All I can do now is to leave. Nothing else can save me from the daily pain of breathing the dusty air; it is filled with pain, sorrow, and hatred and seeming order of authority. Why can't people just be? Why do some of them feel the need to 'correct' others?
I've never forgot these thoughts ever since I've moved to Hanoi and gave birth to my dear Hang. The love I have for her is as simple as my life at the moment. All I ever do is for my little girl: I wake up, prepare food, sell it, and then bring home the paltry money I make for whatever need she might have. I have learnt to live simply. Ever since the horror my brother made me go through, I've put an end to unimportant needs in life; the midnight tears, the hatred that I've been feeding, the hopeless hours overflowing with misery-I had ended them all. Until, Chinh showed up at my door again, after ten years.
I had to listen through stories of his 'revolution'. How the society is being reformed to a better one for all. How the proletariat and the peasantry are the only two idealised persons, and how I should stay away from merchants in this time of struggle between capitalists and communists. I have, for many times, doubted that he was the latter one. His actions did never seem selfless to be. I never saw him, as I did many others, suffer for his life.
Anyways, I had to be polite, since he was of my blood. Although the only last drop of love I had for him was because we were a family, he did not seem to give importance to this. As a matter of fact, as we were talking about out parents- God let them rest in peace, he told me that these were nonsense in "a materialist age". He said "after death, there's nothing". At that moment, for a split second, I wished I were dead. But for Hang's sake, for the sake of Ton's memory, I took a deep breath.
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