“That’s not completely true,” the old man refuted. “There had never been a storm in Cà Mau until this unfortunate year. Water is the most dangerous of the elements, followed by fire, our ancestors warned. It’s lucky that he survived and came back unharmed. You and I have lived a hard life, but we have five sons, and they’re all alive. That’s a blessing from our ancestors. Expecting too much shortens your life.”

  The sea is vast and deep, and humans are small. As one ages, the sea becomes vaster.

  After the elderly couple returned home, a loan officer from the bank arrived and said to their son and daughter-in-law, “This is your loan—two hundred million đồng. Please sign here.”

  The young couple had to borrow the money from the bank to pay back their neighbors and friends who had helped them buy the boat.

  Tư Bảo, Thúy’s husband, looked at the loan document as if it were a fishing net. Without hesitation, he signed his name. The movement of his pen felt like a knife across his mother’s heart. Even though she had been in labor seven times, she had never experienced such pain—the pain caused by the anticipated scattering of her beloved.

  On the rooftop, Thúy told me that, after the storm, she went to Sài Gòn and Bảo worked for his eldest brother taking care of racehorses in Long An. The family separated. Thúy’s mother had to take care of her six-year-old son and two-year-old daughter. The boy looked like his father, the little girl looked like her mother. During her eleven years working as a caregiver, she hadn’t spent a single Tết with her family. She had to stay in Sài Gòn during the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, not because she got paid double, but because Tết was when her patients needed her the most. Her mother-in-law did not complain about her absence, which was a way of showing Thúy that she supported and sympathized with her choices. However, her sisters-in-law showed disgust toward Thúy’s lowly job, which, according to them, was full of temptation. It wasn’t easy for a live-in caregiver to maintain her chastity, they argued. But because she had no formal education, Thúy had no choice but to work as a caregiver. She had to send home at least twenty-four million đồng every year to pay for her children’s school tuition and to make payments on the loan.

  Good caregivers must love their patients the way they love their own parents, siblings, or relatives.

  “People normally don’t trust caregivers,” Thúy said. “And caregivers are fully aware of the dangers of sexual harassment and molestation.”

  “People need to overcome their prejudices to work together,” I said.

  “I’m still young, so I must resist temptations because I love my husband and my kids. It isn’t easy.”

  Then she told me a story:

  Once upon a time, I was the hired caregiver of a fifty-year-old Korean man in the hospital. He had never been married and he fell in love with me. He invited his younger sister from Korea to visit Việt Nam.

  “Thúy, please marry my brother and move to Korea with us. He never loved anyone until he met you. You’re living a miserable life here. Why don’t you take this opportunity and change your life for the better?” the Korean sister said.

  “I have two children. The sea tore up our lives, but we still love the sea and our hometown, Cà Mau,” I replied.

  “That’s the Thúy I know. If she went to Korea, she wouldn’t be herself. And I can’t live with a woman who has lost her true self,” the Korean man said when we said our farewells.

  To continue our conversation, Thúy clicked her tongue and said, “I have to uphold my dignity for myself and my family, and it’s not easy for me. I’ve been in Sài Gòn for over ten years. I miss my family tremendously, but I have to pay off the loan. My husband’s brother will give him a racehorse, and if he sells it, he might get seventy or eighty million đồng, if he is lucky. We can use that money to start over.”

  A month later, my mother’s health improved, and when she was released from the hospital, she insisted that I go to Long An with Thúy to visit her husband. To our surprise, their two children were also visiting. Although Thúy’s son was about to turn eighteen, he embraced her with tears in his eyes as if he were a little child. Her daughter hugged her tight as if afraid that Thúy would leave them again.

  I had a little daughter, and whenever she visited her grandmother in the hospital, Thúy paid her special attention and gave her all kinds of treats. Thúy had become a member of the family. One afternoon, she took my daughter to the stairs leading to the rooftop, and said to me dejectedly, “The day I left, my daughter was about her age. She has grown up a lot, but in my mind, she’s always a little girl, just like when I left her.”

  When Thúy looked at her children, her eyes grew wet. Thúy’s children were summoned to the front yard to prepare fish for lunch.

  “I have to work far away from home to earn money to pay back our loan,” she said. “I feel guilty when I can’t be with my children, especially when they’re sick.”

  In the distance, Egyptian river hemp flowers blazed against the horizon. The breeze blowing in from the plains reminded the young couple of harrowing memories and their disconsolate, separated lives. When the typhoon hit Cà Mau in 1997, the entire nation rallied, and people provided the victims with aid. But many families still had to separate to recover financially. Thúy and her husband had been working extremely hard but hadn’t managed to pay off the loan yet.

  “When my father-in-law was a fisherman, he and his wife were able to earn enough money to raise their children and still save a little extra. My generation invested more in their fishing businesses, but the sea took everything from us. My parents-in-law gave us their entire savings, and I feel very guilty. What if it takes us twenty years to get back to where we were before the storm? Is this Heaven’s will, or the result of something we did? Sometimes, I get so distraught that I want us to abandon the sea and do something else, but my son loves being a fisherman, just as all the villagers do. Sometimes I ask God what we should do, but He says nothing.”

