Chapter 1 — Cartographer of Lost Roads

The map has been on the glass table since seven o'clock in the morning, but Quach Van Khue still hasn't dared touch it with her pen.

That is not the timidity of a newbie. Van Khue has been working as a draftsman at the Kim Xuyen City Urban Planning and Archives Center for four years, long enough for her hand to get used to tracing each yellowed ink stroke, long enough for her to distinguish between folds caused by time and folds caused by people intentionally folding a document to hide certain parts. What made her hesitate this morning was that this was a 1987 master plan map — a papier-mâché map, measuring two meters by one and a half meters, one of the largest remaining maps from the era before the city had large-format scanners. The center had recently received funding to digitize the entire trove of historical maps before they crumbled to dust, and this one was high on the priority list, as it had begun to get brittle in the folds, and in some places the ink had faded to the point of being almost transparent.

She pulled her white cotton gloves up to her wrists and carefully spread the map out on the light table, gently pressing down the curved corners with felt-covered brass bars. The light from under the table shined through the thin layer of paper, clearly revealing the pencil lines beneath the ink layer - the traces of the old cartographers, the guiding lines before they inked on top. Van Khue always liked this moment, the moment of seeing the "naked" map, before the scanner turned it into lifeless pixels on the screen.

Kim Xuyen city in 1987, through the drawings of some anonymous painter, looked surprisingly small and clear. The central streets — Tran Phu, Le Loi, Bach Dang — have almost the same shape as they do now. But the closer you go to the riverbank, the more tangled and winding the roads become, as if the cartographer had tried to accurately record every small alley without straightening them out to make them neat. That is a sign of a spontaneous residential area, springing up from living needs, not from any planning drawings.

Van Khue held a hand-held magnifying glass along the river's edge, where the map noted in tiny letters: "Van Dang — fishing village, about 200 households." A small square marks the location of the temple, an even smaller triangular symbol marks the ferry wharf. She smiled to herself. The name sounds beautiful — Van Dang, ten thousand lights. She envisioned fishing pens lighting up the entire river at night, the light sparkling on the water like a horizontal galaxy.

She noted down the coordinates, preparing to put the map into the large-format scanner placed in the corner of the room, a machine worth nearly half a billion VND that the center had just purchased last year, as long as a billiard table, scanning each strip of paper less than a meter wide and then reassembling it using specialized software. The job requires almost meditative patience — scanning, checking, matching, checking again, and if there's even a half-millimeter error, scanning again from the beginning.

At noon, when Van Khue completed the 1987 scan, she opened the storage cabinet and took out the next map in the file of the same area - the 1995 master plan map, redrawn "on the basis of inheritance" of the 1987 map, according to the stamped text in the lower right corner. This is a normal process: every few years, the city redraws the master map to update changes — new roads opened, new residential areas, completed projects.

But as she placed the two maps side by side on the two light tables, something made her pause.

The riverbank where Van Dang Hamlet used to be, in the 1995 map, is only a monotonous light blue patch, captioned with italicized text: "Reserve land - flood drainage corridor". Not a single alley remains. There was no trace of the temple, the wharf, or the two hundred rooftops that had been meticulously marked on the map eight years earlier.

Van Khue is not surprised when a residential area disappears from the map — it happens often in the history of urban planning, especially in areas that are subject to clearance for safety or beautification reasons. What annoyed her was its suddenness. Normally, a cleared area will leave traces in the accompanying documents: land recovery decisions, asset inventory records, lists of resettled households, and even a drawing of the "pre-clearance status" saved in parallel as a basis for future comparison. It's an unwritten rule in the planning archives industry — no one removes a neighborhood from a map without leaving at least a note.

She searched the accompanying file, code HS-1995-047, corresponding to the east riverbank area. Inside there are only drawings, a map acceptance record signed on March 12, 1995, and a few pages of appendices about the drainage system. There is no decision to recover land. There is no list of households. There is no mention of Van Dang Hamlet, as if it never existed.

Van Khue sat up straight, took off her gloves, and rubbed her temples. Maybe the file was lost, she told herself. Thirty years is long enough for many things to disappear from the archives — rats, termites, hasty warehouse transfers during the subsidy period when people still considered old records more of a burden than an asset. She had encountered similar cases, gaps in records that no one bothered to explain.

But there was one small detail that kept stuck in her mind, like a grain of sand in her shoe. On the 1995 map, the lines drawing the "land reserve for flood drainage" area show no signs of a patchwork drawing, pasted over the old version as people often do when urgently editing a completed map. It is drawn seamlessly, with the same ink, the same density as the rest of the map — meaning the entire Xom Van Dang area has been redrawn from scratch, not edited. Someone sat down and drew that entire stretch of riverbank as if the fishing village had never been there, then merged it seamlessly into the rest of the overall map.

