Only Nguyen Quang Huy is oblivious to the coming deluge. Shortly after 5 p.m., thunder cracks over the center of Saigon and people run for cover from the cloudburst. Lien and Xuan keep working indoors. Nhung gets a car through the downpour to her rehearsal. The rain falls in tropical quantities, then abruptly stops.
Life returns to the sidewalks.
By the time Huy emerges from his studio at 8 p.m., the streets are dry again. It is as if the storm never happened. Children of one of the starkest generation gaps in the world, they have no interest in hearing about the hardships their parents endured in the fighting that ended a quarter century ago. They are determined to get on with their own lives, to make up for lost time since the communists took over and dumped Vietnam at the bottom of Asia's economic league. Theirs is a world of mobile phones, mopeds, long days at work and long evenings dating in coffee shops.