens . . . I am in danger of having many citizens die if they are not rescued now. On behalf of the citizens of St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, I am begging for your help.”

On Monday night, Dad paces the roof of his hospital, dialing and redialing my sister’s phone number in Little Rock. It takes about 20 tries, but he finally gets hold of her husband. Everyone is huddled on the second floor of the building because the first floor has flooded, my father says quickly. And the water is still rising. The connection drops. Dad is gone.

***

Only once did my father consider not becoming a doctor. In 1963, he won a fellowship to study chemistry in France as a 16-year-old high school senior. Dad had planned to take the entrance exam for medical school in Saigon, but now that sounded lame compared with a year in the City of Lights.

“Going to Paris was like a dream for all of the young students of the time,” Dad says. “Paris was like the capital of life.”

But my grandfather — or ong noi in Vietnamese — would have none of it. He was an aviation inspector for Shell and had also worked as an interpreter for the French. Life had been difficult for him and my grandmother, or ba noi. One of their children had died from lack of medical care, and Ong Noi had lost his left arm during war with the French. They had made a decent living for themselves over the years. But they knew Dad could do better.

My father is the oldest of six children, so Ong Noi poured all of the family’s resources into his education. Medicine was the most prestigious career my father could choose. It was his duty to live up to the those expectations. Stay in Vietnam, Ong Noi told him. There would be time to go abroad later.

My father was depressed, he says now. A poet and artist in his spare time, he felt like he belonged in Paris. But Dad was not a rebel at heart. He followed Ong Noi’s wishes.

Dad met my mother, DanTam, in 1967 when he was in his third year of medical school. He was at her high school to meet up with a different girl. But then Mom, who was 17 and one of the prettiest and most popular girls in her school, pedaled her bike past him and dropped her book bag. Dad picked it up. They were married a few years later.

At the time, Dad was 25 and poised to take over his medical school’s department of parasitology and mycology after graduation. My mother, 22, was in law school. My sister, Vy, was born about a year into their marriage.

Then, in 1973, my father got an offer to study public health and tropical medicine for one year at Tulane University in New Orleans. Finally, here was his chance to go abroad.

Ong Noi had been right. Some of the students who’d gone to France had been lured away from their studies by drinking, drugs and debauchery. Ong Noi was wise to forbid my father to join them, Dad says. The lesson stuck with him. “That’s why I more or less follow the philosophy that you have to do your duty,” he says. “If you have a duty that you don’t do, then what’s going to happen?”

Vietnam was being torn apart by war when he flew to New Orleans, but my father wasn’t worried about leaving my mother and sister behind. Our entire extended family was there to watch over them. Even in 1973, Saigon felt far removed from the carpet bombs and napalm. As Dad explains it, war always seemed to be going on in Vietnam — with the Chinese, with the French and now with the Americans and each other. Disaster had been looming in the background so long that it simply became a fact of life.

“We didn’t think the communists would take over,” he says. “Nobody did. If we did, I wouldn’t have gone.”

***

Mom is frantic. It is Tuesday, the day after Katrina hit, and she still has not been able to contact my father. She and the rest of my family are safely ensconced at a friend’s house in Houston. I call to check up on her, and my aunt answers the phone. Your mom is not doing well, she tells me. She cannot sleep for worry.

I am grateful to my aunt for telling me this. My mother never lets on when she’s worried, frightened, sad or heartbroken. Experience has taught her that life is hard — just deal with it. But I know that she is thinking about what happened after my father left for the States. He was supposed to stay for one year, but he tacked on a few months so that he could earn a doctorate in science as well.

Before he could return, Saigon fell. Suddenly, my father was locked out of Vietnam, and my mother and sister were trapped inside.

When I was growing up, my parents rarely spoke about Vietnam, and I rarely questioned them. I knew the general outline of their story, but the details were hazy. It wasn’t until Katrina swept away everything safe and familiar that I learned how strong my parents have been all their lives.

My mother tried to escape the day in April 1975 when the communists captured Saigon. But her plan to sail to freedom with my sister and a distant relative on a navy ship fell through. Rumors swirled of helicopters airlifting people out of Saigon. But chaos reigned in the crowded streets. My mother says she was afraid that if she tried to push her way to a helicopter, she or my sister would be shot. So she stayed at home while the country collapsed around her.

Dad watched the fall of Saigon on television. He was devastated but helpless. There was no word from my mother for six months, until a letter from her finally arrived by way of a family friend in Paris. It didn’t say much, just that she and my sister were safe. Mom was scared to write more because all mail was being censored. And saying the wrong thing could be dangerous. The communists sent my mother’s brother and my great uncle who had fought with the South Vietnamese to reeducation camps.

Desperate to be reunited with my father, my mother tried several times to escape with the boat people. She traveled to small beach villages with my sister, waiting days for tiny canoes that would ferry them to international waters. There they would flag down passing ships and beg to be let on.

On the third attempt in 1977, my sister, then 4, nearly drowned. She and Mom were being pushed in a small basket out to the canoes because they could not swim. Vy toppled into the ocean. A stranger grabbed her by the hair and pulled her back up, saving her life. They made it to the canoes only to wait endlessly with little food and water for a ship to pass. When one finally did, it refused to pick up the refugees. Too crowded, Mom remembers the crew telling her. So they returned to shore. The communists were waiting for them.

My mom and sister were detained at an abandoned house nearby. Everyone was sick and vomiting constantly. After a few days, Mom begged the people in charge to let her leave. She had my sister to take care of, she said. They let her go.

Meanwhile, my father had been working on his own plan to rescue Mom and Vy. He had lost his scholarship to Tulane when the United States cut off relations with Vietnam. But his adviser at the university offered him a position as a research associate at one of its centers in Colombia. There, his new boss helped him craft a desperate plea to the Vietnamese government to save his family: Dad was deathly ill with hepatitis and suffering from deep depression. Without his family by his side, he would surely die. He and his boss forged medical documents to back the diagnosis and faked Colombian citizenship papers.

The government bought it. My mother and Vy flew to France, where they stayed about a month with distant relatives. Then, in 1979, nearly six years after my family had been split apart, they were reunited in the airport in Bogota.

Mom cried then. There had been so many questions and doubts. A friend of hers had reunited with her husband only to find him involved with another woman. But when my mother arrived at the airport and saw my father, she says, she knew their love had survived everything.

“When they came back, we had such a brighter future,” Dad says. “It just, like, opened up a new chapter in my life.”

An official at the U.S. Embassy in Colombia helped them emigrate to New Orleans. Mom and Vy were having trouble getting visas. A military attache who was married to a Vietnamese woman arranged to get them green cards and even a flight to America.

Once in Louisiana, my family settled in St. Bernard to be near the elderly American couple who had hosted my father while he was at Tulane. My sister, who was 6 at the time, dubbed them our American grandparents.

Now my American Grandma and Grandpa are camped out at their daughter’s home in a small town outside Houston. Like my aunt, Grandpa is worried about Mom. He remembers when my parents first came to America together after so many years apart. “I thought she’d never let him out of her sight again,” he says. He starts to tear up, and so do I.

On the phone with me, Mom says nothing of her sleepless night. Only that she wants me to do her a favor: If Dad gets in touch with me, she says, I must tell him to come to Houston immediately. Bus, plane, whatever. It doesn’t matter. Just tell your father to leave that hospital. Now.

***

Two agonizing days pass before Mom finally hears from my father by phone. Don’t worry, he tells her on Wednesday evening, someone is coming to rescue us.

He wasn’t sure how. First, he heard they would be taken to the St. Bernard prison, where it was unclear if there were actual prisoners but supposedly there was electricity and running water, and that was all that mattered. Then they were going to be shipped to Jackson Barracks, the National Guard base that sits along the border between the parish and New Orleans. Then to Algiers, on the dry west bank of the city. Then, Baton Rouge.

On Wednesday morning, all of the patients were evacuated to the prison, including a 500-pound woman who had to be lowered from the roof and placed in a waiting canoe. But Dad stayed behind to help care for the more than 200 people who’d sought refuge at the hospital after the storm.

On the first day of the hurricane, the hospital lost power and the generators gave out, he told us. There was no electricity, no water, and the toilets stopped working. The hospital began to heat up, just like an oven. Some of the more enterprising employees managed to get a small, water-damaged generator running and found a way to grill hamburgers. But as the hours turned into days, food began to run short. Five nurses collapsed from exhaustion and depression. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” they told Dad before they crumpled.

And still, the people were coming. A man in his sixties was plucked out of the flood-waters and dropped off at the hospital. He had tried to chop his way out of his house with an ax and swim to safety. He nearly drowned. Dad and other hospital employees administered IV fluids by the glow of a flashlight. They also found themselves caring for a 300-pound person with diabetes, and an 18-month-old baby who was vomiting uncontrollably. The hospital was filled with displaced children. There was no rioting, but there was death. My father lost four or five patients during the evacuation.

Dad finally left the hospital on Thursday afternoon. A helicopter brought him to Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, which had been turned into a makeshift hospital. The elderly and sick were lying on the baggage claim belt or sitting on mattresses soaked with water.

Dad asked FEMA officials what he could do. They told him to mop the floors. Dad was not authorized to assist in emergency situations, they said. Liability, they said. Dad protested, but they wouldn’t budge. He sat down and cried for the first time.

“We spent five days in the hospital, five days in Hell, and we didn’t cry,” Dad says later. “Now, at the airport, we cry. It was a nightmare.”

A few hours later, buses arrived from the Hospital Corporation of America to evacuate their doctors and employees. Dad’s hospital is owned by a different company, but one bus had extra room. Dad and his staff got on. In a few hours, he was in Lafayette, about 135 miles west of New Orleans. He got a hot meal, fresh scrubs and a chance to shower. On Friday, Dad boarded a bus to Houston.

A week after the storm, the survivor stories begin to emerge. I read them carefully, looking for familiar names. In one newspaper article, I find the family of the guy I took to winter formal my senior year of high school. In another, I discover the police officer I interviewed as a rookie reporter. I even spot the owner of a bar where I celebrated my 21st birthday.

For the first time, I am not reporting the news. I am living through it.

My brother, Dan, is one of the “Katrina kids.” He was excited about his senior year at Jesuit High School, getting his class ring, homecoming, the state math convention. Now my parents send him to live with my great-aunt in Rockville and commission me to watch over him. Another Jesuit school, Georgetown Preparatory School, takes Dan in, and soon I find myself attending back-to-school night and nagging him about his college applications.

My cousin Michael was a member of a Louisiana National Guard unit deployed to Baghdad when Katrina hit. His mother had just bought a new house near my parents’ home two weeks before the storm. It was destroyed. My cousin and his unit were rushed back to help the relief effort. But Michael opted for a discharge and decided to move in with my great-aunt in Rockville as well. After a year wanting nothing more than to go home, he had no home left.

There are so many unanswered questions. Will insurance cover the damage? When will the family be able to go back? Is anyone guarding our neighborhood? How much is there left to guard? But the biggest one of all is simply: What next?