That's a huge amount of work to do just for the sake of "updating". People don't redraw an entire stretch of riverbank nearly a kilometer long just to delete a caption.

She sat quietly for a moment, looking through the storage room window at the street below, where motorbikes were weaving through the rush of people. Kim Xuyen in the afternoon is always noisy in its own way - car horns, sales calls, temple bells echoing from the riverbank. She wondered, if two hundred rooftops had existed there, where their sounds had gone. The sound of children playing in the alley, the sound of people calling each other to cast their nets, the sound of pennants hitting each other as they were pulled out of the water - all those sounds, if they were ever real, have now disappeared, when even the map no longer retains a single word about them.

That afternoon, before leaving, Van Khue stopped by the room of Dinh Trong Khai, head of the Department of Maps and Cadastral Documents, who had worked at this center for nearly thirty years, long enough for him to know almost every corner of the archive by heart.

"Mr. Khai," she lightly tapped on the open door frame, "do you remember the Van Dang Hamlet area on the east riverbank? In the 1987 map it was still there, by 1995 it had completely disappeared, but the accompanying documents did not contain any land recovery decisions."

Mr. Khai was typing on the computer, his fingers paused on the keyboard for exactly half a second - a silence so short that if Van Khue had not been accustomed to observing small details on papers for four years, she probably would not have noticed.

"Van Dang," he said, his eyes still not leaving the screen. "I haven't heard that name for a long time. The records must have been lost since the warehouse transfer in the 2000s, when a lot of documents were lost. Just note in the inventory record 'vacant records', then continue with the main work. Next month, the progress of the central area should be completed."

Reasonable, neat answer, exactly the way an experienced manager would say to close a side question. But Van Khue realized he wasn't looking at her when he said that, and his hand, which had been typing steadily, now rested on the keyboard as if waiting for her to leave the room.

"Yes," she replied, "I'll make a note of it."

She turned and walked out, but in her heart, that answer didn't close anything. It only made the sand in her shoes sink a little deeper.

That evening, returning to the family's small three-story house on Nguyen Trai Street, Van Khue saw his grandfather, Quach Van Tuyen, sitting alone on the porch like every night, an old radio crackling with news next to him. He is seventy-eight years old this year, his back has become hunched over in recent years, but his eyes are still sharp, and his hands still have the strange habit that the whole family has long been familiar with: every time he sits idle, he often uses his index finger to draw invisible straight lines on the table, on his lap, on any flat surface within reach - like a person who has held a brush all his life, but now his hand still remembers the movements even though there is nothing left to draw with.

"You just got back," Mr. Tuyen said, without looking up.

"Yes, I just came back. Have you eaten yet?"

"I've eaten. Your mother left your portion on the table."

Van Khue stood for a moment, looking at his figure sitting huddled in the yellow light shining from inside the house. She intended to tell him about the map, about the fishing village with a poetic name that had disappeared without a trace - because her grandfather, before retiring, also worked for many years at the Department of Planning, and sometimes his old stories are still the most valuable source of documents that no records can record. But looking at him sitting quietly, his fingers still drawing invisible lines on her thighs, she stopped.

"I'm coming in to eat," she said, then entered the house.

She didn't know that, right behind her, her grandfather's finger had just stopped halfway through a line, and in the dim darkness of the porch, his face flashed with an expression that if Van Khue had seen it, she probably wouldn't have been able to eat dinner that night.

That night, before going to sleep, Van Khue took an old leather-bound notebook out of her drawer - the notebook she used to sketch the roads that appeared in her dreams, a strange habit she had kept since she was in college, when a technical drawing teacher once told the class that if a mapmaker works long enough and conscientiously enough, he will begin to dream of roads that are not real. She opened a blank page, and for some reason, instead of drawing from her dream memory as usual, her hand automatically sketched the shape of the river and the winding alleys of Van Dang Hamlet that she had just seen on the map of 1987 that morning.

She drew until her pencil broke, then sat looking at the page for a long time, wondering why a residential area she had never been to, and had never heard anyone talk about, bothered her so much. Perhaps, she thought, it was a professional instinct — a draftsman couldn't stand the feeling of an unexplained gap on the map he was in charge of. But maybe, some part of her, the unnamed part, felt that void was not simply a geographical void.

Outside the window, Kim Xuyen city is still lit up like every night, and somewhere on the riverbank, the water still flows through the bend where there used to be a fishing village named after ten thousand lights, now just an empty lot covered with weeds, waiting for a new real estate project to be started.