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reading, gave that up some time ago; it just reminds him of all he has lost.
    Hng carries his bottle of papaya milk down to the pond and douses his apron with it, then rubs the material back and forth against the washing stone before rinsing it along with his cooking pots in the pond’s brown water. From where he squats at the water’s edge, he can spy a nest among the reeds, two ripe eggs waiting to be claimed. He thinks better of it, though, thinks of the long term, a luxury that has only come about in recent years.
    A pond has its own ecosystem, largely unobserved by humans, except when their lives come to depend upon it. Hng, who had drifted like some one hundred and fifty others to this muddy, buggy shore in the middle of an industrial wasteland at the edge of the city, has long been a keen and attuned observer. Hng came from the country and the country is still in him. He knows the exact conditions that will promote the spread of algae, the precise details of the dragonfly’s life cycle and where the various pond and shore creatures bury their eggs. He’d been a student of nature as a child, a study encouraged by his father, in lieu of companionship, that he could never have known would be of such use in an urban life.
    Like Hng, the people who collected on this shore in the late 1950s had lost everything. They were eating rats and the lice from their hair. Their shacks were built of scrap metal, woven pond reeds and bamboo posts. The trees had been felled by government edict. The land had been stripped of its small dwellings and kitchen gardens in keeping with Uncle H’ô’s promise of industrial revolution. The combination of the tire factory across the pond and the construction of blocks of socialist housing co-operatives to the east produced great burning clouds of tar that floated overhead so that on a good day the sun appeared a weak orange through grey gauze.
    But nature is a fighter and Hng was a man blessed with a cook’s imagination. He had immediately seen the promise lurking beneath the surface of this pool of lazy, brown, mosquito-breeding water. No one in the shantytown would go hungry as long as Hng was there, a fact that became apparent just shortly after his arrival when he caught a duck, the first duck anyone had seen in over a year, among the reeds.
    Hng had wrung the bird’s neck and plucked it before applying a burning stick to the leeches that had affixed themselves to his feet and ankles. He then drained the blood to make a custard, peeled off the skin and fried it into golden strips, and used the fat he’d scraped from the inside of the skin to flavour and fry the shredded breast meat. He boiled and mashed the liver with a few peppercorns he had in his possession; he stewed the duck’s feet in the juice of a single orange; he roasted the duck’s eyes and brains on the sharpened ends of chopsticks; he boiled the carcass, heart and kidneys to make a broth; he chopped the boiled heart and kidneys and dark meat of the legs and wrapped the mince in betel leaves and sautéed the remaining meat with sliced pondweed and wild leeks.
    The smells enticed neighbours, and neighbours enticed those beyond, and soon a lineup of people had formed in front of his shack—shabbilydressed, grime-encrusted men, women and children with sharp cheekbones and skin variously scabbed, pockmarked and grey. Each clutched a pair of chopsticks and bowed a head in thanks before sampling the elements of the feast Hng had prepared.
    But Hng himself had forgotten to eat that day. He had been left without hunger or breath by the sight of the girl who emerged with her grandmother from the shack next to his, a girl with the graceful posture of a crane and skin as pearlescent as eggshell.
    You do not belong here
, he wanted to say to this vision.
My God. You belong on a throne
.
    He watched her eat from her bowl like the daintiest of birds, and found he was still staring in the direction of the shack where she lived with her