Chapter 2 — The Test Has No Name

Sewing Machine And Outline

At five o'clock in the morning, Nguyen woke up to the sound of a sewing machine that had been running for a while. He lay quietly for a few minutes in the dark, listening to the steady rhythm of the needle sewing through the fabric, then got up and slipped his feet into the plastic slippers placed next to the bed.

His mother sat with her head bowed at the desk, a pile of pre-cut shirts piled high on the left, a finished stack much lower on the right. The urgent order for the garment factory needed to be delivered before seven o'clock, so she had been awake since three o'clock to make it in time.

"You woke up so early?" She looked up, her hand still pushing the cloth through the needle.

"I wake up and study." Nguyen half lied — he really intended to study, but the main reason he woke up was the sound of the sewing machine. He pulled out a chair and sat down next to his mother, picked up a few buttons scattered on the table, and began to fill in the missing places as if he had been familiar with them since childhood.

"Let me go, Mom, go study, you have an exam tomorrow."

"You did it faster than I thought." Nguyen smiled and didn't stop. "Besides, I'm still able to calculate the derivative formula in my head when I'm pregnant, it won't affect anything."

Mrs. Dieu did not argue further, just glanced at her son and then bent down to continue her work. The yellow light reflected on her face, lines that were deeper than her forty-two years of age should have been, traces of nearly ten years of struggling alone after her husband passed away. Nguyen still remembers that year when he was in eighth grade, his father fell ill in just a few months, from a still healthy man who rode a tricycle carrying rented goods every day, to a skinny figure lying on a district hospital bed, and then did not survive. He still kept his father's old watch in his desk drawer, doesn't wear it, only occasionally took it out to clean the glass and puts it back in its original place.

"There's Civic Education class at the beginning of today," he said, trying to change the subject. "Miss Loan said she would talk about exam integrity or something, probably because last week there was a question leak in the newspaper."

"Everything must be honest to last, my child." Mrs. Dieu spoke while biting the thread. "I don't have many words, but I believe that whatever is gained through deception will sooner or later be lost, and whatever is done with one's own strength, even if it is slow, is sure."

Nguyen nodded, not expecting his mother's carefree words that morning to be something he would remember again and again for many years to come.

At the beginning of the Civic Education class, Ms. Tuong Bich Loan stood on the podium, holding a newspaper clipping from an exam scandal in another province - a student was discovered bringing documents into the exam room and was suspended right in the middle of the graduation exam.

“I want you to think about a question,” she said, her voice slow but heavy. "If you saw someone cheating, but that person was a close friend, or someone you could get implicated in if you spoke up, what would you do?"

The class was silent for a few seconds. A girl in the middle row raised her hand first. "I'll tell the teachers, because that's not fair to my real classmates."

"What if that person is your best friend?" Ms. Loan continued to ask.

The question made the classroom atmosphere slacken. Nguyen glanced at Khanh Thu sitting two tables away and saw her biting the end of her pen, her eyes looking far out the window, as if asking herself that question. In another corner of the classroom, Chu Dinh Vy - the third best student in the grade, quiet, always sitting straight and attentive - clenched his hand around the pen so tightly that his knuckles turned slightly white, but no one noticed.

"Honesty is sometimes the hardest thing, not because it's complicated, but because it requires you to pay with something of your own," Ms. Loan concluded. "But in a society where no one dares to tell the truth, in the end everyone is a victim, even those who were silent."

Nguyen wrote that sentence in the margin of his notebook, without thinking too much, just because it sounded good. Little did he know that less than two months later, he would be the one who would have to live with the answer to that question — not as a witness, but as an accused.

In the afternoon, the homeroom teacher assigned group exercises for the upcoming inter-school Math competition round, pairing pairs according to the highest score in the block. Nguyen and Khanh Thu, not surprisingly, were placed on the same team.

"My study materials are more at home, can you come over to my house to study?" Khanh Thu asked after school, her voice was as natural as if she was inviting her to a snack, not inviting a friend from a different situation to a completely strange place.

Nguyen hesitated. He had never set foot in houses like Khanh Thu's, only seeing them from afar every time he cycled past the villa area near the town center. But he also knows that if he lets his pride get in the way, he will lose the opportunity to access better materials that the school doesn't have.

"Okay," he replied, neatly as if accepting a condition of competition, not an invitation.

Khanh Thu's house is located behind a high iron gate, with a security guard opening the door when he sees her car coming. Nguyen followed behind on his bicycle, stopping in the courtyard, looking around at the large paved yard, the rows of square trimmed trees, and the three-story house with large glass windows reflecting the afternoon light. He parked his bicycle next to the shiny car parked in the yard, feeling like those two things did not belong to the same world.

