Chapter 6 — Cartographer of Lost Roads

The Provincial Archives Center is located nearly twenty kilometers from the center of Kim Xuyen city, in a newly built administrative area, the five-story building covered with green glass looks much more modern than the old building where Van Khue works every day. She arrived early, waited in the lobby for nearly fifteen minutes before being led by a staff member to the reading room on the third floor - a large, quiet room with soft light from large windows, dozens of wooden tables arranged in rows, each table with a small reading lamp and a sign saying "Please keep order and wear gloves when handling original documents".

The officer in charge, a middle-aged woman wearing black-framed glasses, brought her three gray cardboard boxes of documents, numbered according to the file code she had looked up in advance over the phone. "This is what we found regarding the City Land Fund Management Board from 1993 to 1996," the woman said. "I must say first, some of the records here are incomplete and show signs of being shortened before being transferred here for storage. We recorded this situation in the receipt record, but do not have the authority to investigate further."

Van Khue thanked her, put on cotton gloves, and began opening each box carefully. During the first two hours, she found only general administrative documents — briefing minutes, quarterly financial reports, personnel lists — nothing directly related to Van Dang Hamlet. She began to feel discouraged, wondering if this trip had been a waste of time, when the most important document, if it had ever existed, had most likely been destroyed long ago.

Near noon, as she was flipping through the bottom of the third box, a voice from the next table startled her.

"Excuse me, are you looking for documents about the east riverbank area? I see you keep flipping through the maps of that area."

Van Khue looked up and saw a man in his thirties sitting at a table two rows away from her. In front of him was a tall stack of documents and an open laptop with many notes windows. He has a calm face, wears thin-rimmed glasses, slightly messy hair as if he had scratched his head thinking many times in the morning, and eyes that are curious but not prying.

"Yes, that's right," Van Khue replied, a bit surprised. "How do you know?"

"Because I'm also looking for that exact area," the man said, smiled, stood up and walked over to her table, holding a photocopied map. "My name is Ta Duy Khanh, I do independent research on urban heritage. I'm doing a personal project about the neighborhoods that have disappeared along the Kim Xuyen River through the ages, and the eastern riverbank area is one of the spots I find most difficult to explain."

Van Khue stood up and shook his hand out of politeness, although she couldn't help but feel a slight wariness in her heart - over the past few weeks, she had gotten used to having to keep what she learned private, in case the information reached people who shouldn't know. "I'm Quach Van Khue, I work at the city's Urban Planning and Archives Center. What do you mean 'most difficult to explain'?"

Duy Khanh pulled out an empty chair and sat down opposite her. His voice became more excited when talking about his expertise. "I made a list of about fifteen old residential areas in Kim Xuyen that had been cleared or had their functions changed in the past fifty years. For most of the areas, I found at least one set of clearance documents, although incomplete — land recovery decisions, compensation lists, even before and after clearance photos. But for the eastern riverside fishing village area, what old documents call Van Dang Hamlet, I found almost nothing. Nope. no administrative decision. Not a single photo. It's as if the entire area never existed in official records, even though it was clearly on the map before 1995."

Van Khue felt her heart beat faster — not from surprise, but from a strange sense of relief that for the first time, after weeks of struggling alone with her doubts, she met another person who saw exactly what she saw. "I found out the same thing," she said, her voice a little emotional. "I digitized the 1987 and 1995 maps and saw that Van Dang had completely disappeared without any accompanying clearance records. I searched the archives in the city center and found a few clues, but the most important original records were moved away in 1995, never to be returned."

Duy Khanh looked at her, his eyes lit up in the way of someone who had just found the exact piece of the puzzle he needed. "Can you show me what you found? I promise to share all the documents I have, including the interviews I conducted with some elderly people in the neighborhood."

Van Khue hesitated a bit - she still remembered Mr. Khai's advice about not "asking around outside" - but looking at the seriousness in Duy Khanh's eyes, looking at the thick stack of documents on his desk, she realized that this might be the only chance for her to escape the situation of groping alone in the dark.

"Okay," she said, "but I want to know more about you first. What do you mean you do independent research? Are you not affiliated with any agency?"

"I worked as an architect for a large design company in this city for nearly five years," Duy Khanh explained, his voice a bit self-deprecating. "But I quit my job two years ago, after the company took on a design to renovate an old town that I thought should have been preserved in its original state instead of demolishing most of it to build a new one. I argued with my boss a few times, and finally decided to do freelance research, collaborate with a small non-profit urban heritage preservation center, and live on writing articles and a few odd consulting projects. I'm not rich, but I feel lighter."

His story made Van Khue suddenly smile — there was a certain harmony between him giving up a stable job because he couldn't bear to see urban memories erased, and the fact that she herself, although still keeping her stable job, was also silently doing the same thing in her own, quieter way.

"So what do we do next?" she asked.

"First of all," Duy Khanh said, opening his laptop, turning the screen towards her, "I think I should compare everything we both have, see if there are any gaps that need to be filled. Then, if you agree, I would like to introduce you to a few people I know, who are trying to collect memories of old neighborhoods. There is a group on social networks called 'Van Dang Memories', founded by a guy named Kha Duy Thinh about two years ago. gathered descendants of families who lived in that area. I contacted him several times to ask for documents, but never met him in person."

Van Khue sat up straight, a stream of excitement running through her body. "Is there such a group? I didn't know."

"That group is quite discreet," Duy Khanh explained, "it doesn't advertise widely, it's mainly a place for people to share old photos, old stories within the family's children and grandchildren. I think because they're also cautious, perhaps because someone once made things difficult for them when trying to bring up old stories."

The two spent the rest of the afternoon sitting next to each other, spreading out documents, comparing and contrasting every small detail. Duy Khanh showed her a black-and-white photo he found from a private photo collection, capturing a stretch of riverbank with small stilt houses close together, a few fishing boats parked along the water's edge, and in the distance, cone-shaped fishing pens standing protruding like a giant bamboo fence in the middle of the river. Looking at the photo, Van Khue felt an indescribable emotion rising in her heart - for the first time, the fishing village that she only knew through dry map lines now appeared before her eyes as a real, living, breathing place.

"So beautiful," she whispered, almost without realizing she was speaking out loud.

"That's right," Duy Khanh replied, his voice also lowered in a familiar way. "That's why I do this work. Every neighborhood that disappears isn't just the loss of a few houses, it's the loss of an entire way of life, a community, a part of the city's memory that nothing can replace."

That afternoon, before leaving the Provincial Archives Center, the two exchanged phone numbers, promising to contact Kha Duy Thinh next week. On the drive home, Van Khue found herself smiling to herself for unknown reasons — perhaps because for the first time in weeks, she no longer felt alone in her journey to find the truth, or perhaps, even though she didn't want to admit it to herself yet, because something else, smaller but warmer, had just begun to stir in her heart as she thought of the serious eyes and calm smile of the man she had just met.