I had to get ready for my teaching assignment in the mountains. As always, Mom packed for me as if it were her lone remaining pleasure in life. She bent her head to conceal tearful eyes as she meticulously filled my bag.

  “Try to take good care of yourself, and don’t worry about anything. I can take care of your brother,” she assured me.

  I ran to the river pier and cried in solitude. Early afternoon, the sun’s golden reflection bobbed atop the surface, which was beset by floating algae. Out of nowhere, Tít ran toward me and whistled loudly. A piece of red cloth was pinned to his sleeve. He waved a stick that had one end painted red and the other blue. I wiped away my tears and realized that I needed to help Mom with something. Tít was well behaved and stood still while I gave him a bath, pausing every now and then to pucker his lips to tease me. Mom stood on the veranda, her eyes sparkling with unusual gaiety.

  Without a man in our family, all the burdens fell upon Mom. I taught in a mountainous region far from home and thus couldn’t be of any help. My detached attitude toward Tít saddened her even more. But I realized I didn’t hate Tít as much as I had thought, back when I used to blame my disabled brother for Dad abandoning us. If Tít were a normal kid, Mom would be less disconsolate.

  My boyfriend Vũ had lost his patience with me and didn’t want to wait until the day I could move back to the Mekong Delta to make things work. The last time we met, he said he was no longer excited about traveling nearly one hundred fifty miles through the mountains just to hold me briefly in his arms. It wasn’t enough to satiate his longing every week. I jerked my head away from his face proudly and refused to ask him for an explanation. When there is no love, all attempts to hold on become ridiculous. In my mind, I thanked him for not telling me the real reason for our breakup—his mother didn’t want him to marry me because Dad left Mom. His mother was afraid that I would have Dad’s bad genes. Her rationale helped me forget Vũ and come to terms with the end of our relationship without anger or bitterness. Vũ was like everybody else. He didn’t like conflicts or complications. I decided that I didn’t want to be a burden to anyone, so I embarked on a carefree life.

  I visited Mom twice a month. She refused to entertain any suitor, although two men admired her beauty. At night, Tít slept in a swinging hammock in a corner of the house, forgoing a bed because he preferred the hammock’s rocking motion. He didn’t sleep much and opened his eyes while holding his whistle between his lips. He placed his stick across his belly while the piece of red cloth remained on his shirt. He didn’t blow the whistle loudly at night. He only blew it gently, generating a mere flutter.

  At first, I was irritated because I couldn’t sleep.

  “Leave him alone. He’s always like that,” Mom sighed and said.

  At four in the morning, the river pier grew busy. Tít jumped out of his hammock, running excitedly toward the gate, blowing his whistle loudly.

  “Recently he’s been flirting with girls. Poor thing!” Mom turned over and said.

  It dawned on me that Tít was already twenty years old. I had often counted on my fingers to remember his age and also to remember how many years it had been since Dad had left us. I used to wonder where Dad was, whether he knew he had a son who now reached the same age as his when he had left, and which of his biological urges were starting to express themselves in his son’s handicapped body. Tít kept teasing the girls, which frightened them, and they would screech and throw rocks at him. Days went by and Mom’s sighs filled our house even more frequently.

  Winter nights on the mountain were extremely cold. High, steep cliffs emitted frigid air that made me shiver. I nestled in my warm blanket and listened to the wind ripping through my thatched roof. The locked door shuddered, making a ghostly sound. The night was long. My despair froze when I thought about my parents, and I warmed myself with memories of Vũ, but eventually a feeling of loneliness and self-pity filled my heart.

  I was pregnant. Vũ, this insistent and passionate man, had knocked on my door one night when my spirit was at its lowest. The animals out in the wild couldn’t stand the cold either and their terrifying howls echoed across the forest.

  “Oh, no! I never taught you to act so foolishly! Do you want to kill me?” my mother bellowed after learning about my pregnancy.

  I felt dead inside.

  “It’s because of Dad. Do you know that? It’s your fault, too,” I argued. “Neither of you was ever there when I needed you the most. You never gave comfort in my life.”

