In memory of fallen comrades

by Vu Hong

At twilight, Mr Bay Triet usually went to the plains of alang grass with a bag over one shoulders. The entire area was dimly lit under the starry sky.

There were only nine families in our little hamlet. We were the first clans to settle in this half-wild land heavily polluted with alum water and toxic waste after the liberation of South Viet Nam. I remember that our migration to this locality happened between mid-1978 and the end of that year. Every night, looking out of the small window of our shanty I felt happier than I did in the days we evacuated to and stayed at the township of Kien Hoa for I was able to contemplate swarms of fire flies hovering over the cork plants by the Ba Lai River to my heart’s content. But I soon found it rather boring. You see, we children are very fond of new things at first, then we tire of them in a matter of days!

In the daytime, we came under a blazing sun. As far as the eye could see, there stood only a few cork trees and several calophylluses.

"This place is full of toxins sprayed by the enemy," Mum told me.

"What for, Mum?" I asked her.

"To create a no man’s land around Binh Duc Base."

"What does no man’s land mean, Mum?"

"When you grow up, you’ll understand, my dear."

"How stupid you are!" added my elder sister Lien.

Adults always say that, "You’ll understand when you grow up" to explain something complicated or delicate to us kiddies.

That year I was only a 7th-grader at primary school. Kids at that time knew, in general, far less than those of the corresponding level of today. However, we were quite familiar with military planes and bombardment when the war was still raging in our region.

* * *

Usually, after dinner I dropped in on Mr Bay Triet. Feeling uneasy with such frequent visits, my sister once whispered into my ears.

"Beware of him. He’s mad. Don’t go to his place too often, my dear."

"Mad but kind-hearted!" Mum argued. "Have you ever seen him killing a chicken or a duck?"

Taking advantage of their negligence, I rushed over the fields to his hut by the river-side.

In my eyes, he was not mad at all, just a bit odd. In the dry season, when it was sunny, he usually loitered here and there on the rural path, mumbling something then bursting out laughing. That was all he did: neither harming nor bothering anyone. Even Mrs Sau Long’s pet dog wagged her tail to welcome him when he passed by and he merrily waved his hand in response. In the rainy season, he stayed indoors. In the evening, when the weather was fine, he went out, a bag over his shoulder. Nobody knew where he was going because they were too busy trying to eke out a living on this barren zone.

In fact, he had no official name. Bay Triet was only a nickname endearingly given by his neighbours. He lived in a hut by the riverside. In reality it was just a small dilapidated house with a roof made of coconut leaves, walls of mud-daubed slats of bamboo and straw. Some parts had been eroded by rain water, revealing pieces of trellis and straw. He usually wore a faded military uniform with a striped headband and a trunk revealing his yellow legs stained by alum water.

The water in these paddy fields was so clear that small fishes could be seen easily. Several of them looked deformed due to Agent Orange. Once I managed to catch some of these queer fish and offered them to him, he flew into a rage. He refused to see me for a long time. He did not smile as he used to.

"Our little Ty follows Uncle Bay Triet to catch fish all morning, so now he is neglecting his studies. Now, he is beginning to look as black as a water buffalo," nagged my sister.

"It’s his summer vacation," answered Mum. "Anyhow, we should make him accustomed to our rice fields and farming. Your Dad died at Tet in the Year of the Monkey when he was leading his unit into the town of Quang Tri and your two elder brothers laid down their lives in Ba Chuc during a fight against Pol Pot’s troops in Cambodia. In the future I shall need an assistant to care for my farm; what can I do on my own with only one arm," she pleaded.

Moved to tears, my sister embraced Mum. Sometimes we asked Uncle Bay Triet to help us plough the field so that we could grow manioc. In exchange, he accepted a little rice, just enough for a meal.

Once when I was following him to gather cork I asked him softly: "Where do you come from, Uncle?" Without answering my question, he just stared at me with his vacant eyes then silently climbed up the tree and tossed me several ripe cork fruit. "Beware of the bees, Uncle," I screamed loudly. Suddenly, he plunged into the water. A few seconds he emerged from the muddy water of the stream and smiled broadly. On the sight of his broad smile, I loved him even more.

Then came the rainy season, with heavy downpours on and off throughout the day. An opaque veil spread over the paddy fields, and raindrops began falling on his coconut palm-leafed roof. Behind me, Uncle Bay Triet hummed a ditty:

It drizzles continuously

Making cork trees bloom

Girls find husbands

Youths find wives

And women have children.

Finishing the song, he jumped up like a child. I burst into laughing. It was the first time I had enjoyed his singing. "Is it the rain that makes him so happy that he has forgotten himself?" I thought. Finding him in ecstasy I asked him again, "Have you got any children, Uncle?" He shook his head then he told me something about his native village. All of a sudden, he wept bitterly.

The day he moved to this half-wild expanse to settle down, our neighbours only knew that he had been imprisoned on Phu Quoc Island for many years. This small 9-household hamlet welcomed him as a compatriot, that’s all.

The country path became muddy after just one rainy night. The meadow looked lonely. Suddenly from afar, echoed the sound of several turtle-doves. I reached out my arm to take down the fishing tackle.

"You want to go out to play, don’t you?" asked my sister.

"No, I’m going fishing."

I rushed out at once for fear that Mum might stop me as she was afraid that I might be bitten by snakes.

I came to Uncle Bay Triet’s to borrow his fish-basket lid. Suddenly, I heard a cough and a moan. Stepping inside I found him lying on his bed with a pale face. His fishing net was stained with mud. Perceiving a noise he woke up, breathing heavily as if he was having a violent fit of asthma. From the bottom of my heart, I knew that he was too weak to smile. Walking out to the court, I shouted loudly, "Help, help."

Immediately, our neighbours came to his rescue. Some of them rubbed his chest; another person massaged him on the back and neck; while another woman poured ginger liquid into his mouth. Fifteen minutes later he got up with a confused smile. Maybe he was asking himself why there were so many people in his poorly-rigged up house.

"Thank you all," he mumbled. Everybody felt very pleased and moved to tears.

Later on, I asked him a question that was on my mind: "Why do you go out every night to dig holes then fill them up again, my dear Uncle?" Without replying, he just stared at me with his vacant look. Feeling offended, I went out to the rice fields to investigate what he had done during the night. It turned out that the result of his nocturnal efforts were some big newly-made mounds of earth.

"What a madman!" I exclaimed. "There are eight of them in all. What tricks has he been up to during the night?"

Sensing my curiosity, Mum reproached me.

"Stay away from that place," she warned me.

"Why, Mum?"

"I’m told that that place was formerly a terrible battleground with lots of dead bodies."

"How can they affect us?"

"Mrs Sau tells me that for many nights, she has heard laments echoing to her house from that place. If you’re still interested in loitering there, you’ll be kidnapped and tortured one day," Mum threatened me.

After that, evening after evening, I just sat at home, glancing at the coconut palm trees full of bullet marks, which had seen many crucial engagements between Sai Gon soldiers and revolutionary forces. Then half a month had elapsed since I had been to visit Mr Bay Triet.

"Last week, Mr Hai Chi’s legs were blown off by mine near a cluster of bamboo trees at the entrance to our hamlet," sister Lien told me.

"Lien, have you visited Mr Bay Triet recently?" Mum asked her.

"Yes, I have, Mum. He’s quite healthy now."

* * *

The following year, paraffin was restricted for consumption by the State. As a result, few people in the country could afford to buy it because the price escalated day by day. On top of that, but the country was facing huge shortages of rice because a plague of insects had destroyed crops in the Cuu Long (Mekong) Delta. Meals were served with kaoliang instead of rice and calophyllus oil replaced paraffin for a long time. In general, food shops became almost empty. Rumour had it that another war had started somewhere near the national frontier.

Time flew very fast! My summer vacation came to an end quicker than I had expected. I moved up to the 8th class in a new district school far away from my hamlet. My meetings with Uncle Bay Triet became scarcer and scarcer with every passing month. Sometimes we met each other on the rural path as we travelled in opposite directions. He just glanced at me, smiling broadly. The same torn clothes and the same stained legs as before! Nevertheless, my sweet memories of him stayed fresh in my mind forever.

One evening by the end of October, when our calophyllus oil ran out, Mum told me to go to his dwelling to ask for a few pieces of fruit from this kind of tree to burn instead of paraffin, I said, "I’m afraid of ghosts, Mum."

"It’s broad daylight and his home’s just a stone’s throw away from here. What are you afraid of? What’s more, in our clan, you’re the only male. Who else in this home can do it?" she persuaded me in a soft voice.

"Is there anybody at home?" I said, knocking at his door.

"Yes, I’m here. Just a moment, please."

Immediately, I opened his door. By his side, there stood a few bulging sacks. Next to them several joss-sticks were flickering. I felt sick.

"What are you doing, Uncle?" I asked him.

"Oh dear… Kien! So, you’ve come back home."

"Which Kien? Actually, I’m Ty, the only son of my father Hai Sa."

"Sorry, my fault, my dear Ty." On saying these words, he sobbed bitterly. It seemed to me that he was on the point of collapsing.

"Yes, your Ty’s here."

I dashed towards him and held him.

"My comrades, try to sleep together in these sacks. At a convenient time, I will go in search of you all," he said to the contents of the sacks. I took great pity on him.

"Well, let me help you, my beloved Uncle."

