Part 1

The small canal lay across a large field. And when we decided to stop, the fierce drought seemed to have gathered all the sunlight to pour down on this place.

The young rice plants in the field, their stems already dry and curled like unfallen ashes, crushed to pieces when held in the hand. My father removed the bamboo frame that covered the boat floor, the flock of ducks swarmed out, frantically, squirming and splashing into the alum-scummed water. A new layer of alum, dark yellow, thickened on the feathers of the hungry ducks,

sticky on Dien's shoulders as he swam away to stake and spread the net to fence the flock of ducks. I carried the basket to the shore, lit a fire.

Then the fire that was whistling under the rice cooker rose to her heart, the woman was still lying on the boat. Even the intention to sit up quickly disappeared under the long groans.

Her lips were swollen and pale. And her hands, and her feet, and under the shirt I had covered her with was another shirt that had been torn to shreds, exposing the purple flesh that had been pinched.

And the roots of her hair were also bleeding. People had put their hands in them, twisted them to drag her all the way down the village road, before stopping for a moment

at the rice mill. They tossed and tossed her on the ground strewn with chaff. The female lead, a disheveled woman, had lost her voice, sometimes fainted from jealousy

and exhaustion. But the bustling crowd around her had revived her spirit, they kicked her with their feet at her tattered body with a spiteful, gleeful look,

forgetting the failed rice crop that had dried up in the fields, forgetting the worry of hunger in the middle of the lean season. The fun would have been long, if a new idea had not come up in the excitement. They used machetes to cut her thick hair, vigorously, as if they were chopping a handful of hard, dry grass. When the tail of her hair was severed and she was free, she jumped up, rushed

down to our boat like a scream, rolled over my feet, to my father, and knocked over the bags of rice husks that my father had just stacked.

The crowd was stunned for a few seconds to accept that their prey had run away. It took me a few seconds to eagerly see myself as chivalrous as Luc Van Tien, I struggled to push

the boat away from the shore, scared and happy, I held the pole and pushed myself to the middle of the river, my eyes never leaving the crowd that was pouring out to the edge of the bank, ready to jump down, jumping around

madly. Then the sharp curses faded away, the sound of the flock of ducks quacking under the stall faded away, in me there was only the sound of the Koler4 machine exploding, shaking violently

under Dien's hands, spitting out clouds of acrid, black smoke. The smoke drifted behind us, blurring the figures of people looking on in despair, a hand

holding her hair and waving it in the wind…

My father had no role in that escape, he was silent, when he had gone quite far, he went to the bow holding a pole. I crawled into the boat, took a shirt and covered her,

so that it could cover her torn breasts and bloody thighs. She smiled tearfully, said thank you with her eyes and fell asleep.

The whole way, she did not change her lying position, still, cold as a dead person. In the boat, there were only endless moans, sometimes long, sometimes short,

sometimes sad and sad, sometimes sounding like choked sobs…

Thanks to that, we knew she was still alive, to go with us almost all the way down the Bim Bip River, to this desolate field. Dien was a bit worried when he heard her still

moaning, thinking she was hungry, he urged me to cook rice quickly. It felt sorry because on the boat there were only a few dried, salty fish, “I can’t even swallow them, let alone…”

But that afternoon and the next day, she didn’t eat. She refused to drink water, waiting until her dry lips had begun to crack, then she took a few small sips, which seemed to be just enough to wet her lips. Hungry and thirsty, but she was even more afraid of pain. People had poured iron glue on her vagina…

I told my father and Dien during the meal. I heard the two of them fall silent, the sound of bamboo chopsticks hitting the bowl stopped. Dien looked at me and I read the fear and disgust rising in my father’s eyes. Dien poured water into the bowl, stirred it quickly, then followed the dirt road along the canal, and went into the village. I told him,

stop by the store and buy me a thousand and a half of sugar.

