One recent Saturday night, a family of four tucked into a capacious booth at Mai Village and, over cream-cheese wontons for the small folk ($4.25) and limey bun salads topped with two types of sweet, fatty pork ($6.95 each), for the credit-card-wielders, they talked of Vietnam. And therefore of the two-headed dragons adorning the wooden bridge at the entrance and the koi shimmering beneath. Of the elaborate carvings on nearly every surface in the dining room—the windowsills, the chairs, the astonishing fenced grotto at the heart of the space. The small admirers wondered why anyone would leave Vietnam in the first place, and by the time the talk and the meal were finished, all agreed that in the Twin Cities we are lucky indeed that someone poured so much history, and so much love, into creating this slice of old Hue for young Vietnamese-Americans to sample the richness of their ancestral home. Beauty and grace are splendid teachers indeed.