Even before moving to Saigon, Winnie had anticipated that she would be a mediocre English teacher at best, as she lacked any prior experience or real interest in the job. But after only a couple weeks of working at Achievement! International Language Academy, it was clear that she would fail to surpass even her own low expectations. Winnie was incompetent. She went blank when confronted with the unnerving stares of twenty bored teenagers. Her own English came out sounding wrong, her students couldn’t understand her, and if she tried switching into halting Vietnamese for them—gleaned from seven years of childhood Sundays spent at language classes in the purple-carpeted basement of suburban Maryland’s Our Lady of La Vang church alongside two dozen other young American Nguyens and Phams and Trans whose parents feared they were losing their mother tongue—it only confused them more.
In the beginning she had tried her best. Or, at least, had tried her best at trying. She prepared activities, printed out worksheets that she copied from online teaching blogs, and one Saturday she spent an hour in the bookstore on Le Loi Street picking out a perfect grading notebook. But her first lessons went so poorly that by week two she gave up on planning them altogether and re-designated the entirety of the hour-long class as “Unstructured English Conversation Time.” Her students were the kind of wealthy urban high schoolers who had grown up secure in knowing that they would eventually go to college but either weren’t quite smart or quite wealthy enough to attend one overseas. There was little incentive for them to excel at the extra English courses they were being forced by their parents to take at a third-rate academy. Most of them spent Unstructured English Conversation Time playing on their phones, but a few enterprising ones used the period to work on their homework from other classes, and one group of older boys who sat at the back of the room would occupy themselves by meticulously filling the pages of their vocabulary workbooks with lewd doodles, which they then left behind for Winnie to crumple up and hide at the bottom of the trash can after class.
Winnie spent her own class time reading unevenly translated Japanese crime novels that she bought from the secondhand paperback stalls near the backpacker quarter. Whenever she finished a book, she gave it to one of her more advanced students in hopes that they would enjoy it one day after their reading comprehension had improved under the tutelage of a more capable educator. It was a gesture she made to try and offset her guilt about the fact that they weren’t learning anything from her. Teaching English was what most of the other unmoored expats seemed to do in Vietnam, qualified or not, and Winnie didn’t see why they were able to manage it when she could not.
Luckily, the owner of her academy—a morose Singapore-educated man in his forties named Mr. Quy—hadn’t caught on to Winnie’s sham yet because he struggled to keep his non-Vietnamese employees straight; there were seven other foreign teachers at Achievement!, two of them were both named Alex, and Mr. Quy was frequently day drunk, because his job primarily consisted of wooing prospective investors over beers at eleven a.m. If he was ever in the teachers’ lounge it was to take a nap on the foldaway cot he stored in their broom closet. He regularly confused Winnie with Dao, another Vietnamese American teacher in her early twenties, and Winnie never corrected him. After the second time it happened, she had even started pulling her long hair back into a low, disheveled bun—the way that Dao always wore hers—so that they would be indistinguishable from behind. She stopped putting sunscreen on her arms and let them darken to a Dao-ish shade, and she toted her untouched grading notebook around in a straw bag she had purchased because it was similar to one she had seen Dao carrying.
She tended to stay away from other teachers. It was easy to avoid interacting with Nikhil, American Alex, and a middle-aged blond woman whose name she had forgotten; their classes were on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Winnie’s were on Wednesdays and Fridays. But Dutch Alex, Dao, and Jeff and Anna Cook were harder to hide from.
She wasn’t exactly sure how old Dutch Alex was. He was bald, with a deeply tanned but curiously unwrinkled face, and his wardrobe was made up entirely of zip-off cargo pants and shirts with dragons on them. His wife was Saigonese, and every Friday he brought their roly-poly mixed-race baby to the academy and let the students and other teachers coo over it. Winnie took particular care to stay away from Dutch Alex when he had his small, gurgling accessory in tow after one afternoon when she had accidentally gotten caught in his crosshairs while he was parading down the hallway, brandishing his infant at everyone he encountered and expecting them to squeal with excitement and squeeze the child’s saliva-slick fingers.
“Winnie!” he had boomed. Dutch Alex’s voice could fell pine trees. Winnie hadn’t been able to dart into a side room in time. “Here—hold him!” He thrust the hairless nine-month-old at her, and Winnie was polite enough to stop herself from recoiling. The baby had taken one look at her and then emitted a loud, saurian screech of displeasure. “Awww, he’s laughing!” Dutch Alex had said. “He likes you because he knows you’re a halfie too!”
Luckily, the baby had begun wailing. This allowed Winnie to slip away unnoticed with her face burning slightly.
