She wears silver bangles in her ears and more around her wrist. She wears a hand-dyed indigo ensemble and leg warmers tied tightly with ribbon she has stitched. Her name is Shu, she's 10 years old, she's Hmong, and together we go walking...

My husband, Jerry, and I meet her one evening as the sun droops over terraced hills, and twilight dims the cobbled streets of Sapa. It’s a small burg in northern Vietnam, high on a skinny precipitous hill, near the Chinese border. She finds us walking through the market. She insists on friendship.

Shu makes music as she goes, carrying a walkman in a black leather satchel. She pushes the buttons, and her friend sings in Hmong. She pushes them again, and a voice sings in Vietnamese. "That me," she says.

She takes my hand, leads us through the darkening street and asks, "Tomorrow you leave?"

No.

"OK, tomorrow you go walking?"

Maybe.

"OK, tomorrow I find you." Then: "Here's a present for you."

She dangles a black ribbon embroidered with green stems and leaves, red and yellow flowers. She made it herself. She wraps it around my right wrist, ties it snugly, and tells Jerry he'll get one tomorrow. Then she swings my arm. She'll find us, yes, she will.

And she does. She pounces from the foggy morning market as we overlook the cloudy abyss that leads to Cat Cat, a Hmong village not her own.

"Hello. You remember me?"

Of course.

"Your name Karen?"

Yes.

She grabs the hand again, asks our intentions. Cat Cat, we say. She knows. We go walking now, together as she planned. She'll show us the way.

We follow the pebbly road and talk about her business. She sells her mother’s embroidered jackets, with little silver bell buttons. She sells the earrings, bracelets and necklaces that her father carves and fashions. She stays here in Sapa, two hours by foot from her village, Lao Chai. She stays in a Vietnamese house with other Hmong girls who do the same. She walks home often, gives her parents the money she makes, then returns to Sapa to sell more. She’s never seen the nearest city, 20 miles away. She’s never been to Hanoi, never traveled beyond her walks. Her feet—brown, stained, cold in plastic sandals—they’re her life.

And her life, at 10, mirrors the lives of many. It divines a life to come. They, the ethnic ones, mob Sapa. They rap on restaurant windows, grabbing free white arms, hoping to sell their clothes and precious metals for a pittance to wide-eyed travelers who come here just to see them in their togs among their chiseled mountains. They start much younger than Shu. They continue well into wrinkled, grandmotherly life. Many ethnicities share the fertile nooks and crannies near Sapa, but the Hmong and Dao govern the tourist trade.

But Shu—Shu is different. While others seize time and personal space whispering, “OK, OK, you buy from me,” Shu pounces instead upon the heart. She bewitches with inexorable charm. Shu meets many foreign friends, takes them by the hand, learns their language. She opens her sack, plucks a tiny purse, unwraps plastic from a parcel, unravels paper around a stack of passport photos. There's Erik, John, Nancy, Margaret and many more. From England, Holland, Norway, Australia. Shu pins the Canadian flag on her lapel. She dons a plastic flower in her headdress and totes a stuffed toy mouse—"From Japan," she says.

Shu sells, that’s her job, the thing she knows, at 10 years old.

No school today?

"Maybe I don't go to school and the teacher is very angry with me."

The teacher is in Lao Chai. English, tourists, money all hail from Sapa.

*****
After our walk, we offer lunch. We pick the Four Seasons restaurant, with Hmong and Dao women clustered around the doors. The proprietor grunts, preparing to evict our friend. We say it's OK, and the owner asks again, for certainty. She's our guide today, we say, and the man chuckles.

Shu can't read the menu, English or Vietnamese. We order green tea and fried rice with chicken. She gobbles, then clutches her belly, says she's full. Then she eats a springroll.

It's time for business. She keeps her father's tiny carved hoops pinned inside her jacket. She stashes the shirts and necklaces at "the Vietnamese house." She leads us there, to a wooden and earthen abode on a hillside. Freshly dyed indigo dries out front. When the clouds part, the house snatches stellar views of Fansipan, Vietnam’s highest point.

Shu takes us into the bedroom where five, six, then seven women assemble. They say hello in chorus and dangle their wares before us.

"You buy, you buy, OK?"

