It would take fifteen minutes to reach District One. Dzung pedaled along the narrow cracked concrete alley that fronted his home, waving to familiar faces squatting in the doorways. Then he turned onto a slightly larger road, bordered by tiny sidewalks that were filled with an interminable row of small tables and stools. Older men were gathered at most of the tables, drinking tea or beer, smoking their first cigarettes, and arguing about the past. They wore shorts and rubber sandals. Their hair was gray and their eyes were vacant and red. They had lost a war twenty-five years ago and after wounds, terror, humiliation, and reeducation, this was their final repayment: to sit idle in the squalid isolation of District Four, with no work permits, no permission to relocate, and nothing to look forward to but the long hot days of sitting and smoking and remembering.

He reached Nguyen Tat Thanh Street and turned left, heading toward a bridge that would take him into District One. Nguyen Tat Thanh, which bordered the Sai Gon River, was the major artery of District Four. Dzung found himself immediately lost in a swarm of vehicles, large and small: cars, trucks, motorbikes, bicycles, and cyclos, all mixed together in no particular lanes or order.

Dzung blended in with the flow, a wave of contentment rushing through him. He was at one with his cyclo now, his body swaying slightly side to side as he pedaled, his hands resting on the curved metal of the cyclo’s carriage as he maneuvered the vehicle in the traffic. Motorbikes sped past him, some holding whole families. Large trucks honked their horns and threw sand and dust into the heavy air. He passed another bicycle that had been mounted to a flatbed trailer, where two boys sat together in the driver’s seat, their feet sharing the pedals on each side as they pushed a load of six pigs stacked onto the trailer. The pigs had been stuffed into individualized cylindrical baskets that froze them motionless. A yellow “meter taxi,” new to Sai Gon, slipped in and out of the traffic, its driver hauling some well-heeled foreign customer. Dzung looked enviously at the taxi as it disappeared in front of him. It was his dream to someday own one.