The typist owned exactly three typewriters. While the one directly in front of her must have sported a sleek cream finish that was now fading into a greasy lacteal, the two on her left and right, in celadon, still seemed fairly new. Her desk faced the wall, with the right-hand window opening onto the concrete driveway next to the ferry dock. I used to stand under the awning outside, away from the rain, and turn my gaze inside. I would see half of her face, dotted with mauve freckles, bent lightly forward as her fingers danced on the metal keys like rain. Her workspace was a corner extension of Bay Laurel Herbal Shop, an area just big enough to install a desk, a chair, and a metal cabinet packed with documents. I used to gaze lovingly at the black carbon papers, seemingly suffused with the scents of licorice, cinnamon, and dried jujube coming from the shop counter.
About forty and slender, with her hair coiled into a bun and kept in place with a hedgehog’s amber quill, the typist spoke with a Hanoi accent. Her face was kind but businesslike. She would wear áo dài the color of green cowslip or ripe plum, and her ringless fingers were long and graceful, the blue veins on the back of her hands like jade threads. Once she had become used to my presence outside her window, she would invite me in and ask me to help her with small tasks, and afterward she would give me old sheets of carbon paper as payment—sheets so overused they’d become silver, but how I treasured them! I would take a carbon sheet to trace beautiful illustrations in books, which impressed my classmates to no end.
Back then typewriters were rare in our neck of the woods, and since anything official would require printed forms, the typist’s services were always in high demand—perhaps that was why she needed three typewriters, one for marriage licenses, one for job applications, and one for “testaments in lieu of birth certificates.” Although she was ostensibly a typist, her job actually demanded more situational acumen, intangible finesse. She would often fix her clients’ spelling mistakes and syntax, and counsel them on anything from jobs to romantic and marriage prospects.
There were those who came without handwritten drafts but would tell her their purposes, and she would draft their intentions on forms that she personally devised. Once, an asthmatic client with a voice scratchy from years of cigarette smoke stood behind her and recited his wishes: Petition to waive the compulsory draft due to family circumstances . . . My son’s name . . . Born on . . . Birthplace . . . Place of residence . . . I hereby submit this petition to request the government to waive the compulsory draft as pertains to my son since he’s my only son, and there’s no one else to carry on the family name, his mother is not well, and my daughters don’t count. The typist turned around. Why did you say your daughters don’t count? The man smiled, OK, you can fix that part for me.
She had several stacks of old newspapers and magazines for clients to browse in the waiting area. I would sit in a small chair behind the door, looking at government-funded magazines like Freedom, with its nice color photographs; Scent of the Homeland, featuring short stories from the southern countryside by Bình Nguyên Lộc or Sơn Nam; privately owned daily newspapers like Independence, Peace, and Tsunami, all the while listening to the conversations, loud or whispered, between the typist and her clients. Occasionally she would get up to turn on the kerosene burner in the far corner of the room and make tea–the flickering blue flame, burbling water poured into a ceramic pot filled with loose Ti Kwan Yin tea, then green fluid decanted into a delicate cup, which she would sometimes offer me as she moved gracefully among her piles of documents.
Located on a desolate street on the way to the river, her office was cramped and had no signage, as it was just an extension of the herbal shop. While she made no effort at advertising, anyone needing anything always found a way to get there. Outside her makeshift office stood an ancient white mulberry tree, with sweet red berries and cool green leaves—but today the tree is no more. On those days, during the monsoons or the dry season, when the ferry would be hours late in taking me home across the river, I would stop by her office. She worked in silence but would occasionally turn to look at me with her warm, smiling eyes. Now and then an older gentleman, with brilliantined hair, pale skin, high cheekbones, a white starched shirt, and a black umbrella, rain or shine, would show up and chat with her from outside the window. He would pay cash for paperwork, but sometimes he would only exchange a few words with her before moving on. At those times she would stand up from her desk and respond to his greetings while leaning on the window frame with her arms folded in front of her chest. After this male guest departed, she would tilt her head, close her eyes, smile mysteriously, and then resume her work.
Life went on like that, from school year to school year, as if everything would proceed smoothly, as if time wouldn’t exactly stop but nothing would ever change. The revolution, the war, all the death and dying that followed—they weren’t what we could have understood or anticipated back then.
Sometimes I imagined the typist as Mai, the heroine in Spring Equinox, a groundbreaking novel by Khái Hưng that was published during the French colonial period. An educated woman from a poor family whose father died young, Mai has to work to support a younger brother who attends the Pomelo Protectorate Lyceé in Hanoi. Beautiful, pure, and principled, she loves Lộc, a young man from a wealthy family, but their love is thwarted by class and economic barriers. Sometimes I imagined myself as Huy, Mai’s younger brother, who loves his sister but feels powerless before the forces of destiny. But most of the time I would sit, as in a trance, and watch how the typewriter keys would rise and fall like clattering pellets beneath the typist’s aerobatic fingers.