With zeal, I picked up the calophyllus-oil lamp and opened the mouth of one the sacks. From inside, several bones and skulls stared at me from out of the darkness.

Oddly enough, I didn’t scream. I just looked at the bones and showed no fear.

Translated by Van Minh
(from Viet Nam News)

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The yang legend

by Do Tien Thuy

Y Than possessed the beautiful features of a wild flower that attracts lots of butterflies when it opens. Day and night Old Anuk was worried for her in her prime of life. As the head of Sap Village, how could he order his inhabitants to perform their tasks properly when he was unable to persuade his own daughter to get married?

Time passed very quickly. Twenty seasons of slash-and-burn farming had elapsed, yet she remained alone with her father and a little female monkey.

Then one day when she was gathering aubergines in the garden, the little animal climbed down from a high branch and touched her skirt. Feeling a bit worried, Y Than followed the monkey to a shrub and peered through the foliage. To her surprise, a few hundred metres away a herd of elephants was standing by the stream. Next to them, muscular hunters in loin-cloths lay on the ground. One of them was naked – a strong youth with muscular arms and legs like superman, he looked like a real novice among the experienced hunters. In her childhood, while walking to the milpa, Y Khan would hear very interesting stories about elephant hunters of Yook Don jungle.

Of course Krol had not yet caught any elephants. That was the reason for his nudity. These were the rules of his tribe. Nevertheless, he always dreamt of becoming a valiant hunter who would be one day be able to take the place of Gru Nhon, the leader of the group. Now he was on his maiden trip for everybody to assess his capacity and cleverness.

After three days on end in the jungle chasing wild herds of elephants, who seem to have disappeared, they were totally exhausted and had to take a rest to regain their strength. They all fell into a sound sleep, except for the young man. Lying supine, he looked at the green canopy above and thought of the promising day ahead when he would proudly take home a wild elephant amid the admiring eyes of the fair ladies in his mountainous area.

All of a sudden this train of thoughts was interrupted by the rustle of a thick bush nearby. He got up and stared at it. He was greatly amazed and ashamed as his eyes met the gaze of a girl right in front of him. Hurriedly, he covered his belly while stooping under her burning eyes full of passion. Then a few moments later, he completely forgot his shame and he made his way towards her. She was also coming up to him. They approached each other step by step, as if in a daydream, and the plants of the forest opened their branches wide to welcome them.

Their naked bodies twisted together for quite some time. It wasn’t until they heard the roar of the ferocious elephants that they realized what they were doing. Five big elephants were standing around them like a thick black wall. The head of the hunting party Gru Nhon was pointing his spear at Krol.

"Damn you the son of the Eban clan! You must die for your sin," Gru Nhon shouted. "You learnt the hunting rules by heart, and yet you broke one of the most important taboos: not to have sex with a woman for thirty days before the hunt, to bath in the clean water of the Serepox one day before and to offer five bottles of rice wine and one pig to God. Meanwhile our wives are forbidden to pound rice and must evade men’s wanton looks when their husbands join the hunt. What’s more, we have to sleep on the ground to get rid of our scent. But you, a newcomer, dare to break the rules."

Kron turned pale. Kneeling before the leader, he implored in a low voice. "Sir Gru Nhon, I’ve made a great mistake. I’m to blame, but she’s done nothing wrong. Please forgive her because she’s not guity."

Y Than burst into tears. She imagined the sight of her lover, bound to the tail of a strong elephant and dragged along into the thick of the forest. She wept, "If I’m still alive, I’ll try to find you, my dear.’

She returned home in horror and pain. Her father watched her as she ascended the wooden stairs to their home.

***

Most of the villagers were present at Y Than’s trial. Inside the large rong house, the flame came to life again after being doused for many days. Y Than knelt in the centre of the court, head bent a little. Paradoxically, the so-called judge of that session was none other than her father. In spite of all the angry words thrown at her, she remained silent.

She did not know her lover’s whereabouts or what had befallen him. But he had left something for her in her womb. Biting her lip for quite a long while, she suddenly stood up and stared at her father.

"Esteemed Father Anuk, please don’t accuse me of doing anything wrong. For the time being, I cannot reveal the father of the child in my womb. But he’ll soon return home, father."

"Drive her out of our village," he shouted angrily after breaking his mug of rice wine into pieces then collapsing on the ground.

Silently, Y Than left her home and went in search of Krol. Following the footprints left by the huge animals, she went further and further into the jungle. "What has happened to him? Was he pardoned? Where would he go?" she asked herself. She remembered Gru Nhon’s serious countenance that day.

During the solemn ceremony before the start of the hunting party, Krol had drunk a lot and had taken an oath that he would resign himself to death if he violated the rules. In fact, there had been numerous hunters who had lost their lives so far, but they all died on the hunt. Krol’s case, however, was beyond his imagination.

***

As the leader of the party, Gru Nhon had to abide by the rules and try Krol in one of two ways: either expel him from his team or to leave him to God’s mercy during a fight with wild elephants. Gru Nhon trembled at the thought.

On the way to the battle ground, the one-tusked elephant driven by Gru Nhon suddenly stopped short and uttered a low cry. That was a signal that wild elephants had been detected. At once Gru Nhon ordered his men to halt and prepare for a struggle. Normally, his herd of elephants would encircle the wild animals, but this time those tactics could not be put into practice.

"Hey Krol of the Eban Clan! Now it’s high time for you to be punished," he said to Krol in a loud voice. Then he told his men to untie him in front of the wild herd of beasts.

"You can have one of the two choices. One of them is to fight against these animals alone. If you manage to catch the lead elephant, you’ll be free and can stay with us. The other is to abstain from the struggle and go home to lead a shameful life, and say goodbye to the career of a hunter forever," he declared resolutely.

Glancing at his boss with eyes gaunt due to lack of sleep, he seemed to entreat something. Fighting against the wild and ferocious herd of huge animals alone meant death. And he didn’t want to die yet, for he could still see in his mind’s eye the shining eyes of Y Than. Gru Nhon stared at him as if urging him to enter into the fatal engagement.

The one-tusked elephant had knelt down to allow Gru Nhon to get off. He kept on looking at Krol in wait. For him, there was no way out. Having a last look at his fellow-hunters, Krol took the staff his boss had flung to him, then jumped upon the back of Gru Nhon’s elephant. The leader glanced at him admiringly, then told his men not to help him at any cost.

At first the wild elephants ran away at the sight of the tamed animals, but then they realized that only one was heading their way. Krol rode forward, while the four others stood aside, watching. Combat began.

The fight between the wild elephants and Krol’s lasted from noon to sunset, trampling all the surrounding flora. Krol’s elephant started bleeding, but it continued to struggle on. Although Gru Nhon felt afraid that such a talented man might be in danger, he did not dare break the rules. With his decades of life and death combat, he knew that Krol might soon face a terrible test. Indeed, the wild elephants changed their strategy. Surrounding Krol, they began to throw stones at him and his courageous animal. To the best of his knowledge, he knew that if he defeated the leading wild elephant, the rest of the herd would run helter-skelter and his task would be achieved easily. With this in mind, he spurred his elephant, which hesitated for a few seconds because it had never been urged to do so, and it beat a retreat. At once the wild lead elephant chased after them. When the two had come close to each other, Krol pulled back the bridle strongly. The four legs of his animal furrowed the ground, then in a twinkling, it turned back. When Krol shouted loudly it darted violently at its opponent. A horrible noise resounded, wild elephants shot away, and yellow leaves showered all over the place. After that, all fell into silence.

When the torches were lit, the hunting party bent their heads in admiration in front of the battlefield. The tusk of Krol’s elephant had pierced a large tree and kept the dead animal standing upright. As for Krol, he was nowhere to be found. Gru Nhon and his men started to disperse in search of his body. What they saw were blood stains on tree trunks and leaves. Soon they found his dead body lying motionless near the injured tree.

***

When Y Than reached the elephants’ battle ground, she found only a mess of uprooted plants and leaves. She called out the name of her lover. In response to her lamentable cries, she heard only the replies of the forest wind. Exhausted, she fainted. In her nightmare, she found herself lifted up by elephant trunks then placed beside the dead elephant as it stood propped against the tree.

On one morning years later, many inhabitants of Sap Village saw a big piece of a tree trunk with a tusk piercing into it washed ashore near the wharf. They picked it up and put it into a large rattan basket. They hung it on the roof of the rong house because the village head regarded it as a precious godsend embodying the Yang Genie. Every year, Sap residents held a ceremony to wash the tusk for Yang. During the festive days, a strong village youth was chosen to take the basket down. In the wake of mysterious rites, Yang would be lifted out of the rattan basket. It was a moment of paramount importance and hundreds of eyes would stare at the bottom of the basket. Rumour had it that every year, Yang gave the villagers many eggs. When there were a great number of eggs, they would reap a bumper crop and vice versa. At this year, Yang offered them twelve rosy eggs, which looked like those of pigeons.

Translated by Van Minh

(from Viet Nam News)
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Living in expectation

by Nguyen Bich Lan

Lam Anh, my best friend, worked in the advertising department of an Internet service provider. He told me that his daily task was to speak eloquently and make his message agreeable to the ears of the company’s potential customers, to give a succinct speech promising the Internet will bring the whole world right to their room.

"Bringing the whole world to your room, oh, yes, let’s assume that it’s true, but after bringing the whole world to your room, what are you going to do with that world?" – I asked him.

"Just swim in it, swim in it!" he answered.

