Chapter 1 — The Bookmobile Through the Mountains

At four-thirty in the morning, when the town of Van Thac district was still covered in a thick layer of cotton-like fog, Khuong Bao Nghi sat behind the wheel of a small truck painted faded orange-yellow, the engine rumbling like an old man's cough. On the side of the car, the once brilliant words "Sunshine MOBILE LIBRARY" have now peeled off in pieces, revealing the gray primer underneath, but anyone who has seen this car drive by once will always remember that name, and also remember the figure of the man who drove it for sixteen years before Nghi replaced him in that seat.

Turn the key. The car engine sputtered twice before starting, as if it needed time to wake me up like her. She let the engine idle for a while, holding a cup of black coffee her mother had prepared the night before, looking out the foggy windshield. The single road leading to the villages in the west of the district was still dark, with only the headlights of her car shining into the mist like a needle piercing a cotton cloth.

The back of the truck was filled with cardboard boxes covered with tape, inside were books - picture books for children, fairy tales, old textbooks, a few novels for adults, and agricultural technical manuals that people most often asked to borrow during the planting season. Some books were so worn that Nghi had to re-attach them with clear tape. Some books still smelled like brand new paper and had just been donated by a publisher in the city following a call for donations that her mother posted on social networks last year. Every time she opened the trunk door, the smell of book paper mixed with the smell of motor oil and the musty smell of the mountains always entered Nghi's nose first, so familiar that she could close her eyes and still know where she was.

She put the car in gear, rolled slowly through the deserted district street, crossed the bridge across a small stream that was drying up because it was the end of the dry season, and then started climbing uphill. The asphalt road only lasted about three more kilometers before turning into a rough red dirt road, flanked on both sides by steep cliffs covered with vines and wild banana bushes. Nghi has memorized every turn and every pothole on this route to the point that she can sometimes drive without looking, just feeling the vibration of the steering wheel under her hand.

Her route today was to Ban Seo Lu, a H'Mong village located halfway up the mountain, nearly thirty kilometers from town but it took nearly two hours to get there because of bad roads. This is one of four fixed stops on the route that her father, Mr. Khuong Vinh Trac, outlined sixteen years ago, when he was a young elementary school teacher who noticed that his students had no books to read other than the wrinkled pages of textbooks passed down through generations.

Nghi still vividly remembers the first time her father took her here, when she was only eight years old, sitting in the passenger seat, her legs dangling off the ground, her hand clutching her favorite comic book in case she got bored along the way. Her father at that time drove a motorbike with a homemade cargo box behind it, which could only carry a few dozen books per trip. There was no such thing as this truck. He drove and sang, his voice was hoarse but happy, occasionally stopping to show her a bird's nest, a bush of wildflowers, and a clear stream flowing through a rock crevice. "This road is very long, Nghi," he once said, "but if you keep going, you will get there. It's the same with books, if you read each page, you will finish the whole book."

Sixteen years later, that road is still there, just as long, as rough as before, only the person behind the wheel has changed.

The car swayed through a curve. Nghi eased off the accelerator, eyes glued to the tire tracks printed on the ground still wet with night dew. In the distance, the mountain peaks began to glow a pale pink color as the sun prepared to rise, and the fog rolled up like white silk strips across the hillside. The scenery is so beautiful, but Nghi doesn't have much time left to admire it - she still has to get to Seo Lu before the children leave the morning love class opened by a young volunteer teacher at the village cultural house, so they can stop by the bookmobile before returning to help the family with the farming.

Nearly seven o'clock, when sunlight spread throughout the valley, Nghi's car finally slowly crawled to the beginning of Seo Lu village. From afar, she saw a small figure waiting on the side of the road, holding a dry stick and fiddling with the ground, occasionally looking up at the slope as if counting the minutes. That is Sung A Dinh, a ten-year-old boy with eyes as bright as two burning coals, the child who is always the first to run out to meet the bookmobile every time Nghi goes to the village, regardless of whether it is a rainy day or a sunny day.

"Miss Nghi! Miss Nghi is up!" Stick shouted, ran after the car for a while even though the car had not yet stopped completely, his honeycomb sandals with broken straps covered in mud and flapping on the road. It ran so fast that Nghi had to brake suddenly, afraid the boy would hit the front of the car.

