A sentence by the river
There is a cafe on the bank of the Perfume River in Huế called Cafe Lọng Gió, which a sign at the entrance translates roughly as a creative space for childhood. What had drawn me in the first time I passed it was not the coffee but a small wooden structure beside the cafe, shelves built four sides around an open space, books stacked and leaning and overflowing. A pink sign above it read Trạm Sách Yêu Thương. The Station of Loving Books. People left books, took books, sat in the open middle and read. No one charged anything. No one watched the door.
I had been in Huế for a few weeks by then. On a clear afternoon I came back, ordered an iced coconut coffee, and took it to one of the low chairs set in a row on the grass slope between the cafe and the river. A young woman and her boyfriend were sitting in the same row, she in the middle, he on the far side of her. We exchanged a quiet greeting. After a while she turned and asked, in careful English, why I was in Huế.
I told her about the vacation, about the book I was writing, about how generous people had been to me on this trip. While I was talking, I mentioned the tattoo on my shoulder. She asked to see it, and I pulled my sleeve up. Thiên Mụ Pagoda rising above the river. Small wooden boats on the water. A red thread running through the scene like a current. Her boyfriend leaned forward to look. She held her phone up to take a picture, and I let her.
I was telling her how wonderful the trip had been, how kind everyone had been to me, when something else moved in the back of my mind that I did not say out loud. I was remembering that the father of one of my closest friends had served on a gun boat on this same river in the late 1960s. American boats, American guns, sixty years ago, on the same water that was now the most peaceful place I had been in years. The guilt sat in my mouth and would not leave.
I could not say any of that through Google Translate. The app would not carry the shape of it. The grandfathers, the gun boats, the long shadow that lay over a Sunday afternoon by the river. So I typed the simplest version of what I felt. My country did not do very nice things to Vietnam. But the Vietnamese people are still nice to me.
I handed her the phone. She read the Vietnamese translation. She read it again. Then she showed it to her boyfriend. Something shifted in her face, but quietly. She did not say much. She asked if she could take a photograph of the screen with my tattoo in the same frame, and I said yes.
The next day she sent me a message. The post she had made on Threads, the photograph of the screen and the tattoo, had been shared more than thirty thousand times. By the end of the week the same image was circulating on Facebook and other platforms with more than a hundred thousand likes. ZNews wrote first. Then VnExpress. There were interviews, a tourism official's comment, an article that drew tens of thousands of responses of its own.
I have thought a great deal about why that sentence carried. It was not eloquent. It was almost too simple. I believe that is what carried it. The young woman beside me on the grass had read it in her own language and understood, in a way I had been trying to explain to myself for years, that an American can love this country and also carry the weight of what was done here. That the two are not separate. That you can hold both at once.
The library was still beside us as she took the photograph. Trạm Sách Yêu Thương. Books left out for whoever needed them. No one watching the door. I think about that station of loving books often now. It was already telling me what I had come to say, before I knew how to say it.