Her halfness was the reason she hated getting confused for Dao, even as she gamely played up their slight physical resemblance in order to continue slacking off at work. By pure coincidence, Winnie and Dao were both in their early twenties, originally from the D.C. suburbs, and Vietnamese American. But while both of Dao’s parents were Việt, Winnie’s mother was white. Their similarities continued to unravel from there: Dao was from a charming tree-lined town in northern Virginia, and Winnie was from the part of Maryland that was entirely strip malls. Dao currently lived in a large apartment full of charming, shabby-chic rattan furniture and had a balcony overlooking the Saigon River. Winnie’s unfurnished spare room in her great-aunt’s house was deep in the distant warren of District 11. She shared a bathroom with two second cousins from the countryside who had moved to the city to attend university and barely spoke to her when they were home. And her balcony overlooked a garbage-filled alley behind a hospital. Dao was an excellent teacher, bubbly and beloved by her students. Her Vietnamese was superior, her feet were smaller, her complexion was brighter, and her boobs were perkier. Winnie resented Dao for being a better, full-blooded version of herself, but she hated herself more for the involuntary swell of joy she felt whenever she was mistaken for her colleague.
It was a relief for Winnie to be able to loathe the Cooks in the purest and least complicated of ways. Originally from Oregon, Jeff and Anna Cook had been living in Saigon for six years, and the first time they met Winnie they introduced themselves, unprompted, as “the good kind of expat.” Over the following weeks they had made sure to list all the evidence they had gathered to support this claim: 1) Unlike most of their colleagues (including Winnie), the Cooks had gone to the trouble of acquiring English teaching certifications. 2) They had taken a year and a half of Vietnamese lessons and reached semiproficiency, though their language skills were primarily inflicted upon Bà Khanh, their housekeeper. 3) They never went to Bui Vien to sweat on plastic stools next to other foreigners and get drunk on candy-colored vodka cocktails served in plastic buckets. 4) Neither did they spend their holidays at the coastal resort towns whose shorelines were crowded with clubs and whose white sands were strewn with the beer-barf of kitesurfing English gap-year students. 5) Instead, they donned elaborately velcroed trekking sandals and went tramping through nature preserves in forgotten rural stretches of the North. 6) They documented all of their kayaking and karst-climbing and rappelling and put the photographs up on their travel blog. 7) Somehow in six years they’d only ever gotten their fancy blogging camera stolen once. 8) They had rescued a one-eyed alley dog and named him Goji, and he was now more vaccinated and better fed than most of their students. 9) They smelled like the aloe-scented hand sanitizer with which they anointed themselves constantly, and this was probably the reason why 10) the Cooks had never, ever gotten food poisoning, a fact they particularly enjoyed reminding others of.
The Cooks were also the hardest for Winnie to evade. Both of them taught on the same days that she did, and they always seemed to be waiting to pounce on her with questions about her weekend plans or unsolicited advice about which Saigon pizza restaurant had the best imported cheese or very long stories about spelunking in Quang Ngai. They would pop up behind her unexpectedly in the teachers’ lounge, or the bathroom, or the balcony that she liked to disappear to between classes. Their persistent social overtures puzzled Winnie, because she could tell that the Cooks liked her as little as she liked them. Mrs. Cook’s classroom was located directly opposite hers, and sometimes, when Winnie was reading her detective novels, her feet up on her desk and her students left to their own devices, she would glance out the door and see the other woman watching her from across the corridor, lips pursed disapprovingly. But for unknown reasons, Mrs. Cook hadn’t snitched on her yet to Mr. Quy. Winnie had the troubling hunch that she was just waiting for the right moment to blackmail her with the information.
By her fifth week, Winnie no longer felt guilty when she cashed her paychecks. She had adopted a uniform of black and indigo and dung-colored linen sack dresses, purchased for five dollars apiece from an airless, sepulchral semibasement boutique in the shadowlands around Binh Tay Market. Winnie thought they helped her blend in with the dark academy walls. If she was successful at avoiding the Cooks, entire days could pass where she didn’t speak to another human being. Her students no longer needed the pretense of her faux instructions, and would file into the room and begin doodling or texting or napping on their own, then leave quietly when the period was over. At home, Winnie’s two cousins treated her like an American ghost who happened to live with them; they either seemed slightly frightened when she appeared in the hall or just ignored her completely. She was proactive about hiding from her great-aunt, who would interrogate her about how often she attended mass every time their paths crossed. Most days, the house smelled like the steamed sardines that Winnie’s great-aunt ate wrapped in rice paper for every meal. On extra-hot days, it smelled like the biomedical waste dumpster of the hospital next door.