"Drive slowly, Dinh, otherwise I'll have to take you back to the district clinic," Nghi smiled as he opened the car door and got out, patting the boy's head. Her hair was burned by the sun, hard as straw, and speckled with red dirt typical of the highlands.

"Did you bring a book about the forest? A book about rangers, you promised last time!" He immediately asked, without having time to say any more, his eyes shone with unconcealed excitement.

Nghi laughed, went around to the back of the car and opened the trunk door. "Do you remember? I also brought two more books, one about birds in Vietnam, one about how to recognize wild animal footprints. Is that what you need?"

Sticky Eyes lit up like he had just been given a treasure. It let out a loud scream and immediately climbed into the trunk of the car, where Nghi had arranged small wooden bookshelves along the sides, each shelf labeled with classification labels made of pieces of cardboard she cut and hand-wrote. This is Dinh's "library", for children like him — not a building with shiny tile floors and air conditioning, but the back of an old truck, where the sunlight filtering through the door casts long streaks of light on the spines of the books.

While Dinh was passionately rummaging around, other children in the village also kept coming, some were still wearing muddy work clothes because they had just returned from the fields, some had wet hair because they had just bathed in the stream. They line up without needing to be reminded, a habit that has been formed over many years when the bookmobile stops by regularly twice a month. Nghi stood next to him, his hand quickly taking notes in a small notebook - the borrower's name, book title, return date - a job that seemed simple but required meticulousness, because there were books that had passed through the hands of dozens of children for many years, were worn out but never lost.

"Miss Nghi, will you stay long today?" A voice spoke from behind. It was Mrs. Sung, a middle-aged woman carrying a large bundle of firewood on her back, stopping on the side of the road to look at the group of children surrounding the book cart with affectionate eyes mixed with something like nostalgia.

"Yes, I'll only stay until noon. I still have to go to Khuoi Tra in the afternoon," Nghi replied, bowing his head.

"Your father used to say the same thing to me," Mrs. Sung smiled, her voice a bit sad. "He's always racing against time, afraid he won't be able to reach all the copies of the day. You're a lot like him, Nghi."

Nghi smiled slightly, not knowing how to respond. She had heard that sentence, or similar sentences, countless times since the day she took over this route — from people who knew her father, from parents who had been students of the old bookmobile, had now grown up, got married, and brought their children out to meet the bookmobile again. Every time he hears the phrase "so much like him", Nghi feels a mixed feeling between pride and a vague nameless fear - fear that he will never be like his father enough to be worthy of continuing what he has built.

The morning in Seo Lu passed with the sound of rustling book pages, the sounds of children competing to read a story aloud, the sound of roosters crowing in the distance and the sound of the wind passing through the pine forests on the top of the mountain. There was a little girl about twelve years old sitting alone in the corner of the trunk, not reading a book but diligently drawing something in an old notebook, occasionally looking up at an illustrated page in the fairy tale book and then bending down to continue drawing. Nghi glanced at it, intending to come closer later to take a look, but first she had to deal with a long line of children eagerly waiting for their turn to borrow books.

Near noon, when the sun began to shine above his head, Nghi had some time to sit and rest on the steps of the village cultural house, sipping a sip of water he brought with him, watching the children spread out in small groups under the shade of the trees, each child holding a book like a treasure. She took out an old leather-bound notebook from her pocket and opened it to the page with her father's familiar handwriting - the notebook he used to record each family and child on the route, the notebook that Nghi found in his desk drawer after he passed away, and from then on always carried it with her as a guiding map, not only for the mountain roads but also for the way of living and loving this job.

The page she opened today was the page about Seo Lu, with familiar italic handwriting: "Seo Lu, day... The children here are very thirsty for words. Some of them walk two hours just to wait for the book bus. We have to try to maintain it, no matter how far the road is." Nghi gently stroked the page, his eyes stinging. She closed the notebook, put it in her breast pocket, close to her heart, then stood up, brushed the dust off her pants, walked back to the book cart, where Sung A Dinh was sitting perched on the door step of the cart, passionately reading a book about wild animal tracks, her lips moving attentively to spell each word.

The sun is rising higher on the top of Van Thac mountain, and the road ahead is still long, very long. But Nghi knows, like her father once said, if you keep going, you will come.