Dzung stretched like a cat, scratching his chest and rubbing his face and head. He waved lazily to a neighbor. He squatted, making a cook fire. Then he dipped a bucket into the ceramic pot that held the family’s water and put it over the fire. Lighting a cigarette, he took a deep drag and then measured out that morning’s rice, pouring it into the bucket and stirring it while the water heated. And as the rice softened it filled Dzung with a sense of calm, an odd tranquillity.

Women’s work, boiling rice. He often found that thought ironic. In the city, in peacetime, a man was laughed at if he cooked rice for his wife. And yet on the battlefield and in the reeducation camps it was the very symbol of manhood, that one could find and make his own meals, could provide for himself. In the cold and lonely mountains more than twenty years before, Dzung had become quite the envied epicure, knowing just which weeds could combine with the rice to make a gourmet stew.

The rice was cooked, fluffy and white, filling the bucket. As was his custom Dzung scooped out portions for each of his children, then for his wife, and finally for himself. They had no table. He handed the children their bowls and then carried his own, along with Tu’s, to the bed, where she still sat in the shadows, feeding the baby. They ate quickly, silently, and without ceremony, holding the bowls just under their mouths and scooping the rice with quick movements of their chopsticks.

The neighborhood was now pulsing with noise and motion, as if the packed dirt underneath him and the thin walls around him had come alive. The sounds of the motorbikes passing and the two old grandmothers across the alley beginning their daily argument and the dogs forever yapping energized Dzung as well. He put on a stained white T-shirt and pair of baggy black trousers, found his old black baseball cap and his gray plastic flip-flop sandals, and waved good-bye to his family. Outside the front doorway, he unlocked his cyclo, climbed onto its high seat, and set out for work.