Chapter 6 — The Chorus of Those Out of Rhythm

On the first day of officially starting work, Thu An transformed a corner of the living room into her own "command station" — a folding table borrowed from a neighbor's house, a laptop, a file that was growing thicker by the day, and a small whiteboard she quickly bought at a nearby stationery store to write down her schedule. She called the organizers of the Urban Singing Festival to find out the competition regulations, deadline for submitting registration documents, requirements for the number of members and the type of performance.

"The organizers require each team to perform two performances, one mandatory performance following this year's theme of 'Urban Memories', and one optional performance," Thu An informed her mother in the evening, after carefully recording every detail. "The duration of each performance is no more than five minutes. The qualifying round takes place in exactly fifty-two days."

"Urban Memories." Ms. Nguyet muttered, her eyes distant as if searching for a suitable melody in her head. "I have an old song, written by a friend of mine a long time ago, about old streets, about things that are gradually disappearing. I've never arranged it for the whole group to sing, but maybe this is the right time."

Thu An took notes, then continued to review the list of teams competing in previous years to evaluate the level of competition. This job, although strange to her familiar auditing profession, has one thing in common: both require meticulousness, the ability to see details that others miss, and a little patience to not give up halfway because of mountains of paperwork.

She opened the videos of previous years' award-winning teams on the organizing committee's page, watched each performance over and over again, and took careful notes in a separate file: how to set up the lineup, how to handle stage lighting, and how young teams often choose vibrant, technically rich songs to impress the judges. The more she watched, the more clearly she realized the disadvantages of the Binh Minh choir - no skilled vocal techniques, no eye-catching choreography, only the rustic voices of people who have lived through many ups and downs.

"Maybe I shouldn't try to compete with technique," she muttered to herself, hastily typing a few notes. "We should compete with stories."

That idea made her even more excited. She began to sketch out a plan to present to the judges not simply two musical performances, but a story told through music - the story of an old cultural house, of the people who have been attached to it all their lives, and of the fear of being forgotten as the city changes day by day. She called Viet Long, asking if he could help write a short introduction for the MC to read before the performance started, and Viet Long agreed immediately, equally excited.

In the evening, when presenting this idea to her mother, Mrs. Nguyet nodded in agreement, her eyes shining in a way rarely seen in recent days. "You have eyes to see further than I thought," she said, a bit of pride and surprise in her voice. "In the past, my mother only knew how to teach people to sing in the right rhythm and at the right pitch. She never thought about telling a story through music like you just said."

"I learned this from audit work," Thu An replied, smiling slightly. "The number itself doesn't say anything, you have to put it into a story for people to understand and believe."

The next afternoon, while cleaning her old room to have more working space, Thu An accidentally found a cardboard box hidden deep in the closet, covered in dust. She opened it, and inside were old family memorabilia — a few black-and-white photos, a stopped watch, and a worn leather-bound notebook, her father's familiar handwriting covering every page.

She flipped through the pages, her heart beating faster when she realized that it was her father's diary, written sporadically in the last years of his life. Most of them were trivial notes about work and health, but there was a passage that made Thu An stop and read it over and over again.

"Today, Nguyet was late for practice again. She was angry, refused to eat, sat alone in the room. I understand she feels abandoned, but I also understand why Nguyet is like that. She has not found any other place for herself besides music, since last year. I don't blame her, I just hope my daughter will understand one day, not to understand to forgive, but to understand to reduce the pain."

"About last year." Thu An read that phrase over and over again, trying to search her memory to see what her father was referring to, but couldn't find any more specific clues. The diary page did not have a clear date, only a vague number of years that she recalculated and fell into the period not long before she was born.

She brought the notebook to the living room, where Mrs. Nguyet was sitting and reviewing the old music she had just mentioned the day before. "Mom," Thu An spoke up, her voice somewhat reserved. "I found this in dad's old stuff."

Ms. Nguyet held the notebook, immediately realized what it was, and her face suddenly changed color. She turned to the page Thu An had just pointed to, reread her husband's words, and for a moment, her eyes turned red.

"What happened last year, Mom?" Thu An asked, trying to keep her voice calm even though curiosity and worry were rising in her heart. "Dad wrote that mom hasn't found a place other than music since that incident. Did something happen before you were born?"

Ms. Nguyet was silent for a long time, her trembling fingers gently stroked the yellowed page. "That was a long time ago," she said softly, her voice choked. "I'm not ready to tell you, not because I want to hide it from you, but because I've never really been able to face it, even though more than forty years have passed."

"Mom..."

"Give me more time, okay?" Mrs. Nguyet looked at her daughter, her eyes both pleading and carrying an old pain that Thu An had never seen before. "I promise to tell you, but not now. Right now I need to focus on this competition first."

Thu An nodded, even though her heart was still full of unanswered questions. She put the notebook in a safe corner on the bookshelf, telling herself not to ask more questions until her mother was ready, but her father's words kept lingering in her head that evening - a missing piece in the picture of her mother that she thought she understood, but it turned out there were still many things she never knew.

That night, when Thu An turned off the lights in her room, Mrs. Nguyet was still sitting alone in the living room, her husband's notebook placed on her lap, her hand turning over the page with the paragraph about "last year's story", reading it over and over again until tears rolled down her cheeks. She remembered a winter far away, a hospital room, a baby's cry that never came, and how music became the only thing that kept her from breaking down completely during the darkest days of her life.

That year, she was just over twenty-five years old, seven months pregnant with her first child, when an unusually high fever took the baby away from her mother's womb. She was bedridden for the next two months, not speaking, not eating, no longer realizing the meaning of anything around her. It was Doan Minh Vu, her husband, who brought the old piano home and put it in the bedroom. Every day he sat and played a small song, saying nothing, just playing, until one afternoon, she suddenly raised her hand touch the keys, and the sound of the music - even though it was just a few scattered, clumsy notes - pulled her back to life.

From then on, music was no longer simply a hobby for her. It is the lifeline of salvation, the place where she consigns her unnameable pain, the reason she volunteers to teach singing to anyone who needs it, because she understands better than anyone what it feels like to be pulled out of the abyss by music. And perhaps, for that reason, when Thu An was born five years later, when family life required her to balance her role as a mother and the passion that saved her, she could not — or did not dare — let go of music, even for a moment, because deep inside, she was still afraid that abyss could return at any time.

It was a secret she had buried for so long, so long that she almost believed it would lie dormant forever, until her illness and her daughter's return forced her to face what she had avoided forty years.