My parents had planned to stay in our house forever. They had even kept my and my sister’s bedrooms intact so that we could sleep there when we visited. Trophies from my fourth-grade piano competitions, my sister’s science projects and my brother’s karate tournaments filled the living room. Every nook and cranny — the cupboard where Mom used to keep our Lunar New Year money! — was filled with a lifetime of memories.

Yet Mom and Dad make the decision to walk away with breathtaking speed. They aren’t going back to Chalmette, they tell me. The entire parish has been wiped out.

Almost all of the 25,000 homes, including ours, are damaged beyond repair. At least one of my father’s two private medical clinics is destroyed. So is my mother’s beauty salon.

The decision might have been harder if some semblance of our old lives had remained, my parents say. But there is nothing to hold on to. And they don’t want to rebuild in a place where another hurricane could strike.

“Running away,” my mother tells me in Vietnamese, “it will make you crazy.”

They begin looking at new houses in Houston. The city is an obvious choice. My dad’s five siblings immigrated to Houston. His parents are buried there. Dad puts in his application for a Texas medical license so that he can start working. Mom is on the phone with the insurance companies and FEMA all day. Though my parents have access to some cash, Mom still waits in line for five hours for a $1,500 debit card from the Red Cross. For the first time, we get food stamps.

Yet somehow my parents remain upbeat. Dad is interviewed on CNN, and a stranger who hears his story sends my parents a check for $20,000. They learn that their flood insurance will pay full damages for the house, though they still aren’t sure about the businesses. My sister announces that she is pregnant again.

“We always believe that if you do not do any harm to people, then you will get a reward sooner or later, no matter how much hardship you have to go through,” Dad says. “That’s the principle of my life.”

My parents just keep doing the same thing they’ve always done: Looking to the future.

***

It takes two more weeks for parish officials to let us back into St. Bernard to see firsthand what has been lost. I fly to Houston to meet my parents and aunt. Together, we make the long trek back to Louisiana.

The minivan is stocked with rubber boots, paper towels, bleach, two cases of water, gasoline canisters and croissants, in case we get hungry. But my parents have forgotten the goggles. Not the goggles! Officials are warning about E. coli, tetanus and hepatitis — for real this time. What if we get pink eye or toxic mold flies into our faces and we all go blind? I demand that we go to Home Depot before getting on the road.

Fine, Mom agrees. But first, she wants to stop at the Hong Kong Market to buy Asian vegetables for friends who are still in Louisiana. Fine, I say impatiently. Fine.

Mom spends nearly an hour in the grocery store. Then we order Vietnamese po-boy sandwiches for lunch. We still haven’t gone to Home Depot. I close my eyes and breathe deeply. I am annoyed. Dad is annoyed. Mom is annoyed that we’re both annoyed.

The drive to Chalmette takes more than seven hours. I compete with my duffel bag for leg room — there is nowhere else to put the luggage. The trunk is stuffed with supplies. I don’t know how they plan to make room for things we hopefully will be able to salvage from our house. I mentioned this to them before we left, but they dismissed it. No one listens to me.

My parents and I have always exasperated each other. I like to believe it is because I am too much like them, as sensitive as my father but as stubborn as my mother. Katrina has only intensified that dynamic.

Mom makes conversation about new houses she has been looking at in Houston. None of them quite measures up to our old one in my parents’ eyes — the rooms are too small; there are too few rooms; there isn’t enough light. Mom is set on having at least four bedrooms, maybe five. Our old house had five. Dad is adamant that it have two stories. He has seen what happens to one-story houses during floods.

So far, Dad’s favorite house is a $600,000 mansion that they now cannot afford. It has two wet bars (So what if neither of my parents drinks alcohol?), a tiki hut in the back yard and a pool with a stone waterfall.

This is ridiculous, I say. You don’t need that much house.

Dad is plaintive. “You don’t like the $600,000 house?” he jokes, but sounds almost hurt. We sit in stony silence for a few minutes. Then he relents.

“Do you need to ask me anything?” he says. I had told my parents that I want to interview them to write this story. But I am too sullen to muster up the energy. Let’s talk later, I say to him. Dad nods in agreement. Then he makes one of his hallmark cheesy jokes.

“You need to interview me? Ask: ‘Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Do you need anything?’” he says. He then answers his own question. “I need to win the Powerball!”

I laugh half-heartedly, but it is enough to break the tension. Soon, we cross into Louisiana.

The line to get into St. Bernard snakes all the way up the Paris Road bridge. Traffic is not moving.

Mom is now riding in the SUV of a Louisiana family friend who has volunteered to help. Dad and I are behind them in the minivan. The moon is still out, high and hazy. The sun is rising deep red in the east. From the interstate, New Orleans looks like a ghost town. Cars are piled on top of one another. Houses look like they’ve been punched with a wrecking ball. The Superdome is nearly bald.

St. Bernard lies just southeast of New Orleans along the Mississippi River and suffered some of the worst flooding in the region. This is where nearly 30 nursing home patients died.

The smell starts near the exit for Elysian Fields Avenue, a putrid, dirty smell like the wall of port-a-potties at Jazz Fest when it rains. I don’t want to think about what’s causing it. We sit on Paris Road, one of only two “big streets” in St. Bernard. We snap pictures of military Humvees cruising by, overturned boats at the marina across the street and the decimated Mr. Binky’s Adult Superstore.

Paris Road and the other big street — Judge Perez Drive — have been largely scraped clean of sludge. But the muck still clings to the homes and businesses that once made up our neighborhood. There is the Jiffy Lube that used to be a snowball stand that I went to in elementary school, destroyed. There is the Piccadilly Cafeteria, where we ate after church on Sundays with my American grandparents; I can barely see it through the debris and flooded cars lining the parking lot. There is the Mexican restaurant that used to be a daiquiri shop that used to be an exotic pet store. Dusty memories of my childhood haunt every abandoned building, lurk around every godforsaken corner.

“All of this familiar scenery,” Dad says as we drive through, “saying goodbye to it.”

***

My parents started off living in a rented duplex here while Dad did a postdoctorate at a hospital in New Orleans. My mother worked as an interpreter at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, where I was born in 1980. When I was a small child, we lived in a tiny two-bedroom house owned by our American grandparents. Grandpa was the pastor of a local Baptist church. Grandma directed its preschool and kindergarten program. Slowly, my family began to put down roots. By 1985, my father was running a family practice clinic in St. Bernard that was owned by the local hospital. In addition, he and a partner opened a private clinic in eastern New Orleans. My mother quit her job as an interpreter to run the office. When they bought out the practice in St. Bernard in 1989, Mom and Dad split their time between the two, working side by side.

They worked constantly. Dad often didn’t get home until after 9 p.m. We always ate dinner late. I hated that they worked so much. I wanted my mother to make Rice Krispies treats like the other moms at my school did. I wanted Dad to come to my piano competitions. But they were too busy.

When I became a teenager, I worked at the clinics, too. I filed patients’ charts, typed letters and spun around in my swivel chair. I didn’t know then what my parents had been through just to afford those swivel chairs. I do remember once asking Mom what her dream job was. She said she had always wanted to own a beauty salon. I was surprised. What did running a medical clinic have to do with beauty salons?

I was in fifth grade when we moved into the house where my family would stay until the weekend that Katrina hit. To me, it was the biggest, nicest house on the block — the biggest, nicest house my 9-year-old eyes had ever seen. I thought I would get lost in it. We kids had our own rooms upstairs, along with my dad’s parents, ong ba noi, who had left Vietnam to come stay with us. My parents lived downstairs. Their bedroom had a Jacuzzi tub, sauna and fireplace. My parents never used them, of course, but just the fact that those things were there was somehow comforting.

I moved out of the house in 2000, when I was a college junior in New Orleans, and left for good three years ago to come to Washington. By then, my mother was studying for her aesthetician’s license. She already had a name for the salon she planned to open: La Belle Evelyn, after Vy’s daughter. She had a building, across the street from Dad’s office in St. Bernard. It was going to look like a West Elm catalogue. Then we found out she had breast cancer.

She refused to let it get in her way.

After surgery and several rounds of chemotherapy, she was hitting the books again and trying to persuade me to let her wax my eyebrows. The salon held its grand opening in 2003. Massage therapy, laser treatment, sunless tanning, manicures and pedicures — the salon had it all. She threw herself into it, working harder than she ever did at the clinics. She was there seven days a week, sometimes until 11 p.m.

Now my father parks the minivan in front of La Belle Evelyn. It is our first stop in St. Bernard. He pulls on a pair of rubber boots over his green scrubs. A mask goes over his face, and yellow dishwashing gloves cover his hands. We can see the high-water mark on the outside of the building, but otherwise the structure seems intact. Mom unlocks the front door, and we follow her inside.

The sludge is so deep it covers our boots. I pull my mask up over my nose to block the smell, but it doesn’t make much of a difference. Silk scarves and clothing are strewn everywhere. The sunless tanning booth is covered in slime. Mold dots the ceiling of the first floor.

My mother makes a beeline for the cash register, sloshing unheeded into the water that still stands inside the room. She pulls out a tiny silver key from the folds of her clothes and tries to open the register. But the key won’t turn in the lock. “There’s money in there,” she tells me.

Just leave it, I say. It’s been sitting in that water for weeks. I bet it’s disintegrated. But she won’t listen. She picks up the cash register to take it home — maybe she can break it open later. But as soon as the register tilts, a flood of dirty brown water pours out of it.

Just leave it, Mom, I implore. She says nothing but puts the cash register back and heads upstairs. The aromatherapy candles on the walls, the water cooler, the nail polish station are all perfectly intact. We pack bottles of pricey Obagi and Dermalogica skin care products into at least half a dozen plastic crates. The microdermabrasion machine and tubs of wax also make it into our minivan. Finally, we can carry no more. It all takes less than half an hour.

We cross the street to Dad’s clinic. We can see from the road that there is nothing left to salvage here. The large glass windows and door are busted in. Our boots sink in the mud that cakes the driveway. Medical records are embedded in it. A chair from the waiting room sits outside. The entrance to the examining rooms is blocked by debris. And though I didn’t think it was possible, the smell inside is worse than in the salon. Mom just waits in the car, while Dad wanders around outside the building for about 10 minutes taking pictures. There is nothing to do here.

We press on to our house. That is what we have really come for. We are prepared for the worst. A reporter friend of mine had gotten into the neighborhood and sent us some pictures of it. I could see rings of mold around the front columns in the photos. Orange spray paint marks the house clear of dead bodies. The garage has collapsed. But we still hold out hope for a hundred little things that might have miraculously survived.

We drive up the street until we get to our turn. It is blocked by a military tank and National Guard from Colorado. There are metal barricades that normally come out only for Mardi Gras. We were not prepared for this. The guards forbid us to cross the street. Our half of the neighborhood is not allowed back in yet. It is not safe, one of the guardsmen says. He has a big gun. I am inclined to follow his orders.

But my mother won’t listen. We can almost see our house just two blocks away. Can’t we just go in for a minute? We’re business owners. We already crossed the street once to get to the salon. What’s one more time?

