Dust Child

by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

“Life is a boat,” Sister Nhã, the Catholic nun who had raised Phong, once told him. “When you depart from your first anchor—your mother’s womb—you will be pulled away by unexpected currents. If you can fill your boat with enough hope, enough self-belief, enough compassion, and enough curiosity, you will be ready to weather all the storms of life.”

Throughout his life, he had been called the dust of life, bastard, Black American imperialist, child of the enemy. These labels had been flung at him when he was younger with such ferocity that they had burrowed deep within him, refusing to let go.

Whom they had once tried to kill. But he needed to understand the people he’d dehumanized during the war. In searching for their humanity he was trying to regain his own.

People in their region believed that evil spirits often went after the eldest children, hence the traditions of calling the first child “second.”

“Don’t you dare cry. Your tears will bring him bad luck.”

A proverb said that rough seas make better seamen, but Trang knew wars made tougher women.

“Just like your banana plants, you need good soil,” she’d said. “And your soil is your education.”

Quỳnh was a rare flower that bloomed only at night—the night-blooming cereus; its white petals radiated a beautiful, pure scent. Trang meant “graceful, gentle, virtuous.”

Once Phong’s tears had dried and everything became quiet, he learned the weight and depth of sorrow. He understood the true meaning of loneliness; it ate at his core the way termites ground away their meager furniture.

He wandered to Sài Gòn and became a bụi đời, the dust of life. He hated the term, for it referred to all homeless people, as if to erase them of their own identities. Many bụi đời he knew were Amerasians.

Nhất nam viết hữu, thập nữ viết vô—a son is a child, ten daughters equal none.

He couldn’t believe that from a child of dust he had been turned into a person of gold.

These days, Quỳnh didn’t want to talk, and whenever they did, their conversations were shallow, as if both of them feared that if they reached down deep enough, they would touch the hearts of their pain.

The room was as quiet as a book no one had read. Trang studied each piece of furniture, each item of clothes, knowing how much history was held within it, just like an unopened page.

Those in power feared free minds, and nothing unlocked thinking like literature.

Quỳnh stared at her drink. It was empty, as drained as she was.

A woman earned the title Mother not simply through the act of giving birth but from years of raising a child, from sleepless nights when the child was sick, from many meals and conversations they shared, from the joy that doubled in her presence and the sorrow that lessened with her being there.

she’d heard tears that touched a dead person would prevent him or her from having a peaceful departure from earth.

They were safe now, buried deep under the earth, below the banana plants, below the flowers that hung like the red lanterns that once filled the village of her childhood during the Mid-Autumn Festival. The flowers under which she and her sister had waited, full of yearning and hope, for their father to return from the war.

She hoped her grandchildren’s dreams were taking them to a peaceful world where humans were kind to other humans, so that no one needed to live with regret and sorrow.