Every weekend, Cô Luyến took the local bus from Đà Nẵng to Hội An—not because she had to, but because it reminded her of her mother.
She wore pressed cotton shirts, neatly hemmed pants, and a straw nón lá that she’d kept for over thirty years—not the tourist kind with fresh lacquer, but a well-used, carefully stored one she only brought out for sunny walks and market visits. The inside brim still had a faint pencil note: “Luyến, Tết 1993 – Mẹ.” She never erased it.
Cô Luyến was 68, retired from the Department of Education, widow, two children living in Canada. Her apartment was tidy, with books on the shelf and a rice cooker that sang when it finished. She didn’t need to sell anything, didn’t need to beg or worry about daily meals. But she hated the malls and preferred the open air. Each Saturday, she walked along Hội An’s quiet alleys before the lantern crowds arrived—buying a small fish, a bunch of rau răm, a few dried lotus seeds. She liked to sit by the river and watch the ferrymen push off from the shore. Sometimes tourists took photos of her, mistaking her for a vendor. Once, an American woman offered her 100,000 đồng for her hat.
Cô Luyến smiled, polite but firm. “Cái này không phải để bán, chị. This one’s not for sale.”
She walked slowly, with the calm of someone who didn’t hurry anymore. She thought often of her youth—wearing a similar hat on a bicycle to university in Huế, buying fried bánh lọc from a roadside cart, writing poems no one ever read. She still wrote poems, in small notebooks she never showed. One ended like this:
Dưới vành nón cũ, tôi vẫn là tôi,
một người lặng lẽ, đi giữa nắng gió Hội An.
Beneath this old hat, I’m still myself,
a quiet woman walking between Hội An’s sun and wind.
Then she’d fold the notebook, buy a glass of sâm dứa, and wait for the last bus home.