Lam Anh gave me a secondhand laptop as a gift he had bought in a Singapore curiosity shop. He spent three days during the holidays giving me my first computer lessons. After that, besides the computer handbook that had come with the machine, I had to teach myself how to swim on the Internet. I did swim everyday in that sea of multi-form and multi-language information. I read everything and searched anything. I read the websites of poets, child prodigies and patients suffering from, cancer and AIDS. I swam deep inside news pages, forgetting the truth of my life: that I spent all hours of the day waiting.

I began this wait when I was 16 years old. I still remember the day the doctor at a famous hospital said to me: "You are showing signs of muscular dystrophy. But only one out of a million people get this disease. Scientists still haven’t found a way to treat it. Wait and see though!" When I heard this, I still could not imagine how my expectations would be fulfilled. But I did believe I should wait with calmness and steadfastness. But I was wrong. Waiting was a sophisticated art, where overconfidence was easily dashed.

I did not cry when they ran a pin through my spine to get bone marrow for a test. I did not cry when they cut a piece of muscle from my calf for a biopsy. I also did not cry when I had to take bitter pills endlessly. I did not cry from the pain. I did not cry from hopelessness. I only cried because my days were so long, that was the only reason.

My parents intentionally ignored my birthday in their grief and Lam Anh made up for this by his extra consideration when my birthday rolled around. When June 24 came, the day the doctor asked me to wait while he wrote me a prescription, Lam Anh spared no time in distracting me. He recalled a myriad of happy stories. Of course these stories belonged to a time when I was still strong. A time when I was young, barely a teenager, and used to preen in the mirror with a comb. Until I heard him speak, I had no idea how lovely I was in Lam Anh’s eyes. He said that in the old days my cheeks were rosy all the time, my hair shiny and smooth and my eyes were always glistening. Lam Anh remembered the first time he thought of me as his best friend, the day when he splashed ink on my white shirt and even though I threatened to tell the teacher, I did not do it. He also remembered every time I was recommended for good conduct and good study, every time I was selected to attend the examinations for excellent students and each time the teacher read my well-written essay out loud to the whole class. He remembered these occasions so well he even surprised my father.

On the day when my waiting had reached a five-year point, the bracelet I was wearing came loose and dropped to the ground. I pushed my wheelchair in front of the mirror and looked at my reflection. I knew I had lost four or five kilos every year. I knew what I looked like. I was just a bag of bones. The disease continued to gnaw at me and nobody could do anything to help me stop it. I cried while I pushed my wheelchair over to the laptop and sent a very short message to Lam Anh. The message said "TV" [TV is short for Tuyet Vong in Vietnamese, hopelessness in English]. Thas was the first year he did not organise a celebration for my birthday.

***

One day, Lam Anh sent me a message boasting that he had just discovered an extremely interesting webpage and asked me to take a look. I immediately logged on and after reading a funny introduction on the homepage, I found a strange entry: a list of those who could wait best.

As I scrolled through the list, I could not understand why a woman who had been waiting for her missing husband for 28 years had been listed first while other people who were waiting for things for 30 years or even 40 years were listed 50th or 60th. I also didn’t understand why a 73-year-old man who had been waiting for her son, who was sentenced to life imprisonment when he was only 55 years old, was listed at the bottom. It was incomprehensible to me that a gay man who had been waiting for a sex change operation for 12 years was listed 18th out of the 94 waiting men. I could not even understand why they had intentionally printed in bold the number of years spent waiting after each name.

The numbers made me angry. I didn’t understand why some crazy man had made such a weird webpage. Just to laugh scornfully at their powerlessness, those people with their stupid expectations or to make people compete in waiting?

I felt responsible for this group of waiting people, so I sent a letter asking the owner of the webpage to shut it down immediately, explaining why. The web owner replied with a false name: "In your letter, we have counted the word ‘waiting’ 17 times and only six times have we seen phrases like ‘not waiting’ or ‘stop waiting’. Instead of boycotting or changing this webpage, why don’t you join us? Because you too are just waiting."

I found it impossible to deny the truth, so I vented my anger at Lam Anh for having given me the wrong medicine and criticized him for being insensitive. Lam Anh reacted calmly. He advised me to register myself on the website and that if I was still angry afterwards, he would accept the label of insensitive. I registered myself immediately and was supplied with a list of user names for those who had waited best. All the names began with "wait", like "wait 15", "wait 785", "wait 367" and so on. I looked at the long line of words "wait" with great boredom. I hated them all.

Twenty four hours after my registration, I was immediately messaged by a person bearing the code 32. They asked me: "What are you waiting for?" I responded with the same question. "I’m waiting for a pardon," came the reply.

"Haven’t you got any other way than to wait?"

"I did in the past but not anymore".

"Why?"

"Because the person who is going to give me the pardon is no more now."

"What a fool!" I sent the message and shut down the Net.

***

I was again invited to chat by Wait32: "I don’t feel angry with you. I’ve had a hundred people tell me that I am a fool". I did not strike up a conversation. But a few minutes later, I received this: "Each time I took a mad man home, the number of people who told me that I was a mad man increased". I did not understand what Wait32 was trying to say. "Is there a person who takes mad man home?" I asked. Wait 32 replied: "It’s me." I thought Wait 32 was pulling my leg, so I made a joke: "How many mad men can you endure?"

"Nine at least."

"I don’t believe it!"

I shut down the computer.

This time I messaged Wait937. "Are you a male or a female?" I asked.

"Male."

"What are you waiting for?"

"I’m waiting for the time when I can stand on my two legs."

"So are you in the wheelchair?"

"No. I am lying on my side."

"For how many years?"

"38 years."

"What are you doing while waiting?"

"I’m working."

"In what way?"

"With three fingers."

"What are you doing with three fingers?"

"I write newspaper articles."

"How long does it take you to write an article?"

"I write twenty five articles a month. I’m sorry. I’ve got a phone call."

I did not feel like sitting idle, so I searched online for Lam Anh, asking him if he knew any mad men. He seemed well prepared for the question, sending me the link to an article about a man who used his house as a poorhouse for mad men he found on the streets. He also sent me a series of e-articles written by a man who could move only his three fingers. Having read all these stories, I sat dumbfounded.

After that, I spoke to someone waiting whenever I logged onto the net. One of them told me that when he was a little boy he stood and waited for his mother, who was going to buy an umbrella to protect them from the sun. His had been waiting for her to come back for 13 years. I thought the boy was cultivating his hatred for his mother. But on the contrary, he had become a poet, who won high prizes for poems on his mother – the gentle mother, the mother who had devoted all her life to her children. I began to show my admiration for him, because I knew life had ignored me and I had showed an even colder attitude towards life.

Wait133 was the 27th waiting person I had met on the Internet. Her situation was similar to mine, the same disease. She asked me the same questions I had put them to others: "What are you doing while waiting?"

I gave her my sincere answer. "I eat, I sleep, I read books and I surf the net."

"So what, you read and surf the net?"

"To kill the time."

"I’ve got a very interesting book. Shall I send it to you through the Net?"

"Yes, please!"

So Wait133 sent me the book. It took almost two hours. The book told of the life of an Irish boy in dire poverty. I read it with great interest in two weeks. And then I found out that Wait133 had translated the story. So I wrote to Wait 133:

"How do you put aside your feeling of loneliness, your pain, the disease that is gnawing your body day in and day out? How could you forget everything to translate the book?"

"Wait937 can work with three fingers, while I can move my ten fingers, you know. And we all have our head safe and sound! Without that nobody would want to keep waiting."

"I also know English. My father taught me when I was still a little girl."

"Oh, you’re much luckier than me. I’ve no teacher, only books."

"But I haven’t used my English for a long time. Actually I’m not sure I even need it."

"Each foreign language is a treasure. You’re a rich person, you know."

***

One afternoon my father came home from a meeting, looking thoroughly drunk. This was the first time I had ever seen my father in that condition. I was told that he had become drunk after tossing back the fourth cup of whatever they were drinking. But he only cried and cried – he didn’t curse or say anything foul. Maybe he had been forced to drink too much.

My father was an English teacher at the district’s English centre, which helped people who wanted to improve or brush up their English. He taught English with all his heart. On the day my father got drunk, a woman came in with a boy, earnestly asking father to teach English to her son, because she wanted him to learn in the district’s school instead of going back to a mountainous school. After hearing this, I said I could help instead of father. Mother was very glad and quickly went to get a stool for the boy. I began to teach the boy. He was completely ignorant of any English, so I had to be patient to teach him and wait for father to get a hold of himself.

The next day, I mentioned this to father who said: "You accepted the boy, you should teach him!" I thought of it as a challenge and I accepted. The boy wrestled with English through all those sultry summer afternoons. He made progress and the news about him spread to the school. The principal said that he would invite the boy to attend the school’s English lesson and, if his English was good enough, he could stay for the school year. After nearly three months of teaching the boy, I was anxiously awaiting the result. I was on the edge of my seat as I waited for the school bell. The boy ran straight from school to see me and informed me that he had been accepted at the school. It was enough for me, for the boy and his ecstatic mother.

***

Word that the boy had successfully finished a two-year English learning programme in only three months spread throughout the elementary school. Children’s parents came to see me with a proposal to set up a class and teach their children. I was not ready to treat teaching as a real job until one day father took home five big boys, saying to them: "My daughter will help you learn English with ease".

"Dad, you’re so funny!" I cried in surprise.

"They are all eager to learn," he said stubbornly.

