To this day, I still remember running across this Vietnamese guy in Berlin when I walked up the steps from one of the numerous subway exits. It was the fall of 1994 and I was on holiday from the university. The man had this look on his face as if he knew me and he proceeded to speak to me in Vietnamese and held out a pack of cigarettes. He had a baseball cap perched on his head, wore a wrinkled blazer and a pair of dark slacks. His face was reddish brown and quite chapped from exposure to the sun and the wind. He was a little shorter than me, but he looked to be twice my age. I stared at him, then hesitated, and finally just brushed him off and walked away; not because I didn’t smoke, but because I had more questions than small talk would allow. By the time I left Berlin, I had seen several of these cigarette vendors standing near subway entrances, trying to sell, sell, sell. I only realized much later that I didn’t just bump into some anonymous Vietnamese guy, but rather someone who had unwittingly played a part in an elaborate story that few people have heard and even fewer have the patience to listen to.