Looking at the two children together made Dzung feel deeply proud. There was so little one cyclo driver could do to bring harmony to the world, and yet Thuc’s gentleness assured him that his life was a success. But Dzung was also somewhat worried. Thuc was beautiful, with her big round eyes and small triangular face. His daughter stroked the baby’s back and head with a certainty that seemed inbred. Dzung would do anything for her, and Tu, and the other children. But there was so little he could do.

Tu was awake. She sat in the bed, taking the baby from Thuc and putting him to a breast. She smiled softly to Dzung, a reassurance that made him worry even more about her exhaustion. For her size she was incredibly strong, and she had never complained about their life. Over the years he had lost nearly everything, suffered the deaths and dislocations, the torture of not knowing whether family members were dead or alive, the cruel spite or perhaps the masked incompetence of the conquerors or liberators. But he knew that if he ever lost this one person, this woman who had married him and in whose arms he collapsed every night, he would want to lay down and die.

A good Vietnamese woman is tot nhat, he liked to brag in passable English or French to the foreign customers he sometimes would pedal through Sai Gon, the best in the world. Beautiful, man, dep qua. They take care of you, love you till you can’t let go.

Their home had no doors. Shafts of sunlight poured into the front entranceway, lighting the inside of the shack. His two older sons began to stir on their boards near the opening. Outside, he could hear the neighborhood awakening, mothers calling to their children, small dogs yapping, pots clanking as the rice was being made. Odors moved toward him, smoke from the cook fires and cigarettes, dank memories of last night’s rain, someone else’s food. A motorbike started and soon passed along the narrow sidewalk that made a road between the shacks of District Four.

Dzung walked to the rear of the shack and then outside, standing on a small piece of mud that was his back porch. The mud sloped slightly, a natural streambed that passed between two other houses and then disappeared. The slope was filled with clutter, trash, and effluvium. Other houses pushed toward his from all sides. The sun was up, high and hot, and it had already begun to bake the mud.