In the end I accepted it and helped these mountainous boys learn English. At the end of the school year, they all passed their final examinations. I was so happy that I told all my "Wait" friends on the Net. They all shared my joy and persuaded me to register my name on the list. The owner of the webpage sent me an e-mail to congratulate me:

"Congratulations to you for being put on in the list. I would like to inform you that you are now classified as 62nd. This is not a modest rank at all. It is not the number of years that makes you the best waiter. It is how you live while waiting – this is the main thing. We know that when you hit the 10 year mark for waiting, you sent a message to your friend saying ‘hopelessness’. Your friend never told you, but he has done everything he can to stop your hopelessness from destroying your expectations, but only you yourself can separate that hopelessness from you forever."

I burst out crying. I knew the owner of the webpage was really Lam Anh, the friend who had been waiting together with me for all these years.

Translated by Manh Chuong

(from Viet Nam News)
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A starry night

by Trong Bao

After the death of her mother, little Chuyen turned taciturn and became visibly depressed. Her two-year-old brother Can was the exact opposite. He cried and called out his mother’s name everyday, because he thought she had either just gone to the market or was standing behind the door playing a hide-and-seek game with him when he returned home from pre-school. Poor little thing, he did not know that after the traffic accident that day, she would never come back to him.

On the afternoon of the accident, after receiving a bonus for her hard work at the office, Chuyen’s mother had taken her to the market to get some presents and candies for both her and her brother. Then they had gone to pick up her brother after pre-school and had taken both of them to the store to get some ice-cream.

Chuyen still remembered every detail of that terrible accident quite well. While they were eating their ice-cream on their bike by the side of the road, Chuyen had been boasting about her good result at school: eight marks for her composition about a starry night. Suddenly, a motorbike with two teenagers on it going at maximum speed crashed into them from behind so violently that their mother had lost her balance.

Everyone was tossed off their bikes. Her mother’s face hit the ground hard and scraped against the pavement; Chuyen suffered a minor head injury. After a few days in the hospital in a coma, Chuyen’s mother passed away. Chuyen’s head had to be shaved to stitch up a long gash.

After the accident, Can followed his father to the hospital to visit his mother and sister. He was too young to understand what had happened and kept asking his dad a string of endless questions such as: "Why are the two nurses in white?" or "Why can a police car enter this place?"

He felt sad because his mother did not even smile at him. Suddenly, he shrank back and hid himself behind his father after he spotted the nurse holding a big syringe approaching his mother’s bed. Then he burst out laughing, when he saw his sister’s shaved head. Chuyen just bit her lips tightly and tried not to weep.

***

Since her mother’s death, Chuyen had become another girl; actually she had been forced to become an adult. At the age of eleven, she was now responsible for almost all housework and chores for the family. Every morning she had to go to the market to buy food and vegetables. Then she would return home and cook instant noodles for breakfast for her three-member family and prepare everything for dinner. When her father was busy at work, she was responsible for her brother’s schooling. Even when her father returned home extremely drunk and vomited everywhere, she would have to wipe the place clean. These were all things her mother had previously done, and now Chuyen whole-heartedly took on all the responsibilities herself.

One day, after she returned home from picking up her brother, she noticed a stranger sitting in the living room with her father.

"This is Miss Oanh. Say hello to her, dear," he said.

"Good evening!" Chuyen greeted her in a low voice.

Oanh tried to give Can a packet of cakes and a plastic car. Can reached out to accept the toy, but Chuyen held his hand back. Oanh appeared crest-fallen.

Chuyen dragged her brother, who looked like he might begin to cry, into the kitchen. Chuyen told him: "I’ll get you a better car some day." Can was not persuaded and insisted on receiving the toy at once.

"If you insist on taking that woman’s gift, I’ll tell mom," she threatened him. Remembering his mother, he shouted out, "mom… mom!"

"Stop crying, and be good! Some day when mom returns home, she’ll get you lots of presents," she said in an effort to console her brother.

"No, I want mom to be here right now," he insisted.

"If you behave properly, I’ll take you to where she is," Chuyen said.

For dinner Can ate a lot more than usual. Instead of taking the toy car down from the top of the cupboard, he only snuck covetous glances at it.

After dinner, Can dragged his sister into the courtyard. Ever since their mother’s death, he had a habit of going out there and whispering his mom’s name before going to sleep. In the courtyard, Chuyen pointed at the sky and told him that their mother was staying up there. She pointed to a blue star and said that was their mother, but he pointed to a red star he insisted was her because it twinkled at him. A moment later Can fell asleep and his sister took him inside.

Each time she looked at the starry sky, she believed that her mother was somewhere in the firmament, and that she would come back to them astride a shooting star traveling rapidly across the sky. There was a myth that the soul of certain dead people could be carried on a shooting star down to Earth.

The next day, on the way home from school, Can touched his sister’s hand and reminded her of her promise. "Dear sister, today you must lead me to mother’s place," he said. Chuyen was startled for she thought that he had forgotten what she had promised.

"But you look very sleepy. How can you go see mom later tonight, if you are sleeping?" she replied.

"I’ll stay awake tonight, you’ll see," he said resolutely. It seemed she had no choice but to agree.

Once back at home, their father was nowhere to be found. Chuyen made instant noodles for dinner, and then made two cups of strong tea. She drank one and gave her brother the other.

"It’s too bitter! I can’t drink it, sister. Please give me some milk," he implored after tasting the tea. "If you don’t drink it, how can you stay awake to see mom?"

He refused. "No, I can’t stand strong tea anyway."

"Well, I’ll drink it myself then." She drank his cup of tea, and then led him into the courtyard to wait for their mother’s appearance in the sky.

Unfortunately, there were too many clouds to see the sky. Chuyen locked the door, put the key under the flower pot, and then led her brother to a high hill behind their home in the hopes of seeing the stars more clearly and of being closer to their mother if possible. At first Can seemed in high spirits and kept up with her easily, but a few minutes later he became weary and asked to be carried on her back.

Weighed down by her brother, Chuyen could barely trudge uphill. After a while, she had to stop and let her brother down and rest; then she made herself get up and continue the climb. When she finally reached the peak, she was exhausted, and her brother looked like he was almost asleep. His eyes were drooping shut.

"When mom comes down, wake me up, sister," he said to her before falling asleep.

"Yes, surely, my dear," she assured him.

She felt a bit frightened, because it was quite dark on top of the hill with only faint light reflected up from the street lamps and vehicle headlights below. With such dim light, the bushes looked like ghostly dancing figures. All of a sudden the wind blew violently and cleared away the clouds. Millions of stars appeared through only a little bit of haziness. It became quite cold, and Chuyen took off her coat to cover her brother and kept her eyes fixed above. A few shooting stars chased each other across the sky; each time she was going to wake her brother up, but they disappeared as rapidly as they had appeared.

She thought they should go back, because it must be almost midnight. Her efforts to wake up her brother didn’t work he was sleeping so soundly. Finally, she gave his cheek a good pinch, and he seemed to wake up but didn’t open his eyes.

"Mom, mom!" he shrieked happily. That was the way mom had always gotten him to wake up. After opening his eyes and not seeing his mother anywhere, he was about to cry when Chuyen exclaimed: "There comes a shooting star!" Can stood up. There was a whole group of shooting stars traveling together across the sky. Their brilliant long glares seemed to tear the atmosphere apart.

As the stars were gliding past overhead, Can made a desperate wish that his mother would come home. He squeezed his eyes shut and thought about how much he missed her and loved her, and then opened his eyes wide and stared up at the sky again. Suddenly, he clapped his hands in excitement.

"Sister Chuyen! Stars, stars! Lots of shooting stars! Please come here, mom!" he shouted joyfully. She looked in the direction he was pointing, which was the foot of the hill.

It was not shooting stars at all, but many torches that were spreading their light along the path. Their names were being called again and again.

Obviously, their father, relatives and many neighbours had been in searching for them throughout the night.

"Dad! Dad! We’re up here," Chuyen cried out at last.

Translated by Van Minh

(from Viet Nam News)
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Ithaca

by Phan Viet

He had heard about her through some friends. The stories always went like this, "Oh, Cornell University? Well, at Cornell, there was a young lady getting her PhD in psychology. I heard she was such and such." He didn’t remember much; just a lady, one year older than him, getting a PhD at a good school.

But then, in his third winter in America, he had to go to Ithaca for a conference on elementary particles. Before leaving, he entertained the idea that perhaps he would email her when he got there. He would say, well, I had heard so much about you and would love to meet you; that is, of course, if you have time.

But having arrived at Cornell, it seemed impossible for him to write that email. What now? To write the email and to meet a lady who might be quite pretty, quite fun, quite this, and quite that... but so what? What could possibly come from a meeting with a lady living 6 hours from him by car and who is a year older than him? What can possibly come from any meeting any more?

The last day at Cornell, just three hours before he had to leave, he dad nothing to do. He checked his email and surfed the Internet. There was nothing new in his mailbox except a few spam emails. He deleted the spam and replied to some older emails. Then, out of boredom, he started reading emails that were a few years old. They were the ones he had sent out when he first arrived in America, in hopes of making new friends. It was bizarre to read them now and realize he no longer talked to any of these friends. There weren’t any arguments or tragic breaks during those three years, as far as he could remember, but somehow things just seemed to end.

Still two more hours to go, he thought, checking his watch. He clicked on the "Compose" button and typed fast without thinking.

