He Was Making Rice on That Late Winter Day

Duong Vu
Duong Vu
Nov 7 · 16 min read

The bell tower at Saint Joseph’s uttered six unbroken strikes above the Old Quarter, each a distant, waning call for dusk. A persimmon sun, the glow of a burning incense head, lit the western horizon from beneath, revealing wisps of clouds drifting away, hazy.

As Chan walked his motorbike to the gate, he winced at the dying light reflecting off the rear-view mirror. The February breeze sent a faint shiver, and Chan zipped up his wind jacket, glancing unbothered at a shirt flap that had come undone. He could tell the wind was going to pick up. A couple of kick-starts, and the Super Cub rumbled to life. Back then, having a 50-cc vehicle was still enviable for the average Hanoian. Chan was fortunate to inherit it from his older brother, who now worked in Can Tho and had decided that taking along a bike with worn leather seats and a missing left mirror wasn’t worth the hassle.

Chan checked that the oranges were neatly packed against his faux-leather briefcase inside the small screwed-on basket, before making a turn for Hang Ngang.

The last of daylight was fast receding from the brick-tiled roofs lining the old street. Chan’s eyes traced their ragged silhouette etched against the sky, now a gradient of distressed pink and grays. But for the movement of the sun, he would never have been quite sure if it was nightfall or daybreak.

Dong Xuan market was sparse and noiseless. A few aunties bargained for the meat trimmings in mumbles. The hunched poultry vendor loaded his bicycle with rustic, half-full cartons of eggs. A cyclo driver peddled on the other side of the street, his passenger seat topped with carcasses from the local butchery. Times were hard, and their rickshaws had to be put to use somehow. A few other half-shadows closed up shop, chain-locking the things they couldn’t bring home in flimsy metal cabinets that Chan always thought looked like caskets on wheels. The melancholy of day’s end filled him with a familiar and fleeting void, which he felt growing and falling with each chilly breath. At the far end of the marketplace, a lady was setting out two, three bamboo stools for the construction workers who came to her tea shop.

The night settled over Hanoi, vast and thin. Merging onto Hang Dao, where the emptiness of the market minutes ago was replaced by the sight and sound of crisscrossing traffic, Chan switched on his headlights, which cast a yellow patch, irregular and pale on the bumpy road. Though public lighting was better than a couple years before, there wasn’t quite enough illumination even in the city center. For the few households that had electric lights, it was a blessing. His family once lived on the very same street, three wealthy generations before, where his great-great aunt’s silk shop used to be. No matter how many times Chan reminded himself, he could never firmly remember which house it was. Whichever one, he imagined it must have had a balcony, whereupon he could look down onto the nameless office workers, flower vendors, students, bricklayers, the myriads of Hanoians passing in and through the vignettes formed at the foot of the occasional lamp post.

Out of the Old Quarter, the cacophony of people and bikes faded, and houses gave way to towering almond trees, many of them so old they had lived to see the start and end of two wars. Above the trees’ crown he could see the full moon of that late winter day rising. Its outer glow was so modest as to render the rim crisp and fine. Flat against a solid blue sky of the darkest sort, it was almost paper-like, make-believe. One could have reached out and peeled it off like a stamp. Chan filled himself with these stray thoughts and let his mind drift into unknowns, since the way home was still long, and the wind biting.

To enter the apartment block, one had to pass through an alley walled on either side by crude brick and concrete, about a head or two taller than an adult. Street lights weren’t yet installed, and barely anyone was out after dark; not that there were even many people around. Somewhere a dog was barking at invisible passersby.

Chan walked his motorbike into the communal garage space on the ground level, little more than a repurposed storeroom. There were a couple of Thong Nhat bicycles, tired under the impression of the moon through iron gridded windows. Chan lifted the nylon bag up and felt the oranges on the outside with his fingertips. No bruises. On his way out of the garage, Mrs. Mai was perching on a stool. In front of her was a small table for the two jars packed with pickled cabbage and Thai eggplant.

“Is Mr. Thinh not here anymore? I didn’t see his motorbike in there.”

“The Cub? Got taken by the mafia or something. Gambling, no wonder why he had so much money before. He left Hanoi a month or so ago, before Tet, ran away to the country. No-one knows where the guy is now. Probably dead if you ask me,” she said, chewing betel and areca like many old women still did.

“How’s the cabbage?”

“A bit sour, this batch. But you can stew it. I remember your dad liked it with carp’s head.”

The pickles looked too old for his liking, but Chan bought some anyway, along with some dried anchovies Mrs. Mai pulled out from the cabinet under the table. She complained about how her son’s wife hadn’t given her a granddaughter in so long, as she packed the cabbage in a plastic bag.

