“Don’t worry,” my mother said, coming over to where I was pretending to be asleep. “He will love you more if …”
But she couldn’t finish the sentence. As my mother bent down, pretending to adjust the blanket over my shoulders, I saw her quickly wipe away tears with her shirt sleeve.
Tuc organized all the letters she received according to the dates they were written. Some had been written in the summer, but they didn’t get to our village until many months later, in the winter. Some had been written deep in a forest along the northernmost border. Sometimes the letters had gotten lost, transferred from postal station to postal station, with people writing on the back of the envelope “Urgent.” At another postal station, one of the workers might write “Censored and deliverable,” or even “Love in wartime must be urgently delivered. Send my northern countrymen millions of kisses.” That last must have been written by a soldier.
Among the hundreds of letters she received, there were only about ten Tuc was able to reply to. The rest of the letters had no return address, which made Tuc feel anxious. Only my mother knew how much this upset her.
Mr. Kieu, the commander, did not write to Tuc after that first letter. At the time, the fighting on the B1 front was at its cruel peak.
In our village, Tuc was head of the local government group called “The Unit for Prevention of Spying and Protection of Army Secrets.” The group had the right to stop and interrogate any stranger who passed by the village after 7:00 p.m. The war had also spread to the North—spies could be anywhere, trying to gain access to sensitive information. Tuc’s group had already caught a spy in our village who had disguised himself as a street beggar.
But mostly the village seemed quiet. In the still night sky, the moon was bright. Out in the fields, on the outskirts of the village, the group who had night rice-harvesting duty sang folk songs that sounded both harsh and romantic. They were all women, loud and tough, outspoken and often careless with their words. Tuc was afraid of them. Once, some of the younger girls from the group had surrounded Tuc and tried to coerce her to reveal her lover’s name and age. Cornered, Tuc admitted that she loved “a soldier.” She thought her answer was enough, but they kept questioning her.
“Did you guys kiss?”
Tuc looked as if she were about to faint. One of the younger girls replied on her behalf: “Yes they did! I knew it!”
“How did it feel?”
“Like an electric shock!” one of the other girls shouted, before finally Tuc managed to break free and run away.
The group’s singing echoed through the village at night, depending on where the wind was blowing. Tuc felt as if each lyric to the outlandish songs was coming toward her like a wave. The wind also carried the scent of rice stalks. Tuc shouldered her rifle and looked out at the sea of fog covering the fields.
There was the sound of footsteps on grass. In the moonlight, Tuc saw the shadow of a big man coming toward her. When it got close, the shadow stopped and just stood there. Tuc adjusted the rifle on her shoulder. She was trembling. Still, in a stern voice she asked,
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me.”
“Who are you?”
“I am a lonely man.”
“Be more specific or I will shoot you,” Tuc said, readjusting the rifle against her shoulder. “What are you doing here?”
“Tuc, you ‘shoot’ me every day. Isn’t that enough?”
His answer sounded sad and sentimental, but it was obvious that he knew her. Then suddenly she recognized him. It was Hao, son of the vice-chairman, Doc, one of the most powerful and well-connected villagers. Hao was something of a dandy, his long hair always neatly combed as he used to follow her around during the yearly rice-cooking contest. Although they were the same age and lived in the same village, Tuc rarely saw Hao because he didn’t hang around the other young men. When it was time to enlist, Hao had excused himself, saying that he had to follow in his father’s career path, and disappeared.
Then suddenly he’d shown up a few weeks earlier at the rice-cooking contest, all well groomed like an urban intellectual. He wouldn’t leave Tuc alone, which bothered her. Still, she won the first round of the contest. When the lid to Tuc’s pot was removed, the smell of her cooked rice filled the air. Tuc cooked the rice so well that each grain was perfectly fluffy and tender. The bowl filled with her rice looked like a bowl of cotton. Even though the judges were experienced and picky older villagers, they ranked her at the top.
Round two of the contest involved cooking rice on water. The contestants were given a bundle of sugarcane stalks, a pot, and a box of matches. The sugarcane had to be chewed first to extract the liquid inside so the stalk would be flammable. The contestants had to cleverly calculate how many sugarcane stalks to use so that the rice cooked in a timely manner.
Tuc knew that thousands of eyes were watching as she tried to cook the rice in the melon-shaped bamboo basket that kept dancing on the water.
But she won first prize, and continued on to round three—perhaps the strangest round of all. This time, the contestants were meant to play the role of mother. They would again have to cook a pot of rice using sugarcane stalks as fuel out on the open water, only this time each contestant would also receive a mischievous child, and if he cried while the rice was cooking, the contestant would lose.
Who in the past had come up with this ridiculous challenge? Tuc thought, blushing. But she was by nature a kind and gentle woman, so throughout round three her assigned