"I am on campus for a conference and only heard about you a few minutes ago," he wrote. "If you have time, I hope we can meet. That is, of course, if you receive this email before 3pm." Then he shut down his laptop and prepared to wait until it was time to leave for the airport. "She won’t reply," he thought. "If I were her, I wouldn’t."

But 30 minutes later, his cell phone rang.

"Have you left yet?"

"I’m still waiting for you," he said.

"Oh good. I was afraid you had gone."

They met in a Starbucks cafe overlooking the college town and the pine forests – the only thing still green in January. In the days that followed, he could not remember what she wore. He only remembered that voice. A voice that sounded like the wind on the barley fields after the crop has been harvested. The wind would take up the seeds left scattered on the field and swirl them into tiny tornadoes, which danced happily across the fields.

For the first 10 minutes, he busied himself with ordering coffee, commenting on the cold January weather in New England and talking about Cornell – trying to get comfortable with her presence.

"Do you know Urie Bronfenbrenner?" she asked. "I came to Cornell because of him."

They talked about Hanoi and common friends in Boston and Chicago. Then they talked about America, the illusions they had when they first arrived, their illusions about the PhDs and what it took to be a true scientist.

"Why do you study physics?"

"Ah, that’s hard to answer. I don’t think I have enough time," he smiled.

"No no... You only need to give me an example. Something that, when you see it, you say to yourself, ah, this is why I want to study physics."

She leaned back, waiting. The waiting emptied his mind.

"Well, let’s see... I don’t think I have revealing moments like that. Things always come to me gradually. Naturally, I mean."

"Oh, I don’t mean revealing moments. I mean, what makes you still excited about physics after all these years? In my case, whenever I read an experiment that is designed beautifully, I get excited. I remember the first time I read Piaget’s notes. He wanted to know how children distinguished the square from the circle and rectangular. Have you ever sat for four hours to watch a child play?"

He said no, he never had. He said he didn’t know how to play with children. And perhaps he didn’t know how to play with adults either. She laughed.

But they had bypassed the question about physics. Why were they talking about physics? Good God, physics, of all things! Yet, it seemed natural.

"You know," she said, "I think one day people will find out that your physics and my psychology are not that far from each other. Western psychology only touches on the idea of the unconscious but they don’t believe in things like previous-life knowledge. And your modern physics doesn’t believe in Buddhist ideas about the origin of the world. Like The Four Noble Truths or the Original Karma."

"Well, Einstein said Buddhism comes closest to the truth about the universe."

"I believe him," she said and suddenly added, "It’s almost three."

"I’d better go back to the hotel," he said.

Outside the coffee shop, they stood facing each other. While he was trying to find something significant to say, she extended her hand.

"I will see you again."

"Sure. I will see you again."

They shook hands, smiled, then turned and walked away. He never turned around to look back.

Back in Baltimore, he googled the psychology department of Cornell and found a profile picture of her on the department’s website. The picture was accompanied by two lines saying she was studying speech development in children. Then he started searching for Piaget on JSTOR. He read Piaget’s experiments with children; then Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory. He thought the next time they met, they must talk about psychology. He would say:

"You know, I think Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory has serious problems. That theory is like taking a snapshot of life, rather than seeing it as a course. It focuses on a moment, not the process. Just a random, particular moment. Which is pretty meaningless when one wants to examine the nature of things."

***

But there was a year between that first meeting and their second. In that one year, he did not contact her once. No email. No phone call. Nothing. He just couldn’t.

It was funny how things happened. The first week back from Ithaca he was obsessed with reading about psychology; he was sure they would meet again very soon. He was sure there had been a connection that, like gravity, would draw them closer to each other. It must happen, there was no other way around it. But then a week passed and it suddenly occurred to him that he should have emailed her right after he returned to Baltimore. He should have done something to acknowledge what had happened. Even gravity would have remained thin air if Newton hadn’t acknowledged it.

He thought about it for two weeks, half wondering if he should do something now and half wishing she would write him. When there was no contact from her either as the weeks passed by and when the psychology readings became so complicated that they pushed him into a strange world, he started thinking that he had been right not to email. It would have been a burden to her and it would have exposed him. "I must be mad to think there was a connection. It’s just me and my old tricky mind," he thought.

He had more reason to believe this after they met accidentally at a friend’s birthday party in Washington DC. It was March and a year had passed since Ithaca. When he saw her sitting on the couch of his friend’s sitting room, he thought she was a mirage. But when he realized it was really her another thought occurred to him. She had come to DC without letting him know, even just as a friend.

Especially when, for the past year, he had waited for a "natural" chance to go to Cornell once again.

"I am here to see the cherry blossoms," she said. "I’ve been in the US for four years and have never been to DC."

"Well, there’s not much to see in DC but it’s still the capital and worth visiting in that sense. If you are not familiar with the city, I can take you around."

She looked straight into his eyes when he spoke. Immediately, he knew something was not right.

"Oh thank you," she smiled. "But I am going home tomorrow."

Before he could figure out what he was feeling, a man and a young girl came up to them. They told her that the others traveling in their group decided they would stop by Philadelphia on the way back to Ithaca. She nodded, then introduced them. The man had recently come to Cornell for a master’s degree in public administration, and the girl was a first-year student. Their group of 8 people had been visiting DC for the last few days.

He said hello, made some brief small talk and then excused himself. Their paths didn’t cross for the rest of the evening. An hour passed. At 8 o’clock, he told the host that he had to leave. He did not stop by the couch to say goodbye. He took his hat and winter coat from the closet, then opened the door and walked out.

***

Time trudged on. Since that second meeting in DC, he had met other girls – quite a few girls in fact. He knew that she was in Hanoi the next summer, when he was also there. Then the next fall, he had another conference in Cornell, which he attended, but never told her about. The following winter, he met a 24-year-old girl earning a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins. They soon started dating. When the next summer came, he heard she had returned to Hanoi to get married to the public administration man from the party. He broke up with the public health girl. From then on, news about her was always accompanied by news about her husband or vice versa. As for him, he went on many more dates with more girls but somehow the excitement often faded away before he started to care how he felt about the girl. He never really thought why. It all seemed natural.

He received his doctorate the next summer. In the fall, he went to Cornell for his post-doc. She had graduated that summer and returned to Hanoi with her husband. After the one-year postdoc, he left Cornell to work at the Fermi Lab in Illinois. Time kept passing.

A year later, they met again in Hanoi at the wedding of a mutual friend. She was at the wedding alone, on behalf of her husband, who was in Belgium for business. In the corridor outside the wedding hall, they had some time alone. Neither one was nervous any more. Smiling easily, he said:

"You know. I think Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory doesn’t make any sense. It only takes a snapshot of life, rather than viewing it as a journey. It doesn’t look at the process and only focuses on a moment. A random moment. Which doesn’t make any sense and has no significance whatsoever because a random, silly moment can say nothing about a man’s life. Only the journey is important."

He stopped, surprised that he still remembered that stuff and even felt excited to talk about it.

"You really think so?" she replied.

The question was simple. She didn’t even seem to expect an answer. He looked straight into her eyes. Suddenly, a thought seized him like a strong wave crashing down on him. It was obvious. The last 5 years of his life, with all its ups and downs, the vague longing, the unnamed fear, the doubt, the diminishing excitement and the prolonged but unacknowledged lovesickness. They all originated from that random moment when he wrote her the short email from Cornell, only two hours before he had to go to the airport. Perhaps his whole life had been determined by that silly moment, which seemed to come out of nowhere. Nothing that came before it seemed to warn him of that moment nor prevented what happened afterward. No prior experiences seemed to have been able to stop him from writing that email; and all his free will and reason could not help him in the years that followed. There was no process. There was no journey into and out of that moment. It was just a random particular moment; a gigantic disruption that had no place in his life. Even he did not have a place in it.

And while he stood there, surrendering unconditionally to the present, he heard a soft laugh from her.

"You and I, we are always like two drifters."

Two drifters! Two drifters! "Two drifters off to see the world". That afternoon in the Starbucks in Ithaca, he had heard those Moon River lyrics while they waited for their coffee. He had held on to reality by repeating these words in his mind while watching her from the corner of his eye. That day, she wore a long white winter coat, with a light gray scarf that had tiny white fringes.

Two drifters. Two drifters. She knew it. She had known it all along.

From then until the end of the wedding, they did not exchange another word. They sat opposite each other at a table that was arranged for former students in the US. He did not look at her once and she didn’t look at him either. But he felt he knew every one of her thoughts. He knew them all because he knew she had been thinking of him and waiting for him in the years after the afternoon in Ithaca. They had been both scared and stupid.

But he had no regrets.

***

The years passed by. They sometimes ran into each other here and there, one time at a reunion of former New England expats, another time at a conference and another time at a house-warming party for a friend they didn’t even know they had in common. At these chance encounters, sometimes they were arranged to sit next to each other. But they rarely talked to each other nor to other people at the table. They just sat and listened; and answered only when they had no choice. If her dress accidentally touched his trousers under the table, she would apologise and draw her chair further away. Or if his elbow touched hers on the table, he would excuse himself and pull back. But then, at the end of the conference or party, they would find a minute to be alone at the door. There, they would look straight into each other’s eyes and hold the look for a moment while they bowed slightly in farewell. — VNS
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Like salt and like that

by Pham Thi Diep Giang

I wondered why I suddenly wanted to become a grain of salt. A tiny salty grain lying in silence somewhere in the white salt holder on a spice rack in a small kitchen. Or a grain of salt crusted on an old La Vie bottle, which my father used in the old days to gargle after waking up. Or a grain of salt perched on the brim of a glass of red wine, as red as a ruby. Or a grain of salt shining brightly in the sun amid the grains of sand in the Mediterranean Sea, where I hope to travel sometime in the distant future.

