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out five faded National Geographic magazines and sets them on the counter. When I glance up at her, she shrugs and says, “My husband’s a subscriber. We’ve got, like, a zillion of them.” She looks kind of embarrassed, but also curious to see how I respond. Despite myself, I look through the covers. Each bears a photograph of Vietnam. Four come from the 1960s and early 1970s. The most recent,
    published thirteen years ago in 1989, bears the headline “Vietnam: Hard Road to Peace” and promises articles on Hanoi, Hue, and Saigon. Hanoi in 1989, ten years after I left it. I feel as if I’ve been offered an invitation to peek at what would have been my future.
    I look up at Shelley. Actually, I’m touched by her thoughtfulness, but I’m also uncomfortable with interactions that have no commercial purpose. “Thanks,” I say.
    She busies herself by zipping closed her bag. “It’s nice to have a use for them,” she tells me and then, after an awkward silence, she mumbles, “I should be heading home anyway.” She lets her fingers tap the air in a little wave, and then she’s gone.
    For a while, I just eye the magazines on the counter. Part of me would like to ignore them altogether, but I’m tempted to look. Warily, I pull them closer, run my finger across the covers. Then I open an early issue, just to check. It contains familiar images—water buffalo, women wearing áo dài, children spooning out their morning bowls of rice—and images like the ones I remember from North Vietnamese newspapers depicting the war in the South—sick babies, anguished parents, a U.S. Navy flotilla steaming down the Mekong. Though the photos interest me, I find myself happily unaffected. I’m an American now and I experience the same feelings of curiosity and pity that any American would feel viewing photos of an exotic country, a long-ago war. I’ve endured many emotions over the past twenty-three years, almost all of which I’d rather have avoided, so it comes as a pleasant surprise to look at pictures of Vietnam and feel, well, nothing.
    Marcy ambles over. “Cool,” she says, pushing the magazines around on the counter. But Vietnam doesn’t really interest her. After a couple of minutes, she wanders off.
    I look at every picture. Then, braced, I push the other magazines aside, ready to peruse the most daunting one, the one that features photos of Hanoi. I am primed and ready, immune. But it takes only a moment to discover that I am not invulnerable after all. There, on page 558, my city lies before me in all its dingy grandeur, a lost treasure that I’d convinced myself I no longer missed. In the ten years between the day I left and
    the period during which these photographs were taken, my city hardly changed. In one picture, a bride, posing in front of a gauzy mosquito net, reminds me of my cousin. In another, a man rides a bicycle exactly like the one my family used to own. Every detail in every photograph feels personal. Worn rubber shoes. Wooden doorways covered in peeling paint. The gritty, uneven slabs of city sidewalks. A woman scrubbing a baby in a basin of water, gripping its leg to keep it from slipping. I miss my mother, my father, my sister, my niece. Vietnam.

    A few days later, Shelley appears again. This time, Marcy’s at the register, while I perch on a stool back in produce, dividing a crate of basil into four-ounce plastic bags.
    “Everybody on campus knows me,” I hear Marcy say. “Even people I don’t know, they know me.” The girl’s body is slender but curvy, and her clothes fit as tightly as the skin on a ripe tomato. It isn’t hard to see why she’s famous at UNCW. Even in worn jeans and a dirty T-shirt, she looks like one of those “Talk to a Sexy Lady” girls in the phone number ads on cable.
    “Try studying for a chemistry exam when guys keep wandering by ask-ing for your number,” she complains.
    “It must be kind of rough on you.” Shelley’s voice sounds both sympathetic and