Dzung was remembering the first time he had seen her. It was hard to believe it had been fourteen years, during the time Sai Gon was only beginning to awaken from the darkest days of conquest or liberation, depending of course on one’s perspective, just before the government announced the new change, doi moi.

He had been pedaling his cyclo along Hai Ba Trung Street just where it met the Sai Gon River. A new Soviet ship had docked near the old naval base just up the river, at the same spot the American ships used to dock and before them the French, and Dzung had been hoping to pick up a customer. She was standing on the road near a scraggly patch of grass where a pair of old French cannons still loomed over the water, also pointing toward the ship. She was holding a basket of mangoes, her circular straw non la hat tied underneath her chin with a bright yellow ribbon. The pink and yellow flowered pattern of her blouse and slacks excited him. It was a bold fashion statement. For nearly a decade the government had issued only black cloth at its garment stores. Sai Gon was emerging from a dark cocoon.

The tilt of her face and the sureness in the way she stood reminded him of a girl he had loved once, when he was much younger and such a thing as love had seemed more possible. She was looking at him so openly, so warmly that he knew she was not a Sai Gon girl, that she was in from the villages. She stood firmly, the mangoes under one arm, her small breasts rising toward him as she breathed, and she smiled as if she were actually happy to see him.

Somehow it made him imagine he was making love to her. Yes, like a memory. Hiding from the others, whispering and laughing and embracing as they stood lazily neck-deep in a warm pond with the water swirling and sucking against their bodies and the paddy dikes and high weeds surrounding them and the rain beating down and the smell of rotting soil and wet grass and lotus blossoms wafting over them. And the moon above them, shimmering like a mirage beyond the rain. And the sound of artillery, far in the distance. Or had it been thunder?

And so he had slowed his cyclo, pulling alongside her and teasing her.

“Where did you come from?” he asked.

“Bien Hoa,” she answered, her smiling face telling him already that she liked him.

“Nha que, huh? A country girl. You came all this way to sell mango to a Lien So? The Russians eat nothing here in the city. They only drink. You should be bringing whiskey.”

“My father doesn’t grow whiskey,” she had answered, surveying his thin frame. “Besides, why do you want to take them in your cyclo? They’re as big as waterbulls.”