Ten miles north of Saigon stood a smoldering mountain of garbage, the dumping ground for the city's two million inhabitants. For weeks I had wanted to go there, to talk to the ragpickers and see their trade.

I arrived to find the football field of garbage crawling with roaches, rats and ragpickers. They swarmed over the bulldozers that pushed the trash back and forth, ready to snatch anything of value that might surface among the rotting grapefruit rinds and wispy plastic bags. At least half the pickers were children, some as young as six years old, expertly sifting through the refuse with curved metal hooks and nimble fingers.

A small area near the road had been piled high with mounds of gathered garbage - eight vertical feet of black galoshes, six feet of women's blouses, a smaller heap of gray bones, black with flies.

The mountains of accumulated wealth were deceptive. Pickings were surprisingly slim. The garbage that made it to the final dumping grounds had already been sifted a dozen times by the Saigon pickers. Little of value escaped their eagle eyes. Even a discarded wok, dented and worn through in several places, would attract the attention of a steady stream of city homeless who, mounted on bicycles or carrying double baskets of rusty cans, spent their days plodding from one potential find to the next, racking aside dead rats and rotting cabbage in search of something to eat or sell. At five in the morning the street sweepers made their rounds; delicate young women with elbow-length gloves and white surgical masks, using homemade brooms that had been worn down to stubs. Once again the city pickers flitted by like silent wraiths, to stoop briefly over the mounded garbage and be gone. Eventually the piles were shoveled into a truck which labored slowly to the dump, leaking a trail of rubbish and clouds of bitter black exhaust. There the process began all over again.

But there was something odd about the ragpickers that scurried over the rotting field, competing with roaches and mangy dogs for society's scraps. They moved, not with the mind-numbing rhythm of farmers planting rice, but with quick, birdlike gestures, their eyes alert and their hands ready to snatch a valuable find from the refuse. The children laughed often and gave each other brief glimpses of their discoveries, like kids on the beach looking for colored sea glass.

It made sense, somehow. A farmer surveying his paddy knew just how much harvest he could hope for, even under the most benevolent conditions. In this field of filth the possibilities were endless and a lottery-like mentality prevailed. The very next pass of the rake could uncover a gold ring, a bracelet, a working carburetor. Anyone, young or old, male or female, could strike it rich - if their luck prevailed.

Alongside the highway a group of ragpickers squatted among the trash, their rice sacks disgorging armfuls of junk to be sorted. A young boy sat under a wide-brimmed conical hat, his fingers slipping like snakes through the tangle of wires, bottle caps, washers, broken pens and cutlery, old bones, forks, and bits of copper. Everything had a market. An entire basin was reserved for toothbrushes, their bristles bent almost horizontal, their handles cracked and jagged. The boy held each new item just long enough to assign it a value and then tossed it into the appropriate pile. He tested pens across the back of his hand and slipped a crooked pair of sunglass frames over his nose before dropping them into a heap with a dozen similar sets.

An old man approached, offered me a Vietnamese cola, and waved me onto a salvaged chair with one missing leg propped up on bricks. He surveyed the field. "You don't see much of this in America, do you?" he asked in perfect English. I sank into the seat. He laughed at my surprise.

"I spent years in Minnesota, working as a mechanic," he explained and inclined a languid hand towards the West, disturbing a host of flies. "You have better garbage, but terrible winters." He pretended to shiver and chuckled. In a curious reversal of the trend, he had chosen to return to his family in Saigon rather than import them to America. He now spent his time foraging for the parts to build himself a car. He pointed at a rusty hulk listing heavily against the edge of a tar-paper shack. "When she is done, then I'll become a cab-driver!" he announced and looked at me with sudden hope. "You have nine-sixteenths socket wrench?" I shook my head. He nodded serenely and settled back into his chair, waiting for one of the scurrying forms to approach him with yet another piece of his dream machine, in what was probably the most environmentally sound car manufacturing facility in the world.

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