Chapter 6 — Potters and the Last Fire Season

Linh wants to make a set of earth-colored rice bowls that retain the maker's fingerprints. Minh believes that products must have uniform sizes to withstand transportation. The two argued right on the drawing.

That morning, they sat at the long wooden table in the design studio, a small corner temporarily divided by a plywood wall, where Linh hung the sketches she brought from the city. The light from the window shined diagonally through the drawing paper, clearly highlighting the lines she had painstakingly sketched all night before.

“If everything is the same, why do we need a worker?” Linh asked.

“If each item is so different that it cannot be stacked, customers will not buy it a second time,” Minh replied.

“You're talking like a sales person, not a product maker.”

“I'm speaking as someone who has seen three hundred sets of dishes returned because the sizes were too different for packaging,” Minh replied, his voice unflinching. “Nice distinction on the display table, but it's a nightmare for the shipping unit.”

Linh threw her pen on the table, a small gesture but enough for Minh to realize she was really upset, not just arguing for reasons. “So in your opinion, everything must be measured by packaging ability?”

“Not everything is like that,” he replied, softening his voice. “But if you want to sell it out of the village, you have to think about the whole journey from here to the customer, not just about when it's still on the turntable.”

Mr. Phuc listened to everything but did not intervene. At night, he brought out two old bowls: one was crooked but fit well in the hand, the other was round but hot when holding soup. He told them to try it out instead of looking at it on paper.

He placed two bowls on the table, didn't say anything more, just sat down to observe. Linh held the bowl up first, turning it in her hand, feeling the way the slightly tilted mouth fit the shape of her hand, as if the bowl was molded specifically for a specific person and not for a general mold.

Minh held the round cup, scooped a little hot water from the teapot and poured it in, then touched the edge of the bowl. He immediately withdrew his hand, hissing.

“See,” Mr. Phuc said, not hiding the small smile at the corner of his mouth. "The round ones are easy to mass produce, but the thin walls make heat transfer faster. The lopsided ones, which are thick and thin in places, retain heat better in the handle."

Ha suggested dividing it into two lines. The Bach Earth line keeps fingerprints and is sold in small collections. The Home Kitchen line uses stable molds and accessible prices. Linh was silent for a long time then added another column to the expense table.

“Two lines mean two parallel production processes,” Ha explains, tapping her pen on the spreadsheet. "It takes more management time, but each line serves a different customer group. Collectors will pay a high price for lines with fingerprints. Everyday users will choose cheaper, more stable lines."

“The problem is that there is only one furnace,” Linh said. “What about heating two different types of products together at the optimal temperature?”

Minh reviewed the heat parameter table of both soil lines and compared the glaze melting temperature range. “It can be arranged in tiers,” he said after a moment of calculation. "The Bach Tho series is on the lower floor, closer to the heat source but keeps the heat stable for a long time. The House Stove series is on the upper floor, requiring a slightly lower temperature."

Minh took her back to the warehouse on his old motorbike. On the way, he talked about the first time he entered the lab, when everyone laughed because he brought a piece bricks from the countryside kiln. Linh asked why he still kept it.

The dirt road leading from the factory to the warehouse ran through a row of bamboo. The wind blew the bamboo leaves rustling above their heads. Minh's old motorbike made a hoarse engine sound, but he still kept a slow speed, perhaps so that the story had enough time to be told before arriving at his destination.

“On the first day of entering the lab in the city, the instructor told each student to bring a sample of material that was meaningful to them,” he said, his voice gentle as if telling a story he had told himself many times. "People bring crystals, they bring alloys, they bring things cut perfectly under a microscope. I brought a piece of broken brick from my father's furnace, warped, burned at one corner."

“I must have laughed a lot,” Linh said.

"Yeah. But I kept it because it was curved," he said. “Looking at it, I remember thinking that everything had to be straight to have value.”

Linh was silent, watching the road ahead pass by in the weak light of car lights. She knew that feeling better than she wanted to admit — she had also left the village thinking everything in the city was the norm, and what she learned at the factory was just the foundation to leave behind.

“Do you think differently now?” she asked.

“Now I think, the curved and the straight only differ in purpose, not in value,” Minh replied. “The problem is whether I have enough confidence to keep both.”

They agreed to try both lines in one batch. No one calls it compromise. For Linh, that was the first time an idea was kept without turning into a fight.

Arriving at the warehouse, they stopped the car and stood looking at the rows of clay piled high in the pale moonlight. Minh turned off the phone and was silent for a moment before continuing.

“Thank you for not giving up in the middle of the debate this morning,” he said. “Many people will choose the easier way — just do one line, avoid the hassle.”

“I'm not good at choosing the easy way,” Linh replied, laughing softly. “Ask my father.”

They both laughed, light laughter dissolving into the night air, and in that moment, Linh felt the eight-year gap between them was gradually being filled, not with big promises or declarations, but with evenings like this, where they learned to make decisions together instead of imposing on each other.

The next morning, the whole team gathered around the design table to complete the final drawings for both product lines. Linh redraws the Bach Tho bowl set, intentionally leaving light ridges where her thumb strokes while molding, a detail she calls the "wordless signature" of the craftsman.

“Each piece will have a different signature,” she explained to Ha, who was taking note of the parameters to calculate the price. “Not because we did it carelessly, but because each hand left a unique mark.”

Ha nodded, but still kept the careful expression of a bookkeeper. “So I need to know how much this line sells for to compensate for the slower production time of the mold line.”

Minh gave a time comparison table: a molded bowl takes about eight minutes to shape, while a hand-shaped bowl in Bach Tho style takes nearly half an hour, not including editing time. That number made Ha sigh, but did not object.

"If the price is right," Ha said, "the Bach Tho line must sell three or four times more than the Bep Nha line. I don't know if customers will pay."

“There are customers who are willing to pay,” Linh said, recalling the girl at the market the other day who said she wanted a bowl Don't try to pretend to be perfect. “The problem is whether we find the right person, not whether the price is reasonable or not.”

Mr. Phuc, standing next to listen to the story, interjected with a short sentence. "In the past, this oven only made one type, sold to everyone the same. Now listening to you two talk, I see that it makes sense - not everyone wants to be like everyone else."

In the afternoon, they started working on prototypes for both lines at the same time. Linh sat at the turntable, her hands covered in soil, trying to remember the hand-sculpting technique Mrs. Nam taught her many years ago — keeping the pressure even but not too hard, letting the soil find its own shape under the guidance of her hands, instead of being completely forced.

Minh, at the next table, works with plaster molds for the Kitchen House line, measuring and re-measuring the wall thickness with calipers. Occasionally he glanced over to see what Linh was doing, and she caught his gaze more than once, each time causing her to bend down and focus on the ground to hide her sudden smile.

By the end of the day, they had fifteen hand-shaped bowls and thirty molded bowls in hand, enough for a test batch combining both lines in the cascading way Minh had calculated. Mr. Phuc walked around the table, looked at each one, and nodded in approval before announcing they would test it out over the weekend.

Linh stood alone after everyone had left, looking at the two rows of bowls lined up next to each other on the shelf under the dim light - one side was as neat as copies, the other side each had its own, unmistakable shape. She never thought that one day she would be standing between two seemingly opposing options and see that they complement each other, instead of having to choose one and throw away the other, as if this pottery profession, like everything else in life, always has more than one right way to exist, as long as one has enough patience to find a suitable place for each way, instead of hastily discarding one to keep the other.