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in all the places that needed to be preserved—the tree-lined walks that seduced us away into the hills, the park benches, the mimosa trees, the moonlit lanes on which I had walked her home, the long good-night kisses by the hedge. She was leaving, and I was afraid.
    I wondered if she would forget the intimate, nameless places where we had talked through the lazy hours. I wondered if, like me, she felt as if we had lived a whole, though tiny, life here.
    We paused at a few boutiques and peered through the glass store-fronts, but she wouldn’t let me buy her anything. She knew I was poor. We strolled through our usual window-shopping circuit, down the one avenue then up the other, weaving back and forth around vendors crowding the brick sidewalk. The streets curved and sloped in such a way that the town appeared laid out like an old-fashioned vertical painting, buildings and trees in the distance rising to the sky or falling off toward the valley. Climbing the hill to the town center, you saw the narrow, cranky buildings edged against mountain and sky. Turning around, you saw rooftops layered against the lake and the dale below. I was fond of Dalat for its crooked intersections, its uneven buildings, its sweeps and jags that made the light changes captivating.
    Anh wanted a baguette and bananas for her trip, so we stopped at the main market. It clung halfway up the hill, a quilt-work of multicolored tarps strung up at different angles, overlapping and flapping in the wind. Beneath, aglow in the filtered light, was a congested world of colors, aromas, odors, and noise, all ruled by women. Sellers sat snugly behind their counters, arranging and rearranging their wares. Shoppers stomped about on thick clogs, holding their hems away from the mush of trampled banana leaves and mud. They haggled, gossiped, laughed, yelled, napped, cackled, and sang over baskets of fruits, bins of produce, sides of raw meat, coils of sausage ropes, silvery fish laid out like steel blades, great bags of spices, barrels of rice in a dozen varieties, toy-like plastic wares, and every conceivable household item, short of furniture.
    I waited for her on the market fringe amid peanut roasters, pork-bun steamers, fruit-women with baskets of tiny peaches and blood-dark plums, flower-maids with packs of incense sticks and altar bundles of carnations and daffodils. Wrapped in sweaters and scarves, schoolgirls with rosy cheeks gathered around a vendor who sold fried dough fritters, hot from a bubbling oil vat. People bantered, rattling off quick words with a lilt that reminded me of the central highlanders.
    When we topped the hill, it began to drizzle. Anh steered me to a kiosk tucked in an alley barely three paces wide, next to Thien Nhien Bookstore. It was one of those foldable tin-and-wood assemblies that at the end of the day could be carted home. The cook, a woman in her mid-forties, sat like a barrel of flesh behind the counter, flanked on three sides by six woks, each set on a coal stove no bigger than a flowerpot. Despite the chill, she sweated through her white peasant blouse, her face flushed and jovial. Equally good-humored, the thin husband, a chain-smoking man with huge hands, made coffee and served the customers while their teenage daughter prepped the food and washed dishes at the back end of the alley. It was a bustling operation of six tables sheltered under a green army tarp.
    “This is my favorite place. They make the best
banh xeo
in Dalat,” she announced and waited for my reply as was proper.
    “Then I insist we eat here before you leave.” I grinned.
    Anh gossiped with the woman, touched her forearm, laughed, talked about catching the afternoon train, and somewhere in between special-ordered our
banh xeo
with all her favorite fillings. She had a way with common folks that was beyond me. Even though my family had become miserably poor, our lot no better than any cyclo driver’s, a big part of me was still rooted within my family