Because she dreaded being at home so much, Winnie had started spending most of her free time in coffee shops. She chose a new one each day, leery of becoming a regular somewhere and losing any of the anonymity she was working so hard to achieve. After leaving the academy for the day she would take a motorbike taxi out to an unfamiliar district, amble along until she found a place that she liked, then loiter for as many hours as she could, only returning to the house after her great-aunt went to bed at nine. Sometimes she chose little coffee shops that were cached down narrow alleys—four tables packed into the front sitting room of a family’s house, pantsless toddlers capering about underfoot, roasted watermelon seeds—complimentary but never touched—slowly going stale in red plastic bowls next to the unused ashtrays of card-playing men in undershirts who tapped their cigarettes out onto the floor tiles instead. On other days, Winnie chose one of the large chain coffee shops: glossy, air-conditioned boxes with maroon-and-beige interiors and particle board furniture and Wi-Fi-seeking backpackers. She discovered sprawling garden cafés hidden behind inconspicuous gates on mundane-looking avenues, where well-heeled professionals and housewives met to drink pastel-hued smoothies and pose for photos next to the manicured fig trees and plumeria shrubs and miniature waterfalls. She sat on the sidewalk on plastic stools, beneath makeshift tarp roofs strung up between scrawny elms, drinking coffee poured over gray ice that she had to pick gravel out of. She studied faces. She read her detective novels. She switched to soy milk or beer when she had drunk too much coffee. She walked streets until they ran out, and then she chose a new direction. She ducked under awnings during sudden downpours. When she got hungry there was always someone on a street corner selling grilled porkchops on rice or bánh mì or soup iridescent with chicken fat. Winnie believed that this was the best way to absorb the entirety of the city, inch by humid inch, and she applied herself to the task with all the energy that she was not devoting to her actual teaching job.
Winnie’s forty-ninth day in Vietnam found her once again among the shelves of a used book stall on Pham Ngu Lao, searching for crime novels between the blue spines of the Lonely Planets.
She purchased two (per their back covers: “Haunted by the memory of his murdered wife who he could not save, Detective Kusakawa searches for a serial killer on the loose in Osaka,” and “A salaryman is seen getting onto a train at Tokyo Station bound for Aomori at nine in the morning but his corpse is discovered in Yokohama one hour later…” Winnie could tell that it was going to be twins, but she didn’t really read the books for the mystery) and, as she was putting away her change, felt a fat droplet of rain sting the skin on her forearm. She and the bookseller tilted their heads back in unison. Above them: an ambush of dark clouds. Winnie and the bookseller glanced at each other for a nanosecond of panicked solidarity before the sky opened up, the bookseller ran to pull protective tarps over his shelves, and Winnie dashed toward the internet café a few doors down—no time to find a coffee shop—for shelter.
Inside, the patter of teenage fingers on keyboards drowned out the patter of the rain outside. Winnie found a free computer and decided to check her email.
The state of her inbox was one of such extreme neglect that her fourteen-year-old neighbor, flicking his eyes away from his game and over to her monitor for what he had only intended to be a half second of perfunctory snooping, pursed his lips and let out an unvoiced whistle of horror and awe. There were over six thousand unread messages.
Winnie did not notice him. She was unbothered by the clutter of her own emails and hadn’t deleted a single one in at least three years. Was it apathy, was it nostalgia, or was it because if Winnie ever cleared out her arsenal of old promotions and newsletters and phishing scams, the scant handful of real correspondences that remained would be a painful testament to the smallness and loneliness of her life? Because she already knew the answer, there was no need for Winnie to ask herself this question.
Today, however, two new emails had arrived that could be added to that scant handful. The first was from her mother. Winnie only skimmed it, because all emails from her mother were identical: an exuberant greeting followed by a brief chastisement for not responding more often and in greater detail, and then several paragraphs of gushing updates about Winnie’s three (much) older siblings and their families. When she got around to it later, Winnie would reply with the same bland reassurances she had deployed five weeks ago in response to the last one. In the imaginary Saigon of Winnie’s six-sentence responses, her classes were great. Everything, in fact, was great. Her room at her bà cô’s house was great. Her new friends (who, in email world, existed) were great, and her coworkers were great too. Her two cousins? Great!
The second one was from her brother Thien, and while Winnie had been expecting this particular message, she still felt her stomach tighten when she saw his name nestled among the spam.
HEY! HOPE YOU’RE DOING WELL OVER IN THE FATHERLAND! WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW THAT I REACHED OUT TO MY OLD FRIEND FROM MEDICAL SCHOOL, SANG, THE ONE I MENTIONED BEFORE. HE’S BEEN LIVING IN DISTRICT 1 FOR THE PAST SEVEN YEARS AND HE SAID HE’D BE MORE THAN HAPPY TO SHOW YOU THE ROPES AND HELP YOU OUT WITH ANYTHING YOU NEED. SO PLEASE GIVE HIM A CALL AS SOON AS YOU CAN. BIG LOVE, T
Winnie scowled at the phone number at the bottom. Along with staying at her great-aunt’s place, the promise to meet Sang from Medical School was the familial appeasement tax she had agreed to pay before leaving America. Her parents had been so relieved to hear that there was a successful Vietnamese American doctor in Saigon who could keep an eye on their substandard daughter, they hadn’t even minded that Winnie only had a one-way ticket and no concrete plans for returning.
