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It's funny, you just listed the main Vietnamese dishes/drinks I would really consider a must-try. Vietnamese coffee is truly incredible albeit a bit sweet (though understandably so given the use of Robusta), and southern-style banh mi is the only food I tried that I would call great. I only had a short layover in HCMC when I went, and I'm very glad I ventured into the city just for that one banh mi stall.
I suspect I would have liked Vietnamese food more had I spent more time in southern Vietnam; the more south I went, the more flavourful the food became. I'm typically more accustomed to heavily-spiced food, and much of northern Vietnam seems to enjoy food that's perhaps even blander than Cantonese cuisine.
The answer to this hugely depends on what "Chinese food" we're talking about here.
China has a ridiculous number of regional cuisines, so many in fact that one attempt to categorise them all identifies 63 cuisines. Throughout the trip I was only able to scratch the surface of only 3 cuisines in that list - Beijing, Shanxi and Central Shaanxi food, and they're quite different from the mostly Cantonese-inspired (and increasingly Sichuan-inspired) Chinese food in the West. It's different enough that all of these cuisines barely feature rice as a staple grain since it doesn't grow well at all in the desolate and harsh climate of the north.
Shanxi food is by far my favourite - the dishes there are very vinegar-heavy, and it's something the province specialises in. The vinegars there are made from sorghum, barley, and peas, and they're ridiculously varied and malty and deep in flavour (I actually got to see some being actively fermented the traditional way in an old Ming/Qing dynasty building). Every restaurant in the region will provide a variety of vinegars to pour onto each dish, as well as a large pot of chilli oil. The food in this province is flavourful and hearty, and many of these dishes aren't well represented outside of China, I highly recommend it. Though there are dishes that some laowai should maybe avoid unless particularly adventurous - I saw dishes featuring rabbit head being served in places like Datong, which I imagine would turn off a large number of Westerners.
On the other end of the spectrum, Beijing food is not all that fantastic. I find that their dishes tend to lack depth and flavour, and while I wasn't hugely excited for the cuisine there in the first place I was still surprised at how little I cared for it. It's not bad at all, but their flavour preferences don't excite me. Peking duck is still good though, and another thing that I really enjoyed there was their jianbing, a sort of savoury stuffed crepe popular in that part of China.
Something that really unexpectedly blew me away when I was in China was their yoghurts. Nai pizi and suannai are less sour than Western yoghurts and way more texturally satisfying, and in Shanxi province they come in weird flavours such as sea buckthorn and vinegar (I am not joking when I say it works; some vinegars in Shanxi are downright caramelly in flavour and actually complement the taste of yoghurt really well). They run circles around Western yoghurts all day, and being back in Australia now I can no longer find them anywhere, something which I am extremely disappointed by. In addition, China also has the most comforting drinks - their coffee is good, their tea is super fragrant, and their soy milk is downright delectable. I don't even like soy milk usually, but the Chinese really know how to do it right.
All this is to say that overall I really liked Chinese food (it was certainly way better than Vietnamese, come at me), and I don't just think it's as good as western MSG slop, I think it's often better. But food in China is far from a singular cuisine, the dishes in different parts of the country are nothing alike, and it's not really possible to say whether real Chinese food is "good" or "bad" without specifying which Chinese food we're talking about.
Not really, for a few other reasons - for example there's a pretty distinct lack of homelessness and drug addiction in Chinese cities, and the country is extremely safe, which actually makes it feel rather non-dystopic compared to many Western cities I've been to (which are often very visibly riddled with these problems). The country also doesn't feel very totalitarian compared to many other one-party states of its ilk, police presence isn't heavy and you can generally travel quite freely. I would not call China third-world as a whole, I'm unsure where I would slot it within that definition because it's not really easy to categorise along that axis.
There are elements that you can pattern-match to a Hollywood dystopia (like having to scan your bags when you enter the subway), but as a whole China doesn't feel "low-life" or dystopic as much as it feels contradictory. People love trotting out extremely polarised and sensationalised views of China - people will either say it's "living in the future" or that it is a CCP hellhole that's about to collapse, but I don't think what I saw actually matches either view particularly well. I think people can come to these conclusions because they focus in on aspects that already confirm a preexisting view - there are things that it's extremely good at, and there are areas where it lags. In general it seems the Chinese government and people have a very different view of what their country should look like, as opposed to the West.
I just got back from a December trip to northern China. It's a country that's modernised in a very non-Western way, such that it appears like a weird cyberpunky juxtaposition of hypermodernity coexisting with third-world elements - the streets are very clean, robots in hotels deliver stuff to your door, face recognition for check-in and boarding is a thing in some airports, the whole country uses pretty much only payment apps, etc, but the AQI can be bad, the public toilets are dirty, taxis and some train stations smell like cigarette smoke, nobody speaks anything but Mandarin (or some other Sinitic language), there are touts who will try to sell you shit, and so on.
Personally, I think it's an amazing destination. I would go back in a heartbeat if I could. I have so many superlatives for it, and I won't forget being almost completely alone on the Great Wall with mist rising over the surrounding mountains like some Chinese ink painting, or stepping into an ancient grotto cave the size of a cathedral with thousands of religious carvings covering every square inch of its walls, or suddenly encountering a colourful festival in the streets of a Qing dynasty walled town. There is an astounding amount of history and culture there, I think it boasts by far the greatest density of genuinely historical stuff in Asia.
I have a travel report lined up and pictures to upload, but I'm suffering from severe jet lag and am too lazy to do that right now.
Agreed on the high quality of the fruit (and poor quality of the meat). Didn't try any mangoes in Vietnam, but the pineapples and coconuts I had there were so very fresh. Fresher than anywhere else I've been. I had at least one coconut every day with my meal and it didn't matter where I went - regardless of if it was a sit-down restaurant or some tattered stall on the side of the street they were delicious.
I very consistently had a good time with Vietnamese desserts, which was unexpected. I was a big fan of the che when I was there, and there's a gigantic variety of these sweet soups; there's even one featuring a savoury pork dumpling (che bot loc heo quay) that actually kind of works in spite of the flavour contrast.
Never been to Cambodia, though Siem Reap is a destination I've had on the backburner for a while now.
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