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In Sadec I rented a motorbike of course, everything was really far apart, I had scoured the internet for places Marguerite had been to and lived in and marked them with a pen on a map but there were no smartphones, no staked-out trails, no translation apps. Today there are organised tours and homestay packages, but back then there were only three hotels and a lot of gesticulation. I’d lived in Saigon for long enough to get by on my halting Vietnamese, but I still spent a lot of time driving somewhat aimlessly along riverbanks looking for addresses I was only half sure existed. It was at one of these times that I found myself accosted by this gang of river kids, who were reassuringly playing with a machete down by the water near what I hoped would turn out to be the site of Marguerite’s mother’s house, “built on a raised strip of land, clear of the garden, the snakes, the scorpions, the red ants, the floodwaters of the Mekong.”

It wasn’t, but I did get this photo of the boys, which they (quite aggressively) demanded and into the formation for which they organised themselves in three seconds flat. The leader was the tiny one in the centre, showing only his face and making V-signs with both his hands. After I pressed the shutter they all came running up to me, as coordinated as any Broadway dance-troupe, to see the photo on the back of my camera. Obviously, the only thing on the back of my faux-arcane film camera was light blue Japanese hipster plastic. I smiled awkwardly and drove off, and the boys went back to playing with the machete. (at Sa Đéc) https://www.instagram.com/p/CiFdc6Io0J8/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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