In the hot afternoons after they closed down for a rest, all would bustle again. It rained. The streets ran with water. Now and then she’d still see an ox. Work lasted until night when everyone visited with their neighbors and talked about each other, how Doc Thin Yu’s daughter had come home, and how well they had done for the day. Even if they lied about it, even if their business was on the edge of broken, they said, “We had an excellent day.”

“Ours, too, was very good.”

The bread-baker had been a scholar once. A professor. She learned from him, even when school was still against the law in the changed world. At his place she looked at the globe. She closed her delicate eyes and she pointed. Turkey. She wanted to go there, and she would because, above all, in her softness, her greenness, she was stubborn and willful. She pointed again. Midland, Ohio. Maybe not. But then perhaps it was exotic. Perhaps it was close to her father. How she wanted to see him. But for now, she was happy enough riding her bicycle through city streets, getting off and pushing it, seeing the look of happiness pass over someone’s face when she delivered flowers for her boss woman, and looking at everything there was to see, women washing the windows of shops or cleaning the walk in front, green forcing its way through old stone.

Lin liked to watch the people mostly, a woman rushing by with a new haircut and a plastic bag of something no doubt beautiful in her slender right hand. Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon, had changed.

And then she’d enter the trees and stop, enchanted. She walked the bike through this world. The trees were her place. Jungle was her blood. Ocean was, too, but she didn’t yet know it.

Lin had her father’s map, along with his photograph. She didn’t know that the dirty, folded, and rough-edged paper was a valuable thing. It was a book against the Americans. It told of those who crossed over into a country not theirs for war. It told of unlawful boundaries crossed, beliefs, places, and even bodies trespassed.

In class, it was easy for Lin to understand the dialects of others, as if some were a trace in her memory. And they also spoke English, from her childhood, but her own people had spoken many languages and dialects because they had to.

In her long-distant past old Uncle Song would gather them together and they would practice. “No, no,” he would say. “Do you want to get killed? You pronounce it this way or they will think you are an enemy.” They’d laugh. They couldn’t cry. It was a world of many enemies, each with their own intonation of voice, of belief, of hatred.

“Ha! I am an enemy!” said Auntie with great gusto, a woman with a white streak of hair who hated all those around them, but she then looked vulnerable and her lip didn’t hold as firm. Her face, the mask, would soften into nothing that hated, only what feared. Lin remembered this, even though at the time she was perhaps only five or six.