Buford Highway is a six-lane commercial corridor in Chamblee whose Asian businesses and ordinary highway retail form the setting for a crucial stretch of Conrad Hensley’s flight. For Conrad, the road is at once a place to search for food and work, a landscape he must learn to read, and a reminder that the familiar world of California is now distant and potentially dangerous.

Setting and Urban Form

The route reaches Buford Highway from New Peachtree Road, beyond an underpass and the elevated MARTA line. Lum Loc directs Conrad toward it from Meadow Lark Terrace, describing the far side of the tracks as another world. The distinction belongs to Lum Loc’s vivid way of explaining the area, but Conrad’s walk gives it a physical shape: a transition from a sleepy, tree-lined road and the older town north of the tracks to a commercial strip organized around fast-moving traffic and shops.

Conrad sees the highway as a familiar kind of American roadside development, despite the signs that make it unlike the surroundings he knows. It has six lanes of blacktop, broad stretches of concrete and hard-baked dirt, low commercial buildings, overhead wires, and bright pennants and tall signs intended to catch the attention of drivers. The road’s scale and visual clutter are functional: businesses compete for notice from passing traffic, including motorists traveling at highway speed beneath the Georgia sun.

The surrounding businesses range from restaurants and small shops to pawnshops, collision services, and vehicle-emissions testing. Across the road from the restaurants are signs advertising pawned car titles and gold and diamond sales, while a tan, quonset-shaped tent houses an emissions-testing operation required under Georgia motor-vehicle laws. The mix makes the corridor neither an isolated enclave nor a purely ethnic district: it is also a low-rent retail landscape shaped by automobiles, roadside visibility, and everyday financial need.

Businesses and Languages

The Asian commercial presence is concentrated in and around Asian Square. Conrad passes businesses with names including Ming’s Auto Service, Kien Ngay Brake Land, Minh Ngoc Travel Agency, and Le Phan Mini-Storage. Along the highway he sees Hoang Nhung Jewelry, Hong Kong Bakery, Chuyen Tien Money Transactions, Quoc Hu’ong Chicken World, Pho Hoa Insurance Agency, Kim’s Pharmacy, and Kien Ngay Music, which sells Vietnamese videos, CDs, and recordings. Some signs are in English, while others carry scripts Conrad cannot identify, leaving him unsure whether he is seeing Thai, Cambodian, Laotian, Korean, or Vietnamese writing.

The businesses present a working commercial community through their services as much as through their signs: auto repair, travel, money transactions, food, medicine, music, and storage. At the same time, the stretch retains the standard forms of American roadside commerce. A customized lavender Pontiac Firebird pulls into Asian Square, where three young men dressed in black enter Pho Ca Dao; farther along, familiar signs for pawnshops and car-related services punctuate the same highway setting. The scene is filtered through Conrad’s limited knowledge. His uncertainty about the languages and his attention to the people and vehicles record his first encounter with the area, rather than establishing a definitive account of its residents.

Mr. Saigon Noodle Parlor becomes one of Conrad’s immediate refuges. Hungry and anxious to conserve his dwindling money, he orders Tranh Van Five Different Flavor Seafood Noodle Soup for $5.95, a steep expense by his calculation. He eats by a window overlooking the highway, where the restaurant’s Vietnamese menu supplies English translations in smaller print. The meal brings the corridor’s cultural particularity into close contact with his practical concerns: he needs to eat, but every purchase shortens the time his cash can sustain him.

Conrad’s Passage Through the Corridor

Conrad arrives on foot with an overnight bag and, at first, $700 left. As he walks toward the commercial center, he passes apartment buildings, a convenience store, small businesses, antique shops, and the local City Hall and police station. Seeing two policemen near a cruiser suddenly makes the stakes of an otherwise ordinary walk immediate: he is an escaped convict, and he has not yet settled on what name or explanation he would use if stopped. He keeps his pace steady and continues toward the underpass rather than drawing attention to himself.

At the highway, he reads the strip for signs of how to survive there. He pays his restaurant bill before leaving for a newspaper vending machine, then buys a copy of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for 60 cents and returns to his table with green tea costing another 75 cents. The decision is small but deliberate: he wants the classified advertisements, yet he does not want the restaurant staff to think he has left without paying. While looking for work, he also finds a report on the earthquake in California. It says that parts of Pleasanton, Camp Parks, and Santa Rita were demolished and that eight people had died and twenty inmates remained unaccounted for. It gives no names and mentions no manhunt, offering him some information without resolving the danger of being identified.

On another visit to the corridor, Conrad goes to a Cambodian bank in Asian Square and exchanges ten dollars of his remaining cash for rolls of quarters. Near the Vietnamese music store, he uses a telephone booth to call Kenny in California. The details mark a change in his resources: earlier he had $700; later, after Kenny has given him $1,500, he has only $272 left. He is still improvising, but now the highway’s businesses and public facilities enable contact with someone from the life he has fled.

The costs of staying there continue to shape his choices. Conrad remembers sleeping on the floor at Meadow Lark Terrace with his overnight bag pressed against him, waking repeatedly amid the noise of nearby conversations. He worries that eating at Buford Highway restaurants will consume his remaining money too quickly. On a warm June morning in Old Chamblee, his discomfort with those conditions and his dwindling funds sharpen his awareness of being alone on the streets. The road is accessible, but access does not make him secure or settled.

Transit and Narrative Significance

Buford Highway is linked to a wider network of local movement. Conrad reaches its shops by walking from Meadow Lark Terrace and crossing beneath the transportation infrastructure around the MARTA line. Later, Lucy Ng gives him public-transit directions to the Croker house on Blackland Road: take MARTA to Lenox Square, then bus 40 west along West Paces Ferry Road and another bus north on Northside Drive. This route does not make Buford Highway itself the destination of that later journey, but it places the highway episode within a story where buses, rail lines, walking, and the cost of travel repeatedly determine what characters can reach.

For Conrad, the corridor’s importance lies in its practical uses and its exposure. He can find a meal, a newspaper, a bank, a telephone, and the possibility of work along the same strip, but he must also move through public space as someone who fears recognition. The highway’s contrast between familiar roadside commerce and unfamiliar signs mirrors his own unstable position: he is physically in the United States, yet cut off from the ordinary protections and relationships that once made a place feel known. The corridor thus serves not merely as a backdrop to his flight, but as the first environment in which he tries to assemble a precarious daily life.