Mrs. Ba sat down on a chair, picked up a cloth, and cleaned the table. She rearranged the cups and saucers, and then placed a hot teapot into a coconut shell to keep it warm. She looked at her wrinkled hands covered in age spots and recalled the first time she visited her daughter in jail. She had begged her husband to go with her but he refused, saying that he had no such daughter who would dare disgrace the family. She was furious, but when she looked at him, she realized that even she, his wife, and their daughter meant nothing to him. Acknowledging his own mistakes would equate with a loss of authority and manhood, and he expected his wife and daughter to dutifully assume their roles. She was reminded of the fact that he never wanted a daughter. Before that first visit, she stopped at the market to buy some mangosteens and took the bus to the prison. Mrs. Ba held her daughter’s tiny hands in the visiting room and sobbed. Her daughter choked out the words, “Mom, I’m so sorry,” when Mrs. Ba was about to stand up and leave.

  The chickens in the yard squawked and clucked endlessly and the cacophony interrupted her thinking. They gathered around a bunch of vegetables she had left outside. She quickly stood up and waved a broom to shoo them away.

  Mrs. Ba then walked out to the veranda and sat down to pick dead leaves from the bunch of vegetables and put the green ones into an old basket. A mother hen cooed to call her chicks after she had found some grain left from their breakfast by a hedge of hibiscus. The old woman looked at the chickens and her eyes became blurry. All she had ever wished for was a harmonious family, a humble life, a kind and hardworking husband, and a simple house. To her, that was felicity. Unfortunately, her married life had drowned her in tears. She smiled bitterly and blamed herself for being gullible—for believing her husband’s ingratiating words when they were in love. After their wedding, her dreams were shattered and everything turned upside down. She became responsible for her husband’s debts, even though she had no idea where, exactly, he spent his nights gambling.

  She went into labor on a stormy, wind-filled day. The torrential rain made the roads treacherous, green leaves fluttered everywhere, and dead trees fell across streets. While she was taking her struggling steps to the clinic, he was busy playing cards. Not once had he visited her in her maternity room, but she hoped that seeing their firstborn would change his way of life. Three days later she was discharged and walked to their house holding their newborn in her arms. He was sitting in the living room with a bottle of wine in hand. Upon seeing her, he pointed his finger at her and scolded, “Worthless woman! Don’t you know how to give birth to a boy? I told you I wanted a son. Don’t you understand? Your daughter will end up miserable like you.”

  “It’s your child, no matter if it’s a boy or a girl,” she blurted out.

  Before she finished her sentence, he slammed the bottle of wine on the floor. Pieces of shattered glass scattered all over. From the kitchen, Mrs. Ba’s mother heard the quarrel and rushed into the living room. He glared at and berated his mother-in-law, “It’s none of your business. You don’t need to tell me how to teach my wife.”

  The scene was not unfamiliar to Mrs. Ba’s mother, a traditional country woman who dared not challenge patriarchy and always put her own husband above all else. She said nothing and quietly took the baby into the kitchen. The insolent son-in-law was so inebriated that he soon fell asleep on the floor and snored like a freight train.

  Mrs. Ba joined her mother in the kitchen, looked at her newborn in her mother’s arms, and realized that her feelings for her husband were dead.

  She remained patient until the day her daughter received a college acceptance letter. On that same day, two tattooed gangsters smashed open the gate of their home and stormed inside. They pinned her husband down on the floor, beat him, and broke everything in their home. The turmoil was terrifying. She was powerless, and out of desperation, she knelt down to beg them to forgive her husband. She wasn’t paying attention to her daughter who had snuck away and returned carrying an iron bar.

  Mrs. Ba’s outdated cell phone, which could only make and receive calls, rang in her pocket. The repetitive ringtone brought her attention back to the present. She quickly wiped away her tears and answered.

  “You forgot the chicken you bought here. I’ve de-feathered and cleaned it for you. I looked around for you but you were gone,” a middle-aged woman from the market said cheerfully over the phone.

