Chapter 1 — Pottery Kiln Fire Keeper

At four o'clock in the morning, when the dew was still beading on the old tiled roof, Thach Van Khe got up, quickly put on a faded clay-colored Ba Ba shirt and walked out into the yard. At this time, Doi Sanh village was still immersed in light green darkness, with only the sound of roosters crowing in the distance mixed with the sound of Boi Giang river water gently lapping on the land bank. She passed by the row of jars lined up along the yard, her hand passed through each one like a habit she couldn't break, feeling the remaining moisture on the enamel of her rustic shirt, then stopped in front of the massive gourd kiln tree hidden behind the bamboo grove - the Vong Nguyet kiln, the three-generation inheritance of the Thach family.

Lo Vong Nguyet is an earth dragon lying on its side along a slope, more than twenty meters long, divided into nine successive gourds like the vertebrae of an ancient animal. Her grandfather, Thach Van Tuyen, once said that the gourd stove is not an inanimate object, but a living being with its own breath, its own temperament, and needs to be comforted like one would comfort a difficult child. During his forty years of handling furnaces, he learned how to listen to the sound of fire ringing through each furnace door to predict the temperature, how to watch the fire light change from red-orange to bright white to know when to add more firewood and when to slow down. He passed these things on to Van Khe when she was an eight-year-old child following him to the clay field, her hands not yet strong enough to knead a small lump of soil.

Now he has been gone for three years.

Van Khe placed her hand on the wall of the furnace, feeling the coldness of the refractory bricks left over from the last batch nearly two months ago. Since his death, the number of times she fires the stove has decreased, not because she is lazy or depressed, but because each batch of firewood is now too big a gamble. A complete batch requires seven days and seven nights without rest, requires dozens of blocks of pine wood, requires at least three people to take turns watching the fire twenty-four out of twenty-four hours, and there is always a ten percent chance that the whole furnace will fail because of a bad wind, a piece of damp wood, or simply because the fire god is not sympathetic that day.

— You wake up so early.

The voice of her father, Thach Dinh Vong, sounded behind her, his voice hoarse because he had just woken up. He stood against the door, one hand clutching his chest in a reflex that had become familiar since the day the doctor diagnosed his heart as weak and needed to limit exertion. Van Khe turned around, trying to hide the worry in her eyes.

— I'm planning to light a fire to test the kiln, I'm afraid if it takes too long, the bricks will become moldy.

— Hong is hong, don't think about baking a big batch.

Her father walked down the steps, slowly, step by step as if counting his heartbeat. Van Khe looked at his figure, which was noticeably thinner compared to last spring, his skin pale under the remaining oil lamp light from last night, and a familiar pain arose in her heart - the feeling of both love and helplessness when watching the person you love grow old day by day without being able to do anything but stand by and watch.

— What did the doctor say, father? Last week's follow-up—

— Still the same. Take medicine regularly, don't make it worse, don't worry too much. — Mr. Vong smiled faintly, a somewhat bitter smile. — But I told you how can you not worry when the furnace left by your ancestors is about to become a pile of useless bricks.

Van Khe was silent. This wasn't the first time her father had said that, and she knew that behind it was a pressure even greater than heart disease - the pressure of money. Monthly hospital fees, medicine, and the loan debt to repair the factory roof last year after the storm all weighed heavily on his already hunched shoulders. Meanwhile, wood-fired ceramics sell slowly, the price is three or four times higher than industrial ceramics, but not everyone understands why a bowl fired for seven days is more expensive than a bowl released after eight hours in a gas kiln.

— Father, — Van Khe said, trying to keep her voice steady — I have already planned. Next batch I will make the ancient cracked yeast, the type that Uncle Tu in the old town still orders all year round. The selling price is five times that of gas ceramics. Only selling one-third of the kiln is enough to cover the cost.

— Children can count or father can count. But can you calculate the sun and rain? Can you calculate the price increase of firewood this year by thirty percent? Calculate that if the furnace breaks down in the middle of the process, what will you use to turn it?

The question hung between father and son like smoke that had not yet cleared. Van Khe could not answer, because she herself did not have a certain answer. Firewood pottery is inherently a profession of gambles, and her grandfather once said that people who work in this profession must learn to love even the times they lose.

They stood there for a long time, amidst the mist that was gradually disappearing as the sunlight emerged from behind the bamboo trees. In the distance, the sound of a truck starting up could be heard from the beginning of the village - where the new pottery factory of Tan Tho company had just expanded another line, shipping goods to the provinces day and night. That sound, to Van Khe, was like a death knell echoing from afar, reminding her that time is not on the side of people like her.

