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poem.”
    Admittedly, Hng elevated his own status in these stories by referring to Ðạo as a friend. He knows he was never the man’s equal. Hng had spent years in awe of Ðạo, who, despite being five years his junior, had been something of a mentor to him. Ðạo took an interest in Hng’s aborted education, encouraging his desire to read and engaging him in the debates of the time. He had shown Hng a respect to which he was unaccustomed.
    “My friend Ðạo believed everyone had a right to an opinion,” he told Lan and her grandmother. “Wherever he came from. Or she. ‘Let’s hear what Hng has to say on the matter,’ he used to say.
    “The men seated at the table with him laughed at first. Laughed and pointed at me. Why was this learned young man they all looked up to soliciting the opinion of a simple country boy turned cook? they wondered.
    “‘Stop it,’ Ðạo would say, batting his hand in the air as if he was swatting at flies. ‘I think his perspective could be useful here.’ I remember him turning to me and asking, ‘What do you think, Hng? Should all things cost the same? One pair of shoes, one watermelon, one bowl of ph?’
    “They were all staring at me, waiting for an answer,” Hng told the girl and her grandmother. “I did not know what Ðạo expected of me, so I simply said what I knew to be true. ‘You come here for some reason. There is cheaper pho.’
    “‘You see?’ Ðạo raised his finger and smiled. ‘We are hypocrites where it suits us. We will always be willing to pay the difference for a superior bowl.’”
    Lan laughed like a bird might laugh, a giddy twitter she stifled with her hand.
    Lan’s enjoyment of Hng’s stories made Ðạo real again, leading Hng to feel both the pain of Ðạo’s absence and the simultaneous relief from that pain. The girl was a balm to him: both her desire for his stories and her improbable beauty. Even though much of the latter was concealed by the government-issue black pyjama bottoms and shirt she wore, when she was bent over washing pots in the pond, her spine, as delicate as that of a fish, pressed into the back of her shirt, he would think how much better she deserved—an
áo dài
of luxurious silk to grace her frame, gold for her elegant wrists and fingers, a pearl necklace, a garland of jasmine for her hair.
    Hng prayed she was old enough to understand her impact, though he guessed her an innocent of no more than eighteen. Shecalled him Uncle, but Hng’s feelings toward the girl were not those of an uncle. He was almost forty then—a middle-aged man in love with a girl half his age—an ugly man, a poor man, a man in love for the first time in his life.
    Although the girl’s grandmother would often fall asleep while they sat on the grass mat together, her dreams whistling through her nostrils, Lan would remain bright, nodding, asking questions in a voice as soft as silken tofu, causing Hng to forget the squalor that surrounded them and transporting the two of them to some alternative plane.
    “Tell me about the Hundred Flowers, Uncle.”
    “Teach me why you prefer poems that do not rhyme.”
    She would lie on her side, her heart-shaped face resting in her upturned palm, her perfect feet moving back and forth against each other according to some internal rhythm.
    Tell me. Teach me
. Poetry and politics. In the absence of both, she had made him feel he still had something to give. These had been exquisite moments: a brief respite from life on earth, a journey to some faraway Buddhist heaven. But it is not a place he has visited ever since. He has neither the means nor the desire. He turned his back to her long ago, and his heart became a stone. They do not even acknowledge each other, have not done so now for over forty years.
    She has lived alone in the hut next door since her grandmother died, refusing to move. Whether this is motivated by a deliberate wish to torture him or rooted in some more benign and practical reasoning,