  “My gosh! I forgot. I saw some gladioli in Mrs. Như’s shop next to yours and went to buy them, and completely forgot the chicken. Let me run there and get it,” Mrs. Ba said in a fluster.

  “Okay! Hurry up because I’m about to go home.”

  “Definitely, definitely. I’ll be there shortly. My daughter loves boiled chicken, and I must cook it for her.”

  “How could you forget it, then? How about this? Let me ask my son to take the chicken to you.”

  “No need to. I have to go back to the market to buy some herbs, anyway. I am old and I forget things easily.”

  “OK, then. See you soon.”

  Mrs. Ba stood up quickly, used her conical hat to fan the chickens away from the gate, and locked it behind her as she left. She vanished behind the thick, green hibiscus hedge.

  The motorbike repair shop at the entrance to the village was quiet. Its owner and sole mechanic was bending over to tighten screws on an old electric bicycle. He held a cigarette that had been smoked down to its butt in his lips. He grabbed it with his fingers, flicked off the ashes, inhaled one last time, and threw it into the street.

  Two dark-skinned boys around nine or ten years old were walking by and jumped out of the path of the flicked cigarette butt. “Hey, don’t litter!” one of them looked at the man and shouted.

  He glared at the boys. Intimidated, they ran. “Forget him,” one of them said. They went to the kapok tree to hear what Biên had to say about Mrs. Ba’s daughter’s early release from jail.

  The man exhaled the smoke from his mouth and turned back and forth, looking for a tool from among the piles of stained metal items strewn across the ground. The two little boys had irritated him. He sat on the floor with his elbows on his knees and looked outside. He lit another cigarette and took a long drag.

  He recalled vague images of a skinny girl with pigtails swinging over her shoulders like fried Chinese breadsticks. The girl was shy and cowered when her peers picked on her while walking home from school. He often stood up for her, because otherwise, what would have happened to her? The girl had an oval face and often-puckered lips. She threw him a guava or a piece of candy and then ran away whenever he told her that when she grew up she would have to pay him back for his protection. Unlike other kids in the village, the girl never called him a fatherless bastard. She was fearful, like a scared hare.

  The day the police stormed into her house, he was at its gate. He had been on his way to the vocational school and saw the gathered crowd. He, out of curiosity, elbowed his way through the villagers and craned his neck to see what was going on. A police officer stopped him there. About thirty minutes later, an ambulance arrived and soon drove away with a big, tall, tattooed man lying on a stretcher inside. Then, he saw Mrs. Ba’s handcuffed daughter being escorted to a police car, followed by her father. Mrs. Ba insisted that she accompany her daughter but her request was denied. The crowd started to gossip noisily:

  “She must be sleeping around. That’s why her jealous boyfriend came to teach her a lesson.”

  “Such a disgrace for a girl to be beaten by her boyfriend right in her own home. She looks like a good girl, but who knows . . .”

  “Don’t judge her so harshly,” asserted an elderly woman, in defense of the girl, but her words were drowned out immediately by slanderous remarks.

  He was unable to approach her to ask what happened. When she walked by him, she looked at him as if she was pleading or trying to explain something. He desperately wanted to run toward her and defend her, as he had often done. He was five years older than her, and thanks to her untiring encouragement, he finally finished high school, at the age of twenty-three. She had given him her used textbooks and tutored him on the difficult subjects. It was she who had helped him keep from falling into a life of crime. Without her assistance, he probably would have joined a gang and become just another cursed bastard.

  The cigarette he held between his fingers had burnt all the way down and nearly seared his skin. The sensation brought him back to the present. He shuddered, stood up, and wiped his oil-stained hands on his dirty pants. The waistband was so loose that it slid down his hips, revealing his underwear. He tugged the pants up while looking at the disassembled electric bicycle and frowned.

  “Obsolete model. What’s the use of keeping it? Fixing it all the time is costly. If Mrs. Ba had let me marry her daughter, I would’ve bought her a new bicycle a long time ago,” the man mumbled to himself.

