Chapter 2 — Cartographer of Lost Roads

On Saturday morning, Van Khue did not have to go to the office, but she still woke up early as usual, sat at the dining table with the whole family while her mother, Mrs. To Thi Bich Nguyen, served a bowl of hot snakehead fish porridge on the table.

"You didn't go to work today and got up so early," her mother said, her voice both questioning and as if she already guessed the answer.

"I plan to stop by the city library to look at old newspapers," Van Khue replied, gently stirring the bowl of porridge to cool it down. "There is a part of my job that I find a bit strange. I want to learn more."

Her father, Mr. Quach Dinh Lam, was reading paper newspapers - a habit he kept for twenty years as a construction engineer. Even though now there are electronic newspapers, he still likes the feeling of paper rustling under his hand every morning - looked up at his daughter through the rim of his glasses.

"How strange?" he asked.

"There is a residential area along the river, a fishing village called Van Dang. I saw it on the old map in 1987, but on the 1995 map, it completely disappeared, without any trace. The accompanying documents also do not have a land recovery decision."

Mr. Lam frowned and took a sip of tea. "Van Dang? This name sounds familiar to me, but I can't remember clearly. I was probably still young at that time. I'll ask my grandfather, he worked at the Department of Planning all his life, maybe he remembers."

The whole dining table paused for a very small moment when that sentence ended. Van Khue noticed her mother quickly glanced towards the kitchen door, where grandfather Quach Van Tuyen had just walked in, holding an empty kettle in his hand, intending to go to the faucet to add more boiling water.

"Grandpa," Van Khue called, trying to keep his voice natural, "do you remember Van Dang village along the river? In the past, it seemed to be located near the East bridge."

The kettle in Mr. Tuyen's hand gently hit the edge of the sink - a small sound, but enough for Van Khue to look up. He stood with his back to the dining table, his shoulders stiffened for a moment, then he turned on the faucet, letting the noisy flow of water cover the silence just now.

"Van Dang," he said, his voice monotonous, without turning around. "It's just an old fishing village. It was cleared a long time ago, before I was even born. There's nothing to find out."

"But I couldn't find any release decision in the archives," Van Khue said. "There is no compensation record, no list of resettled households. Very strange, sir, usually there should be at least one piece of paper."

"Back then, the war was over and a lot of documents were lost," Mr. Tuyen replied, turned off the faucet, carried the kettle back to the gas stove without looking at the dining table. "Don't waste your time looking up old stories. It's a waste of time. Eat breakfast and then go to the library."

There was something about that last sentence that made Van Khue a bit stunned - how did he know she was going to the library, when she had just told her mother a moment ago, and he had just walked into the kitchen? Perhaps he heard it from outside the door. Perhaps just a coincidence in wording. But she remembered that detail, putting it in a corner of her mind, next to other details that were gradually forming into a vague shape that she could not yet name.

Breakfast ended in a somewhat more awkward atmosphere than usual. Mr. Lam tried to change the conversation to the weather and the football match last night, but Van Khue realized that his father was also paying attention to his grandfather's reaction, even though he did not say anything more.

After breakfast, Van Khue cycled to the Kim Xuyen City Library, a three-story building built during the French colonial period, with faded yellow lime walls, located modestly between two newly built buildings. The local archives room on the third floor is a place she often visits when her work at the archives center requires collating old newspaper sources — because the center only keeps administrative records, while current affairs newspapers are located here, in rolls of brown microfilm.

She signed up to borrow a microfilm reader, then searched through the catalog of issues of Kim Xuyen Nhat Bao — the only local newspaper still in existence from the 1990s to the present — from early 1993 to late 1995, the period she guessed was the time Van Dang Hamlet disappeared from the map.

The work of flipping through each roll of microfilm is slow and tiring for the eyes. Each roll contained hundreds of photographed newspaper pages. She had to turn the lever, keep her eyes glued to the illuminated screen, and skim through each headline. Most of it is general news — conferences, inauguration ceremonies, articles promoting the production emulation movement. But near noon, when she opened the microfilm of April 1994, a small headline in the corner of page three made her stop filming:

"COMMENCEMENT OF THE PROJECT OF FLOOD PROTECTION AND RECOVERY OF THE KIM XUYYYYYY RIVER BANK"

The article was short, only about three hundred words, written in the dry, administrative tone typical of newspapers of that period. It announced that the city would implement a flood protection embankment project along the eastern riverbank, to "ensure the safety of people's lives and property during the stormy season" and "renovate the urban landscape in a civilized and modern direction". The article mentioned that "a number of households in the project area will be resettled according to the city's general policy", but did not specify the number of households, did not mention the name of Van Dang Hamlet, and did not have any specific numbers on the area or compensation level.

At the end of the article, there was a name that caught Van Khue's attention: "Mr. Diep Khac Bon, Deputy Head of the City Land Fund Management Board, said the project is expected to be completed within nine months, ensuring progress before next year's rainy season."

