MY NEW FRIEND Hong, a friendly and husky-voiced 29-year-old Vietnamese woman, is pouring me another shot of rice wine from a bottle that contains the pickled remains of a lizard, a cobra, a scorpion, and two seahorses, swimming in a medley of vegetation that looks like something cleared out from the underside of a lawn mower. It's February 15, and we're sitting in a living room in the Old Quarter of Hanoi, two nights before the official start of the Tet holiday. For many Americans, Tet conjures memories of the 1968 Tet Offensive, the massive communist assault against U.S. and South Vietnamese forces that precipitated our gradual withdrawal from the Vietnam War. But for the Vietnamese, Tet is a weeklong celebration marking the Lunar New Year. It's like every American holiday rolled into one: a time to eat like it's Thanksgiving, light fireworks like it's the Fourth of July, give gifts like it's Christmas, party like it's New Year's, hand out candy like it's Halloween, and dress up like it's Easter. Hong is pouring the shots in the spirit of holiday cheer, but I'm throwing them back to get liquored up. I need all the bravery I can muster, artificial or not, because I'm in town to do a daring and taboo deed.

Hong is a family friend of Peter Kastan, a 56-year-old American who's over in his open-air kitchen slicing fruit beneath a rain shield of corrugated plastic. He lives here with the family of his Vietnamese wife, Mai, an attractive woman of 46 with whom he has a five-year-old son, Bao. Peter is broad-shouldered, with massive hands and a shaved head, and he reminds me of Kurtz as played by Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. I first located him through a blog that he keeps about his life in Hanoi, and he agreed to assist me on my mission. Now, a month later, we're ready to go for it. But first Peter and Hong issue a pair of warnings.

"It's good—if you can bear it," says Hong.

"The heat hits you in your chest," explains Peter. "They say it's very powerful. That's why it can be lucky. Or unlucky."

I look over at Hong, confused. She demonstrates the heat for me with fluttering hand gestures directed toward her chest, as if she's putting out a deep, fearful flame. It's something I will see often during my stay in Vietnam, a gesture I understand to convey a cocktail of trouble and power and temptation and fear, mixed in with a touch of good ol' "what the hell?" adventure. Hong's gesture reminds me of what I'm feeling inside my head at this very moment. I look at the bottle of wine. Is this sensation a possible side effect of drinking the essence of critters known to kill folks, or is bad karma already crashing down on me? Either way, I'm going to follow through with the plan. I'm in Hanoi to eat Canis lupus familiaris.