Rootless Jenny Xie Between Hanoi and Sapa there are clean slabs of rice fields and no two brick houses in a row. I mean, no three— See, counting’s hard in half-sleep, and the rain pulls a sheet over the sugar palms and their untroubled leaves. Hours ago, I crossed a motorbike with a hog strapped to its seat, the size of a date pit from a distance. Can this solitude be rootless, unhooked from the ground? No matter. The mind resides both inside and out. It can think itself and think itself into existence. I sponge off the eyes, no worse for [...]