Hao didn’t know that Tuc had glanced behind her, seen his chubby face, and been unmoved.
Hao left the village very early the next morning, when the roosters were crowing. Village dogs chased after his motorbike all the way to the rice fields on the outskirts. The road was full of potholes from the heavy footprints of water buffaloes, so the motorbike jostled and bounced as it sped away. Hao never looked back.
From Tuc’s diary:
I have gone through huge stacks of letters at the Hanoi post office. The postal staff was very kind. Every day they have to satisfy the requests of various customers, as well as my particular request. I still haven’t found him. I pick up another letter that might be the one. Which Kieu is this? If it is the Mr. Kieu that I used to know, then maybe I can find out some information about him. My heart beats like mad. I feel a little sick and disoriented. What’s going on? Nervously, I turn the envelope over in my hands. Damn it! It’s Mrs. Kieu, not Mr.
There are other people also searching through the stacks of letters. Sometimes one of them screams and runs frantically out of the post office. When will it be my turn?
It has been two days since I left the village. I wonder what people think about me now. Maybe that I’m a crazy woman? Who cares anyway? I find myself thinking instead about my friend Le. I love her so much. She has suffered tremendously. Le has been married for seven years but is still childless, so she has to put up with all the village rumors. Her father-in-law is an evil person, a devil camouflaged in human form. He’s the one who convinced his son to turn the bed upside down and throw Le out of the house on a stormy night. But of course the father-in-law is always the first person to come to the village shrine. Le has not admitted it to me, but I can see it written on her face: she took revenge by giving her body to him. She wants them all to be imprisoned in an incestuous maze so that their family will one day be extinct.
The village is very different now. People have started to become indifferent to everything.
…
I can’t find him anywhere. There are forty people named Kieu, but none is the one I know. Maybe he wants me to go to the afterlife to find him. How unfortunate! If he is still alive, I believe he will return.
The moon is blue this season.
…
A disabled veteran was sitting alone on a stone bench, oblivious to the noisy world around him. Why did he look so sad? I could see that he’d lost a leg and an arm and had several scars on his face. His eyes looked full of sorrow, quietly lost in the twilight. He stared off into the distance, not looking at anything specific. Who, besides me, even noticed him? A few feet from where he was sitting there was a couple, cuddling and caressing each other like a pair of cats. My god! How could they do that in public when it’s wasn’t even dark yet? I felt like running away, because there was nothing more gruesome and cruel than this scene. Gruesome because … (Because I envied them, perhaps?) They were cruel. They should at least have known that there was a person who had lost almost everything sitting right next to them. But how strange! Even that scene didn’t affect him at all. He was still sitting there quietly and looking up at the evening sky. He looked like a shadow in a black-and-white painting.
Suddenly he looked at me. (Why did he do that?) I had trouble handling how sad his eyes looked. Now it was my turn to sit still. The modern couple had finished what they wanted to do. Now they were tired and bored. They would probably go to a restaurant to try to relieve this burden. It looked like they, in fact, were the lonely people.
“It’s getting dark already.”
I was startled and looked at him fearfully.
“Yes, it’s getting dark,” I replied mechanically. “Who are you waiting for?”
“No one. I just wanted to be alone.”
“Every day?” I asked.
But he didn’t respond. Instead he stood up and started walking away, his wooden leg clopping against the ground.
Maybe Kieu is disabled just like that veteran. Maybe he imagines that I married long ago and have lots of children. Is he tormented by memories of the past?
No—I will keep looking for you and slap you in the face before I shed tears against your chest.
…
I have visited eighteen military hospitals where seriously wounded veterans are being treated, but he is not there. All the other veterans say, “He is probably dead,” when I ask about him. Why do they say that about their comrade? Maybe they are talking about themselves. They’re trying to test me. He must be alive, and probably suffering—maybe in the final military hospital, which I have yet to visit.
“But how do you know how many military hospitals there are in this country?” I hear him saying to me.
I don’t like this question at all.
…
I don’t know what inspired me to visit the war museum. Life is such a cruel game! All the personal belongings on display—reminders of the thousands of people who died for our country. I stopped in front of an old photo of a young female guerrilla. But wait! My god—I recognized my own image in the photo! I must have been mistaken. The photo was so warped and blurred that the image looked like it was composed of decaying leaves. But why—why did I want to run immediately from the eyes staring back at me from this photo?
Suddenly I heard the voice of the museum guide behind me.
“This is
