Picasso

PICASSO

District 5 is Chợ Lớn, Ho Chi Minh City’s old trading quarter, and even in 2006 it still felt like a different city inside the city: its own rhythm, its own history, layers of trade and migration going back generations. This book came from a family whose household had, before 1975, done business with a French export house. It had survived in a chest under a staircase, wrapped in newspaper that had long since yellowed and fused to the cover. The smell of the room when I opened that chest is still the clearest memory I have of finding it.