The wind must have drowned out my words, when he returned, Dien had nothing with him, he quietly spread his hands in front of me, his hands were covered with a layer of something, smooth, transparent, and

was drying, making his fingers stiff as stone. Dien said, “Iron glue…” It seemed that the people who produced this glue did not expect it to have so many uses. My sister and I carefully peeled off the glue, the young skin on his hands was red and burned, bleeding. We looked toward the boat’s hold,

hearing the vast breathing with the wind

Part 2

The field has no name. But for me and Dien, there is no place that is nameless, we mention, we name it with the memories we have in

each field. The place where my sister and I planted trees, the place where Dien was bitten by a snake, the place where I had my first period… And tomorrow when we drift to another place, mentioning

this field with her name, we will surely be moved.

Early in the morning of the third day, she was able to sit up, looked around, and asked, “Oh my god, where is this deserted place?” The village was far away behind the rows of green coconut trees. The fields were empty, on the banks of the canals, there were only cotton trees. Two children with dewy heads were busily mixing food for the ducks, looking at her in surprise and ecstasy. Her voice was unharmed, clear and sweet.

She asked, “Where do you bathe, my dears?”. I pointed down the canal. She looked at the alum scum, bored. There is a pond over there, Dien said.

It was an old bomb crater, with water spinach growing all around, and water spinach covering the water surface, the stems of which were thin and red. This was where Dien had caught some soft, plump catfish yesterday. She immersed herself in it for a long time, without scrubbing, just letting the cold water soothe the painful areas. When she came ashore, I saw blood dripping down between her thighs, she must have done something with that cruel glue. Then, after a long time, with short limping steps like when she had walked, she

and I returned to the canal bank. Dien was delighted to see her wearing her alum-stained shirt and her crumpled shorts.

Only my father was sullenly clearing the grass around the hut. Only my father was indifferent to the results of my sister and I. Ignoring her father's indifferent attitude, she looked at the man

who was hunched over in the early morning sun, staggering: "Your father is so handsome...".

For that reason? Was it because of her father that she stayed with us, in a deserted field. The wounds had healed very quickly. She smiled, being beaten so often was getting used to it.

I asked her what she did to be beaten. She smiled, "Being a whore". Then perhaps she felt guilty for being too rude to us, she ruffled Dien's hair "You probably don't know...".

Dien looked at me and smiled. We had met many, many women like her. Every harvest season, they would bustle along the dike, hovering around the huts of the harvesters,

the men guarding the rice and the duck farmers running the fields. They tried to look young and fresh, but their faces and necks were sagging, looking closely made tears well up. At night,

behind the rice piles, they let out their giggles, their gentle breathing... into the sky, making many women who were busy cooking rice and breastfeeding their children in the tents feel heartbroken.

Every night when we bought wine for our fathers, we passed by couples. We recognized them right away, when they were naked, they still calmly

giggled and wriggled their bodies, not standing there embarrassed and resigned like the women in the countryside. The next morning, they staggered away, taking with them

the small wages from a hard day's work of the men.

She, like them, was just starting to decline, starving in the city, so she ran down to the countryside, opened a small shop, pretended to sell small cakes and candies, but in reality, she was working.

There, the men were easy-going and honest. She lived on the money they earned from fishing at night, from selling rice, dried coconuts or bunches of ripe bananas. There was also a time of unexpected harvest, when she lured a man into bed play, for two days and nights, and she got one million and two. That was the loan to reduce hunger and poverty, when she got home, with eight hundred thousand left in her pocket, how sad must that man have been, how resentful she must have been when he saw his wife and children huddled around a pot of boiled potatoes in the dim afternoon sunlight. - Eating on other people's sweat and tears, so getting beaten up every now and then is a worthy price, isn't it, my dears?

She said, and fell over laughing, as if she felt that the price she had paid was just right. "But I'm lucky, thanks to that I met you, to be able to live together like this, it's really

happy...".

