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Chapter Twenty-Six

VIVI

I wave goodbye to Lan and watch her back disappear into the dark before lifting a finger to my lips, a tingling sensation coursing through me as I replay our moments on that small rooftop overlooking Sài Gòn. It felt like the city was ours—like we could do anything and be all right. I wish I could take a photograph of that moment, of the feelings that fill me when I look at her, and frame it forever in my mind.

Instead of walking to my room, my legs drag me toward the kitchen and into the backyard where Bà Hai’s hunching over a hearth and roasting some squids.

“Bà Hai?”

Surprised, she turns toward me with a burnt piece sticking out of her mouth. It seems tough, already giving me a toothache just from looking at it. “Vivi? You’re still awake? What are you doing up so late?”

I smile sheepishly. “I could ask you the same thing. I just got back and saw that the kitchen lights were on. What are you doing?”

She returns the smile, fanning herself from the heat of the fire. Grabbing a cup of water, she motions for me to come over. I tiptoe toward the backyard, the smoke from the hearth curling around us and into the night sky, fleeing into Sài Gòn’s humidity.

“Here, sit with me.” She nudges pieces of dry squid into my palm while popping one into her own mouth. “Eat some dry squid.”

I smile softly, tearing the squid into bite-size pieces and hovering them over the fire. The flames crackle and the cool breeze tickles our backs. Bà Hai throws more coal into the fire. It hisses back at us, making me flinch, and she laughs.

“It’s tasty,” I say.

“Eating it at night like this reminds me of my days back in Hà Giang, when my family would squat around a fire, roasting sweet potatoes from the fields and fish from the nearby rivers.”

“I didn’t know you’re from Hà Giang.”

She chuckles and moves the logs around, making the fire dance back and forth. “Really? You can’t tell from my northern accent?”

I blush. It’s something that I’ve always been embarrassed about. Another sign of being Vietnamese but not fully Vietnamese. “I can’t tell accents apart in general,” I mumble shyly.

She laughs harder. “I’m only teasing.” She clicks her tongue. “Too bad I don’t have any sweet potatoes lying around.”

“Tell me about Hà Giang,” I ask. “What was it like?”

“Hà Giang was beautiful. The mountains were vast and stretching as high as the sky, as if they were actually steps to Heaven. In Hà Giang’s province, there is also Qu ? n B ? , or Heaven’s Gate. And from Heaven’s Gate, you can see all the mountains, the open fields, and the rice paddies that gave us our life. But it wasn’t always like that,” Bà Hai says, a look of longing in her face as she tends the roasted squid, probably imagining herself decades ago when she was just a little girl.

“What do you mean?”

“Con, you ask many questions.”

Laughing at my embarrassment, she continues. “It’s a good thing to be curious. You must enjoy your youth. But, from the stories of my family, life was hard in Hà Giang during the French occupation of Vi ? t Nam. And it wasn’t just the French. The Japanese came, too, and they were just as ruthless as the French.”

“How did… your family do it? Survive through all that?”

She shrugs. “They did everything they could—found any jobs they could get, traded everything for food. By some miracle, they lived and I came into this world. But con, a life in Vi ? t Nam was still so hard for many of us.”

“Did you… have to leave Hà Giang?” I ask the question I can already sense the answer to. I try to imagine that feeling, the sadness that would grip me if I were forced to leave Little Saigon and the only home I’d ever known.

“I was just a small child, but we left Hà Giang for Hà N ? i, never looking back at the mountains and hills again.”

I reach out to squeeze her hand, the hissing of the fire filling the silence between us. Like my parents, Bà Hai was forced to leave a home she has always known—a place she clearly loved.

A lump forms in my throat. “I’m sorry. Was it better to live in Hà N ? i?”

Still staring into the fire, she only nods. “We tried finding work in Hà N ? i, waiting tables, or working for someone—anything to feed ourselves. But when the Americans came to Vi ? t Nam, rain turned into bombs—which meant death.” Her voice cracks, and she lifts her hand to wipe away a tear.

“So, so many deaths,” she continues. “To the point that none of us could go to school anymore because who knows what would happen during school? What if one day, the bombs came while I was at school and I never saw my family again?”

“But Vi ? t Nam won, right?” Something good happened. The country survived.

Bà Hai doesn’t respond. She continues staring at the hearth, still tossing leftover squid into the fire. She turns to me, her eyes glossy. “It’s not black and white. It never is. The war wasn’t just about winning or losing. It was us shouting at the world that we, too, are human.”

“How could it not be about winning or losing, when so much was at stake?”

“Con, if there is one thing about war that I’ve learned, it is that it takes and takes and takes, relentlessly, without mercy. Vietnamese people are the ones that suffered the most—no matter which side of the war they were on. On both sides—in fact, on all sides—the war took everything away from all of us. People left Vi ? t Nam, fleeing to wherever they could.”

I suck in a breath. Bà Hai’s comments remind me of Mom. I think of her living with the aftermath of a war, and how different Sài Gòn was from the city I’m visiting now.

Bà Hai speaks again. “We were like puppets, forced to fight among ourselves while the world watched and laughed without a care in the world. Without a care that we were bleeding our own land dry.”

“I wish I had learned about this when I was growing up from my own parents. That they’d told me their stories. I never met my family here in Sài Gòn. I never knew what kind of people they were, and I felt like I missed out on such a big part of my own life.”

Looking into the fire, I see the history of Vi ? t Nam the way I learned it as a kid in the States—as something insignificant and small, not worth being included in every high school curriculum. Even movies and media only depict Vi ? t Nam as a war-torn place, a country that needed saving. They hardly touch on the atrocities that happened here or the boat people who braved the seas. For all their puppetry, we’re forgotten, our stories untold.

Bà Hai continues. “Hurt and loss take up so much space in our hearts—and they turn into hate. My husband’s father was sent to reeducation camp after the war ended for being on the American side. Two weeks later, my mom and I received news that my brother on the Northern side was never going to return home because he died on the battlefield.”

I say nothing, allowing the trickle of my tears to fall, staining my cheeks as I picture my own family tossed around in this war, facing horrors from all sides. Maybe Dad is right, that I can’t blame Mom for wanting to avoid talking about all the hurt and loss. Maybe Bà Hai is right, that the scars run too deep, that they’re too agonizing to face. Perhaps there isn’t a right and a wrong and a good and a bad and a truth and a lie… There are too many perspectives, too many personal losses and sacrifices and griefs to try to quantify what happened in Vi ? t Nam into something simple, something people can learn for five minutes in history classes.

“But despite everything, we’re still all Vietnamese,” she continues. “And do you know what that means?”

I shake my head. “No.”

“When you’re Vietnamese, you have tenacity in your blood. You have the will to survive. So no matter what, we will always be okay, because we’re Vietnamese.”