The apartment block was built nine years ago as affordable housing for those in the Writers’ Association. The outer-wall of these buildings had been effaced by blackened moss. They remotely smelled of it too. Their u-shaped plan enveloped a small courtyard. From there one could see clothes hanging on copper wires, and potted plants dotting here and there, all the way up to the third story. Chan could see a bright light going up in the second-floor apartment, just beyond the railing where a faded red banner with gold lettering “New Year 88! New Victories!” still hung on an end. Chan climbed up the flights of concrete staircase, his skin absorbing an air cold, dark, and patiently still. The fruit bag rustled as it brushed against his khakis.

204 was second from the end of the hallway. Darkness dissolved as Chan’s vision narrowed to the single source of light, a balmy amber radiating from an oil lamp that stood quiet on the window sill. The wooden door was loosely locked, and when he pushed it open with a creak, he saw his father crouching on the porcelain floor on a pair of rubber slippers. The old man was folding a piece of newspaper to light the oil stove — to cook some rice, Chan supposed, by the familiar cast-iron pot sitting on the side. Over his shoulders fell a wood-brown wool coat, its cuffs touching the shadow behind him. The skin on his hands had shrunken from the last time Chan had seen him, and his cheeks appeared hollower as the budding flame kindled his profile. He saw his hair growing yet grayer where it was parted in the middle. The only thing that hadn’t changed was his father’s eyes. Though squinting, they had the same bright and kind glow they had always been. As the father raised his eyes to meet his son’s, he tried to hold the coughs coming from the back of his lungs, before either could say a word. Chan let the briefcase and plastic bags down on the bed frame with a dull thud.

“You shouldn’t be sitting on the cold floor, Father. You know better than this for your age.”

“It’s just a change of weather. My health might be better than yours, Chan,” he said hoarsely, and chuckled. “The rice has to be cooked anyway, and you must be tired.”

“I’m all fine. I don’t see you that often anymore, so at least let me do it,” Chan said, sitting his father down on the bed. He tried lighting the stove again, as the fire was not on; he thought he saw it lit already. “I should get you a new one next time. We’ve had this since we moved back to Hanoi.”

“This one still works, don’t worry. Maybe you can boil some water for the tea first. I see a tin of Oolong on the table.“

The bamboo table across the room was among the few things the old writer had in this apartment. A mini desk at the one end of his bed near the window, a Soviet typewriter, and a couple of books comprised his most treasured possessions. Other than that, a closet with two, three changes of clothing, a clock, a wooden altar for the ancestors, and a tea set to use on occasions of thanksgiving like this, January the 15th by the Lunar calendar. In good humor he once told Chan when he died he wouldn’t be able to take everything with him anyway, so why bother living in a mansion.

A sudden wind made the oil light tremble, and the night outside momentarily spilled through the window. Chan was quick to close it. When the rasping of the wind stopped, he could feel a smaller flame swaying on the lamp’s wick. It cast a blurred shadow on the concrete behind his father, who was now sorting through the manuscript, looking for something. Chan’s eyes were affixed on his figure, once more realizing how feeble he had become. He knew well it wasn’t because of age alone.

The water started to bubble. Echoing in the apartment now was the clinking of ceramic cups as Chan prepared them for the tea, the intermittent sound of the typewriter as his father paused to listen to his stories. There hadn’t been much business lately, Chan said, but his firm was expecting a residential construction order for the area near Thang Long bridge. He once wanted to move his wife and kids there one day, but now that divorce seemed almost inevitable, he didn’t have the mind to think about it anymore. But at least, he said, once construction started, he could send his two daughters to a better school in the district. The kettle had been hissing for some time when he remembered to take it off.

When Chan reached into the rice sack, he found it almost empty. “Father, I would have bought you another quintal of jasmine. I’m sorry, I should have known.”

“Nonsense now. I’m old, Chan, I don’t eat quite as much as I did. You save that money. The price of rice also just went up again, I heard.”

At the time rice cost twice or three times as much as they had just a few years before, or even more, Chan couldn’t remember. Nonetheless, the point was that life wasn’t getting much better for most people, contrary to what was promised after Independence. He felt his luck hadn’t yet run out when he still had a somewhat stable job. Looking at the shabby rice sack and ugly misshapen grains that were labeled “Excellent-quality jasmine,” Chan was reminded of the subsidy period, when he was still a child, and when rice tickets were traded in for a kind of grain that was half inedible. He kept a dog-eared copy of his father’s book written during that period, the fifth in The Writers of Our Time, which would stay with him his whole life. It said on the first page, “For Hang, to forget in a moment the hard life when the price of rice has come to six-hundred, seven-hundred a quintal” — one among the many books the writer had dedicated to his wife. Chan tried to shrug off these memories that were conjured up by such a dull and insignificant thing as a rice sack, which made him feel strangely vulnerable. The tapping of the typewriter resumed.