Nine months. Van Khue calculated mentally. With the scale of a relocation project of nearly two hundred households, nine months was an unusually urgent period of time, even by the standards of that time - when administrative procedures were less binding than now, but convincing, compensating, and resettling hundreds of families was always a complicated process, often lasting many years, not months.

She went through the following issues, looking for any articles mentioning the project's progress, the people's reactions, the inauguration of the embankment — but there was almost nothing. There was only a short piece of news in December 1994, announcing that the project "has completed the site clearance phase, preparing to enter the embankment construction phase", and after that, complete silence. There are no articles about the inauguration ceremony. There are no articles about the embankment that promises to "ensure people's safety during the stormy season". It was as if the entire project, having achieved its goal of displacing people from the site, simply evaporated from public view.

Van Khue copied all the information into a notebook, her hands shaking slightly from both excitement and a growing vague sense of insecurity. She asked the library staff to print out copies of two articles, paid for photocopying, then sat alone in the corner of the reading room, looking at the two pieces of news lying next to each other on the table.

A flood protection embankment project was started with great fanfare in the newspapers, then fell silent after completing site clearance. There was no inauguration ceremony. No embankment was mentioned after that — and in fact, according to Van Khue's knowledge of the current riverbank topography, the only permanent embankment in that area was built only recently, in an urban beautification project a few years ago, not since the 1990s. So where did that 1994 "anti-flood" embankment go? Was it really built, or was the "flood protection project" just an excuse to clear valuable riverside land?

On the way home, Van Khue stopped by the east riverbank area, which is now a large vacant lot, overgrown with weeds, and a rusty corrugated iron sign erected at the beginning of the road reads faintly: "Planning area — Kim Xuyen Riverside Project — No illegal entry." Behind the sign, she could see a few remaining old trees, including a large banyan tree, its foliage spreading wide and its secondary roots hanging down like the silver hairs of an old man. There was no sign of any flood protection embankment — just a natural bank sloping down to the water's edge, just like the one on the 1987 map she had scanned yesterday morning.

She stopped the car and stood looking at the banyan tree for a long time. There was a strange feeling rising in her heart — not quite sadness, not quite anger, but a vague regret for something she had never known, never touched, but now she felt its absence as clearly as a human-shaped void on a dusty wall.

An older man riding a three-wheeled bicycle carrying vegetables passed by, saw her standing hesitantly in front of the sign, stopped and asked: "What are you looking for here? This place has been abandoned for decades, there's nothing to see."

"Yes, I... I'm just curious," Van Khue replied. "Do you know what this place used to be?"

The man squinted his eyes and looked towards the land, scratching his chin in thought. "I heard there was a fishing village in the past. It's been a long time. I haven't been here since I was in the countryside. Now only the old people know, but newbies like us don't accept it. We only know that this is the land of some real estate company. It hasn't been there for a long time. It's rumored that they're going to build a luxury apartment or something."

He cycled on, leaving Van Khue standing alone next to the rusty corrugated iron sign. She looked up at the canopy of the banyan tree one last time, then took out her phone and took a few photos — the banyan tree, the sign, the empty lot — even though she wasn't sure what she would use them for. It's just an instinct, like the instinct of a plotter not to let a space on a map go unmarked.

That night, when the whole family went to bed, Van Khue sat back in her room, spread out two photocopied articles on the table, next to a notebook filled with notes and scribbles. She opened her laptop, typed into the search box the name "Diep Khac Bon", curious to know more about the man who served as Deputy Head of the City Land Fund Management Board in 1994. The search results were not many - a few old articles about other land projects in the 1990s and early 2000s, a short interview on the occasion of his retirement in 2003. But there was one result that caught her attention: a recent economic article, published Three years ago, about the groundbreaking ceremony of a real estate project called "Kim Xuyen Riverside", invested by Hai Nguyen Group, with the caption below the photo of the groundbreaking ceremony: "Mr. Diep Nhat Binh, General Director of Hai Nguyen Group, spoke at the ceremony."

Van Khue sat up straight, her heart beating a beat faster. She continued typing in the search box, comparing the dates, and realized a coincidence that could not be a coincidence: the Kim Xuyen Riverside project was located exactly on the eastern riverside land - the land that used to be Xom Van Dang.

She closed her laptop and sat quietly in the dark for a long time, her mind reeling with a series of unanswered questions. Who is Diep Nhat Binh, and what is his relationship to Diep Khac Bon — same last name, or just a coincidence? Why did a flood protection embankment project that was started with great fanfare quietly disappear from public opinion after completing site clearance? And why, of all the people she could have asked, was her grandfather — who worked for many years at that same Department of Planning — the only one who seemed unwilling to mention the name Van Dang?

She had no answer. But she knew, from tonight, she wouldn't be able to stop looking for them.