Nobody among them remembers the war. They weren’t even alive for it. Much like our post-World War II baby boom, they must have gone straight home from the battlefield and done an awful lot of fuckin’ around here. Everyone—everyone, it seems—is young and either on the way to eat, returning from eating, or eating at this very minute, absolutely choking the sidewalks on low plastic stools, filling the open-to-the-street shop houses, slurping noodles or nibbling on delicious-looking bits, drinking bia hoi, the fresh beer of Hanoi, with varying degrees of joy and seriousness of intent.