As she grudgingly took out her phone and began composing the message (Hi. This is Thien’s sister…), Winnie consoled herself with the thought that this Sang was undoubtedly very busy with his doctoring, and had only agreed to meet her out of politeness. With luck, he wouldn’t even respond. And even if he did get back to her, his schedule was probably so full that she would not have to endure any of his rope-showing for at least several weeks. Winnie hit send.
She was wrong. Two minutes later, her phone chirped. Are u free now? Text me ur location and I’ll come meet u
While Winnie was put off by his unwillingness to write out “you,” the brisk impatience of his message verged intriguingly on the creepy. She briefly considered telling him she was working, but she was now, despite herself, a little curious. And more importantly, once she had paid her family the Sang fee, their grip on her, already loosening, would become even flimsier.
She logged out of her email and gave 3,000₫ to the front desk for her seventeen minutes of internet use. During this time, the rain had stopped, and Winnie stepped outside into a Saigon in the act of drying itself off. The bookseller was dumping the pooled water from his tarps. A woman was wringing out the end of her ponytail into the gutter. A man taking his postdownpour constitutional did not observe the low, raindrop-laden branches of a tree growing out of the sidewalk until it was too late; he accidentally walked into one and cursed loudly as it released its miniature shower upon him. There was a transient crystalline quality to the light. The heat had not yet relaunched its offensive. Winnie found the street number of the internet café and texted it to Sang. I’m free, she wrote, even though it did not feel particularly true.
While Winnie was debating whether she should buy a coffee from a woman with a pushcart, she heard the squeak of taxi wheels coming to a halt on the wet asphalt.
Sang rolled down the window, quickly scanned the sidewalk for his half-American, and nodded when he saw Winnie. “Ngoan!” he called, “Hop in.”
Ngoan. She flinched when she heard it, and then chastised herself for being taken aback. Of course he would know her by her Vietnamese name; it was what Thien and the rest of her family called her. Mouth set in a grim line, she rose from her stool and began walking over to the taxi.
Ngoan. The name on all her paperwork. The name she couldn’t quite kick. A jarring cohesion of letters that could not be easily molded into something more Western sounding. In its various distortions on the lips of her American peers and teachers and neighbors growing up, it was a croak, or a yawn interrupted by something phlegmy in the throat. And it was made even worse in conjunction with her surname, Nguyen. Ngoan Nguyen. A double helping of letter combinations that were jarring to the American eye and nonsoluble to the American tongue. She could recall in perfect detail every awkward roll call, every raised-eyebrows-and-pursed-lips look of panic on the attendance-taker’s face at the beginning of the semester when they arrived at the n’s. “Winnie” had been the gradual result of years of explaining how to say her last name. “Nguyen” became “Win,” which by high school became “Winnie,” which stuck.
Even if Winnie had wanted to ask Sang to call her by her preferred name, she didn’t have the chance to:
“Glad you could make it,” he said as she climbed into the back seat of the cab. From the front, he reached around and offered her an abrupt and awkwardly angled left-handed shake. His right hand was holding a flip phone up to his ear. “You can call me Dr. Sang. Everyone does.” He pointed to the phone. “I’ll be done with this in two minutes.”
He proceeded to have a sixteen-minute conversation conducted entirely in what Winnie inferred was slightly halting Thai, which she wished she didn’t find impressive but did. She spent this time trying to figure out their location by looking at street signs. Her mental map of Saigon was too patchy to guess where they were going.
After Dr. Sang had finished his phone call and hung up, the window for introductions and name corrections had closed. “Ngoan,” he said (she almost flinched again but was able to stop herself in time), studying her via the taxi’s rearview mirror, “You’re all grown up. I almost didn’t recognize you.”
“Oh,” said Winnie, embarrassed, “Have we met before?”
“Only once, very briefly,” he said with a smile. Winnie thought that his teeth were too long and the hair on the sides of his head was too short. She didn’t like that she could see his scalp through it. Pink-white skin, like a scallop. “You probably don’t remember. Thien introduced me to your family at our graduation. That would have been, what, ten years ago? You were just a kid.”
Winnie nodded slowly, an imprecisely edged memory beginning to reassemble itself in her mind against her will. The graduation: She, surly and thirteen. Her thighs sticking to a wooden auditorium seat. Thien in golden academic regalia that matched his status as golden child. Their father struggling to figure out the buttons on the camcorder he’d bought the week before, a used Sony the size of a loaf of bread. Thien posing for the video with Winnie’s other older brother and sister, who were twenty-four and twenty-one, respectively, while Winnie watched, resenting the three of them for their closeness in age and in every other way that mattered. Resenting the three of them for taking up all the space in their family for nearly all of her young life and then vanishing in quick succession, leaving behind a vacuum that she could not fill. Thien posing with his friends from the Vietnamese Student Association, all the fellow golden children with refugee parents and bright medical futures—ah yes, she thought, twisting the mental lens of her memory into focus—there was Dr. Sang with his long teeth, standing next to her brother. Greeting her family in formal Vietnamese, even her white mother, because golden boys were always polite boys.