The officer is adamant. Dad refuses to argue with him. The law is the law, Dad says. He turns the minivan around.

We stop at a friend’s house on the west bank of New Orleans, where there is power and running water, to rest before heading back to Houston. Mom begins venting as soon as Dad gets in the shower. There has got to be a way to get into the house, she just knows it. Your Dad never challenges the rules, she fumes. He doesn’t realize that rules can be bent.

Her cell phone rings. It’s my aunt. She was riding in a separate car, and, sure enough, she has found a way into our neighborhood using a side road. My mother’s eyes light up. One of our friends offers to drive us in his minivan. Mom looks at me and grins. I grab my camera and pull my boots back on.

In less than half an hour, we are back in Chalmette. There is no longer a line to get in. We drive past all the old landmarks again, but now I am numb to them. Soon we are pulling the minivan into the cracked, dry sludge in our circular driveway. We stand outside our blown-out front door.

The house is worse than I imagined. It is almost surreal, even though I can see the water mark near the top of the stairs and smell that horrible stench. It is our house, certainly, but I feel detached from it. This isn’t home as I remember. As my father said before we left Houston: “We are not going back to the house of the past. We are going back to the house that we lost.”

I had wanted so much to come back with my parents. To help them to say goodbye. But now that I am here, all I want to do is get out. If my mother is feeling the same way, she doesn’t show it. She is not one to pine over what has been lost. She climbs the stairs to the second floor, which is still intact. She grabs some insurance documents and other important papers that she and my father had the foresight to move upstairs. I take whatever electronic equipment I can easily unplug and carry. I dart into my room to get two pictures that my dad painted of me as a child. I stop in my little brother’s room to pick up his only two requests: his Manny Ramirez Boston Red Sox MVP plaque and his old laptop.

Dad calls my cell as I haul another box downstairs. I answer the phone, but the connection breaks up immediately. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but I yell into the receiver that we’re okay. I am afraid that he is worried or even mad at us. We’re in the house, I yell into the phone. We’re leaving soon, promise.

Mom and I work largely in silence. We go only as far as the foyer on the first floor — the debris and sludge is so bad that we can’t get in any farther. All we can do is stick our heads around the corner and stare at the ruins of the kitchen where we ate countless family dinners, fought over who was going to wash the dishes and poked fun at my little brother’s antics.

Mom walks outside and stands in front of the gaping hole that used to be the floor-to-ceiling windows of her bedroom. She peers in, trying to find a path into the room. But she is little, barely 5 feet tall, and the mound of broken furniture is so big. I walk over. I touch her shoulder and ask if she is okay. She says quietly that she wants to get into the bedroom. But she just stands there, immobile. For the first time, I see her eyes turn red.

“Never mind,” she says in Vietnamese. “I don’t want to go in anymore.”

She slowly walks across the driveway, not even looking at our garage or my dad’s flooded Mercedes. She lingers by our dead plants. Then she turns around.

“Okay,” she says in English, “let’s go.”

On our long ride back to Houston that same day, my parents insist they are not afraid of starting over, though there are still so many questions hanging over them. What will they do with the house? Will the parish bulldoze it, and if so, who in their right mind would want to buy the land? How will they pay my brother’s tuition when he starts college next year? How will they restart their businesses? What will happen to their retirement?

“Retirement is boring,” my father says. “We still want to work.” They hope the rhythms of work will make life normal again. But they admit that they are weary. They don’t have the energy they did 25 years ago.

They have been back to Vietnam only once since the United States normalized relations in 1996. They went alone, and when they returned, Mom told me she couldn’t believe that she used to eat fruit from the open-air markets. The market was so much dirtier than she remembered.

I went to Vietnam for the first time just after college. Dad thought it was important that I understand my roots. But my mother couldn’t understand why I wanted to go. Your dad doesn’t know how bad it got, she told me. He wasn’t there when Saigon fell. We left for a reason.

Now they are starting over again. Leaving Vietnam was hard, my dad says. But they built a better life for themselves in America. Maybe the same will be true for Houston.

“Maybe something good will rise from the bad,” he says in English. “Like the phoenix.”

What’s a phoenix? Mom asks. Dad explains it to her in Vietnamese. It is considered a mythical creature in Vietnam, representing virtue and grace. In other legends, the phoenix is a bird that burns itself in a fire every 500 years and is then reborn from the ashes.

Oh, Mom says in recognition. Then she turns to me. “It’s not real, you know,” she explains.

I roll my eyes, but I’m grinning.

***

When we return to St. Ber-nard for the second time, my father is with us. My parents have brought a trailer and a truck to pack up everything that isn’t covered in mold or bolted down — and I do mean everything. A trash can from the salon, a cheap plastic clock that a drug company gave us for free, clothes that my parents haven’t worn in so long that they have literally melded to the hangers. Anything that is remotely familiar is thrown into the trailer.

Dad is as stoic as Mom while we are working. All of the pictures that we took the first time back helped mentally prepare him, he says. Yet he doesn’t believe that everything on the first floor is lost forever. There must be something down there.

He wades deep into the sludge, his rubber boots leaving dirty stains on our overturned couch as he steps over it. I follow his lead for a while but soon give up. Dad keeps trudging until he finds what he is looking for: the picture.

It is the one that they had taken out in California, a reminder of better days. It is in the middle of the living room, buried underneath the muck. Dad gingerly carries it out to the front porch. It is barely recognizable, the canvas damp and covered in mud.

Dad wipes it off to reveal a flash of red, a hint of Mom’s black lace dress. See, he insists, it’s still good. He just has to clean it. Then he lays the picture out on the front steps to dry in the unforgiving Louisiana sun.

Later, when they are back in Houston, my parents will have to throw it in the trash. It is dirty and stinky, and besides, by then they’ve realized that they can have a new portrait made from the original photograph. And it will be every bit as good as the old one.

MICHELLE HEARD stares at the menu in front of her at the restaurant in Saigon and comes to a conclusion.

“No squid,” she says firmly, shaking her head, her blond bob tossing around her like a halo. And then, almost as an afterthought, she adds, “And no chicken feet.”

Tung Bui, a tour guide whom the Americans call “Tom,” laughs and promises he won’t order that.

It is a typical sweltering night in Saigon at the start of the rainy season. Heard and the 15 other college students on this study-abroad trip have not gotten used to the heat. Even with the overhead fans at full speed, they are dripping with sweat, tired and dehydrated.

This is the farthest the 21-year-old Heard has ever been from her small home town of Richland, Miss., a crossroads seven miles outside Jackson. Until the grueling flight to Saigon, which took more than a day, she had never even been on a plane before. Her best friend, Jessica Shows, 22, a history major at the University of Southern Mississippi, persuaded her to go on the three-week, $3,800 tour. They figured it would be an adventure.

“Everyone thinks we’re crazy, a couple of loons going to Vietnam,” says Heard, one of the few non-history majors on the trip. She’s studying medical technology at Southern Miss and knows little about Vietnam — or about war. But the use of U.S. military force in a hostile, faraway land is a subject that has become far more relevant to Heard than she’d like. Her fiance, Vincent Clay, is a medic in the Army National Guard, and his unit was activated just before Heard left for Vietnam. He’s headed for Iraq, although he doesn’t know when yet. His orders are to serve for 545 days. Heard won’t be surprised if it’s longer.

She tries not to dwell on what the future holds at this boisterous restaurant, dissolving into giggles as her Vietnamese companions futilely try to teach her to use chopsticks. Waitresses dressed in tight blue tops and miniskirts with orange racing strips down the sides cart out bottles of the local Tiger beer. The students pop off the bottle caps and lift their beers for a toast. A resounding chorus of “Vo!” — the Vietnamese equivalent of “Cheers!” — fills the restaurant.

Heard takes a swig of her beer and turns to history professor Brian O’Neil, the group’s leader.

“It’s my first Tiger beer!” she announces.

“How’d it go down?” O’Neil asks.

“It’s got a little wang to it,” Heard replies. “It’s not a Coors Light, I tell you that.”

***

Nearly 30 years after the fall of Saigon, Americans are back in Vietnam. We have returned politically, with some of the most heated battles of the war refought during the presidential campaign. And we have returned psychologically, with mounting U.S. casualties in Iraq inviting anguished comparisons to Vietnam.

The U.S. college students in this study-abroad program run by Southern Miss are literally in Vietnam. Only it’s not the same country many Americans remember. They are in a Vietnam where more than 60 percent of the population was born after the fall of Saigon and the children of Viet Cong veterans major in English at the country’s universities. Part of the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” prison for American soldiers has been turned into a museum, while the rest is being torn down to make way for a high-rise. The Vietnamese call the changes Doi Moi, an economic revitalization effort that represents a new beginning for a new generation.

The American students, too, are the product of a new generation. Many of them, including Heard, are too young to clearly remember even the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War. Geoffrey Philabaum, 20, another student on the trip, says he has hazy memories of watching tanks crossing the desert on television. “I remember my first-grade teacher saying, ‘This will be something you’ll tell your children about,’ ” he says, “and I was, like, ‘Whatever.’ ”

That leaves the Vietnam War little more than another chapter in a history textbook. The Southern Miss study-abroad program, which is open to students from any college, is designed to change that. Founded five years ago, the program bills itself as the only one in the United States that brings students and veterans to Vietnam together, giving students first-person perspectives of the war in the place where it happened.

This is O’Neil’s third time leading students through Vietnam. The lessons they learn here far surpass anything he could teach in a classroom, he says. But he can never quite prepare them for the trip.

“The focus is on the war and its legacy,” he tells them after they arrive in Saigon. “But you’ll be learning a helluva lot about Vietnam and the culture today, and a lot about yourselves.”

John Young — who lives in Mississippi and has three Bronze Stars, two Air Medals, a Purple Heart and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry — has been returning to Vietnam with the program since its inception. Every year before they leave for Saigon, Young, 59, listens as students debate the U.S. role in Vietnam. Every year, he comes to the same conclusion: “Everything that students think they know about the war at the beginning of the semester is wrong.”

***

IT IS MAY 19, birthday of the late North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, whom Vietnamese affectionately refer to as “Uncle Ho.” It is also Heard’s first day in Vietnam.

She and the rest of the group barely have time to recover from their jet lag before boarding a tour bus for the Presidential Palace, which was South Vietnam’s version of the White House. As the students walk inside, they pass a replica of the North Vietnamese tank that stormed the building on April 30, 1975 — the day the Americans abandoned the U.S. Embassy and the war.

Tour guide Bien Phan leads the way through the palace’s opulent rooms, which feature living quarters with Austin Powers-style mod furniture, a library with untouched books, a ballroom and a rooftop helipad with banyan trees growing all around. Then he takes the students to the war planning rooms in the basement. There are pictures of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and charts showing the strength and location of South Vietnamese and U.S. troops in 1968. Radio equipment used during the 1968 Tet Offensive takes up a whole room. Heard and friend Shows are snapping pictures left and right. Shows has brought 25 rolls of film, and Heard is not far behind.

