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Toward the middle of December, whispers circulated that it was now safe to return home, that the American President Nixon would take a rest from the war to enjoy his Christmas holiday of peace and goodwill.
Một miếng khi đói bằng một gói khi no.” One bite when starving equals one bundle when full.
Grandma had told me proverbs were the essence of our ancestors’ wisdom, passed orally from one generation to the next, even before our written language existed.
I had expected victory but destruction hit my eyes everywhere I looked. A large part of my beautiful city had been reduced to rubble. Bombs had been dropped onto Khâm Thiên—my street—and on the nearby Bạch Mai Hospital where my mother had worked, killing many people. Later, I would go back to class, empty of my fifteen friends. And our house! It was gone.
Three months earlier, as my mother got ready to go to the battlefield, she told me Grandma had been born into one of the richest families in Nghệ An Province. “She’s been through great hardships and is the toughest woman I know. Stay close to her and you’ll be all right,” my mother said,
Trained as a doctor, she had volunteered to go south, to look for my father, who’d traveled deep into the jungles with his troops and hadn’t sent back any news for the past four years. “I’ll find him and bring him back to you,” she told me, and I believed her, for she’d always achieved whatever she set out to do. Yet Grandma said it was an impossible task. She tried to stop my mother from going, to no avail.
“Ahhh!” I leaped away from the phản. “What’s that?” The old man flinched. “A huge rat.” The animal had vanished, but I still rushed to my mother. She laughed. “Our harvest is disturbing them, Kitten. They’ll soon go back to their burrows.”
In the US, most of us would (almost) burn down our house if we saw a rat. We are not very comfortable with animals.
“Trong cái rủi có cái may,” said Grandma. Good luck hides inside bad luck.
To prepare for her journey, Grandma had stayed up the night before, cooking a small bucket of rice, pressing the rice into balls, sprinkling them with crushed peanuts and salt.
only those who faced battles were entitled to trauma.
The more I read, the more I became afraid of wars. Wars have the power to turn graceful and cultured people into monsters.
Oh, Guava, I used to think that we were the ones in charge of our destinies, but I learned then that, in time of war, normal citizens were nothing but leaves that would fall in the thousands or millions in the surge of a single storm.
the Việt Minh was getting rid of its anticommunist members, as well as intellectuals and the rich. The Party had to belong to farmers and workers, not to a member of the bourgeoisie
“I heard about the Land Reform, Auntie, but we have nothing to worry about. Remember how much rice, silver, and gold we donated to the Việt Minh?” I closed my eyes, trying to make myself believe what I was about to say. “The Party will protect us against any uprising. After all, together with other landowners, we financed their troops.” “I know, Diệu Lan. But I’m worried.” “We’ll be fine, Auntie. We work as hard as everyone else. We give people jobs. We’ve done nothing wrong. Công and I already talked about this. . . . And Auntie, we can’t just leave. The workers and their families depend on
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Later, much later, I found out that the Việt Minh deliberately chose bần cố nông—landless farmers who were fed up or angry with life—to lead the Land Reform movement. “Kill them all, the wicked landowners!” the mob was chanting. Many of them were pointing their fingers at me.
If I had a wish, I would want nothing fancy, just a normal day when all of us could be together as a family; a day where we could just cook, eat, talk, and laugh. I wondered how many people around the world were having such a normal day and didn’t know how special and sacred it was.
This is a normal life for a lot of people in the world.
Fire proves gold, adversity proves men.
As we turned to go, I looked back at the white-haired woman squatting on the ground, a cloud of flies her company. “Heaven has eyes,” I said. “Cruelty dispensed, cruelty returned.”