  Mom collapsed on the floor like a fallen tree.

  When I was fifteen, I once accompanied Mom to the poplar forest to collect dry leaves. It was windy in the forest. I kept walking negligently until I got lost on a beach. A man with a thick beard stopped me and asked, “Do you want to meet your dad? Come with me.”

  “How do you know my dad?” I inquired as I opened my eyes wide and looked at him skeptically.

  “I’m his friend,” he replied.

  Then he grasped my wrist and pulled me. My legs seemed shackled by a ghost and I followed him.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, Mom rushed toward me and cried out, “My daughter . . .”

  She was like a mother hen stretching out her wings to protect her chicks. The bearded man disappeared quickly. Mom dropped to the ground, felt my entire body up and down, and hugged me.

  “Thank God! My daughter is OK.” She exulted in my safety.

  “Why are you crying, Mom?” I remained aloof and inquired. “The man told me he would take me to see Dad.”

  “That man is not a good person,” she glared at me and warned. “Don’t ever trust him. Your dad is far away.” Her voice was drowned in the vastness of the area; her eyes filled with sorrow.

  The incident terrified Mom and afterward she watched over us even more attentively. My pregnancy traumatized her to her core. I secretly had an abortion and bore the pain alone. I avoided the father of my unborn child like the plague. I squelched his hope of ever having me back when I ground my teeth during the abortion. I had already lost my virginity and with it my opportunity to marry a worthy husband.

  “Nobody can be a virgin twice in their life. Women have limited value. That’s why people say we are only as capacious as a flat-bottomed betel tray,” Mom reprimanded me.

  Filled with despair, I looked at the blue sky and her words were like salt grating across my heart.

  Dad hadn’t come back. Tít became feebler when winter came. His asthma tormented him constantly, and one day he was unable to blow his whistle. Tít lay on the bed, his eyes lifeless, his breath heavy. The two growths on his face turned red. He died in pain, not knowing how many of the girls that he had teased cried upon hearing the news. Mom grieved by his cold corpse. I hugged her and my chest ached. If paradise existed, I hoped that he would go there, because he had lived a life of agony predetermined by fate.

  After Tít’s death, our house became quite empty. In the early morning, the river pier was depressingly quiet. Shadows circled Mom’s dark, sunken eyes. I rolled up Tít’s hammock, hoping that it would alleviate Mom’s sorrow, but she still cried every night. I started to have nightmares about Tít.

  On the ceremony marking one hundred days after Tít’s burial, Dad came home, carrying a big, heavy suitcase. Mom was astonished when he arrived at the door. He gently patted her shoulder, nodded his head, entered the house, and looked around. Mom ran out to find me. I could hardly understand what she mumbled upon seeing me.

  When I followed her home, I was neither happy nor excited—I just stood there staring. My longing for Dad had long ago become hardened, petrified into hatred. My indifferent attitude was like a declaration of war on him. I rejected his caring gestures, and Mom looked at me anxiously. I said to myself, Mom, please don’t be mad at me. Dad wasn’t around during my childhood. When I was growing up, he wasn’t there to teach me right from wrong. He comes back when I have nothing to lose, when feelings of loss have already permeated my heart.

  I wanted to cross the river and return to my windy mountain. It was the first time I left without telling Mom when I would be back.

  “I beg you. Please don’t hate him. He’s heartbroken, too,” she held my hand and pleaded.

  “Is he really heart-broken? He doesn’t deserve our longing,” I argued bitterly.

  “Honey, everything is my fault,” she said regretfully. “He isn’t as bad as you think. In fact, he should be pitied.”

  I stared into her eyes and detected an unspeakable desolation. My heart sank into exhaustion.

  “Tít is the evidence of my betrayal to your father. I must tell you about my sinful secret. When he was in my womb, it was already too late to hide him from your dad. Tít’s father was my first love. I lost control with him and we slept together. I lied to your dad. After learning of my affair, your dad was mortified. I tried to get rid of the baby in my womb but I failed, and Tít was born—a pathetic, handicapped boy. Dad left. Back then I wanted to commit suicide. Only death could free me from my guilt. But I had to live for you and Tít, and I’ve been tormenting myself with the glimmer of hope that he eventually would come back.”

