Chapter 9 — The Alley Is No Longer On The Map

The first week in Sydney, Vy made video calls home every night, at exactly nine o'clock in the evening Vietnam time - twelve o'clock noon Australian time. Now she took advantage of the middle of class to run to the dormitory hallway to find a strong wifi signal. She told all kinds of stories: her dorm room was small but clean, her Malaysian roommate was very friendly, the cafeteria food was bland and not as good as the rice her mother cooked, the biting cold in the early days of winter made her shiver even though she had to wear three layers of clothes.

Khanh, Mo, Mrs. Nhien, and sometimes even Uncle Hai Moc crowded around the only phone with a relatively clear front camera, sitting in the common well yard, eagerly listening to her story as if listening to a fairy tale from another world.

"Is it snowing there yet?" Fat asked, eyes bright.

"Sydney doesn't have snow, Honey, this is winter, not a cold country." Vy laughed and explained again for the third time this week.

"Is that so? I thought foreign countries had to have snow." Fat scratched his head, embarrassed.

Those calls, although short, were the only thread that kept Vy from feeling lost in a strange city. But her curriculum is much harsher than she imagined. Urban planning requires a huge amount of homework, presentations in English that keep her up all night to prepare, not to mention the invisible pressure weighing on her shoulders: she not only studies for herself, but also carries the expectations of an entire alley, a promise to Mr. An, a scholarship that hundreds of others wish to have.

"If I'm not excellent, people will think poor Vietnamese students don't deserve this opportunity." She wrote in her diary, the words increasingly filled with anxiety. "I'm not allowed to fail."

That thought, initially just a motivation, gradually became a pressure that gripped her every day. She took a part-time job at a coffee shop near the school to have pocket money. She did not want to ask her mother for more money even though the scholarship covered all tuition and accommodation. The cycle of study - work - study repeated endlessly, and the calls home, from every evening, gradually decreased to twice a week, then once a week.

The shift at the coffee shop usually starts at five in the morning. Before dawn, Vy had to cycle from the dormitory to the shop, standing behind the counter for four hours before running back to shower, change clothes, and rush to the lecture hall in time for her first class. There are rare days when it snows in the suburbs. Her hands are stiff from the cold and she still has to work quickly because customers are waiting in line. The shop owner, a fastidious Chinese man, scolded her many times for being slow on days when she was seriously lacking sleep.

At night, she buried her head in homework until dawn, only getting three or four hours of sleep a day. One time, she fainted in the middle of the lecture hall due to exhaustion. Her classmates took her to the medical room. The doctor diagnosed her with lack of sleep and eating irregularly. Lying on the school infirmary bed, looking at the strange white ceiling, Vy just wished there was someone by her side, but then she reassured herself that this was just a small thing, not worth calling to worry her mother and everyone at home.

*

Three months later, one evening, Khanh waited in front of the phone screen, having scheduled a time with Vy in advance, but half an hour after the appointment time, she still did not call. He texted to ask, fifteen minutes later he received a reply.

"Sorry, I was working on a group project and forgot about the time. Let me call you to make up for the weekend."

Khanh looked at the message, not angry, just a little disappointed in his heart. He typed back: "It's okay, studying is more important. Try your best."

That weekend, the make-up call also did not come. Then next week. Not because Vy deliberately avoided it, but because every time she tried to call, there was another deadline in between, an unexpected overtime session, a feeling of fatigue that made her just want to sleep instead of having to explain her life in English and Vietnamese to people at home.

There were nights when Vy lay on her dorm bed, watching her phone screen light up with text messages from Khanh, short lines asking "How are you doing", "Are you okay", and she just stared at it, her fingers hovering over the keyboard, then turned off the screen, telling herself "I'll reply tomorrow, I'm too tired right now". Then that "morning" lasts for several days, sometimes even a week.

She did not realize, or perhaps she intentionally did not allow herself to realize, that behind the busyness there was actually another fear silently growing: fear that if she called back, heard Khanh's voice, heard the familiar noise of Gieng Chung alley, she would no longer have enough strength to continue staying in this strange place, she would just want to leave everything and go back. Keeping her distance, for her at that time, was a way to protect her fragile determination.

*

At home, Khanh also has her own changes. He graduated from high school with a good degree, not as excellent as Vy but enough for Uncle Hai Moc to proudly show off throughout the neighborhood. Instead of taking the university entrance exam like some of his classmates, Khanh decided to stay and help his father expand the car repair shop, repair motorbikes in addition to bicycles, and invest in buying more professional tools.

"Don't you regret not going to college?" Mrs. Vui asked once, her voice worried.

"I love doing this, Mom." Khanh replied, still disassembling a carburetor. "Besides, Dad also needs a helper. The shop is more crowded than before. Dad can't do it alone."

He said that, but in his heart, there was another reason he had never said: he wanted to maintain something fixed, an unchanging fulcrum, so that if one day Vy returned, she would still find that car repair shop, that alley, and him, still in the same place she had left.

But at the same time, the gap between the two of them keeps growing with each passing month. The calls became less frequent, short messages replaced long stories, and there were times when Khanh picked up the phone to call, then put it down, telling himself "it must be busy, let's leave it for another time", a silent patience that he did not know how long it would last.

During these months, Uncle Hai Moc also began to have coughs that lasted longer than usual, especially in the early morning when he opened the shop and inhaled road dust. He brushed it off every time Mrs. Vui urged him to go to the doctor, just saying "it's nothing to do with being old and having a little cough", then continued to bend down to work, his hands still nimble as if no age or illness had ever crept into his body. Khanh noticed those coughs, but like his father, he brushed them off, engrossed in worrying about the shop and in idle thoughts about the growing distance from Vy, not realizing that they were the first signs of something bigger that was silently approaching.

*

Near the end of the first year away from home, a small event made that gap more obvious than ever. Vy received a summer research scholarship, a rare opportunity to work with a famous professor in the industry, but required her to stay in Sydney for the entire vacation, unable to visit home as originally planned, even for just two weeks.

She called to tell me the news, her voice was both excited and guilty.

"I'm sorry mom, I thought I could come back this summer, but this opportunity is so important, I can't miss it."

"It's okay, if you have a good opportunity, just take it." Mrs. Nhien replied, trying to keep her voice calm over the phone, but Vy clearly heard a short silence before her mother continued. "Mom is fine at home, don't worry."

When Vy texted Khanh, he only replied briefly: "Yes, try your best", without any more questions like before. Vy read the message and felt a slight coldness in each word, but she didn't have time to think deeply, because right after that a project team meeting called her name again, drawing her back into the cycle of non-stop work.

She did not know that, that night, Khanh sat alone at the edge of the common well, looking at the land under the tamarind tree where the tin box was buried. A question arose in his heart that he had not dared to say out loud to anyone: whether the promise from years ago still had any meaning, when the person who promised seemed to be increasingly distant, not only in geographical distance, but also in mind.

He pulled half a coin out of his breast pocket, where he always carried it, twirling it gently between his fingers under the dim light of the tube light. The once rough edge of the saw had now been gradually smoothed due to the habit of rubbing it every time he thought. He told himself, perhaps this was just a difficult period, and everything would return to the way it was when Vy gradually got used to her new life, but a small corner of his heart, the part that didn't want to lie to himself, still whispered another, much scarier possibility.