The Tailor's House, Hội An

The Neck

The first thing Dì Phượng did was put a tape measure around Tuyết's neck, and the second thing she did was not tell her the number.

It happened in the doorway, before hello. Tuyết had one hand on the handle of her roller bag and the other holding a white paper sack of California candy, and she had just begun the sentence she had rehearsed across the Pacific, a sentence with the correct pronouns for a niece addressing her mother's youngest sister, when a small woman in an indigo blouse stepped out of the shop light, lifted a yellow tape from around her own shoulders, and looped it under Tuyết's hair. The tape was cool and slightly damp, the way everything in Hội An would turn out to be slightly damp. Two fingers slid in beside her windpipe. The woman looked at the tape, not at Tuyết's face, and her lips moved.

Then she let the tape go slack, took a pencil from the knot of gray hair at the back of her head, and wrote something in a small notebook with a cardboard cover.

"Dì," Tuyết said, in Vietnamese. "It's me, Tuyết."

"I know who you are," said Dì Phượng in Vietnamese. "You have your father's neck. Long. Come in before the mosquitoes eat your ankles."

Tuyết stood on the step for one more second, because she was a pharmacist and believed that a measurement taken was a measurement owed. Then a mosquito did find her ankle, and she went in.

---

She had flown San Francisco to Seoul to Đà Nẵng, twenty-one hours with a layover, on a seat that reclined to the exact angle of a dental chair. She had brought one roller bag at 22.6 kilos by her own digital luggage scale, which she had weighed three times in her garage in Berryessa while her husband, Merrill, sat on the step to the laundry room and asked whether the scale was going to change its mind. She had brought a carry-on with her pill organizer, her reading glasses, two pairs of compression socks, a printed itinerary, a folder of photocopies in a clear plastic sleeve, and a single folded square of paper in her mother's handwriting, which she kept in the inside zip pocket where other women kept a passport.

She had also brought gifts. Fish oil, two bottles, the big warehouse-store size with the softgels the color of honey. Glucosamine. A box of chocolate candies from a shop in a strip mall off Story Road, near the corner where a Vietnamese bakery had stood for twenty-six years and had closed in July; she had sat in the parking lot for a minute looking at the papered windows before she went in for the candy. Three tubes of a sunscreen she trusted. A blood pressure cuff, still in its box, for an aunt whose blood pressure she did not know.

The driver who brought her down from Đà Nẵng had offered her a ginger candy in a twist of plastic. She had read the ingredients by the light of her phone. Ginger, sugar, maltose. Reasonable. She had eaten it and watched the road unspool past rice fields gone silver in the last light, a wedding tent the color of a traffic cone, a row of cement egrets on a gatepost, a woman on a motorbike with a pane of glass held upright behind her like a sail. Then the town had closed around the car. The driver had stopped at the end of a lane too narrow for him and pointed with his chin. "Giếng Đá," he said. Stone Well. Tuyết had paid him in a currency in which everything cost a number with too many zeros, and she had overtipped by what she later worked out was the price of four bowls of noodles, and she had walked into the lane pulling 22.6 kilos behind her over brick.

That was the part she would try to describe to Merrill that night and fail. The lane. It was yellow. Not the yellow of a crayon or a school bus, but a yellow that had been painted on lime over lime for a hundred years and then left out in the rain, so that it had a grain like cornmeal and went the color of turmeric near the ground and the color of butter near the eaves, and at the base of every wall it bloomed with black mildew in shapes like spilled ink. The shutters were green, a soft mineral green, and some were propped open with sticks. Above the doors hung lanterns, silk stretched on bamboo, round and long and tasseled, red and saffron and a blue like a gas flame, and they were lit, every one of them, so that the lane at seven in the evening had the swollen, held-breath glow of a room where somebody is about to blow out candles. The air sat on her skin like a compress that had been soaked in warm water and wrung out halfway. It smelled of motorbike exhaust, steamed rice, frying shallots, wet brick, and something sweetish and starchy she would learn was the glue the lantern maker next door used to fix silk to his frames.

The shop said TIỆM MAY CHỈ VÀNG in gold letters on a black board, and underneath, in smaller English, GOLD THREAD TAILORING — SINCE 1958 — SUITS DRESSES ÁO DÀI 24 HOURS. The glass counter inside held rolls of ribbon and a basket of buttons and a fan of fabric swatches like paint chips. Behind it, bolts of cloth leaned on slanted shelves to the ceiling, folded silk in a hundred colors, and the shop light made them look like the spines of books in a library where all the books were about weather.

Out of that light came her aunt, and her aunt's tape.

---

"This is Quân," Dì Phượng said, and a man of about forty, in a pressed shirt with a yellow tape measure hung around his neck like a stethoscope, came forward and took the roller bag out of Tuyết's hand before she could object.

"Chị Tuyết," he said, and grinned, and switched to an English that had clearly been tuned on a great many people from Melbourne and Manchester. "Welcome home. Heavy bag! You brought bricks?"

"Twenty-two point six kilos," Tuyết said.

"Exactly?"

"Exactly."

He laughed as if this were a joke. It was not a joke. A girl of about eleven came down the steep stairs at the back of the shop, holding on to the rail with one hand and a phone with the other, and stopped on the last step to look at Tuyết with frank, scientific interest.

"My daughter, Sen," said Quân. "Sen, greet your Bác."

"Hello, Bác Tuyết," the girl said in English. "Are you from San Jose, California?"

"I am."

"Is it near Hollywood?"

"It's near a lot of parking," Tuyết said, and the girl considered this and seemed satisfied.

Tuyết remembered the presents. She held out the white paper sack of candy to her aunt with both hands, the way her mother had taught her to hand anything to anyone older, and Dì Phượng accepted it with both hands and set it on the counter without looking inside. Then the fish oil, the glucosamine, the sunscreen, each handed and received. The blood pressure cuff in its box. Dì Phượng turned the box over, read the English on the back with her glasses pushed up her nose, and said, "For whom?"

"For you, Dì. For checking."

"Checking what?"

"Your pressure."

"My pressure is fine," said Dì Phượng. "Your pressure, I think, is high. You've been on an airplane with your mouth shut for a day." She put the cuff on a shelf between a bolt of plum silk and a jar of pins. "Quân. Rice."

---

They ate in the kitchen at the back, past a narrow courtyard open to the sky, where a stone basin held rainwater and a pot of rau răm grew leggy toward the last light, and past a workroom where Tuyết glimpsed a long table scarred with chalk, a black sewing machine on an iron treadle base, and a square hatch in the ceiling with a rope hanging from an iron pulley, like a ship's. The kitchen was tiled in green and white to shoulder height. A gas ring hissed. A rice cooker ticked down from cook to warm. There was a low table and plastic stools in the color of mint toothpaste, and on the table there were five dishes, which was three more than Tuyết had expected, and Dì Phượng kept adding.

Morning glory stir-fried with garlic until it squeaked. A clear soup with squash and tiny shrimp. Fish braised with black pepper until the sauce had gone the brown of old varnish. A plate of thin pork, boiled and sliced, with a bowl of shrimp paste so pungent that when Quân lifted the lid Tuyết's eyes watered in a way that had nothing to do with emotion. A plate of herbs, green and purple and furred and smooth. Pickled shallots. Rice.

"Eat," said Dì Phượng. And she put a piece of fish in Tuyết's bowl, and then a second piece of fish, and then pork, and then a fistful of morning glory on top like a roof.

"Dì, I'll eat slowly," Tuyết said in Vietnamese.

At this the table went still. Sen put her chopsticks down. Quân pressed his lips together. Dì Phượng looked at her niece across the steam with something that might have been delight.

"Say it again," said Dì Phượng.

"I'll eat slowly."

Sen made a small sound into her hand. Quân said, kindly, in English, "Chị, you talk like my grandmother's friends. Like a very old lady from the countryside, but with an accent from television."

Tuyết understood at once, the way one understands a misfilled prescription in the second before reading it. She had left this town at eight. She spoke the Vietnamese of an eight-year-old in Quảng Nam in 1979, the swallowed vowels and the round flat a's of her grandmother's kitchen, and on top of it, poured over it for forty-six years like varnish over varnish, the Saigon-accent Vietnamese of San Jose, of the women at the nail salon and the uncles at the coffee shop on Tully Road and the hosts of the Sunday music videos her mother used to play while ironing. She sounded, she realized, like a country grandmother doing an impression of a newscaster.

"Your mother talked like that too," said Dì Phượng, "on the telephone. I never told her. It would have upset her." And she put another piece of fish in Tuyết's bowl.

---

After dinner Tuyết took the clear plastic sleeve out of her carry-on and set it on the table between the soup and the herbs, which she knew even as she did it was a poor sense of timing. Quân looked at the sleeve with the polite alarm of a man watching someone set a lit match beside a curtain. Sen leaned in to read upside down.

"I thought," said Tuyết, in English, and then, because her aunt was waiting, in her strange antique Vietnamese, "I thought we could talk about the house. Not tonight. This week. I've made an appointment with the notary for Thursday."

"Which notary?"

Tuyết told her. Dì Phượng nodded, as one nods at the name of a dentist whose prices one knows.

"I brought a copy of the land paper," Tuyết said. "The one Mạ kept. It's still in Bà Ngoại's name. And Mạ left a note." She did not take out the note. It stayed in the zip pocket. "It says the house is mine."

"It says that?"

"It says, *The house in Hội An is yours, con.*"

"Con," said Dì Phượng. "Your mother called the cat con. She called the postman con. She called me con when I was sixty." She stood up and began collecting bowls. "Go upstairs. Your room has a fan. Don't open the shutters before the lights are off or the moths will come to see who you are."

---

The stairs were steep enough to be a ladder that had ambitions. Twelve steps of dark wood worn pale in the middle; the third one shifted under Tuyết's foot with a small knock, like a knuckle on a door, and she stopped, and something went through her that she could not name, and then Quân, behind her with the roller bag on his shoulder, said, "That one is loose since forever," and she went on.

Upstairs was the gác, a long room under the roof, beams of a dark wood that smelled faintly of pepper, a floor that gave and answered underfoot. The front opened onto a narrow wooden balcony over the lane, carved with a pattern of something that might have been bats or clouds. Bolts of cloth were stacked along one wall in plastic, and baskets, and a sewing dummy wearing half a jacket, and at the far end a cot with a mosquito net knotted up above it like a cloud that had been tied in a bun. A standing fan. A hook for clothes. A small table with a lamp and a thermos of hot water and a single glass.

Quân set the bag down. "Mạ says the net, you must use. Here mosquitoes have dengue. You know dengue?"

"I'm a pharmacist," Tuyết said.

"So you know." He smiled. "Good night, Chị. Tomorrow I will show you the market."

When he had gone she sat on the cot and listened. The lane below made a soft constant soup of sound: a motorbike idling, two women laughing, a tourist asking in English whether the restaurant did vegan, a little Bluetooth speaker somewhere playing a love song with a lot of synthesizer. Next door, through the wall, a man was humming and the dry rattle of bamboo strips being sorted came in bursts. A gecko on the beam above her clicked twice, loudly, like someone testing a stapler. She looked up. It was the length of her hand, pale and almost translucent, with toes like the ends of cotton swabs. It looked down at her with absolute confidence of tenancy.

She opened her laptop on her knees. Since her mother died, she had been building, in the evenings, a record of where the family had gone. It was a plain thing: a line, with dots on it, each dot a date and a place and whatever she could find to hang from it, a photograph or a document or a sentence. *Hội An, 1958. Bà Ngoại opens the shop.* *Hội An, 1971. Tuyết born.* *Cửa Đại, June 1979.* A gap. *San Jose, February 1980.* *San Jose, 1997. Tuyết licensed.* *San Jose, 2009. Ba.* *San Jose, December 2025. Mạ.* It had been her way of not crying, Merrill said, and she had told him that was a very band-director thing to say, and he had agreed.

She added a dot. *Hội An, 27 September 2026. Tuyết returns.* She looked at the word *returns* for a while. Then she changed it to *arrives*, because it was more accurate, and because she was not sure that *returns* was a word she had earned.

She called Merrill. It was morning in San Jose; she could hear the kettle he always forgot until it screamed.

"You're there," he said.

"I'm here."

"How's the aunt?"

Tuyết considered. "She measured my neck."

There was a pause on the line, a band director's pause, the kind he left before a downbeat. "Did she say why?"

"No."

"Did she say how big it was?"

"No. She wrote it down."

"Huh," said Merrill. "Well. Is it a nice neck?"

"She said it was my father's."

"That sounds like a compliment."

"It sounded like evidence," Tuyết said.

---

She did not sleep for a long time. At some point the lanterns in the lane went out one by one, and the lane went from gold to a dark blue that smelled of rain not yet fallen, and she got up and untied the mosquito net, which came down around the cot with a dusty sigh. Lying inside it was like lying inside a held breath. Through the gauze the gác became soft-edged, the beams fur, the sewing dummy a ghost of a woman with no head and one sleeve.

She heard her aunt come up the stairs, slowly, a hand on the rail. The third step knocked. The footsteps came along the gác and stopped at the far end, by the stacked bolts, and there was the small sound of something metal being lifted and set down, and then they went away again, and the third step knocked, and it was quiet.

In the morning, when Tuyết came down at six, Dì Phượng was already at the cutting table with her glasses on her nose and a stub of chalk in her fingers, drawing a curve on a length of gray wool for a man from Sydney who wanted a suit by Thursday. A glass of coffee was dripping through a little tin filter on the corner of the table, one black bead at a time, into a thumb of condensed milk.

"Dì," said Tuyết. "How big is my neck?"

"Thirty-four," said Dì Phượng. Then she said, "No. That was your mother's, the year you were born." She did not look up. "Yours, you can find out at the fitting."

"What fitting?"

Dì Phượng blew chalk dust off the wool, and it went up into the shaft of light from the courtyard like flour.

"Drink your coffee," she said. "It is getting cold, and so am I."

---

*Hội An, the fourteenth day of the sixth month, 1979*

Chị Nguyệt,

The house is very loud with nobody in it. I did not know a house could be loud this way. Mạ walks to the door and back. The gecko over your old bed has been calling all night as if he wants to know where you put his supper.

I went to the river at dawn after. The water was the color of the inside of an oyster and there were no boats where your boat was. I stood until Chị Liễu came with her oar and told me to go home before people looked at me. So I came home and opened the shop. A woman came for her daughter's school blouse, the one with the round collar. I finished it. Collar, buttons, hem. You would say I was showing off.

I put a stub of chalk in Tuyết's handkerchief, the gray kind she always stole off the table. I tied the corners. If she has it still, tell her it is for drawing a road home. If she has lost it, tell her nothing. There is more chalk.

Mạ says she is too old to go and too stubborn to die, so she will sit. I will sit beside her. Someone has to keep the scissors sharp.

I will not send this letter, because I don't know where you are, and because if I knew, I would be ashamed for you to see how many times the pen went through the paper.

Em, Phượng

Across the Shoulders

The market began before the sun, and Diễm went to meet it on a motorbike with Tuyết on the back holding a plastic basket in one hand and Diễm's waist with the other, which was a liberty Tuyết had not taken with another adult since her wedding.

"Hold tight, Chị," said Diễm, who was Quân's wife, a broad-faced woman of thirty-nine with a sun hat tied under her chin with a ribbon and a fabric stall at the market that she had run for fifteen years. "Here we don't drive. We swim."

They swam. The town at five-forty in the morning was gray-blue and smelled of charcoal starting. They went down a street of shuttered shops where an old man was sweeping the step in front of his door with a broom of dried palm ribs, the strokes making a sound like someone saying *hush* to a child, and out onto the river road where the Thu Bồn lay wide and flat and the color of weak tea with milk, and boats were already moving on it, low wooden boats with eyes painted on their prows, red-and-white eyes with black pupils that looked forward with an expression of mild skepticism. A woman stood in the stern of one, rowing with two crossed oars, pushing rather than pulling, her whole body leaning into each stroke like someone opening a heavy door.

The market itself came on Tuyết all at once, like a wave of hot air from an oven door. Under a long roof of corrugated metal and under umbrellas beyond it, on tarps and low tables and in shallow baskets set right on the wet concrete, there was everything a person might put in her mouth, and a few things a person had to be talked into.

Diễm parked between two other motorbikes with a precision that made Tuyết think of a pharmacist sliding a tray into a shelf, and they went in.

---

Tuyết had planned to observe. She had a notebook in her bag. She was a person who observed, and her observing usually took the form of counting, weighing and reading the label, and on the first morning in the Hội An market she found that nothing had a label, everything had a weight, and nobody would let her count.

Fish lay on beds of their own wet: silver scad in fans, their scales coming off on the fingers like sequins off a dress; a pink snapper with a surprised mouth; squid with skin that shimmered from brown to violet as the light moved; shrimp still moving, faintly, like a thought one is trying to have. The fish women squatted on low stools with their heels flat to the ground in a way Tuyết's knees remembered and declined, and they cut with short heavy knives on wooden rounds, and the scales flew and stuck to their forearms, and they talked to each other across the aisle without looking up. A woman sold eels from a basin. A woman sold frogs, which Tuyết did not look at. A woman sold only lemongrass, tied in bundles like bouquets, and the smell came off them clean and sharp as a cut lemon.

Then herbs. Diễm stopped in front of a woman with heaps of green on banana leaves and said, "From Trà Quế, the village," and Tuyết saw basil with purple stems, and the small round leaves of something she knew by smell before her mind found the word, and the long rough tongues of saw-leaf, and rau răm with its red-brown spots, and mint, and a pale feathery green she could not name at all. The woman picked up a sprig and crushed it between thumb and finger and held it under Tuyết's nose, and it smelled like a lime that had grown up next to a pine tree.

"Ngò om," said Diễm. Rice paddy herb. "For the sour soup."

"I know," said Tuyết, who had not known, and the herb woman looked at her and then at Diễm and said something quick and Quảng that made Diễm laugh.

"What did she say?"

"She asks if you are the American niece."

"And?"

"I said yes. She says your face is from here and your shoes are from there." Diễm glanced down at Tuyết's walking shoes, which were gray and had orthotic inserts and had been recommended by a podiatrist. "They are very good shoes," Diễm added, in the voice of a woman who would not be seen dead in them.

Turmeric came next, a woman with a mortar the size of a hat and fingers stained the deep orange of a traffic cone, the color running into the lines of her knuckles like ink into paper. Tuyết smelled it and was, for one disorienting second, in a San Jose kitchen in 1983 with her mother rubbing a chicken with turmeric and salt over the sink, her mother's fingers that same orange for two days after, her mother saying *don't touch* as Tuyết reached for the bowl.

She bought a small bag of fresh turmeric from the woman, five knobs that looked like the fingers of a very small person. She did not know why. She asked the price, in her careful antique Vietnamese, and the turmeric woman put her hand over her mouth.

"She talks like my great-grandmother," the woman said to Diễm.

"I know," said Diễm.

"With television on top."

"I know."

The turmeric woman, still laughing, would not let her pay. Tuyết tried. She held out the money with both hands. The woman pushed it back with both hands. They did this four times, while a man carrying a crate of ducks on his shoulder said "*Ơi, ơi,*" to get past them, and the ducks looked down with the same mild skepticism as the boats. In the end the woman put the bag of turmeric in Tuyết's basket and a second bag on top of it and turned away to another customer, and the money stayed in Tuyết's hand, damp.

---

By seven the sun had come over the river and the market went from blue to gold, and the heat came up off the concrete, and Tuyết, who had been running a careful private tally of her own fluid intake since Seoul, was down by what she estimated was five hundred milliliters.

"Breakfast," said Diễm, who had seen her face.

The cao lầu stall was a woman, a cart, six low stools and a shelf with a row of bowls. The woman stood behind a steaming pot in a gray apron with her hair in a net and did not smile at anyone, which Tuyết found at once restful. Into each bowl she laid a nest of thick noodles, pale yellow-brown, firmer and squarer than any noodle Tuyết had met, then slices of pork that had been braised until the edges were mahogany, then a fistful of the raw greens and herbs, then a few spoonfuls of dark, sweet-salty broth, not enough to swim in, only enough to dress, and on top a scatter of square crackers fried until they blistered, and a handful of bean sprouts, and a wedge of lime, and a tiny saucer of chili jam on the side. She handed it across without a word.

"Mix," said Diễm. "From the bottom."

Tuyết mixed. She ate. The noodle had a chew to it, a pull and give, like biting into the heel of fresh bread; it tasted faintly, impossibly, of smoke and of something mineral, as if it remembered where its water came from. The pork was sweet. The greens were cold and bitter and woke up her mouth. The cracker shattered. She ate it all and drank the cup of iced tea that came with it and then sat on the stool with the bowl in her lap and felt a feeling she would have called, in a patient, hypoglycemia corrected.

"Good?" said Diễm.

"My mother made this," Tuyết said, "in San Jose. Every Tết. It wasn't like this."

"No," said Diễm, kindly. "It can't be. The noodles, only here. Old families make them with water from one well and ash from the islands. Mạ says the noodle is a person who refuses to move." She tilted her head in the direction of Giếng Đá lane. "Like somebody."

---

Diễm's stall was a cave of cloth at the back of the market's fabric hall, a dim aisle where bolts were stacked to the roof on both sides and the light came down from high slatted windows in stripes. Diễm unlocked a metal shutter and rolled it up with a noise like a train, and there it was: silk in sixty colors, taffeta, brocade with dragons and peonies, raw silk with the little slubs in it like grains of rice under the skin, linen for the Australians, cotton for the children, a stack of synthetic satin she called "for the people who don't ask."

She pulled out a bolt and unrolled an arm's length over the counter, a heavy silk the green of a young banana leaf. "Touch."

Tuyết touched. It was cool and then it was warm. It slid on itself. When she lifted the edge it fell back with a kind of liquid reluctance, a slowness, like honey off a spoon.

"Mạ will make you an áo dài," Diễm said. "Did she tell you?"

"She measured my neck."

"Then yes." Diễm rolled the silk back. "She will take a long time. She does one measurement, then she thinks. She did it to me, before the wedding. Four months. I said, Mạ, the wedding is in five months. She said, then we have a month to spare."

"Why does she do it like that?"

Diễm shrugged. "She says a body tells the truth slowly." She put the green silk back on the shelf, at the very top, behind other bolts, where nobody would see it. "And she likes to make people wait. You will see."

---

At home the house had gone into its daytime voice. In the shop, Quân was pinning the hem of a linen dress on a sunburned woman from Brisbane who stood on a low wooden box as still as a heron, her arms held out from her sides at the angle Quân told her. Dì Phượng was at the cutting table in the workroom with three young women from the neighborhood who came in to sew by the piece, and the room was full of the dry hum of their machines and the sound of scissors, which in Dì Phượng's hand did not snip but spoke, a long low *shhhhk* down a straight line and a series of small decisive bites around a curve.

On the floor of the workroom, by the courtyard door where the light was best, Sen sat cross-legged in her school uniform, a white blouse and blue skirt, with a stack of old books beside her and her phone held flat over one of them, like a hand over a candle.

"What are those?" said Tuyết.

"Bà's books," said Sen in English. "From before. My teacher says we bring something old and make a record. I am taking pictures." She turned a page carefully, using only her fingertips at the very corner. "So the paper doesn't get tired."

Tuyết sat on a stool and looked. The book was a ledger with a marbled cover gone soft as cloth, and inside, on pale blue squared paper, someone had drawn in pencil and ink the pieces of garments. A collar, laid flat, with its curve marked in tiny dashes and numbers. A sleeve like a long fish. The front panel of an áo dài drawn as a slim tall shape with the side seam curving in at the waist and out again, and beside it notes in a slanting, decisive hand. In Vietnamese: *Collar three centimeters high. The teacher from the girls' school. Thin, sloping shoulders.*

"That's Bà Ngoại's handwriting," Tuyết said, before she knew she knew it.

"Yes," said Sen. "Look." She turned to a page where, in the margin beside a jacket pattern, the same hand had written something and then underlined it twice. Sen read it aloud in Vietnamese, slowly, and looked up.

"Measure twice, cut once," Tuyết said.

"And look here." Another page, later in the book, a child's dress, and in the margin, in a different hand, round and wobbly and pressing too hard, three letters in gray chalk-pencil: T U Y. And a small drawing of what might have been a cat or a lantern.

Tuyết looked at it for long enough that Sen took the picture without being asked, and then took another one, closer.

"Bác," said Sen. "Was that you?"

"I don't know," Tuyết said, which was not true.

---

In the evening, after dinner (four dishes, which Tuyết took as a softening), Dì Phượng came out of the kitchen drying her hands on a cloth and, without warning or preamble, stood behind Tuyết where she sat on a stool in the shop, and laid the yellow tape across her back from the point of one shoulder to the point of the other.

"Stand up."

Tuyết stood up.

"Relax your shoulders."

"They're relaxed."

"They are not. You are holding them like a woman holding an umbrella against the wind." The tape pressed lightly. "Let the umbrella go."

Tuyết tried to let the umbrella go. She discovered, as she tried, that she had been holding it for some time. Possibly since December. Possibly since 1979. Her shoulders sank half an inch and something in her neck creaked like the third step.

"Better," said Dì Phượng. She took the pencil from her hair and wrote in the notebook.

"Dì," said Tuyết. "Speaking of gifts—"

"We weren't."

"The fish oil. It's a good brand. It's tested for mercury. It's very good for the heart, for the joints, for triglycerides—"

"Yes," said Dì Phượng. "I know. I gave it to Chú Tín."

"You gave it to—"

"He has bad knees. From squatting over his lanterns forty years." She closed the notebook. "And the other bottle to Bà Liễu, who rows the boat and has bad everything. And the shoulder medicine to the woman who sells turmeric, because her mother is ninety-one."

"That was for *you*."

"I know." Dì Phượng put the pencil back in her hair. "I am very generous with what you brought me."

Then she went to the counter, opened a drawer, took out the white paper sack from Story Road, unwrapped one chocolate, and ate it, slowly, with her eyes closed.

"These," she said, "I am keeping."

---

*Hội An, the twentieth day of the ninth month, 1979*

Chị Nguyệt,

The rain has started. It comes sideways down the lane and the shutters bang and Mạ says it sounds like a man with no manners at the door.

Business is thin. Nobody is ordering new clothes. Everyone is ordering old clothes made smaller, or larger, or into clothes for someone else. I took apart Chú Vĩnh's wedding jacket and made two school shirts for his grandsons, with the lining for the pockets. I have become a tailor who works backward. Mạ says Bà Cố did the same in the hungry years and it is nothing to cry about. I am not crying. The steam from the iron is in my eyes.

Mạ is not well. She coughs at night. She will not let me buy medicine. She says she will buy it when the price comes down, as if medicine were mangoes. I make her ginger water and she drinks it to stop me talking.

I keep your sewing stool where it was. Anh Thạch from the bicycle shop asked if he could have it and I said no, it belongs to someone who is coming back to sit on it. He looked at me the way you look at a dog that is waiting at a gate. Let him look.

I will not send this letter, because the post office wants more for a stamp to a country I can't spell than I made this week, and because the stool would sound silly to you, in America, where I suppose there are chairs.