All of a sudden, I earnestly wanted to become a grain of salt more than ever before. What was I expecting from this incarnation? What was I hoping for from this grain of salt which was me? Was it possible for a grain of salt to have a mind? Or when I became a grain of salt, would I live a life different from the other grains of salt, because I was myself, even though I was a grain of salt?

Now I am going to tell you a funny story. One day my niece came back from school and threw herself onto my lap and said that she wanted to become a skunk. "A skunk!" I said in great surprise, because I did not know what a skunk was like – what sound it made, what colour its fur was, and didn’t it give a really unpleasant smell? So I asked her why she wanted to become a skunk. She grinned, showing the gap in her teeth.

"You know, a woman called me a skunk today. She is a fruit seller at the school gate, and I like the name very much!"

I thought I needed to meet the woman. And I did meet her. She was a fat and slovenly woman of about 60. She had tousled hair and a wrinkled face. The fruits she sold were all placed on a small wooden table near some small stools upholstered in leather. The scene was like a badly made silk painting. I sat down on one of those small stools in silence and after a moment asked her in a serious voice:

"May I ask you? Do you know what a skunk is like?"

The woman looked greatly surprised, as if I had fallen from somewhere high above and was not a girl made of worldly flesh.

"What did you ask? What a skunk?" – she asked as if she did not believe her ears. This meant that even she did not know what a skunk was like. It also meant that the woman had only said it accidentally.

I chose to make a fuss about it, because if I wanted I could have just gotten the answer by searching Google. It was like a breeze to get an answer there.

But how could I tell my niece only the scientific information I had picked up from the Net? That’s not what she wanted. On the other hand, I also did not want to stuff her head with all that information. So, my meeting with the fruit seller and my search on the Net were fruitless.

But man still does many pointless things. I used to have long, time-consuming arguments with my university friends on the Net about whether banh troi Tau, Luc tao xa or Chi ma phu were better, even they were merely the snacks that some of my girl friends and I would eat often at street stalls. We let our days pass in that same fruitless manner. We were so concerned with these meaningless things that helped us kill time. Anybody could get scared of time and anybody could say "Oh, time flies, and I haven’t done anything yet". Often someone will remark they wish there were forty eight hours in a day, so there would be time to do everything. What a fool! If time could be lengthened to no end, if each day was prolonged to a year or even a hundred years, we would still while away our time with these fruitless things. Yes, we have to live with these trifles. There is no other way!

It was the same here as I sat in the dark, unable to get a wink of sleep, watching the last minutes of my thirtieth birthday roll by and wishing that I could become a grain of salt. At least as a grain of salt, I could be more useful than I was as my human self. Yes, it was true!

Once during a meal, my father and mother had an argument over the tasteless braised fish. Father said: "If you would only add a grain of salt, it would be much better!" So had I been turned into that grain of salt, could I have stopped the bickering? But I could not. They had that first argument, because father complained that a tasteless braised fish was worthless. Mother should have kept mum about it as usual. But out of the blue, she began arguing the scientific benefits. She said aged people should eat less salty food, particularly men, because it would cause trouble with his kidneys, if he ate too much salty food. Argument turned into argument. Mother began arguing a lot when she retired, and she spent a lot of time listening to the radio or watching television. She followed almost all the programmes during the day. She had even learned the names of the actors and actresses on soap operas, science and current affairs programes by heart. She had been well-taught by those doctors on TV, and she had even copied the instructions on how to teach school children to make decorations.

The argument between mother and father ended abruptly when he began coughing. A fish bone had gotten stuck in his throat because of his fighting. His face began to turn blue, and he clawed at his throat and coughed, trying to get the fish bone out. I could feel something looming large in front of us. I thought he was about to do something destructive.

It was a divorce! It was a stupid thing to do, but he could not bear another argument with his wife! I myself at that time thought I would live an easy life when I got old. I was so afraid of becoming a fastidious old woman, critical and demanding, even though I was that person already. But mind you, if you get fastidious when you get older, you will live longer, but more unhappily. Because the longer you live, the more unacceptable things you will have to accept. For this very reason, it was difficult for me to imagine that father had divorced mother just because the braised fish she cooked for him was tasteless, lacking only a single grain of salt.

But my father was like that. It was said that men are like children and it was also said that old people become like children, if they live long enough. It means that an old man has got inside him two children, or in other words, he easily becomes sulky, angry, hurt and flies off the handle. If this is true, my father was a typical person in that sense. The next day, father threw all his personal belongings into a suitcase and told us he had to go to his country home for a while. Mother was not sensitive enough to understand. She insisted on going with him, and of course father refused pointblank.

The lack of a singe grain of salt for a pot of braised fish made father decide to live seperately from mother. And I could not turn myself into that grain of salt in time. I was thirty years old that day. I was sitting in the dark, feeling the heat of early summer days and wishing in silence to be a grain of salt.

When I was a first-year student, I read a moving story titled "Salt Coffee", where a young man loves a young girl. The young man went to a coffee house one day and joked with the waitress by ordering a cup of salt coffee. The waitress thought his order was real, so she went to put some salt in the coffee. Day in and day out the man drank it; he got addicted to this coffee, and they fell in love. A really romantic love story, isn’t it? Back then, we girls all wished for a dream boy, so we could give them this beautiful love story. And one day this story lost its poetry when I met a young guy in the middle of this summer, who gave me a pack of coffee with the brandname Tuy Hoa. He told me I would find the coffee a bit salty. I asked:

"Do they roast coffee with salt?"

"Not with salt, but with shrimp paste" – the young guy answered, smiling.

So, I understood that salt coffee was real, and it was salty not because of salt, but because of shrimp paste. Salt and shrimp paste are in two different categories. They have different smells. But now, at the age of thirty, what was I expecting? Something romantic? No. I was sitting in the dark of my room to dream about becoming a grain of salt at the age of thirty one.

Recently, my girl friends wanted to set me up on blind dates with some of the their guy friends. I was no good at all, if I did not get married at this age. My girl friends were all married and had one or two children already. So they showered me with their pity. However, at first they all told me they were envious of me – that I could travel here and there without any heartache, without thinking about caring for my any husbands, singing lullabies to any children. Even one of my closest friends said to me:

"I wish I could step into your shoes!"

And by looking into her face, I could tell she was telling me the truth. She had two beautiful children and a good husband, but she was unable to go out because she had to take care of her children and her household chores. She was up to her eyeballs in work. One day, we went to a cafe where she ordered a glass of salted apricot juice. Taking a small sip, she grimaced, complaining about the salty juice.

"You see, life is as salty as this glass of salted apricot juice. That’s why I am as thirsty as ever!"

I smiled, understanding that she was thirsty for my life. I was a free girl. I could eat or wear anything I wanted. So I thought about my dream of becoming a grain of salt. If I were like that, I would probably arrange something for myself. It was my habit to arrange everything in life. I was thirty-one years old now and it was true, and I was still unmarried. Actually when I was twenty eight, I did think about marriage; if I had done it, I would have a child already. But I could not arrange anything for father and mother. I never could have predicted that father would live separately from mother. This event cut off the chain of my life. I had to look back and draw some conclusion. I would marry a man who would leave me if I agreed. I would always be the person who took the initiative in things.

Even when I was a grain of salt, it would be better to be a grain of salt lying amid grains of sand and amid the shining sea shells on the Mediterranean beach. This grain of salt would be lying a bit higher than the shore to avoid the tide, of course, to avoid being dissolved, to avoid going another round of the life cycle. But I thought, the life of a grain of salt was so tasteless, if it should lie for all its life under the blazing sun, amid those grains of sands and sea shells on the beach.

I was thirty-one years old now. The clock was ticking, and it reminded me of the fact. The Mediterranean sea had disappeared, those bars and pubs smelling richly of brandy had also disappeared, the glasses of salted lemon juice were gone. Only I was left here, thirty-one years old, in the dark of the room, with my lips tasting of the salty tears running down my face.

Salty as salt.

Translated by Manh Chuong
(from Viet Nam News)

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Spring returns

by Luong Anh

My father's family name is Hoang. My clan was the biggest in the Ha village, so it was treated with indulgence and respect by the villagers. On moonlit nights, father often spread a mat in the middle of the yard, smoking, sipping green tea and telling stories about the Hoang clan's exploits in the olden days when they came to reclaim this wild land, and turn it into the present-day villages. This history was the great pride of the clan's descendants. Years later, when immigrants from other areas wanted to settle in the area, they had to get approval from the clan's ancestors. As great as the clan's past was, the men were generally unsuccessful. Most of them had to toil in the fields all year round. Few of them had ever ventured beyond the village's bamboo groves. Because of this, most men in the village were addicted to gambling, to playing to tom, a five-person card game using a deck of 120 cards.

