september 10, 1999, 8:15 p.m. | le thi diem thuy II

Every morning Ahn wakes up in the house next to mine, a yellow duplex she and I call a townhouse because we found out from a real estate ad that a townhouse is a house that has an upstairs and a downstairs. My father calls Ahn the "chicken-egg girl." Each morning Ahn's mother loads a small pushcart with stacks of eggs and Ahn walks all over Linda Vista selling eggs. Her back yard is full of chickens and roosters. Sometimes you can see a rooster fly up and balance itself on the back gate, and it will crow and crow, off and on, all day long until dark comes.

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I knew women like this, who kept chickens and rabbits in their backyards, crowded with palm trees and wire hutches. Not in Linda Vista, though, and there were plenty of Vietnamese refugees there. Most of these women, friends of my mother's from as far back as Catholic high school in Hanoi, live in Westminster, or also known as Little Saigon.