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By Phan Tan Hai I have a friend back in our poor homeland— countless stories, still wandering each day, a traveling healer on his bicycle, carrying needles, old books, and sometimes a few half-finished poems seeking someone to offer a thought. Many days he lacked enough rice to feed his wife and children, yet in that terrible hunger he stayed optimistic, praying with his beads at the temple, sipping sidewalk coffee, unhurried, reading aloud the sutra of “forgiving others,” though our generation had done nothing wrong— our hands and feet calloused from the rare joy of finding a day’s labor. In a time when childhood poems were tossed into the street to forget a whole life, he saved every coin hoping one day to buy a rickshaw and pull it through Sài Gòn’s sidewalks, so his children could grow up knowing enough letters to look into their father’s tearful eyes and read again the words still unspoken between the lines of his poems. I have another friend— a bond beyond counting— we shared books in our first years of growing up, ran through rain across the fields, and were crushed by the storm of history. There were days we vowed to risk our lives for peace, then took turns going to prison to witness how fragile a human fate can be. Later we wandered from temple to temple asking the monks about great meanings, words not yet spoken though tears had already soaked the sutras. Holding a bowl of temple porridge, we felt the weight of a thousand worlds. We wrote carefully each ancient character, searching for the mind of those before us, so gently, afraid to crack the soul of ink and paper. And when I left the country, I regretted not telling my friend all that I had understood— for sometimes, without meaning to, the heart falls silent and pockets hold no words. I have four younger siblings jobless year-round; in 2000 they still lived together sharing a black-and-white TV, their hands never touching a phone. Each day they scattered into the streets, biking from Ch? L?n to Sài Gòn, to Gia Ð?nh, sweating as they searched for work. Sometimes they found a job for a few weeks, then came the notice: “work ended.” They heard the country was “renewing,” entering the 21st century, money flowing freely— yet every two months they wrote asking me for help, not knowing I was here picking up quarters on the street, hunched over each day writing enough lines to fill a newspaper page, like old scholars selling calligraphy during springtime, often scolded by passersby, sometimes accused of protesting in Little Saigon— a place people say is where birds find good land. My siblings’ hair has begun to turn white, though to me they remain as small as long ago, and my heart still wants to offer a simple word of guidance— like giving them a recipe for instant noodles of wisdom— but my lips falter and words no longer come. My friends’ backs have begun to bend, as another friend told me— still waiting for news from me as if waiting for a miracle. Yes, once we believed in miracles, but I no longer see them anywhere except our homeland, where my friends and my siblings live each day by miracles— some days surviving on air and plain water, some weeks on coffee and cigarettes, some years on nothing but poetry and a simple heart, and in that place we lived an entire lifetime on tears alone.

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