Chapter 5 — Potters and the Last Fire Season

The first try failed. The yeast flows into black streaks, sticking hard to the bottom of the oven. A bowl cracked across its body as soon as it was placed on the table. Linh stood looking at the row of broken products, no longer having the strength to be angry.

This is a larger batch, three times larger than the previous test batch of thirty, the first batch they dared to bake in enough quantity to deliver to a real customer. The oven door opened after fifteen hours of waiting, and instead of the smooth green ash glaze like last time, the entire row of shelves was a scene of chaos — the glaze was flowing, some were stuck to the pallet, and had to be pried with a chisel to remove.

Minh accepts his mistake. He trusted the laboratory's heat table, while the soil in Bach Tho had a different moisture content than the test sample. Mr. Phuc does not blame. He just told everyone to scrape each piece of enamel off the pallet, then record which one failed at what temperature.

“I miscalculated,” Minh said, his voice low, still holding the cracked bowl. "The previous batch was small, the heat was evenly distributed. This batch is larger, I didn't calculate enough time to keep the heat in the middle of the oven."

“No one blames you,” Linh said, although her voice could not hide the fatigue.

"I know. But I need to say it, so it doesn't happen again next time."

Mr. Phuc walked around the furnace, his hands touching each hot brick, as if he was talking to the very structure he had lived with for decades. He didn't say anything for a long time, just signaled everyone to start cleaning up.

That afternoon, Ha called to say a customer wanted to cancel an order. Linh intended to return all the money, but Mrs. Nam stopped her. She chose the most beautiful cracked bowls, used wax to polish the cracks and then brought them to the market.

Linh sat idly on the stool, watching Ha on the other end of the line explain the customer's reason for canceling - they heard the factory might close, and didn't want to deposit a deposit for a place that wasn't sure it would still exist until the delivery date. She hung up, placing the phone on the table harder than she intended.

“Don't sell it like it's defective,” Ms. Nam said. “Let's just say it's a one-time bowl.”

“I don't think anyone will buy cracked things, no matter how polished they are,” Linh replied, her voice somewhat bitter.

“Then you've never stood at the market long enough to hear people talk,” Mrs. Nam replied, not angry, just straightforward as always. "Follow me. If you can't sell it, I'll accept it, you won't lose anything."

Linh followed. She told about the failed fire, about the glaze that refused to be obedient, and about how each crack was retained. Some people left, others came back and asked to buy. A young girl held the bowl for a long time and then said she liked it because it didn't try to pretend to be perfect.

The market took place on the open ground next to the village communal house, temporary stalls built with bamboo frames and plastic tarpaulins, the smell of dried fish, raw vegetables and incense from the stalls selling offerings mixed together. Mrs. Nam displayed the cracked bowls on a mat, there was no sign, no price listed, she was the only one sitting next to her, ready to tell stories to anyone who stopped to ask.

A middle-aged man holds a bowl with a line running from the rim to the bottom, rotating it in the sunlight. “Can this bowl be used for soup, or is it just for viewing?”

“It can be used,” Mrs. Nam replied. "The crack is only in the glaze, not through the soil. You can use it, just don't soak it in cold water suddenly after scooping hot soup."

The man nodded and bought two. Linh stood next to her, observing how Mrs. Nam talked to each guest, no Far from apologizing for the product being imperfect, it told it as a story worth knowing.

At the end of the day, they sold more than expected. Not enough to pay off the debt, but enough to buy more land for the next batch. Linh counted the money in the cloth bag again, surprised to see it was more than she had estimated in the morning, even though each bowl was only sold for half the price of the whole item.

Minh placed the cracked bowl next to the heat register when the group returned to the workshop at dusk. He sat down, opened the notebook, and started recording today's numbers — not the temperature this time, but the amount of money sold, as if that was also a data to save for the next try.

“Does this failure have a name yet?” he asked, without looking up.

“Yes,” Linh replied. “The first batch doesn't lie.”

She sat down opposite him, looking at the notebook that was gradually filling up with pages of notes from both of them - half were Minh's technical data, half were her emotional notes about the color, texture, and feeling when holding each product. She realized that the notebook was becoming something more than a production diary — it was evidence that they were relearning the craft from scratch, together, in a way neither of them had ever done before.

“Shall we try again tomorrow?” she asked.

“Yes,” Minh replied, closing the book. "But this time, reduce the scale by half, double the heat retention time. Go slower to go more firmly."

Linh nodded, feeling a strange calmness creep into her heart, different from the panic she felt when she opened the oven door in the morning. Perhaps this is what Mrs. Nam wanted to teach her from today's fair - failure is not the end point, but just a layer of glaze that has not flowed in the right place, which can still be fixed in the next firing.

Mr. Phuc walked in from the backyard, holding a turned off flashlight, looking tired after a long day of cleaning up bad batches and scraping off hard bits of enamel from the pallet. He saw two people still sitting at the table with the notebook, the string lights from the porch shining down on the page full of words.

“Still calculating?” he asked, his voice no longer as stiff as it had been in the morning.

“Recalculating the parameters for the apricot batch,” Minh replied. “Reduce scale, increase heat retention time.”

Mr. Phuc pulled out his chair and sat down, looking over Minh's shoulder at the numbers written in the book. He didn't understand all the technical symbols, but he understood how people worked carefully, and he recognized a seriousness in the way the two people sat and calculated that he had never seen in previous engineers who visited the factory, who only gave formulas and then left without waiting for the results.

"In the old days," he said, his voice slow as if he was recalling an old memory, "every time a batch failed, my father didn't say anything. He just walked around the oven all evening, alone. The next morning he started again as if nothing had happened."

“Can't you do that?” Linh asked.

“I can do it, but I think it's good for you two to do it differently,” he replied. "Don't hide failure, but write it down, learn from it. Maybe that's what I should have done when I was young."

Linh looked at her father, feeling in that sentence something close to a compliment, even though he didn't say it directly. She showed him the book page recording the amount of money sold at the market, and he nodded, calculating in his head how much was still missing to buy land for the next batch.

“There's still an amount missing,” he said. “But not as much as I thought.”

That night, when Mr. Phuc had gone back to his room to rest, Linh and Minh were still sitting, completing the parameter sheet for the next batch of tests. Outside in the yard, the night wind blew through the cracked bowls left on the table, making soft collision sounds like discrete musical notes.

“Are you afraid that the apricot batch will spoil again?” Linh asked, putting down her pen.

“Yes,” Minh replied frankly. "But being afraid doesn't mean stopping. It just means being more careful."

Linh smiled, closing the notebook, leaving enough time for the rest of the night to take a nap before the day began with another fire, smaller but, she hoped, more reliable.

Before entering the house, she stopped by Mrs. Nam, who was sitting and mending a torn cloth bag containing soil. The small oil lamp light illuminated her wrinkled but still elegant face. Linh sat down next to him and said nothing for a moment.

“Aren't you tired?” she asked.

“Tired,” Mrs. Nam replied, constantly sewing. "But sitting still is more tiring. For an old person like you, keeping your hands free is letting your mind wander."

“Thank you for today's market event,” Linh said, her voice sincere.

Mrs. Nam looked up and looked at Linh for a long time before answering. "You don't need to thank her. She just taught me what her mother taught her, and her mother's mother taught her mother, many generations ago that she can no longer remember. Pottery has survived for many generations not because of perfect batches, but because people know how to live with imperfect batches, and then find a way to turn it into something that still has value, even a value different from the original plan."

Linh nodded, feeling those words settle in her heart like a seed that had just been sown. It would still take time to grow into something she truly understood, not only with her mind but with her own hands that were already covered in dirt, through each fire that lay ahead.