Em, Phượng

The Bust

The notary's office was the coldest room in Quảng Nam province. Tuyết felt it the moment the glass door sighed shut behind her: the air-conditioning came down from a white box over the door like a weather system, and the sweat that had been sitting on her upper lip for four days dried in a single second and left her feeling salted, like a cracker.

It was a long bright room with a tiled floor polished to the shine of a dinner plate and two rows of blue plastic chairs bolted together. Framed certificates hung on the wall at intervals as precise as fence posts. A machine by the door dispensed numbered paper tickets. A television high in one corner played, with the sound off, a cooking program in which a smiling man was making something with a great deal of pineapple. The room smelled of photocopier toner, floor polish and jasmine tea.

Tuyết took a ticket. She had dressed for the occasion in navy slacks and a white blouse with a small collar, the outfit she wore for the pharmacy's annual inspection, and she carried the clear plastic sleeve in front of her like a tray. Her number was 47. The screen said 31. She sat in a blue chair and arranged the sleeve on her knees and read, for the fourth time, the photocopy of the land-use certificate, its seal a smudged red circle, her grandmother's name in a clerk's careful print: Võ Thị Gấm.

The pages were in order. She had put them in order on the plane. Her mother's death certificate, with a certified translation. Her father's death certificate, with a certified translation. Her own birth certificate, the old Hội An one, a copy of a copy. Khánh's birth certificate. Their passports, copied. A copy of the land paper. A copy of her mother's note. A typed summary, in English and her best Vietnamese, of who was who.

At 46 she stood up. At 47 she went to window three, where a young woman in an áo dài the blue of a robin's egg, with a name badge that said VÂN, looked at her with the bright attentive face of someone who was going to be helpful for exactly as long as the rules allowed.

Tuyết explained. She explained in Vietnamese, carefully, and then in English when the Vietnamese ran into a word she had never needed at eight, such as *inheritance*. Miss Vân listened. She did not laugh at the accent, which Tuyết noted and filed under integrity. When Tuyết had finished, Miss Vân took the sleeve and went through every page with the tip of a ballpoint pen, not touching the paper, only hovering over it, the way a person reads a menu in a language she is learning.

Then she looked up.

"This is a very beautiful copy," she said in English.

"Thank you."

"Very clear."

"I used a good machine."

"Yes." Miss Vân slid the land paper photocopy back across the counter with two fingers. "But I need the original."

"The original is with my aunt."

"Then your aunt must bring the original." She went on, gently, in the manner of a person laying out cutlery. All the heirs of Võ Thị Gấm must agree. All of them must sign, here, in person, or by a properly authorized representative with a power of attorney done properly, which in the case of a person abroad meant done at a consulate and then made legal here, with stamps. Was there anybody else? Any other child of Võ Thị Gấm?

"My aunt in Melbourne," said Tuyết. "Dì Huệ."

Miss Vân wrote this down with an expression of sympathy that Tuyết recognized. It was the expression she herself used for a patient who had just learned that their insurance required prior authorization.

"Also," said Miss Vân, "your brother."

"He's in Houston."

"Then also Houston." Miss Vân smiled. "Please come back when you have everybody."

Tuyết stood at window three with the sleeve against her chest, in the cold, while the man on the silent television cut a pineapple into the shape of a flower.

"Everybody," she said.

"It is a family house," said Miss Vân, as if that explained it, and it did.

---

She walked back to the shop the long way, through the old town, because she needed the heat to take the cold out of her and because she did not want to arrive while she was still thinking in the voice she used for the district manager.

By eleven the old town had filled. Tourists moved down Trần Phú in a slow loose river, under the lanterns that hung unlit in daylight and looked, without their fire, like ripe fruit on a tree that grew fruit in improbable colors. People wore sun hats and linen and the white cotton conical nón lá bought from a woman on a corner, worn askew. A Korean tour group followed a guide with a pink flag. A French couple argued about a map. Shopfronts opened their whole faces to the street, and in them were ceramics, silk scarves, wooden frogs that croaked when you ran a stick down their backs, paintings of the very street you were standing in, and tailors, tailors, tailors, every third door a tailor, mannequins in the doorways wearing three-piece suits in heat that could cook an egg on a car hood. A young man at one of these doors stepped into Tuyết's path with a laminated menu of suits and said, "Madam! Suit, dress, forty-eight hours!" and then looked at her face and said, uncertainly, in Vietnamese, "Cô ơi?" and she said, "I'm from Giếng Đá," which was not true and not false, and he melted back into his doorway as if she had said a password.

On the riverbank a man was selling coconuts with the tops sliced off. Tuyết bought one and drank it standing in the shade of a tree, through a straw, and counted it as three hundred milliliters with potassium, and felt better.

---

In the workroom, the Ketterings had arrived.

They were from Dayton, Ohio. Ron was sixty-eight, retired from heating and cooling, with forearms like hams and a face that the Vietnamese sun had turned the shade of the turmeric woman's fingers. Trudy was perhaps sixty-five and had a photograph on her phone of a dress she had seen in a magazine in 1987 and never forgotten. They had a daughter getting married in Cincinnati in February. They had read on the internet that Hội An was the place to get a suit, and Ron had said, as he now told Tuyết, who was standing in the workroom doorway still holding her coconut, "Trudy, if we're flying nineteen hours to a country, I'm going home with pants."

"Good," said Dì Phượng in Vietnamese, without looking up from her table. "You speak English. Tell them the jacket needs two fittings."

Tuyết told them.

"Two?" said Ron. "The website said one."

"The website," said Dì Phượng, in Vietnamese, "is not a tailor."

Tuyết translated this as, "The website is approximate."

Dì Phượng looked up at her over her glasses for a moment. Then she went back to her chalk.

Quân measured Ron, standing him in front of a long mirror at the back of the shop beside the faded green fitting curtain. He moved around him with the yellow tape the way a cardiologist moves a stethoscope, quick, light, and talkative, calling the numbers out to one of the young piece-sewers, who wrote them on a card. Chest. Waist. Seat. Sleeve. Ron held his arms out and sweated. A bead ran down from his temple and into his collar. He wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist and said, "Boy," and Trudy said, "Ron, drink your water," and Ron said, "I'm drinking it, I'm drinking it."

Tuyết saw it then: the faint red patch along the back of his neck and on the backs of his hands, angrier than the rest of his sunburn, raised a little at the edges. She knew that rash. She had stood at a counter and explained that rash four or five times a summer for twenty-nine years.

"Excuse me," she said. "Mr. Kettering. Are you on a water pill?"

Ron turned his head, carefully, so as not to move his measurement. "Am I on a what?"

"A diuretic. For blood pressure. Hydrochlorothiazide, maybe. The little peach one."

"Well, I don't know if it's peach," said Ron.

"It's peach," said Trudy. "Twenty-five milligrams. And the lisinopril. How'd you know?"

"I'm a pharmacist," said Tuyết. "It makes some people very sensitive to the sun. That rash is from it. And with the heat, and the water pill, he's losing more fluid than he thinks. He should have salt with his water, not just water. Long sleeves in the middle of the day. Shade from eleven to three. Watch for dizziness when he stands up. And if he gets confused, or stops sweating, that's an emergency." She heard her own voice, the counter voice, the one that went on in the right order whether anybody wanted it or not, and she could not stop it, the way one cannot stop a sneeze. "There are oral rehydration salts at any pharmacy here. Blue packet. I can write it down."

There was a silence in the workroom. The piece-sewers had stopped their machines. Quân stood with his tape around Ron's bicep, frozen in a kind of delight.

"Well," said Ron. "I'll be darned."

"She's from here," Trudy said to Quân, as if this were the explanation.

"She is from here," Quân agreed. "And from America. Two for one."

From the cutting table, without looking up, Dì Phượng said, in English, with perfect clarity, "Long sleeves. I make the shirt with long sleeves. Free."

Tuyết turned to look at her. Dì Phượng was drawing a curve on the gray wool with her stub of chalk, steady as a surgeon, her glasses on her nose, her mouth a straight line.

"You speak English," Tuyết said in Vietnamese.

"Only for business," said Dì Phượng. "Ask them if they want the pocket square in the same fabric as the wife's dress. Americans like that. They think it is romantic."

Tuyết asked. They did. Trudy put her hand on her heart.

---

At four o'clock a woman came down the lane with a shoulder pole, two baskets swinging from its ends, one with a pot of something hot wrapped in towels, the other with bowls and a stack of spoons, and called out a long falling cry that Tuyết's ear turned, after a second, into *sweet corn soup here*, and Sen ran out of the house with a fistful of small notes, and came back with four bowls on a tray.

Chè bắp. Sweet corn soup. Tuyết had not thought of it in forty years, and now it was in her hands, warm through the thin plastic bowl, pale yellow and thick, the kernels plump and pearly, a thread of coconut cream laid on top in a white spiral that sank slowly as she watched, like a curl of smoke going the wrong way. She tasted it. It was sweet and slightly salty and the corn burst on her tongue, and there was the faint chewy sweetness of tapioca threads, and she was eight, and her grandmother was buying two bowls from a woman at the door and saying, *just one for you, not two, or you won't eat your rice.*

"From Cẩm Nam," said Sen. "The island in the river. The corn grows in the sand there."

"I know," said Tuyết, and this time she did.

Dì Phượng came out of the workroom wiping chalk from her hands. She took Tuyết by the elbow, not roughly, and steered her behind the faded green curtain of the fitting corner, a space the size of a phone booth with a full-length mirror bloomed with silver at the edges and a hook on which a dozen safety pins hung on a loop of wire.

"Hold your bowl."

"Dì—"

"Hold it in front of you. Normal. As if you are eating."

Tuyết held her bowl of chè in front of her as if she were eating. Dì Phượng passed the tape around her back and under her arms and brought it round across her chest, over the white blouse, firmly, and looked at it.

"Breathe."

Tuyết breathed.

"Not like that. Like a person, not like a patient."

Tuyết breathed like a person. The tape moved with her. In the mirror she could see the two of them, her aunt small and gray-headed and intent behind her, her own face above the bowl of corn soup, flushed from the heat and the chè and the absurdity, and for a moment the silvered edges of the mirror made them look like a photograph already old.

"The notary wants the original," Tuyết said to the mirror.

"Of course she does."

"She wants everybody. Dì Huệ. Khánh. Everybody."

"Of course she does. It is a family house." Dì Phượng let the tape go and wrote in her notebook. "Did she give you a tea?"

"No."

"Then she thinks you'll be back." She put the pencil in her hair. "Eat your chè before it goes cold. It is like a man. Hot, it's a pleasure. Cold, it's only sweet."

---

That night Khánh called on video from Houston, where it was nine in the morning and he was between patients, wearing his blue scrubs and a pair of magnifying loupes pushed up on his forehead like a second set of eyes. Behind him was a poster of a cross-section of a molar.

"So?" he said.

"So the notary needs everybody," said Tuyết. "Including you."

"I'll do a power of attorney," said Khánh. "I'll do whatever. Let's sell it, split it four ways, and I'll take Dì Phượng to dinner. Is that her? Hi, Dì!"

Dì Phượng, who had been passing behind Tuyết with a tray of dishes, stopped and looked into the screen at her nephew, whom she had last seen at the age of three in a pair of shorts on the night of a boat. Khánh waved. He had their father's ears. Dì Phượng looked for a long time.

"Your teeth are very white," she said at last.

"It's my job, Dì."

"Too white. You look like a man who sells cars." And she went on with her tray.

Sen slid onto the stool beside Tuyết and leaned into the camera. Khánh, who could not help himself, said, "Open," and Sen opened, and he peered. "Good. Very good. No cavities. Floss the back ones."

"What is floss?" said Sen.

"I'll send you some," said Khánh, and Tuyết thought of the fish oil traveling down the lane and wondered where the floss would end up.

"Also," said Khánh, "your timeline thing. I was looking at it on the plane." He had it open, she could see it reflected in his loupes, the line, the dots. "You've got San Jose, February 1980. It was January. January twenty-ninth. Mạ's paper from the agency says so. It's in the blue folder in her closet. I'll send you a picture."

"I wrote February because she always said we came for Tết."

"We came the week *before* Tết. She always rounded up." He grinned, their mother's grin, the left side higher. "You'd know that if you'd ever let her tell a story without correcting it."

Tuyết opened the laptop on her knees after he'd gone. She found the dot. She looked at it. *San Jose, February 1980.* She moved it back one month. Then she moved it forward again, and then back, and sat with the cursor over it for a while in the lamplight under the gecko, and finally left it on January, because the paper said so, and added a note beneath: *Mạ said "for Tết."*

---

*Hội An, the first day of Tết, 1980*

Chị Nguyệt,

Tết. Mạ and I made bánh tét, only four, because who would eat more. I tied them too tight, the way you always told me not to, and when we cut one the rice had squeezed the beans into a little yellow eye in the middle that looked at us. Mạ laughed until she coughed. I think it was the first time she laughed since the summer. So I am glad I tied them too tight.

I made something. Do not tell me I am foolish. I made Tuyết an áo for the new year, red, with a small round collar. I did it from memory. I measured the air where she used to stand at the table. I added two fingers at the hem for every month she has been gone, because children grow. Seven months, fourteen fingers. It is very long now. If she does not grow as fast as I think, she can wear it as a dress. If she grows faster, I will take it up. Either way I will have to see her.

Liễu's mother says there are people in a camp on an island and from there they go everywhere, to America, to Australia, to France, to Canada. She says it like she is reading a menu. I don't know which dish you are.

I will not send this letter because there is nowhere to send it, and because the áo is hanging on the hook in the gác and I would have to explain why I keep it there.

Em, Phượng

The Waist

It was Sen who took her to see the roses, on Friday morning, because school had a holiday for reasons Sen described as "teachers' business," and because, Sen said, "you look like you need to see something that is not paper."

The family that made the white rose dumplings lived in a house on a street behind the market, and the house was a factory and the factory was a kitchen and the kitchen was three generations of women sitting on low stools around a long table dusted with rice flour, working with their fingers in a silence so complete and companionable that Tuyết, coming in from the street, lowered her voice as if she had walked into a library.

The dough was rice flour and water and nothing else, kneaded until it was smooth and white as a peeled egg, and a girl of perhaps sixteen pinched off pieces the size of a fingertip and rolled them and pressed them flat with the heel of her hand into rounds so thin that when she held one up to the window Tuyết could see the girl's fingerprints through it, and the light. An older woman put a dab of filling in the center, shrimp pounded with pork and pepper, pink and pale. Then a grandmother, whose hands moved so fast they blurred, gathered the edges up and twisted and pleated and pinched, and set down on the tray a thing that looked so much like a small white rose, its petals ruffled, its center a blush of pink showing through, that Tuyết laughed out loud, and the grandmother looked up for the first time and smiled with three teeth.

"Water," said Sen. "They say the water is from one well. That's why only here."

"Everybody here says the water is from one well."

"Yes," said Sen, with satisfaction. "Hội An has a lot of wells."

They steamed the roses in bamboo baskets stacked five high over a pot whose steam rose to the rafters and hung there in a sweet rice-smelling cloud, and after six minutes a woman lifted the lid and the roses had gone translucent, glassy, the pink of the shrimp glowing through like a cheek through a veil. She plated them in fives, scattered crisp fried shallots over them, and set a little bowl of fish sauce cut with lime and sugar and chili beside, and put a plate in front of Sen and a plate in front of Tuyết, and wouldn't take money, either, because Sen said something in a fast low voice that included the words *Bà Phượng* and *Mỹ*.

The wrapper was slippery and then chewy and then gone. The filling was hot and sweet with shrimp. The shallots crackled. Tuyết ate all five and wanted more and was ashamed, and the grandmother saw it and put two more roses on her plate without a word, and Tuyết's pharmacist mind, which never slept, noted that she had now eaten at every opportunity offered to her for six days and had not once been allowed to pay.

"Sen," she said, on the street outside, "what did you tell them?"

"I said you are my great-aunt's niece from America and you are sad because your mother died and you came to take the house." Sen considered. "Is that wrong?"

"It's very efficient," said Tuyết.

---

Next door to Tiệm May Chỉ Vàng, on the uphill side, Chú Tín made lanterns in a room open to the lane, and had done since he was nineteen, and his father before him. He was sixty-one, lean as one of his own bamboo ribs, with a white goatee and a cotton hat with a brim and reading glasses held together at one hinge with a twist of wire. His room smelled of split bamboo and of the glue, a starchy sweet smell like a bakery that had made a mistake, and the walls were hung with frames waiting for silk, bare ribs curved into globes and gourds and diamonds and long drums, so that sitting in his shop was like sitting inside the skeleton of some beautiful animal.

He sat on a stool with his knees up around his ears, which was, Tuyết thought, exactly how he had ruined them, and next to him was a basin of water where strips of bamboo were soaking, and a little charcoal brazier with a grill over it, and a wooden form like a fat spindle, around which he was bending wet strips one by one and tying them top and bottom with fine wire.

"Chú Tín," said Sen, holding up her phone. "For school. You say how."

"How what?"

"How you bend."

Chú Tín looked at the phone with the deep suspicion of a man who has been photographed by tourists eleven thousand times. Then he looked at Tuyết. "This is the American?"

"Yes," said Sen.

"She gave me fish oil."

"Dì Phượng gave you fish oil," said Tuyết. "I gave it to Dì Phượng."

"Ah." Chú Tín nodded slowly, as if this were a well-known form of exchange in America. "American fish oil. The pills are very big. Like the eggs of a gecko." He took a strip out of the basin and held it over the charcoal, turning it, close but not touching, and talked as he did it, to the phone, which Sen held steady with both hands.

"Bamboo doesn't want to bend," said Chú Tín. "Bamboo wants to be bamboo. Straight, up, toward the sky. So you give it water first, three days. It gets soft in the heart. Then you give it a little fire, not much. Too much and it burns, it cracks, it says no forever. Little fire, and it says, well, all right, maybe. Then you bend it slowly, around the form, and you tie it, and you leave it overnight to think. In the morning it remembers the shape you gave it. It thinks it was always that way." He bent the warm strip over the spindle and it curved, obediently, a long slow bow. "Like a daughter-in-law."

"Chú!" said Sen.

"Like a son-in-law," Chú Tín amended. "Same thing."

He let Tuyết try. She held a strip over the coals, and it hissed faintly and steamed and smelled of a cut lawn, and when she put it to the form it fought her, and then gave, and then she pulled too hard and it split along its length with a small sound like a knuckle, and Chú Tín said, "American," without rancor, and handed her another.

The silk went on last. He cut it on the bias so it would stretch, red that morning, a red like the inside of a pomegranate, and brushed the ribs with glue from a jar with a stick, and laid the silk on and smoothed it with the side of his thumb, rib by rib, so that the cloth wrapped the frame like skin on a drum. He trimmed the edges with a razor blade. Wet, the silk sagged a little between the ribs.

"Now," he said, "it has to dry. You can't hurry. If you put it in the sun, the glue dries before the silk is ready and it wrinkles, like an old man's face. In the shade, slowly, it pulls tight by itself." He hung the lantern from a hook in the rafters, where it turned a little in the air from the lane. "Tomorrow, you knock on it, it sounds like a drum."

Sen stopped the recording and played it back, and Chú Tín's voice came out of the phone small and tinny, saying *bamboo wants to be bamboo*, and he listened to himself with his head tilted, and said, "Is that how I sound?"

"Yes," said Sen.

"So old," said Chú Tín. Then, after a moment: "Send it to my grandson in Đà Nẵng. He thinks lanterns come from a factory."

---

Tuyết had decided, around three in the morning on the previous Thursday, in the cold of the mosquito net, that she would cook.

She had not slept well. She had lain awake considering her position the way she would have considered a patient's medication list: what was being taken, what was interacting with what, what was causing the symptoms. The symptom was that she was being fed. Relentlessly, lavishly and with every appearance of love, she was being fed, at every table in the lane, and she was not allowed to pay, and every dish laid in front of her said, in a language she was only beginning to recover: *you are a guest.* A guest did not own a house. A guest did not get an opinion about a house. A guest ate the fish and said thank you.

She would cook for them. She would cook her mother's cao lầu.

In San Jose, every Tết, her mother had made something she called cao lầu, in the kitchen of the house on Kollmar Drive, with the window steamed and the radio off and the Sunday music video playing on the little television on the counter. It had involved thick Japanese udon noodles from the Japanese market on Saratoga Avenue, which her mother said were "nearly"; pork shoulder rubbed with five-spice and garlic and soy and roasted until the edges caught; wonton skins cut into squares and fried for the crackers; a dark sauce of the pork drippings and soy and a little sugar; and every herb that could be found on Story Road in January, which in a good year was most of them and in a bad year was mint and cilantro and an argument with the produce man. It had been, Tuyết understood now, sitting in a stall in the market with a bowl of the real thing, a translation. A loving and inaccurate translation of a noodle that refused to move.

She would cook the translation for the original. It seemed to her, at three in the morning, a gesture of great dignity.

The udon took her most of Saturday to find. The market had none. The noodle woman looked at her as if she had asked for snow. In the end she found two vacuum packs of it in a small air-conditioned shop for foreigners near the river, between the granola and an imported jar of peanut butter, at a price that would have bought eleven bowls of real cao lầu at the stall. She bought them. She bought pork shoulder from a woman in the market who asked what it was for and, when Tuyết told her, put down her knife and called two of her neighbors over to hear it again. She bought wonton skins, five-spice, soy. Herbs she did not need to buy; there were herbs everywhere; there was rau răm growing out of the stone basin in the courtyard.

On Sunday afternoon she took over the kitchen.

Dì Phượng allowed it. That was the worst part. She did not object or advise. She sat on a mint-green stool by the door to the courtyard with a bowl of green beans to string in her lap and did not look up once, and every time Tuyết did something, she said, "Ừ." Yes. Mm. In a tone that made a small bruise.

Tuyết rubbed the pork. "Ừ." She roasted it in a little countertop oven Quân dragged out from under the stairs, that smelled of its first use in some years. "Ừ." She cut the wonton skins into squares and fried them in a wok and they puffed and blistered and went gold, and she lifted them out onto a newspaper, and they were exactly right, and Dì Phượng said, "Ừ," and pulled the string off a green bean with a little snap.

Chú Tín came round at five, drawn by the smell, wiping glue off his fingers with a rag. Bà Liễu came at a quarter past, a tiny bent woman of seventy-nine with a face creased like a dried date and a boatwoman's shoulders and a conical hat she did not take off indoors, and sat down on a stool without being asked, and looked at the udon boiling in its pot.

"What is that?"

"Cao lầu," said Tuyết.

Bà Liễu looked at the pot for a long time. Then she looked at Dì Phượng. Dì Phượng strung a bean.

"Ừ," said Dì Phượng.

They ate it in the kitchen at six, with the courtyard going blue and the first lanterns coming on in the lane, seven of them around the low table, Quân and Diễm and Sen and Chú Tín and Bà Liễu and Dì Phượng and Tuyết. Tuyết laid out the bowls as her mother had: noodles, pork, herbs, a few spoons of the dark sauce, the crackers on top, a wedge of lime. Her hands knew it. Her hands had done it for forty Tết holidays without being asked.

Nobody said anything. Chopsticks moved. Chú Tín chewed, and chewed, and frowned at his bowl as if it were a lantern frame that had come out the wrong shape.

"The noodle," he said at last, "is very soft."

"It's udon," said Tuyết.

"Ah." He chewed. "Like a cao lầu that went to university in Japan and forgot to come home." He took another bite. "Cao lầu Mỹ," he pronounced. American cao lầu. "Very interesting."

Bà Liễu ate in silence, quickly, with her face down near the bowl, the way women who have worked outdoors their whole lives eat, and when she had finished she put the bowl down and said, "The crackers are good," and Tuyết felt that she had been awarded a small medal.

Sen ate two bowls and asked for a third. "I like it better," she said. "The real one is too chewy. My teeth get tired."

"Sen," said Diễm.

"Bác Khánh said I have very good teeth," Sen said. "I want to keep them."

And Dì Phượng ate one bowl, slowly, and then, to Tuyết's astonishment, held out her bowl for a second.

Tuyết filled it. Their hands did not touch. Dì Phượng ate the second bowl as slowly as the first, picking out each cracker and eating it separately, and when she had finished she put the chopsticks down across the bowl and sat for a moment with her hands in her lap.

"It tastes like your mother's mistakes," she said.

The kitchen went quiet.

"She used to make it too sweet when she was young," said Dì Phượng. "Mạ would say, *Nguyệt, it's not chè.* And she would add more salt and it would be too salty. And Mạ would say, *Nguyệt, it's not the sea.*" She looked at the bowl. "In America she had no one to tell her. So it stayed too sweet." She stood up and gathered the bowls. "I missed it," she said, with her back turned, at the sink.

---

After dinner, when the guests had gone and the kitchen was clean, Dì Phượng came into the workroom where Tuyết was sitting at the cutting table with a glass of tea, looking at nothing, and put the tape measure around her waist.

"Dì," said Tuyết. "I just ate."

"I know," said Dì Phượng. "I watched." The tape tightened. "Breathe out."

"This isn't fair."

"Nothing about an áo dài is fair. It is made to look like nothing is happening, and everything is happening." She read the tape, and her mouth moved, and she wrote in the notebook. "You eat a big dinner on the day of the fitting, the waist is right. You come hungry, it is wrong. A tailor must know what a person is like when she is full."

"When will you tell me the numbers?"

"When they are finished."

"When will they be finished?"

The pencil went back into her hair. Dì Phượng looked at her niece over the glasses, a long measuring look, as if there were still something left to take down.

"When you stop asking," she said.

Later Tuyết went out into the lane in the dark to look at the stars and could not see them for the lanterns. Next door, in Chú Tín's open room, the new red lantern hung from its hook in the shadow, turning slowly. She stepped closer. The silk that had sagged that afternoon between the bamboo ribs had begun, as it dried, to pull itself tight, a little at a time, so slowly she could not see it happen but only, after a while of looking, see that it had.

---

*Hội An, the eleventh day of the fifth month, 1980*

Chị Nguyệt,

Your letter came. Your letter came. Liễu's little brother brought it from the post office running, with his shirt off, waving it, and the whole lane came out. San Jose, California. I made Mạ say it six times. It sounds like a medicine.

You say America has everything. You say there is a market as big as the whole of Trần Phú street with a roof over it and cold air inside, and you can buy rice in bags taller than Khánh. You say the children have shoes for school and shoes for running. You say the water from the tap is safe to drink. I am glad. I am very glad.

I wrote you two pages back. In the first page I told you about Mạ and the roof and the price of thread. In the second page I made a list of what America does not have. It does not have our river. It does not have the chè woman. It does not have Chú Tín's father singing when he glues. It does not have the smell of the lane when the first rain comes and the dust goes dark. It does not have the third step. It does not have me.

I will not send this letter, because the second page is rude, and the first page is boring, and if I tear off the second page there is nothing left of me in it.

Em, Phượng

The Hip

On Thursday at one in the afternoon, Dì Phượng closed the shop.

She did it without announcement. She finished pinning a sleeve, took the pins out of her mouth, put them in the wire loop by the fitting curtain, stepped out into the lane, and pulled down the front shutter with a long iron hook, and the rattle of it went up and down Giếng Đá like a rumor. Across the lane, at Ánh Dương, the tailor shop with the LED sign that ran SUITS SUITS SUITS in red letters in a continuous loop, Bà Mận came out onto her step in a lilac blouse and looked at the closed shutter and then at her watch and then at the sky, as if checking for an eclipse.