"Come in, don't be shy," Khanh Thu said, perhaps noticing the pause in his steps.

Khanh Thu's private classroom on the second floor has bookshelves covering one wall, a large desk with an adjustable desk lamp, and a stack of carefully bound exam preparation materials - the result of extra study sessions with a private tutor that Nguyen has only heard about but never seen with her own eyes. He sat down, trying not to let his eyes stay too long on anything, afraid of being misunderstood as comparing.

Not even ten minutes had passed since the two of them had opened the document when there was a decisive knock on the door. A middle-aged man, wearing a neat suit even though he had taken off his tie, walked into the room, his eyes quickly glanced over Nguyen, enough to evaluate from the plastic sandals to the worn-out uniform shirt.

"Are you in the same class?" he asked, his voice polite but cold, directed more towards his daughter than Nguyen.

"Yes, Nguyen, you're on the same math team as me," Khanh Thu replied, her voice somewhat stiff, as if she was mentally preparing for an uncomfortable conversation.

"Finish studying early and then go home. We have guests tonight," Mr. Vo Dinh Khuong said, not really an order but also leaving no room for protest. He looked at Nguyen one more time before closing the door. That look had no obvious malice, but was enough to make Nguyen understand that he was standing in a space where his presence needed an explanation.

Khanh Thu did not say anything more about her father, just bent down to the documents, her voice a little lower. "Sorry, my dad's a bit...aware of strangers in the house. His work has been stressful lately."

"It's okay," Nguyen replied, although in his heart he had just realized something new: the wealth that he once thought was a layer of armor protecting Khanh Thu from all worries, turned out to also come with its own strings, just the type of strings that he had never had to carry.

They continued to solve the problem, trying to regain their interrupted working rhythm. This year's inter-school exam has a difficult combination test, requiring the combination of a lot of knowledge at the same time, a type of test that Nguyen only practiced through a few old books borrowed from his senior, while Khanh Thu had a separate set of topics compiled by her tutor.

"The solution in my document is too long and time-consuming," Nguyen said, after looking at the sample solution Khanh Thu gave him. "Try this way, it's shorter." He quickly wrote a different approach on scrap paper, using induction instead of listing each case.

Khanh Thu looked at each stroke of the pen, her eyes lit up. "This way is really better. Why doesn't my tutor's materials teach this way?"

"Because maybe no one taught you how to solve problems when you don't have enough tools at hand," Nguyen replied, not intending to be sarcastic but the words still carried a bit of thorniness. "We are used to having to find shortcuts because we don't have enough time and materials to travel long distances."

Khanh Thu was silent, did not object, just wrote down the solution in his notebook with unusual attention, as if he had just shown her something she had never thought of during her years studying with a private tutor. Then she asked a few more questions about two other difficult exercises, and so they worked together until the document on the table had only a few unfinished pages left.

At nine o'clock in the evening, the maid knocked on the door and invited the two of them to come down and have a light dinner before Nguyen returned, but he politely refused, claiming that his mother was waiting for dinner at home - partly the truth, partly because he did not want to sit at the dining table in the house where Khanh Thu's father just looked at him like he was looking at a misplaced item.

On the way home from cycling, the cool night wind blowing against his face, Nguyen thought back to the question Ms. Loan asked that morning - about what to do when he sees something wrong from someone he doesn't want to hurt. He did not expect that he would remember that sentence for a long time, like a vague omen that he was not able to understand at this time.

When he got home, his mother was still waiting for the rice, even though it was cold. Nguyen briefly talked about the group study session, not mentioning his strict father or the large paved yard, only saying that the group exercise went well. Mrs. Dieu nodded, did not ask any more questions, just told him to eat quickly so that the cold rice would not harm his stomach, then returned to the computer desk and continued the unfinished work from the morning.

That night, before going to bed, Nguyen took his father's old watch out of the desk drawer, cleaned the glass as usual, and then placed it on the desk instead of putting it away immediately. He looked at the second hand running slowly for a while, thinking about his mother's words this morning - whatever was done with his own strength, even if it's slow, was sure - and told himself, no matter how many documents Khanh Thu had, how many tutors he had, he still had something she did not have: the need to win with his own hands, there was no turning back.

During that class, no one mentioned Khanh Thu's strict father, but they both knew it was there, quietly lying between them like a new boundary line, different from the money boundary that Nguyen was used to thinking about.