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Downtown Saigon is a tangle of bikes, pedestrians and rickshaws. The year is 1976 and the Vietnam War has just ended. A crowd of people wait at the end of Phu Street, where the train tracks curve sharply around a bend. A young girl of twenty-one, dressed traditionally in long cotton pants and a commoner’s shirt, grips her bag with both hands, takes a deep breath and steels herself for the run. The locomotive screeches into view and abruptly slows down to turn the corner. The girl and the gathered crowd start sprinting, jostling for the best positions to jump onto the slowed down train. The girl chucks her bag into the train compartment then runs as fast as she can, trying to grab hold of the doorway. Back on the straight the train begins to speed up; she is not going to make it. The bag of snacks and fruit that she needs to sell to support her mother and five younger siblings, as well as her father and two older brothers who are locked away in communist ‘re-education’ camps, is on that train. Her family is depending on her. She keeps sprinting and makes one last desperate attempt to grab the doorway, loses her grip and her heart plummets. Suddenly a hairy brown arm reaches out the door and grabs her elbow. She holds her breath, leaps and the brown arm yanks her into the speeding train. She stands up and straightens her clothes, picks up her bag and thanks the owner of the arm—a smiling squat middle-aged man with a cigarette where his two front teeth should be. She then starts her day’s work. Up until 1975 when the communists took over, it was legal for traders to sell goods on the trains in Saigon. But since the end of the war the communists have made all trade that isn’t documented with government papers illegal. The girl has just finished a sale when the passengers around her start making the coughing noises that signal the guards are coming. She sits down quickly and tries to look as inconspicuous as possible. ‘Tickets!’ She hears an unfamiliar voice; there must be new guards. She watches as one of them hassles an old man. The first thing you must remember when you start this kind of work is to give the guards some money or goods to soften their eyesight, so they don’t see the bulge on your ankle where you’ve strapped packets of cigarettes or peanuts or whatever it is you’re selling. And you have to do this ever so carefully, otherwise a real stickler- for-the-rules kind of guard might dob you in for bribery. Then you’re really in trouble, much more than if you got caught selling stuff in the first place. It is all truly frightening. A bloody and merciless war has just finished and the murky, ugly rules of a stain-covered jungle now apply. finger to the cuff