She turned left onto Nguyen Van Troi Street, and he knew where she was heading. After fighting thick traffic for a few miles, they angled off to the right, past large billboard signs and an old concrete bunker left over from the French days. A tollgate met them in the center of a widened road. She paid five thousand dong at the busy gate, and in minutes they were outside the terminal of the Tan Son Nhat airport.

Throngs of cars and taxis lined the street and parking areas around the terminal. Hundreds of travelers flowed into and out of the building. Behind the terminal they could see a huge Boeing 747 parked on the runway. An international flight had just landed. Shuttle buses were hauling passengers from the tarmac to the terminal, captained by smiling young women in pink or blue ao dais.

“Here,” she said, looking longingly at the terminal building where the travelers ebbed and flowed. “This is my dream.”

“It’s only an airline terminal,” he said, thinking she was joking.

“To you it is an airline terminal,” she said quietly, her eyes lost in the endless possibilities that rose into the sky with every departing flight. “You can come and go whenever you want. Where do you come from? Where do you go when you leave? Do you know what this airport is like to someone who doesn’t know the answer to those questions? Japan or America might really be the moon. That’s what it’s like when you do not know.”

Her dream was his normality, and for the first time he saw the bustle of the airport from her eyes. Dzung’s struggle was to survive; that he understood. But hers was different; it was to live. How many times had he passed through those doors, on his way into and out of Viet Nam, thinking of nothing more than the foul taste in his mouth and the sleep he had lost on the plane?

“Maybe you could work for Viet Nam Airlines,” he said weakly.

“It’s too late,” she said with a genuine, muted sadness. “There is so much competition for those jobs, Cong Ly. I think it is the hardest job to get in all of Viet Nam. I tried three years ago, but they stopped most of their hiring when the economy went bad. If I had known Chinese I could have had a chance. But Chinese is so hard. I could not pass the test. And now I am twenty-six. Too old.”

Twenty-six and too old. The longing in her eyes was palpable, as was the reality of her fading dreams. “Maybe when things get better you could work for a business that travels overseas,” he said.