"Mạ," said Quân, who had come in from the back with the expression of a man who has heard a smoke alarm. "The man from Sydney is coming at three."

"Then you will be here at three," said Dì Phượng. "Take him to the back door. We are going to the sea."

"The sea," said Tuyết.

"An Bàng. You have been here eleven days, and you have looked at nothing but paper and food. Sen. Bicycles."

---

They rode out of the old town in a procession that Tuyết would later describe to Merrill as "a parade nobody had asked for." Dì Phượng sat sideways behind Quân, who had given up on the man from Sydney or rather delegated him to the oldest piece-sewer, on his motorbike, her knees together and her handbag on her lap and a nón lá on her head tied under the chin with a strip of indigo cloth, upright as a queen on a float. Sen rode a pink bicycle with a basket and a bell she rang at chickens. Tuyết rode a rented bicycle from a stand on Trần Phú, a heavy black upright thing with a wicker basket, a squeaking left pedal, and a seat that had been adjusted by someone much taller and then rusted in place, so that she rode with her toes pointed like a ballerina and had to stand on the pedals to start.

The town fell away fast. One moment there were walls, and lanterns, and a woman grilling corn on a corner; the next there was a road between rice fields, and the sky opened over them like a lid lifted off a pot.

The fields in October were nearly ready, green going gold at the tips, the heavy heads of grain bowing over in long rippling waves when the wind came across them from the sea, and the wind smelled of warm grass and mud and, faintly, of fish sauce from somewhere upwind, the sour round smell coming and going like a radio between stations. Water stood in the channels between the paddies, flat and silver, and in it the sky stood too. A flock of white ducks moved down a channel in a body, herded by a boy with a long bamboo pole with a rag tied to the end, and they made a sound like gossip. A water buffalo lay in a pond up to its nostrils, only its horns and eyes and the ridge of its back showing, gray and wet and utterly at peace, and an egret stood on its back and looked out over the fields as if it owned the buffalo, the field and Tuyết.

"Bác!" called Sen, over her shoulder. "You are going slow!"

"I'm riding with my toes!"

"Why?"

"Because the seat is for a giant!"

Sen rang her bell at her, twice, which was apparently the end of the discussion.

They passed a school letting out, children in white shirts on bicycles six abreast. They passed a man selling sugarcane juice from a cart, the cane fed into a squealing steel press, the juice coming out frothing and green. They passed a row of new villas with balconies and swimming pools and signs in English and Korean, a construction site with a crane, a field where a woman in a conical hat bent to the rice with a sickle, all three in the space of a minute, so that it was like riding through a stack of photographs from different decades. And then the road narrowed, and went sandy, and the casuarina trees began, tall and thin and feathered, their long gray-green needles combing the wind and making, all together, a sound Tuyết had not heard in forty-seven years and knew at once: a sigh that never finished, like the sea practicing.

---

An Bàng in early October was a beach between seasons. The summer tourists had gone and the winter ones had not come, and the bamboo-roofed shacks along the sand had half their deck chairs stacked and lashed with rope. The sand was fine and pale and hot as flour from an oven, and it squeaked under Tuyết's shoes when she walked, and got into them at once, so she took them off, the gray orthopedic shoes, and carried them, and felt the heat come up through the soles of her feet, and then a little farther down toward the water the sand went damp and cool and firm as a bar of soap.

The sea was green, a gray-green like an old bottle, and it was not calm. The wind was up and the waves came in steep and close together and broke white, and a red flag flapped on a pole by a lifeguard's chair where no lifeguard sat. Along the high-tide line lay the basket boats, the round woven thúng chai, upturned on the sand like the halves of enormous coconuts, tarred black inside, each big enough for a man to sit in and spin. Two old men sat in the shade of one, mending a net spread over their knees, their fingers working the green nylon with a wooden shuttle, and they did not look up as the parade went past.

Quân found a shack with a roof of dried palm and a woman with a charcoal grill and a cooler of squid on ice. He ordered without asking anybody. Sen ran straight into the edge of the waves in her school skirt and ran out again shrieking when one came farther than she'd expected. Dì Phượng sat in a deck chair in the shade with her handbag on her lap and her nón lá tilted down over her eyes, and Tuyết sat in the chair beside her and put her shoes in the sand and felt, for the first time since she had landed, that nobody needed anything from her.

The squid came, grilled whole over the charcoal and then sliced into rings and brushed with a paste of chili and salt and lemongrass, charred at the edges and white and tender inside, with a saucer of salt and pepper and lime to dip it in. Then little clams in a broth with ginger and lemongrass. Then a plate of tiny fried fish, eaten whole, heads and all, crunching like chips. Then cold sugarcane juice in plastic bags with straws tied in at the neck.

Tuyết ate everything. Her mind made a note about sodium. She told it to be quiet.

---

After the food, Dì Phượng stood up, took off her plastic sandals, set them side by side in the sand with their toes pointed toward the sea, and rolled her black silk trousers to the knee. Her shins were thin and very white. She walked down the beach, straight-backed, her nón lá on her head, past the basket boats, past the fishermen, and stopped where the foam reached its furthest, and stood there, with the edges of the waves running up over her feet and sucking the sand out from under her heels as they went back.

Tuyết followed, carrying nothing. She stood beside her aunt. The water was warmer than she expected, warm as a bath that had been drawn an hour ago. It hissed around her ankles and pulled.

"I never learned to swim," said Dì Phượng.

Tuyết looked at her.

"Your mother learned. Huệ learned. Your grandfather took them to the river when they were small and held them under the stomach until they kicked. I was born too late. He was sick by then." She watched the water go out. "Then Mạ said a tailor has no business in the river. So."

"You live on a river."

"I live beside a river. That is different. The river lives beside me." A wave came in, bigger, and wet the rolled cuffs of her trousers, and she did not step back. "Every year it comes in to visit. I don't go out to visit it."

They stood. Down the beach, Sen was building something in the wet sand with Quân, a wall, it looked like, against the sea, which the sea was patiently taking down.

"In 1979," said Dì Phượng, "I stood like this at Cửa Đại. Not here. Down that way." She lifted her chin southward along the coast. "It was night."

Tuyết's body knew before she did. Her toes curled in the sand.

She did not remember much. She had been eight and it had been dark. She remembered being woken. She remembered the smell of her mother's hair, which was coconut oil, as her mother bent over her. She remembered being dressed in two of everything, two shirts and two pairs of trousers, in the heat, and not being allowed to ask why. She remembered sand, cold, wet, at night, and the sound of the sea in the dark, which was bigger than the sea in the day, and her mother's hand closed around her wrist so hard that her fingers went numb, and her father ahead with Khánh asleep on his shoulder, and Dì Huệ with a bundle, and somewhere out on the water an engine that coughed and coughed and would not start and then did.

She remembered Dì Phượng's hands. That was the clearest thing. Dì Phượng's hands in the dark, pressing something into the pocket of her outer pair of trousers and patting it, twice, and buttoning the pocket. And she remembered asking, because she was eight and did not understand what was happening, in the voice one uses to ask whether someone is coming to the market: *Dì, are you coming?*

And Dì Phượng saying: *Later.*

She remembered nothing of the boat. She remembered, afterward, an island, and a long line, and a tin cup. That was all she let herself remember. She had been a child, and it had been a long time ago, and she had been lucky. She knew she had been lucky. She had built a whole sensible life on knowing it.

"I remember the chalk," she said.

Dì Phượng did not look at her. The sea came in and went out.

"You kept stealing it off the table," she said. "Gray chalk. You drew on the walls in the gác. Mạ smacked your hand. You drew on the step instead."

"The third step."

"The third step."

They stood. Somewhere behind them, at the shack, the woman with the grill was singing along to a radio, a long sliding love song.

"Turn around," said Dì Phượng.

Tuyết turned around, and her aunt took the yellow tape out of her trouser pocket, where apparently she always carried it, even to the sea, and passed it around Tuyết's hips, at the widest point, over her navy slacks, which were wet at the hem now and caked with sand. A wave came in around their ankles. Dì Phượng held the tape steady and squinted at it.

"Your grandmother's hips," she said. "They don't apologize."

"Is that good?"

"For an áo dài? Very good. The áo is tight above and falls below. It needs somewhere to fall from." She wrote in the notebook, the pages fluttering in the wind; she held them flat with her thumb. "Your mother had narrow hips. She was always cold."

"Dì."

"Hm."

"Why didn't you come later?"

The wind took the question off down the beach. Dì Phượng closed the notebook. She put the pencil back in her hair. She did not answer. She looked down at their feet, at the sand being drawn out from under their heels, and then she turned and walked back up the beach toward the shade, toward her sandals set side by side with their toes to the sea, and Tuyết stood alone at the edge of the water with the question still in her mouth, like a pill she had been told not to swallow.

---

Later, in the deck chair, while Dì Phượng dozed under her hat with her mouth slightly open and her hands folded over her handbag, Tuyết took out her phone and photographed the sea. She did it badly; the horizon tilted; the red flag was cut in half. She took another. Then she walked south a little way, as far as she could without losing sight of them, to where the casuarinas ended and the beach had been eaten away in a raw steep step of sand, and someone had laid long gray bags of sand along it in a wall, and photographed that too.

She opened the record of where the family had gone. She found the dot. *Cửa Đại, June 1979.* It had been empty except for the words. She hung the photograph from it, the tilted green sea, the gray bags of sand. Under it she typed: *Dì Phượng: "Later."* And then she sat with her thumb over the screen, not typing anything else, until Sen came running up the beach with sand to her knees to say that Bà was awake and Ba said it was time to go before the rain.

---

*Hội An, the third day of the tenth month, 1980*

Chị Nguyệt,

The parcel came. Liễu's husband carried it from the post office on his bicycle and the whole lane walked behind him like a funeral, except happy. Brown paper, string, your writing on the front in English and Vietnamese both, so neat I knew you had practiced.

Inside: two bottles of aspirin, a bottle of vitamins with a picture of a smiling orange on it, a packet of needles in every size, a card of hooks and eyes, three spools of Japanese thread, black, white and the gray that matches everything, and a length of blue cotton with small white flowers. Mạ held the needles up to the window one by one and said, *These are honest needles.*

I must tell you something and you will be angry. I sold the vitamins. Also one bottle of aspirin. A woman from the market gave me enough for the roof, the part over the gác where the water comes in, and there was money left for rice and for Mạ's cough medicine, which she finally let me buy, because I said it came from America and so it was free. She believes anything that comes from America is free.

I kept the needles and the thread and the cloth. I made Mạ a blouse from the blue cotton. She looks like a schoolgirl. She says she looks like a tablecloth.

I will not send this letter, because you would be angry that I sold the vitamins, and because you would send more, and I would sell those too.

Em, Phượng

Dress Length

The red book lived, it turned out, in a drawer under Bà Ngoại.

Tuyết had walked past the shelf a hundred times. It stood against the wall at the back of the shop, at head height, a dark wooden shelf with a little carved rail along its front, and on it, as on a shelf in nearly every house in the lane, a framed photograph of an old woman, a small vase of yellow chrysanthemums, a dish with three oranges and a bunch of finger bananas, and a brass cup. Tuyết had noted it the way one notes a piece of furniture in a doctor's office: present, cared for, not her business. Her grandmother's face in the photograph was square and serious, the hair scraped back, the mouth set; it was a face that had just told someone their seams were crooked. On the morning of the second notary visit Dì Phượng took a soft cloth and dusted the frame, and moved an orange a quarter inch to the left, and then reached under the shelf and slid out a shallow drawer that Tuyết had not known was there, and took out a document in a clear plastic sleeve.

Tuyết looked at the plastic sleeve.

Dì Phượng looked at Tuyết looking at it.

"You think only Americans have sleeves," said Dì Phượng.

The land-use certificate was a booklet the dusty red of old brick, with a crest on the cover and inside, on paper that had gone soft and slightly furred at the folds, a map of the lot drawn in thin lines, the house a narrow rectangle with its long side to the neighbors, and her grandmother's name, and a seal. Tuyết held it in both hands. It weighed, she estimated, about forty grams. It was the lightest heavy thing she had ever held.

"Put it back in the sleeve," said Dì Phượng. "You are breathing on it."

---

Dì Phượng dressed for the notary. Tuyết had not expected that. She came down the stairs at eight, the third step knocking, in an áo dài of dove-gray silk, plain, with a high collar and a small row of buttons from the collar to under the right arm, over white silk trousers, and the effect, in the cluttered shop between the bolts and the button baskets, was of a heron landing in a henhouse. The silk moved when she moved and then a half-second later finished moving. Her gray hair was pinned up without the pencil. She carried a black handbag in the crook of her elbow and the red book in its sleeve against her chest.

"Dì," said Tuyết. "You look—"

"Old," said Dì Phượng.

"Formidable."

"I don't know that word."

"It means people will do what you say."

"Then it is the right word," said Dì Phượng, and went out into the lane.

Across the way, Bà Mận was on her step again, in a blouse the color of a lollipop, supervising her two nephews, who stood in the mouth of the lane with laminated menus and called *Suit! Dress! Very cheap! Look only!* at every passing tourist. Bà Mận saw Dì Phượng in her gray silk and stopped in the middle of a sentence. The two women regarded each other across the six feet of brick for one long second, like two cats on two walls. Then Bà Mận said, "Where are you off to, Chị, looking so fine?"

"To court," said Dì Phượng. "My niece is suing me."

"I'm not suing her," Tuyết said to Bà Mận. "It's a notary."

Bà Mận looked Tuyết up and down, from her collar to her orthopedic shoes, and then said, to Dì Phượng, with enormous sympathy, "Trời ơi." Heavens.

---

In the cold room with the silent television (today a program about a man restoring a fishing boat), Miss Vân stood up behind window three when she saw who had come in, and came out from behind the counter, and took Dì Phượng's hand in both of hers.

"Cô Phượng!"

"Vân. How is the collar?"

"Perfect. Everyone asks."

Tuyết looked from one to the other. Miss Vân was wearing, she now noticed, a pale blue áo dài with a narrow stand collar piped in a darker blue, and the piping met at the throat in a point as fine as the tip of a pen, and she had seen that piping before, in pencil, on blue squared paper, in a ledger on the workroom floor.

"Dì made your áo dài," Tuyết said.

"For my wedding," said Miss Vân. "And this one, for work. She made my mother's, too." She beamed at Dì Phượng, and then remembered herself, and went back behind the counter, and became a notary clerk again, with visible effort. "Please sit."

They sat. A young man brought two glasses of jasmine tea on a tray. Dì Phượng accepted hers with both hands. Tuyết accepted hers and caught her aunt's eye over the rim, and her aunt raised one eyebrow by perhaps a millimeter, which was enough.

Miss Vân examined the red book with real respect, the way a pharmacist looks at a properly written prescription, turning each page with the very edges of her fingertips. She examined Tuyết's death certificates and their translations, and said, kindly, that they were beautiful translations but would need to be legalized, with stamps, which could be done, which would take some weeks. She asked about the brother in Houston. Tuyết said he was willing. She asked about the aunt in Melbourne.

"My sister Huệ," said Dì Phượng, "will sign what I tell her to sign."

"My aunt Huệ," said Tuyết, "will sign what is fair."

Miss Vân looked at both of them with the expression of a woman who had sat at window three for six years and had seen a very great many families drink tea.

"Then she will need a power of attorney," she said, "done at a consulate in Australia. And then made legal here. With stamps." She wrote it down. She handed each of them a list, identical, in neat blue handwriting. "Please come back when you have everybody."

---

Ron Kettering had wandered.

They found this out on the way home. Ron and Trudy had been due at eleven for Ron's first jacket fitting, and Quân had stood at the counter with the jacket on a hanger and pins in his mouth until eleven-twenty, when Sen, sent to look, came running down the lane in her school uniform to report that Mr. Ron was in Ánh Dương. Across the lane. On Bà Mận's box, with Bà Mận's nephew pinning a shirt on him. A short-sleeved shirt.

"Short sleeves," said Tuyết, appalled, with the counter voice already rising in her throat. "In this sun. On a thiazide."

"Wait," said Dì Phượng.

She went into the kitchen. She came out with a plate. On the plate were four pieces of bánh xoài, the little pale cakes the old town made in the shape of a mango, soft and dusted with flour, split down the middle to show a filling of crushed peanuts and caramelized sugar like amber. She arranged them on the plate with a single sprig of mint. She gave the plate to Sen.

"Take this to Bà Mận," she said. "For her health. Say I heard she has been working too hard. Say it loudly."

Sen took the plate across the lane, holding it out in front of her with both hands like an offering at a school play, and said it loudly, in Vietnamese and then, for good measure, in her school English. *For your health. You are working too hard.* Bà Mận, caught on her own step in front of her nephews and two Korean tourists and Ron Kettering, had no choice but to accept the plate with both hands and say thank you.

And Ron Kettering, who had been standing on the box in a half-pinned short-sleeved shirt and looking out at the lane with the mild bewilderment of a large man who has lost track of which store he is in, saw the cakes go by.

"Say," he said. "Are those the little mango things?"

Sen turned on the step. "Bà Phượng has more," she said in English. "And your jacket is ready. With long sleeves. Free."

Ron got down off the box.

---

That night after dinner, Tuyết's phone made the small chime it made for messages from Australia, and it went on chiming, and chiming, until Sen came and sat beside her to see.

Dì Huệ was seventy-seven and lived in Springvale, in the southeast of Melbourne, in a brick house with a lemon tree, with her son and his wife and a grandson who was studying to be a physiotherapist. She did not like to type. She said typing was for secretaries. When she had something to say, she pressed the microphone and said it, and then she pressed it again and said the rest of it, and then she remembered something else and said that, so that a message from Dì Huệ arrived not as a message but as a weather pattern, twelve or fifteen little bubbles of sound, each one a minute or two long.

Tuyết pressed the first one.

"Tuyết à," said a voice she had last heard on a crackling line the week of the funeral, which had been in San Jose, and which Dì Huệ had been too ill with her hip to fly to. It was a soft voice, rounder than Dì Phượng's, and it had kept its Quảng vowels intact in Melbourne the way some people keep a fruitcake in a tin. "Tuyết à. Is it hot? It's cold here. The lemon tree is flowering. I hear you went to the notary. Phượng says you are very thin and you eat like a horse. Both are good."

The second one: "About the paper. Tell Phượng I will sign. Tell her I will sign what you two decide. But I will sign only if you decide together, in one room, and you call me, and I hear both of you say it. Not one, then the other. Both. I know my sisters." A pause. "I knew my sisters."

The third one was singing.

Tuyết did not know the song. It was slow and it went up and down in a way that was not quite a scale, a lullaby rhythm, the words long and drawn out, *ầu ơ*, the sound that every Vietnamese lullaby seemed to start with, a sound like rocking. Dì Huệ's voice was thin and true and it cracked on a high note and she laughed at herself in the middle and kept going. Sen sat absolutely still beside her with her chin on her knees.

From the kitchen, the sound of washing dishes stopped.

The song went on for a minute and forty seconds. Then Dì Huệ said, "That's the one Mạ sang when Phượng was born. I was three. I remember it because I was jealous. Tell Phượng I still am."

Tuyết saved them. All fifteen. She put them where the family kept things now, in the private space she had set up in the spring, when her mother died and there had been so many photographs and nobody had known where to put them; a place only the family could open, where her mother's photographs were, and her father's handwriting, and the line of dates and places. She made a new folder for Dì Huệ's voice. She called it *Dì Huệ, Springvale.* Then she thought about it and renamed it, simply, *Dì Huệ sings.*

When she looked up, Dì Phượng was standing in the kitchen doorway, a dish towel on one shoulder.

"Play the third one again," said Dì Phượng.

Tuyết played it again. Dì Phượng stood in the doorway and listened to her sister's voice come out of the phone, thin and true and cracking on the high note, and her face did not change at all, not once, which was how Tuyết knew.

---

The measurement that night was the longest one, and Dì Phượng did it upstairs, in the gác, by lamplight, with a trunk open on the floor.

The trunk was camphor wood, with brass corners gone green, and when Dì Phượng lifted the lid the smell rose from it so strongly that Tuyết sneezed: camphor, and something under the camphor, old sandalwood soap, and under that the faint dry sweetness of silk that had been folded for a long time. Dì Phượng knelt. She lifted out layers of tissue paper. She lifted out a folded thing in lavender silk and stood up and shook it out, and it fell open in the lamplight with a whisper.

An áo dài. Lavender, with a pattern of tiny white flowers woven so fine they were more a sheen than a pattern, and a round collar, and a row of cloth-covered buttons, and two long panels, front and back, that fell from the waist almost to the floor. The silk had gone a little yellow along one fold. At the hem of the front panel there was a darn, so small and so perfect that Tuyết only saw it because she was looking for flaws, the way she always looked for flaws.

"Your mother's," said Dì Phượng. "From her engagement. 1968. Mạ cut it. I sewed the buttons. I was sixteen and I did them wrong and Mạ made me do them again. Eleven buttons, twice."

"She left it?"

"She couldn't wear two áo dài on a boat." Dì Phượng's voice was perfectly level. "She was already wearing two of everything else."

She held the lavender áo dài up against Tuyết's back, the collar at the nape of her neck, and let it fall. Tuyết could feel the weight of it settle against her, no more than a hand's weight, cool through her blouse. She could smell her mother, or thought she could, or could smell camphor and remembered her mother.

"Her hem was here," said Dì Phượng, and touched the back of Tuyết's leg, just below the knee. "She was shorter than you. You have your father's legs, too. You are made of your father with your mother's face on top." She laid the tape from Tuyết's nape down her spine, past the back of her waist, past the hem of the lavender silk, down. "Yours will be two fingers longer."

"Why two fingers?"

"Because you're taller."

"Dì, I'm taller by more than two fingers."

"Then because you're older," said Dì Phượng, and wrote it down. "An old woman's áo dài is a little longer. It shows less. It means: I have nothing to prove." She folded the lavender silk back into its tissue as carefully as it had come out, and laid it in the trunk, and stood looking down into the trunk with her hand on the lid.

"Dì Huệ says we have to decide together," said Tuyết. "In one room."

"I heard."

"She says she knows her sisters."

"She knew one of them," said Dì Phượng. She closed the trunk. "The other one, she only knew in letters."

"I thought you didn't write."

Dì Phượng straightened, slowly, a hand on the small of her back, and for a moment in the lamplight she looked exactly seventy-four, and then she did not.

"Go to sleep," she said. "Tomorrow Bà Mận will send the plate back with something on it, and we'll have to answer."

---

*Hội An, the twelfth day of the tenth month, 1981*

Chị Nguyệt,

The river came in last night. Not as big as the year the old people talk about, but big enough. Ankle at dusk, shin at midnight, and by morning it had stopped just short of the stairs.

I did it alone. Mạ stood at the top of the stairs with the lamp and called out what to lift, like the captain of a ship who can't swim. *The silk first. Not that silk, the good silk. Not the good silk, the BEST silk. The pattern books. The scissors. Your sister's stool.* I said, Mạ, the stool is wood, it floats. She said, I don't want it floating, I want it upstairs. So the stool went up.

You remember the pulley. I found that if you put the bolt in the cloth sling and pull with your back and your legs, not your arms, it goes. Forty bolts. My arms are ropes this morning. I have learned my arms can be ropes.

When the water was at the bottom of the stairs, Mạ said, *Phượng, sing something,* and I said I don't sing, and she said, *Liar, you sing when you think nobody hears.* So I sang. The one about the girl who waits at the ferry. She went to sleep on the floor of the gác with her head on a bolt of black taffeta, and the water stayed at the foot of the stairs all night as if it were listening.

I will not send this letter, because you would worry, and because I am proud of the forty bolts and pride looks bad on paper.

Em, Phượng

The Sleeve

The rains came on the fifteenth of October in the afternoon, not as rain but as a decision.

Tuyết was standing in the shop door looking at the sky, which had been white all morning, a damp blank white like the inside of a sheet of tissue paper, when the light in the lane went suddenly green, and the air fell two degrees all at once, and the lanterns hanging over the doors swung on their hooks in a gust that came down the lane from the river smelling of iron and leaves. Then the first beads of rain hit the brick, fat ones, each the size of a coin, each leaving a dark round mark, and the dust rose up off the brick in a smell so sudden and so total that Tuyết put her hand out to the doorframe. It was the smell of the first rain on a hot street, of earth and stone and something green, and it went straight past every part of her mind that read labels and lodged in a part that was eight years old. *Petrichor,* her pharmacist's brain supplied, a little desperately, *from the oils of plants and a compound made by soil bacteria*, and the eight-year-old said, *shut up*, and Tuyết stood in the door and breathed it.

Then the rain came properly, a gray wall of it marching up the lane, and the tourists ran for cover under shop awnings with their shopping bags over their heads, and Bà Mận's nephews dove into Ánh Dương with their laminated menus, and the water came off the tile roofs in ropes, in long braided ropes from every trough of the yin-and-yang tiles, so that each house in the lane stood behind a curtain of beads. It drummed on the awning over the shop with a sound like a crowd applauding and did not stop, and it did not stop, and two days later it was still, on and off, raining, and the town had gone soft and dark and gleaming, the yellow walls darkened to ocher where the wet had soaked in, the brick shining, the river rising slowly brown behind the market.

"Is this the flood?" Tuyết asked Quân on the second day.

"This?" said Quân, laughing. "This is the river clearing its throat."

---

On the second evening the rain paused, and Dì Phượng said they were going to play bài chòi.

"What is bài chòi?" said Tuyết, and then, before anybody could answer, remembered. A field at night. Huts. A drum. Her grandfather's friend, a man with a long beard, singing. Her own small body asleep across her mother's lap in the straw.

"It's a game," said Sen. "With singing. Like bingo, but the man sings the numbers. Except there are no numbers."

"That's not like bingo at all."

"It's exactly like bingo," said Sen, with the patience of the young for the old, "if bingo was good."

They walked to the river at seven, Dì Phượng and Tuyết and Sen and Bà Liễu, who had been waiting on her step with her hat on, and the wet lane shone under the lanterns, reflecting them so that every lantern had a second one under it upside down in the brick, wavering. For once since Tuyết had come, the air was cool. It had a clean scrubbed feeling, like a room after mopping. They crossed the little bridge to the An Hội side, where the river walk was lined with stalls selling paper flower candles and grilled rice paper folded around egg and scallion and chili, and found, on an open square of packed earth near the water, a ring of small huts.

There were ten of them, five on each side of a wide U, each hut no bigger than a garden shed, built of bamboo poles with a roof of dried palm, open at the front, raised a little off the wet earth on a platform of planks. Each had a bench inside and a small drum hung at the corner and a bamboo pole stuck up from the roof with a strip of cloth on it. At the open end of the U, between the arms, stood a low stage under a tarp with a single bulb strung on a wire, a big drum on a stand, a chair, and a bamboo tube full of what looked like wooden paddles.

People were already in the huts. Families, mostly, grandmothers with children on their laps, a group of teenage boys elbowing each other, a pair of young women in matching T-shirts that said, in English, BEST FRIENDS FOREVER (AND EVER). Tourists stood around the outside of the U with their phones up, the screens glowing like a second, smaller set of lanterns.