“Do you work around here?” she asked, hoping he would provide a clue about where they were headed. “Are you at one of the big hospitals?”
“Oh, no,” said Dr. Sang. “You could say that I run a private practice. More money and better hours, so I can pursue some of my other business ventures on the side.”
“Is that why you moved to Vietnam?” In the mirror, Winnie saw Dr. Sang’s eyes flick sideways. Her question had accidentally brushed up against something it should not have.
But then he just laughed. “Why would I settle for simply doing well in America when I can have the run of the entire playground here?” he said. From his jacket pocket he produced a small pink bottle, rattled out two pills, and swallowed them dry, seemingly without any difficulty. Winnie felt her own throat seize up reflexively just from watching. Then the doctor squinted out of the taxi window. “Oh, good, we’re here.”
The taxi had turned down a side street and was pulling up in front of a moderately sized pagoda with walls painted the mealy red-pink of an overripe guava. Winnie looked at Dr. Sang for some sort of explanation (“Your Vietnamese education requires a temple blessing” or “I am now going to perform surgery on a monk”), but he just gave her an encouraging smile and gestured for her to exit the vehicle.
“Go ahead,” he said.
Winnie hesitated, her hand on the door handle. “Is this a special pagoda?” she asked, hoping it was an effective way of disguising the question “Why are we here?”
Dr. Sang flashed her a look of exasperation. “It’s a pagoda. It’s a very nice pagoda. What more do you want?” There was a sharp edge to his voice that took Winnie by surprise. “All Americans who visit Vietnam like to see the pagodas,” he added, enunciating carefully, as if reciting something he had memorized from a book.
“I’m very excited to see it,” Winnie said quickly, and got out of the taxi. Dr. Sang remained seated. It appeared that he did not intend to leave the car. “Are you…” Winnie began, apprehensively.
Dr. Sang pointed to his phone. “I have to make another quick call. You go have a look around. Take as long as you like. Enjoy yourself!” The sharpness in his voice still had not dissolved completely, causing the last line to sound vaguely like a threat.
Relieved to get away from her host, Winnie bolted for the pagoda gate. She now understood that Dr. Sang had never been eager to meet her, just eager to get their meeting over with. This half-guided tour was his own version of paying a tax.
The pitiful thing was that she had nowhere better to be than this largely empty pagoda, in the middle of the afternoon, with the kind of man who asked people to call him “Doctor” outside of the office. In forty-nine days, this was the first time that she had gone somewhere besides her great-aunt’s house or the academy and not been alone. Winnie was determined not to enjoy herself, purely because it was what Dr. Sang had told her to do and she disliked him, but as she passed through the stone archway and into a shaded courtyard, she felt a hush fall over her heart. It did not feel like stepping back in time but like stepping sideways into a protected pocket that existed outside of it. Banyans flanked the courtyard, cauled with tangles of aerial roots that resembled dripping candle wax. In a walled, circular pool at its center, the silhouettes of three geriatric turtles moved slowly through cloudy green water. Long wires had been strung up between the archway and the entrance to the actual temple; every few feet, lanterns bobbed like buoys, their exposed wooden ribs peeking out in spots where the silk had rotted away. Winnie followed them inside.
The only light within the temple came from offertory candles and a single glowing recess that housed a statue of the Buddha with blank, bronze eyes, framed by concentric circles of psychedelic flashing yellow and purple tube lights. The air was stagnant and agarwood scented from the bedspring-shaped coils of burning incense that dangled from the ceiling. In the darkness, distorted by the strobe of disco Buddha, the shadowy figures of the few other visitors to the pagoda—all of them women and most of them on their knees—took on a touch of menace. Despite the heat, Winnie felt a strange chill burrowing its way across her shoulder blades, and the longer she stood there, her skin turning violet, gold, violet, gold with each flash of the lights, the more the feeling spread. She exited the temple quickly and found a banyan to regain her composure beneath.
Winnie felt better in the sunlight. She let her hand rest on the tree’s ropy trunk. The bark was smooth beneath her fingers. These were the breed of strangling ficus that spent two hundred years braiding their bodies around a host tree, killing it while gradually assuming its form. Parasite, doppelgänger, sarcophagus. Winnie admired it. What she wished, she reflected dreamily, her whole back now leaning against the tree, was for the same thing to happen to her. For the new self she’d hoped she would become in Saigon—a better self, a banyan self, resilient and impenetrable—to encase Old Winnie completely in its cage-like lattice of roots and then let her wither away inside. She wanted there to be no trace left of that thirteen-year-old girl that Dr. Sang had remembered.
But now her daydream had been interrupted by the reminder that the doctor was still sitting in a taxi on the other side of the gate. Winnie wondered how many minutes she should wait before returning to him. How long was long enough to have believably pretended to enjoy oneself at a pagoda? She pushed herself up from the trunk and headed toward the turtle pond, thinking that she would pass the time by staring at them, but just then, in the corner of her eye, something glinted.
