Chapter 1 — Makeup Artist for the Final Journey

At seven o'clock in the morning, the fluorescent light on the ceiling cast a cold white halo. Trần An Nhiên tilted the color palette toward the window to compare the shades under natural light. Three streaks of foundation lay side by side on the back of her hand: yellow beige, lighter pink beige, and a shade with a touch of ash gray. Mr. Đặng Văn Cẩn's skin had turned pale yellow after months of liver disease. Two days in the cold chamber had tightened the capillaries beneath his skin, leaving a pallor beneath the yellow cast. None of the three mixtures was quite right. An Nhiên rubbed her fingertips together, mixed a dot of yellow beige into the ash-gray streak, waited three seconds for it to settle, then held it against the untouched skin on her other hand.

She had been doing this job for five years, but she had never lost the habit of comparing colors beside the window. The preparation room at Vĩnh An used warm, 3,200-kelvin light—the kind that made the living look rosier but could turn a body an ugly yellow if the background color was wrong. One small mistake, and the family standing under that light would see their loved one's face as “not quite the same.” That was the sentence An Nhiên feared most, not because it criticized her workmanship, but because it meant she had failed to preserve the only thing people still needed her to preserve.

The door opened a little without a knock. Mr. Lê Thành Nghị walked in with a cup of hot tea and placed it on the corner of the table, safely away from the tool tray.

"I used three parts yellow beige, half ash gray." He looked over her shoulder, his voice not a question.

"Yes. The jaundice is more pronounced than I expected from the intake form." An Nhiên replied without taking her eyes from the two streaks of color. "I'm adding a little gray because the cold light in this room casts blue across your forehead."

"All right." Mr. Nghị watched as she applied the final streak of color, softening the border between the two layers with a damp sponge. After eighteen years in the profession, he no longer needed to supervise every detail, but he had kept the ritual of standing in the preparation room with a sip of tea before each shift. "Mr. Cẩn's eldest son, Uncle Tín, came by at ten with his father's shirt. He asked us to leave the mustache intact—he'd worn it for forty years."

"I know." An Nhiên nodded, put down the palette, and prepared the next tray: small makeup brushes, shaping wax, and a box of matte powder without shimmer. Older faces did not need glitter; on wrinkled skin it only made every line more obvious. She had learned that not at school—there were hardly any formal funeral-cosmetology programs in Vietnam ten years earlier—but through thousands of hours beside her mother in a small bridal salon in Gò Sao, watching her choose different powders for a bride photographed outdoors in the morning and another standing beneath a chandelier at night.

Mr. Đặng Văn Cẩn had died at home in his sleep after an ordinary family dinner. The only warning had been a slight fatigue; he had told his daughter-in-law that he was feeling worse. That was what people called a gentle death—if such a thing existed. His large family—five children, eleven grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren—had returned the night before and filled the funeral home's downstairs living room. Adults' voices, telling the children to keep quiet, echoed up the stairs.

An Nhiên pushed the tool cart into the cold room, where Mr. Cẩn's body had been moved to the preparation table and covered to the chest with a white sheet. Nguyên Khang stood nearby, writing in a leather-bound notebook with frayed corners. For seven years he had recorded the name of every person he drove to their final farewell, even if he had spent only fifteen minutes behind the wheel. He also noted one small detail—not to remember everything (the book was more than three hundred pages thick), but because, as he once told An Nhiên without further explanation, “They deserve to be more than just a car ride.”

"His daughter-in-law told me he had worn that mustache for forty years." Nguyên Khang closed the book without looking up. "He had been teaching for almost as long."

"Mr. Cẩn used to be a teacher?"

"Teaching middle school math, at the old school in town, before that school dissolved and merged into a larger school. His students are probably over fifty now." He put the notebook in his chest pocket, stepped out to make room, and closed the door so quietly that An Nhiên almost didn't hear the sound of the latch.

She was left alone with Mr. Cẩn, and this was the moment she always needed, whether her colleagues asked for it or not: a few minutes of observation before touching anything. His face was thin, with high cheekbones and a small callus on the bridge of his nose—a trace of the glasses he had worn for decades. The corners of his mouth drooped slightly, as old people's mouths often did after years of smiling less freely than they had when young, but the corners of his eyes still held traces of someone who had laughed often. Thin, fan-shaped folds spread from the corners toward his temples. An Nhiên studied those folds. She would not erase them. She never erased smile lines, only the lines of fatigue and pain; the difference, she had learned, revealed itself only if she looked long enough before beginning.

