My in-laws come to the lake on Saturday afternoons with mats and food they cooked at home.

They spread out on the grass, the children disappear somewhere, and the adults settle in for a few hours. None of them lives in Phú Mỹ Hưng. They ride in from other parts of Ho Chi Minh City and go home again at a set hour. Residents wander down to the water whenever they feel like it and fall back.

Everyone else keeps a visitor’s clock.

Eleven years here and that is still the first thing I see.

I did not arrive in this city through this district. My first years in Vietnam were spent in Củ Chi, which falls inside Ho Chi Minh City and belongs to a different world.

People are hard on Phú Mỹ Hưng.

They call it an enclave, and they mean that it is expensive and closed. The apartments support the charge. Most of this city could never buy one, and I have no interest in pretending otherwise.

The charge falls down on the question of who uses the place.

Walk through the parks on a weekend, and most of the people in them came from somewhere else (dog walkers, families with cool boxes, groups who claim a patch of grass at two in the afternoon and hold it until dark). The wide roads and the slow traffic were designed for the people who live here, and they have become the reason a family in another district will spend an hour on a motorbike getting across town.

There are few places in Ho Chi Minh City where you can take your eyes off a child for a minute.

The ground floor has changed more than the grass in my time here.

Most of the independents I knew when I arrived have closed, and international chains now hold their units, which is what happens to somewhere on its way to becoming more expensive. Anyone making the enclave argument should lead with it.

I would not have much to say back.

There are more people in the parks than when I moved in, and more of them live somewhere else.

Mornings I ride before the heat, when the roads are empty, and the coffee shops are still putting their chairs out. The hour belongs in peace and quiet.

The afternoon is the part I love.

For a few hours a week, the district stops behaving like a product and turns into an ordinary piece of the city, full of other people’s food and other people’s children, running through picnics on the way back around the bridge.

It was built and sold as somewhere to live.

Eleven years on, most of the people I watch enjoying it never bought or rented anything here. My in-laws are among them, and they will be back next Saturday with the mats.