Bà Liễu marched to a hut on the left side, the third one from the stage, and sat down in it as if it had her name on it. Perhaps it did. Dì Phượng sat beside her. Sen climbed in and sat cross-legged on the floor at their feet. Tuyết took the end of the bench and found it was damp, and decided not to mention it.

A young man came around with a tray and gave each hut, for a small payment, three long thin wooden paddles, each with a card fixed to its end. Tuyết looked at hers. The cards were old, printed from woodblocks, worn soft at the corners, each with a picture and a name in old-fashioned letters: a figure in a hat, a pair of fish, something that might have been a scholar or a duck. She did not know any of them.

"You hold them up," said Sen. "When he sings yours, you hit the drum."

"How will I know he's singing mine?"

"You listen," said Sen.

---

The caller was Ông Cẩm.

He came out from behind the tarp at half past seven, and the crowd made a sound, a pleased murmur, as if a favorite uncle had arrived at a wedding. He was eighty-four. He wore a long tunic of dark blue silk to the knee, buttoned at the side, over white trousers, and on his head a khăn đóng, the old-fashioned round turban of wrapped black cloth that sat on his white hair like a small, dignified tire. His face was long and lined, and he had a white beard to the second button of the tunic, and when he smiled he had very few teeth and did not care.

He sat down in the chair under the bulb. A younger man, his nephew, took up the sticks at the big drum. Ông Cẩm put his hand into the bamboo tube and drew out a paddle and looked at it without showing anyone, and the drum went *tùng, tùng, tùng*, three slow beats, and the crowd went quiet.

Then he sang.

It was not a song exactly. It was something between singing and talking and calling across a river. His voice was rough, like a bell that had cracked once, and it went up in a long falling line and hung at the top and then came down in little steps, and Tuyết could not at first understand any of the words at all. Then she could. It was verse, rhyming verse, couplets in the old six-and-eight measure her grandmother had used for scolding and her mother had used for lullabies, and what he was singing, she realized, was a riddle. A story with the name of the card hidden in it, which he would not say until the very end, so that everyone in all ten huts was leaning forward, listening for their card in the turns of the verse, and the tension of it went through the whole ring like a held breath.

*A man goes walking with no shoes,
his wife says, husband, what will people say?
He says, let them say what they choose,
my feet were born before my shoes, anyway—*

At the last line the crowd laughed, and Ông Cẩm called out the name, and in a hut across the U a grandmother hit her little drum, *tùng*, and raised one of her paddles, and the boy from the tray ran over and checked it.

It went on. Each card a verse. Some verses were old ones that the crowd knew and sang along with under their breath, the grandmothers' lips moving. Some, Tuyết understood, he was making up as he went, about the people in front of him. He sang about the teenage boys who were too busy elbowing to listen. He sang about the BEST FRIENDS FOREVER (AND EVER) girls, a couplet about two birds on one branch that made them shriek. He sang about the weather, about a man who had promised his wife a roof before the rains and was now sleeping under a basket. Every few cards a hut would have a match and hit its drum, and the drum at the stage would answer, *tùng tùng*, and a little red flag would go up the bamboo pole on the roof of that hut on a string, and everyone would cheer.

Tuyết held her three paddles up and listened so hard her head hurt.

Then Ông Cẩm drew a card, and looked at it, and looked up, and looked straight across the U at the third hut on the left, and smiled his few-toothed smile, and the drum went *tùng*, and he sang:

*A daughter of the lane went far,
across the sea where the big ships are.
Now she's come back with a paper in her hand
to ask the river who owns the land—*

The crowd turned to look. Of course they did. Everyone in the lane knew; everyone in the lane had known before she arrived. Tuyết felt the heat climb her throat. Sen, at her feet, put both hands over her mouth. Bà Liễu cackled.

Ông Cẩm let the line hang. Then he finished:

*The river says, I own nothing, not even me.
Go ask the woman who sewed the sea.*

And he called the name of the card, and it was not hers.

The crowd roared. Somebody across the U hit their drum for a match, and nobody paid any attention to them. And beside Tuyết, on the damp bench, Dì Phượng sat very straight with her hands folded on her knees and her face composed and her mouth moving, very slightly, as if she were tasting something.

Then Dì Phượng sang back.

She did not stand up. She did not raise her voice very much. She simply opened her mouth and sang, two lines, in the same old six-and-eight, back across the U at Ông Cẩm under his bulb, and her voice was nothing like her speaking voice; it was low and full and perfectly in tune and it carried across the wet square like a stone skipping on still water:

*The woman who sewed the sea says, Uncle, hush,
you can't hem a river and you can't hem me—*

The whole ring went silent. Even the tourists put their phones down, or rather held them up higher, which was the same thing.

Ông Cẩm put his hand on his chest and laughed out loud, a delighted wheeze, and beat the side of his chair with his palm, and the nephew at the drum did a roll on it, *tùng tùng tùng tùng*, and people in every hut were clapping.

Tuyết stared at her aunt. Dì Phượng did not look at her. She was looking at Ông Cẩm, and her face had the same expression it had when she ran her chalk along a perfect curve.

"You sing," said Tuyết.

"Everybody sings," said Dì Phượng. "Hold up your cards. You're not paying attention."

---

Tuyết won at nine-fifteen. She did not notice.

She was watching the river, which had gone black and smooth and was carrying the paper flower candles that people set on it from the steps, small red and yellow paper lotuses with a candle in each, drifting downstream in a long scatter of lights that bobbed and turned and went out one by one, and she was thinking about nothing, really, about the smell of roasting peanuts that came from a cart by the bridge, about how the mosquitoes had found her ankles again, about her aunt's voice, when Sen shrieked and grabbed her wrist and hit the hut's little drum with her other hand, *tùng*, and Bà Liễu hit it too, and the boy came running and checked Tuyết's three paddles and shouted, and the drum at the stage went *tùng tùng tùng*, and somebody hauled on a string and a red flag went up the bamboo pole over their hut.

"You won," said Sen. "Bác. You won!"

"What did I win?"

The prize was a small red flag on a stick, a bag of coconut cookies, and, from Ông Cẩm, a verse.

*The American daughter didn't hear her name.
Over there, they must play a quieter game.*

The crowd laughed. Tuyết, holding her flag, laughed too, helplessly, the first time she had laughed in front of all of them, and she felt the lane's attention on her shift, very slightly, in a way she could not have described except that it was the difference between being looked at and being seen.

---

Afterward, when the huts were emptying and the nephew was rolling up the tarp, Sen went up to Ông Cẩm with her phone, and Tuyết followed.

"Ông," said Sen. "For school. Can I record you? The verses?"

Ông Cẩm looked at the phone, and then at Sen, and sat back down in his chair under the bulb, slowly, a hand on each knee.

"Child," he said, "the trouble with me is, I never sing the same thing twice. Tonight's verse is gone already. It went down the river with the candles." He stroked his beard. "But all right. Hold it close. My voice is not what it was."

Sen held it close. Ông Cẩm sang, softly, for her alone, under the one bulb with the moths circling it: the old verses first, the ones every grandmother knew, the man with no shoes, the two birds on one branch, and then, without warning, a new one, about a girl with a telephone who was trying to catch a river in a cup. Sen's hand shook a little, and she held it steady with the other.

When he had finished he said, "Who will listen to that?"

"My class," said Sen.

"And after your class?"

Sen thought. "Whoever sings after you."

Ông Cẩm looked at her for a long moment. "There is nobody who sings after me," he said. "My sons drive taxis. My grandson fixes air conditioners in Saigon." He shrugged, a slow lift of the blue silk. "But keep it. Maybe someday somebody will want to know how the old fool did it."

---

Walking back over the bridge, in the dark, with the rain beginning again in a fine mist that hung in the light of the lanterns like flour in a sunbeam, Dì Phượng stopped Tuyết at the top of the arch and said, "Hold out your arm."

"Here?"

"Here. Hold it as you held your cards. Bend it a little. As if you're reaching for something on a shelf."

Tuyết held out her arm in the mist, bent a little, reaching for an invisible shelf, her little red flag still in her hand. Dì Phượng laid the tape from the point of her shoulder down the outside of her arm, over the elbow, to the knob of bone at her wrist, and squinted at it in the lantern light, and then moved her thumb a little farther, to the base of the hand.

"Long sleeve," said Dì Phượng. "For a woman who reaches." She wrote in the notebook, sheltering it from the mist with her body.

"Dì," said Tuyết. "Where did you learn to sing like that?"

Dì Phượng put the notebook away.

"From waiting for boats," she said, and walked on down the far side of the bridge, and after a moment, under her breath, so low that Tuyết almost thought she imagined it, she began to sing again, the same low full voice, a slow song Tuyết did not know with *ầu ơ* at the start of it, and Tuyết, two steps behind, slid her phone out of her pocket without thinking, the way she would have reached for a pen, and lifted it, and the screen lit up her own hand in the dark.

Dì Phượng heard the small sound of it, or saw the glow. She stopped singing in the middle of a word.

---

*Hội An, the fourth day of the third month, 1982*

Chị Nguyệt,

There is a man named Tuân who rows a boat. He carries rice and bricks across the river to Cẩm Kim and brings back firewood and sometimes a pig. He is not handsome. His ears stick out. He has very big hands and they smell of the river, which is to say of mud and fish and something green.

Twice this month I had to take a finished order to a family across the water and both times his was the boat at the steps, and both times he refused my money, and both times I had to sit in the bow with a parcel on my knees while he rowed standing up behind me, and both times he sang. Badly. Very badly. A song about a girl at the ferry, with half the words wrong.

The second time I corrected him. I sang the right words. He stopped rowing. We sat in the middle of the river going slowly sideways, and he said, "So the tailor sings," and I said, "The tailor does not," and he said, "Then who was that," and I said, "Row."

Mạ says he has asked Liễu's mother, who has asked Mạ. Mạ says she is not getting younger and neither am I. I told Mạ I am not marrying anybody. I am waiting to go. You know this. I told her the stool is still in its place.

I will not send this letter, because you would laugh, and because if I put it in writing that I am not going to marry him, then it will be on paper, and you know how paper is.

Em, Phượng

The Armhole

Diễm said it was nothing, and Tuyết knew at once that it was something, because nothing does not sit down on the stairs in the middle of carrying a basket of laundry and stay there.

It was the twentieth of October, a Tuesday, gray and close, the rain holding off in a sky like wet plaster. Tuyết came in from the courtyard with a glass of coffee and found Diễm on the fourth step with the basket on her knees and her forehead against the rail. Her face was flushed in two patches high on the cheekbones, and when Tuyết put the back of her hand to her forehead without asking, the way she had not done to an adult since her father was dying, the skin was hot and dry as a plate from the oven.

"Head," said Diễm. "Behind the eyes. And my bones."

"Your bones."

"Like somebody is bending them." She tried to laugh. "Like Chú Tín's bamboo."

Tuyết's mind went into a different gear, the way it did at the counter when a mother came in carrying a feverish toddler, the gear where it stopped noticing the shape of the light and the color of the walls and began, instead, to make a list. Fever, high, sudden. Pain behind the eyes. Pain in the joints and muscles. Rainy season. Mosquitoes. She looked at Diễm's forearms. Nothing yet.

"Has anybody on the lane had dengue this month?"

"Everybody on the lane has dengue every month," said Diễm. "Bà Mận's nephew had it. The small one."

"Did you take anything?"

"Not yet. Quân was going to buy—" She named a pain reliever that Tuyết knew, and Tuyết said, more sharply than she meant to, "No. Not that one."

Diễm looked up at her, startled.

"Not that one and not aspirin," Tuyết said, more gently. "If it's dengue, those can make you bleed. Paracetamol only. Acetaminophen. The plain one. And water. A lot of water. Oral rehydration salts, the blue packet, the kind I told the Kettering man. And you need a blood test today, so they can count your platelets. Then again in a day or two." She heard herself, the counter voice, but it was a different counter voice than the one she had used on Ron Kettering. It was the one she used at night, with the frightened ones. "It's usually all right. Most people get better at home. But you have to watch. The dangerous part is often when the fever comes down, around the third to the sixth day. If your stomach hurts badly, or you keep vomiting, or your gums bleed, or you feel very tired and cold and restless, you go to the hospital that minute. Not tomorrow. That minute."

Diễm stared at her. Then she looked past her, and Tuyết turned, and Dì Phượng was standing in the doorway of the workroom with a pair of scissors in her hand and her glasses on her nose, and had obviously been standing there for some time.

"Quân," said Dì Phượng, not loudly, and Quân was there. "Take Diễm to the hospital. Now. Do what your sister says."

Quân, who had been about to say something, closed his mouth and went for the motorbike.

"Dì," said Tuyết, after they'd gone. "I'm his cousin. Not his sister."

"In this house," said Dì Phượng, "when you tell my son what to do, you are his sister." She went back into the workroom. "Somebody has to mind the counter," she said over her shoulder. "I have a wedding at four and two Germans who want to be married in linen. Linen! In October!"

---

So Tuyết minded the counter.

She had not intended to. She had intended, that day, to walk to the office of the man who did legalized translations with the death certificates in her sleeve. Instead she found herself behind the glass counter of Tiệm May Chỉ Vàng, between the button basket and the fan of swatches, with the bolts of silk leaning on their shelves behind her like a hundred colored books, a phone in her hand to call Quân, and a line of customers.

She discovered in the first ten minutes that she was very good at it.

It was, she realized, the same job. People came in not knowing what they wanted, or knowing exactly what they wanted and wanting the wrong thing, and they had a problem, and they were anxious about money, and they were in a hurry, and somebody had to stand on the other side of the counter and listen to all of it and then translate it into something that could be done, safely, by Thursday.

"Any allergies?" she asked a woman from Leeds who wanted a wool jacket.

"To what?"

"To wool. Some people itch."

"I—actually, yes, a bit, round the neck."

"Then we'll line the collar in silk," said Tuyết, and wrote it on the order card in her neat small pharmacy print, *collar lined in silk, client sensitive*, and the woman stared as though a small miracle had been performed at the counter.

A young Dutch couple wanted matching shirts for a festival. She asked them what festival, how hot, how long they would be standing up, whether there would be dancing. A man from Denver wanted a suit by tomorrow. She told him what it would cost to have a suit by tomorrow and what it would cost to have a good suit by Friday, and wrote both numbers down, and turned the card around so he could see them side by side, the way she showed patients the price of a brand-name drug next to its generic, and he chose Friday, and thanked her.

Bà Mận's younger nephew lingered at the mouth of the lane with his menu and watched her work, frowning. Once a pair of Australians who had been walking toward Ánh Dương changed course and came into Chỉ Vàng instead, because Tuyết had been standing in the door in her navy slacks with her reading glasses hung on a beaded chain, and one of them said to the other, "She looks like she knows what she's doing."

In the workroom, Dì Phượng cut. Tuyết could hear the scissors through the wall: the long low *shhhhk* of a straight seam, the small bites of a curve. Every now and then they stopped, and Tuyết knew without looking that her aunt was listening.

At two, Quân called. Diễm's blood test showed what Tuyết had expected. Her platelets were low but not dangerous. The doctor had sent her home to rest and drink and come back on Thursday to be counted again.

Tuyết took a sheet of paper from the order pad. On it she drew a grid. Time down the side, every two hours. Across the top: temperature, fluid in, urine, paracetamol given, symptoms. It was a medication administration record. She had made a thousand of them. She stuck it to the refrigerator in the kitchen with a magnet shaped like a lantern.

Dì Phượng came in from the workroom for water, and stopped, and looked at the grid for a long time.

"What is that?"

"So we know," said Tuyết. "Who gave what, when. So nobody gives her two doses by mistake. So we see if she's drinking enough."

Dì Phượng read the grid. She took the pencil out of her hair. Under *Fluid in*, at the two o'clock line, in her own slanting hand, she wrote, in Vietnamese, *1 bowl cháo, 2 glasses water*. Then she put the pencil back.

"In this house," she said, "we write in the margins." And went back to her scissors.

---

The Ketterings came on Wednesday for their second fitting, and found the shop running on a new timetable that ran on Tuyết's grid.

Ron's jacket was on him, unfinished, in pieces held together with white basting stitches like the dotted lines on a map, one sleeve on and one sleeve off. He stood on the box in front of the long mirror and looked at himself and said, "Well, that's a man," with simple wonder. Trudy's dress was the color of a ripe apricot, cut from the 1987 photograph, and when Quân, back at work and gray with worry and lack of sleep, pinned it on her behind the green curtain and she came out, she put her hands to her cheeks and cried a little, and Ron said, "Trude," and got down off the box with his one sleeve flapping and hugged her, and the basting on his back popped.

"Oh, no," said Ron.

"It's all right," said Tuyết. "That's what basting is for. It's a rough draft."

"You hear that, Trude? I'm a rough draft."

"You've always been a rough draft," said Trudy, laughing, wiping her eyes.

They sat in the plastic chairs afterward with glasses of iced tea and Trudy told Tuyết, while Quân re-pinned the back of Ron's jacket, that the wedding was costing them more than their first house. "Our daughter's marrying a lovely boy," she said. "Lovely. His family's from Cleveland. They want a band. We said, a band? We had a man with a record player."

"My husband is a band director," said Tuyết.

"Is he! Well then you know."

"I know," said Tuyết. "Bands are expensive. And loud. And they always want to be fed."

"That's exactly it," said Trudy. "That's exactly it."

"How's your sunburn, Mr. Kettering?" Tuyết said.

"Long sleeves," said Ron, raising one arm, the sleeved one. "Salt in my water. That lady across the way tried to sell me a short-sleeved shirt and I said no ma'am, my pharmacist says I'm on a peach pill."

---

On Thursday evening, Diễm's second count came back better, and the fever broke, and Tuyết did not relax, because Thursday was day three, and she watched Diễm through Thursday night and Friday with the fierce boring attention of a night pharmacist on a ward, and wrote everything in the grid, and Dì Phượng wrote in the margins, and on Saturday morning Diễm came down the stairs by herself, pale and a little unsteady, and sat at the low table, and asked for cháo with ginger, and ate it, and Tuyết finally let go of a breath she had been holding since Tuesday.

"Bác Tuyết," said Sen, who had been mostly silent all week, and who had slept two nights on a mat outside her parents' door. "Thank you."

"I didn't do anything," said Tuyết. "Your mother's body did it. I just wrote it down."

"That's doing something," said Sen.

---

On Saturday afternoon, with the shop quiet and the rain coming down soft and straight outside like a bead curtain, Quân set up the stand.

It had been his idea, after Sen's school photographs; or rather it had been Sen's idea and Quân's construction. Sen's pictures had been taken on the floor, with the phone held over the pages, and they were tilted, and shadowed by her hand, and some were blurred. Quân borrowed from Chú Tín four straight lengths of split bamboo and a lantern frame, a square one, without silk, and from these he lashed together, in an hour, with wire and a great deal of advice from Chú Tín over the wall, a kind of tower that stood on the cutting table and held his phone face down, steady, at exactly the right height over a page, with a desk lamp clipped to one leg and a sheet of white tissue pattern paper taped over the lamp to soften the light.

"Like a lantern," said Chú Tín from his doorway, satisfied, "for reading."

They brought the pattern books down from the gác, all of them, eleven ledgers with marbled covers gone soft as cloth, and set them in a row on the end of the cutting table in order of their dates. 1958. 1960. 1962. 1963. 1964. 1966. 1968. 1971. 1974. 1976. 1979. The last one had pages left blank in it.

Quân turned the pages. Sen pressed the shutter. Tuyết sat at the end of the table with the order pad and labeled.

It seemed to her the only way to do it. She wrote each label as she would have written a prescription label, plain, in the same order every time, so that someone who had never seen the books could find anything in them. *Book 4. 1963. Page 14. Áo dài, front and back panel. Client: teacher, girls' school. Notes: collar 3 cm, sloping shoulders. Hand: Bà Ngoại.* Then, an hour later, another book. *Book 7. 1968. Page 15. Child's blouse, round collar. Client: not named. Notes: "for the Lâm girl, grows fast, two fingers at hem." Hand: Bà Ngoại.* Then the next. Sen read the margin notes aloud and Tuyết wrote them down and Quân said, now and then, "Ah, I remember that family," or "That one became a doctor," or "That one moved to Canada," and Tuyết added it in brackets, and the stack of labels grew, and the light from the paper-shaded lamp fell steady and soft and even on each old blue page like light from a lantern seen from inside.

Dì Phượng came and stood behind them for a while, watching, her arms folded.

"Why do you write so much?" she said to Tuyết.

"So someone can find it."

"Who?"

Tuyết thought about it. "Somebody who wasn't here," she said.

Dì Phượng was quiet. Then she reached over Tuyết's shoulder, took the pencil out of her hand, and on the label for *Book 7. 1968. Page 15*, in the margin, wrote: *Lâm girl = Ngà. Went to France 1980.* And gave the pencil back.

---

In the evening, with the lamp still on and the pattern books stacked and the labels in a rubber band, Dì Phượng put a length of cheap white muslin on the cutting table, and a ruler, and a stub of gray chalk, and said, "Draw a line."

Tuyết picked up the chalk. It was soft and slightly greasy, and it left gray on her fingertips at once, and the feel of it on her fingers made something go loose in her chest, like the third step under a foot.

She laid the ruler down. She drew a line.

"No," said Dì Phượng.

"It's straight."

"It hesitates. Look." She pointed. The line, under the lamp, was straight, but it was not one line; it was a series of short decisions, each a little darker where Tuyết had paused and pressed and gone on. "A hesitating line is a lie. It tells the scissors you're not sure. The scissors believe you, and then they're not sure either." She took the chalk. She held it not by its end, like a pencil, but flat, along its edge, tilted, between thumb and two fingers. She laid the ruler. She drew, one movement, from her shoulder, not her wrist, and the line came out of the chalk as if it had been in it all along, even and pale and certain, a single breath of gray. "Again."

Tuyết tried again. Again. Again. The muslin filled with lines. Some of them hesitated less.

While she was drawing, Dì Phượng took her arm, lifted it a little away from her body, and passed the tape around the top of it, under the armpit and over the point of the shoulder, at the joint, and held it there, and Tuyết's next line wobbled.

"Keep drawing."

"You're measuring me."

"I am always measuring you. Keep drawing." The tape stayed. "The armhole," said Dì Phượng, "is the hardest seam. This is where the arm leaves the body. Too tight, she can't lift her arm, she can't reach anything, she can't leave. Too loose, the whole thing slips, and she looks like she's wearing someone else's clothes." She released the tape and wrote in her notebook. "Like a child leaving a house."

Tuyết put the chalk down on the edge of the muslin. Then she picked it up again. She held it flat, along its edge, between her thumb and two fingers, the way she had been shown, and she did not think about the house, or the river, or her mother's hand around her wrist on a beach in the dark. She thought about her shoulder. She laid the ruler.

She drew.

It came out in one breath, gray and even, from one edge of the muslin to the other, and it did not hesitate anywhere, and when she lifted the chalk at the end of it there was no darker mark where she had stopped, because she had not stopped.

Dì Phượng looked at it for a long time over her glasses.

"Ừ," she said.

It did not make a bruise.

---

*Hội An, the twentieth day of the eighth month, 1983*

Chị Nguyệt,

I married Tuân. There. It is on paper now and you can laugh.

I made my own áo dài. Red silk, the good one from the bottom of the third shelf that Mạ was saving for nobody. I measured myself in the mirror. Do you know how hard that is? You have to measure your own back. I used the doorframe and a piece of string and Liễu's mother held the end of the tape and talked the whole time.

Mạ cut it. Her hands shake now when she sews but they don't shake when she cuts. She said, *I cut your sister's and now I cut yours and now I can die,* and I said, *Mạ, you've been saying that since 1979,* and she said, *Because I keep cutting.*

Tuân came to the wedding in a jacket I made him that is too big in the shoulders, because I made it a year ago and he has since got thinner from being nervous. His hands still smell of the river. At night in the gác I can smell it on the pillow. It is not a bad smell. It is like sleeping near a door that's open.

Tell Tuyết the stool is still in its place. Tell her I am still coming. A boat can carry two.

I will not send this letter, because a married woman should not write to her sister like a girl, and because you would read it to Huệ, and Huệ would cry, and then she would ask what color the áo was, and I would have to admit it was the good red.

Em, Phượng

Where the Waist Falls

Bà Liễu's boat had eyes, and they did not approve of Tuyết.

That was how it felt, anyway, at five in the afternoon on the twenty-fifth of October, standing on the stone steps at the river's edge below the market while the old woman held the boat against the bottom step with one foot and waited for her to get in. The boat was wooden, long and low and shallow, painted a blue that had faded to the color of a vein under the skin, with a red stripe along the gunwale. On each side of the prow there was an eye, red and white and black, almond-shaped and a little hooded, and both of them looked straight at Tuyết's orthopedic shoes.

"Sit in the middle," said Bà Liễu. "Not on the edge. You're heavy."

"I'm not heavy."

"You're American," said Bà Liễu, which seemed to be the same thing.

Tuyết sat in the middle. Dì Phượng stepped in after her, light as a bird landing on a wire, and sat in the bow with her handbag on her knees, facing back toward them. Bà Liễu pushed off from the step with her foot and the boat slid out onto the river, and she stood up in the stern, took the two long oars that were crossed there on their pegs, and began to row, standing, facing forward, pushing the oars away from her in long crossing strokes, leaning her whole small bent body into each one and then straightening, leaning and straightening, and the wooden pegs creaked against the oars with every stroke, a dry two-note creak, *eek-ook, eek-ook*, as steady as a clock.

The river at dusk was the color of milk tea, and it was high from the week of rain, and it moved under the boat with a weight and a strength that Tuyết felt through the planks, a pull like the pull of a crowd. The old town stood along the bank with its back to them, and from the water it looked completely different. From the lane the houses were faces; from the river they were backs, the old backs of tube houses that had once all been warehouses and docks, their walls stained in long dark streaks from the eaves, their back balconies hung with laundry, a woman on one of them combing her hair, a man on another feeding a bird in a cage. Behind the market, fishing boats were tied up three deep, their eyes all looking the same way, upstream, as if waiting for someone. A man on the bow of one of them stood with a circular net over his arm, its weighted edge gathered in his hand, and as they passed he turned and threw it, and it opened in the air into a perfect circle like a skirt spun out by a dancer and fell flat on the water and sank.

"There," said Bà Liễu, with satisfaction. "That one is my nephew. He never catches anything."

---

The lanterns came on while they were on the water. First a few, then whole rows, then the bridges, the long bridge to An Hội strung with them in a curve and the small old covered bridge at the end of Trần Phú lit up gold from inside like a jewelry box with its lid half open, and all of it doubled in the river, the lanterns on the bank and their reflections underneath, red and gold and saffron, shivering on the brown water and breaking apart when a boat passed and coming back together behind it. The tourist boats were out, a dozen of them, each with a woman rowing and a couple in the middle holding a paper lotus with a candle in it, waiting for the right moment to set it on the water and make a wish, and along the banks the vendors called out *đèn hoa đăng, đèn hoa đăng*, flower lanterns, flower lanterns, holding up stacks of the paper lotuses, pink and red and yellow, like stacked teacups.

