Chapter 1

Con Tre Village lay deep inside a mountainous district of Nghe An. The road into the village was a winding red-dirt track, muddy as sludge in the rainy season and choked with dust in the dry one. At the end of the village, beside a small stream, stood an old thatched house with mud walls, long since falling apart. That was Old Tu’s house.

He was seventy-two years old. Thin, bent-backed, his skin blackened by sun and field wind. The index and middle fingers of his right hand had been blown off in 1972, and on the left side of his chest were two sunken scars, the marks of two AK rounds that had nearly taken his life when he shielded a comrade. His wife had died thirty years ago. Alone, he had raised three children: Van, the eldest; Hung; and Minh, the youngest.

From the day they married and had families of their own, they had almost forgotten him completely.

No one sent money home. Not a single dong. Not one phone call to ask after him. Van, the eldest, had married a pork seller at Binh Dien wholesale market. Her husband gambled and ran up debts, and Van was busy carrying her husband’s whole family on her back, so she could not be bothered to remember her own father either. Hung got married without even telling Old Tu. As for Minh, the youngest, Old Tu had given him the fullest education of all, paying for him to finish university properly. Then Minh lost contact for ten straight years.

Old Tu did not complain. He would just sit outside on the porch, smoking pipe tobacco, looking at his two missing fingers, then mutter one of those filthy old Nghe An curses:

“Goddamn this life ... Raised three kids till they were grown, and in the end I’m alone like a dog.”

Every morning he woke before dawn. He put on an old short-sleeved shirt worn thin at the shoulders, slipped into plastic sandals, went out to pull weeds, water vegetables, and catch snails to cook soup. In the afternoon he went to the stream to fish. At night he sat on the porch listening to an old radio broadcast the news, then switch over to cai luong songs. On some nights, when the rain came hard, the house leaked everywhere, and he had to curl up under the eaves all night while water dripped onto his head. No one knew. No one called.

Mrs. Tu next door pitied him. From time to time she brought him a rice ball and a piece of braised fish, sighing:

“Mr. Tu really has it rough. Raised three children into grown people, and in the end he’s lonely as an old dog.”

Old Tu only gave a dry laugh and said nothing.

Then, one afternoon in June 2025, an old pickup truck stopped in front of the village gate. From the truck stepped a frail old man breathing through an oxygen tank. It was Tran Van Dinh, the wartime comrade for whom Old Tu had risked his life taking those two bullets in 1972.

The two old men looked at each other for a long while.

Dinh trembled.

“ ... Tu? Is that you? Tu from Con Tre?”

Old Tu stood up, his maimed hand shaking.

“Dinh ... that you, Dinh, you old bastard?”

The two men embraced. They did not sob loudly. Tears simply rolled down their wrinkled faces. They cried from joy, from bitterness, from seeing each other again after more than fifty years.

Dinh stayed at Old Tu’s house for three days. The two men drank village corn liquor, ate braised fish with sour bamboo shoots, and talked about bombs, bullets, and friends who had stayed behind forever in the forest. Dinh said he had done well in Saigon and owned a row of thirty-five rental rooms in Binh Tan, but he had no children. His wife had died long ago. For decades he had been tormented because he could not find the man who had saved his life back then.

On the night before he left, Dinh held Old Tu’s hand, his voice weak but firm.

“Tu. I’m about to die. I don’t want my property falling into the hands of distant kin who only know how to wait for me to drop dead. I’ve made a will. The whole row of thirty-five rental rooms goes to you. You saved my life. Those two fingers of yours, those two bullet holes in your chest ... they’re because of me. Don’t refuse.”

Old Tu sat silent for a long time. He took a long pull from his tobacco pipe, then said only one sentence:

“Dinh ... go home. I don’t need riches. I just need ... someone to talk to when I’m about to die.”

But Dinh had already decided.

Three months later, Dinh passed away. A lawyer came all the way from Saigon with the documents to find Old Tu in Nghe An.

Old Tu officially became the owner of a row of thirty-five rental rooms in Binh Tan. No name, no signboard, just a long four-story building rented out to workers and students. Each room was three million dong a month.

Old Tu sat outside on the porch, staring at the will. He smoked his pipe for a long while, then muttered:

“Well, fuck me ... that bastard Dinh left me a whole pile of houses. Now what the fuck am I supposed to do?”

He thought for three days. Then he made a decision no one expected.

He would go to Saigon.

Not to enjoy himself. He only wanted to see his three children’s faces one more time before he died, however far they had pushed him away.

Old Tu packed an old backpack with a few clothes, some pipe tobacco, and a few little bottles of medicated oil, then locked the door of his thatched house. He walked to the head of the village, caught a coach to Vinh, then bought a sleeper-bus ticket from Vinh to Saigon.

On the bus, Old Tu sat in the middle seat, curled up inside his old jacket. The bus ran through the night. He did not sleep. He looked out the window and saw young women on the bus wearing tiny shorts and thin spaghetti-strap tops, shoulders, thighs, and cleavage clearly exposed. Old Tu turned his face away, his cheeks burning red, silently cursing himself:

“Fuck ... old as I am, my eyes are still dirty. Embarrassing as fuck...”

The bus stopped for a rest in the middle of the night at a roadside station along the highway. Old Tu got off to take a piss. He went deep behind a dark bush, afraid people would see him.

While he was pissing, he accidentally heard movement nearby. He glanced over. About ten meters away, under the bus’s weak yellow light, a young woman around twenty-five was pulling down her jeans and squatting to piss. Her bare white ass, round and smooth, showed plainly under the light. She did not know anyone was there and kept squatting there, the sound of water trickling.

Old Tu froze. His cock, still midstream, suddenly hardened for no reason he could understand. Blood rushed downward. His heart thudded.

He hurriedly turned his face away, but the image of that bare white ass kept haunting him. Old Tu leaned against a tree, panting, telling himself:

“Goddamn this life ... old and I still want it. Turns out ... there are still plenty of wonderful things in this world.”

He stood there for a long time, until the girl pulled up her pants and left. Old Tu lowered his head and looked at his half-hard cock, then gave a dry laugh and muttered:

“This seventy-two-year-old bastard ... still has some blood in him.”

He zipped up and went back to the bus. But from that moment on, something inside Old Tu had changed.