Chapter 1 — The Test Has No Name

The ink on the score sheet had not yet dried

The exam paper still smelled of red ink when Mr. Khang placed it face down on Huynh Dang Nguyen's desk, tapping twice on the wooden table like a punctuation mark.

"Nine point seven," the teacher said, not looking at him but looking straight at the board, where the highest score column for class 12A had just been written with white chalk. "Tallest in the grade, as usual."

Nguyen did not immediately turn the paper over. He placed his hand on it, feeling the remaining moisture of the ink that had not completely dried, then flipped it. The number 9.7 lay neatly in the red frame, next to the teacher's hastily scribbled signature. Not a ten. He miscalculated a derivative sentence at the end, where he shouldn't have been wrong.

At the back of the classroom, the sound of chairs dragging on the tile floor rang out. Vo Khanh Thu stood up to receive her exam paper from Mr. Khang, holding it with both hands as if holding something fragile. She glanced quickly at Nguyen before bending down to look at her score — a habit that had lasted since the tenth grade, when they both started taking turns holding the top position like two milestones that no one would give up.

"Nine point eight," Mr. Khang read aloud, his voice sounding almost satisfied. "Khanh Thu has surpassed it."

No one in the class said anything, but a few eyes turned towards Nguyen, waiting to see his reaction. He just folded the exam paper in half and stuffed it in the middle of his Math notebook, his movements were so neat that it didn't reveal anything.

During recess, Nguyen sat alone in the last row of tables, opened the paper again, and retraced each step of the solution. Wrong in the fourth line — you forgot to change the sign when switching clauses. A childish mistake. He bit his lip, took a pen and drew a thin line under that line, not to correct but to remember.

"Are you still reading cards?" Duong Nhat Khoi swooped down next to him, holding a steaming sandwich in his hand, pushing half of it towards Nguyen. "Losing by one point one but your face looks like you just lost your house."

"Not a one point one loss." Nguyen pushed half the loaf back. "It was wrong in a place that shouldn't have been wrong."

"So what? The scholarship entrance exam is still a month away, it's not like this test will decide anything."

Nguyen did not respond immediately. He looked out the window, where Vong Khe schoolyard was drenched in October sunshine. The phoenix trees had long since shed their flowers, leaving only dark green leaves covering the cracked cement floor. The school was not big, located a fifteen-minute bike ride from the town center, where kids like him and most of his classmates grew up amid sugar cane fields and rows of workers' boarding houses.

"For me, yes," he said finally. "This is the only exam I can win on my own, without anyone investing anything."

Nhat Khoi was silent for a moment, knowing exactly what Nguyen was talking about. Everyone in class knew that Khanh Thu had a private tutor who teaches three main subjects, three times a week, and the tuition was equal to half of what Nguyen's mother earns in a month as a factory worker. No one blames her for that - Khanh Thu really studied, took real exams, never relied on anyone for grades - but that gap still lies there, silently, like an invisible line dividing the classroom.

In the afternoon, when most of the students had gone home, Nguyen stayed in the library to borrow last year's provincial excellent student exam book - the only book in the school, which was being rotated among a few of the best students in the grade. He pushed open the door and walked in, seeing Khanh Thu already sitting at the innermost table, books spread all over the table, her hair tied high to expose the nape of her neck, biting the tip of a pencil in thought.

"You're later than I thought," Khanh Thu said without raising her head, as if she already knew who was coming in. "I keep the exam book for excellent students here, do you need it?"

"Need." Nguyen pulled out a chair and sat opposite, the distance between the two of them was just enough for a narrow wooden table. "Haven't you finished reading to ask that?"

"Two-thirds done." She pushed the book past, her finger still holding the corner of the cover for a few seconds before letting go, as if regretting something unsaid. "Question number twelve is difficult. I tried to solve it and still got negative results. Maybe I'm wrong or I'm wrong."

"Let me see."

The two of them bent down on the same page, their heads so close to each other that Nguyen could smell the scent of jasmine shampoo wafting from Khanh Thu's hair, a smell completely different from the familiar smell of cheap laundry soap in his house. He didn't move away, just focused on the numbers, looking for mistakes in her solution.

"Here," he pointed to the third line. "You got the wrong sign in the step of taking the derivative twice. It's not a mistake."

Khanh Thu looked at the place he was pointing, was silent for a few seconds, then burst out laughing, a short, unintentional laugh that came out naturally. "That's true. I thought I checked carefully."

"Everyone has times when they can't see their own mistakes." Nguyen said, then suddenly realized that what he just blurted out sounded more like a reminder to himself than a comfort to others. He thought about the fourth line in the morning's practice test, where he forgot to change the sign.