When I was four years old, my mother died suddenly from a fatal illness. My brother Hoa and I were so young when she died that we can no longer picture her in our minds. Our sister Hien, left teacher's training college at the age of 19 and started teaching at the village's primary school. A border guard unit was stationed at the foot of a small hill near her school. One day the soldiers were training in the woods near the school and marched by a field where her class was having a lesson. The class stopped and sang out a greeting, "Good morning, soldiers!" Sister Hien had to postpone her lesson, waiting for her students to calm down after the soldiers went way. After that day a soldier called Hoang often came to visit my family. I remember how agile he was with his hands. Once he made me a grasshopper out of coconut leaves and a top made of a guava pit. Sometimes he would play with us. Nothing made us happier.

Since my mother's death, the running of the household had fallen squarely on sister Hien's shoulders. She had become our family's main support. Our father was head of the family, but he didn't pay attention when something needed fixing or his children needed to be fed. He only had eyes for the mat where he would sit down with other men from the village to play to tom. All the players were relatives in the same clan. One day the players got a visitor: Mr. Tai, whose son had just come from a foreign country as a guest worker. It seemed that Mr. Tai wanted his son to ask sister Hien's hand in marriage, so he had come to see my father. He seemed to lose the game on purpose to please all the players. And when the gambling was over, he invited all the players to eat with him at the dog meat shop. Drinking loosened father's tongue and he managed to slur out a reply:

"Don't worry about it. I'll marry my daughter Hien to your son Loc. If any other guy flirts with my daughter, I'll break his legs!"

Sister Hien taught a class every morning. After she was done teaching, she hurried home to work in the field and then finish the housework in time to prepare dinner for us. When soldier Hoang came to visit, he offered our sister a helping hand. Sometimes he split firewood or built a fence around the vegetable garden to keep out the chickens.

Father was always gone for the whole day. If he was not on the gambling mat, he could usually be found officiating at one of the wedding ceremonies or funerals in the village. One day after arriving home from a wedding, he called out Hoang, who was absorbed in repairing the leg of a table for sister Hien:

"I warn you that you and my daughter Hien are only friends. You don't have my permission to go any farther! I'll never agree to it!"

Then father collapsed on the plank bed and began to snore loudly. Sister Hien quickly drew Hoang to the corner of the yard, whispering something in his ear and then giggling, her cheeks rosy as a ripe persimmon.

The traditional Lunar New Year was drawing near. You could feel the excitement building in the atmosphere. It was the morning of the 29th. We were enthusiastically cleaning up the house, sweeping the garden and cleaning rush leaves to make banh chung (sticky rice square cake). The peach tree in front of the house was blossoming. It was a cold winter and the flowers seemed to brighten up the house. Hoang chose the most beautiful branch and put in it a vase.

On the afternoon of the 30th of Tet, we fished the banh chung out of a large pot and placed it on a long wooden plank. Then we weighed them down with bricks to shape them. Sister Hien selected four of the best-looking banh chung and put them on the altar for ancestor worshipping. After that we finished up the cooking and Hoang sat down to enjoy the New Year's Eve party with us. He was wearing his best clothes and wanted to ask father permission to bring his parents from Thai Binh province in late January to ask for my sister's hand in marriage. Father did not come home until it was nearly dark. He burned incense and prayed for quite a time before the ancestor's altar. Hoang waited. Father seemed to read his mind. He asked immediately:

"You have something to talk to me about, don't you?"

"Yes, I've been wanting to ask your permission for quite a long time... Hien and I..."

He was interrupted right away. Father went into a rage, screaming at Hoang with foul language. Sister Hien rushed into the kitchen, tears streaming down her cheeks. Hoang sat there like a stone. His face was white and the atmosphere was so tense you could feel the air thicken. Hoang stood up.

"Good-bye, uncle," he said, walking out.

"Hoang..." sister Hien called from the doorway, her voice faltering.

"Hien!" father shouted, his face turning purple with rage.

She rushed out of the room, sobbing bitterly.

Father was sitting there, smoking a bamboo pipe and exhaling smoke. Brother Hoa and I sat by the untouched tray of Tet food. Not until father lay down on the plank bed and began to snore loudly could we tiptoe into the room and lie down next to Hien. She was still crying, her body shaking with grief. I embraced her tightly.

Never had I found Tet so dull and tedious as I did that year. Father had gone away for several days. When he was at home, he drank and scolded us. On the morning of the third day of Tet, Mr. Tai and his son came to visit us. Loc tried to find ways to be near sister Hien, who was drifting through the house like a shadow. After New Year's Day had gone by, I came to ask sister Hien:

"Sister, why didn't Hoang come to see us?"

Sister Hien hugged me, crying.

"He'll never come here. He's gone far, far away."

Years passed by and I was fully-grown. My sister Hien's youth had come and gone. She was still beautiful, but tinged with an air of sadness. She never paid attention to any of the village boys. After a few years they lost their patience and most of them married. But she still waited anxiously in silence. She had tried everything to contact Hoang over the years because she knew that he was waiting for her somewhere. A friend of Hoang's gave her his address, but her letters never received a response. Yet she kept writing them- day after day, year after year. Until her 40th birthday. That day she took every last clean, white sheet of writing paper and burnt them in the back yard.

Father's health had begun to deteriorate, even though he was just over sixty. A lifetime of drinking and gambling had destroyed him. My brother Hoa had settled down in Da Nang and married a girl there. I had gone with my husband and moved to Ha Noi. The house was left in the care of father and sister Hien. We phoned them often, making sure they were taking care of themselves. Father quit playing cards and began to stay in the house all day. It was clear he felt sad and guilty to see his daughter's youth passing her by. Sister Hien did not feel anything and she did not cry any more, but she managed to feel a great pity for father.

This Tet, father wanted us to have a family reunion, because it had been a long time since all his children and grandchildren had been together. Brother Hoa and his family had booked their plane tickets months ago. My son always asked me when he could return to see his grandfather and aunt Hien.

We began preparing food for Tet, just like the old days. Sister Hien made beautiful banh chung again. The peach tree was blossoming brightly in front of the house, as if no time had passed by at all.

This Tet we all agreed not to cut a peach branch. Sister-in-law had bought a bunch of gladiola flowers and was arranging them in a vase. The grandchildren were hanging around their grandfather. Father looked decades younger. Sister Hien stopped arranging food on the altar and said:

"Look, dad is very happy now. He's stopped drinking, but still smokes a lot. I think we should ask him to stop smoking so much for his health. Don't you agree brother sister?"

New Year's Eve had begun. The moment of transition between the New Year and the old year was a sacred time. Father went out to the yard and prayed to heaven and earth. Then his grandchildren rushed to sit on his lap. All of a sudden, father said:

"My dear children, I want to tell you something. First of all, I want to apologize to Hien for all these years." He choked, tears streaming from his eyes. "Today I want to tell you everything that I have regretted in my life, things I will regret even when I'm dead and buried. I've made your sister unhappy for over twenty years now. There are no words to express how sorry I am for that. If I did not say anything that day to..." he stopped, feeling for the key in his pocket and giving it to brother Hoa. "Open that wooden trunk and take out that blue nylon bag for me..."

Hoa opened the bag and dropped a pile of letters onto the table. None of the letters had been opened, but we could clearly see they were addressed to Hien. They were Hoang's letters. We were all stunned. Sister Hien picked up the letters in her trembling hands and pressed them to her breast. Her eyes clouded over with tears and Father called out, his voice shaking.

"This is my mistake. This is my mistake!"

Hoa helped father into bed. My husband left and my sister-in-law tucked the children into bed. I arranged the letters in chronological order and took them to sister Hien. She was lying on her mat, facing to the wall, remembering what had happened that day.

On the afternoon of the 30th of Tet that year, father had just stopped playing cards and gone home. He was in a temper because he had lost the game. Mr. Tai had poured oil on the flame, saying, "You're unlucky in gambling but lucky in love. You're going to have a son-in-law whose name is your family name...."

By the time he got home Father was furious. When Hoang brought his proposal to father, he refused, pointing at Hoang:

"You see, you're a deceitful man! Your name is Hoang and my family name is also Hoang. If you do anything wrong later, the world will scold you with my name, so my whole clan will have to hear it. Get out now! If my daughter tries to marry you, I'll kill you!"

The next afternoon, Hoang had registered to volunteer to work in the far-flung border area in the west of the country. He sent letters encouraging her and asking her to wait so that they could be together one day. But he had never received a response.

Now twenty years had gone by. I slept in that morning and awoke to father's murmuring prayers. Sister Hien was helping the children get into their Sunday best. Happiness seemed to shine from inside her. Her eyes were bright and happy. Sister-in-law drew me into the kitchen and said:

"Tomorrow morning, sister Hien is going to take an early train to see Hoang in his unit. What a pity for them! They've been waiting for each other for these twenty years. By now Hoang will be an elder in the hamlet up there, I guess!"

Out there in the yard, the spring rain was drizzling onto the buds and onto the roofs of our house. Happiness was stretching towards the light. Spring was returning.

Translated by Manh Chuong
(from Viet Nam News)
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A good life to live

by Nguyen Dinh Tu

Doan decided to bring his crow to Vu.

The coal-black bird was given to Doan by a relative from his home village. After caring for it for a while, however, it had not grown healthier and still cowered in the corner of its cage if anyone came near. Doan’s friend, Vu lived alone in a small flat with a narrow yard filled with a dozen ornamental plants. Doan had already given Vu a wild rose plant that he had gotten as a gift, because like everything Doan touched that was alive, the plant failed to grow and only bloomed once before starting to wither. That was why he had brought it to Vu, who was vastly better with these things.