They walk through a tunnel fortified with armor and into a war room, where South Vietnamese President Thieu Van Nguyen and his family spent the final weeks before Saigon fell. (The Communists renamed Saigon Ho Chi Minh City and declared April 30, 1975, “Liberation Day.”) Eventually, the students are ushered into a small, dark room with a television, where they watch the Vietnamese account of “the American War.” The film begins with images of dead Vietnamese bodies. Thousands of Vietnamese were killed, the narrator says in English, adding that “the Vietnamese people will never forget their bloody repression.”

The film accuses the United States of setting up a puppet government in South Vietnam and using a supposed attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 as an excuse to bomb the country “back to the Stone Age.” The film ends with the takeover of the Presidential Palace in 1975. A song swells in the background; the students can make out only the refrain: “Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh . . . Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh.”

After the video is over, the students head outside. Back in the bright sunshine, William Quinn, 21, and Jason Sokiera, 26, break into their own rendition of the chorus. “Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh . . . Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh,” they sing out as the group pauses for photos in front of the tank.

“I don’t know why, but I want to become a communist now,” Sokiera says jokingly.

Back at the hotel a few hours later, Quinn sits in one of the overstuffed red chairs in the lobby, trying to sort out what he saw. He’s a military history major and knows that the film served up a healthy dose of propaganda.

“They put an interesting spin on it,” he says as he drags on a cigarette. The film didn’t explain the U.S. justification for the war: to prevent communism from spreading throughout Southeast Asia. It didn’t mention the thousands of U.S. planes shot down or soldiers killed. It didn’t acknowledge the torture that some American soldiers faced in Vietnamese prison camps. But then, Quinn adds, “we like to put a smiley face on our side of the war, too.”

Take the war in Iraq, he continues. The U.S. government calls it “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” but Quinn thinks a better name would be “Operation American Imperialism.”

Two tours of duty in Vietnam have given John Young a much different perspective. Iraq, he argues, is a necessary front in the war on terrorism. In Young’s view, the U.S. occupation there is not comparable to the war in Vietnam. Different terrain. Different tactics. Different enemy. The war in Vietnam was fought against an identifiable opponent, he says, while the war in Iraq has focused on small, militant subgroups and invisible networks of terrorists. Young can think of only one similarity between the two wars: They have both required soldiers to risk their lives.

“The worrisome thing that I see in the young generation today is they don’t, in fact, realize that resorting to violence is sometimes the only solution,” Young says. “We’ve gotten so modern, so civilized and liberal that Americans are losing sight of the fact that there are people in the world who would kill you as soon as look at you. And the only response we can have to them is to destroy them.”

***

AFTER THE TOUR OF THE PRESIDENTIAL PALACE, Heard calls her fiance at the rate of $1 a minute. Their conversation is short — she hasn’t brought that much money with her. He tells her there’s still no word on when his unit is scheduled to depart for Iraq.

The war in Iraq is looming over both of them, though Heard says she avoids reading about it. It’s too depressing. Hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis have died. The big news today is an American bombing of what the Iraqis say was a wedding celebration, killing about 40 people.

“Every time you read [the newspaper], it’s somebody else dying,” Heard says. “If the war is over, and we’re just keeping peace or whatever it’s supposed to be, why are people dying?”

She’s skeptical about the purpose of the war, but maybe that’s because her relatives and loved ones are the ones fighting it. Her brother, James, 19, is a military policeman with the National Guard who is scheduled to train in the California desert before shipping off to Iraq. Her great aunt, who is in the Air Reserves, has been activated as an emergency evacuation nurse.

And, of course, there is her fiance. She and Spec. Vincent Clay, Company C of the 106th Support Battalion, have been engaged since February. They still haven’t set a date for the wedding. Heard wonders if they should wait until Clay returns from Iraq. Leaving him to come on this trip was hard for Heard. She knows that it will be even harder when he leaves her to go overseas. They’ve been together since high school, when they were both working at a pizza place called Mazzio’s. When Clay, now 26, asked her to marry him, all her friends said: Finally.

A few days after Heard’s arrival in Vietnam, Clay receives an order to report to Mississippi’s Camp Shelby to begin training. In another hurried phone call, he finally gives voice to their biggest fear: “What if, God forbid, I don’t come home?”

Her answer is immediate: It would be unbearable to lose him without ever exchanging wedding vows. “I would hate to have that kind of regret laying on me, that I had the opportunity to be your wife, and you died,” she says she told him.

His tour of duty will begin nine weeks after she gets back. They decide to get married before he leaves. Heard had already planned to buy her wedding dress in Vietnam. She’ll just wear it sooner than she thought.

***

JOHN YOUNG WAS MARRIED ONCE, TOO. Twice, actually. Neither union lasted very long.

The Army veteran had tried to open himself up to other people, wanted someone in his life. But he simply couldn’t do it, he says. His memories of the war — and the scars he bears from them — are his lifelong companions. There is no room for anything, or anyone, else.

“Nobody is going to stay around you very long,” he explains. “You ruin everyone.”

Unlike many of the soldiers Young fought with, he enlisted in the Army, specifically requesting to go to Vietnam. His country was at war, he says. There was no other honorable option. He tells his story in a hotel conference room, where the air conditioning is making the college students shiver. Tomorrow they will visit the area where Young fought as a 21-year-old rifle squad leader. And they will watch him hand out packages of notebooks, crayons, pens and other supplies to local schools — a small gesture of penance, he says, for what he did as a soldier here.

His company had been in Vietnam a few months when it was ordered to scope out a stretch of the Mekong Delta about 12 miles south of Saigon. It was June 19, 1967. The soldiers traveled by boat to the edge of a rice paddy, shielded by bright green nipa palms. After he got off his boat, Young couldn’t see but a few feet in front of him, he says. As he and others advanced through the rice paddy, they drew light fire from the tree line. But when they arrived at a rice paddy dike, they were hit by a barrage of .50-caliber machine-gun fire.

The gunfire triggered something primal in Young, he says: raw self-preservation. He can remember the things that happened, but he is unsure of their sequence. He remembers learning that the soldiers in three of the boats going up the canal beside the rice paddy were all killed. Twice, helicopters tried to ferry away the dead bodies in the canal and in the field. Twice, they were shot down. No one on the helicopters survived.

“I thought we were all going to die that afternoon,” Young says.

The Americans were only about 50 yards away from the North Vietnamese troops wielding machine guns on the other side of the canal. Three American aircraft eventually flew in to silence them, Young says. They dropped their bombs on the Viet Cong positions, and the land shimmied like Jell-O. But as the smoke cleared, Young realized that there was fire coming from behind him, from a small straw hooch. No one had been hit yet, he says, but it gave him “a naked feeling.”

Young pulled another guy out of line to help him get rid of the gunfire. A Navy boat fired a white phosphorus round into the hooch to smoke out whoever was inside, Young says. He and the other soldier were gripping their M-16s on either side of the hooch when Vietnamese women and children began pouring out, he says. Mothers were dragging their children out by their arms, screaming. He can’t remember how many there were. Maybe 30. All running for their lives.

These are the people who have been killing us, Young remembers thinking. That’s them. “And I started to shoot.” The other soldier did, too. They fired until every last one of the women and children went down. Then they walked away.

Afterward, what was left of the company crossed the canal to clear out any remaining Vietnamese with an infantry assault, which Young describes as “fire all you can as fast as you can.” He threw a grenade into a spider hole, tearing apart a Viet Cong soldier. He emptied his magazine into a wounded Viet Cong. “The hell with you,” he remembers thinking as he riddled the body with bullets.

Though he has told this story many times before, Young’s words come out slowly, as if it is a struggle to pull them out of his soul. His breathing is labored, and his eyes are wet with tears.

“It’s an ugly story,” he tells the students. “I know that.”

None of the soldiers was the same after that battle, says Young, who has fought alcoholism and depression for almost four decades. He still revisits that hooch every night in his dreams, still hears the screams of the women and children, he says.

“War’s a pretty terrible business,” he says. “It’s terrible because of what you learn about yourself.”

The room is quiet for a few moments, the silence broken only by stifled sobs. Amber Miller’s makeup is streaked with tears. Miller, a 26-year-old sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, was born long after the Americans pulled out of Vietnam, but grew up surrounded by the war. Posters, maps and other memorabilia fill her parents’ home.

Young reminds Miller of her father, who also fought in Vietnam and struggles with its legacy. The way they talk, the way they dress, the cares etched into their faces, everything. Listening to Young, she says, was like hearing the story of the war that her father has never been able to bring himself to tell her.

Several other students have family members who served during the war. Twenty-two-year-old Scott Houston’s father helped direct Air Force bombers and planes spraying Agent Orange. Twenty-two-year-old Tiffany Beckham’s stepfather served two tours of duty. The first time he fought in Nha Trang with the 101st Airborne Division, he was ready and willing to battle communism, she says. The second time, those ideals no longer mattered. He returned for a Vietnamese woman he had fallen in love with. He never found her.

Before this trip, none of the students had talked to their parents much about the war, and their parents hadn’t brought it up. Maybe they were trying to forget. About one-third of all Vietnam veterans suffer from chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

When Miller was little, she used to wonder why the war always seemed to be more important to her father than the toll that his anger and depression were taking on her and her mother. But now, she says, she is beginning to understand.

“I’m not going to grab his hand and be like, ‘Oh Dad, I love you,’ because we’re not like that.” She stops and looks away. “I wish he were here, I tell you that much.”

***

AS HEARD LISTENS TO YOUNG TELL HIS STORY, a scary thought creeps into her mind: What if the war in Iraq devastates her fiance the way the Vietnam War devastated Young? Clay is a medic, which she hopes means that he won’t be in the line of fire. Heard has been praying that he’ll be safely tucked away at a base hospital somewhere in the desert, treating people for bug bites. But Young has made it harder for her to harbor those illusions. Deep down, Heard knows Clay will witness the carnage of war.

“I don’t know what he’s going to see, and I don’t know what he’s going to experience,” she says. “He’ll probably have seen more than I have ever seen in my life. He’ll see people die, and probably hold them while they die.” She pauses to imagine her beloved treating people with their legs blown off.

Heard is counting on their faith — both in each other and in God — to help them make it through the separation and return. Still, she can’t get this one dream she had out of her head. In the dream, Clay was off in Iraq, and she learned that she had stomach cancer. When he found out that she was on her deathbed, he left his post to be with her. It was a bittersweet homecoming: They were together, but they didn’t have much time before the stomach cancer ate away at her completely.

What will this deployment do to them? Neither of them knows. “I keep saying, ‘Are you going to tell me about it when you come home?’ And he’s like, ‘What do you want to know?’

“I say, ‘I want you to tell me everything.’ ”

***

PHUNG TANG AND TRUC VO CAN’T BELIEVE THAT HEARD IS GETTING MARRIED. She’s too young, they tell her.

Both in their late twenties, the Vietnamese women are happily single, their cell phones constantly buzzing inside their trendy purses. Heard meets them at a banquet on one of the first days of the trip, and they become fast friends throughout her stay in Saigon. They get their nails done together, shop for lingerie and zip around the city on mopeds.