Chan sat down on the bed, mindful of the desk between him and his father. He picked up the top leaf of the manuscript and saw that it was blank. The old writer seemed to be trying to finish something, and if he was in any hurry, it wasn’t betrayed by the constant squinting and slow typing. The light in this corner was dimming, and for a while the father and son sat in silence. Chan peeled an orange and quartered them onto a small plate. The wind grazed the outer wall of the apartment and whistled through the window cracks. Chan observed the two deep wrinkles going under his father’s cheekbones and round the mouth, thinking how they, together with his straight, soft nose, resembled the Chinese character “Man.” His face, despite the marks of old age, was still round and embraced by an endearing warmth. It came to Chan how he had missed his father, and in trying to deny the sentiment, he was filled with a loneliness distant and vague.

The old man coughed.

“Father, have some of the orange. It helps with the cold.”

His father nodded.

The last time Chan saw him writing, it was for his memoir, spanning from the time long before the French, the Americans, to the days after the revolution. “While there’s still some sharpness left in me,” his father had said. He had stopped writing for a year or two before that, after his wife passed away, and resumed for a short while only to complete a few more chapters in the book. It wasn’t because he didn’t have the strength to continue, but because, losing someone who had for sixty years shared with him the bed and the bread, he just wasn’t quite sure what to do.

His father was going to say something when one of the windows’ latch came loose, and a cold air swept a few loose leaves of paper off the desk. The oil lamp seemed as though it almost went out, or its halo so weak as to appear inundated by the night. Chan stood up and shut the window tight, wondering where the moon had gone hiding as he peered through the metal frame. Turning towards the corner, he saw that his father was still sitting there behind the typewriter, seemingly untroubled as he took a slice of orange. Chan removed the lamp from the window sill and stood it on the bed, in front of his father.

“You have your mother’s hand for choosing fruits, you know that? I remember the time Hanoi was evacuated and we were in Thanh Hoa, where they had the best oranges in the North. The smell of this alone reminds me of them.”

Chan collected the last piece of paper strewn on the floor. “You’ve told me this before. The fruit lady today had a Thanh Hoa accent, so these might actually be from there.”

He sat down beside the old man. The bed creaked.

“Do you still see her often?”

His father nodded. “How is she?” Chan asked.

“Your mother is doing well. There’s less housework for her these days, so she’s writing poetry again. She seems to be eating better than before — I used to have to nag her, you know,” he smiled and shook his head lightly. “Just the other day, she was telling me your brother, Hong, is well too. He helps around in their town, and teaches the kids how to spell. He takes them to bird hunting too, apparently. The kids love him.”

Hong was born before him, and at the age of nineteen he had lost his life on the battlefield. Chan knew little about Hong, but his mother always told him how he had wanted to come back to Hanoi, go to lycée, and be a grade-school teacher. A sepia picture showed him with a wide forehead and straight parted hair, just like their father’s when he was young.

Chan believed his father’s stories, the visions of his mother. He knew he was telling the truth. In his mind, like many other Vietnamese, there were no ghosts, just people, nothing to be afraid of. The moment a person was out of this realm, she went on to another. Some people chose to stay close to the living, when they had unfinished business, or ties they couldn’t yet leave behind — Chan remembered Mrs. Mai once told of a time when her daughter, who died of a flu at the age of one, would occasionally visit as a toddling three-year-old girl, because she missed her mother. The first time her daughter came, Mai laughed, she was startled and almost scared the kid away. When he was little, Chan’s mother told him not to cry at funerals or in front of the altar, because it would be even harder for whomever he was crying for to leave. Only those who had had their conscience clear and their heart content, would be placed in heaven if they had led an honest life. Those who were stuck in between this world and heaven, it was as if they weren’t entirely dead. They were allowed to see both the living and the ones in heaven from time to time, but they themselves belonged to neither, wandering in the transition.

Chan didn’t know what it was like up there in heaven, but from the stories he had been told, he pictured it as not too different from his world. People had jobs and houses, motorbikes and trains, food to cook, books to read, worries and joys, aspirations and desires. His mother was just one of them, who continued to be a poet as she had been; she seemed happy. Knowing all this, Chan told himself he should only feel glad, but the fact that he longed for a chance to see her still pinched him like a needle. The dead move on, but the living, we just stay here.

“She asked about you too, Chan,” his father said, “I didn’t know what to say other than that you and the kids were well, and whatever would happen, she should rest assure that you can figure out a way around it, like you always do.”

