In a quiet courtyard stained by years of sun and monsoon, Bà Lựu sat cross-legged on a reed mat, her hands stained crimson from the powder of ground sandalwood and dyed bamboo. She was an incense maker—not the tourist kind wrapped in shiny gold foil, but the real kind: earthy, sacred, meant for altars and ancestor shrines.
Each morning, she mixed her own paste: trầm hương, quế, bột keo—agarwood, cinnamon, tree resin. No machines. Just mortar, pestle, rhythm. She dipped the thin bamboo sticks into the wet paste, rolled them smooth, then fanned them out to dry like red suns across bamboo trays.
Children often passed her alley on the way to school. Some stopped to watch.
“Bà ơi, sao lại làm tay vậy?” Why do you still do it by hand?
She smiled, not looking up.
“Vì tay mình nhớ.” Because my hands remember.
She had made incense since she was a girl—first to help her mother, later to earn money during the hungry postwar years, and now, simply because no one else in her family cared to carry it on.
Tourists rarely found her. The big stalls near the river sold machine-made cones with jasmine oil and tourist markup. But locals knew. Monks from the pagoda came quietly, nodding. A widow from Cẩm Nam bought three bundles every new moon. To them, her incense wasn’t just smoke. It was connection.
To the dead. To memory. To the part of Hội An that whispered rather than shouted.
At dusk, she sat back, wiped her palms on her áo bà ba, and lit a stick for herself—no ceremony, just habit.
The smoke curled upward into the orange sky,
carrying with it the scent of cinnamon,
and the life of a woman
who still wove the sacred
one stick at a time.