Bà Liễu had a basket of them at her feet. She did not sell any. She said she was off duty.

Tuyết breathed the river. It smelled of mud and diesel and something green and rotting and something sweet, frangipani, drifting from the garden of a hotel on the bank, and, every time Bà Liễu's oars came up out of the water, of the water itself, cool and mineral, the smell of the inside of a well. Mosquitoes found her within two minutes. She slapped her ankle. Bà Liễu laughed without stopping rowing.

"They like American blood. Sweet."

"Dì Phượng," said Tuyết, "why aren't they biting you?"

"Because I'm sour," said Dì Phượng.

"She's been sour since she was born," said Bà Liễu. "Born sour. Like a green mango. Her mother said she came out of the womb and looked at the midwife and said, *Your hands are cold.*"

"I did not say that."

"You looked it."

Dì Phượng ignored her, which was apparently a skill she had been practicing for seventy years.

---

They went upstream past the market, where the river widened and the town thinned out into the backs of ordinary houses and coconut palms and a boatyard where a half-built hull sat on blocks like the ribcage of a whale. The noise of the town fell behind them. The creak of the oars was louder. A boy sat on a step with his feet in the water and his chin in his hands. Bà Liễu turned the boat in a slow wide circle in the middle of the river, and let it drift, and sat down on the stern thwart, and took a betel leaf out of a tin and did not chew it but held it, out of habit, and looked at Tuyết.

"She stood on the steps," she said. "After your boat."

Dì Phượng, in the bow, turned her face toward the bank.

"Every morning," said Bà Liễu. "Before the shop opened. On the bottom step, by the market, where you got in tonight. A year. More. I'd come down to the boat at five and she'd be there already, standing, not doing anything. I said, *Phượng, the fish are laughing at you.* She said, *Let them.*" Bà Liễu turned the betel leaf over in her fingers. "Then the parcels started coming. Then she stopped standing on the steps. She didn't have time. She was too busy being a pharmacy."

"A pharmacy," said Tuyết.

"The American aspirin," said Bà Liễu. "You don't know?"

Tuyết shook her head.

"Your mother sent parcels. You know that, at least. Every few months, a box. Brown paper, string. Needles and thread and cloth for the shop, and the rest, medicine. Aspirin. Vitamins. A brown bottle for coughs. Little packets for fevers. Cream for the skin. In those years," said Bà Liễu, "we had nothing. Nothing. A child had a fever, you put a cold cloth on her head and you talked to the ceiling. And Phượng had American aspirin." She looked across at Dì Phượng's back. "Half the lane came to her door. She sold some. She gave more than she sold. When my boy had the fever that wouldn't break, the winter of 1982, she came down to my house at midnight in the rain with a packet in her hand and stood over him until he swallowed it."

"She sold the vitamins," said Dì Phượng to the bank, "to fix the roof."

"She sold the vitamins to fix the roof," Bà Liễu agreed. "And she gave the cough bottle to Chú Tín's father, and the fever packets to every child on the lane, and the cream to the woman with the burns from the charcoal." She put the betel leaf back in its tin. "Your mother's boxes," she said, to Tuyết, "kept this lane alive in the bad years. And your aunt kept the boxes. So."

The boat turned slowly in the current. The lanterns of the town were small and far away now, a low gold smear along the water.

---

Tuyết was ten, and it was 1981, and the kitchen on Kollmar Drive smelled of cardboard.

She had not thought about it in years. She had thought about it so rarely that when it came back now, in the middle of the Thu Bồn in a boat with eyes, it came back whole, the way a smell comes back, with no edges. The kitchen table covered in newspaper. Her mother at one end with the big roll of brown paper and a pair of scissors that had come from Hội An in the bottom of a cloth bag, the only scissors she trusted. A cardboard box from the grocery store, the kind that had held canned peaches, with the peaches crossed out in black marker. The tape gun. The terrible shriek of the tape gun, which her father used, laughing, because it made Khánh, who was five, scream with joy every time.

And Tuyết at the other end of the table with the medicine.

That had been her job. Her mother had decided it. Tuyết had the best handwriting in her class at the elementary school on Story Road, and she was careful, and she was the oldest, and so she was given the bottles. Her mother bought them at the big drugstore on King Road, aspirin and children's chewable vitamins and cough syrup and the blue-and-white boxes of antacid, and on the kitchen table Tuyết took them out of their boxes to save weight, because the parcels were charged by weight, and counted the pills out into small plastic bags, ten to a bag, twenty to a bag, exactly, and folded the instruction leaflets small and tucked them in, and then, on a strip of white tape on each bag, she wrote the label.

In Vietnamese. Her mother dictated. Tuyết wrote. In her careful round ten-year-old handwriting, with the accent marks she was always getting wrong, so that her mother had to lean over and correct them with a ballpoint, the little hooks and hats and dots above and below the letters that Tuyết, by then, had stopped using at school.

*Headache medicine. One tablet each time.*

*Cough medicine. For children, half a spoon.*

*Vitamins. One a day. For Ngoại.*

She had done it for nine years. Every few months. Through elementary school and junior high and high school, through the whole of her teenage years, through the years when she had been embarrassed by everything, by her mother's accent, by the smell of fish sauce in her hair, by the Sunday music videos, she had sat at the kitchen table every few months and counted pills into bags and written labels in a language she was trying to forget, in a handwriting that got smaller and neater and more precise every year, until the last parcels, in 1990, when she was nineteen and in her second year of college and had just decided, without telling anybody, that she was going to be a pharmacist.

She had never once asked who the medicine was for, past *Ngoại* and *Dì Phượng*. She had never once imagined a child on the lane with a fever in the winter of 1982. She had never pictured her aunt in the rain at midnight standing over Bà Liễu's son.

She had thought she chose pharmacy because it was sensible. Because it was steady and well-paid and you could do it anywhere and nobody could take it away from you. She had told Merrill that, on their second date, and he had said, *That's a very practical answer,* in a tone that meant he didn't believe it.

She had chosen it at a kitchen table at ten years old, counting aspirin into bags for a lane she could not remember, and she had not known.

"Tuyết," said Dì Phượng.

Tuyết looked up. She was crying, a little, without noise, the tears just running, and she was so surprised by it that she put her hand to her face to check.

"It's the mosquitoes," she said.

"Yes," said Dì Phượng. "They're very bad tonight."

---

Bà Liễu stood up and took the oars and began to row them home, and Dì Phượng moved from the bow to sit beside Tuyết in the middle of the boat, which made it tilt, and Bà Liễu complained, and Dì Phượng took the tape measure out of her trouser pocket.

"Sit up straight."

"In the boat?"

"You are sitting. It's good. An áo dài is for sitting as well as standing." She put one end of the tape at the top of Tuyết's shoulder, near the neck, where a seam would fall, and ran it down the front of her body, over the bust, to the narrowest point of her waist, and pinched it there. "From here to here," she said. "Where the waist falls." She looked at the tape in the light of the lanterns sliding past on the bank. "Most women, it falls lower when they sit. You, it doesn't move. You sit like you are standing."

"Is that bad?"

"It's honest." She wrote in the notebook against her knee. The boat rocked. Bà Liễu said something rude in Quảng.

"Dì," said Tuyết. "Why didn't you ever write?"

The oars creaked. *Eek-ook.* The covered bridge came closer, gold.

"Who said I didn't write?" said Dì Phượng.

---

That night Khánh sent pictures from Houston.

He had gone, at last, to the blue folder in their mother's closet, the one he had mentioned, which he had brought back to Houston after the funeral in a box with her jewelry and her good scissors. He sent eleven photographs, taken on his kitchen counter under the light from his range hood. Receipts from the post office. Customs forms, green and white, filled out in their mother's square capitals in English and below that in Vietnamese. A list of contents, itemized. *Aspirin 325 mg, 2 btl. Vitamins, children, 1 btl. Cough syrup 4 oz, 1 btl. Needles, assorted. Thread, 6 spools. Cotton fabric, 3 yd.* Dates. Weights. Every parcel weighed, every weight written, in pounds and ounces and then converted, in their mother's hand, to kilos, to the decimal.

*She kept all of them,* Khánh wrote. *Thirty-seven parcels. 1981 to 1990. I didn't know she sent so many. Did you know?*

*I packed them,* Tuyết wrote.

There was a long pause. The dots appeared and disappeared and appeared.

*I remember the tape gun,* Khánh wrote.

Tuyết opened the record of the family's moves. Between *San Jose, January 1980* and *San Jose, 1997. Tuyết licensed*, there had been a long empty stretch of line, seventeen years with nothing on it but the dates of her graduations. She added a new dot, a long one, a dot that was really a span. *San Jose to Hội An, 1981–1990. Thirty-seven parcels.* She attached Khánh's eleven photographs to it. Then she sat and looked at the first customs form for a long time, at her mother's square capitals and the weight converted to the decimal, *2.6 kg*, and thought about a box that heavy going across an ocean, and about her aunt's hands opening it.

She was almost asleep, under the net, with the laptop closed on her chest, when she remembered one more thing. A strip of white tape on a small plastic bag. Her own handwriting, ten years old, round, careful, with an accent mark her mother had corrected in blue ballpoint, the little hook redrawn over her wrong one.

*Headache medicine. For Dì Phượng. Don't give it to anybody else.*

---

*Hội An, the second day of the fourth month, 1984*

Chị Nguyệt,

A son. Born at dawn on the first, in the gác, with Liễu's mother and the midwife and Mạ giving orders from the stool. Quân. He has Tuân's ears, heaven help him. He has my temper already. He screamed at the midwife. Liễu's mother said, *Look, he's telling her her hands are cold,* and everybody laughed except me, because I was busy.

Mạ held him first. She's so thin now, but her arms knew what to do. She held him on her lap at the cutting table the next morning, which I told her was not a place for babies, and she took a stub of chalk from the jar, the gray kind, and put it in his fist, and closed his fingers round it. He held on. Mạ said, *Ah. Another one.*

Tuân rowed to the post office to send a telegram to you and then came back without sending it because he didn't know if a telegram to America cost a pig or a boat. I said a letter would be cheaper. He said, *Then write one.* So I am writing one.

The parcel from March came. The cough bottle went to Chú Tín's father. The fever packets went to the Hà family; their little one had a fever for four days and it came down on the second packet. Tell Tuyết her labels are very clear. Tell her the Hà girl's mother cried over the handwriting. Tell her the headache medicine with my name on it is in the drawer under Mạ's elbow, and I take it only when I need it, and so I have not needed it.

I will not send this letter, because I have a baby on my arm and I am writing with my left hand, and it looks like a chicken walked across the page.

Em, Phượng

Upper Arm

On the twenty-seventh of October the river changed color, and the whole town looked at it the way a family looks at the face of a man who has come home from work and has not yet said what happened.

It had been milk tea for two weeks. Now it was something thicker, a heavy opaque brown like coffee that has had too much condensed milk stirred into it and been left to stand, and it was moving faster, and it was carrying things. Tuyết stood on the river road at seven in the morning with Sen and watched them go by: a whole clump of water hyacinth with its purple flowers still open, turning slowly; a plastic chair, upright, as if waiting for someone to sit; branches; a mat; a single green coconut bobbing like a buoy; a sandal. The water had come up over the bottom two of the stone steps where Bà Liễu had held her boat two days ago, and it lapped at the third, and it made a sound against the stone that it had not made before, a hungry slapping sound.

"Upstream it rained," said Sen. "In the mountains. All night. Bà says the mountains are sending us their laundry."

Tuyết's phone buzzed in her pocket. She looked. A text message in Vietnamese from a number she did not recognize, an official alert, long, with numbers in it. She read it twice. Water levels at a station upstream. A level at Hội An. A warning level. Another number, higher, expected by the night of the twenty-eighth.

"Sen," she said. "*Alert level three.* What does that mean, here?"

Sen read it over her arm. Her face did something quick and serious, an eleven-year-old's face trying to be an adult's.

"It means we lift the silk," she said.

---

The lane had already begun.

It began without anybody calling a meeting, without a siren or a speech, the way a body begins to sweat before you notice you are hot. When Tuyết and Sen came back up Giếng Đá at half past seven, every door was open and every house was turning itself inside out and then upside down. Chú Tín was standing on a ladder in his open room handing lanterns up through a hole in his ceiling to his wife, who was a pair of hands and a voice in the dark above, and the lanterns went up one after another, red and yellow and blue, round and long and diamond-shaped, like fruit being lifted into a tree. Across the lane, Bà Mận's nephews were carrying mannequins up her stairs, two at a time, headless men in suits with their arms around the nephews' necks like drunks being helped home. Two doors down, a family was lifting a refrigerator onto four stacked plastic stools with a great deal of shouting. A motorbike was being walked up a staircase by three men, one at the front, two at the back, its mirrors folded in like the ears of a frightened dog. Everywhere there was the sound of furniture scraping on tile and people calling numbers up and down stairs, and over it all, from somewhere, a cheerful Bluetooth speaker playing a love song, because nobody had thought to turn it off.

The shop was the same. Quân had rolled up the front shutter halfway and was moving the glass counter, with the help of two men from the lane, onto bricks. Diễm, still thin and gray from the fever but upright, was sitting on the stairs with a pad of paper and a marker, writing labels and handing them up. The piece-sewers had gone home to lift their own houses.

And Dì Phượng was in the workroom, under the square hatch in the ceiling, untying the rope from its cleat on the wall.

---

Tuyết had looked at the hatch every day for a month. It was a square opening in the workroom ceiling about the size of a kitchen table, framed in dark wood, with a hinged cover that folded up into the gác. Over it, bolted to a beam in the gác, was a black iron pulley wheel, and through the pulley ran a rope as thick as Tuyết's thumb, gray with age and soft as a dog's ear, tied off to a cleat by the courtyard door. On the end of the rope there was a hook, and on the hook, folded, a long sling of heavy canvas, patched in three places, that had clearly been made by a tailor, because its seams were perfect.

"In my mother's time," said Dì Phượng, "this house was a warehouse. Tea, silk, dried fish. Everything came up from the river to this room and up through that hole to the gác. Now, only once a year." She shook the canvas sling open. "Now we are the dried fish."

"How many bolts?"

"A hundred and sixty-two. And the finished orders. And the pattern books. And the machine head. And whatever Quân has left on the counter that he thinks is not important and is." She looked at Tuyết. "You will go up, I will stay down. You pull. I load."

"You're seventy-four. You should go up. I'll load."

"I am seventy-four," Dì Phượng agreed. "And I have loaded this sling for forty-five years. You have loaded it for zero. Go up."

Tuyết went up. The third step knocked under her foot. The gác, in the gray light from the balcony, was already crowded: the bolts that had been stacked along the wall, the baskets, the camphor trunk, the sewing dummy in its half jacket, the cot with its net tied up like a bun. Quân had pushed things back to make a clear space around the open hatch, and Tuyết knelt at its edge and looked down through it, and there was her aunt below in the workroom, foreshortened, gray-headed, her face tipped up, the canvas sling at her feet.

Dì Phượng did not start with the silk. She came up the stairs first, past Tuyết, along the gác to the far end, and knelt by the camphor trunk. On the floor beside it there was a tin. Tuyết had seen it before without seeing it: a round blue tin of the kind that comes from Denmark full of butter cookies and then lives, in every house in Asia, for the rest of its life, full of sewing things. Dì Phượng picked it up in both hands and stood, and set it on top of the trunk, and then, after a moment, picked it up again and reached up and set it on a crossbeam over her head, as high as she could reach, pushed back against the roof tiles.

"Dì," said Tuyết. "The water doesn't come up here."

"In 1999," said Dì Phượng, "it came to the fourth step from the top." She dusted her hands. "I don't care what doesn't come up here. I care what does." She went back down the stairs. The third step knocked.

---

They lifted the silk.

It was, Tuyết thought later, the hardest physical work she had done since she was twenty-six and helped Merrill move a piano up three flights of stairs in an apartment in Santa Clara. It was also the most argued-over.

The first bolt came up in the sling, swaying, a blue taffeta, and Tuyết hauled on the rope hand over hand and the pulley squealed and the bolt rose through the hatch like a whale breaching, and she grabbed it and pulled it in onto the floor and unhooked the sling and lowered it, and Dì Phượng below loaded the next.

By the tenth bolt, Tuyết had developed opinions.

"We should sort them," she called down. "By fabric. Silk here, wool there, cotton there. And label the stacks. And the most valuable ones should go up first."

"They are going up in the right order."

"What order?"

"The river's order," said Dì Phượng, loading. "Silk first, because silk dies if water touches it; one splash and the color runs and it's finished. Then the orders that are promised, because people are waiting. Then wool, because wool is stubborn, it can sit in the wet a day and dry and forgive you. Then linen. Then cotton. Cotton can swim. Then the satin for the people who don't ask. The satin," said Dì Phượng, with feeling, "can drown."

Tuyết hauled. The pulley squealed.

"That's not the most valuable first."

"The most valuable is what can't come back."

"That's—" Tuyết hauled. "That's a triage system."

"I don't know that word."

"It's a hospital word. It means you treat the ones who'll die first."

"Then it's the right word," said Dì Phượng. "Pull."

Tuyết pulled. Somewhere around the thirtieth bolt she stopped arguing. Her shoulders burned. Her palms, which were the palms of a woman who had spent twenty-nine years handing small paper bags across a counter, found the rope and began, very quickly, to find out what a rope was. Around the fortieth, she learned what her aunt had learned in 1981: you did not pull with your arms. You pulled with your back and your legs and your whole weight, sitting back on your heels against the rope like Bà Liễu leaning into her oars, and the bolt came up out of the hatch as if it wanted to.

Around the fiftieth, out of curiosity and something like spite, she took the digital luggage scale out of her suitcase, the one that had weighed her bag at 22.6 kilos in her garage in Berryessa, and hooked it to the end of a bolt of green silk and lifted.

"Four point eight," she called down.

"What?"

"Kilos. The green silk. Four point eight."

There was a pause from below.

"Dry," said Dì Phượng. "Wet, it's twice that, and it holds on to you."

Tuyết put the scale away.

The rain began again at eleven. It came down on the roof tiles over her head, first a patter and then a roar, so loud in the gác that she and her aunt had to shout to each other through the hatch, and the light went gray-green, and water ran off the eaves outside the balcony in a solid sheet that made the lane beyond it waver like something seen through old glass. The air in the gác was thick and hot and smelled of wet wood and camphor and sweat and the dry, sweetish, dusty smell of a hundred bolts of cloth. Tuyết's blouse was soaked through. Her hair was stuck to her neck. She did not care.

At one, Quân brought the finished orders up the stairs, wrapped in plastic. Tuyết made him bring the Ketterings' first.

"Patients first," she said.

"Customers," said Quân.

"Same thing."

He laughed and laid Ron's jacket and Trudy's apricot dress across the top of the camphor trunk, under the tin on the beam, like two people lying down for a nap.

---

At two, Sen came up with the pattern books in her arms, three at a time, in plastic bags, and Quân followed with the rest, and they stacked them on the cot under the net. Then Quân stood at the top of the stairs, counting, and frowned.

"Ten," he said.

"Eleven," said Sen.

"I count ten." He went through the stack again. "1979, 1976, 1974—" He stopped. "Where is the last one? The 1979. With the blank pages?"

"That one is here," said Sen. "It's the 1964 that's—" She stopped too.

They looked at each other.

"Never mind," said Quân. "We photographed all of them. Didn't we?"

"Not the last pages of the 1979," said Sen. "We ran out of time. On Saturday. Remember? Bác Tuyết said we would finish it on Monday, and then on Monday Mẹ was sick again, and—"

Quân was already moving. He took the 1979 book from the stack, put it on the floor of the gác in the gray light from the balcony, took out his phone, and without the bamboo tower or the paper-shaded lamp or Tuyết's labels, knelt over it and turned the pages and photographed them, fast, one after another, the rain roaring on the roof, his thumb jabbing at the screen, the last twenty pages of the 1979 ledger, the pages where the handwriting changed from Bà Ngoại's to Dì Phượng's and grew sparser, and then the blank pages, which he photographed too, because he was not sure, and which Tuyết, watching over his shoulder, understood he was photographing because they were also a record.

When he had finished, he sat back on his heels.

"Done," he said. "Now they're somewhere dry."

"And the 1964?" said Tuyết.

Quân looked down the stairs. Below, in the shop, the glass counter stood on its bricks with its drawers open. "I had it out on Friday," he said slowly, "for the German lady. The collar. I put it in the—" He went down the stairs at a run. The third step knocked like a plate hitting tile.

He came back up a minute later shaking his head. "Not in the drawer. Not on the counter. Someone moved it. Diễm thinks it's with the finished orders, or maybe Mạ—" He shrugged, helpless. "We'll find it."

"We photographed the 1964," said Sen, very quietly. "All of it. In the first week. On the floor. I remember. The pictures aren't very good."

"Then it is somewhere dry," said Quân again, and put a hand on her head.

---

At four, there was one more thing to lift, and it was the machine.

The black Singer sat on its iron treadle base by the window of the workroom where it had sat since 1962, its gold decals worn to ghosts, its wheel polished by sixty years of palms. Dì Phượng and Quân unscrewed the head from the base, a thing Tuyết had not known could be done, and lifted it together, and it was so heavy that Quân grunted, and they set it in the sling, and Tuyết pulled.

It came up slower than anything. The pulley squealed in a new key. The rope stretched and creaked. Tuyết sat back on her heels with all her weight and her shoulders shook, and the black head of the machine rose through the hatch an inch at a time, swaying, and for a long moment it hung there in the opening between the workroom and the gác, half in and half out, and she could not pull any more and could not let go.

Then hands closed on the rope beside hers. Small dry hands, with chalk in the creases. Dì Phượng had come up the stairs. She knelt beside Tuyết at the edge of the hatch and took the rope, and they pulled together, and the machine came up into the gác and swung toward them and Tuyết grabbed it and they lowered it to the floor together with a thump that shook the beams.

They knelt there, breathing.

Dì Phượng reached over, without a word, and took hold of Tuyết's upper arm, the right one, through her soaked blouse, and squeezed it. Then she took the tape measure out of her pocket and passed it around the arm, at the thickest part, above the elbow, where the muscle was still trembling.

"Now," she said, "it's a tailor's arm."

"It's going to fall off."

"Tomorrow it will hurt. The next day it will hurt more. Then it will be yours." She read the tape. She wrote in the notebook, which had somehow stayed dry in her trouser pocket all day. "I'll make the sleeve two fingers looser here. In case you keep it."

---

Merrill called at six, when the rain had let up and the light in the lane had gone a strange bronze color, because he had seen it on the news.

"There's flooding," he said. "In central Vietnam. They showed a picture. Are you in it?"

"We lifted the silk," Tuyết said.

"You what?"

"A hundred and sixty-two bolts. And the orders. And the pattern books. And the head of a sewing machine. Through a hole in the ceiling. With a pulley."

There was a long band-director pause.

"Who's we?"

"Me and Dì Phượng."

"Tuyết," said Merrill. "Your back."

"My back is fine." It was not fine. "Merrill. A bolt of silk weighs four point eight kilos. I weighed it."

"With the luggage scale."

"With the luggage scale."

"Of course you did," said Merrill, and she could hear him smiling, and then not smiling. "Is it going to get bad?"

She looked out over the balcony. The lane was empty. All the doors were closed. Chú Tín's room was dark. The lanterns had been taken down from every doorway, and without them the lane was only yellow walls going gray in the dusk, and wet brick, and the sound of the rain starting again, softly, far off, coming up from the river like a crowd.

"I don't know," she said. "Dì says it's the river clearing its throat."

---

It came at nine.

They were in the gác, all of them, eating cold rice and dried fish and pickled mustard greens on a mat on the floor by the light of a battery lamp, Quân and Diễm and Sen and Dì Phượng and Tuyết, when Sen, who had gone to the top of the stairs to look, said, "Bà," in a voice that made everyone put down their bowls.

Tuyết went and looked.

At the bottom of the stairs, in the dark of the shop, something was moving on the floor. It came in under the front shutter in a thin bright line in the lamplight, quick and silent and flat, and spread across the tiles the way tea spreads when a glass is knocked over, and then the line was not a line but a sheet, and it was coming, and it found the leg of the counter on its bricks, and went around it, and found the bottom step of the stairs.

"It's here," said Dì Phượng behind her, quite calmly, as if announcing a guest. "Bring the lamp."

---

*Hội An, the twenty-ninth day of the eleventh month, 1984*

Chị Nguyệt,

Your letter came, the one with the forms. I read it eleven times. Tuân read it once and then went out and sat in his boat in the rain.

You say it may be possible. Next year, or the year after. You say there is a way to go that is not a boat at night, with papers, slowly, with a lot of waiting, and that you have started. You say Tuân and the baby too, perhaps. You say, *Phượng, come and sit on your stool in America. I have bought one.*

You bought a stool.

I don't know what to say to you. Mạ is very weak now. She sleeps in the afternoons at the cutting table with her head on her arms, and when she wakes she looks for the scissors before she looks for me. Tuân's mother is on the other side of the river and has no one else. Quân has learned to say *Bà* and to pull the tape measure off my neck. The shop has three orders this week and one of them is a wedding.

And I have been standing on the steps for five years.

I will not send this letter, because I don't know what is in it, and I will not send a letter until I know what is in it.

Em, Phượng

The Wrist

By midnight the water was at the eighth step from the top, and the lane was a river, and nobody on it was asleep.

Tuyết sat on the top step of the stairs with the battery lamp beside her and watched it. It did not rush. That was what she had not expected. In her mind a flood had been a wall, a roar, a thing on the news with a helicopter over it. This was a slow, patient, almost polite filling, as if somebody very large were running a bath. The water lay in the dark shop below her as flat and brown as the surface of a pond, and the tops of things stood up out of it: the glass counter on its bricks, its top just clear; the iron treadle base of the Singer, its wheel half under; a plastic stool floating upside down in a slow circle like a lost turtle. The lamp's light lay on the water in a long trembling stripe. The water smelled of the river, mud and leaves and something faintly sour, and under that of wet plaster, the house's own walls drinking. Every few minutes it rose. She could not see it rise. She could only see, if she looked away and looked back, that it had swallowed another half inch of the wall, another edge of a step.

"Don't watch it," said Dì Phượng from the gác behind her. "It likes to be watched. It shows off."

"How high will it come?"

"As high as it wants."

"Dì."

"Higher than the counter. Lower than 1999." Dì Phượng was sitting on the cot with her back against the wall and her legs stretched out in front of her, ankles crossed, her black silk trousers rolled to the shin, as if at the beach. "Come away from the stairs and eat something."

---

The power had gone out at ten. The whole town had gone with it, all at once, every light, so that when Tuyết went to the balcony the lane below was a black canal, and the houses on the other side of it were black shapes against a sky only a shade less black, and there was not one lantern anywhere. Then, one by one, the balconies began to glow: a candle, a battery lamp, the blue square of a phone. Faces appeared. People leaned on their carved railings and called across the water to each other, quietly, the way people talk in the dark.

"Chị Phượng! How high at yours?"

"Eighth step. And yours?"

"Same. My husband put the television on the wardrobe and now he's lying in bed looking at it."

"Is it on?"

"There's no power, Chị."

"Then he's very loyal."