Father was not happy, because he had another mouth to feed. The ducks were not happy either, they pecked at her feet every time she stepped over the fence, "Why are you here to have our food portion

been cut down, the trough is full of rice husks, it's disgusting to see you, and on top of that, you force us to lay eggs to feed you". She jumped out, screamed, then laughed (with her eyes swaying toward her father) "one day these devil ducks will like you, for a while...". But Dien and I knew she would leave, exhausted. The time she spent with us was therefore fragile. Many times, when herding the ducks to eat a certain amount of rice, thinking she had left, Dien would run back in shock. - Do you guys really love me? Isn't that pitiful...!? "

She was surprised to see tears streaming down Dien's cheeks (she didn't know he had been suffering from a disease called hydrocele since he was nine years old). It was touching that life had beaten us up, but these two children were strangely affectionate and attached. Another reason for her to stay with us, during an unusually hot and dry season. The season came early. That's why the sun was so long. Recently, we stopped at a small hamlet on the bank of a large river. Ironically, the people here had no water to use (like us walking on the endless land without a clod of earth to throw at the birds). Their bodies were covered with scabs, the children scratched until they bled. They went to buy fresh water by rowing boat, holding their breath to keep the water from spilling out because the road was long and the water was expensive. In the afternoon, after working for hire, they went down to the pond to bathe in the water that was sour because of alum, then

rinsed it with exactly two buckets. The water used to wash rice was used to wash vegetables, and after washing vegetables, it was used to wash fish. Three-year-old children already know how to appreciate water, and even if it is necessary, they will try to run out to the garden to pee in the chili pots and onion pots (causing the trees to lose their leaves). There, a boy said, "I wish my mother could have a good bath before she dies." This sentence made me feel sorry for him so much. The day I left, he stood hesitantly on the sidewalk and asked softly, "I wonder if you want to stay with... my mother?!". I shook my head, how could I bear to share his mother's two small buckets of water?

I urged my father to leave that dilapidated hamlet. The fields we passed through had dried rice when it first bloomed. People could not grow beans or melons because of the lack of water. Groups of children played on the dry canals.

The place where we pitched our tents and held ducks, the water had turned dark and gloomy yellow. But we had nowhere else to go, from the other side of the Bim Bip River was a buffer zone for large cajuput forests. This season, people take water from all the small rivers and canals to pump into the forest to fight fires. We also cannot go up the Bim Bip River to cross Kien Ha, where veterinary quarantine is very strict. And bird flu is said to still be breaking out all over the plain.

To prevent the ducks from being buried alive (which means losing capital for the next season), we decided to keep them here. They are raised in exhaustion.

Every day, I drive the ducks to eat the dry, shriveled rice flowers in the fields. Without water, they are pale, slow, and cannot go far. Eggs are sparse, the ones they lay are also hard, long, light, with thick, rough shells. What more can we ask of old ducks, who have been laying for three seasons, and have been hopeless because it is increasingly difficult to find rice and bran in the food trough. Even the water for them to bathe in is sour because of alum.

But the rainy season was still far away.

Every day, Dien invited her sister to go fishing, catch fish and bail out the shallow ditches. She brought the fish she couldn’t finish, and proudly gave her father a few tens of thousands of dong left over after buying some clothes. Her eyes looked at her father provocatively, “The pursuit is still long, honey…”.

She was stubborn. She tried every way to get close to her father. One day, she told Dien to go down to the boat to sleep with me, and she would go up to the hut. It was a dark night, a thin, flickering moon drifted in the sky. Dien wriggled and turned constantly, he said he had trouble sleeping, he wanted to hear me sing, any song. But Dien was still awake, it seemed that my singing voice couldn’t drown out the rustling sound in the small hut on the shore. Dien complained that sleeping on the boat was too shaky. I knew his heart was wavering.

Dien had days of confusion. He often asked me, “How do people love their mother?”. His face relaxed, when he realized that the hairpin, the fresh coconut or the catfish… that he had given to her was exactly the same as what people often gave to their mothers. And the longing when he was far away, the desire to lie close, to rub his nose against that person’s skin…

was as natural as the most normal thoughts of children. But doubts still lingered in Dien’s eyes, and he decided to endure alone,

to explore alone. For example, tonight, what makes our hearts ache, what makes us feel angry, heavy?