  He reached into his cigarette pack for another smoke and was about to flick the lighter when the owner of the shop next door stomped in. The mild stink of sweat always wafted off her fat body.

  “Hey, your future wife is back now. Has your mother-in-law said anything to you yet?” the woman asked with a sneer.

  The man spat onto the ground and snickered.

  “Do you really think it’s easy to marry Mrs. Ba’s daughter? She is not a bunch of vegetables that you can buy at the market.”

  “Why not easy?” the woman pouted her lips, asking. “She was beautiful when she was a high school student wearing her white áo dài to class. Now, she is just an ex-convict; it shouldn’t be difficult for you to have her. She and her mother might be overjoyed, and you might gain a real jewel.”

  “You’re right,” the man glanced at the chubby woman and scoffed. “She is an ex-convict, but she’s far better than a lot of people out there who want to judge others while they themselves have all kinds of vices.”

  The woman pouted her lips again and plodded toward him.

  “Hey, do you have money? Lend me some. If I win the lottery this afternoon, I’ll pay you back.”

  The man remained indifferent, rubbed the grime off his hands, and put a cap on his head.

  “I have no money to lend you. I’m just a mechanic trying to make ends meet. No extra money to lend you.”

  The woman elbowed him in his hip.

  “Such a devil! Are you afraid that I won’t pay you back? If I can’t pay you back with cash, I’ll pay with something else,” she said with a wink.

  “Only your husband, a drug addict, would want that. No other man would want to touch you,” he deadpanned as he led his Honda 67 through the door.

  “Hey, so you won’t lend me money? Seriously?” the woman yelled histrionically.

  “I don’t even have enough money to feed myself. No money to lend you.”

  “Hey, we’re talking. Why are you leaving?”

  “I’m going to buy some supplies. Do I have to ask your permission?” the man replied before revving his engine and speeding away.

  “Bastard!” mumbled the woman as she walked out in a huff.

  The noon sun danced across the young woman’s shoulders. Some of her shiny black hair had freed itself from a rubber band and was fluttering in the breeze.

  She was wearing a discolored white T-shirt and held the straps of a duffel bag slung across her shoulder as she walked down the dirt road. Each footstep tossed up tiny plumes of dust.

  The engine of an old Honda 67 coughed and sputtered as it sped toward her. The driver was thin, his skin dark and glistening. He was bare-chested, wearing only a pair of old, grease-stained jeans. He bent over the handlebars as he passed her.

  She moved to the side of the road to wait for him to pass her before she continued ahead and covered her nose and mouth with her hand to avoid the dirt flying up in his wake.

  Her shadow shrunk in front of her as she continued on a road that led between two fields filled with yellow rice plants.

  The young woman stood in front of the shoulder-high hibiscus hedge and craned her neck to look for something inside the hedge.

  The gate was locked. The house was quiet. Two plastic baskets, a bunch of vegetables, and a pot of uncooked rice sat on the veranda.

  She inspected the house carefully, conjuring images from the past. She thought of one rainy night when she was a little girl, when she and her mother had fled into a storm to escape her father’s beatings. And when the loan sharks of the times came to her house and humiliated her mother because her father had borrowed money from them for gambling but failed to pay them back. And when she and her mother had to share a single boiled sweet potato because they ran out of rice. And when she suddenly awoke at midnight and saw her mother facing the wall weeping.

  Her hands gripped the duffel bag. She walked toward the silk cotton tree growing beside the iron gate.

  She stared up at its flower-laden branches. The foliage and the flying clouds reflected in her eyes.

