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studied the woman as he passed, studied the boy as well. What would it be like to have a mother who sat and waited for him, who liked looking at his face?
    “I’ll find a drunk one for you tonight,” Mai said, leading him across a street, walking erratically so as to avoid the looming headlights of scooters and taxis.
    Minh shook his head. He didn’t like playing the drunks, for they could be cruel to Mai. And they always seemed to ask about his hand and why he never spoke.
    “I wish you’d play them,” she countered. “Their money’s so easy to take. They toss it about like trash. Ah, you can be stubborn, Minh the Powerful. As stubborn as that old water buffalo we saw the other day. If only I could play like you. I’d beat every drunk tourist in the city and we’d be rich.” Mai turned toward Minh and saw that he was watching boys kick a soccer ball in a park. “Did you hear anything I said?” she asked, knowing that he did, but understanding that his thoughts were with the boys, that he was somehow in their company.
    Mai understood because she also knew how to place herself in the company of others, to pretend that she inhabited different worlds. Minh was better at the game, of course. But she still played, still imagined that she walked among schoolgirls, ate pho on the street with her father, read a book while waiting for her mother at the market. Mai, like Minh, played the game because it transported her from a place of hunger and pain, weariness and fear. In the pretend worlds she didn’t have to worry whether or not Minh would win, whether Loc would beat them, whether she’d have to someday sell herself to survive. In these worlds she went to school, Minh was her brother, and she was loved and protected by those who had given her life.
     
     
    BEN THANH MARKET HAD BEEN IN existence for about a hundred years—since the time of the French occupation. In the muted darkness, the entrance to Ben Thanh resembled an old schoolhouse or country church. The yellow, rectangular structure boasted an arched entry, above which rose a square face that bore an immense black-and-white clock. Inside this entry, the market opened into a sprawling labyrinth of stalls and passageways. At a height of some thirty feet, a vaulted ceiling was supported by yellow girders and protected merchants and shoppers from the city’s unpredictable weather.
    Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of locals and tourists populated Ben Thanh, browsing for bargains in Ho Chi Minh City’s most famous and popular market. Closet-size stalls offered eel, pig stomach, skinned oxtail, sea snails, lemongrass, dried shrimp, coffee beans, dragon fruit, and loaves of fresh bread. Beyond the food stalls, vendors sold lacquer platters, teak chopsticks, traditional Vietnamese clothes, tea sets, bronze animals, sunglasses, T-shirts, and about anything else imaginable.
    Gathered outside the entry to Ben Thanh were the Vietnamese who made a livelihood from pleasing tourists. Drivers leaned against dozens of cyclos, or bicycle taxis. Entrepreneurial tour guides scanned the area for confused travelers. Women moved quickly about, selling bottled water, bags of potato chips, and candy bars.
    Sitting near the entry, atop an old bench, a hunched woman who looked two decades older than her fifty-one years held a child on her lap. The woman wore a traditional conical hat, which was made by sewing palm leaves onto a peaked bamboo frame. Her clothes were simple blue pants and a shirt—an outfit that Westerners might think to be pajamas. The woman’s face was thin and sunspotted and bore ripples of wrinkles. Several of her front teeth were missing. Those that remained were stained and crooked, jutting from her gums like the rocks at Stonehenge.
    The child was seven years old. She wore shorts and a tank top, revealing legs and arms as thin as the handle of a tennis racket. Her elbows and knees were much wider, inflamed by a disease beyond her understanding. Short and parted