Laughter, soft, across the black water. Somewhere two doors down a man had a Bluetooth speaker running on its battery and was singing karaoke into it, a love song about a girl at a train station, very badly, and nobody told him to stop. From Ánh Dương across the lane, Bà Mận's voice came, sharp: "Phượng! Is the American alive?"

"She is eating my dried fish," Dì Phượng called back.

"Give her mine too. I have too much."

And a moment later something came across the lane, swinging on a rope that Bà Mận's younger nephew had thrown from their balcony, and Quân leaned out and caught it: a plastic bag, inside it a packet of dried squid and a bag of roasted peanuts and, wrapped in newspaper, two of the little mango cakes, slightly squashed.

"She's returning the plate," said Dì Phượng, satisfied. "Late. With interest."

The frogs had come. Tuyết did not know where from. The river had brought them, or they had been waiting in the courtyard basins and the drains all year for this, and now the lane was full of them, invisible, and they sang, a deep slow throbbing chorus that came up off the water from every direction at once, *ộp, ộp, ộp*, like the whole lane breathing through a reed. A gecko on the beam over Tuyết's head answered them, *tắc kè*, twice, loud as a hand clap. There were no motorbikes. That was the strangest thing. For a month there had always, always been a motorbike, somewhere, the two-note horn, the idle, the rising whine; and now there were none, and the silence where they had been was so large that the frogs and the water and the karaoke man all sounded like they were in an empty concert hall.

---

At one in the morning a boat came up the lane.

Tuyết heard it before she saw it: the creak of oars on wooden pegs, *eek-ook, eek-ook*, coming slowly up the black canal between the houses, and a light swinging. Then it came into the glow from the balconies, a long low boat with eyes on its prow, and in the stern, rowing standing up, was a young man in a plastic raincoat, and in the middle, under a conical hat, holding a lantern on a stick, sat Bà Liễu.

"Phượng!" she called up. "Have you died?"

"Not yet," said Dì Phượng from the balcony.

"Good. I brought coffee."

She had brought coffee. She had brought a dented aluminum thermos of it, black and sweet, and a stack of plastic cups, and a basket of sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves, still warm, the rice inside sticky and purple-flecked with peanuts and shredded coconut and topped with a pinch of salted sesame. The nephew, the one who never caught anything, held the boat against the front of the house with one hand on a shutter while Quân let down a rope from the balcony, and Bà Liễu tied the basket to it, and Quân hauled it up, and the boat moved on to the next house, and the next, the lantern on its stick swinging, Bà Liễu's voice calling up at every balcony, *have you died? good, I brought coffee*, until it went around the corner at the end of the lane and was gone, and only the oars could be heard, fainter and fainter, like a clock in another room.

They ate the sticky rice sitting on the floor of the gác. Tuyết drank the coffee. It was very strong and very sweet and tasted faintly of the thermos. It went into her like current into a wire.

"She does that every year?" she said.

"Every year," said Dì Phượng. "Since her husband died. Before that, he did it, and she rowed."

"And before that?"

Dì Phượng ate a mouthful of rice. "Before that," she said, "Tuân did it. In the bad years. With this house's boat. And I made the coffee."

---

Quân and Diễm went to sleep at two, on a mat at the far end of the gác, with Sen curled between them. Tuyết did not sleep. Dì Phượng did not sleep. They sat at the top of the stairs together, one on each side of the battery lamp, and watched the water.

Tuyết had brought the blood pressure cuff up with the orders. It had been sitting on the shelf in the shop between the plum silk and the jar of pins for a month, and when they were lifting she had grabbed it without thinking and put it in the sling with the Ketterings' clothes. Now she took it out of its box.

"Give me your arm," she said.

"Why?"

"Because it's two in the morning and the house is underwater and I need to do something with my hands."

Dì Phượng looked at her for a long moment over her glasses. Then she rolled up her sleeve and held out her arm.

Tuyết wrapped the cuff around it, above the elbow, the thin arm, the skin soft and loose and spotted brown with age, the muscle underneath it still hard, a tailor's arm, a rope-puller's arm. She pressed the button. The cuff hummed and tightened. Dì Phượng watched it as if it were a snake that had been introduced to her as a pet.

The numbers came up on the little gray screen. Tuyết read them. She did not say them.

"Well?" said Dì Phượng.

"I'll tell you at the fitting," said Tuyết.

Dì Phượng's mouth twitched. It twitched again. Then she laughed, out loud, a short helpless sound like a sneeze, and put her hand over her mouth, and her shoulders shook, and Tuyết, who had not meant it as a joke, or had only half meant it, began to laugh too, and they sat at the top of the stairs over the dark water laughing with their hands over their mouths so as not to wake Sen, and the cuff hissed as it let go.

"It's a little high," Tuyết said, when she could. "One fifty over ninety. It's probably the flood. And the stairs. And the coffee. But you should check it again next week. And see a doctor."

"It's high," said Dì Phượng, "because my niece came from America to take my house."

"Then I'll have to stay to bring it down."

She did not know she was going to say that until she had said it. The water lapped the step below them.

Dì Phượng took the cuff off her arm, slowly, the velcro tearing, and folded it, and put it back in its box. Then she took Tuyết's hand, not gently, and turned it over, palm up, and put the yellow tape measure around her wrist, at the knob of bone, and held it.

"What's this one for?" said Tuyết.

"The sleeve ends here. The wrist." Dì Phượng's thumb lay against the inside of Tuyết's wrist, on the pulse, where Tuyết would have put her own two fingers to count. "A wrist tells you how a person holds on," she said. "Your mother had thin wrists. Strong. She held on to everything. Your hand, the boat, Khánh, Huệ, the parcels, America. She held on so hard she never let go of anything long enough to put it down." She read the tape. "You have her wrists."

She let go. She did not write anything in the notebook. Tuyết noticed that.

"She said you chose the house," Tuyết said.

The water lapped. The frogs breathed.

"Mạ said that. When I was young. When I asked why you didn't come. She'd say, *Dì Phượng chose the house.* Like a thing you'd say about the weather. Then she'd change the subject. I was angry at you for years. I thought, she chose a house over us. Over Mạ. Over me. I thought, what kind of person chooses a house." She looked down at the water. "I think I came here partly to see what kind of house you'd choose over us."

For a long time Dì Phượng did not say anything at all. The lamp hissed. The karaoke man two doors down had stopped singing; somewhere a dog barked once, on a roof, and stopped.

"Your mother said that," said Dì Phượng at last.

"Yes."

"She was right," said Dì Phượng. "And she was wrong." She opened her mouth to say something else, and Tuyết saw her decide not to; saw it as clearly as she had seen her own chalk line hesitate on the muslin. Dì Phượng closed her mouth. She looked at the stairs. "Not tonight," she said. "Tonight I'm watching the river."

---

At three, when Dì Phượng's head had begun to nod, Tuyết took out her phone. It was at nine percent. She had been saving it.

"Dì," she said. "Tell me about 1999."

Dì Phượng opened her eyes. She looked at the phone in Tuyết's hand, and Tuyết thought she was going to refuse, the way she had stopped singing on the bridge. But it was three in the morning, and the house was full of water, and perhaps that changed what a person would and would not say.

"Hold it closer," said Dì Phượng. "I'm not going to shout."

Tuyết pressed the red circle and held it close.

"In 1999," said Dì Phượng, in Vietnamese, in a low voice, to the phone, "Mạ was gone already, eight years. So it was me and Tuân and Quân. Quân was fifteen and thought he was a man. It rained for six days. Not like this. Like the sky had broken a pipe. On the third day, the water came in the door, and we lifted. Tuân pulled. I loaded. Quân carried things up the stairs and cried because his schoolbooks were wet, and then said he wasn't crying, it was the rain.

"On the fourth night, the water came up the stairs. Up and up. Past the third step, past the sixth, past the middle. We put everything we could on the cot, on the trunk, on the beams. Tuân tied the silk to the roof beams with rope, the best silk, bundle by bundle, so it hung over our heads in the dark like hams in a kitchen. The water stopped at the fourth step from the top. I sat right here and I watched it, all night, the way you were watching it tonight, and I said to it, *You can have the shop and you can have the stairs, but you can't have the gác, because that's where I keep the things I'm waiting with.*"

"What things?"

Dì Phượng did not answer that. She went on.

"On the fifth day, Chú Tín's father was on his roof next door. He was eighty. He wouldn't leave his lanterns. Tuân got our boat, this house's boat, which we kept tied in the courtyard, and he rowed it out through the front of the shop, right through the door, under the beam, with his head down, like a man coming into a low kitchen, and he rowed it up the lane to Chú Tín's and got the old man down off the roof and into the boat, and the old man was holding a lantern, a red one, the only thing he'd saved, and he held it over his head the whole way back, so all the lane could see him coming, like a lamp on a bow. And all the lane came out on their balconies, and they—"

The phone made a small sound. Tuyết looked down. The screen had gone black.

"Dì," she said. "It died."

Dì Phượng looked at the dark phone in Tuyết's hand for a while.

"Then that's where it ends," she said, and leaned her head back against the wall, and closed her eyes, and was asleep before Tuyết could ask her what the lane had done.

---

*Hội An, the eighteenth day of the third month, 1985*

Chị Nguyệt,

Mạ said go.

She said it this morning at the cutting table, with the scissors in her hand. She didn't look at me. She cut a straight line through a whole length of navy cotton without stopping, the way she always told us to, and at the end of it she put the scissors down and said, *When the papers come, you go. You take Tuân and the boy and you go to your sister. I have Liễu. I have the lane. I have Huệ's letters and Nguyệt's parcels. Go.*

I said, Mạ, who will cut?

She said, *The scissors don't need me. They're sharp by themselves.*

So today, after she slept, I measured the house. I don't know why. I took the long tape from the wall and I measured it, the way you'd measure a customer you'll never see again, so you can make their clothes from far away. The shop, front to back: eleven meters and a half. The workroom: four. The courtyard, the basin, the kitchen. The stairs: twelve. I measured each one, the rise and the depth. The third step is one finger shorter than the others; that's why it knocks. I didn't know that. Thirty years I've been walking on it and I didn't know.

The gác: the length, the width, the height to the beam where the pulley is. I wrote it all in the back of the 1979 book, on the blank pages, in a column, like a customer's numbers. I don't know who it's for.

I will not send this letter, because Mạ would want to read it first, and I would have to tell her I measured the house, and she would know what that means before I do.

Em, Phượng

Trouser Length

The water crested at dawn on the thirtieth at the seventh step from the top, and stayed there for most of a day as if thinking it over, and then, very slowly, the way it had come, it went.

It did not go cleanly. That was the second thing Tuyết had not expected. She had imagined, if she had imagined anything, a tide going out, a beach left wet and shining. What the river left behind was mud.

Not dirt. Not the honest brown mud of a garden. It was silt, fine as flour and slick as soap, a gray-brown paste that lay over everything the water had touched in a layer as thick as a finger, and it smelled exactly like the inside of a clay pot that has been left out in the rain: wet earth, iron, river weed, and something faintly sour and green under it, the smell of things that had been underwater and had not liked it. It coated the shop floor. It coated the bottom five steps of the stairs, each one a little less, so that the stairs looked like they had been dipped in chocolate by a careless confectioner. It filled the stone basin in the courtyard and drowned the rau răm. It lay on the counter's bricks, and in the counter's drawers, and inside the iron curls of the Singer's treadle base, and on the treadle itself, and on the floor of the kitchen, and on the mint-green plastic stools, which now were not mint-green but the color of milky coffee.

"Rubber boots," said Quân, at seven in the morning on the first of November, handing a pair down from a hook in the gác. They were pink, and two sizes too large, and had cartoon frogs on the toes. "Diễm's sister's."

Tuyết put them on. She went down the stairs, past the third step, which knocked even through the mud, and stepped off the bottom step into the shop.

The mud took her boot to the ankle and held it.

---

The whole lane was out.

It was out in the way it had been out before the flood, every door open, every family turning the house inside out, but now in reverse, and in the sun. The sun had come back on the morning of the first like an apology, enormous and hot and white, and it fell on the wet lane and the wet walls and the wet brick, and steam rose off everything. The yellow walls, washed by the river, were darker and mottled and gave off a damp limey smell like a plastered room that has just been painted. The brick of the lane was invisible under mud. People were shoveling it. They shoveled it out of their doorways into the lane, and other people shoveled it from the lane into barrows, and a man with a small gasoline pump had a hose running down to the river, which was still high and fast and brown, and was pumping the river back up into the lane to wash the river out of it, which struck Tuyết as so perfectly logical and so perfectly absurd that she stood in the doorway in her pink frog boots and laughed until Diễm came and handed her a shovel.

Everything that had been carried up was now being carried down and out into the sun. Mattresses leaned on walls to dry. Plastic chairs stood upside down in rows. Chú Tín's lanterns, the ones that had gone up through his ceiling, came down again unharmed, and he hung them from a line strung across the lane, dozens, red and yellow and blue, to air, so that the muddy lane was suddenly roofed again with silk, glowing in the white sun, and under it people shoveled. Bà Mận's mannequins stood on her step in their suits, headless, drying in a row like a jury. A family two doors down had laid every one of their cooking pots out on the brick in order of size, like a set of Russian dolls taken apart. Somebody's television sat on a stool in the middle of the lane, its screen blank and gray, as if waiting to be asked a question.

And everyone talked. They talked across the lane, shovel to shovel, the way they had talked across the dark water from their balconies: how high at yours, how long, who had lost what, who had a pump, who had a spare broom. The talk had the giddy, exhausted, slightly hysterical tone of people at a party after a funeral. Bà Mận, in rubber boots and a lilac shower cap, shoveling mud out of Ánh Dương with fierce efficiency, called across to Dì Phượng, "Your American is shoveling!"

"She's very strong," Dì Phượng called back. "She has a tailor's arm now."

"Since when?"

"Since Tuesday."

---

They shoveled for two days. Tuyết's tailor's arm, which had hurt on Wednesday as promised and hurt more on Thursday as promised, now settled into a new, deep, general ache that seemed to include her whole back, both legs, and the soles of her feet inside the frog boots. She did not care. She shoveled. She scrubbed the tiles with a stiff broom and a bucket. She scrubbed the stairs, step by step, on her knees. She found that she could not stop. It was, she thought, a little like the night shifts after her father died, when she had cleaned the pharmacy's shelves at three in the morning, one by one, because her hands needed to do something.

On the second day, at noon, Ron Kettering appeared at the mouth of the lane in long sleeves, a sun hat and a pair of rubber boots, carrying a mop.

"Thought you folks might need a hand," he said. "Trude's back at the apartment. She's making sandwiches."

It turned out that the Ketterings had not gone home. They had never been going home, not until spring; they were what Ron called snowbirds, who had wintered in Florida for nine years, got bored, and decided this year to winter in Vietnam instead, in a rented apartment near the beach that had flooded only on the ground floor, where they kept no ground-floor things. They had stood on their balcony for two days watching the river come over the fields, and on the third day Ron had gone out and bought a mop.

"I did heating and cooling forty-one years," Ron said, surveying the shop with professional calm. "I've seen a lot of wet basements. This here's a wet basement with a nice view."

He took over the man with the gasoline pump. Within an hour he had the man's pump working twice as well, by means of a length of hose and a lot of pointing, and the two of them, without a word of each other's language, were washing out every doorway in Giếng Đá in turn, Ron calling "Okay! Okay! Next!" and the pump man calling back what Sen said was the Vietnamese for "Okay! Okay! Next!" At three, Trudy arrived with a cooler of egg-salad sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off, and the lane ate them, standing in the mud, with polite astonishment, and Chú Tín pronounced them "American bánh mì," and asked for another.

---

On the third day they got to the machine.

The Singer's iron treadle base had spent two days under the river, and it showed. The big wheel, which had turned so smoothly under Dì Phượng's palm for sixty years, was frozen. The treadle plate under the table would not rock. The ornate iron legs, curled and pierced in a pattern of leaves and the word SINGER in openwork letters along the crossbar, were packed with mud in every curl, and where the mud had been wiped away the iron underneath had bloomed with orange rust, fine as pollen.

Tuyết knelt beside it on the clean wet tiles with a bucket and a rag and looked at it.

"Dì," she said. "Let me buy you a new one."

Dì Phượng, who was sitting on a stool beside her with her trousers rolled up and her feet in a basin of clean water, looked at her.

"A good one," said Tuyết. "Electric. There's a Japanese one, computerized, it does buttonholes by itself and embroidery and it has a light. I looked it up. I can order it from Đà Nẵng. It would be here in a week. Please. Let me."

She heard herself. She heard, under the words, what she was really asking, the thing she had been asking for five weeks at every table on the lane: *let me pay for something. Let me put something into this house that is mine.*

Dì Phượng took her feet out of the basin and dried them carefully on a towel, one and then the other.

"Does the Japanese one know my foot?" she said.

"It doesn't have a foot. It has a pedal."

"Then no." She put her sandals on. "This one knows my foot. Sixty years. It knows when I'm angry and when I'm tired and when I'm sewing something I don't want to finish. The Japanese one would know nothing. It would be very polite and know nothing." She stood up. "Chú Tín!" she called toward the lane. "Bring the oil!"

Chú Tín came with the oil. He came with an oil can with a long spout like a heron's beak, a wire brush, a rag, a screwdriver, a jar of something black and thick that smelled of tar, and an air of enormous expertise. He squatted beside the treadle base with his bad knees up around his ears, despite the fish oil, and said, "Ah. Old friend," to the machine, and began.

They worked on it together for two hours, the three of them, while the lane shoveled around them. Chú Tín brushed the rust out of the iron curls with the wire brush, and it came away in orange dust that stuck to their fingers. Tuyết scrubbed the mud out of the joints with the rag and a bucket of clean water and an old toothbrush that Quân produced from somewhere. Dì Phượng sat on her stool and directed, pointing with a chopstick at the places that needed oil, and Chú Tín oiled them, a single bead each, from the long spout, and the oil went into the iron dark and gold and sank in.

Then Dì Phượng put her palm on the big wheel and pushed.

Nothing.

Chú Tín oiled the axle again. Tuyết wiped it. Dì Phượng pushed again.

The wheel moved. An inch. It gave a long, rusty, grinding shriek, like a gate in a horror film, and every person in the lane stopped shoveling and turned to look.

"Again," said Dì Phượng.

She pushed again, and the wheel turned, a quarter turn, shrieking a little less, and the belt that ran up to where the head would go slapped once against its pulley, and Chú Tín oiled, and Tuyết wiped, and Dì Phượng put her foot, her bare foot, on the treadle plate, and rocked it, heel and toe, heel and toe, and the wheel turned, and turned, and the shriek fell to a groan, and the groan fell to a creak, and the creak fell, after a long while, to a sound Tuyết recognized from the first morning, from under her aunt's voice and the scissors and the coffee dripping through its little filter: a soft, steady, iron *thrum-thrum, thrum-thrum*, like the heart of a large calm animal.

Dì Phượng kept rocking. Her face did not change. Her foot moved heel and toe, heel and toe, on the iron plate.

"There," she said. "It remembers."

Out in the lane, under the lanterns, Ron Kettering, who had been watching from the doorway with the pump man, began to applaud. The pump man joined in. Then Bà Mận, from her step, in her shower cap. Then the whole lane.

---

That evening, with the Singer's head back on its base and its wheel turning and the shop floor scrubbed down to the original tiles, green and white and brown in a pattern like a checkerboard that had been rained on, Dì Phượng measured Tuyết's legs.

She did it standing in the doorway of the shop, with the lane outside drying in the dusk under Chú Tín's lanterns. She knelt, which made Tuyết want to say something about her knees, and laid the tape from Tuyết's waist down the outside of her leg, over the hip, past the knee, to the ankle bone, and then past the ankle bone, and down to the top of the pink frog boot.

"Trousers," said Dì Phượng, "must clear the mud."

"There's no mud in San Jose."

"There's mud everywhere," said Dì Phượng. "Some places hide it better." She wrote in the notebook, and got up, slowly, one hand on the doorframe and one on Tuyết's arm, and Tuyết held her up without thinking about it, and her aunt let her.

---

The 1964 book was found on the fourth of November, at the very bottom of the glass counter, on the lowest shelf, behind a box of zippers, in a plastic bag.

Quân found it. He had been emptying the counter's last shelf into a bucket, and he came out from behind the counter holding the bag in both hands at arm's length, the way one carries something that has died, and set it on the cutting table, and nobody said anything.

The bag had been knotted at the top. It had not been enough. River had got into it, slowly, over two days, and the ledger inside had drunk it. The marbled cover had gone to pulp, soft and gray and swollen. The pages had swelled and stuck together into a single block like a brick of wet bread, and when Quân, very carefully, with a knife, separated the edge of the cover from the first page, the blue squared paper came away in a damp gray scrap, and under it the pencil lines were smudged into a soft cloud and the ink had run, blue, into long feathers down the page. Of the garment that had been drawn there, a jacket perhaps, or a child's dress, nothing could be read but one corner of a collar and, in the margin, in Bà Ngoại's slanting hand, half a word.

Quân stood looking at it. Sen stood beside him, very still, her hand over her mouth.

Dì Phượng came in from the courtyard, and saw it, and stopped. She came to the table. She did not touch the book. She looked at it the way Tuyết had seen people look at a prescription for something that could not be cured: carefully, with a terrible courtesy.

"1964," she said.

"Mạ," said Quân. "I'm sorry. I put it in the counter for the German lady. And then the water, and Diễm, and I didn't—"

"I know."

"I'm sorry."

"I know." She put a hand on his arm without looking at him. She looked at the book.

Tuyết took out her phone.

She did it without deciding to. She opened the place where the family kept things, and found the folder Sen had made in the first week, the one with the tilted, hand-shadowed, slightly blurred pictures taken on the workroom floor, and found inside it the pictures of the 1964 book, all of them, every page, and turned the phone around, and held it out.

Dì Phượng looked at the phone. She looked at Tuyết. Then she took it, in both hands, the way she had taken the box of chocolates on the first night.

The first page was there. The marbled cover, in the photograph, whole, a little crooked, Sen's thumb in one corner. Dì Phượng touched the screen with one finger, as if it might be hot, and the page turned. A jacket for a schoolmaster. The page turned. A child's dress, smocked at the yoke, *for the Hà girl, six years.* The page turned. An áo dài, front and back panels, the side seam drawn in at the waist and let out again, and in the margin, in Bà Ngoại's hand, *Phượng cut this. First time.*

Dì Phượng stopped. She held the phone very still.

The lamp on the cutting table hummed. Outside in the lane somebody was rinsing a bucket, and the water ran away down the brick toward the river, and Chú Tín's lanterns swayed overhead on their line in the evening air from the water, and nobody in the workroom said anything at all, and Dì Phượng stood at the cutting table with the phone in both hands and the ruined book in front of her and looked at the photograph of the first garment she had ever cut, at twelve years old, under her mother's eye, and the screen lit her face from below, blue-white, and she did not turn the page, and she did not hand it back.

---

*Hội An, the fifteenth day of the seventh month, 1985*

Chị Nguyệt,

Last night was a happy night and I want to put it somewhere before it goes.

There was bài chòi by the river, the first in a long time. Somebody fixed the huts and somebody found the old cards and young Cẩm, the one from the boatyard with the big voice, called. Tuân carried Mạ there on his back, all the way from the lane, and she pretended to complain the whole way and held on with both arms round his neck like a girl. We sat in a hut on the left side with Quân asleep on a mat and Mạ wrapped in a blanket and Liễu and her husband, and the river was full of stars.

Cẩm sang a verse about me. About a tailor who sews so fast her needle catches fire. Everybody laughed. Then Tuân, who has the worst voice on the lane, stood up in the hut and sang back at him, the old ferry song, with all the words right this time, because I taught him:

*At the ferry I wait, the water is wide,
the boat comes back, and I'm still on this side.*

And then he looked at me, and I sang the next line, the one that answers. In front of everybody. I haven't done that since before you left.

*The boat can come back as often as it likes;
the girl on this side has learned to like the side.*

The whole river clapped. Mạ woke up and asked what she'd missed.

I will not send this letter, because it's a happy one, and it would make all the others look like lies. They weren't lies. They were just written on different nights.

Em, Phượng

The Trouser Hem

The district manager's name was Craig, and he called on the ninth of November at four in the morning Hội An time, which was one in the afternoon in San Jose, which was when Craig did what he called his "people calls."

"Trish," he said. Tuyết had been Trish at work for twenty-nine years; it was on her badge under T. DANG, PHARMD; nobody at the pharmacy had ever been able to make the sound of her real name and she had long ago stopped asking them to try. "Trish. How's the family thing?"

"There was a flood."

"Oh, wow. Are you okay?"

"I lifted a sewing machine through a hole in the ceiling."

There was a pause in which Craig audibly decided that this was a metaphor. "Well, that's—that's great, Trish. Listen. Your leave was through the fifteenth. Are we looking at the fifteenth?"

Tuyết sat on the cot under the mosquito net in the gác in the dark with the phone against her ear. Through the gauze she could see the sewing dummy in its half jacket, and the beams, and, high on the crossbeam above the camphor trunk where Dì Phượng had pushed it on the twenty-seventh, the round blue tin, catching a little light from the lane. Downstairs, the Singer was silent. The house smelled, still, faintly, of river.

"No," she said. "We're looking at December."

"December." Craig absorbed this. "Trish, that's, I mean, I'd have to—"

"Then do it," said Tuyết, in her counter voice, the one for prior authorizations. "I have four hundred and twelve hours of unused leave going back to 2011. I've never asked you for anything. I've covered every Christmas Eve for nine years. I'm asking."

Craig said he would see what he could do. Craig always said he would see what he could do. This time, she thought, after she hung up, he might actually look.

---

"We're going to Trà Quế," said Dì Phượng, on the morning of the tenth. "On bicycles."

"Dì, you're seventy-four."

"You keep telling me that. As if I'll forget." She was already wheeling a bicycle out of the courtyard, a black upright lady's bicycle older than Tuyết, with a wicker basket on the front and a rear rack and a bell that had rusted silent, and she threw a leg over it with no visible effort. "The motorbike is for people in a hurry. We're not in a hurry. We're going to look at vegetables."

They rode out of the old town at seven, through streets still raw from the flood, past houses with their furniture out drying in the sun for the tenth day and their walls scrubbed pale, past a school where children in white shirts were carrying their desks back inside two to a desk like a procession of ants carrying leaves. Dì Phượng rode ahead, upright, slow and absolutely steady, her nón lá tied under her chin with the strip of indigo, and she did not look back. Tuyết, on the same rented bicycle with the same giant's seat, which she had finally persuaded the stand on Trần Phú to lower with a hammer, rode behind her and found, to her humiliation, that she could not keep up.

"Dì! Slow down!"

"I am going slowly!"

"Then go slower!"

"There's no such thing," called Dì Phượng over her shoulder, and rode on.

The fields opened. And they were not, Tuyết saw, what they had been on the ride to An Bàng a month ago. The rice was gone; it had been cut before the rains. In its place the paddies lay flat and full of water to the brim, a whole landscape of mirrors laid side by side, each one holding a piece of the sky, white and blue, with the low dikes between them like the lead between pieces of stained glass. The water was still, so still that the egrets standing in it stood twice, once up and once down, white on white. A buffalo was walking along a dike with a small boy on its back, and the buffalo walked in the water too, upside down, with the boy hanging from it by his knees.

