They spent the week at a backpacker’s inn, living like equatorial flâneurs. They woke up late, ate insanely cheap croissants, drank milky café and rented bicycles to ride around the tree-lined boulevards—the French, unlike the Americans, had left some nice things behind. The bicycles came in handy for eluding the street beggars who chased them around, trying to sell them old wartime currency. Contrary to what the guidebooks said, Wrigley’s gum wasn’t enough to send them away. Kate saw young women with missing limbs plying the streets for spare change—this could easily have been her if it hadn’t been for Operation Babylift. The thought spooked her to the core.

Crossing busy intersections on foot without the aid of traffic lights was for Kate and her friends a harrowing rite of passage. After the convulsions of hysterical laughter subsided, they were ready for anything. Two of them followed a tout outside the crumbling Hotel Continental, made famous by writers like Graham Greene, to a blind alley where an opium den flourished. The boy, Dan, got a massive headache after his five-dollar smoke while Yolanda, his girlfriend, felt only a light buzz. Then they all hired cyclos and had the riders pedal them around the city, crossing perilously into the paths of other cyclos, bikes, mopeds, buses, even trains—all the while screaming and lifting their arms in the air like they were on a theme-park ride.

They bought conical rice-planter hats from street vendors and wore them around town, bumping their wide rims into the throng at the Ben Thanh market. This was the central market housed in a French colonial building that Jules said reminded him of run-down train stations in Prague and Budapest. There Kate saw an Amerasian around her age wearing an ao dai—the Vietnamese national dress—on her haunches, skinning frogs under a running faucet; this, too, could have been her if she hadn’t been airlifted to America. When the girl looked up and met her eyes, Kate felt nauseated. They could have been sisters. Not just metaphorically.

In a fit of romanticism, Jules traded in his perfectly good Teva sandals for a pair of rubber flip-flops that fell apart the moment he stepped out of the market. He went back to the stall but the vendor would only return his Tevas for “ten dollah.” An altercation was averted when Kate produced the money and grabbed the sandals, handing them back to Jules. They ate a ton of twenty-cent chocolate éclairs at the next stall to forget about the whole thing.