Doan and Vu had gone to the same school, but had pursued different studies. After graduation, Doan worked in the banking sector and Vu worked as an editor for a publisher.

Recently, Doan had been staying at Vu’s place, while Vu was on a business trip abroad for a book exhibition. The crow, under Vu’s care, had for a time become livelier, but it still had not made a noise. This kind of bird is very sensitive, so Vu had covered much of the cage with a shirt to make it feel safe. Before he left, Vu said to Doan:

"It takes great effort to feed your bird, you know. I had to buy live worms and grasshoppers to feed it. When the bird moulted, I even gave it some ant’s eggs. This crow is very greedy and wild, so I hope to tame it and make it less shy. When I am away, don’t let it go hungry!"

Doan planned to stop by Vu’s to water the plants and feed the bird and then leave. However, it was a weekend, so he decided to stay overnight at Vu’s. The next morning, he woke up to a rapid knocking on the door. A woman appearing to be in her 40s stuck her head into the room, asking:

"Oh, where’s Mr Vu?"

Still half-asleep, Doan looked at the strange woman with disdain. She looked like an unkempt sack of bones with buck teeth.

"He’s gone on business!"

"Has he? Oh, I’ve brought him some sticky rice like I do every morning. If he isn’t at home, would you please eat it?"

Doan took it and closed the door quickly.

He was too awake to go back to sleep after that. So he tidied his sleeping space and washed his face. It was eight am. He was about to take his motorbike to go out for breakfast, and then go home to check on his parents before going to the office. When he opened the door, a woman was walking by with an old white-haired lady on her arm; the old woman was walking with great effort on trembling legs.

"Are you leaving now? I can cook your lunch today, if you want!" The woman looked at Doan, smiling with delight.

"Thank you, but I can’t tell you when I’m coming back." Having replied, he started the engine and darted down the lane.

Doan did not go back to Vu’s house until late in the afternoon. He had brought his laptop and some clothing, because he had decided to stay at Vu’s for a few more days. He stopped at a tea stand near the house and ordered. The owner asked:

"Is Mr Vu away from home again?" Doan nodded in affirmation.

"Whether you listen to what I have to say is up to you, but I have to advise you that you should both get married now. You’re over thirty. If you don’t do it soon, by the time you have children you’ll be too old to keep up with them!"

Doan looked away, feeling depressed. He constantly had to listen to his parents telling him to marry, and now he had to hear it from this old woman.

As soon as he looked away, he caught the sight of the woman he had seen with the old lady on her arm that morning. Again, she was helping the older women struggle her way down the alley. Doan followed them with his eyes, until they disappeared in the house. It turned out that they were Vu’s neighbours.

"What a pity for the old woman over there! She had a massive stroke ten years ago," said the tea stand owner.

"Is that younger woman her daughter?" The woman intrigued Doan.

"No. She is a housemaid. The old woman has very wealthy children who now live elsewhere, so they have hired this woman to take care of their mother for nearly ten years. The maid is a little foolish, but she is very good at caring for the old lady."

"Is she married?"

"Her home village is in the South. And yes, she was married, but her husband left her and married another woman. She has a thirteen or fourteen-year-old daughter, but the girl is mentally handicapped and now lives with her maternal grandmother. The maid is paid about $60 a month and has her room and board paid for. So, she sends her money back home to her mother. Some rickshaw drivers at the other end of the street like her very much, even though she is so plain, but she is not interested in them."

That night, Doan was watching a European Champions League football match of the on TV, when he heard a knock on the door. The maid from next door looked panicked and said breathlessly:

"Please come and help me. I don’t know what is happening to the woman I take care of."

Doan said: "Why don’t you call her children?"

"I did, but all of them must be off on a trip somewhere. I can’t get ahold of them. The old woman has had a lot of little strokes over the last few years, but this time something is really strange."

Doan quickly put on a shirt and rushed to the neighbour’s where the old woman was doubled up and looked like she was having a seizure.

Doan said, "Shall I call an ambulance?"

"The other day I had to call her son, and everything was all right then. But now that he’s not home, I don’t know what I should do," the maid said.

Doan was still contemplating what they should do, when the maid started shouting, "Oh, it looks like she is regaining consciousness!"

Doan and the maid rushed to the old woman’s bed. The old lady had stopped convulsing, and she opened her eyes a crack to look at them.

"Am I still alive?" The old woman’s voice was barely audible.

"You’ve given me such a fright! Is there anything wrong with you? Shall I call an ambulance?" .

The old woman replied: "Where’s my husband?"

"He’s gone to work. Please lie still, and he will come home in a moment."

Doan found the conversation between the two women difficult to understand and was impaitent to get back to watching the football match.

He asked: "What are you going to do now?"

"Thank you. The old woman is getting better. Nothing to worry about. You can go now."

Doan looked at the two women with concern in his eyes. Before he left he turned and said: "If you need me, don’t hesitate to call me."

After the football match, Doan was about to go to bed when some of his friends came, asking him to go to a restaurant. He said "yes" immediately and took the motorbike out of the house. He came home at two in the morning and slept until noon.

He had just gotten dressed and opened the door to head out for a cheap meal, when the maid from next door came by with a tray of food.

"I’ve been waiting for your door to open for some time. I got up very early this morning, and bought a chicken to cook into a broth for the old woman; I saved a bowl of it for you. Please eat it!"

Doan took it with a word of thanks. Once he was back in his house, he took the cover off of the bowl of broth. What a nice smell! He quickly ate a leg of the chicken, and drank all the broth. After that, he wondered, if the old woman was eating the broth now. Maybe she was eating the other leg of the chicken. What about her husband? What would he eat? I have to buy another chicken for them, he thought. He was about to wash the bowl when the woman came in.

"Is the broth delicious? Let me wash it for you. Don’t worry! I’m used to doing it. Just a minute, and I will be done!"

The maid took the bowl from Doan and walked briskly to the back door. It seemed that she must usually come and help Vu, so she was familiar with everything in the house.

He ventured to asked her: "Does the old woman feel better?"

"Yes, she is better. This morning, I took her for her morning exercise, you know!"

"What about her husband?"

"Who’s her husband? Oh, he already died a long time ago."

"Last night, I heard you and the old woman talk about him," Doan wrinkled his eyebrows in confusion.

"The old woman forgets things sometimes. I am told that in the old days her husband often told her not to die before him, because if she died before him, he said nobody would take care of him. Then she had a stroke and was thought to have died. Yet, she regained consciousness, and said she had had a strange dream, so she could not die!" The maid had finished washing the dishes and placed them on the rack to dry.

"What was the dream?"

"This is what the old woman said. In her dream, she says she was standing in front of a cave with the fragrant smell of burned sandalwood and fireflies surrounding her. Some of her old childhood friends were waiting for her there. She could hear lovely music, as if they were preparing to have some kind of ceremony. She was about to enter the cave, when her husband stopped her. He whispered in her ears: ‘Please don’t. You did promise me not to die before me. Who will care for me if you do this?’ Suddenly some of her friends ran to her and tried to pull her along with them. She fought with all her might against them. It was because of her fighting them, that she was able to open her eyes and come back to life."

"Was this a long time ago?"

"Yes, it was long time ago, when her husband was still alive. A few years later, he died and I came to help her a few days after that. She had some severe health problems, and right about that time her dreams about the cave had reappeared in her mind. She had fought hard to live on, because of her husband. So whenever she regains consciousness, she always asks: ‘Am I still alive?’"

Doan had chills running up and down his spine. The old woman’s squinted eyes from the night before haunted him. It was strange to have such a will and vitality. If one day the old woman regained consciousness and knew that her husband had died, she could have let herself die in peace! Now she lived with dementia. What was the use of living in that way? And what about the maid? Didn’t she feel so dispirited by living with and caring for the old woman for all these years? The old woman’s children should have tried to take care of their mother, if she was in this condition.

"Has your daughter ever come to visit you here?" Doan ventured to ask the woman.

"Oh, yes, she has. She’s a good girl. She can do many things, and the old woman likes her very much. I’m advised to send her to a school for the deaf and mentally-challenged, but the fee is beyond my means. So, I had to send her back to my home village."

Doan suddenly remembered that the bank where he worked had sponsored this kind of special school, and many students had been accepted there on scholarship. So, what he needed to do was to ask the bank to sponsor the girl."

"Oh, I’ve got to go now to make sure my old woman is okay."

The maid carried the clean dishes back to her house.

That afternoon, Doan’s mother phoned to ask him to come home. So, he packed everything up and left Vu’s house. Before he went, he did not forget to leave some food for the bird, and asked the maid from next door to tend to it while giving her the key. A few days later, he stopped by to check if the bird had been fed and the plants watered.

Doan came into the house and found to his amazement that all the plants were in bloom, and especially his dog-roses were blossoming in great profusion. And, what was even more strange, was that his bird was singing. He was standing there, dumbfounded, when the phone rang. It was Vu calling to check on the situation at the house, and Doan could only give a short answer:

"Don’t worry! The flowers are blooming, and the bird is singing!"

After the phone call, Doan looked out of the window and again saw the maid from next door walking in the lane. Oh, God! He had forgotten to talk with the head of the school for special needs children about the woman’s daughter. How could he have let it slip his mind? So, he phoned immediately. While waiting for the response from the other end of the line, he heard the bird twittering and smelled the wonderful fragrance from those plants in the corner of Vu’s yard.

Translated by Manh Chuong
(from Viet Nam News)
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