And everything was green. The flood had laid its silt over the land and the land had drunk it and, in ten days, the banks of every channel, the edges of every dike, every patch of ground that was not water, had burst into a green so new and so bright that it looked wet, a green like the inside of a lime. Tuyết's pharmacist mind said *nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, alluvial deposit*, and her eye said *green*, and her eye won.

---

Trà Quế was a village of gardens.

It sat between the river and a lagoon on a low bank of sandy earth, and the whole of it, between the houses, was beds: long, narrow, raised beds of dark soil, each one the width of a person's reach, combed into ridges, running in rows like the lines on a page, and in them grew the herbs Tuyết had smelled in the market on her first morning, basil and mint and rau răm and the round leaves of the one she still could not name, and lettuce, and coriander, and garlic chives with their flat dark blades. The flood had come through here too. Some of the beds were still under a skin of gray silt, and on them, everywhere, men and women in conical hats were bent with long-handled rakes and hoes, combing the silt into the soil, rebuilding the ridges, and in shallow baskets at the ends of the rows there were heaps of something dark green and glistening and stringy that smelled powerfully of the sea.

"Seaweed," said Dì Phượng, getting off her bicycle. "From the lagoon. They dig it into the beds. That's why the herbs taste like that." She inhaled. "Like the sea grew a garden."

The smell came over Tuyết in layers. Wet earth, rich and dark as coffee grounds. The iodine-salt reek of the seaweed, so strong it almost had a color. And over it, as they walked between the beds, rising off each row as they passed like steam off soup, the herbs: a clean sharp mint, a sweet licorice basil, the peppery bite of the rau răm, and then that unnamed one again, the lime grown up next to a pine.

"Dì," she said. "What's that one? The round leaves."

"Húng lủi," said Dì Phượng. "No. Wait." She bent and picked a leaf and crushed it and smelled. "Húng quế? No." She frowned at it. "Your grandmother had a name for it. Every village has another. Everybody here calls it something different." She held it under Tuyết's nose. "Does it matter what it's called, if you know the smell?"

"It matters to me," said Tuyết. "I like to know what things are called."

"I know you do," said Dì Phượng, and tucked the leaf into Tuyết's shirt pocket, and walked on.

---

They ate at the house of a woman Dì Phượng had made a wedding áo dài for in 1987. The woman's name was Bà Thoa and she was in her sixties now and she had a garden of herbs that ran all the way down to the lagoon and a kitchen open on one side to it, and when she saw Dì Phượng get off her bicycle she let fall her rake, and when she learned that Tuyết was the American niece she sat Tuyết down on a bench under a trellis of bitter melon and fed her.

She made a dish she called the three friends. Tuyết had never had it. It was three things: a curled pink shrimp, a slice of boiled pork belly, and a sprig of herbs, laid together and then tied around the middle, all three, with a single long blade of garlic chive, knotted, so that each one was a little bundle like a bouquet tied with a green ribbon. You dipped it in a sauce of fermented shrimp and chili and ate it in one bite, and it was sweet and fat and fresh and salt and sharp all at once.

"Three friends," said Bà Thoa. "The shrimp from the river, the pig from the land, the herb from the garden. Tied together, so they can't argue."

"Like sisters," said Dì Phượng.

Tuyết looked at her.

"Three," said Dì Phượng, holding up a bundle. "Nguyệt, Huệ, Phượng. Tied together by a piece of grass." She ate it. "The grass is very strong," she said, chewing. "Until it isn't."

---

After lunch, sitting on Bà Thoa's bench in the green shade with a glass of iced tea that tasted faintly of the lagoon, Dì Phượng said, "Show me your line."

"My what?"

"Your line. Your dots. Sen told me. Where the family went. On the little computer." She held out her hand. "Show me."

Tuyết did not have the laptop. She had her phone. She opened the record of the family's moves on it and handed it over, and Dì Phượng held it far away from her face, then close, then took her glasses off the tape-measure cord and put them on and held it at the right distance, and scrolled with one stiff finger, slowly, from the beginning to the end.

*Hội An, 1958. Bà Ngoại opens the shop.*

*Hội An, 1971. Tuyết born.*

*Cửa Đại, June 1979.* The tilted green sea. The gray sandbags. *Dì Phượng: "Later."*

*San Jose, January 1980. Mạ said "for Tết."*

*San Jose to Hội An, 1981–1990. Thirty-seven parcels.*

*San Jose, 1997. Tuyết licensed.*

*San Jose, 2009. Ba.*

*San Jose, December 2025. Mạ.*

*Hội An, 27 September 2026. Tuyết arrives.*

Dì Phượng scrolled back to the beginning and down to the end again. Then she lowered the phone to her lap and took her glasses off.

"It's very neat," she said.

"Thank you."

"It's all people who left."

Tuyết opened her mouth and shut it.

"Hội An, 1958, then nothing. Then you. Then the boat. Then America, America, America." Dì Phượng held the phone out to her. "Where is 1983? I married Tuân in 1983. Where is 1984? Quân. Where is 1991, when Mạ died? I sewed her last áo myself and put it on her myself. Where is 1999? The water to the fourth step. Where is 2015? Tuân." She put the phone in Tuyết's hand and closed Tuyết's fingers around it, the way a shopkeeper closes a child's fingers around change. "Your line has a hole in it the shape of this house."

Tuyết sat with the phone in her hand under the bitter melon. The lagoon lay flat and silver beyond the garden. Somewhere a rooster crowed, late and out of tune.

"I'll fix it," she said.

"No. You'll ask Sen to fix it. She knows the dates better than you." Dì Phượng put her glasses back on their cord. "And 1985."

"What happened in 1985?"

Dì Phượng looked at the lagoon.

"Leave 1985 empty," she said. "For now. You'll know what to write."

---

That evening Sen sat at the cutting table with the laptop, very serious, and added the dots while Dì Phượng dictated and Tuyết watched. *Hội An, 1983. Phượng marries Tuân.* Sen found a photograph for it in the private family space, one Quân had added years ago, scanned from a print: a young woman in a red áo dài, unsmiling, beside a young man with big ears in a jacket too large in the shoulders. *Hội An, 1984. Quân born.* *Hội An, 1991. Bà Ngoại.* *Hội An, November 1999. The water to the fourth step from the top.* *Hội An, 2015. Ông Tuân.* *Hội An, October 2026. The water to the seventh step. Everyone lifts the silk.*

And between 1984 and 1991, at Dì Phượng's instruction, a dot with a date and a place and nothing else.

*Hội An, 1985.*

Sen looked up. "What do I write, Bà?"

"Nothing," said Dì Phượng. "Bác Tuyết will write it."

The line, when Sen turned the laptop around, looked different. It was the same line. But it had two sides now, the way a seam has two sides, the dots on one side going away and the dots on the other side staying, and between them, at the place where they ran closest, a single empty dot.

---

The papers came on the eighteenth of November.

They came by courier, in a stiff white envelope with a red stripe, carried up the lane by a young man in a helmet who could not find the number and asked Bà Mận, who brought him across the lane herself with great ceremony and stood on the step to watch it opened. Inside was Dì Huệ's power of attorney, done at the consulate in Melbourne and then made legal, with a great many stamps on it in red and purple and blue, like a passport that had been on a long trip. And with it, in Khánh's envelope from Houston, his. And with both, a note from Dì Huệ in her own hand, which Tuyết had never seen, a round soft hand with long loops:

*I have signed what you two will decide. Call me when you decide it, both of you, together, in one room, and I will listen. Phượng, I am still jealous. Tuyết, eat.*

Tuyết called Miss Vân. Miss Vân, on the telephone, sounded genuinely pleased, as if a long and difficult garment were finally coming together on her own table.

"Everybody?" she said.

"Everybody."

"Then the twenty-first," said Miss Vân. "At nine. Please bring the originals. And Cô Phượng. And your decision."

---

Tuyết did not know what her decision was.

She sat that night on the top step of the stairs, where she had sat on the flood night, and looked down into the shop. It was dark and clean and dry now, the tiles scrubbed back to their checkerboard, the counter off its bricks, the bolts back on their slanted shelves in the river's order, silk at the top. The Singer stood by the workroom window in the gray light from the courtyard, its wheel still. Everything was where it had been when she arrived, and nothing was.

She had the plastic sleeve beside her. She took out her mother's note and unfolded it. *The house in Hội An is yours, con.* She had read it so many times that the fold had begun to wear through, a soft furred line across the middle of the paper like the folds in the red book.

*Con.* Your mother called the cat con. She called the postman con.

She heard her aunt come up behind her along the gác, the floorboards answering. She did not turn around. Dì Phượng went past her, to the far end, to the camphor trunk, and Tuyết heard the trunk creak as her aunt stepped up onto it, and a small scrape of metal on wood, high up, at the beam.

Then Dì Phượng came back and sat down beside her on the top step, and put the round blue tin in her lap.

It was heavier than it looked. The paint was worn off at the edges to bare metal, and there was a dent in the lid, and on top, under the dent, a faded picture of a Danish country house with a thatched roof in a snowy field, the snow gone the color of tea.

"I was going to give you this before," said Dì Phượng. "On the first night. Then on the beach. Then in the flood. Every time, I thought, now. And every time, I thought, not until she has stopped asking." She folded her hands on her knees. "You've stopped asking."

"I haven't."

"You have. You asked about the house for a month. You haven't asked about the house since the water." She looked straight ahead into the dark shop. "Read first," she said. "Then sign. Or don't sign. But read first."

She stood up, slowly, with a hand on Tuyết's shoulder for balance, and Tuyết felt the weight of the hand and then felt it go, and heard her aunt go down the stairs, one step at a time, and the third step knock, and the courtyard door open and close.

Tuyết sat alone at the top of the stairs with the tin in her lap and the note in her hand. Then she put the note down. She put both thumbs under the edge of the dented lid, the way she had heard her aunt do on the first night, in the dark, and she pushed, and it resisted, the way a tin lid always resists, and then, all at once, with a small dry pop, it gave.

---

*Hội An, the twentieth day of the ninth month, 1985*

Chị Nguyệt,

The papers came. Not the papers, the letter about the papers. A date. Next spring. An office in Saigon where we must go. A list of things to bring. Tuân's name is on it. Quân's name is on it. My name is on it, spelled wrong, with the hook on the wrong letter. Tuyết would correct it.

I put the letter under the clock on the shelf, and I have not taken it out for nine days.

Mạ is very small now. She doesn't go down the stairs anymore. I carry her down in the morning to the cutting table and she sits in the light from the courtyard with a piece of chalk in her fingers, not drawing, just holding it, and she watches me cut. Yesterday she said, *You're cutting too fast. Who's chasing you?* I said nobody, Mạ. She said, *Then slow down. There's time.*

Is there time? You would know. You have clocks in America that tell you what time it is in every country.

Liễu says go. Tuân says he'll do what I say. Chú Tín's father says the lane will be very quiet. Huệ, in her last letter, says Melbourne is cold. Quân says *Bà* and holds the tape measure in his mouth.

I will not send this letter, because I have started it four times and every time it ends differently.

Em, Phượng

Height

There were thirteen of them, and they were tied in bundles with thread.

That was the first thing Tuyết saw when the lid came off, before she understood what anything was: thread. Gray thread, the gray that matches everything, wound around and around a small stack of folded papers and knotted in a tailor's knot, flat and tidy, that she knew she would not be able to untie without cutting and then untied without cutting in four seconds, because her fingers, it turned out, knew it. Under the first bundle was a second, tied in black. Under that, a third, in white. The thread was Japanese. It was the thread from the parcels. She had counted those spools into those boxes on the kitchen table on Kollmar Drive. Six spools, the customs form had said. Black, white, gray.

She carried the tin to the cot. She untied the mosquito net and let it fall, and sat inside the gauze with the lamp on the floor outside it shining through so that the light came in soft and even, like light through tissue paper, and she untied the first bundle, and unfolded the first letter, and read it.

*Hội An, the fourteenth day of the sixth month, 1979. Chị Nguyệt, the house is very loud with nobody in it.*

---

They were written on everything.

The first three were on pages torn from a school exercise book with a pale green cover, lined, the lines a faint blue that had gone gray. One was on the back of a sheet of tissue pattern paper, the ink sinking into the fibers so that the words were furred at the edges like something seen through tears. One was on the back of a customs form, green and white, the form from a parcel, its other side filled out in English in her mother's square capitals, *Aspirin 325 mg, 2 btl*, so that Tuyết read her aunt's letter and then turned it over and read her mother's handwriting and then turned it back, and had to put it down on the blanket for a minute. One was on the inside of a flattened cigarette carton. One was on very good paper, cream, heavy, with a watermark, which must have cost something, and which said, at the top, *Hội An, the twentieth day of the eighth month, 1983. I married Tuân. There. It is on paper now and you can laugh.*

She did laugh. Then she didn't.

She read them in order. That was the pharmacist in her; she could not have done it any other way. June 1979. September 1979. Tết 1980, the red áo with fourteen fingers at the hem. May 1980, the first letter from San Jose, the two pages, *it does not have the third step. It does not have me.* October 1980, the vitamins sold for the roof. The flood of 1981, forty bolts, *my arms are ropes*. Tuân and his boat and his bad singing. The wedding. Quân and the chalk in his fist. The forms. *You bought a stool.* Bà Ngoại at the cutting table: *when the papers come, you go.* The house measured, step by step. The bài chòi night: *the girl on this side has learned to like the side.* The date in Saigon, the name spelled wrong.

And at the end of every one, every single one, the reason. *I will not send this letter, because.* Because the stamp cost more than a week. Because she didn't know where. Because the second page was rude. Because pride looked bad on paper. Because it was a happy one and would make the others look like lies.

Tuyết read the line in the September 1985 letter, *Tuyết would correct it*, and put her hand over her mouth.

She read the line in the April 1984 letter, *Tell Tuyết her labels are very clear*, and lay down on the cot with the letter on her chest and looked up through the net at the beams for a long time.

The gecko on the beam looked down at her. It clicked, once, as if asking whether she was finished.

She was not finished.

---

At the bottom of the tin, under the white bundle, there was a cloth.

It was folded small, a square of red silk, faded at the folds to pink, and it was wrapped around something flat. Tuyết lifted it out and unfolded it on the blanket, and the cloth was a child's áo, a tiny long tunic with a round collar, red, its hem absurdly, impossibly long, folded up on itself three times; and inside it, laid flat, there were two more letters.

The first was not her aunt's. It was on thin blue airmail paper, the kind that folds into its own envelope, with the printed red and blue border and the word PAR AVION, and it had been opened along its edges with a knife and flattened, and the handwriting was round and quick and slanted backward, and Tuyết knew it the way she knew her own face.

*San Jose, the ninth of March, 1986.*

*Phượng ơi,*

*The house in Hội An is yours, con.*

Tuyết sat on the cot. She did not move for a while.

Then she reached outside the net, very carefully, as if the air beyond the gauze were water and she did not want to make a ripple, and found the plastic sleeve where she had left it on the floor beside the lamp, and took out of it the folded square of paper that she had carried across the Pacific in the zip pocket where other women kept a passport, and unfolded it, along its worn soft fold, and laid it on the blanket beside the airmail letter.

The same hand. The same words. The same slant backward, the same hook over the vowel a little too large, the same quick tail on the *g*. Her mother's note was not a note. It was a first line. It was the first line of a letter, written on a scrap, and crossed out at the bottom where a second line had begun, *I don't*—and stopped. She had seen those crossed-out words a hundred times and taken them for a list begun and abandoned; her mother had begun half her lists with a word and abandoned them. A draft. Her mother had sat somewhere in the house on Kollmar Drive in the winter of 1986 and tried to write a letter to her youngest sister, and started it on a scrap of paper, and stopped, and started again on the blue airmail sheet, and finished it, and sent it. And kept the scrap. For forty years, in her jewelry box, between the jade bangle and the pearl earrings, she had kept the scrap.

*The house in Hội An is yours, con.*

Your mother called the cat con. She called the postman con. She called me con when I was sixty.

Tuyết read the rest of her mother's letter. It was short. It said that she had received Phượng's letter, the first one, the only one, after six and a half years, and that she had read it standing up in the kitchen with her coat still on, and that Hảo had found her there an hour later still standing. It said: *Stay, then. Keep it. I can't come back to a house nobody kept. Keep the shop and keep Mạ and keep the third step. The house is yours. We'll come back to it someday, and you can make us pay rent.* It said the children were well. It said Tuyết was fourteen and very serious and wanted to be a doctor and wrote all the labels on the parcels now by herself. It said: *I'm sending more thread. Don't sell it.*

It was signed *Chị.* Older sister.

And under it, the last letter in the tin. On the cream paper with the watermark. It was not folded the way the others were folded. It was folded the way a letter is folded to go into an envelope, in three, and it had been unfolded and refolded so many times that the folds had gone soft as cloth. At the top, in the right-hand corner, in pencil, in her aunt's adult hand, there were one word, small, added later: *copy.*

---

*Hội An, the first day of the first month, 1986*

Chị Nguyệt,

This one I am sending.

I have written to you thirteen times in six years and I have not sent one of them. They are in Mạ's biscuit tin in the gác, tied with your thread. I will not tell you what is in them. Someday maybe someone will read them, and they will be embarrassed for me, and that will be their business.

I am staying.

I went to the office in Saigon in my head a hundred times. I packed. I unpacked. In the end, Mạ cannot be carried that far, and I cannot leave her, and Tuân's mother cannot be carried either, and the boat, you know, he says the boat would miss him. And Quân is nearly two and has never been anywhere but the lane, and already he puts the chalk in his mouth.

And the house. Chị, if I go, they will sell it, or take it, or let it fall in. Then where will you come back to? A hotel? You will come back someday, all of you. Maybe not you. Maybe Tuyết. Maybe her children. Somebody will come down this lane with a bag and stand in front of this door, and the door has to be here, and somebody has to open it. So I will be the one who opens it. That is my whole decision. It is not very big. It is the size of a door.

Please stop sending for me. Send thread.

Tell Huệ she can stop being jealous of me now. She won't, but tell her.

Tell Tuyết her chalk is under the third step. When I measured the house last spring, I found the third step is one finger shorter than the others; that is why it knocks. I took it up to fix it. Underneath, on the riser, behind where nobody looks, she had drawn in gray chalk: a lantern, a boat, a cat, and her name, with the hat on the wrong letter. So I put the step back without fixing it. I left it loose so it knocks. Every time it knocks I think somebody has come home.

Em, Phượng

---

It was getting light when she went down.

The lane outside the balcony had gone from black to the deep blue of a mosquito net at night, and somewhere a rooster was trying out the first note of the morning and not getting it right. Tuyết went along the gác in her bare feet with the lamp in her hand, past the sewing dummy, past the bolts, to the top of the stairs, and down. One step. Two. On the third, she knelt.

It knocked under her knee as it always did, a small knuckle on a door, and she put the lamp down on the fourth step and took hold of the edge of the tread with both hands and lifted. It came up easily. It had been coming up easily for forty-one years. Under it was a narrow dark slot, the riser behind and below, the dry dusty underside of the staircase smelling of old wood and, faintly, of the river, which had been through here three times since 1985.

She held the lamp to it.

The riser was bare. Brown wood. A crust of gray silt along the bottom edge, three weeks old. Nothing else.

The river had been through here three times.

She knelt on the stairs with the tread in her hands and the lamp shining into the empty slot, and something went through her that was so large and so sudden she could not have named it, and she understood that she had come halfway around the world and forty-seven years to find that a drawing in chalk had been washed away by a river, which was what happened to drawings in chalk, which anybody could have told her, which was why her grandmother had smacked her hand.

"Not there," said Dì Phượng.

She was standing at the bottom of the stairs in the blue light from the courtyard door in her indigo blouse, her hair down, gray, past her shoulders, which Tuyết had never seen. She had a glass of coffee in each hand.

"In 1999," said Dì Phượng, "on the fourth night, when the water passed the second step, I knew it would go. So I came down in the dark with the water at my knees and took the step up again, and I took the riser out, the whole board, and I cut out the piece with the drawing with the little saw, holding the lamp in my teeth, and Tuân swore at me from the top of the stairs. After, I put a new board in. It's in the tin." She came up two steps and held out a glass. "At the bottom. Under the cloth. Under the áo. You didn't read to the bottom."

"I read to the bottom."

"You read to the bottom of the letters. You didn't read to the bottom of the tin." She sat down on the second step below Tuyết and set both glasses on the step beside her. "You read like a pharmacist. Every word, and not the box."

Tuyết put the tread back. It sat down in its place with its small knock. She went back up the stairs, and along the gác, and knelt by the cot, and lifted the tin, and turned it over onto the blanket, and out of it, from under where the red áo had been, slid a flat piece of old brown wood, a little longer than her hand and about as wide, the edges sawn neat and sanded, wrapped in a sheet of plastic and taped shut.

She unwrapped it.

A lantern, round, with ribs. A boat, with an eye on its prow. A cat, or possibly a gecko. And beneath, in letters that wobbled and pressed too hard, gray chalk on brown wood, gone soft and pale but there, kept by twenty years in the dark and twenty-seven in plastic: *T Û Y E T.*

The hat was on the wrong letter.

---

When she came back to the top of the stairs, holding the piece of wood against her chest, Dì Phượng was standing on the landing by the doorway into the gác, where the doorframe of dark jackfruit wood ran up to the beam.

"Stand here," said Dì Phượng. "Back to the frame. Shoes off. You are already shoes off. Good."

Tuyết stood with her back to the doorframe. Dì Phượng took the stub of gray chalk from the jar she kept on the shelf by the stairs, reached up, and laid her palm flat on top of Tuyết's head, pressing her hair down, and drew a line on the wood beside her with the chalk, a single line, not hesitating.

"Step away."

Tuyết stepped away. She turned and looked.

The doorframe had other lines on it. She had not seen them, in eight weeks, because they were very faint and because they were on the inside of the frame, at the edge, where you would only see them standing in the doorway looking back into the gác. Chalk lines and pencil lines and, lower down, lines cut into the wood with the tip of a knife, each with a name and a number beside it. *Quân, age 5. Quân, age 8. Quân, 12.* Higher: *Quân, 16*, and a joke drawn beside it of a very tall man with a very small head. Lower, newer, in pencil: *Sen, 4. Sen, 7. Sen, 10.* And low down, much lower than all of them, cut with a knife into the dark wood so long ago that the edges of the cut had gone soft and dark as the wood around it, a short line, and beside it, in a hand Tuyết now knew from the margins of eleven ledgers: *Tuyết. 1979. Age 8.*

The new line was a long way above it.

Dì Phượng stood looking at the two lines, the old one and the new, with the chalk in her fingers.

"You grew," she said. "I didn't see it."

And that was when Tuyết cried.

Not the way she had cried in the boat, a little, without noise, blaming the mosquitoes. Not the way she had not cried at her father's funeral, at her mother's, at the airport, at the notary, in the cold room with the man on the television cutting a pineapple into a flower. She cried the way the river had come into the shop: not all at once but steadily, from underneath, rising, past every step she had built, past the counter, past the eighth step and the seventh and every place she had told it it could not go. She slid down the doorframe until she was sitting on the floor of the gác with her back to the jackfruit wood and the piece of brown board with her name on it in her lap, and she cried for her mother standing in a kitchen in San Jose with her coat on, and for a woman on the bottom step by the market at five in the morning for a year, and for a girl at a kitchen table counting aspirin into bags, and for a gecko, and a lantern, and a cat, and a hat on the wrong letter, and it went on for a very long time, and Dì Phượng did not say anything. She sat down on the floor beside her, slowly, a hand on the doorframe, her long gray hair falling forward, and put one arm around her niece's shoulders, and held on, with a thin strong wrist that had held on to a house for forty-seven years.

When it was over, or over enough, the sky beyond the balcony had gone from blue to the white-gold of a lantern seen from far away. The rooster had found his note. Down in the lane, a motorbike started, and then another, and the two-note horn went, and a woman called out something about bread.

Dì Phượng reached down the stairs, to the second step, where she had left the two glasses, and handed one up to Tuyết, and kept one.

It was cold, of course. The ice had melted into it while she cried and the condensed milk had settled to the bottom in a pale thick layer, and the coffee on top had gone thin and bitter, and Tuyết drank it anyway, sitting on the floor of the gác with her back against her own height, and it was the best coffee she had ever had in her life.

"Dì," she said, when she could speak. "Is the notary at nine?"

"At nine."

"Can I take a picture of every page first?"

Dì Phượng looked at the tin, and the bundles, and the red áo, and the piece of wood.

"Every page," she said. "And the box."

The Panels

At nine o'clock on the twenty-first of November, in the cold room with the silent television, Tuyết stood at window three with the plastic sleeve in her hands and told Miss Vân that they were not ready.

Miss Vân looked at her. Then at Dì Phượng, who sat in a blue plastic chair behind her in the dove-gray áo dài with her handbag on her knees, looking at the television, on which a woman was demonstrating how to fold a towel into the shape of a swan.

"Not ready," said Miss Vân.

"We need to call Melbourne first," said Tuyết. "Together. In one room. My aunt Huệ asked. And we need—" She stopped. She had been going to say *more time*, and it sounded, in the cold, like the oldest excuse in the world.

"More time," said Miss Vân.

"Yes."

Miss Vân sat back in her chair. She looked, for a moment, not like a notary clerk at all, but like a young woman who had sat at that window for six years and watched families come in angry and go out angrier, and families come in quiet and go out quieter, and had seen, once in a while, something else.

"Everybody needs more time," she said. "Nobody asks." She opened a ledger, a real one, paper, with a pen on a string, and ran her finger down a column. "The eleventh of December. Nine o'clock. Everybody. And the call to Melbourne." She wrote it down. Then she called to the young man by the photocopier, and he brought jasmine tea in two glasses, and Miss Vân said, "Please. Sit. Drink. It's very cold in here."

---

Tuyết photographed every page.

She had begun at dawn, on the cot, with her phone; she finished that afternoon at the cutting table, under Quân's bamboo tower and the lamp with its shade of tissue pattern paper, the way they had done the ledgers. Each letter flat. Each side. The tissue-paper one twice, because the ink had sunk so far into it that the words on the back showed through the front like a second faint letter underneath. The customs form, both sides, her aunt's handwriting and her mother's. The cigarette carton. The cream paper. Her mother's airmail sheet and her mother's scrap, side by side, the same first line. The little red áo with its hem folded up three times, laid out flat so its absurd length showed. The piece of brown board with the lantern and the boat and the cat and the name.

And the tin. Lid on, lid off. The Danish house in its snowy field gone the color of tea.

Under each photograph, in the folder she made for them in the place where the family kept things, she typed the letter out again, in Vietnamese, carefully, with every mark where it belonged, the hooks and hats and dots that her mother had once corrected in blue ballpoint over her ten-year-old shoulder; and under that, in English, her own translation. It took her three nights. It was not a good translation. It was a pharmacist's translation, exact where it could be and helpless where it couldn't, and in the places where her aunt's Quảng turns of phrase had no English, she left the Vietnamese and put a note in brackets, the way she put notes in brackets on a label: *[a Quảng way of saying "there's nothing to be done"; literally, "the rice is already cooked"]*. She did it in English because of Khánh's daughters in Houston, who were sixteen and nineteen and could say *bánh mì* and *cảm ơn* and not much else, and because of Dì Huệ's grandson in Melbourne, who was studying to be a physiotherapist and had told his grandmother he wanted to understand her and did not know how to start.

