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candy appear from behind my ear instead of urging me to play with the other children.
    My first journey on my own, without my parents, was to Texas, to see Anh Phi again and this time give him a candy. We were sitting side by side on the floor against his single bed in the university residence when I asked him why he’d given the package of gold back to my parents, when his widowed mother had to mix their rice with barley, sorghum and corn to feed him and his three brothers. Why that heroically honest deed? He told me, laughing and hitting me repeatedly with his pillow, that he wanted my parents to be able to pay for our passage because otherwise he wouldn’t have a little girl to tease. He was still a hero, a true hero, because he couldn’t help being one, because he is a hero without knowing it, without wanting to be.

I wanted to be a heroine to the young girl selling grilled pork outside the walls of the Buddhist temple across from the office in Hanoi. She spoke very little, was always working, absorbed in the slices of pork she was cutting then putting into the dozens of baguettes she’d already split down three-quarters of their length. It was hard to see her face once the coal had been kindled in the metal box blackened by grease accumulated over the years, because a cloud of smoke and ash enveloped her, suffocated her, made her eyes water. Her brother-in-law served the customers and washed the dishes in two pots of water set on the very edge of the sidewalk, beside an open sewer. She must have been fifteen or sixteen, and was stunningly beautiful despite her misty eyes and her cheeks smeared with ashes and soot.
    One day her hair caught fire, burning part of her polyester shirt before her brother-in-law had time to pour the dirty dishwater over her head. She was covered with lettuce, slices of green papaya, hot peppers, fish sauce. I went to see her before lunch the next day to offer her work cleaning the office and to suggest that she sign up for a cooking class and English lessons. I was sure I would be granting her fondest dream. But she refused, refused all of it, by simply shaking her head. I left Hanoi, abandoning her to her bit of sidewalk, unable to make her turnher gaze towards a horizon without smoke, unable to become a hero like Anh Phi, like many people who have been identified, named and designated heroes in Vietnam.

P eace born from the mouths of cannon inevitably gives birth to hundreds, to thousands of anecdotes about the brave, about heroes. During the first years after the Communist victory, there weren’t enough pages in the history books to fit in all the heroes, so they were lodged in math books: if Comrade Công downed two airplanes a day, how many did he shoot down in a week?
    We no longer learned to count with bananas and pineapples. The classroom was turned into a huge game of Risk, with calculations of dead, wounded or imprisoned soldiers and patriotic victories, grandiose and colourful. The colours, though, were illustrated only with words. Pictures were monochromatic, like the people, perhaps to stop us from forgetting the dark side of reality. We all had to wear black pants and dark shirts. If not, soldiers in khaki uniforms would take us to the station for a session of interrogation and re-education. They also arrested girls who used blue eyeshadow. They thought these girls had black eyes, that they were victims of capitalist violence. Perhaps for that reason they removed the sky blue from the first Vietnamese Communist flag.

W hen my husband wore his red T-shirt with a yellow star in the streets of Montreal, the Vietnamese harassed him. Later my parents had him take it off and replaced it with an ill-fitting shirt of my father’s. Even though I could never have worn such a thing myself, I hadn’t told my husband not to buy it because I myself had once proudly tied a red scarf around my neck. I had made that symbol of Communist youth part of my wardrobe. I even envied friends who