The war changed direction without warning. For two days and two nights, the infantry divisions stationed at the Ái Tử and Đông Hà bases in Quảng Trị withdrew in chaos across the river, leaving behind tanks and weapons—a scene that would repeat itself exactly three years later in other parts of the country. Terrified civilians and officials fled, only to be blocked by intense shelling on the highway. They scurried back and forth like ants in a hot skillet under the April sun. The air was thick and hot. The newly bloomed red flame trees wilted but did not die, their young stems dried up but did not fall. On the last day before leaving my hometown, I wandered on the empty road, the asphalt surface melting under the vast sky. The light took on an eerie cast over the ground, neither of war nor of peace. The horizon was streaked a dull gray-blue, as if before an eclipse. I walked along the border between darkness and light, but even this border was moving too fast. I could not catch up and stumbled over the trenches and the corpses scattered along Highway 1, near the Long Hưng intersection.
Walking back to the center of town, I arrived at my beloved places, one by one: Bodhi School, Phước Môn School, Thánh Tâm School, Nguyễn Hoàng School, Lương Giang Bookstore, Phú Long Bookstore, and Tao Đàn Bookstore. I greeted the scenes of my childhood for the last time. I imagined I was the only one saying goodbye to the provincial market’s ferry pier, with its many steps covered in white fish scales that exuded a fishy smell; the Tỉnh Hội pagoda with its silent bells under the shade of the Chinese parasol trees; the fabric store stacked full of silk that my mother often visited, the saleswoman smiling with one hand covering her mouth; my father’s favorite duck blood restaurant; my sister’s favorite noodle shop; and the billiard hall my friends loved, where I stood for a long time, watching the blue and red balls roll forlornly in a corner of the pool table. I picked them up and listened to them clack as I put them down.
In the late afternoon sun, the city shimmered and dissolved as if in a fable. I lingered before a classmate’s elegant house with a lucuma tree out front that would soon be whitewashed with spring blossoms; just as its blue gate, now locked, would soon be covered with cobwebs. Two white doves huddled together on the brick terrace near the rain pond, on which a half-torn lotus leaf floated.
I went to the typist’s shop and saw that the door was shut; the lock was still intact, but the window had been flung open. I looked around for a while, climbed inside, and turned on the light switch—no electricity, maybe the typist had left along with the tens of thousands of other war refugees and, like them, thought that she would return in a few days, when the situation improved. From the black carbon papers scattered all over the floor, I detected the familiar Chinese herbal scents: bitter almond, sugar-soaked plums, cinnamon. The three typewriters stood intact on the typist’s desk. I approached the cream-colored one in the middle—spooled with a marriage license, perhaps having just been typed, looking immaculate, official. On its left, in the jade typewriter, there was another sheet of paper, only half done. I glanced over the first few lines:
RENUNCIATION OF FILIAL BONDS
These strange words piqued my curiosity. I pulled out the sheet and read on:
We are __ and __. Our son, __, born on __, is a student in the ninth grade at __. We have made this public document, to be published in the newspaper, to announce that, from this day forward, we will no longer acknowledge __ as our son in the __ family. Reason: __ has been unruly and disobedient, has neglected his studies, and has left the comfort of his home to follow the Kim Chung traveling opera troop. Respectfully submitted on ___
I stood for a long time in the darkened room, while the sun slowly sank below the Nhan Biều willow forest on the other side of the river, turning the sky a deep pomegranate. On the red-tiled roof, a sparrow’s startled cry could be heard, followed by the brittle sounds of branches falling, this omen of a broken nest intensifying the desolate air of the abandoned town. I thought of the unknown and faceless young man, who perhaps until this moment had not received the shocking news that his parents had renounced him—parents who must have loved him but were also quite strict. Where had his parents gone? To the Lăng Cô train station or the Đà Nẵng harbor? Or had they lost their lives during the evacuation? I thought of the Southern opera troop that came to this border town to perform during the New Year, when all seemed peaceful. In that troop, there might be a beautiful singer with a mesmerizing voice, who left the very next day completely oblivious of the fact that she had captured the heart of a ninth grader who wasn’t much of a student but loved pop music and classical opera, who played woodwind instruments and decided to escape his hometown to follow her path to Saigon. He might one day become famous in the capital, then make a triumphant homecoming among his adored fans and kinsfolk. But he could also make a wrong turn, his artistic passion rejected or unappreciated, so that he ended up a failure, homeless and hungry, and one day, stopping by the road, he looked at the slanting sun and yearned for home.
But his hometown had been reduced to ruins—like splintered rocks and fading gold, as the saying goes—and there was no longer any place he could call home.
Perhaps ten, twenty years from now, the parents and their lost son would be given a chance to reconcile on foreign land; how, I wouldn’t know, but there had to be a way, because parents and children, sisters and brothers, who fight over differences in lifestyle or point of view cannot live apart forever.
At that time in the far-off future, would the father look for the typist who had memorialized his filial renunciation? Would he ask her to return that piece of paper now yellowed with age, to slowly let it burn to ash while the sounds of her typing made him think of spring rain at dusk?
As if in a trance, I folded the document, put it in my pants pocket, and buttoned up the flap. I jumped out the window, then closed it behind me and walked on.
Copyright © by Nguyễn Đức Tùng. Translation copyright © 2025 by Thuy Dinh. All rights reserved.
