to hide her tearstained face behind the fuss of lifting me off her bed and gathering me close. With me dressed, there was nothing left to do except go. She grabbed her purse with one hand, slipped past her mother-in-law mumbling, “Goodbye, Ma,” without meeting her eyes, and went down the narrow cement steps to the first floor.
Outside, my father was staring at his shoes and kicking dirt about, waiting for us to join him so we could begin our trip. It would have been like any other family trip to Da Nang to visit relatives and friends, except my sister, Lyna, and brother, Mau, were conspicuously absent, and I was conspicuously present. It was my first trip anywhere. My father had just taken the two older children to his in-laws, where they were to play with their maternal grandparents and uncles for the day. Instead of driving to Da Nang, as my parents had done so many times during the course of their seven-year marriage, we would be taking a public bus. A bus would give us anonymity, a way to get lost in the crowd and minimize the risk of relatives and friends seeing a familiar car and asking questions. On this trip, my parents were not planning to visit relatives or friends to introduce me as the latest addition to the Yip family, as would have been the expected and normal thing to do; after all, my great-grandmother had been asking to meet me now for two weeks during her periodic phone calls from Da Nang. My parents’ response was pretending that the connection was bad, which was easier than telling her that they did not intend to ever introduce her to her newest great-granddaughter.
We met my father in front of the metal grille door that was open only wide enough to let a single person through. The door had not rolled open for business since South Vietnam had been “liberated” by the North Vietnamese forces, eleven months earlier. With the weight of my grandmother’s stare from her second-story window on us, my parents walked silently away from the house. They walked without looking at the women who squatted on the side of the road, selling rice pancakes and rice crepes with shrimp and pork doused in pungent fermented fish sauce. They turned onto a side street and passed the two-room house of the woman who had delivered two generations of Yips into the world, my father and his brothers and my siblings, the house where my mother had given birth to me not two months earlier. And then they made another turn onto a street that lay on the outskirts of town, where the bus to Da Nang waited, its motor idling and its passengers already climbing aboard.
“One hundred dong to Da Nang per person,” the bus driver told my father when we got to the door, which looked like it might soon fall off its hinges. “Fifty dong for the little one,” he said as my father handed him two bills.
“But she’s not even going to take up a seat,” my father protested.
“Doesn’t matter. Lots of people don’t get a seat on this bus and they still pay full fare. You should be happy I’m letting her ride for half price,” the driver said.
Not in the mood to argue with the man’s reasoning, my father handed over another bill and boarded the bus, and my mother followed close behind. They were lucky to find seats at the back of the bus, because soon people were standing in the aisle and hanging out the back windows. Only when the bus could not take another single person, when a man’s leg was shoved against my father’s arm, did the bus finally move.
My mother was glad she was sitting. It would have been difficult to stand with a baby for two hours on the stop-and-go ride she knew this would be. Only one road connected Tam Ky and Da Nang, and its two lanes were often clogged with a steady stream of trucks, buses, cars, motorcycles, and horse- and donkey-driven carts, especially at midday. She didn’t care how long it took. She would be happy if the bus broke down and they never reached their destination.
The two men sitting in front of us each lit a cigarette as they continued to talk about their plans for the day. The breeze from their window blew the smoke directly into my mother’s face. She pressed my face into