Heard bombards her new friends with a million questions about life in Vietnam: What do they do for a living? (Vo works for an insurance company; Tang is an accountant.) Do they have cars? (No, just mopeds.) How close are they to their families? (Very.) In turn, they take her to karaoke bars and the local open-air market, where Heard and a few other students are the only tourists in sight. Tang and Vo also take them on a picnic at a lush park filled with couples shooting their wedding pictures.

They give her, Heard says later, a “much greater appreciation for Vietnam. I see it more like a country now instead of just like a place where we had a war.”

Tang and Vo don’t talk about the war or what it did to their families, Heard says. It may be because their English isn’t good enough, though they certainly have plenty to say on the subject of men. Most women in Vietnam wait until they are 24 or 25 years old to get married, they say. Is Heard really sure she wants to do this?

***

THERE IS ONE WEEK LEFT ON THE TRIP when Heard gets her wedding dress made. She had picked out the gown in a bridal magazine and then taken a picture of it at a dress shop before leaving for Vietnam, she explains after her return home. The dress, which costs $600 in the United States, has a halter top with an empire waist and elaborate beading on the front. She is in love with it.

The photo of the dress remains packed until the group’s two-day visit to Hoi An, a city known for its fabrics, tailoring and low prices. By then, Heard says, she is ready for a break from all the talk of war.

Over the past two weeks, she has crawled through the Cu Chi tunnels, a vast underground network used by the Viet Cong as a base of operations through 1968, and fired an AK-47 rifle at the shooting range nearby. She has attended a repatriation ceremony at the U.S. Embassy for the remains of soldiers who had been missing in action since the war. She has met Bao Ninh, author of Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam. And she has listened to retired Major Gen. Benjamin Harrison, 76, tell his story about leading the fight for the Firebase Ripcord near the demilitarized zone in 1970, the last major U.S. ground battle there.

Heard has confronted killing fields on this trip. She has seen poverty beyond the worst public housing complex she could imagine — a bathroom that is nothing more than a corner on the dirt floor of a straw hut, and barefoot children shrimping in the delta. But, she says, she has also seen recovery and hope, not just for Vietnam, but also for herself.

She has found, she says, “a deeper sense of my moral values, and how much I take for granted what I have . . . It was sort of an enlightenment for me.”

The first afternoon in Hoi An, she sets off with a tour guide, Shows and another student, Lauren McKee, 22, in search of the Lan Chi tailor shop. Young recommended it to her — he buys clothes every year from the two women who run it.

Inside the tiny shop, bolts of shiny fabric are piled to the ceiling; there isn’t even a dressing room. A shy woman appears and asks them in halting English if they need help. Heard shows the woman the picture of the wedding dress and asks how much it would cost. The woman thinks for a moment. Eighty dollars, she offers. Heard is sold.

The students feel like movie stars for the rest of the afternoon and into the next day. The Vietnamese women take their measurements, and the students put in orders for virtually a whole closet of clothes. They shop so much that McKee jokingly says later: “I think I blacked out. I don’t even know what I bought.”

But when the tailors bring Heard’s wedding dress out for the first fitting, the bride-to-be is crestfallen. The beads sewn onto the front look like a bunch of cheap Mardi Gras trinkets, Heard says, though she can’t bring herself to complain to the tailors. They are so happy about her wedding and excited about her dress. She’ll just have to have the beading removed back in Mississippi.

Heard slips into the dress. It’s a little big, she says, but the tailors promise to take it in. The next time she tries it on, it fits like a dream.

The night before she returns to Saigon, she fingers the dress, taking in its sheen, the fullness of the skirt, even the awful beading, before packing it away with all her other things. This is my wedding dress, she remembers thinking. I am getting married.

Nothing she’s seen or heard in Vietnam has weakened her desire to marry Clay before he leaves for Iraq. Yet she thinks about John Young, fighting the same battle in his dreams night after night. She thinks about some of the other students, a generation removed from the war but still grappling with the effects it has had on their fathers’ lives and their own. And she thinks about herself and Clay, and what it will take for them to make it down the long road ahead of them.

“You think, ‘Oh, the war in Iraq.’ It’s just four words. And that’s all it is to some people, just those four words,” Heard says. She knows it won’t be for her. Not anymore.

SETH TIBBOTT was just an ordinary hippie living in a treehouse when inspiration struck.

The year was 1986, and Tibbott had hoped for six years that his small business selling vegetarian meat alternatives in rural Washington state would catch on. Success proved elusive — the treehouse was the only place he could afford to live — until he developed a soy-based version of the traditional Thanksgiving turkey. He called it Tofurky.

(Turkey Island Foods)

“It’s a name that resonates with consumers,” said Tibbott, who grew up in Chevy Chase. “We’re fine with the fact they think it’s funny or they get a smile out of it. You remember jokes.”

Tofurky hit store shelves in 1995, and the meatless dish has become a cultural phenomenon, even showing up on the TV shows ” Jeopardy” and “The O.C.” Tibbott’s company, Turtle Island Foods of Hood, Ore., has annual revenue of $11 million. Tofurky sales have grown 37 percent this year from 2006. He expects to sell 270,000 Tofurkys by the end of the holiday season, which translates to 438,000 pounds of tofu, wheat protein, canola oil and spices.

The concept was born of Tibbott’s vegetarian frustrations. After attending Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, he left for college in Ohio in 1969 and returned home having sworn off meat. Thanksgiving was particularly tough, he said, recalling a nasty bout with a stuffed pumpkin and a rock-hard gluten roast.

“We were looking for something for an answer and we figured there’s probably other people out there,” he said.

A 2006 poll conducted by Harris Interactive for the nonprofit Vegetarian Resource Group found that about 2 percent of adults are vegetarian, meaning they do not eat meat, poultry or seafood. The total was up from about 1 percent from a similar study the group conducted in 1994. The percentage of adults who do not eat poultry in particular grew to 6 percent from 3 percent.

The market, meanwhile, has been helped by omnivores who seek alternatives to meat for health reasons. They helped turn vegetarian foods into a $1.2 billion industry last year, up 44 percent from 2001, the consumer research firm Mintel said. The report found that 23 percent of non-vegetarians eat meat alternatives, though consumers still say the products cannot match the real thing.

John Cunningham, consumer research manager at the Vegetarian Resource Group, which has received donations from Tibbott’s company, acknowledged that Tofurky does not taste like turkey. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t taste good, with a firm texture and a salty, savory flavor. It just tastes different.

“It can take the place of a big piece of meat,” he said. “People are feeling a little bit neglected because all they get to eat are side dishes” during the holidays.

Tibbott started Turtle Island Foods in 1980 with $2,500 in savings and later with investments of $5,000 from his mother and $17,000 from his older brother, Bob, who lives in Chevy Chase. Originally, Tibbott peddled a product called tempeh, which is made from fermented soybeans. He started making 100 pounds of tempeh after hours in the cafe of a cooperative in Oregon, then delivering it to clients in Portland overnight.

Two years later, he moved the shoestring operation to an abandoned elementary school in a small logging town in the Cascade Mountains. The building had no heat, but it was near a scenic river and about a mile from Tibbott’s treehouse. It was cheaper than renting an apartment, and he could not afford much else. The treehouse was not quite as primitive as it sounds — there was electricity and phone service. At night, flying squirrels passed by his window.

Tibbott lived there for seven years before marrying and moving in with his wife, Suzanne, who lived in a more traditional apartment. When Tofurky hit, the treehouse days were gone for good.

Tibbott had seen a similar name used informally on other products, but he shortened it to have the same number of letters as a telephone number and had it trademarked. The first version of Tofurky, made from soy milk, was a mammoth affair with eight tempeh drumsticks. Tibbott said he had visions of families giving thanks over a large Tofurky, only to realize that just a few people at any gathering were likely to eat it. The latest version serves three or four people, and the drumsticks were replaced by cranberry apple potato dumplings.

The quirky product slowly gained notice. In 2000, it was mentioned in an episode of the TV show “The “X-Files.” A year later, Tofurky was a question on the game show “Jeopardy.” (No one got the correct answer.) The comedian Ellen DeGeneres brought up Tofurky on her show in 2003 and drew laughs from the audience.

“People don’t believe me,” she said. “There is a Tofurky.”

Though Tofurky has attracted the most attention, Tibbott’s company makes a range of faux meats. In fact, its best-selling products are vegetarian sausage and hickory-smoked deli slices. The Thanksgiving Tofurky roasts rank fifth in popularity and make up about 17 percent of the company’s revenue.

Despite the industry’s rapid growth, mainstream appeal may be limited. Harry Balzer, vice president at consumer behavior research firm NPD Group, said that less than 1 percent of households will be putting a meat alternative on their table this Thanksgiving. The National Turkey Federation estimates that 88 percent of Americans will eat turkey Thursday, adding up to 46 million gobblers, the most of any holiday.

“Clearly,” Balzer said, “it’s a strong tradition.”

WE’VE heard the nation’s leaders warn that we can’t really dig ourselves out of this economic ditch until consumer confidence returns—in other words, until we all feel safe enough to get out there and shop. But this plan of action feels rash. Excessive, reckless, down-payment-in-shoes-style consumption is what got us into this mess. And who needs another pair of strappy sandals anyway? But there is one kind of shopping that can help make a difference. It’s the most indulgent, frivolous, pamper-me style shopping—the kind you’ve probably become too monkish to consider. But it’s the best thing for the economy, and for your toes, especially if you’re wearing last year’s styles.

One of the best ways to stimulate the economy yourself is to spend money on personal services, according to Dean Baker, founder of the Center for Economic Policy Research. “Personal services” is finance code for manicures and pedicures, facials, babysitters, lawn care, and dog groomers. Apparently, this is a more efficient and effective form of consumerism, for yourself and the economy as a whole. Service industries generally have low overhead and spend more of their revenue on paying staff than a typical store. They are also often locally owned, keeping your dollars not just within the country’s borders, but in your own community.

Retailers spend most of their revenue on two things: merchandise and labor. They have to pay for the physical goods—which are frequently manufactured overseas (we’ll get to that later). They also have to pay to store the goods in a warehouse, ship them to the store, and then ship them back if they don’t sell. But in the service industry, the goods and the labor are one in the same. The product your manicurist is selling is her time, knowledge, and skills. That means a larger percentage of each dollar you spend goes directly toward paying her, and less is lost to the fixed costs of doing business.

Spending on services also allows your money to stay in your community longer. The services industry is made up primarily of small mom-and-pop outfits rather than national chain stores. Think of your neighborhood nail salon or the day spa in the town center. Any profits from their businesses are boosting the local economy, and that’s stimulus you’re likely to see.

Let’s say you spend $100 on one of those exfoliating facials at your local spa. (Your pores don’t clean themselves just because it’s a recession, you know.) Your esthetician pockets most of that amount—$90—and then uses it to pay for a hair cut at a local salon. The stylist then takes most of that money—$80—to pay the dogwalker. Your initial $100 expenditure has actually resulted in $270 in consumer spending right there in your neighborhood. And the chain continues down to the last cent.