It was sunshine on metal spokes. A woman in a wheelchair was sitting just to the side of the same tree that Winnie had been leaning against. Winnie didn’t know why she hadn’t noticed her earlier. Her face had been powdered to ageless, poreless immaculacy, and she had the kind of hair that was a black so pure, all the light that touched it was swallowed up instead of reflected. The woman smiled at Winnie, and Winnie smiled back automatically before she realized that the woman was selling lottery tickets. Winnie felt it would be rude not to buy one from her after making eye contact. She sheepishly searched for a 10,000-đồng note in her wallet and walked over. With a graceful nod, the lottery woman held out her booklet of glossy red slips for Winnie to choose from and then folded her hands atop the blanket on her lap while she waited.
Winnie could not remember which numbers were supposed to be lucky. She thumbed through the tickets, looking for a 22, her age, or a 30, her birthday, in any of the six-digit combinations. When she couldn’t find either, she decided to base her decision on the accompanying illustrations, for each ticket had a different picture—lotuses, a heap of melons, boats in a harbor, a massive carp. The one she found herself pausing at, 2 5 0 1 2 9, had a seated dog on it, depicted with a cheerful curve to the tail that suggested wagging, and an orangey-brown patch over one eye. It reminded her of the kind of dog she used to draw over and over again when she was a child, filling entire pads of construction paper. Growing up, Young Winnie had longed for a puppy with an intensity that had occasionally frightened her parents, who were “not pet people.” Winnie gave the dog on the lottery ticket an imaginary little scratch on the head with a fingertip and then handed the rest of the booklet back to the woman along with her 10,000₫. She looked at the woman a little nervously, part of her irrationally hoping that she would receive some kind of small signal to show that she had chosen a good number.
To her surprise, the woman’s facial expression did, in fact, change. As she continued gazing unblinkingly back at Winnie, the corners of her lips began curling upward, like guitar strings being slowly pulled taut on tuning pegs. It shifted her smile from pleasantly serene to something that Winnie could not describe but which made her stomach suddenly feel icy. It was triumphant, but there was a detached, almost clinical element of pity in it as well. It was not even really a smile anymore.
Clutching her ticket, Winnie backed away from the woman, who, she noted with fresh alarm, still hadn’t blinked. Away from the temple, away from the trees, away from that face. She backed through the gate, the prospect of Dr. Sang now preferable to remaining in that courtyard a minute longer.
The doctor was no longer talking on the phone—he was texting rapidly, but he was standing outside the taxi now, leaning against its hood at an uncomfortable-looking 140-degree angle that Winnie was sure he thought looked alluringly louche. This was not being done for her sake though, but for the five attractive young women working at the electronics store next to the pagoda who had an unobstructed view of him through their large glass window.
“Done already?” he said, pushing himself up from his deep lean with visible difficulty. “Did you take any photos for your family? If you didn’t remember to take photos, you should go back and get some,” he warned, humorlessly.
“I took a lot,” lied Winnie. She folded her lottery ticket in thirds, so that she wouldn’t crease the dog, and placed it in her wallet. Dr. Sang watched this with the most interest he had shown all afternoon.
“We’ll have to remember to check that tonight to see if you’ve won anything,” he said. Then he slid back inside the taxi. “Ready for the second stop?”
Winnie had not anticipated that the pagoda was part of a larger itinerary. The second stop was the old presidential palace (“All Americans who visit Vietnam like to see the presidential palace,” he declared on the way over, taking out his pill bottle from his jacket and eating two more capsules like they were candy). They didn’t actually stop for a tour of the building, which Winnie was thankful for—the doctor just ordered the taxi to drive slowly around the block three times so Winnie could look at it. He did the same thing at the cathedral, but at stop number four, the post office, he told the driver to pull up onto a curb and then instructed Winnie to go into the building and take photos. (“All Americans like to take photos of the post office.”) While he waited in the car, she strolled around the main hall for ten minutes, admiring the colonial curvature of its paneled ceiling.
When she returned, Dr. Sang announced that they would end with dinner at a hot pot restaurant. It was just past five, but Winnie was already hungry. The promise of both a meal and of the end of the Dr. Sang Saigon Experience cheered her up right away. “Do all Americans visiting Vietnam like to eat hot pot?” she ventured playfully.
Dr. Sang just blinked at her, confused. “What do you mean?” he said. “Americans don’t come here to eat hot pot.” He turned back around in his seat. “What a weird question,” he muttered to himself under his breath.
The restaurant he had chosen was on the top floor of a newly constructed shopping complex. They had to ride eight gleaming escalators in order to get to it, and so Winnie was disappointed when they arrived and there were no windows. It was her first time being this high up in the city—she lived her life in Vietnam horizontally and at sidewalk level—and she had been curious about the view. The restaurant was decorated in a color palette of lacquered blacks and brothel reds, with framed swords on the dark walls, and Winnie and the doctor were the only customers there. Winnie was not surprised at all when Dr. Sang immediately took the sole menu on their table and then ordered for them without consulting her, but she was taken aback when he told the waiter to remove his bowl and chopsticks.
