She was a child alone in the city, one of many such children. They walked in the city and back streets at first like ghosts. She had an uncle, but no one knew where he was. She unstitched her dirty jacket so carefully, leaving her father’s picture and address and map still inside, removing her uncle’s address, showing it to people, asking.

Most tried to avoid her as she seemed to wander aimlessly. A girl with a village face was bad luck. She was one of the Ugly People. She would be sent home or rounded up and reeducated or she would simply die on the street one night. Others who looked at the paper said they had never heard of such a street. Some said, “I don’t read.” Even the cyclo drivers who knew all the parts of town had never heard of this number or name.

Lin had a few coins, but at first she started her lost life in the city begging for food. “Please,” she would ask a shopkeeper, looking at the soup or noodles or at the fried fish or a pastry wrapped in paper. Sometimes one took pity on her, but usually they sent her away, themselves too poor to give anything away, and too many beggars. Finally, she squatted down and thought hard and made a plan. She decided to stay on one street. Even hungry. She would make herself useful there. They would get to know her. She would make them want to keep her, to feed her, to give her small jobs. She used a broom that had been kept outside a shop which no longer existed and she swept the street made of old gray stones, the walkway, and picked up all the trash. After a while, she was noticed and recognized. Then, finding rags, old clothing, she began to clean the shopkeepers’ windows. When the afternoon rains ceased, she wiped them dry, to a shine. “Hey,” the woman at the florist shop called out. “Get out of here. Stay away from my window!” But this street was clean in a town half bombed and filthy. This one street where some of the communists had moved into the buildings upstairs and sometimes, when no one looked, one of them even tipped her. He looked like the young “uncle,” the one who had been there so suddenly and then been killed. Later, she knew he must have fought for the wrong side then. There were too many sides.

Every morning, she woke from the tree where she lived, sometimes damp from rain. She combed her hair with a comb she had found that once belonged to an American. Then she went down on her short legs, already an ambitious girl, and swept the streets in front of all the half-surviving businesses. She was a small girl then, and young, with small dimpled hands. Those who saw her on the street and felt sorry for her didn’t show it. They had their lives. And theirs were also sorrowful. She was a child among children and everywhere they walked were children. Sometimes they had an extra coin for her. Sometimes they didn’t. There was no predicting when or what, if anything, decided it. They were all survivors there. No one thought about where she slept at night or what she ate. The town had been broken and everyone was just trying to put their lives together again and even a child understood this.