Look at them.
Go on. I’m not ashamed.
Wrinkled, yes. Dirty most days. Fingers stiff in the cold. Nails yellowed. But these hands have never known rest, and they’ve never asked for pity.
When I was a girl, I carried water from the river, barefoot. Two buckets and a bamboo pole. The straps cut into my shoulders, and still—these hands held on.
I planted rice until my spine bent. Washed laundry for families richer than mine. Peeled sweet potatoes with a rusted knife so many times, I can do it in the dark.
These hands have scrubbed floors, hauled baskets, dug up cassava in fields where no one remembered our names. They sewed torn áo bà ba shirts. They cooked for neighbors when we had only rice and salt.
They bathed my babies.
Buried my husband.
Wiped tears I didn’t have time to shed.
The lines you see here—each one carries a season. A dry year. A flood. A child leaving home. A child never coming back.
Sometimes the skin cracks.
Sometimes they bleed.
But I keep going. Because what else is there?
People walk past me now—on motorbikes, in fancy clothes—and they don’t see me. They see old. They see poor.
But they don’t see these hands.
They don’t know how much they’ve carried.
How much they’ve saved.
How much they still remember.
So no, I don’t wear rings.
No polish. No softness.
But every scar is mine.
And even now, when I light incense at the altar,
or hold a tin cup of tea in the morning light—
I think:
These hands have lived.