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Synopsis: Nathan Monroe is a 28-year-old American living in Saigon who falls in love with a poor but talented Vietnamese painter. When he fails to protect their love from her desperate chase for a better life in America, his safety net appears in the form of Anthony, an old domineering friend in Hanoi who hires Nathan at his real estate firm. Only much later does Nathan discover that Anthony has intended all along for him to take over his job and family so that he, too, can escape and start his life over in America.
Excerpt from Chapter One
Nathan tossed and turned on the hard lower bunk of his sleeper-class room. He peered at his cell phone; it would take 30 more hours to reach Hanoi. He was struck by how things were always a long wait for him. Nothing was simple, and whatever seemed certain had a way of being turned on its head without warning.
The sound of the train was low and whooshing, like the winds of a relentless rainstorm. Whenever the train pulled into a station the lull of stillness became just as loud, howling inside him, heightening his restlessness.
Lying there, discomposed by his companions’ snores, a premonition of endless night took hold of him. Unable to stand it, he left the room.
In the passageway a young man sat on a stool with his face buried in a copy of the Army Newspaper. There was nowhere else to sit, though Nathan did see, at the end of the last train car he was in, that the door was open and led to a small platform.
He stepped outside and sat down. The night was cool and full of starlight. With his legs dangling over the edge he watched a mosaic of moonlit fields emerge from a tangle of trees now receding on both sides of the track.
Nathan turned around at the sound of someone approaching the platform door. He was surprised to find a young woman with a train-issued blanket draped over her head. It was an odd way to wander through a train, and coming outside alone and as late as this piqued his interest. As she stood in the doorway considering the small space that Nathan occupied, or whatever was on her mind, he gestured for her to sit with him.
She tugged the blanket from her head and, when she slipped into a shaft of moonlight, her hair appeared as pink as a rose.
Her age was hard to guess, though she was young, between 20 and 25. The more he looked at her hair the more its shape came to resemble that of a rosebud: it enfolded her face so that the ends nearly met beneath her chin.
She wore loose-fitting pajamas and tatami sandals. She asked him for the time — Trời ơi, mệt quá . . . Bây giờ là mấy giờ rồi? Her pronunciation—z’s in place of y’s and r’s; ch’s in place of tr’s — was lilting and feminine, yet distinctly northern. There was something almost startling about the Vietnamese she automatically used, and it pleased him that she would.
He pulled out his cell phone and saw it was just after two. Hai giờ rồi.
Hai giờ hả?
The northern accent was easier for him because it distinguished more between sounds. Yet there was something cold and hard about the northern way of speaking, a wintry almost martial quality. But maybe it was only Hanoi’s chill weather and thick cloud cover that bled the color from the streets, buildings, even the clothing of the people, and made him feel this. For there was something warm and inviting about this pink-haired young woman….