  My ears popped as if an arriving storm plunged the air pressure. Mom’s loss of self-control had caused my family turmoil. Dad’s self-respect and masculine pride forced him to refuse Mom’s attempts at repenting. My respect for Mom was gone, but I thought back to how I lost my virginity on a cold, windy night in the mountains—an experience that I wished to forget—and realized that my experience allowed me to understand Dad better and forgive Mom.

  I walked to the river’s pier. The light from the other side of the shore reflected on the currents in front of me. Dad was sitting in a small boat that Mom often used to cross the river. He held a paper bridge to offer to the dead. He lit a match. White ashes fluttered into the air and landed in his hair. When Tít was alive, he had always dreamed about a bridge that would connect the two sides of the river and the sand bar with the busy town. A half-moon had risen and the wind rustled through the coconut trees. I hoped that my mind could hold this memory forever.

  The Bitter Honey:

  Niê Thanh Mai

  Tomorrow you come beneath my longhouse, when the rooster has yet to crow, you stomp your right foot, I know, you stomp your left foot, I see.

  You and I go down the hill together; my eyes in yours.

  Dung couldn’t stand the way her sister-in-law Phen’s singing floated in the mountain air. She sang incessantly from dawn to dusk. When in the fields, her trilling voice pierced her thoughts. It wove itself into the branches of the coffee plants laden with fragrant, white flowers. Phen’s eyes sparkled and she smiled to herself when she was alone. Only a person who is in love smiles like that.

  The fire that raged in Dung’s heart revealed itself when she performed quotidian tasks. For example, when she went to make rice, she burned it three or four times in a row. It was so inedible that her mother no longer asked her to do it.

  But Dung couldn’t stay still. She had to do something. She swept the house, and then brought out the loom to weave a brocade. The sound of shuttles flowing back and forth all night left her mother sleepless, but Dung feared that if she stayed idle, her head would burst.

  “Is something wrong?” asked her mother the night before.

  “Nothing, Mom.”

  “You know how to lie, but your behavior gives you away. You’ve done nothing well recently. You mess everything up. You’re an adult now and you don’t have a boyfriend, so what could possibly be making you so upset?”

  Dung’s mother looked deeply into her daughter’s eyes. Dung’s heart felt like an uneven thread in the loom. Alas, how could Dung confide her heart in someone, while withholding it makes her life unbearable?

  Until the previous day, it had been quite some time since it last rained in Jin village. Under her blanket, Dung could hear the heavy rain furiously pelting the metal roof. It rumbled all night long. Dung tossed and turned sleeplessly until the rooster crowed. When she closed her eyes, the images reappeared vividly. Dung pictured again and again Phen’s wet body seen through the bamboo screen. And the suppressed moaning, heavy breathing . . .

  The sun hadn’t risen yet, but Dung was sitting up, holding her knees against her chest on the mat. She sat like that until the day began.

  “Didn’t you sleep last night? You have dark circles around your eyes. What’s going on?”

  Phen was tightening her sarong as she spoke. Dung said nothing in return and simply stared into her eyes. Dung noticed a flicker of embarrassment in them, but her sister-in-law looked away and said, “I’ll head to the farm early today. Despite the recent storm, it hasn’t rained much this year and our coffee plants will wilt if they don’t get some water.”

  Dung was left to sit next to the window alone. The morning breeze blew in carrying her sister-in-law’s voice.

  In Dung’s village, nobody wanted to live with the husband’s family. Yet Phen came to stay with Dung’s family after marrying Dung’s brother. Êđê girls proposed to their husbands and after they married, the husband would move in with her family. The arrangement would last for three years, seven years, maybe even their entire lives. A husband could die, become a ghost and stay there forever. But Dung’s brother was different; he wanted his wife to come to live with his family. She agreed and moved into their home.

  But Dung knew that she came to stay with her family because she was like an orphan. Her impoverished family couldn’t even build a bamboo screen as Dung’s family could. In the summer and winter, wind tore through cracks in their home’s wall, leaving it frigid every night.

  When Phen arrived at Dung’s house, she gave gifts to her in-laws. She presented a blanket to Dung’s mother, a sarong to Dung, a scarf to Dung’s uncle. Dung’s mother said she didn’t have to give anything else, but to simply have a congenial life with her son. Dung saw how emotional Phen became at that moment. Tears filling her eyes as she gripped her new mother-in-law’s hands.

  Dung’s mother was so ecstatic to have Phen around. She was more elated than Dung’s brother even. Whenever Dung’s mother went to the woods to collect bamboo shoots, she woke Phen up to make rice balls for their lunch and they went together. When rattan shoots peeked out of the soil, she took Phen to the woods and picked some to make broth for the family. Dung’s mother and Phen gossiped together all day long. Dung’s brother acted upset at being abandoned like that, but Dung thought he actually liked it.

  Phen didn’t want her husband to go into the forest to collect honey. She said that her heart jolted when she saw him scale an enormous tree and dangle out on its far branches toward beehives. Besides, bees were just like humans, so how could we take their homes without feeling guilty?

  Dung’s brother laughed loudly, saying, “If we don’t get them, others will. Beehives are lucrative. One season of collecting wild honey is worth a year of farming. Besides, we take just enough for you to buy threads and weave new clothes for next year.”

  Dung used to follow her brother into the woods to look for beehives, so she agreed with her sister-in-law as to the peril of such an enterprise. As she watched her brother climb a towering tree, her pulse raced. Upon reaching a branch with a beehive, he would burn grass or dry leaves. He had to be careful not to start a fire but still to make enough smoke to drive the bees from their nest. The smoke made his eyes sting but once the bees flew out, he could grab the hive and put it in his basket. Some were so filled with honeycombs that he had to make numerous trips up and down to get it all.

  He would give all the money he made from selling the honey to his wife, telling her to buy more thread for weaving brocades and to get some pork to make soup with the bitter eggplant for the rest of the family.

  “Don’t eat dried fish all the time,” her brother said.

  Phen said nothing, but quietly took the money and put it in a wooden box in her room.

  One day in March, Dung’s brother fell from the fork of an old tree while attempting to get honey. Perhaps the bees were especially aggressive and stung him repeatedly, so he lost his grip and fell to his death. He was dead before the villagers found him, crumpled on the earth in torn clothes, his hands still grasping the dripping honeycomb. The villagers informed his family and Dung dashed to look for her mother and Phen. When they arrived, Phen held his body tight, sobbing. Her face grew paler and paler until she fainted.

  After her husband died, Phen paced back and forth like a shadow and neglected her meals. In the first few days after his funeral, she sat at the steps by the gate, her face constantly wet with tears. Dung’s mother also wept from morning until night. Dung lay in the living room, wailing her eyes out as well. The house was in mourning. On the fourth day after the funeral, Phen went to the farm and got some vegetables for dinner. She prepared four bowls, and her voice was clear when she said, “Mom, my husband has passed away, but we have to live well. Mourning him forever would trouble him, and he won’t be able to reincarnate. Please eat, Mom, and drink some wine to live the life that my husband expects.”

  Dung, Dung’s mother, and Phen all sat around the dinner table. Each one held a bowl. They couldn’t swallow the bitter eggplant in their bowls. Finally, Dung’s mother started weeping and said she needed one more day to mourn before she could begin living the life her son would’ve wanted for them.

  Dung’s mother loved Phen like a daughter and never once yelled at her. When Phen’s husband was still alive, the other villagers asked Phen why she hadn’t gotten pregnant yet, as they had already been married for three harvests. They talked among themselves, “Why did her belly look as flat as a crepe myrtle tree in the forest?”

  They then visited Dung’s mother and warned, “Poisoned trees can’t bear fruits, and cursed women can’t conceive children. You should find another wife for your son.”