Excerpt from The Eaves of Heaven by Andrew X. Pham, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The airport was three times larger than Gia Lam Airport in Hanoi. The tarmac sprawled in every direction. Buildings and gigantic hangars lined the long runway. Squadrons of warplanes and cargo carriers were parked in neat rows. The humid air was impregnated with the sting of fuel and engine exhaust. Convoys of trucks rumbled back and forth across the tarmac. Crews were unloading and refueling the cargo planes. They were flying nonstop around the clock, transporting refugees, French troops, and equipment out of the North. A somber mood of retreat permeated the scene.

A fat Chinese-Vietnamese man wearing a khaki colonial hat, a white short-sleeved shirt, khaki pants, and a pair of sandals took a list from the French sergeant, and then came forward to welcome us with open arms. He beamed a generous smile, which immediately put us North Vietnamese on guard. "Welcome to Saigon, misses and children. My name is Mr. Fourth," he said.

It took us a moment to grasp his southern accent. Among other things, he got the "v" and "o" sounds mixed up with the "z" and "u."

His phrasing sounded very odd. Older people flinched, as North Vietnamese commonly addressed a group by saying "Dear ladies, dear gentlemen." I would later learn that "misses and children" was the southern way of saying "folks" and that South Vietnamese seldom called each other by their first names, but by the order of their birth. If a man was the firstborn, they called him "Second" because the title "First" belonged to the village headman. Accordingly, Mr. Fourth was the third-born in his family.

He had us board two buses to go to our temporary lodgings. Outside the airport, orchards and houses lined the busy, fume-choked road. Without rice fields, the land looked drier than in the North. We passed through a tin-shack slum. The air above the roofs wavered with heat. It was a sprawl of rust and decay. The streets were bare, unpaved. Mounds of putrid garbage stewed in the sun. There wasn't a single tree to shoulder the searing heat. Women wore pajama-like clothes and wrapped checkered scarves on their heads. Most men went shirtless and shoeless, covering themselves with only a pair of shorts or a sarong that came halfway down their thighs. There were small groceries, motorbike repair shops, and fruit vendors with strange bright-colored fruits piled high in baskets and bananas hanging under the awnings. Closer to Saigon proper, there were more two- and three-story buildings, dwellings mixed in with shops and warehouses. Every sidewalk was teeming with kiosk-diners filled with shirtless men drinking. People ate right on the street, their backs to the thrumming traffic, their heads swimming in engine exhaust. It was a sobering sight because in Hanoi only the expensive restaurants and bistros put tables on the sidewalk. The cheapest vendors would be the ones putting low benches on the side of the road for customers. In Hanoi everyone was fully clothed; even laborers didn't go outside shirtless, much less sit down to eat. Saigon seemed to me a very unruly, graceless city. It might have been uplifting to see the city center, but the bus took a meandering route, veering on the outskirts and turning onto one small street after another until we arrived in Saigon's Chinatown.

Compared to Hanoi's Chinatown, which spanned a few city blocks, Cho Lon was practically a city. It coexisted side by side with Saigon like an unattractive sibling; it was grimy, bustling, cacophonous. The buildings were crammed together, as if they grew on top of one another. Every door was a storefront with bins of goods, produce, and meats spilling onto the sidewalk. Upstairs were offices with placard billboards and living quarters with laundry hanging out the windows. The city generated its own breeze, a mixture of sewage, garbage, aromatic noodle soup, baked buns, dishwater, roast duck, and mildew.

Excerpted from The Eaves of Heaven by Andrew X. Pham. Copyright © 2008 by Andrew X. Pham. Excerpted by permission of Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.