“I have to save my appetite,” he explained to Winnie. “After this I’m taking a group of investors out to dinner. Bird’s nest soup. Have you ever tried it?” He asked this with a waxy little smile, knowing perfectly well that she hadn’t. “A hundred U.S. dollars for one bowl of bird spit. It doesn’t even taste like anything; it’s all texture. Very slippery. Like raw egg whites.” Winnie no longer felt guilty about the afternoon’s astronomical taxi bill, which the doctor had paid. Across the table, he was taking his pills out again. Now that she was closer, Winnie saw that it was a bottle of Pepto-Bismol.
Dr. Sang noticed her staring. “Oh, this?” he said, giving the bottle a jaunty shake. “Three years ago I decided to quit cigarettes and alcohol and all my other substances cold turkey—better for the brain and the body, et cetera—and to make it easier, I got in the habit of popping a couple of these every time I got the itch, just to take the edge off. And now they’ve grown on me.” He unscrewed the cap and tipped out a chalky capsule. “I even like the taste. But I prefer the pills to the chewable tablets. Swallowing is just more satisfying.” He took the pill between his thumb and index finger, placed it in his mouth with the kind of delicacy usually reserved for tabs of LSD, and then smiled.
Winnie was struggling to keep her face neutral. It was one of the more insane things she had ever heard. In her head she calculated that the doctor had taken five Peptos during their three hours together, so he was going through at least half a bottle a day. She pictured his luxurious apartment somewhere in District 1; imagined his penthouse views, his imported flooring, a rooftop pool, perhaps, and then, in a capacious bathroom, a closet stocked entirely with little pink bottles. With horror, she tried to contemplate what his bowel movements were like. At that moment, two waiters arrived with a tabletop burner and a large vat of broth. They ignited a white puck of paraffin beneath the hot pot and then vanished again.
“So,” said Dr. Sang, “your brother’s email said you’re an English teacher here.”
It appeared that this part of the proceedings would involve more small talk than Winnie liked. “Yes.” The less said about her teaching career, the better.
“And your mom teaches too, if I remember correctly?”
Winnie fidgeted with her chopsticks. “Middle school language arts now,” she said. “But she used to teach ESL. That’s how she met my dad—she volunteered at the refugee camp where his family ended up. He was one of her students.”
The waiters had returned, this time with three platters. One was heaped entirely with noodles. One was shingled with thin slices of raw beef, pork balls, fish cakes, gray apostrophes of uncooked shrimp, puffs of fried tofu. The last was overflowing with vegetables: watercress and shaved banana flower, a whole head’s worth of cabbage, a mountain of okra. It was enough food for six people.
Dr. Sang was nodding to himself. “I remember Thien telling me about your parents. I thought it was such a cute story.” There was that sharpness in his voice again, just beneath the skin of his words. “My parents weren’t American enough to have a cute story. They both just worked at the same nail salon when they came over.”
But isn’t it just the same story? thought Winnie to herself. A four-word story: “It was the war.”
Dr. Sang was still going. “We grew up too poor for cuteness. Whenever your brother talked about your family, it sounded like a fairy tale to me. Especially you guys and your rhyming names. Like the dwarves in Snow White.”
“Well, not all of us rhymed,” demurred Winnie. The names of the seven dwarves didn’t rhyme either, but she knew he would not like to be corrected. “I came along and ruined the pattern.” Thien, Hien, Lien, and then, eight years later, Ngoan, like an intrusive trombone in what was supposed to be a string quartet. “I don’t think they were planning on having to name a fourth child.”
The hot pot was now bubbling. “Load it up while it boils,” ordered Dr. Sang. “Veggies first. Then shrimp and meatballs.” Winnie tentatively began to choose her morsels and lower them in. Impatient with her slow chopsticking, the doctor grabbed the ladle himself and dumped all of the cabbage into the soup.
Winnie’s appetite was faltering in the presence of an insurmountable quantity of food. Because it was impossible to consume this much by herself, her stomach was giving up already. She felt angry now. It was a trap. The doctor had known she would never be able to finish it. He had planned to prove that Winnie was the girl he’d thought she was: spoiled, half white, wasteful. But she was going to prove him wrong instead.
“It never felt like a fairy tale to me,” she said, as she poked all the floating greenery down below the surface of the liquid to finish cooking.
“Hmm?”
“Or if it did, it felt like one that I had accidentally wandered into by mistake. Thien, Hien, Lien. Doctor, lawyer, engineer,” she recited. “Well, technically, doctor, engineer, lawyer, but still. No one needed a Ngoan.” She laughed and began rolling the meatballs into the soup from the platter, ignoring the painful coiling in her stomach. “Between the three of them, they accomplished everything that my parents ever wanted, and they’re all married with their own kids already. There weren’t any American expectations left over for me.” She didn’t know why she was telling him this. The doctor had taken his phone out again and wasn’t really listening.