  On this same date eight years ago, the sky was blue, the breeze was cool, and the silk cotton tree was blossoming. She was giddy like a child as she ran home to show her mother the acceptance letter the post office had just delivered. She shouted with excitement, “Mom, Mom!” while she was still on the dirt road. Everything was ruined when the two usurious mobsters came into their house. She could have remained quiet, cowered in fear, and let things go. She could have studied hard and eventually freed her mother from her present life and her degenerate father, if the two mobsters had only slapped him in the face as a warning and kicked him in the back. But when they attacked her mother—the woman who tried to hold onto life just for her sake, the woman who had suffered miserably at the hands of her wicked father and who had embraced her multiple times in her arms and wept long into the night—she had to defend her. The scrawny girl had no option other than to pick up an iron bar and swing it at the thugs as hard as she could.

  “You’re an unfilial daughter! You want to kill me, don’t you? Everybody, neighbors, come and see my wicked daughter,” her father bellowed in rage.

  The siren of a police car that soon blared outside their home announced the death of her youth. Her eight years in jail were ones of constant psychological torment. She detested her father, although her mother implored her not to. Forgiving her father’s abuse was unthinkable. It was he who robbed her of an education and ruined her future. It was he who soiled her reputation. It was he who had made her mother miserable.

  In the eyes of the public, she would always be an ex-convict, a sinner, a murderer. She hated herself. Behind bars, daily nightmares ravaged her. When she looked at her hands, she saw them covered in blood. She perpetually trembled and sweated in a constant state of panic. She questioned if Heaven was punishing her for failing to maintain filial piety.

  Mrs. Ba kept reminding her daughter that she shouldn’t hate her father, but the logic of that plea made no sense to her. How could her mother be so forgiving and placid although her love for him was long gone? During Mrs. Ba’s last visit, she had said, “It’s the way things are. Women always have stood below men. But your generation is more educated. You’ll have to live for yourself. Marriage is not the only path to happiness.” Looking at her dejected, emaciated mother, she told herself that nobody but she herself would determine her fate.

  She heard a motorbike stop next to the silk cotton tree and the engine shut off.

  The young woman recognized the driver of the Honda 67 as the man who had passed her on the dirt road earlier. He grinned at the middle-aged woman sitting behind him.

  Mrs. Ba got off the motorbike, took out a 20,000 đồng note from the small wallet in her pocket, and handed it to him.

  He waved his hand in protestation, “No, no. You don’t have to pay me, Mom.” The man often called Mrs. Ba “Mom.” “I just happened to see you on my way home and gave you a ride.”

  “Let me chip in some gas money. If I hadn’t met you, I would’ve had to take a motorbike taxi home.”

  The man grinned again and used his foot to ignite the motorbike.

  “I’m not a motorcycle taxi driver. I’m your neighbor, Mom.”

  “Come back and have lunch with me today, then.”

  “Of course! I can’t say no to your delicious food. I’d come even if you didn’t invite me.”

  The man started the engine and zoomed away, leaving behind columns of dust. Mrs. Ba smiled and turned toward the iron gate.

  “Mom, I’m home,” her daughter cried out.

  Mrs. Ba whipped her body around and tears immediately poured down her face. She stared at her daughter for a second and embraced her in a long, tight hug.

  Mrs. Ba placed greens in a plastic basin of saltwater to soak and pulled a chicken out from a black plastic bag before washing it in the sink. She filled a pot with water and put it on the stove. The daughter held incense sticks in her hands and slowly placed them in each bowl on the altar. She bowed to each photo of the dead. When she placed an incense stick into the last bowl in front of a photo of a man, her father, she stood motionless, staring at the picture. Her face froze.

  Mrs. Ba moved closer to her daughter and gently tapped her on the shoulder.

  “It’s all in the past now. Let it go. Dad is no longer with us. His debts are paid.”

  The daughter relaxed her face, looked at her mother, and smiled.

  “Listen to me, dear,” Mrs. Ba continued. “Forgive him. From now on, this house will no longer be home to a degenerate gambler, and you won’t ever accidentally kill another villainous loan shark. Only you and I will live here now.”

  Mrs. Ba caressed her daughter’s hair and smiled.

  “Do you remember Tuân—the guy who used to ask me if he could become my son-in-law?”