#van txt

It was one of those tenements they started building from the 50s through to the 80s in the wake of Vietnam’s newly acquired independence from France; modelled after Soviet communal living spaces — we call them Khu tập thể — and falling apart from lack of maintenance. We had two rooms. Downstairs was Ba ngôi’s bed, which was also the living room, which was also the dining room — she slept there because she couldn’t climb the stairs any more. Mum and I used to sleep up in the loft. Ba ngôi shared a courtyard with four other families, which was where everyone took turns cooking. There was a hole in the ground, hidden away in a brick outhouse, where people did their business. We flushed with a small bucket, water scooped out of a basin which was filled by whatever came creaking down old, corroded pipes.

The last time I was there, I was 12, sick as a dog from dengue fever, and bundled up in polyester sheets and a smelly blanket on the lumpy mattress I once shared with Mum when I was 3.

And somewhere in between memory and fever, I came home again. For the two weeks we visited, it was my home again. We had a TV mounted up there which ran broadcasts of American cartoons, which I watched curled into myself like a comma. The orange cat from my childhood, now arthritic and missing a chunk from his ear, as fat and self-satisfied as ever, still came by to curl itself around my feet. When the power went out, Ba ngôi pulled out the same skinny red candles she used to use; her knobbly, liver-spotted hands shaking as she melted a pool of wax onto a plate to mount it. Home because of all that, and because rice porridge and pickled radish and salted eggs tasted the same in that little Khu tập thể tenement as it did back in our Australian apartment.