  I didn’t know what to say to comfort her, and words just slipped out of my mouth. “It’s our own fault. We destroy nature, and as a consequence nature punishes us.”

  I immediately realized what I just said was disagreeable. The woman in front of me was victimized by the storm. Why did I blurt out such callous words?

  Thúy suddenly looked stronger and said, “I already paid a great price for our wrongdoings. I paid with my youth. I understand that we can’t abuse the sea. For years, I have been asking myself about our treatment of the earth. The sea wants to give us so much, and we should do it no harm. The sea will only get angry and angrier in response to our misdeeds.”

  Thúy’s husband and children carried a pot of fish inside for us to boil. This was the first time I had tasted such delicious, flavorful fish.

  During my visit, Tư Bảo’s older siblings went to Sài Gòn to negotiate the prices for his racehorses. That year, wealthy horseracing fans didn’t mind splurging money on fast and beautiful horses. In the evening, Bảo’s children were exhausted from having been out in the grassland with their father the whole day, so they fell fast asleep. Bảo put a hat on and walked to the horse stable. He placed a wet towel on each horse’s back.

  That night, a mare’s neigh echoed throughout the stable. This sound, along with hoofbeats and the smell of other mares, could make male racehorses ejaculate. If they did, they would lose their energy for the race, and all the groom’s efforts would have been for nothing. Humans must control horses’ natural instincts. Every night, the groom had to be vigilant of thieves and of the horses’ biological impulses. He could rest for a few hours, but then around four or five o’clock in the morning, he would bathe them until eight o’clock. After the horses were cleaned, he would go to a coffee shop to take a break. All the coffee shops in the area had places to tie up horses, and their clientele consisted entirely of local grooms. After the break, the horses were taken back to the stable and fed bunches of fresh, young green grass. Then, the grooms spent time cutting, planting, and fertilizing new grass.

  Being a groom was an exhausting job. Bảo had been working for his brother for ten years without getting paid. When his tenure ended, Bảo planned to ask his brother to give him a racehorse. During his ten years of toiling at the job, Bảo repeatedly asked himself, Why is the sea so cruel to us, to our generation? The only way many of my friends could pay off their loans has been to leave their homes and work elsewhere.

  If Bảo were able to repay his loan, his family could reunite. If he could sell his racehorse for upwards of one hundred million đồng, would he return to fishing? Although Bảo wanted to go back to his former job, he often warned himself, I’ve already paid a huge price; that should be enough.

  During Bảo and Thúy’s reunion, I had an opportunity to get to know more about the people of Cà Mau. When it was time for Thúy and me to return to Sài Gòn, the couple shared a tearful goodbye. Their son gripped Thúy while crying and repeating, “Mom, Mom, please come back to us.”

  Thúy’s daughter held her mother tight, not wanting her to leave. Bảo held Thúy’s hand and said, “I’m sorry that you must return to Sài Gòn and work there a little longer. Please come back to us soon.”

  “I don’t like to visit my family, although I miss them tremendously,” Thúy told me on our way back to Sài Gòn, “because it’s unbearable to see everyone cry when we say goodbye. I live a hard life in Sài Gòn just to earn money, but there is no other way.”

  Thúy’s family suffered for more than a decade after the storm. Storms ravish the region every year, victimizing how many similar families? I have seen and heard that after each storm, many people must separate and take on all sorts of menial jobs to pay off debts and loans. Thúy and Bảo were young, but what about older couples who don’t have the time or flexibility to recover? People have endured storms and environmental devastations generation after generation, but nobody leaves their homeland. People keep asking God why He roils the wind and sea, but never receive an answer. We must answer that question ourselves, for the sake of our own lives, our country, and our planet.

  Could Thúy’s hands, with their maroon nail polish, air their grievances? Regardless of what we can accomplish with our hands, natural disasters can take it all away. Our ancestors said, It’s better to be a jack of all trades and a master of one. This didn’t apply to Thúy and Bảo. He was a full-time fisherman, and he almost died at sea. Thúy did all sorts of jobs—she was a caregiver, a manicurist, and a maid. She could eke out a living, but she could only do that for so long because she couldn’t be with her children and husband when they needed her.

  The couple wished that there would never be another storm to exact such a terrible toll on so many lives, but who is there to listen to their prayer?

  Mother and Son:

  Phạm Thị Phong Điệp

  And now she knew that her son resented her. Wasn’t her heart tormented enough, so why did he resent her? But if he hated her, she had to accept that. She could blame no one, nor did she have to let regrets eat at her. If she could turn back time and start over again, she would still call him her son.

  No other mother in the Dứa neighborhood knew how miserable her life had been. Pregnant six times, with four stillbirths and two miscarriages. But a miscarriage was better than the delivery of disabled children with deformed limbs or even limbless babies covered with slimy membranes that quickly died agonizing deaths. She passed out when she saw the creatures that issued from her belly. These horrific ordeals depleted her. Each time she had a failed birth, her dreams were shattered.