“Like you always do.” Chan repeated in his head the words his father had told him since he was a lanky stubborn child. He inhaled the sweet aroma of rice and a weary sulfur of the cast-iron pot; the space seemed warmer. Chan was lost in thoughts again, his eyes resting on the wall behind the writer, whose shadow was larger now as the oil lamp lit him from below, but it had lost its weight, becoming delicate and transparent.

The clock ticked, by and by. Chan stared at the seemingly untouched plate of orange. He rubbed his eyes, once, twice.

“Father.”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here for New Year’s. On my way home on Hang Dao, I saw a nice cherry blossom branch still on a house’s balcony, and I thought you’d have liked one.“

“And have your old man take care of it himself?” his father said in jest. “If you had been here, that would have meant so much for me already. A blossom branch, however pretty, is just a blossom branch after all.”

“Father…”

“I know you were working until the last hours of the year,” the writer gestured with a wave of hand in understanding. “Your family’s livelihood rests on your shoulders, I know that well.”

Chan thought of how he could have visited his father and decorated his apartment with the red dragon prints, the kind easily bought at Dong Xuan for a small pocket change. He didn’t feel the cold air starting to touch on his back.

“Chan.”

“Yes Father?”

“You have to pardon my age now, but I do miss the days when our family gathered for Tet. Has it been ten years now? That was long before your brother Quang moved to the south, and your mother was still with us.” He paused. “I’m happy for them, but I wish we had had more time, you know, as a family.”

He thought he heard his father mentioning something about writing a short memoir on his family, their family. All his life, he said, he had only translated French books and written literary criticism, never having the chance or energy for other things. Meanwhile Chan kept thinking how all these years, living on the periphery of Hanoi, he should have come to see his father more often, more so after his mother’s passing. He never got him the potted plants like those in front of neighboring apartments to liven up the dreary, long days. He never bought him a new coat. He didn’t even buy him a new stove. Just imagining his father on the cold floor lighting the rusty damn thing every day, he asked himself what kind of son had he been.

“But I’m trying now Chan,” his father’s voice came into focus again. Chan wasn’t looking at him, rubbing the calluses on one hand with his other. “My eyes can’t see that well anymore. Without glasses, it saddens me that I can only see you so blurry. But as long as I can still type, by writing something I could at least feel I have done something for us all as a father.”

The lamp’s flame had grown frail. One could have flicked it, and the room would be overcome by darkness. The distant and stray barks at nothingness echoed again through the narrow alleys, around the apartment complex, and sank into the deep blanket of night. The cold breaths of air moved impatiently and conspicuously through the corridor. Chan suddenly felt the night was passing by too quickly. Was the rice cooked? Was the stove still on? Hadn’t the tea gone lukewarm by now? None of these things appeared to bother him.

“I’m sorry, Father. I’m sorry,” he said, as he buried his face in the rough palms of his hands. What was going through his head at the moment, Chan couldn’t recall.

“What are you apologizing for?”

“I wish I had spent more time with you when I could. All this commotion that is life, I wish I could blame it, but I can’t. I just can’t, Father.”

“I know Chan, I know that well. I’ve wanted to see you too, all this time, but you came today. You came today.”

The old man reached out and placed his wrinkled hand on Chan’s shoulder. Almost weightless as it felt, it carried a tender warmth that made him, a middle-aged man now, feel the same way he had as a child. At that moment, he wished that he had stayed with his father. Chan thought the old man would have needed someone more than he himself had wanted a family. What would have cost him, postponing it a few years? He would have his whole life ahead; his father didn’t.

He felt hopeful. He hoped there was still time.

“Father, how about…”

He had just turned his head to face his father and caught a glimpse of his kind smile, his gray hair, his sunken cheeks, his softly closed eyes when the wick gave out. In a moment, the night embraced the two shadows, and no moonlight was leaking through the pair of windows. Chan stood up and hastened to the small wooden chest next to his father’s closet. He shoved around the sewing notions, old photos, and whatever was in there to find another wick. He grabbed the lighter on the floor next to the oil stove, and came back to fix the lamp. After replacing the wick, Chan dropped the lighter twice before he could set it aflame.

The light was lucid as Chan held it up. Every inch on the wall, the floor, the ceiling, Chan could see a new brightened shade. The night had retreated back to its corners, and out the window. His own standing shadow, long and clear-cut, stretched to the other side of the room.

The smell of rice had, for a while, settled in with the cold air. No dog was barking now beyond the walls of the apartment, and Chan had to listen closely to catch the faintest whispers of the wind. He stood there for some time.

Eventually, he put down the oil lamp back on the window sill. Slowly he filled the teacups, lit an incense stick, and placed the rest of the oranges on the altar.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade