Dong was in grade three then—just old enough to recite the multiplication tables, and still innocent enough to believe that numbers might save the family. While other children memorised poems, she memorised expenses.

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At two at night, she followed our mother’s footsteps into the dark, heading toward distant markets run by ethnic communities, far beyond our village, walking two hours each way to select goods for resale. She learned to calculate not on paper but in her head—loan interest, daily food, school fees, the fragile margin between buying and selling. Before the first sunlight could fall on the thatched roofs of the longhouses, she already knew how much she had to buy, how much she had to sell, and how much loss she could absorb to keep our house from collapsing.

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By six in the morning, she arrived at the village market—one of the first places that taught us the laws of life. The market waited for no one, and it showed no mercy. It opened before dawn and swallowed those who arrived late. Dong was always there before sunrise. The air was dense with the smell of damp earth, vegetables, fresh fish, smoke, and sweat—a familiar scent to everyone, lingering long after the market  emptied. Yellow bulbs flickered above wet ground, baskets scraped against stone, and silhouettes moved in steady repetition, people who had been here their entire lives. Vendors arrived carrying different goods, but they all carried the same hope: to earn something—money, food, or tomorrow. In that place, there were no children or adults, only bodies of different sizes repeating the same motions. Lift. Set down. Measure. Count. Wait.

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Old women squatted beside baskets of herbs still heavy with night dew. Men hoisted sacks with practiced ease. The little, light—threaded through the crowd as naturally as water through stones. Dong stood among them as if she had always belonged there, her small body already accustomed to urgency, her days compressed into an endless cycle—market, school, homework, and sleep that never came whole. She ate in haste, slept in fragments, worked with care, as if being careful enough might persuade heaven to look down and spare our family a little.

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Dong observed closely and learned quickly—what spoiled fast, what endured. Vegetables bruised easily; bamboo shoots lasted several days, though their smell was heavy and sharp. By noon, when the sun burned away whatever fragility remained, Dong washed her hands quickly and went to school. The market followed her into the classroom. The smell of bamboo shoots—dense, unmistakable—clung to her clothes, her hair, the way she carried herself. Some children covered their noses. Some shifted away. Dong did not look up. Sometimes she fell asleep in class, at the dining table, anywhere the body surrendered before the will. Her head dipped forward, quietly, without resistance. When she woke, she straightened again. Laughter passed her desk and moved on. She gathered her books and hurried out. There was always more to do.

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No matter how carefully she worked, how quickly she sold, debt always found its way back to our house by evening. Men pounded on the door as if money might burst from the walls if they struck hard enough. Their voices cut through wood and flesh alike, thick with threats and contempt. Our father pushed us into silence, telling us not to listen. Our mother covered her ears. I cried. Dong listened without tears. And that listening hardened her, turning fear into resolve.

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All of us children in that family carried the battles of the adults in silence. Not because we were strong, but because there was no space left for weakness. We became soldiers without uniforms, conscripted not into war but into family—into an endless conflict of shame, shouting, broken promises, and nights that never fully slept. While our parents wrestled with their failures—one sinking into alcohol, the other into rage—we learned to guard what remained. We learned when to stay silent, when to intervene, when to disappear. We learned to read our parents’ moods the way others read the weather, preparing for storms before clouds appeared. When the duty of parenting failed, it did not disappear; it simply pressed downward, settling onto smaller shoulders.

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Dong asked Hai to grow more vegetables, believing that selling directly would earn more than selling to middlemen. She studied the market—the way others arranged their goods, how colour and display caught buyers’ eyes—and made our small corner brighter, tidier than our lives allowed. She sold faster, earned more, and for a time believed that effort might be enough to drive away chaos.

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But no amount of striving could overcome our father’s drinking, nor loosen what our mother refused to face. While Dong tried to mend every tear, our parents pulled the house apart further. Interest bred interest, plans fell through, tempers sharpened daily like knives. Shame entered our home disguised as anger. To see a child carrying an entire family is a mirror few adults can bear to look into, so instead of facing it, they shattered it. They told her it was her choice, that they had never forced her—as if poverty had ever been something we could choose. One morning, when Dong was already dressed in her school uniform, our mother dumped an entire basket of vegetables over her head in an outburst of fury—leaves clinging to her white shirt, the pain seeping deeper than the cloth. Dong cried, briefly, from humiliation and from the clock. Time was expensive, and she had too much left to do.

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Peace did not live in that house.

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Even meals became provisional, swallowed quickly before turning into a battlefield. Our mother’s sigh could ignite our father’s anger. A single blow of his hand against the table could trigger her endless eruption. She shouted, cried, screamed. He overturned the tray, smashed whatever was still intact, until the house held nothing but shards.

At night, we held our breath together, afraid of the sound of his stomping feet, of her running into the yard, screaming into the dark until neighbours woke, sighed, and shut their doors tighter. We did the same. Some nights we slept in the coffee fields, curling into the earth, hoping it would not judge us.

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Day after day, month after month, year after year, we begged our parents to stop—begged for a meal we could finish without picking up broken pieces, for a night of unbroken sleep. Eventually, after so many hopeless years, we stopped begging. We grew quiet, bent over our work, as if labour itself were a prayer.

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There were moments when I asked, in despair—whether studying harder, working harder, becoming less poor might make our father drink less, our mother scream less, whether peace might someday recognise our address and knock on our door.

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We believed, foolishly and without saying it aloud, that if we continued to live responsibly—clean, quiet, present—things might eventually change. So no matter how the night had gone, every morning we washed our faces, wiped our tears, and put on clean clothes for school. We lined up with other children, sat at our desks, and tried to live ordinary lives.

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Ordinary became a luxury.

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Some families measure time by holidays. For us, holidays exposed the truth more cruelly than ordinary days ever did. When civil servants’ families rested, the market grew busier than ever—more buyers, sellers waking earlier, returning later. By day, the market overflowed with noise and colour. By night, it emptied into silence, leaving only us, the last ones, gathering the final bundles of vegetables into baskets.

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The days leading up to Tết were always the longest, the most hurried. Dong woke earlier, added spices—shallots, garlic, chilli, banana leaves—to sell to people preparing traditional cakes. The hot Lao wind dried our throats as we called out to customers all day, trying not to let our voices dissolve into the growing roar of the market. It split the skin on our fingers and heels as we rushed back and forth weighing and measuring, dried the leaves before they could be sold.

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On New Year’s Eve, both sides of the road glittered with lights, every house glowing. Tết music spilled from living rooms and kitchens where families gathered around dinner tables. My sisters and I rode an old bicycle together, two baskets of vegetables strapped behind us, along with a scale and a bag of flour for pressed cakes. We pedalled harder to make it home before midnight.

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When fireworks exploded overhead, smoke and light filling the sky, we were still hauling buckets of water, bathing one another in haste. The fireworks faded. The lights went out. We sat together, pressing cake moulds by hand, still hoping that in the coming year, we might finally have a Tết that belonged to us.

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Every year, as Happy New Year by ABBA played everywhere, I made the same small wish: a meal without shouting, a night of uninterrupted sleep, a holiday that did not require haste.

Years passed. The market remained—older now, faces more weathered, backs more bent. Dong no longer stood there. She had ended that cycle. She no longer carried baskets heavier than her own body. The smell of the market had faded from her. 

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Tết still arrived every year. Some wishes came true. Some never did. Decades later, I have still never known a complete Tết.

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Even now, the joy of gathering feels borrowed—taken back before the holiday has ended.