She started with a moisturizing primer, applying it thinly with gloved fingertips so the mixed foundation would sit evenly. Even under refrigeration, the skin of the dead lost moisture quickly; applied directly to dry skin, the foundation would flake beneath the lights, a small detail but one that could ruin the ceremony for relatives watching more intently than at any other moment in their lives. An Nhiên worked slowly, one area at a time—the forehead, temples, cheekbones, then chin—using a damp sponge to blend the color at the edges so no boundary showed from any angle.

Uncle Đặng Bá Tín arrived exactly at ten o'clock as scheduled, carrying a cloth bag containing the gray suit that Mr. Can wore at his eldest grandson's wedding, two years ago. He stood at the door of the preparation room, not quite entering, his hand gripping the strap of the cloth bag so tightly that his knuckles turned white.

"Can I... excuse me, can I stand here? Don't come any closer, just stand here."

"Okay. Just stand there. I'll call you when you want to come closer." An Nhiên did not turn completely around; she only angled her body enough for her voice to carry without pressuring him to talk. She had learned through many cases that some relatives needed to watch from a distance—not out of fear, but to witness the process and know that the person they loved was not left alone for even a few hours.

Mr. Tin stood there for nearly twenty minutes, not saying anything, just looking. It wasn't until An Nhiên began combing Mr. Can's thin silver hair, pushing it to one side in the same part he used to comb, that he spoke up, his voice completely hoarse.

"My father has parted on the left since he was young. At that time his hair was still black, now his hair is gray but the part has not changed."

"I see the mark on your scalp is still in the same position, uncle. I'll keep it." An Nhiên replied, not stopping.

Mr. Tin nodded, his lips pursed, his eyes red but without tears - the kind of restraint of a man who has been used to keeping calm in front of his youngest brother and children for the past two days, only allowing himself to almost break in these few rare minutes, standing far away, alone. He placed the cloth bag on the chair next to the door and then quietly pulled out an old wristwatch from his breast pocket, the leather strap was worn, the glass had a small scratch at the corner.

"Can you... put this in my dad's vest pocket? You don't have to wear it on your wrist, just put it in your chest pocket. This watch was given to my dad when we first got married. Dad wore it until the needle broke and then put it away. He couldn't bear to throw it away, couldn't bear to repair it. Now that my mom is gone, I think it's so that you two have something for each other."

An Nhiên received the watch with both hands and bowed slightly. "I will place it carefully, don't worry."

At noon, when the makeup was completed and the gray suits were neatly put on by Mr. Nghi and Nguyên Khang, An Nhiên stood back and took a final look at the overall situation like she did with every shift - not to find fault, but to see if that face, in the overall light and outfit, was still a face their family recognized or not. Mr. Can lay there, his mustache intact, his hair parted to the left, the corners of his eyes still showing marks from years of smiling a lot, his old watch lying still in the chest pocket of his vest, near his heart.

The family was invited at one o'clock in the afternoon. An Nhiên stood in the corner of the room, as usual, not to receive thanks but to observe, ready to make corrections if necessary in the first minutes when her loved ones' eyes were the strictest. The eldest daughter-in-law burst into tears as soon as she entered, but it was the cry of someone who recognized her, not the panicked cry of someone who did not recognize her - two sounds, An Nhiên had learned to distinguish, were completely different.

Mr. Tin stood silently next to the coffin for a long time, his hand gently placed on the wooden edge, not touching his father. Then he turned, looked for An Nhiên with his eyes in the crowd, and just nodded once, briefly. Say nothing more. An Nhiên nodded back, just as briefly.

Late in the afternoon, when the first visit was over, she returned to the preparation room to clean up the tool tray, wash the brushes, and rearrange the color boxes in their correct positions. While wiping off the used sponge, her finger touched a dried yellow-beige stain at the edge of the palette, the exact shade she had seen in an old powder box with a yellowed lid, kept in the bottom drawer of her father's house in Gò Sao - a box of powder her mother left behind, never opened since the day she passed away. An Nhiên stood still for a moment, looking at that streak of color under the lamp, then continued to wipe the panel clean as if nothing happened, put it in a drawer, and locked it.