Or maybe he was. “Is that why you moved to Vietnam?” he asked, without looking up from his screen. Everything was in the hot pot now. Too many things—the soup had risen and was boiling over now, rivulets of orange-hued liquid hitting the burning paraffin and hissing. When Winnie did not reply, he clicked the phone shut and gave her a slightly reproachful glance. “I answered when you asked me the same question earlier,” he reminded her.
“I came here to teach English,” Winnie said lamely.
The doctor snorted. “That’s a justification, not a reason. No one comes here to teach English, least of all the actual English teachers. They’re in Asia to find themselves.”
“I didn’t come here to find myself,” protested Winnie quickly. “I don’t want to find anything.”
Dr. Sang gave her a look that was nearly as unsettling as the lottery woman’s, back at the temple. It pierced through her, but there was something in it adjacent to kindness, and she was unprepared for that. He took the ladle and dealt her a bowlful of broth, making sure that it contained at least one of every ingredient. “Then just be careful nothing finds you instead,” he finally said, handing it to her. “Eat.”
Winnie picked up a shrimp with shaky chopsticks. She brought it to her lips and, even though her throat was trying to tie itself shut, she chewed it into sludge and swallowed. She would waste nothing, she told herself. She shoveled down all the beef next, bringing the bowl up with her free hand to wash the meat down with spicy broth. Winnie ate the okra, ate the gooey strings of what had once been sliced tomato, ate the tofu, transformed during its sojourn in the soup into pouches of boiling liquid that burned her tongue when she bit down, ate the banana flower that felt like coarse, curly hairs in her mouth. Dr. Sang watched her and said nothing.
Once she had drained her bowl, Winnie took hold of the ladle herself and refilled it. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, not sure if what she was wiping were the beginnings of tears but wanting to head them off early if they were. This time she had unwittingly served herself an entire bowl of dripping cabbage. Still, she was determined to consume all of it, and she did, bite by torturous wet bite. Winnie wanted to throw up, but she reached for the ladle once more.
“Ngoan. Stop,” Dr. Sang said quietly. It still took her a moment to remember that the name he had called her by was her own.
Her hand fell back. “Thank you,” she whispered. She couldn’t even look at what was left in the pot. None of it could be saved.
They rode the eight escalators back down in silence.
At the bottom, Dr. Sang asked the doorman to hail two taxis for them. “You take the first one,” he said to Winnie. “I have to go directly to my dinner. Will you be able to get home from here? Do you live close by?”
Winnie nodded, even though she still wasn’t certain which district they were currently in.
“Here,” said Dr. Sang, pulling out two 200,000₫ notes and handing them to her. “That’s enough to get you halfway to Ba Ria.” He laughed. “Oh, wait!” he said suddenly, “I forgot—your lottery ticket. I’ll show you how to check the results. Take it out.”
Winnie unzipped her wallet, putting away the 400,000₫ from the doctor and pulling out the ticket.
“So, first you look and see which province it’s for. It should say it somewhere along the top. It’s usually Dong Nai or Tien Giang.”
Winnie frowned. “It doesn’t have a province.” She flipped the ticket over, examined the back, then returned to the front again. There was the dog, there was the number, but there was no sign of a province.
“Let me see.” The doctor took the ticket, glanced down at it, then handed it back. He couldn’t quite keep the smile off of his face. “Oh, Ngoan. You got scammed. This is a fake. I didn’t even know people went to the trouble of printing their own lottery tickets to trick foreigners. And I thought I knew all the grifts here!” He handed it back to Winnie and laughed when she put it carefully in her purse. “Why are you keeping that? Throw it away.”
“It’s a souvenir,” said Winnie. But the truth was that even though she couldn’t explain it, she knew that the ticket was hers now. She couldn’t just get rid of it.
By now, their taxis had arrived. Dr. Sang waved goodbye to Winnie as she climbed into her car.
“Feel free to contact me if you want help with anything,” he said. “I’m sure that you won’t need to though.” It was polite, but his meaning was clear. The two of them were finished with each other now.
In the taxi, Winnie felt so sick that she wrapped her arms tightly around herself and squeezed like she was holding the seams of her skin together to keep the soup from exploding out of her. The concerned driver asked her if she was cold, and she could not answer because she was sure that if she opened her mouth, hot pot would bubble up. He turned off the air-conditioning, thinking that she hadn’t understood his Vietnamese, and so Winnie spent the rest of the ride back to her great-aunt’s house as sweaty as she was nauseous.
The next morning, Winnie went to a phone store and spent the leftover taxi money from Dr. Sang on a new SIM card. She dropped her old one in the gutter on her walk to the academy. Now he would not be able to contact her again even if he wanted to. Winnie told herself that the uneasy fluttering she still felt in her stomach was just the sensation of her old roots finally starting to come loose.