On the old concrete bridge a small girl squatted, her heels on the curb and her trousers lowered as she defecated onto the road. Nearby, her mother sat languidly in the morning sun behind a small pushcart, from which she was selling drinks and pastries. A wiry dog trotted over to the little girl and sniffed curiously at her haunches as she continued to squat. The girl looked nervously behind her at the dog and began to cry. Twenty feet away, a British tourist snapped a picture of the girl and the dog. The girl’s mother now stood and screamed an insult, then rushed toward the tourist. The tourist backed away, apologizing and protecting his camera. And in the time it took Dzung to pass them, they had all reached a smiling compromise when the tourist agreed to buy two cans of cola for what was obviously an exorbitant price.

Sai Gon, Sai Gon. Dzung laughed, watching the impish satisfaction on the woman’s face as she pocketed the money and returned to her tiny stall. Everything had its price, especially forgiveness.

A beautiful butterfly landed for a moment on the cyclo seat, and Dzung’s father entered his thoughts. Dzung felt immediately certain that the old man’s soul had been carried to him on the butterfly’s wings. His father had disappeared during a battle in the mountains of Laos thirty years before, when the division he was commanding had been surrounded and attacked by the North Vietnamese Army. Some had said his father was captured, others claimed he had been killed. Sometimes the uncertainty still bothered Dzung, but it no longer really mattered. His father was dead by now. Why else would he be visiting on the wings of the butterfly?

Swaying side to side as he pedaled the cyclo, Dzung began to sing. It was a song his father had taught him when he was a young boy, as they washed together in the shallows of the Han River among a row of beautiful fishing nets that in the morning drooped above the water on long poles like sails. His father would sing as they rinsed in the river and the fishing boats floated slowly past them and the pretty girls drove their bicycles along the nearby bridge, heading from Da Nang toward the salt-white beaches at My Khe. A long time ago, with his mother chewing betel nut, standing above the rice pot in their house up from the beach, and his grandmother smoking a twist of tobacco as she squatted comfortably on the porch, and his father now laughing and clutching him with thin but powerful arms, carrying him over one shoulder from the river back into the house. And his brothers playing along the road, young and still alive.

A long time ago, before he had lived enough to understand its meaning. And in his heart Dzung was happy, because he heard his father singing also.