  It wasn’t because her husband didn’t know that chemical agents had infiltrated his body. During the war, his engineering unit had been assigned to pave the road to the warfront at all costs. All sorts of toxic chemicals, especially dioxin-filled Agent Orange, fell along with the bombs. There was nothing he was not exposed to. But at the time, he kept hoping that he and his wife would have a prosperous future, and that God would bless him with a son to maintain his family lineage. But now he knew that he would have to surrender to his fate. His ancestors, or maybe even God, could do nothing. Trying harder would only torment him more.

  After months struggling with such thoughts, he drew up divorce papers and begged his wife to sign them. She deserved a better husband—someone who would give her a child. He was useless. He would be a selfish, heartless husband if he let her keep him by her side.

  She felt something collapse inside her. What was her husband doing? Did he want her to die? She would have only one husband in her lifetime, and if she died, her spirit would stay with his family. How could he abandon her that way? If they couldn’t have a biological child, they could adopt one. Living together for more than ten years, her hair was already gray, so if he didn’t want others to mock him he must reconsider. He looked at her, his throat bitter, his heart in agony. He could hardly breathe.

  “Darling, I owe this life to you,” he said shakily.

  Whenever someone told them about an abandoned child or a kid in need of foster parents, the old couple eagerly raced to investigate. But they always returned home empty-handed. Biological children were impossible and so were adopted ones, it seemed. They slept with their backs turned to each other. They suppressed their sighs so as to not anger each other.

  Then, their ancestors blessed them with the greatest joy in the form of an offspring. She dared not believe it.

  One night, after they had already turned off the light and were about to go to bed, they heard a creaking noise. Someone knocked on the door and whispered. First, they thought it was the wind. But how could the wind speak with a human voice? Or was it a burglar? He would starve if he tried to live off belongings from their home. Or was it a ghost coming to frighten them away? She trembled and leaned against him. He had been a soldier his entire life and refused to believe in ghosts. They just needed to open the door and see if it was a ghost or a human. What good was it to stay in bed guessing? They both gripped their canes, for self-sefense, as they approached the door.

  It turned out it wasn’t a ghost. Nor was it a thief. It was a tiny angel.

  The angel was sleeping in a cloth sack. The couple then noticed a woman shuffling out through the gate. He wanted to run after her, but she held him back. In an instant, she understood everything. She was afraid that if she called out to the woman, the angel in front of them would disappear. She quickly cuddled the baby against her chest, retreated inside, and asked her husband to close the door. She stood at the threshold, nervously listening for anyone who might knock. Her heart was pounding as if she had committed a crime.

  I’m not a good mom. I beg you to take care of my child. A torn piece of paper filled with scribbles and misspellings accompanied the baby. A red fingerprint, as if dipped in blood, stained the lower right corner. Perhaps it was the mother’s.

  A piece of paper floated in silence . . .

  An hour floated in silence . . .

  A day floated in silence . . .

  A month floated in silence . . .

  It was only then that she could believe it.

  The boy was named Thiên n, a gift from Heaven.

  As Thiên n grew from a baby into an adolescent, she never spanked him. When she saw her neighbors chasing their children and whipping them repeatedly, a chill climbed up her back. Not once did she even raise her voice with her son.

  Although she called him her son, she hadn’t brought him into this world. She had no right to assault him. He was a gift from Heaven. She loved him and was so grateful to have him. How could she hurt him? But, seventeen years later, he started to hate her, and she could do nothing about it.

  When he was still a baby, Thiên n suddenly developed a high fever one windy day. The storm blew in when no one expected it. Men and women rushed to secure their chicken coops and pigsties, hastily cut down their banana plants and collected chayote and loofah. Then they latched their doors and waited.

  Thiên n had a high fever for two days in a row. She would try everything the neighbors had suggested to abate his temperature and prevent his seizures, but the fever persisted. His arms and legs were frigid, but his neck, armpits, and head were as hot as charcoals burning in a stove. How could she take her son to the clinic during a raging storm? It was far away and all nurses certainly would’ve left to secure their houses. Who would be available there?

  “My son, you could be sick any time other than now. How can you be sick now?”

  She wiped her tears away so that they wouldn’t fall on her son. She kept wiping and wiping but they wouldn’t stop streaming down her face.

  Her husband moved back and forth through the house like a wild animal that had been stuffed into a cage. Outside, rain and whirlwinds tore across the sky, breaking trees and tossing garbage. Inside, his wife and son were curled up on the bed. What could he do? Never had he felt so useless. He couldn’t even touch his son because their zodiac signs were not compatible, so avoiding contact was best. He counted every hour, waiting for the storm to abate. But the more he waited, the more hopeless he became. Wind hissed through the door. Rain bellowed outside. At midnight, the wind grew fiercer. The downpour intensified.

  A shrub-covered mountain usually protected their home, but this time, the storm had found the “hidden victims.” It didn’t spare them. The wind tore in from the hilltop and rushed across the yard. Strong and soft winds. Mother winds and daughter winds. Their windows and doors rattled endlessly. The thatched roof he had carefully constructed trembled wildly. The steel cords that held it together broke, and the roof began to leak. Buckets and pots were placed on the floor to collect the water. The heavier it rained, the more worried he became.