Shu rifles through a rice sack beneath the bed. We head outside onto the stoop, where she shows us two jackets—dyed deep, rich and royally blue—with embroidered lapels and appliquéd squares with crosses and lines and triangles. We look, touch, snuggle, admire. Shu pulls out needle and thread and stitches a fraying seam. Women crowd around. They snicker at the handiwork; we should buy from them instead.

But we buy from Shu. We bargain a bit, because it is protocol, and I feel criminal for taking so much and imparting so little. I am embarrassed how little we pay for two jackets and a bracelet. She beams and thanks us profusely.

She grabs my hand again, when the deal is complete, and trots along with us.

“Me go with you.”

We walk a bit. She hugs me, straddles my torso, clenches me. “Thank you, thank you,” she says.

We part with plans to meet the next morning. She’ll take us home to mom and dad.

*****
We go by foot, the way she does, down the bumpy road slicing the mountainside, white rock looming above and a pit of air below, filling a valley wide and green.

She holds my hand, skips ahead at her own pace, then runs to reunite with us. She points to buffalo and pigs and rice terraces. “You have?” she asks about our country. We answer sometimes yes, sometimes no, sometimes yes but different. Like the pigs. We watch black, hairy, snorting boars skirting narrow paths. We have pigs, I say, but pink and hairless. We have ducks just the same. We have streams tumbling down hillsides, wiping boulders clean. We do not have rice growing in geometry, row upon row upon square upon square, with water falling from one terrace to the next.

Shu doesn’t know flat land. Hanoi? I tell her it’s flat, like the road. No hills. She can’t imagine it. “You no have?” she asks, sweeping her arms through the air, pointing to the postcard around us.

Well, not exactly.

I ask whether she knows airplanes, in the sky; she motions like a propeller. I tell her that’s how we go from our country to hers.

“Maybe you have many, but me only one.”

She’s seen just one, a small one. It could never hold her whole village and more.

We buy cookies and three trunks of sugarcane at a shop where we turn from road to trail and begin our descent into the valley. The shop owner is Vietnamese. I ask her, When you buy food at the market, do you pay the same price as Vietnamese? In reply, she asks what we pay for bread. There are foreign prices, Hmong prices, Vietnamese prices—in that descending order.

“I pay more,” she says. More than the Vietnamese. “I don’t know why.”

The subject recurs whenever we go walking. In her home—the Vietnamese. Later, over a snack—the Vietnamese. “No, I don’t like Vietnamese,” she says, and then, “Sometimes friends.” But only sometimes.

*****
She leads us down, down through red earth that her neighbors plow and trample and chip away, carving new terraces, preparing for the next reap. She leads us up again, past children sloshing in the river, through a school whose blackboards inside show lessons in Vietnamese. This is where the teacher is angry.

Her home is farther uphill, through muddy trails and dried-up terraces, around a bend. Twelve children scamper and chortle as we approach. Their noses drip, just like Shu’s. Their skin is leathery, their hair snarly, their clothing ragged, their eyes runny. They devour the goodies we bring.

Shu’s home is like others nearby: dirt floor, wood frame, grass-and-shingle roof, corn dangling from ceiling, hemp balls stuck in walls, blackened wok over smoldering fire, water trickling into a trough. There is one bedroom, beside the kitchen fire, with one bed and one big blanket. Light beams through cracks in the wall. Shu’s aunt embroiders an intricate pattern in soft light wafting through the doorway.

Shu’s mother, Cu, chops pork fat with a cleaver. She picks fresh greens with tiny yellow flowers outside and chops them on a wooden block. Shu stirs the fat in a pan while Cu adds the greens. Steam fills the room. Then she sets a small wooden table near the door. She ladles vegetable broth over old, cold rice, then fills our bowls with greens. Cu, Shu and we sup while father Ga naps in the other room, after a few swigs of his pipe.

Then it’s time for business. Shu’s aunt dangles the finished purse before us. There are silver necklaces, shorts, shirts, bags, rings, bracelets—all for sale.

How much?

“You say,” Shu always says.

She rarely names the price. No matter, we could never pay enough. And so it is again today. We buy earrings and a blue-and burgundy embroidery swatch for a tiny price that pleases them immensely. They give us a needlework square and batik embroidered shorts as gifts. Shu hands to her mother our money from yesterday.

Tell your mother she does beautiful embroidery.

“She knows, she knows, I tell already.”

Tell your father he does beautiful silver work.