"Are you sad because you lost to me by one point one?" Khanh Thu asked directly, eyes looking straight at him, not avoiding.

"Not sad about losing," Nguyen replied, also looking straight back. "Sad because of a stupid mistake."

"So if I told you, I wish I was in the wrong place for you, so you would still be at the top, would you believe it?"

The question made Nguyen pause for a moment. He wasn't sure if Khanh Thu was joking or telling the truth, but her eyes at that moment were not teasing at all. He avoided it by bending down to the exam book, pretending to read the next question attentively, but his ears were still inexplicably hot.

"I believe you say that because you prefer fair competition to easy wins," he replied, trying to keep his voice calm. "Not for any other reason."

"It's possible." Khanh Thu smiled softly, put her books back, the afternoon sunlight passing through the library window printed a long yellow streak on the table between the two of them. "But you should know, being at the top of the rankings doesn't mean much to me. My dad decided that I would study abroad in the 11th grade, whether I ranked first or fifth."

Nguyen looked up at her, surprised by that unexpected frankness. "So why do you still study as if every score means your life?"

"Because that's the only thing I can do myself, without anyone's help," Khanh Thu said, her voice lowered. "Do you think only poor people need to prove themselves?"

That sentence stayed in Nguyen's mind all the way home, through the sound of the bike chain squeaking and the smell of copper burning smoke wafting in the afternoon breeze. He still didn't fully understand Khanh Thu's meaning, but for the first time he realized that the distance between them was not simply a money line as he thought.

Returning to the small alley behind the market, where his mother and his son's four-level house was nestled between two rows of workers' dormitories, Nguyen saw yellow light shining from the only window and heard the steady sound of a sewing machine - a sound so familiar that he could close his eyes to guess what number of threads his mother was sewing. He parked the car, didn't rush into the house right away, but stood for a moment in the yard, looking up at the purple sky, thinking about the 9.7 exam paper still in his briefcase.

Today's mock exam is just a small milestone. But he knows, there is a bigger milestone waiting ahead - the exam will decide who in block 12A this year will receive the only full scholarship to study abroad, an opportunity that a poor child like him can only dream of with his own ability, without a penny of tutoring fees, without a single relationship to back him up.

He entered the house, the sound of the sewing machine stopped just as the door opened.

"How was your test today?" His mother — Mrs. Tang Thi Dieu — looked up from the table, still holding the unfinished piece of fabric, her tired eyes lit up when she saw her son.

"I'm second in the class," Nguyen replied, trying to keep his voice light as if it didn't matter. "Nine point seven."

"Second is also very good." She smiled, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes deepening under the yellow light. "You don't always have to be the best, as long as you do your best, that's fine."

Nguyen nodded and did not say more, but in his heart he knew clearly something his mother did not say: the upcoming exam did not allow him to just "do his best". It only had one spot, and the three people qualified to compete for it knew very well that coming in second would mean losing everything.

Dinner that night was only vegetable soup and braised fish, like every other dinner in that level four house, but Nguyen ate slower than usual, his mind still stuck on Khanh Thu's words in the library. He wondered if a person with all the conditions like her still needed to prove anything to anyone, then blamed himself for thinking about things unrelated to schoolwork.

After the meal, his mother cleared the table to continue doing the extra work she received from the garment factory near the market. The yellow light once again cast her shadow on the mottled wall. Nguyen sat at the desk next to the window, opened the exam book that excellent student Khanh Thu had just lent, and turned to the correct question number twelve that she had solved incorrectly. He solved it again from the beginning, carefully each step, wrote it down on scratch paper and compared it, trying not to make the same stupid mistake of changing signs like in the morning.

Outside the window, the sound of motorbikes from a few workers getting off work late echoed from the dirt road in front of the neighborhood, mixed with the sound of a dog barking somewhere and the sound of a radio broadcasting a Cai Luong program from a neighbor's house. That familiar sound, instead of distracting him, became a kind of rhythm that helped him focus — as if every number he wrote down was being measured by the hardship he witnessed every day in this house.

At ten o'clock at night, when the final solution matched the answer at the end of the book, Nguyen closed the exam book and placed it neatly on the corner of the table to return to Khanh Thu tomorrow. He turned off the study light, lay down on the rickety wooden bed, listening to the steady sound of his mother's sewing machine echoing through the wall. Before falling asleep, the last thought that crossed his mind was not about the number 9.7, nor about the upcoming scholarship exam, but about the question Khanh Thu asked at the library, the question he still couldn't find a satisfactory answer to: does everyone need something to prove, regardless of whether rich or poor.