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invited her friends for lunch, organized monthly meetings of her book group, and reserved the entire restaurant to celebrate family birthdays and wedding anniversaries. Every time, she brought me out of the kitchen to be introduced to her guests, embracing me with her whole body. She was the big sister I’d never had, and I was her daughter’s Vietnamese mother.

    yến

    swallow
    ONE NIGHT, SHE PLACED a key on my kitchen counter while I was using tweezers to remove the minute impurities in the fine filaments of a swallow’s nest, making sure it was perfect without wasting a single drop of the soup. My husband had bought that precious find, which was traded for thousands of dollars a kilo, from a vendor of medicinal and Chinese herbs. He maintained that the swallows showed a patient and infinite love for their fledglings because they were the only birds that built their nests using only their saliva. And so to eat those nests would give us a better chance of becoming parents in turn. I didn’t have time to explain to Julie how rare that potion was because she insisted on dragging me towards the exit and had me put the key in the lock next door. And so our adventure began.

    xích lô

    rickshaw
    JULIE HAD BROUGHT ARCHITECTS and decorators to turn the space into a culinary workshop. She had asked her husband, who often travelled to Asia on business, to look for a used bicycle-powered rickshaw in Vietnam, and he’d sent her one whose metal structure was partly rusted and whose saddle was bent out of shape by sweat. On the wall, she had mounted two long wooden panels engraved with two lines of Chinese characters that echoed each other, as was done at the entrance to old mandarin residences. She had ordered from Huế some conical hats adorned with poems inserted between the braided latania leaves and sixteen bamboo circles to be offered as gifts at the opening. At the back of the restaurant, she’d built a large bookcase. Cookbooks and photos were arranged on the shelves, standing at attention, obedient and upright as the children in the schoolyard who sang the national anthem every morning in front of the apartment where Maman and I had lived. Julie held my hand and walked me along the wall, preventing me from falling to my knees when I saw the last shelf, where she’d placed a row of novels of which I’d only ever read a page or two or sometimes a chapter, but never the whole book.
    A great many books in French or English had been confiscated during the years of political chaos. We would never know the fate of those books, but some did survive, in pieces. We would never know what road whole pages had travelled, only to end up in thehands of merchants who used them to wrap bread, a catfish or a bunch of water spinach. No one could ever tell me why I’d been so lucky as to turn up those treasures buried under piles of yellowing newspapers. Maman told me that the pages were forbidden fruits fallen from heaven.
    From these precious harvests, I had remembered the word
lassitude
from
Bonjour tristesse
, by Françoise Sagan;
langueur
from Verlaine; and
pénitentiaire
from Kafka. Maman had also explained the meaning of fiction with this sentence by Albert Camus in
L’Étranger
, for it was unthinkable to us that a woman could show desire: “In the evening, Marie came looking for me and asked if I wanted to marry her.” And then there was Marius; without knowing the beginning or the end of his story in
Les Misérables
, to me he was a hero because one time our monthly ration of a hundred grams of pork had been draped in these words: “Life, hardship, isolation, poverty, are battlefields that have their heroes: obscure heroes sometimes greater than the illustrious ones.”

    tá»± điển

    dictionary
    THERE WERE MANY WORDS whose meaning Maman didn’t know. Luckily, we had ready access to a living dictionary. He was older than Maman. The neighbours