“He knows. He knows. Yesterday, you buy bracelet.”

When business is done, Shu grabs my hand. “OK, we go to Sapa now.”

And that’s that. They all wish us well; Cu tells us to return when we “have baby.”

*****
We head back up from the hot valley bowels. Sweat drips from Shu’s brow. She unravels her leg warmers, then ties the hemp strips around her waist like a belt.

We stop for Coke at a roadside shop. A European man we met the day before lumbers up the trail. Shu says she remembers him.

“I suppose you do,” he says. He remembers Jerry and me. We saw him on the path between Cat Cat and another village called Sin Chai.

“Yesterday, you go Cat Cat,” Shu says. “Me know you.”

Oh, you’re the girl who tried to take tourists to your house yesterday, he says.

No, not the same girl.

Well, then, how does she know I went to Cat Cat? he turns to us.

She was with us when we met you.

Oh, I suppose she was, he mumbles.

They all look the same to him, the Hmong girls wearing blue. There are so many, dressed alike, with dark brown skin and dark brown hair and dark brown eyes. But Shu remembers him well, and knows enough to say so in English, Vietnamese or Hmong.

“Cheeky,” he says. “They’re learning very quickly.”

*****

She finds us again the next afternoon. The flap-flap of plastic sandals on asphalt ends in a robust embrace. She’s here, minus the fake flower on her hat, minus the hat itself, hair in pigtail braids. She has tiny, wispy bangs. She’s the only Hmong girl we see without a traditional hat. Shu is Shu, and does her own thing.

I donate photos to her collection, pictures of us in Hue, the Imperial City. We tell her that’s in Vietnam. “Oh, very good,” and she gives us the thumbs up.

She follows as we move toward dinner. We enter the Mimoza on an evening without electricity. Fluorescence and karaoke give way to candlelight. We sit near the window; she tells Jerry to switch sides with her. She scrunches in the corner, wriggles in her chair, can’t sit still.

You have a problem?

“Yes. Police.”

She’s not supposed to be in here, doesn’t want to be seen. Shall we move?

“Yes.”

We move three tables away and our bodies conceal her. An old man in a beret smiles at her as he sits near the kitchen door, listening to a tape player croon “The Godfather” theme after the electricity flickers on.

We order rice, tea, tomato soup, barbecue pork kabob, tofu, fried vegetables. Shu inhales, four helpings, five helpings. She’s very hungry.

Does Lao Chai have lights? I ask during a flicker.

“No, Lao Chai not have.”

Did you eat today?

“No.”

This the first time? No food yet?

“No food today.”

Why not?

No answer.

No money?

She nods yes.

If you have no money, you don’t eat?

She nods yes.

What do you eat at home?

“In Lao Chai, we have this and this,” she points to the rice and the lettuce beneath the pork—not the meat itself.

Like what we had in your house?

“Yes. Same same, what you had.”

Rice, spinach, pork fat. Every day?

“Yes.”

You eat every day?

“Every day.”

We clear the plates, she nibbles on peanuts, then settles into the large white plastic chair in a food coma. She smiles, twists her hair, loosens her leg wraps.

Does your Japanese friend take you to dinner?

“No.”

Your Canadian friend?

“No.”

Hmong women call to her through the window, and she goes briefly to check the matter.

We ask whether she has a problem.

She nods yes. “Later...Later with Dao and Hmong.”

The Dao women enter as we finish. They drink tea, ask Shu something we can’t understand. We can’t begin to understand the complications of friendship between her, a 10-year-old Hmong girl in Vietnam, and us, two Western tourists who do more than buy trinkets.

We part, say good-night. We have seen the looks, the stares, at foreigners sharing time and food and love with her, a Hmong girl. She has problem, as she says. But she is hungry.

•••••

Life shuffles along, we board a plane, many months pass, and a letter arrives.

“Hello Karen, How are you today?... Today where are you going? Today I went for a walk with my friends. Will you come back to Sapa to visit? I miss you, do you miss me? Do you remember when you came to my village. I remember. I have the photo that you gave me. Thank you. You bought 2 jackets from me, I will remember you. Never forget me, I’ll never forget you.... I have a present for you....”

Enclosed are two bright braided bracelets.

Her name is Shu, she’s 11 now, she’s Hmong, she hugs my heart. And every day, in my mind, together we go walking.