When I woke up, Dien had fallen asleep tiredly, he lay curled up, his hands clasped between his thighs, his face sad as if covered with a layer of frost. She stepped out of the hut, happily

stretching. Satisfaction and contentment sparkled in the corners of her eyes. Her face was filled with light, as if she had just opened a door to the sun. There was a path

somewhere stretching out before her. She smiled and said: - The dew was so heavy that it kept dripping on my face, tickling me to death.

Then she took over cooking. She rolled up her sleeves and busily blew on the fire, her messy hair covered with fish scales. She looked like a hard-working wife. That image brought tears to my eyes,

but my father only smiled indifferently. Because of that smile, I also had tears in my eyes.

My father gave her some money right at the meal, when the whole family was present, "I'll pay for it the other day...". Then my father calmly dusted off his butt and stood up, his eyes filled with contempt and triumph. She stuffed the money into her bra and smiled, "Oh my god, you're so generous."

Dien and I invited her to go fishing (We thought she was sad, although it was quite funny, being a paid prostitute, what's there to be sad about). The whole time, without catching any fish, she

said,

“It’s so funny, even these devil fishes are criticizing me.” The sentence sounded so indifferent, absent-minded, and hopelessly pitiful. Dien quietly caught the perch that swam down the ditch, dived deep, and hooked the fish onto her hook. When it came up, she was already smiling.

That afternoon, we played around in the water for a long time. She laughed and vomited when she saw the mud sticking to my nose, gray-green like the beard of a water chestnut. Suddenly, her expression became strangely affectionate, as if she was cuddling a baby, and my seventeen-year-old brother stood there, frozen in embarrassment. The water churned in his belly, and I knew she was boldly doing something down there. Then, discovering a great loss, she exclaimed in shock: - Oh my God, what’s wrong, honey?

She only asked difficult questions. Just hearing them hurt, let alone answering them. For example, once she asked, "Where is your mother?", "Where is your house?", Dien got angry: - If I knew, I would die immediately.

Part 1

The small canal lay across a large field. And when we decided to stop, the fierce drought seemed to have gathered all the sunlight to pour down on this place.

The young rice plants in the field, their stems already dry and curled like unfallen ashes, crushed to pieces when held in the hand. My father removed the bamboo frame that covered the boat floor, the flock of ducks swarmed out, frantically, squirming and splashing into the alum-scummed water. A new layer of alum, dark yellow, thickened on the feathers of the hungry ducks,

sticky on Dien's shoulders as he swam away to stake and spread the net to fence the flock of ducks. I carried the basket to the shore, lit a fire.

Then the fire that was whistling under the rice cooker rose to her heart, the woman was still lying on the boat. Even the intention to sit up quickly disappeared under the long groans.

Her lips were swollen and pale. And her hands, and her feet, and under the shirt I had covered her with was another shirt that had been torn to shreds, exposing the purple flesh that had been pinched.

And the roots of her hair were also bleeding. People had put their hands in them, twisted them to drag her all the way down the village road, before stopping for a moment

at the rice mill. They tossed and tossed her on the ground strewn with chaff. The female lead, a disheveled woman, had lost her voice, sometimes fainted from jealousy

and exhaustion. But the bustling crowd around her had revived her spirit, they kicked her with their feet at her tattered body with a spiteful, gleeful look,

forgetting the failed rice crop that had dried up in the fields, forgetting the worry of hunger in the middle of the lean season. The fun would have been long, if a new idea had not come up in the excitement. They used machetes to cut her thick hair, vigorously, as if they were chopping a handful of hard, dry grass. When the tail of her hair was severed and she was free, she jumped up, rushed

down to our boat like a scream, rolled over my feet, to my father, and knocked over the bags of rice husks that my father had just stacked.

