Listen, Slowly: Chapters 16–24

For example, you must not eat shrimps unless you’ve witnessed them jumping at the market. Frozen shrimps are for the undiscriminating foreign market; dead shrimps along with heads and shells become fertilizer.

Could she at least jump and play along with my sad attempt to pump some fun, spontaneity, surprise back into my life?

For decades, Ông’s Brother has prepared meals out here on a three-prong clay “stove” that sits right in the middle of the cement porch. Maybe not the exact same stove, but I have a feeling the same design has been around since people discovered clay. The stove, shaped like a big pot with three feet, has a bottom made of mesh wires where the fire is built.

Bossy Út wrinkles her brows and points at the soot-encrusted, misshapen kettle.

At sunrise, we grin until our cheeks hurt while presenting Bà and Ông’s Brother with a perfectly steeped pot of lotus tea.

At Ông’s Brother’s house, there’s this flimsy outback wooden shed, where you squat over a hole that connects to somewhere, and after you’ve done your business you splash everything down with exactly one bucket of water.

My pores have never been so immaculate or invisible.

I now own a face-to-neck mask and a wide-brim hat. The fabric screams red, glowing charcoal red. Why be a subtle ninja when I can announce Cô Hạnh’s sun-blocking technique to the world?

Con Ngọc is sauntering over.

“Where is he living then?” Con Ngọc asks.
I’m not sure if that constitutes a challenge or a sincere question.

I feel like I’ve won some obscure lottery.

My approach is much more nuanced, subtle.

Somehow Út’s mom, Cô Tâm, materializes and grips Út’s arm.

“Cô Hạnh rubbed on a bit of salt and your leech released instantly.”
Stop talking.
“Your leech had not attached for long...”
“It’s not MY leech!”

I swing my legs off the wooden plank, not dignifying it with the word bed. A di văng is its official name, one of those words left by the French, divan.

Út comes pouncing in with one red fruit held up in reverence.

I admit if I saw on PBS Nature a bunch of people clapping as a frog snaps up every bug that escapes from a fruit, I would think they need help. But here, with every maybe-relative elated, I would have to be made of steel to not join in.

A pot of tea, three cups, a plate of peeled, white fruit with lots of supershiny, oblong, black seeds.

By chiseling into the earth, chipping away fingernail bits at a time, I found I could not meet the daily requirement even if I worked without pause day into day.

In this kind of emergency, even he omits the poetic nonsense.

I’m about to report these monumental events to Mom when I realize I left my cell in Ông’s Brother’s house.

It smells like safety: salty beef broth, sturdy white noodles, sprigs of basil, wedges of lime.

In listening, my intestines wrung themselves until I thought they would tear.

I understand Ông’s yearning for real air in possibly the last hours of his life, but I was thinking of us.

She eats half a bowl. That’s not enough sustenance for a two-year-old, but baby steps.

How am I supposed to get beyond lanky in a land where ice cream is made of red beans instead of cream?

So that’s how you spell Hà Nôi? Who knew from seeing the name Anglicized.

“Chò,” wait, I say and take off down the dirt path, into the convoluted alleys between stacked houses, into Ông’s Brother’s house, flip open my suitcase, and there it is: dental wax, given for just this kind of emergency.

You’d think Út and her mother would be ecstatic, yet they’re huddled under a pomegranate tree near the pagoda and are whispering with force.

I, of course, want to go. But I don’t know how to ask because Bà needs me and I’m supposed to be magnanimous and nurturing and glued to her.

The key to making that tone is to close your glottis, which Anh Minh says is the opening between the vocal cords at the upper part of the larynx.

Anh Minh and Út look appalled, like they don’t understand me, or maybe they do, but whatever, let me enjoy my cloud of toxic fumes from thousands of lawless mopeds in peace.

Cô Nga has outstripped Cô Hạnh as the most efficient person on earth.

Our flouncy blouses are long sleeved but cool and soft.

Chị QH looks like at me like I am annoying, but Út is nodding vigorously to help me out.