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By Root 326 0

small shrine at the back of the kitchen in honor of Buddha, in memory of her father, and in spite of her mother's lack of affection for her. The last, of course, troubled her but she dutifully tried to set it aside. Sometimes, though, during the nights when the rain would not stop and she was touched by something akin to the feeling of being cold, she would hold her baby boy in her arms and think about the love that her mother bore for her father. She wanted to know how love for a man could outweigh love for one's own child. How could love be so desperate that it would urge a mother to leave her only daughter behind to this man and his pounding to get through to the other side? At first she was afraid that her husband would find the altar, but soon it became clear that he would never go inside the kitchen, that that was hers. The dirt floor, the clay pots, the tin plates, the ladles made from coconut shells, the earthenware cistern kept out back for collecting the rain, she loved it all as she loved her child. At first, she was afraid that she loved it more because it belonged solely to her. The boy, after all, was also his.

A few months after his second son was born, she found at the back of the neighborhood schoolhouse an old discarded calendar. All the signs of the zodiac were illustrated on it in red ink. Red was the color of good luck, she had been told. So she hung the calendar on the wall of her kitchen, and every day she looked at her sign, that of the Dog, and wondered why her father and mother could not have waited another year so that she could have been born under the sign of the Pig. The Dog is watchful, loyal, a fierce defender of its own, she had been told. The Pig, though, is endowed with the gift of resignation and acceptance, the two things that would always ensure ease in a Pig's life. In this way, she had heard, a woman born in the Year of the Pig would always be lucky. But if luck was not her birthright, she thought, then she would have to look for it on her own. So from then on at the end of every week, the girl made it a point to return to the back of the schoolhouse to see if any other thing of value had made its way into the trash.

Why throw something so precious away? she thought, as she bent to pick up a tin box covered in a gaudy design. On its lid, a woman was flying up toward a full moon, and that reminded her of her mother. The Moon Festival had just ended, and she could still smell the cakes that the box had held for the occasion. She took the tin home and added it to the altar. Even without this offering, she knew that her father and mother were proud of her. She had just given birth to her husband's third son. Her belly was still distended, and she knew that her husband would not notice her again for several months. A blessing, she thought.

By the time of the Lunar New Year, her belly had collapsed, but she was too swept up in the festivities to worry about her husband's footsteps in the night. Like everyone else in Saigon, she wanted something new to welcome in the new year. A tiny bead of gold on a pink silk cord, an áo dài with a touch of embroidery around the neck, a straw hat with a cotton sateen chin strap—but she knew such luxuries were not in her future. So she went by the back of the schoolhouse to see what she could find. Lying there on the ground was another tin box. From the design on its lid, she could tell that it had held candied lotus seeds. She kneeled down to pick it up and was surprised to find that the box was unopened, a length of string wrapped tightly around it. She felt like a thief with something so brand-new in her hands. She looked up to see if anyone was watching her. She looked up and she saw my father. He was watching her through the schoolhouse windows. He wore wire spectacles, small, oval, and almost invisible from where she was still stooped. They marked him as educated and of another class. A scholar-prince, she thought.

Their courtship began like that. Simple. A box of candied lotus seeds sweetened their first sighs of love. The schoolteacher loved