The crowd was stunned for a few seconds to accept that their prey had run away. It took me a few seconds to eagerly see myself as chivalrous as Luc Van Tien, I struggled to push

the boat away from the shore, scared and happy, I held the pole and pushed myself to the middle of the river, my eyes never leaving the crowd that was pouring out to the edge of the bank, ready to jump down, jumping around

madly. Then the sharp curses faded away, the sound of the flock of ducks quacking under the stall faded away, in me there was only the sound of the Koler4 machine exploding, shaking violently

under Dien's hands, spitting out clouds of acrid, black smoke. The smoke drifted behind us, blurring the figures of people looking on in despair, a hand

holding her hair and waving it in the wind…

My father had no role in that escape, he was silent, when he had gone quite far, he went to the bow holding a pole. I crawled into the boat, took a shirt and covered her,

so that it could cover her torn breasts and bloody thighs. She smiled tearfully, said thank you with her eyes and fell asleep.

The whole way, she did not change her lying position, still, cold as a dead person. In the boat, there were only endless moans, sometimes long, sometimes short,

sometimes sad and sad, sometimes sounding like choked sobs…

Thanks to that, we knew she was still alive, to go with us almost all the way down the Bim Bip River, to this desolate field. Dien was a bit worried when he heard her still

moaning, thinking she was hungry, he urged me to cook rice quickly. It felt sorry because on the boat there were only a few dried, salty fish, “I can’t even swallow them, let alone…”

But that afternoon and the next day, she didn’t eat. She refused to drink water, waiting until her dry lips had begun to crack, then she took a few small sips, which seemed to be just enough to wet her lips. Hungry and thirsty, but she was even more afraid of pain. People had poured iron glue on her vagina…

I told my father and Dien during the meal. I heard the two of them fall silent, the sound of bamboo chopsticks hitting the bowl stopped. Dien looked at me and I read the fear and disgust rising in my father’s eyes. Dien poured water into the bowl, stirred it quickly, then followed the dirt road along the canal, and went into the village. I told him,

stop by the store and buy me a thousand and a half of sugar.

The wind must have drowned out my words, when he returned, Dien had nothing with him, he quietly spread his hands in front of me, his hands were covered with a layer of something, smooth, transparent, and

was drying, making his fingers stiff as stone. Dien said, “Iron glue…” It seemed that the people who produced this glue did not expect it to have so many uses. My sister and I carefully peeled off the glue, the young skin on his hands was red and burned, bleeding. We looked toward the boat’s hold,

hearing the vast breathing with the wind

Part 2

The field has no name. But for me and Dien, there is no place that is nameless, we mention, we name it with the memories we have in

each field. The place where my sister and I planted trees, the place where Dien was bitten by a snake, the place where I had my first period… And tomorrow when we drift to another place, mentioning

this field with her name, we will surely be moved.

Early in the morning of the third day, she was able to sit up, looked around, and asked, “Oh my god, where is this deserted place?” The village was far away behind the rows of green coconut trees. The fields were empty, on the banks of the canals, there were only cotton trees. Two children with dewy heads were busily mixing food for the ducks, looking at her in surprise and ecstasy. Her voice was unharmed, clear and sweet.

She asked, “Where do you bathe, my dears?”. I pointed down the canal. She looked at the alum scum, bored. There is a pond over there, Dien said.

It was an old bomb crater, with water spinach growing all around, and water spinach covering the water surface, the stems of which were thin and red. This was where Dien had caught some soft, plump catfish yesterday. She immersed herself in it for a long time, without scrubbing, just letting the cold water soothe the painful areas. When she came ashore, I saw blood dripping down between her thighs, she must have done something with that cruel glue. Then, after a long time, with short limping steps like when she had walked, she

and I returned to the canal bank. Dien was delighted to see her wearing her alum-stained shirt and her crumpled shorts.

Only my father was sullenly clearing the grass around the hut. Only my father was indifferent to the results of my sister and I. Ignoring her father's indifferent attitude, she looked at the man

who was hunched over in the early morning sun, staggering: "Your father is so handsome...".

For that reason? Was it because of her father that she stayed with us, in a deserted field. The wounds had healed very quickly. She smiled, being beaten so often was getting used to it.

I asked her what she did to be beaten. She smiled, "Being a whore". Then perhaps she felt guilty for being too rude to us, she ruffled Dien's hair "You probably don't know...".

Dien looked at me and smiled. We had met many, many women like her. Every harvest season, they would bustle along the dike, hovering around the huts of the harvesters,

the men guarding the rice and the duck farmers running the fields. They tried to look young and fresh, but their faces and necks were sagging, looking closely made tears well up. At night,

behind the rice piles, they let out their giggles, their gentle breathing... into the sky, making many women who were busy cooking rice and breastfeeding their children in the tents feel heartbroken.

Every night when we bought wine for our fathers, we passed by couples. We recognized them right away, when they were naked, they still calmly

giggled and wriggled their bodies, not standing there embarrassed and resigned like the women in the countryside. The next morning, they staggered away, taking with them

the small wages from a hard day's work of the men.

She, like them, was just starting to decline, starving in the city, so she ran down to the countryside, opened a small shop, pretended to sell small cakes and candies, but in reality, she was working.

There, the men were easy-going and honest. She lived on the money they earned from fishing at night, from selling rice, dried coconuts or bunches of ripe bananas. There was also a time of unexpected harvest, when she lured a man into bed play, for two days and nights, and she got one million and two. That was the loan to reduce hunger and poverty, when she got home, with eight hundred thousand left in her pocket, how sad must that man have been, how resentful she must have been when he saw his wife and children huddled around a pot of boiled potatoes in the dim afternoon sunlight. - Eating on other people's sweat and tears, so getting beaten up every now and then is a worthy price, isn't it, my dears?

She said, and fell over laughing, as if she felt that the price she had paid was just right. "But I'm lucky, thanks to that I met you, to be able to live together like this, it's really

happy...".

Father was not happy, because he had another mouth to feed. The ducks were not happy either, they pecked at her feet every time she stepped over the fence, "Why are you here to have our food portion

been cut down, the trough is full of rice husks, it's disgusting to see you, and on top of that, you force us to lay eggs to feed you". She jumped out, screamed, then laughed (with her eyes swaying toward her father) "one day these devil ducks will like you, for a while...". But Dien and I knew she would leave, exhausted. The time she spent with us was therefore fragile. Many times, when herding the ducks to eat a certain amount of rice, thinking she had left, Dien would run back in shock. - Do you guys really love me? Isn't that pitiful...!? "

She was surprised to see tears streaming down Dien's cheeks (she didn't know he had been suffering from a disease called hydrocele since he was nine years old). It was touching that life had beaten us up, but these two children were strangely affectionate and attached. Another reason for her to stay with us, during an unusually hot and dry season. The season came early. That's why the sun was so long. Recently, we stopped at a small hamlet on the bank of a large river. Ironically, the people here had no water to use (like us walking on the endless land without a clod of earth to throw at the birds). Their bodies were covered with scabs, the children scratched until they bled. They went to buy fresh water by rowing boat, holding their breath to keep the water from spilling out because the road was long and the water was expensive. In the afternoon, after working for hire, they went down to the pond to bathe in the water that was sour because of alum, then

rinsed it with exactly two buckets. The water used to wash rice was used to wash vegetables, and after washing vegetables, it was used to wash fish. Three-year-old children already know how to appreciate water, and even if it is necessary, they will try to run out to the garden to pee in the chili pots and onion pots (causing the trees to lose their leaves). There, a boy said, "I wish my mother could have a good bath before she dies." This sentence made me feel sorry for him so much. The day I left, he stood hesitantly on the sidewalk and asked softly, "I wonder if you want to stay with... my mother?!". I shook my head, how could I bear to share his mother's two small buckets of water?

I urged my father to leave that dilapidated hamlet. The fields we passed through had dried rice when it first bloomed. People could not grow beans or melons because of the lack of water. Groups of children played on the dry canals.

The place where we pitched our tents and held ducks, the water had turned dark and gloomy yellow. But we had nowhere else to go, from the other side of the Bim Bip River was a buffer zone for large cajuput forests. This season, people take water from all the small rivers and canals to pump into the forest to fight fires. We also cannot go up the Bim Bip River to cross Kien Ha, where veterinary quarantine is very strict. And bird flu is said to still be breaking out all over the plain.

To prevent the ducks from being buried alive (which means losing capital for the next season), we decided to keep them here. They are raised in exhaustion.

Every day, I drive the ducks to eat the dry, shriveled rice flowers in the fields. Without water, they are pale, slow, and cannot go far. Eggs are sparse, the ones they lay are also hard, long, light, with thick, rough shells. What more can we ask of old ducks, who have been laying for three seasons, and have been hopeless because it is increasingly difficult to find rice and bran in the food trough. Even the water for them to bathe in is sour because of alum.

But the rainy season was still far away.

Every day, Dien invited her sister to go fishing, catch fish and bail out the shallow ditches. She brought the fish she couldn’t finish, and proudly gave her father a few tens of thousands of dong left over after buying some clothes. Her eyes looked at her father provocatively, “The pursuit is still long, honey…”.

She was stubborn. She tried every way to get close to her father. One day, she told Dien to go down to the boat to sleep with me, and she would go up to the hut. It was a dark night, a thin, flickering moon drifted in the sky. Dien wriggled and turned constantly, he said he had trouble sleeping, he wanted to hear me sing, any song. But Dien was still awake, it seemed that my singing voice couldn’t drown out the rustling sound in the small hut on the shore. Dien complained that sleeping on the boat was too shaky. I knew his heart was wavering.

Dien had days of confusion. He often asked me, “How do people love their mother?”. His face relaxed, when he realized that the hairpin, the fresh coconut or the catfish… that he had given to her was exactly the same as what people often gave to their mothers. And the longing when he was far away, the desire to lie close, to rub his nose against that person’s skin…

was as natural as the most normal thoughts of children. But doubts still lingered in Dien’s eyes, and he decided to endure alone,

to explore alone. For example, tonight, what makes our hearts ache, what makes us feel angry, heavy?

When I woke up, Dien had fallen asleep tiredly, he lay curled up, his hands clasped between his thighs, his face sad as if covered with a layer of frost. She stepped out of the hut, happily

stretching. Satisfaction and contentment sparkled in the corners of her eyes. Her face was filled with light, as if she had just opened a door to the sun. There was a path

somewhere stretching out before her. She smiled and said: - The dew was so heavy that it kept dripping on my face, tickling me to death.

Then she took over cooking. She rolled up her sleeves and busily blew on the fire, her messy hair covered with fish scales. She looked like a hard-working wife. That image brought tears to my eyes,

but my father only smiled indifferently. Because of that smile, I also had tears in my eyes.

My father gave her some money right at the meal, when the whole family was present, "I'll pay for it the other day...". Then my father calmly dusted off his butt and stood up, his eyes filled with contempt and triumph. She stuffed the money into her bra and smiled, "Oh my god, you're so generous."

Dien and I invited her to go fishing (We thought she was sad, although it was quite funny, being a paid prostitute, what's there to be sad about). The whole time, without catching any fish, she

said,

“It’s so funny, even these devil fishes are criticizing me.” The sentence sounded so indifferent, absent-minded, and hopelessly pitiful. Dien quietly caught the perch that swam down the ditch, dived deep, and hooked the fish onto her hook. When it came up, she was already smiling.

That afternoon, we played around in the water for a long time. She laughed and vomited when she saw the mud sticking to my nose, gray-green like the beard of a water chestnut. Suddenly, her expression became strangely affectionate, as if she was cuddling a baby, and my seventeen-year-old brother stood there, frozen in embarrassment. The water churned in his belly, and I knew she was boldly doing something down there. Then, discovering a great loss, she exclaimed in shock: - Oh my God, what’s wrong, honey?

She only asked difficult questions. Just hearing them hurt, let alone answering them. For example, once she asked, "Where is your mother?", "Where is your house?", Dien got angry: - If I knew, I would die immediately.