The key is distribution. Ultimately, any time you spend money, you are helping to boost the global economy. But in this scenario, your money circulates within a defined area. It spurs economic activity in your neighborhood and directly employs people that you know.

“In some cases you spend it in a way in which a lot of people make a little money, or in some cases you spend it so that one person makes a lot of money,” said Brent Moulton, associate director at the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Now let’s say you spend the same $100 on a new sweater. Part of that money pays the wages of the person who sold it to you, but a large portion would also go to the people who made the sweater—and those people probably do not live in the United States. You’re also paying for transporting the sweater from a distant shore to your local store, with taxes and fees eating up your $100 every step of the way.

Mark Zandi, chief economist with Moody’s, estimates that roughly 20 cents of every dollar spent on goods in America winds up overseas. At the Gap—where I have admittedly purchased my fair share of striped tees—about 66 percent of total revenue goes toward paying for the merchandise and rent.

If you’re really not a facial, dog-grooming kind of person, there are other things you can buy to maximize the economic bang for your buck. Baker suggests food, particularly produce, as another smart purchase because much of it is grown in the United States. Anything made in American is useful right now. My husband and I, for example, are considering a new dining room table made by a local craftsman with wood from Pennsylvania.

But how many new dining room tables can you buy? Services tend to require frequent, repeat spending—your color needs touching up, the grass always needs mowing, and your kids go to daycare every day. And we’re getting to that point in the summer where toes go to the top of the priority list.

Yes, it’s kind of protectionist, but with a twist. Our bumper sticker will be slightly less obnoxious than the usual nativist kind. Something like: Get a Facial. Good for America. Good for your Pores.

AS many of us tighten our budgetary belts, some people are taking the concept to a new extreme by vowing not to spend any money at all. No movie rentals or drinks with friends. No parking the car at the garage, no newspaper for the subway ride. No groceries, even. This is about more than just pinching a few pennies. This is a consumer detox.

These moratoriums on spending can last a week, a month, or longer. The purpose is, obviously, to save money. But many adherents of the consumer detox are also looking for a deeper meaning. Like monks who fast to bring themselves closer to enlightenment, they are abstaining to clear their minds of superfluous wants that somehow turned into needs. They also hope to reconnect with family and friends by disconnecting from the checkout line. And most of all, they seem to be searching for some lost piece of themselves that got buried under all the junk stuffed into our closets.

The practice presumes that buying stuff is evil or at least a bad habit we should be working to get rid of. But spending money is a fact of life, and it’s virtually impossible to extricate yourself from consumer society. Sure, overspending is a serious problem that can lead to credit card debt and financial ruin, just like overeating can result in diabetes and heart problems. But starvation, in either case, is not a solution.

In 2006, Judith Levine published the book Not Buying It [2], about her year of consumer abstinence. Levine has written several controversial books, including one on our culture’s obsession with protecting children from sexuality. The idea for Not Buying It [2] came during the throes of holiday shopping, when she was overwhelmed by the waste and futility of it all. The same year her book was published, a group called The Compact was founded in California around a similar pledge: not to buy anything new for 12 months.

Both the book and the group sparked intense debate—particularly as reprimands to the country’ growing debt bubble—but remained the domain of progressive hippie-types. Then in February, personal-finance celebrity Liz Pulliam Weston [3], inspired by Not Buying It [2], made the consumer detox more mainstream. In her MSN Money column, she encouraged readers to buy nothing for a month [4] and report back to her. Some of Weston’s followers reported impressive results: They lost 10 pounds. They rekindled the fire with their hubbies. They saved $800. They wanted to keep going. One woman who responded to the challenge included groceries in her moratorium because she had 120 cans of tuna stockpiled in her basement

My interest was piqued when I heard that an old college friend, Asya Johnson Valdez, had embarked on a detox. She and her husband were used to dropping $200 or $300 on dinners with the kids and three-day getaways. But she was laid off in January and decided it was time to get serious about saving. She prepped carefully for her period of abstinence, choosing a month with no birthdays or anniversaries. She even paid all her bills in advance so she could truly go cash-free in June.

She broke her no-spending promise in the first week.

She had to spend $10 on a co-pay for a doctor’s appointment and another $40 on prescriptions. A trip to the emergency room for gall stones cost $50. The washing machine broke. Trying to keep to the spirit if not the letter of the detox, she replaced it with a slightly used one for $100.

I told her those expenses seemed justified. After all, even the most avid detoxer wouldn’t expect her to suffer gall stones in silence. But Valdez said that once she started spending money—on anything—the spell broke. She abandoned the project, took the family to the drive-in, and ordered everyone a round of oyster po-boys. It all unfolded in a vicious cycle, just like they say in AA: She felt guilty about the purchases, so she purchased more, screwing up the whole project.

But with such strict guidelines, screwing up is to be expected. Weston said almost everyone who took her challenge slipped up at least once. Levine’s downfall in her book was a pair of pants. And in a recent interview, she said she has returned to her carefree buying ways, though she now pays off her credit card every month. Trying to extricate yourself from consumerism is like trying to stop breathing, she said.

“When you get right down to it, unless you are growing your own food, cutting your wood, shearing your own sheep and weaving your cloth and making your own clothing, no, there is no way,” she said.

Julia Scott, who writes a blog called Bargain Babe, argues for a different analogy: She thought of her monthlong consumer detox in July like Lent—a lesson in the importance of sacrifice. Her ground rules prohibited discretionary spending but still allowed her to buy necessities like groceries and toiletries and pay her bills.

Scott quickly realized that life without money threatened to be boring. She turned down several dinner invitations and MeetUp events. She allowed herself to accept gifts if they were not out of the ordinary, like the dinner out her husband treats her to every other week. But when her friends invited her to happy hour, her spirits fell. Of course she couldn’t go.

Or could she? She didn’t want the spending moratorium to equal a moratorium on fun. So she ate at home to ward off temptation and braved the happy hour. She ordered a water to be social and tipped the waitress $1 for her time and service—technically breaking the no-spend rule.

Scott said she has tried not to beat herself up about breaking her rules. Imposing a spending moratorium on herself was one thing; making the waitress take part would be another.

“When I enforce my choices on other people, that’s being cheap,” Scott said in an interview.

But every choice we make has consequences, intentional or not. Seven-thousand people got fired from Home Depot because we as a nation decided that now is not the time to remodel the bathroom. Consumer spending drives our economy, and we probably won’t get out of this recession until shopping stops being a dirty word.

The consumer detox is not a sustainable way of life—individually or collectively. It may help you rebalance your financial needs and wants, not to mention your checkbook, but it can also foster unrealistic expectations and induce needless guilt. Though we may try to fight it, we all are consumers. And there is no shame in that.

THE nation’s retailers have begun to embrace the new cost-conscious consumer, developing products they can sell at lower prices without driving themselves out of business in the post-splurge era.

Starbucks dropped the price of a medium iced coffee last week to just under $2. American Eagle cut out the ribbon from the inside waistband of its khakis and lowered the cost. Pottery Barn launched a new “Comfort Collection” sofa that starts at $999.99, which is $300 less than the “Basic Collection” sofa. Even Rock & Republic, whose trendy denim has graced the backsides of celebrities such as Victoria Beckham, recently unveiled a line of recessionista jeans selling for $128, a 29 percent reduction.

Retailers have absorbed the lessons of a ruinous holiday season. Caught with shelves full of unsold merchandise, they slashed prices to draw in shoppers. But the strategy was unsustainable: It decimated profits and resulted in massive layoffs, killing off a number of chains, including Circuit City. Serving recession-era shoppers, retailers realized, would require a long-term strategy featuring lower prices.

“What we have is retailers reacting to a very low-appetite consumer and a consumer that has been now taught to wait,” said Michael Silverstein, senior partner at Boston Consulting Group.

The new consumer has curtailed spending and increased savings to 10-year highs. Smaller houses are newly coveted, bringing the average size of a new home down in 2008 for the first time in 35 years, according to the National Association of Home Builders. Fancy dinners out have been scaled back, prompting restaurants to reconfigure their menus. (Clyde’s created a cheaper entree by offering one crabcake instead of two last month.) A recent survey by Boston Consulting Group found that 48 percent of consumers said they traded down on products last year, an increase from 41 percent in 2007. The number of shoppers trading up fell by six percentage points.

Retailers reassess their prices and their assortment of products every season. But this year, they are being particularly conservative. They are less willing to take risks on trendy, unproven merchandise and are stocking tried-and-true customer favorites. They have been reducing inventories; import cargo fell to the lowest level in seven years in February, according to an industry trade group. Many are putting more emphasis on lowering prices on the cheapest version of their products.

Consumer prices fell on a year-over-year basis in March for the first time in more than half a century, driven primarily by plummeting energy and transportation prices. Apparel and food prices increased during that period but fell on a monthly basis. Some economists have worried that falling prices could result in deflation, but Hemant Sangwan, a consultant with IHS Global Insight, said he doesn’t think that is a danger in the retail sector. He considered the price cuts more of a marketing strategy to win over reluctant shoppers.

“Prices, especially in the retail sector, are very easy to change,” Sangwan said. “As soon as the nature of consumers will change, prices will respond in the same way.”

Some price reductions have come from stripping out fancy details for which retailers once charged a premium. Production costs have also dropped, allowing sellers to pass on the savings. Retailers are streamlining supply chains and creating new merchandise with cheaper components and lower prices. In some cases, they are sacrificing profits and hoping to make up the difference in volume.

Gretchen Hitchner sent back the $400 cocktail dresses she ordered from a vendor in favor of stocking up on a more versatile minidress that sells for $98 at her Bethesda boutique, Ginger. She cut her purchases for the fall by roughly 20 percent and is trying to offer more clothing for less than $200.

“You take a chance every season with every style,” she said. “It’s a whole different story this year.”

Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz said the company is tweaking pricing on its coffees after closing hundreds of stores over the past year. “Grande” iced coffee began selling for $1.95 last week, down from $2.25 in the Washington area. The company is also lowering prices on popular beverages such as tall lattes in some markets, though it is also raising the price of larger, more complex drinks.

“Consumers want to feel good about every hard-earned dollar they spend, and we certainly understand that,” Schultz told analysts.

Profit at the accessories manufacturer Coach fell 29 percent to $115 million, during the most recent quarter, compared with the previous year. The company responded by repricing its merchandise 10 to 15 percent lower and offering more styles for less than $300. Next fiscal year, it plans for nearly half of the merchandise in its stores to cost $200 to $300, compared with 30 percent selling in that range this year.

J. Crew, meantime, now sells a new, more basic version of its popular ballet flat for $98. The cheapest ballet flat previously cost $118. This fall, the retailer plans to lower the price of its entry-level jeans by about $20 from $92.50.

“We do know for sure that there is an enormous price sensitivity out there,” chief executive Millard S. Drexler said in a recent conference call with analysts. “We’re just being real conservative now.”

Williams-Sonoma, which owns the eponymous cooking store, said it is working to sell key items for less than $100 and lower prices on glassware and cutlery. Its home furnishings chain Pottery Barn was able to control costs on its new $999 sofa by manufacturing the frame in its factory in western North Carolina, Pottery Barn President Sandra Stangl said.

“It’s comfortable, it’s easy and relaxed, and I can afford it,” Stangl said of the sofa. “Pricing, especially during these really tough economic times, is extremely important to our customers.”

Getting shoppers to spend without resorting to discounting is crucial to retailers’ bottom lines. According to Silverstein, gross profit margin on “first delivery” merchandise can reach 60 percent or more. After the first markdown, the profit margin shrinks to 40 percent. The second price cut slashes the margin to 20 percent.

But it remains unclear whether consumers are willing to open their wallets. Retail sales were down 10.7 percent in March from the same month last year, according to government data. Unemployment is near 9 percent, wage growth has stalled, and home prices continue to fall.

“I’m seeing it kind of sucks,” Drexler said. “I wish I had a better answer. I wish we could see the road map more clearly. It’s just not the case.”

IN THESE recessionary times, people like Seigrid Walker are no longer concerned about keeping up with the Joneses. Now the goal is to fall far behind them.

The 33-year-old lawyer from Mitchellville once regaled her friends with tales of shopping sprees at Nordstrom and circulated photos of Caribbean vacations with her husband. Now she tells her girlfriends about staying home for pizza night with the kids. (They watch “Madagascar.” Over and over again.)

If people know that she can no longer afford to get her hair done every few weeks, who cares?

“If they notice, it’s like, ‘Phew, I’m not the only one,’ ” Walker said. “There’s a certain camaraderie with everyone understanding that everything is tight.”

The recession has changed the conversation in America. As the era of conspicuous consumption fades along with our 401(k)s, people are clamoring for caps on executive pay and recoiling at the idea of bosses cavorting at expensive spas. At play dates and happy hours, friends are swapping recipes instead of making restaurant reservations. Teenagers are skipping flashy block-long limos and showing up to prom in minivans. Coupons has become a more popular search term than Britney Spears on Google.

Instead of feeling self-conscious about spending less, people are flaunting their frugality. Both those who have lost income, such as Walker, and those who simply fear they may become at risk are part of the new discourse.

“Something very deep has changed in the American psyche,” said Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke. “The recession basically woke us up.”

That change was in painful evidence yesterday when luxury retailer Saks reported May sales were down nearly 27 percent from a year ago and Nordstrom said its fell 13 percent. Abercrombie and Fitch, which has been reluctant to lower prices, was down 28 percent. Overall, sales fell 4.6 percent at U.S. chain stores, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers.

According to a recent telephone survey of 1,000 people that Ariely conducted for Bank of America, about 80 percent of those surveyed said they are more conscious of spending now than at the beginning of the year. A Gallup poll in April showed 59 percent of Americans enjoy saving money, compared with 48 percent in April 2001. The percentage of people who said they enjoyed spending money dropped to 37 percent in April from 45 percent in 1991.

Such large numbers have helped normalize a new, more thrifty pattern of consumer behavior, Ariely said. In other words, being cheap has become socially acceptable.

Sarah Morgan said she didn’t mind showing up at the Loudoun Valley High School senior prom in her mom’s Dodge Caravan. The 18-year-old and her friends considered a limo but quickly dismissed the idea once they realized it would cost $45 to $60 a person.

“Some people were like, ‘Oh wow, you came in a van, that’s cool,’ ” Morgan said. “Everyone is cutting back, and it’s an easier way to get to someplace.”

The same mind-set has helped turn consignment sales into a main topic of conversation during Gina Lincicum’s moms club meetings.

Loathe to attend events with paid tickets, they alert one another to free family outings. E-mail chains now share cheap crockpot recipes for summer. So many people have asked Lincicum for her homemade pizza recipe — as much as $20 cheaper than delivery — that she posted it on her blog, Moneywise Mom.

“You can go to a social and everybody’s talking about how to save money, and that wasn’t the case a few years ago,” said Lincicum, 36, of Burke.

Consumer confidence has rebounded after bottoming out in February, according to data from The Conference Board. The index is now at its highest level since the financial meltdown in the fall, though 45 percent of people reported business conditions are bad compared with 30 percent a year ago.

But IHS Global Insight economist Brian Bethune said spending has not followed the same patterns. Retail sales fell unexpectedly in April despite a significant gain in consumer confidence that month. Low home prices and restricted access to credit have also curtailed the ability — and desire — to spend. The personal savings rate was above 4 percent during the first quarter, the highest it has been all decade.

People now idolize women like Stephanie Nelson, one of the new rock stars of the recession. Nicknamed The Coupon Mom, she retains a publicist and has appeared on The Early Show, The Today Show and Oprah since the downturn began. Traffic to her Web site tripled in 2008 and is up 67 percent this year. At another popular Web site, The Coupon Clippers, members brag about their latest gets on a Facebook fan page and bulletin board:

“I once bought a $40 sweater for 74 cents from the sale rack.”

“I bought $73.00 worth of groceries for $6.00 last week and $180.00 for $35 this week!! LOVE IT!”

“It amazes me when people act like they are above using a coupon. Whatever. Go ahead and pay those prices!”

Coupon Clippers founder Rachael Woodard marvels at the change that has come over Americans as the era of spend-it-all has receded into the age of save-what-you can. Many of her new members are not financially imperiled. Some even report six-figure salaries, she said.

“You had to get around a certain crowd to talk about how much you saved or didn’t spend because you would be called cheap,” Woodard said. “Now it’s okay to talk about it.”

Pamela Thompson, 38, of Leesburg said she got the bug after girlfriend Lindsay Coursen raved about slashing her grocery bill to $100 a month for a family of four. Thompson’s bill was closer to $1,500 for her husband and three kids — even as the family’s investments have taken a hit, and several of her friends have lost their jobs.

“I was like, Lindsay, you have to tell me about this,” Thompson said.

Now the women trade tips and share them with other friends and family. They can get competitive, particularly during a sale. Thompson said has raced to the supermarket when she has heard of a deal — only to find that Coursen has been there and depleted the stock.

“That drives me crazy,” Thompson said. “I tell her I’m going to go at six in the morning . . . and wipe all the shelves before her, just once.”

For those who have long been thrifty, the savings craze represents a vindication of sorts.

Stephanie Blackshear, 41, of Dumfries said her husband has laughed at her penny-pinching ways for years. On a recent morning, she walked the halls of Potomac Mills, checking prices and taking advantage of a free kids’ concert at the mall for her 3-year-old daughter, Madison. She refuses to buy anything that’s not marked down. Her cousins, her in-laws, even parents of the kids in the basketball team her husband coaches — all have turned to her for money-saving advice.

“How can you shop right now when the economy is so bad?” Blackshear recalled them asking. “I said, you should’ve been listening to me all those years. You would have some money in your pocket.”

OPENING more stores wasn’t enough for retailers during boom times. They wanted to create new forms of life.

Specialty chains spun off new concepts that targeted different demographics. Teen retailer Abercrombie & Fitch spawned Ruehl for postgrads, while rival chain American Eagle created Martin + Osa with casual clothes for young professionals. J. Crew launched Madewell, a sort of hipster little sister. Aeropostale had a rock-inspired chain called Jimmy’z.

But now their fledgling concepts are struggling in the face of the worst recession in decades. At best, they have become distractions to the companies’ already embattled management. At worst, they are a drain on earnings — and some are shutting down altogether.

“It’s hard enough for new brands to gain traction in a new environment let alone in the worst recession in decades,” said Todd Slater, an analyst with Lazard Capital Markets. “In downturns, many new initiatives are sidelined.”

Last month, Abercrombie announced it will close its 29 Ruehl stores, including one in Tysons Corner Center. Jimmy’z went dark back in February. Some analysts wonder if American Eagle will pull the plug on Martin + Osa. And J. Crew executives have admitted missteps in fashion and pricing at Madewell.

Retailers are under enormous pressure to reinvigorate sales and slash costs. June sales at stores open at least a year — a key industry measure of health — dropped 4.7 percent compared with last year, according to data released yesterday. Specialty retailers took one of the biggest hits, with sales at Abercrombie plummeting 32 percent in June, the worst performance of any retailer yesterday.

During flush economic times, retailers embraced new concepts as a way to increase sales. Many chains had already saturated shopping centers with new stores, so if they wanted to win new customers, they had to create new concepts for them to shop.

“One thing everyone’s afraid of is [a chain's] maturity,” said Brian Tunick, an analyst with J.P. Morgan.

Some spinoffs have taken off. Victoria Secret’s collegiate-inspired Pink stores are considered one of the most recent success stories. American Eagle followed suit with Aerie, which also has experienced solid results. Retail experts consider Gap’s launch of Old Navy in the 1990s one of the greatest hits ever, though the chain is struggling now.

But dismal sales have forced some retailers to think twice. Many are retrenching by shutting down stores, slashing staff and marking down prices. And investors have little patience for money-losing concepts.

“Later Jimmy!” read the headline for a research report by Jefferies analyst Randal J. Konik. “Other retailers should follow suit.”

Aeropostale’s reputation for bargains has helped it deliver one of the few strong performances during the recession, and it was the first to jettison its money-losing concept in February. Jimmy’z had 11 stores with an L.A. rock vibe targeting 18- to 25-year-olds. The company cited macroeconomic conditions in closing the brand, which it had launched in 1995.

Abercrombie’s Ruehl stores, launched in 2004, were designed to resemble a Greenwich Village brownstone. Unlike most stores that showcase their wares in their windows, no merchandise was visible to mall pedestrians, a thumping bass line and the scent of a musky cologne the only invitations to walk inside.

But though the design was elaborate, analysts said the clothing — torn denim, slouchy T-shirts, soft camis — was too similar to the merchandise in traditional Abercrombie stores. The concept lost $58 million before taxes last fiscal year. Abercrombie also said closing the chain will result in about 200 job cuts.

Industry experts have been speculating that American Eagle could close its unprofitable Martin + Osa brand. But American Eagle executives said sales at the chain have picked up 7 percent from last year, with particularly encouraging signs in its women’s business, and they hope for further improvements the rest of the year.

J. Crew chief executive Millard S. Drexler has acknowledged that clothing at its Madewell spinoff was too basic and expensive, particularly the jeans. The concept is costing the company about $15 million this fiscal year and it lost about $11 million last year, according to Needham analyst Christine Chen.

In a recent conference call with investors, Drexler said that when plans for Madewell were drawn up three years ago, the company decided to start denim at $98 — and shoppers balked. Now the cheapest jeans are $59.50.

“So frankly, in hindsight, a mistake,” Drexler told investors. “The world is kind of changed dramatically in that regard.”

Bringing a new concept to profitability requires a large investment. The rule of thumb, Tunick said, requires 80 to 100 stores ringing up $400 in sales per square foot to break even. Closing a concept now doesn’t always mean it was doomed to failure. Few predicted the consumer meltdown that occurred last fall.

“I don’t think a weak-performing new concept or spinoff is indicative necessarily of anything more than a flaw in timing,” Slater said.

And retailers are not abandoning all hope of innovation. Abercrombie is slated to open a new iteration of its surfer Hollister chain called Epic Hollister in New York later this month that is touted as 40,000 square feet of “pure California fantasy.” Aeropostale recently opened a new store for tweens called P.S. From Aeropostale, with nine more planned for this fiscal year.

“If you’re not moving now to be there, you’re going to be playing catch-up by the time the consumer returns,” said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst for NPD Group, a market research firm. “It’s the world’s worst time to be sitting still.”

EVERY action must have an equal and opposite reaction, or so the laws of physics say. Push and pull. Proton and electron. Gravity and levity.

And now, Red Bull and Drank.

Drank falls in an emerging category of “relaxation beverages,” concocted to soothe the overextended, overbooked and overworked masses that have been hopped up on energy drinks for the past decade. Drank’s slogan? “Slow your roll.”

“I wasn’t the only person speaking 50 miles per hour,” said Peter Bianchi, who invented Drank. “It was my personal quest to relax the world.”

Drank and similar nonalcoholic beverages are hitting the market just as Americans are being beaten down by the longest recession since World War II, and industry marketers have seized on the drinks’ purported calming properties as the antidote for a stressed-out society. Vacation in a Bottle calls itself “the happy relaxation drink.” For Superliminal Purple Stuff Pro-Relaxation Formula, the name says it all. And iChill, a relaxation shot, urges users to “unwind from the grind.”

“You guys in Washington can affect the relaxation-drink market when you get the economy back on track,” said George Smart, founder of the company behind calming beverage Blue Cow.

Relaxation drinks are still only a drop in the bucket of what research firm Mintel estimates is a $50 billion market for nonalcoholic beverages. Soda remains the liquid staple of our diets, commanding about $13.1 billion in sales for 2008. Energy drinks are the fastest-growing sector by far, accounting for about $896 million in sales. But sales are starting to level off after years of triple-digit percentage growth earlier this decade. Consumers have been overwhelmed by the number of new brands — more than 300 energy drinks appeared on store shelves between 2003 and 2008.

“There is room for so much diversification within the beverage market,” said Harry Balzer, an analyst with consumer research firm NPD Group. “The one thing we do like as humans is new things.”

That’s what prompted Funktional Beverages, based near Houston, to heed this Business 101 lesson: go where they ain’t.

The company, founded last year, contemplated launching with an energy drink called Red Stuff, said Tim Lucas, chief marketing officer. But they worried that the beverage would struggle to stand out in a crowded market. Instead, Funktional Beverages created Purple Stuff, packed with herbs and amino acids that supposedly calm the mind and body, and aimed it squarely at the urban 18- to 35-year-old males who once pledged their loyalty to amped-up energy drinks.

To win over this crowd, the company had to make relaxation seem edgy, less yoga studio and more skateboard park, which is exactly where Funktional Beverages handed out free bottles of Purple Stuff. For today’s youths, Lucas explained, relaxation means surfing, water-skiing and cage fighting.

Cage fighting?

“We’re about not being nervous as we jump out of a plane,” Lucas clarified.

Controversy over the beverage is bubbling, because, along with Drank, the name Purple Stuff resembles slang for the dangerous cocktail of cough syrup and soda referenced in hip-hop music. The companies maintain that the resemblance is unintentional and that, if anything, their products are actually good for you.

Many of the relaxation beverages contain the amino acid L-theanine, which is found in green tea and thought to have calming properties, the companies say. (Drank does not include the ingredient.) Japanese researchers isolated theanine about 60 years ago, and a company called Taiyo Kagaku soon began manufacturing it commercially. Introduced to the United States in dietary supplements about a decade ago, theanine got the green light from the Food and Drug Administration for use in food and beverages in 2006.

A spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association said that theanine’s benefits remain unclear but that it certainly is not harmful. Taiyo Kagaku opened an office in the United States, contracting Connecticut firm NutriScience to market the ingredient, and thus the relaxation drink was born.

Perhaps it is only fitting that those who saw theanine’s early potential led tumultuous lives. George Smart said he retired as an executive at food manufacturer Carnation to spend time with his kids in his multimillion-dollar home overlooking the ocean in California — only to wind up living in a van after a messy divorce.

It was lonely then, and Smart had trouble relaxing. That sparked the idea for a new product, Blue Cow, launched in 2005. Packed with theanine, it is billed as the original relaxation beverage.

“They laughed. ‘Nobody will ever buy a relaxation drink,’ ” Smart said of the initial reaction.

But maybe Blue Cow was just ahead of its time. Sales growth in the energy drink market was peaking in 2005 along with the economy. The young and the restless stayed up all night, fueled by Red Bulls, enjoying the riches that healthy bonuses and rising wages afforded them. One energy drink company sponsored a movie produced by entrepreneur Travis Hollman. Members of the film crew started drinking one or two energy drinks a day to get through long shoots. By the end, Hollman said, they were up to six or seven a day and fights started to break out among the strung-out staff.

“They were going crazy,” he recalled. “And then we started talking and said, ‘Why hasn’t anyone done the opposite?’ ”

He launched Vacation in a Bottle — or, simply, ViB — last year. The company now has 26 employees and is on track to pull in about $8 million in annual sales. Hollman said he is unsure whether the recession has helped or hurt his product. He worries that people have less money to spend on such petty indulgences as relaxation.

On the other hand, he said, “if you can’t take a vacation, go buy one at the local grocery store.”

THE economic downturn is forcing America’s households to learn a tough lesson: how to fend for themselves.

Sales of starter sewing kits have shot up by 30 percent at Wal-Mart as families forgo the tailor. Landscaping companies have suffered a 7 percent drop in revenue over the past year. Procter & Gamble said that it has noticed more questions from customers about how to dye their hair at home to match salon coloring.

The recession has had a powerful effect on the American state of mind. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released yesterday shows Americans have grown increasingly insecure about their finances since mid-September, as fears about making mortgage payments have spread and more believe the economy is in a long-term, serious decline.

These feelings have helped set off a change in behavior so pronounced marketers and businesses have coined a name for it. They call it “insourcing”: doing yourself what you once gladly paid others to do. 

Two-thirds of those responding to the new poll said they’ve cut back on spending, including nearly a third who have pulled back “sharply.” Americans across income groups said they are opening their wallets less often these days. 

“There are many of us that have been spending money that we can’t afford to spend and have taken on habits that we had no business taking on,” said Paco Underhill, who studies consumer behavior and wrote the book “Why We Buy.” “Those time-based trade-offs actually are some of the easiest forms of economizing that a person can do.”

Spending on pet services, for example, is expected to grow 6 percent this year after jumping as much as 40 percent earlier in the decade, according to an industry trade group. A report by SBI, a market research firm, shows the number of landscaping firms dwindled by 5,600, or 3.3 percent, last year. And an analysis of a range of services companies compiled by research firm Sageworks showed sales growth slowed to 4 percent last year, the lowest level in at least six years.

“So much of it comes down to perception,” said Gordon Miller, executive director of the National Cosmetology Association, a trade group. “Do I perceive the service that I’m getting as an added pampering, or do I need it?”

Miller said his members report clients stretching the time between appointments. Professional Consultants & Resources, a beauty consulting company, estimated the salon industry continued to grow last year, but at 2.8 percent, a historic low. Susan Gustafson, president of Ratner Cos., which owns national chain Hair Cuttery, said more clients are showing up for just a trim, coloring their hair at home.

Many are adjusting their behavior even though their financial circumstances are unchanged, motivated by fear over the future of the economy. Overall, 70 percent of Americans anticipate a downturn lasting well into 2010 or longer, according to the Post-ABC News poll. More than a third see it lasting two or more years. Those who see an extended recession are more likely to say they’ve pared back their typical buying habits.

Take Chris and Mary Poleto of Haymarket, whose income is stable but who are trying to chip away at credit card bills.

Within one week, Mary changed the bulb in the headlight of her Mercedes, cutting out a $120 trip to the mechanic. The couple made a cake for their 11-year-old daughter’s birthday party instead of spending $50 at the local bakery. And Chris, who works in a management job, picked up some cans of paint from the Sears in Fair Oaks to help a friend redecorate — seven hours of work but a savings of roughly $1,000.

“We really had to look at the equation to build in additional efficiencies,”Chris Poleto said.

Consumers are weighing similar decisions across sectors. Paola Domenge, 34, of Potomac canceled her lawn service last year and now mulches the yard and trims the wisteria herself, saving as much as $500 a month –even before she was laid off from her marketing job about a month ago and started a bakery. Alina Zhukovskaya, 28, of Arlington dismissed her personal trainer to save $60 a week.

Camilla Bozzoli, 66, of the District decided $50 was too much to pay a tailor to dye one of her favorite, but well-worn dresses. Instead, she pulled out a bucket, gloves and a wooden spoon and did the job herself. “Fifty dollars is almost the price of a new outfit,” she said. “It makes me feel good not only because of saving money, but as a philosophy of life not to waste.”

Advertising agency Peterson Milla Hooks, which produces commercials for Target, noticed the insourcing trend last summer as gas prices began to rise. Thomas Nowak, agency director, likened consumers’ response to the financial crisis to the stages of grief: First there was denial and anger. PMH wanted to help Target move them toward the final stage of acceptance. “People say, ‘You know what? This is the new normal, and we need to make the best of it,’ ” he said.

PMH created a series of ads dubbed New Day for Target that depicted an $11.88 yoga ball as “the new gym,” a $29.99 espresso maker as “the new coffee spot” and $1.97 glass cleaner as “the new car wash.”

Sewing products manufacturer Prym Consumer USA was surprised when sales of its basic sewing kit — a needle, thread and a few buttons costing $1.12 — began to rise six months ago at Wal-Mart stores. Typically, sales remain stable, said Laura Mooney, director of marketing for Prym. Sewing kit sales are now up 30 percent. Sales of its popular fabric adhesive Liquid Stitch, which costs $2.93, have skyrocketed more than 50 percent.

Wal-Mart said sales of herb gardens and tomato and pepper seeds are up, an indication that shoppers are trying to save money by growing their own food, spokeswoman Melissa O’Brien said. In Wal-Mart’s auto department, sales of oil, filters, grease and funnels have also risen as more people opt to be their own mechanic.

Underhill, the retail consultant, predicts consumers’ newfound self-sufficiency will last even after the recession is a distant memory. “Americans have always taken some pride in doing things for themselves,” he said. But there may be limits.

Brenda Waller, 42, of Herndon said her consulting firm has frozen salaries, and she’s worried about the future. She has called off the lawn care service for the coming summer and asked the woman who does her nails to cut them extra short — so the manicure will last longer. And no more pedicures. But she is holding on to DoodyCalls, a company that cleans up after her pets in the yard. Founder Jacob D’Aniello said his Charlottesville-based company grew by 21 percent last year.

“The only time I really felt we’d be in trouble,” he said, “is if everybody woke up one morning and decided they liked picking up dog poop.”

Polling director Jon Cohen and polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.