*

In the morning, Van Khe went to the village market to buy a few small things, and happened to meet Mrs. Sau selling vegetables, who was distantly related to several families who used to make wood stoves in the village.

— It's Khe, are you still keeping the oven these days? — Mrs. Sau asked, her voice was both friendly and a bit probing. — Mr. Ti's family in the neighborhood sold land to Tan Tho company, at a very good price, they paid twice the market price, and also accepted him as a worker, regular monthly salary, no need to worry about erratic weather and rain.

Van Khe forced a smile, responded politely, and continued walking. This wasn't the first time she heard similar stories. In just two years, four wood stove-making families in the village sold their land or completely moved to work for Tan Tho. That company, headed by Mr. Chiem Dac Nguyen, has quietly acquired nearly one-third of the riverside land area - lands that originally belonged to traditional pottery-making families, are now gradually turning into raw material yards and low-slung corrugated iron factories.

Villagers gossiped that Mr. Nguyen had the ambition to turn Doi Sanh into an export ceramics industrial cluster, with a modern gas kiln running twenty-four hours, with an output hundreds of times that of a wood kiln, but with much lower labor costs - no need for skilled artisans, just workers to operate the machine. For struggling families, Tan Tho's offer sounds as attractive as a life buoy in the middle of a flood.

But Van Khe knows that once the last wood stove in the village goes out, the name Doi Sanh will only be a place on the map, not a soulful craft village.

*

That afternoon, she sat in the workshop, turning an old turntable with worn edges, kneading a small vase. The clay under her hands was soft, moist and cool, with the typical scent of Boi Giang alluvium - a smell that she could recognize among hundreds of different types of soil if she closed her eyes. Her grandfather once taught her that the soil in the river in front of the village has special plasticity and shrinkage, suitable for shaping thin details without cracking when heated at high temperatures, a property that purchased industrial clay can never have.

Giang Khac Ben, a close friend since childhood and also the only furnace assistant still attached to the workshop, walked in, carrying a bundle of freshly split pine firewood.

— Ms. Khe, is this firewood saved for heating the furnace or is it intended to be burned?

— Just try it, — Van Khe replied, still not taking her eyes off the vase taking shape under her hand. — But I was thinking, maybe I should take a big risk, Ben.

Khac Ben put down the bundle of firewood and squatted next to him, his sweaty face showing concern.

— Are you joking? The doctor told his brother not to exert himself, and the big batch would require the whole family to stay awake for seven nights. Are you going to let yourself and me alone bear the burden?

— In the past, your grandfather and grandfather were only two people in the first batches, — Van Khe said, his voice somewhat stubborn and familiar. — Mr. Thoi is still healthy and can show us the first few nights. The rest, I have to take care of myself.

Khac Ben was silent for a moment, then sighed.

— My grandfather is seventy-four years old. If you make him stay up at night to watch the fire, I feel very guilty. But okay, if you decide, I'll follow. Just... have you thought about it carefully? If this batch fails, what will your family use to get back up?

That question made Van Khe stop. She looked down at the unfinished vase, the fingerprints still imprinted on the soft soil, and suddenly remembered what her grandfather had said one night while watching the furnace when she was fifteen years old: "This job is not a job of certainty, Khe. It is a job of trust. You must believe in the earth, believe in the fire, and most importantly, believe in yourself, then the fire will listen to you."

— I've thought about it carefully, — she replied, her voice stronger than she expected. — If I don't do anything, the Vong Nguyet furnace will gradually shut down because there is no batch large enough to feed it. It's better to risk it once to make a difference, than let it slowly die.

Khac Ben nodded and said nothing more. He understood that once Van Khe made up her mind, no one in the village could shake her, including her father.

*

That evening, when darkness completely fell and the sound of insects began to buzz throughout the clay field, Van Khe sat alone in the old house where his grandfather used to live, flipping through the notebooks recording the yeast formula that he left behind. Most of them are yellowed pages with shaky handwriting from the last years of their lives, recording the glaze ratio, firing temperature, and even personal feelings about each batch of kilns. But there was a thin notebook with a worn leather cover lying at the bottom of the wooden chest that she had never noticed, seemingly hidden for many years.

She picked it up, blew the thin layer of dust covering the cover, and was about to open it when her father's voice called out from the yard, announcing that a visitor had come to look for it. Van Khe quickly put the notebook on the table, intending to take a closer look later, then walked out, not knowing that just a few thin pages would soon open a secret chapter that her whole family had tried to bury for thirty-five years.

Outside in the yard, under the faint moonlight of the moon, a strange car parked in front of the gate, and from the car stepped out a tall figure that it took Van Khe a few seconds to recognize - someone she never thought she would see again in her life.