Occasionally when we went out to a street restaurant, or a choked Vietnamese hangar-style number with not a foreigner in sight, and the stares began to bite, Sophie would pretend to be Korean or Japanese. Anything but Vina. I could get by well enough in Vietnamese to explain that she was not of these parts and that I’d be ordering the nosh. We would instantly get far better service. If the staff thought that we were a Korean-European couple, we figured, they also thought that we had more money and would leave a bigger tip. It also put people off the scent. Sophie would always get the same
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