She asked first.

"Dì," she said, on the third night, at the cutting table, with the laptop open. "If I put them where the family can read them, Khánh will read them. And Dì Huệ, and her son, and the grandson. And Khánh's girls. They'll read all of it."

Dì Phượng, who was sewing a button on Quân's shirt in the light from the lamp, did not look up.

"They'll be embarrassed for me," she said.

"Yes."

"That will be their business." She bit the thread. "Put them."

Tuyết put them. On the first of December, at eleven at night, she pressed the last button, and the folder opened, for the family, everywhere the family was: a kitchen in Houston, a brick house with a lemon tree in Springvale, a shared student flat in Footscray where Dì Huệ's grandson kept his anatomy books. And then, because Dì Huệ's son knew someone who knew someone, and because the family, it turned out, was larger than the people who were in it, one more.

---

The voices began on the second of December, in the morning, and did not stop for two days.

The first was Khánh. He did not send a message. He called, on video, at what was six in the evening in Houston, from his car in the parking lot of his dental office, with his loupes still pushed up on his forehead and his face wet.

"I read them," he said. "All of them. On my phone. In the office. Between a root canal and a cleaning. I had to tell the hygienist I had allergies."

"I know," said Tuyết.

"*You bought a stool,*" said Khánh, and laughed, and dragged a wrist across his eyes. "Tuyết. She bought a stool. I remember that stool. It was in the garage. It was wicker. Nobody was allowed to sit on it. I sat on it once and Mạ chased me around the house with a spatula." He looked past the camera, at something only he could see. "It's in my garage now. I took it after the funeral because nobody else wanted it. I didn't know what it was."

Behind Tuyết, Dì Phượng had come to stand in the kitchen door, a towel slung on one shoulder.

"Khánh," she said.

"Hi, Dì." He tried to smile, the car-salesman smile, the too-white teeth, and it did not quite work, and he let it go.

"Is the stool still wicker?"

"Yes, Dì."

"Don't sit on it," said Dì Phượng. "You're too heavy now. I can see from here."

Khánh laughed so hard he had to put the phone down on the dashboard, and for a while Tuyết and her aunt looked at the ceiling of a car in a parking lot in Houston, Texas, and listened to him laugh.

When he picked it back up he said, "Whatever you two decide. I'll sign it. I mean it." And then: "The girls want to learn. Vietnamese, I mean. Properly. They read the English and they said, Dad, why can't we read the other side. I didn't have an answer."

"Tell them to call me," said Dì Phượng. "I'll teach them to swear in Quảng. It's the best way to start."

---

Dì Huệ sent forty-one messages.

They came in all through the second of December and into the night, a whole weather system of little bubbles of sound, and Tuyết saved them all and did not listen to them at first, because Dì Phượng was in the workroom cutting and Tuyết had decided, without asking anybody, that they would listen together.

So that night after dinner, at the low table in the kitchen with the dishes cleared and a pot of tea between them and the courtyard dark beyond the door, the rau răm in the stone basin beginning, after the flood, to come back, Tuyết set her phone on the table, face up, between herself and her aunt, and pressed the first one.

"Phượng," said Dì Huệ.

Dì Phượng's hands, laced on the table, did not move.

"Phượng. I read them. My grandson read them to me, the English, and then I made him stop and I read the Vietnamese myself with my glasses and the big light. It took all day. My son had to make lunch. Phượng, you are a terrible person. Thirteen letters. Thirteen. And I was in Melbourne all those years thinking you were too busy to write, thinking you'd forgotten us, thinking you liked the house better than your sisters. Huh. Huh." A long breath. The sound of a kettle somewhere in Springvale. "You're still a terrible person. I'm still jealous."

The next one.

"Also the vitamins. I knew you sold the vitamins. Nguyệt knew too. She said, *She'll sell them for the roof. Send more.*"

The next one.

"Also you married a man with ears. I knew that. Mạ wrote me. Mạ wrote me every year until she couldn't. She never said you were waiting. She said you were *keeping*. I didn't understand the word."

And then, the ninth or tenth, after a long silence at the start, so long that Tuyết thought the message was empty, the sound of an old woman clearing her throat, and then singing.

It was the ferry song. Tuyết knew it now. She had read it on the back of a sheet of tissue paper in her aunt's hand; she had typed it out in Vietnamese and in English. It was the song Dì Phượng had sung in the flood of 1981 to put her mother to sleep on a bolt of black taffeta, and the song Tuân had sung badly in his boat, and the song they had sung to each other across a bài chòi hut in the summer of 1985 with the river full of stars. Dì Huệ sang the first line, thin and true, cracking on the high note:

*At the ferry I wait, the water is wide,
the boat comes back, and I'm still on this side.*

And then she stopped. There was a pause on the recording, a breath, and then her voice again, speaking, a little unsteady.

"I don't know the next line. I never knew it. Mạ used to sing that one to you, Phượng, when you were small, the first line, and then she'd stop and wait, and you'd sing the answer. You were three. I was six and I couldn't do it and you could. I was so jealous. I've been jealous for seventy years of a line I don't know." The kettle, again, in the background. "Sing it to me. Please. I'm seventy-seven. I'd like to hear it once before I go and sit on a stool somewhere."

The message ended.

The kitchen was quiet. The gas ring was off. The refrigerator hummed. Out in the courtyard a gecko said its name twice.

Dì Phượng sat with her hands laced on the tabletop, her eyes on the phone.

She studied it for what felt like a whole fitting. Then she unfolded her hands and reached out and picked up the phone, holding it far from her face, then close, the way she had held it at Bà Thoa's under the bitter melon, and she looked at Tuyết.

"How?" she said.

Tuyết reached over and showed her. The microphone. Press and hold. Speak. Let go and it sends.

Dì Phượng held the phone in front of her mouth with both hands, the way she had received the Story Road candy on the first night. She pressed and held. She did not clear her throat. She did not hesitate, not at all, any more than she hesitated with chalk.

"Chị Huệ," she said. "It's Phượng."

And then she sang.

---

They cut the panels on the third of December.

The green silk came out of hiding that morning. Diễm brought it from the market on the back of her motorbike, wrapped in brown paper, the bolt that she had unrolled on her counter on Tuyết's first morning, the green of a young banana leaf, and then rolled back and put away on the top shelf behind the others where nobody would see it.

"Mạ told me," said Diễm, unwrapping it on the cutting table. "The first week. She came to the stall and said, *The green. Put it away. Don't sell it to anyone. Not even an Australian with a lot of money.* I said, Mạ, for who? She said, *For the one who's asking too many questions.*"

Tuyết looked at her aunt. Her aunt was sharpening her scissors on a stone, with a small wet whisper, and did not look up.

The cutting of the panels took all morning, and nobody in the workroom spoke during it. Even the piece-sewers stopped their machines. Dì Phượng laid the silk out on the long scarred table in a single length, smoothed it with the flat of her hand from one end to the other in a long stroke like someone calming an animal, and pinned the paper pattern to it, a pattern she had drawn herself over the last two weeks on tissue paper from the numbers in her notebook, numbers Tuyết still had not been told. Then she took the gray chalk. She traced the pattern, every line in a single breath, the long side seams curving in at the waist and out at the hip, the slit that would run from the waist down each side, the two panels, front and back, the tà áo, long, long, longer than Tuyết's own legs, so long they hung off the end of the table and Sen had to hold them up off the floor like the train of a bride.

Then the scissors.

Tuyết had heard them every day for nine weeks through the wall. She had never watched them on silk. On wool they spoke. On silk they sang, a long, low, continuous hiss, *shhhhhhhhhhk*, as the blades went down the length of the panel in one unbroken line, and the silk parted behind them like water behind the prow of Bà Liễu's boat, the two edges sliding away from each other, and the green light from the courtyard moved on the cut surface. Dì Phượng did not stop once. She walked with the scissors, down the length of the table, her shoulder doing the work, her arm a rope, her eyes on the chalk.

When the first panel was free, she held it up.

It fell from her hands, from the shoulder to the hem, in the slow liquid reluctance Tuyết had felt on Diễm's counter on the first morning, like honey off a spoon, and it hung there in the light, green, nearly to the floor, and swayed in the draft from the lane, the way a lantern sways.

"Front," said Dì Phượng, and laid it down. "Now back."

---

The Ketterings came at two for their last fitting, and they brought the fish oil.

Not exactly. What happened was that Ron came into the shop in his finished suit, the gray wool with the long-sleeved shirt underneath, and stepped up onto the fitting box before the mirror while Quân tugged at the jacket and smoothed the shoulders and did a little dance of satisfaction around him with his tape around his neck; and Trudy came out from behind the green curtain in the apricot dress, the 1987 dress, and stood beside him, and they looked at themselves in the mirror bloomed silver at the edges, two people from Dayton, Ohio, dressed for a wedding in Cincinnati in a shop in a lane in Hội An, and Trudy said, "Oh, Ron," and Ron said, "Well, I'll be darned," and Tuyết, watching from the counter, thought that she had never seen two people look so exactly like themselves.

And while they were standing there, Bà Mận came across the lane.

She came in her lilac blouse, without her nephews. She came carrying something in both hands. She stopped in the doorway of Tiệm May Chỉ Vàng, which Tuyết was fairly sure she had not crossed in years, and looked at the Ketterings in the mirror, and at Ron's collar, and at the line of Trudy's apricot shoulder seam, for a long, professional, appraising moment.

Then she came to the counter and set down what she was carrying. It was a bottle of fish oil, the big warehouse-store size, with honey-colored softgels, half full.

"This came to me," said Bà Mận to Tuyết, in Vietnamese, "from Chú Tín's wife, who said Chú Tín's knees were better and he didn't need it, and that it came from Bà Liễu, who got it from the turmeric woman, whose mother is ninety-one and won't swallow anything bigger than a grain of rice. The turmeric woman said it came from Phượng. Phượng said it came from America." She pushed it across the glass. "It's American. You're going home soon. You take it. For your heart. For the plane."

Tuyết looked at the bottle. It had traveled all the way down the lane and all the way back. It had been in, she calculated, at least six kitchens.

"Thank you, Bà," she said, and took it with both hands.

Bà Mận nodded. She turned to go. At the door, she stopped and looked back over her shoulder, not at Tuyết but at the workroom, where through the doorway Dì Phượng could be seen at the cutting table with the green silk and the scissors.

"Her collars are better than mine," said Bà Mận, very quietly. "Don't tell her."

"I won't," said Tuyết.

"She knows anyway," said Bà Mận, and went back across the lane to her LED sign.

---

The last voice came at eleven that night, and it was from Lyon.

It came through Dì Huệ's son, who knew a family in Melbourne who had been on the island with a family who had gone on to France, and it was a woman Tuyết had never met, or had met when she was eight and the woman was fourteen and they had both lived on Giếng Đá, which was the same thing as never. Her name was Ngà. She was sixty-one. She had read the letters, the English and the Vietnamese both, on a tablet in her kitchen in Lyon, where she had lived for forty-six years and ran, she said, a small shop that repaired clothes, and she had recognized everything in them: the lane, the river steps, Chú Tín's father singing when he glued, the American aspirin.

"I'm the Lâm girl," said Ngà, in a voice message, in a Vietnamese that had gone soft and French at the edges, the r's rolled in the back of the throat. "From three doors down. Bà Gấm made me a blouse when I was small. Did she keep her books? She always wrote in books. My mother kept that blouse. It was the first thing she ever bought me that wasn't from my sister. It's in a frame. In my kitchen. Here." There was a rustle, and a photograph came after the message: a small white child's blouse with a round collar, pinned flat in a cheap gilt frame on a kitchen wall over a counter with a coffee machine and a bowl of lemons, and beside it, taped to the wall, a child's drawing of a lantern.

"Can you send me the page?" said Ngà's voice. "The page where it was drawn? I'd like to see her hand. Bà Gấm's hand. I was three when she made it. I don't remember the blouse. I remember her hands. I remember she smelled of chalk."

Tuyết did not have to search. She had written the label herself. *Book 7. 1968. Page 15. Child's blouse, round collar. "For the Lâm girl, grows fast, two fingers at hem."* Bà Ngoại's slanting pencil, the little round collar laid flat, the numbers, the note in the margin, and Dì Phượng's newer pencil beside it. Sen's photograph from the bamboo tower, square and clear and evenly lit, like a page seen through a lantern. She sent it to Lyon.

Then she sat on the cot under the net with the phone in her lap and listened, one more time, to the message that had come in from Melbourne at a quarter to ten, which she had already listened to six times.

It was Dì Huệ. It was very short. It was only the sound of an old woman, in a brick house with a lemon tree on the other side of the world, crying, and laughing, and crying, and then saying, in a voice gone thin and high and young, the voice of a girl of six who could not sing the answer:

"Once more, Phượng. Sing your side."

Ease

December came to Hội An the way a cardigan comes out of a drawer: a little musty, a little surprising, and then, after an hour, as if it had always been there.

The heat broke. The air in the lane, which for two months had sat on Tuyết's skin like a warm wet compress, lifted off her one morning and was cool, actually cool, twenty degrees Celsius, which her body, after nine weeks, reported as an emergency. A fine drizzle hung over the town most days, not falling so much as standing in the air, so that the lanterns over the doors glowed inside it in soft round halos, like lamps seen through a mosquito net, and the yellow walls went dark and velvety and gave off their limey smell, and the brick of the lane shone. The tourists came out in light jackets they had not expected to need, bought from the stalls on Trần Phú for a few dollars, all of them in the same three colors, so that the old town on a December afternoon looked like a school trip. The women of the lane wore cardigans over their blouses, and knitted hats, and in the early mornings, at the end of Giếng Đá, a man set up a cart with a steaming steel urn and sold hot soy milk in plastic bags, sweet and thick and faintly grassy, with a straw knotted into the neck, and Tuyết bought one every morning and held it in both hands for the warmth before she drank it.

Merrill arrived on the ninth.

He came up the lane at four in the afternoon in the drizzle, pulling a roller bag that she knew without asking weighed 19.8 kilos because she had told him on the phone exactly what to pack, a tall stooped man of fifty-seven in a rain jacket and a San Jose high school band cap, with his glasses fogged, looking up at the lanterns with an expression of total delight. Tuyết met him at the mouth of the lane. She had not seen him in seventy-three days. He put his arms around her in the middle of the brick and held on and said into her hair, "You smell like a lantern."

"It's the glue," she said. "Chú Tín's."

"Is that him?"

It was him. Chú Tín was standing in his open room with a bamboo rib in his hand, looking at Merrill the way he had looked at Sen's phone on the first day, with deep suspicion.

"This is the husband?" he called.

"This is the husband," said Tuyết.

Chú Tín studied Merrill. He studied his height, his cap, his fogged glasses, his band-director's posture, his roller bag. "American," he concluded, with no malice whatever, and went back to his lantern.

And in the shop door, in her indigo blouse, with the pencil in her hair, Dì Phượng was waiting with the tape.

She did not say hello. She stepped out into the drizzle, lifted the yellow tape off her own shoulders, reached up, a long way up, because Merrill was very tall and she was not, and looped it around his neck. Two fingers beside his windpipe. She looked at the tape. Merrill, to his eternal credit, stood perfectly still, and did not say anything, and looked down at her with his fogged glasses and his eyebrows up, waiting, the way he waited in front of a hundred and twelve teenagers with his baton raised.

"Forty-one," said Dì Phượng.

Tuyết stared at her.

"Forty-one centimeters," said Dì Phượng, in English, to Merrill, and let the tape go slack and put it back around her own shoulders. "Welcome. Come in before the mosquitoes eat you. In December, they are slow, but they are hungry."

"Thank you," said Merrill. "Is forty-one good?"

"For a man? Fine."

"You told him," said Tuyết. "You told him the number."

"He's a man," said Dì Phượng, going back into the shop. "Men don't need to wait. It doesn't do anything for them."

---

The last fitting was on the tenth, in the morning, behind the faded green curtain.

The áo dài had come together over the week the way a lantern comes together, rib by rib and then all at once. Tuyết had watched it happen through the workroom doorway. The two long green panels, front and back, joined at the shoulder and the side seams down to the waist, where the slits began. The collar, a stand collar, high and narrow, three centimeters, which Tuyết now knew was the height her grandmother had written in the margin for the teacher from the girls' school in 1963, cut from the same green and lined with a strip of the plum silk from the shelf where the blood pressure cuff had sat for a month. The buttons, which Dì Phượng had covered herself in the green silk, one by one, in the evenings, at the cutting table, under the paper-shaded lamp: eleven, from the collar across to under the right arm and down the side. The trousers, white silk, cut to clear the mud.

Tuyết stood behind the curtain in front of the silvered mirror, in a slip, while Dì Phượng lifted the áo dài off its hanger and held it open for her like a coat.

"Arms."

Tuyết lifted her arms. The silk came down over them and settled on her shoulders, cool, then warm, and fell. Dì Phượng came around in front of her and did up the buttons, all eleven, one at a time, with her small dry fingers, from the collar to the arm, and Tuyết stood still and watched her aunt's gray head bent at her shoulder and felt each button close, small and definite, like a pill pressed out of a blister pack.

Then Dì Phượng stepped back.

Tuyết looked in the mirror.

She had not known. That was all she could think. She had worn an áo dài exactly once in her adult life, a rented one, for a cousin's wedding in San Jose in 1998, polyester, too tight in the arms, and she had spent the evening holding her elbows in to keep the seams from going. This was not that. This fit the way water fits a glass. It lay against her from the collar to the waist with no wrinkle and no pull, close as a skin, and from the waist it fell, the two long green panels falling straight and slow to below her knees, the front one and the back one, moving when she moved and then a half second later finishing moving, the way her aunt's gray silk had moved on the morning of the notary. The green was the green of the banana leaf. In the mirror, with its silvered edges, she looked like her mother's face with her father's neck on top of her grandmother's hips, which was, she understood, exactly what she was.

"Lift your arms," said Dì Phượng.

Tuyết lifted her arms. Over her head, as if reaching for a bolt on a high shelf.

The áo dài pulled. Not much. A small tightness across the back, under the arms, at the armholes, a faint drag at the top of the sleeve where the muscle of her upper arm, her tailor's arm, pressed against the silk.

"Ah," said Dì Phượng.

She took the pins out of the wire loop on the hook. She opened the side seam under Tuyết's right arm with the tip of a tiny pair of scissors, three stitches, four, and let it out, and pinned it, and did the left the same, and then the back of each sleeve at the top, a little, and then stood back again.

"Again."

Tuyết lifted her arms. The pull was gone. The silk moved with her, up and over, as if it had been waiting for her to reach.

"Two fingers," said Dì Phượng, satisfied. "Under each arm. At the top of the sleeve. That's the ease."

"The what?"

"The ease. The room for moving." She took a pin out of her mouth and put it in the loop. "Every garment has to have a little more room than the body. Not much. If you make it exactly the size of the person, it's beautiful while she stands still, and the first time she reaches for something, it tears. So you add a little. Here, at the arm, where she lifts. Here, at the hip, where she sits. You add what the numbers don't say." She looked at Tuyết in the mirror. "You lift things now. So I added."

Tuyết stood with her arms still up over her head, in green silk, in front of the mirror, and laughed, and could not stop, and put her arms down.

"Now," said Dì Phượng. She took the notebook out of her trouser pocket, the small one with the cardboard cover. She opened it to a page near the middle. She put on her glasses. "Now I'll tell you."

---

She read them out in Vietnamese, one at a time, standing behind the green curtain in the cool December light from the courtyard, and Sen, who had been sitting on the stool outside the curtain with her phone, asked through the cloth whether she could record it, and Dì Phượng said, "Yes. Hold it close. I'm not going to shout."

"Vòng cổ. The neck. Thirty-five. One more than your mother's."

"Ngang vai. Across the shoulders. Thirty-eight. After you let go of the umbrella."

"Vòng ngực. The bust. Eighty-nine. Holding chè."

"Vòng eo. The waist. Seventy-four. After American cao lầu."

"Vòng mông. The hip. Ninety-eight. Your grandmother's. At the sea."

"Dài áo. Length. One hundred and twenty-two. Two fingers longer than your mother."

"Dài tay. The sleeve. Fifty-nine. For a woman who reaches."

"Vòng nách. The armhole. Forty-one. Where the arm leaves the body."

"Shoulder to waist. Thirty-eight. In Liễu's boat. It doesn't move when you sit."

"Vòng bắp tay. Upper arm. Twenty-nine. After the machine. Before, it was twenty-seven."

"Vòng cổ tay. The wrist. Sixteen. Your mother's wrist."

"Dài quần. Trouser length. One hundred and two. To clear the mud."

"Ống quần. The trouser hem. Thirty-four. Wide enough to walk. Narrow enough to look like you meant to."

"Chiều cao. Height." She stopped. "That one you know. It's on the door."

She closed the notebook. Outside the curtain, Sen pressed the screen and the little sound of the recording ending went through the cloth.

Then Dì Phượng opened the notebook again, found the pages, tore them out, very carefully, along the stitched spine, and folded them in half, and in half again, and held them out in both hands.

Tuyết took them in both hands.

"Now they're yours," said Dì Phượng. "Next year they'll be wrong. Bodies change. Come back and I'll fix them."

---

That evening, Sen recorded her great-aunt again, because, Sen said, the first one was for the numbers and the second one was for whoever came next.

They did it at the cutting table, under the bamboo tower and the paper-shaded lamp, with a length of cheap white muslin and the yellow tape, and Merrill as the model, because he was the only one in the house who had not been measured part by part for nine weeks and could therefore, Dì Phượng said, be measured properly, all at once, the way a stranger is measured. Merrill stood on the wooden box with his arms out at the angle Quân showed him and an expression of complete happiness. Dì Phượng went around him with the tape, slowly, saying each one to the phone in Sen's hands: where to put the tape, how tight, where the person should look, what to say to make them stop holding their shoulders like an umbrella, how to read a body that is lying to you about its waist. She showed the chalk. She drew a line on the muslin in one breath, and then held the chalk out to Sen, and Sen drew one, and it hesitated, and Dì Phượng said, "A hesitating line is a lie," and Sen drew another, and it hesitated less.

"Who's it for?" said Tuyết, from the doorway, holding a glass of tea.

"Whoever sings after Bà," said Sen, without looking up.

---

Later, alone on the cot under the net, with Merrill asleep on a mat beside it and snoring very gently in what she recognized, after twenty-nine years, as B-flat, Tuyết opened the folder of photographs that Quân had taken of the 1979 ledger on the floor of the gác in the rain on the twenty-seventh of October, in a hurry, without the tower or the lamp, his thumb jabbing at the screen.

She had not looked at them closely. She looked now. The last pages of her grandmother's handwriting. Then her aunt's, sparser. A school blouse. A pair of trousers taken in. Then a page, near the end, before the blank ones, that was not a garment.

At the top of it, in her aunt's hand, a single word: *Nhà.* House.

And under it, in a column, like a customer's numbers:

*The shop, front to back: 11.5 m.*
*Workroom: 4 m.*
*Courtyard, well, kitchen.*
*Stairs: 12 steps.*
*Third step: one finger shorter.*
*Gác: length, width, height to the pulley beam.*

And at the bottom, in smaller writing, added later, in a different pencil:

*For whoever comes back.*

Tuyết lay with the phone on her chest and the gecko on the beam over her head and her husband snoring in B-flat on the floor, and then she opened the record of where the family had gone, and found the empty dot.

*Hội An, 1985.*

She typed: *Dì Phượng stays. She keeps the door.*

Then she scrolled to the end of the line, to the dot she had made on the first night, in this same cot, under this same gecko. *Hội An, 27 September 2026. Tuyết arrives.* She read it over twice. Then she put her thumb on the word *arrives*, and took it out, and put in the other one.

---

The notary's office on the morning of the eleventh of December was colder than it had ever been, and fuller.

They filled a whole row of the blue plastic chairs. Dì Phượng, in the dove-gray silk, the red book on her lap in its plastic sleeve. Quân, in a pressed shirt, the tape around his neck out of habit until Diễm took it off him. Diễm. Sen, in her school uniform, with her phone. Merrill, in a rain jacket and his band cap, which he took off when he saw the framed certificates on the wall, as if entering a rehearsal room. And Tuyết, in the green áo dài, with the white silk trousers and the eleven green buttons and two fingers of ease under each arm, carrying the clear plastic sleeve, which held, now, her mother's scrap of paper with its first line, the powers of attorney with all their stamps, and nothing else.

On the silent television, a man was building a very small boat inside a glass bottle.

Miss Vân came out from behind window three when she saw them, and stopped, and looked at Tuyết in the green silk, and put her hand to her own collar, the one with the blue piping that met at the throat in a point as fine as a pen.

"Cô Phượng," she said, softly. "That's the best one."

"It's the slowest one," said Dì Phượng.

They called Melbourne at nine-fifteen, on speaker, with the phone on the counter of window three between the red book and the powers of attorney, and Dì Huệ answered on the first ring, as if she had been sitting beside the telephone in Springvale since dawn, which, it turned out, she had.

"Are you both there?"

"We're both here," said Tuyết.

"Both," said Dì Phượng.

"Say it," said Dì Huệ. "Together. What you decided."

Tuyết looked at her aunt. Her aunt looked at her. Then they said it, together, in one room, in Vietnamese, Tuyết's antique Quảng with its varnish of San Jose and her aunt's Quảng that had never been anywhere: that the heirs of Võ Thị Gấm agreed that the house in Giếng Đá lane should pass to her youngest daughter, Võ Thị Phượng, who had kept it, and after her to Quân, and after him to Sen.

There was a silence from Melbourne.

"Good," said Dì Huệ. Her voice was shaking. "Good. Now sign it before Phượng changes her mind."

Miss Vân laid out the agreement. It was three pages, typed, in a neat blue folder, and Tuyết read every word of it, top to bottom, the way she read everything, while the room waited. On the last page, under the names and above the place for the signatures, there was a paragraph she had not seen in the draft. It was in Miss Vân's careful typing. It said, as near as Tuyết could translate it in her head, standing at the counter in the cold, that the niece, Đặng Thị Tuyết, of San Jose, California, and her husband, and any child or grandchild of hers who came, would have the right to stay in the house whenever they came, for as long as they liked.

She looked up.

"I didn't ask for this," she said.

"I did," said Dì Phượng. "In October. With the tea." She took the pen on its string from the counter. "A house needs two names to argue over. Otherwise it gets bored and falls down."

"Dì, there's no rent in it."

"Your mother said I could make you pay rent." Dì Phượng turned to the window. "Vân. Write: the rent is one bolt of silk, lifted to the gác, every flood season."

Miss Vân looked at Dì Phượng. Then at Tuyết, in the green áo dài with two fingers of ease under each arm. Then, without a word, she uncapped her own pen and wrote it, in the margin, in neat blue handwriting, and initialed it, and reached for her stamp.

"That's not a legal—" said Tuyết.

Miss Vân brought the stamp down on the page with a sound like the third step.

"It is now," she said.