I was born in 1995, in a quiet village in Hung Yen. My family moved endlessly—more than a dozen times, perhaps. From the village to a market town, then on to the capital, swept along like many others in the tide of the rural “Hanoi dream.”

Each move was a small act of forgetting. We left just as things began to take shape—as if always arriving, yet never quite arriving. I’ve always carried the feeling of being an immigrant, with all its quiet griefs and fragile joys.

In Hanoi, we moved again and again, from the outskirts inward, toward the tangled heart of the Old Quarter. I learned to walk and speak as a city woman, yet I never let go of the “country girl” etched into the grain of my being.

My father harbored a curious fixation with the Red River. He spoke of it in almost mystical terms, convinced that one could only truly live if one built a home on the “bồi” side—the land the river gives, not takes. And so, wherever we went, the river was never far. I grew up walking its banks, unknowingly absorbing his devotion, which in time became my own. I often think of the two cities—Hung Yen and Hanoi—as twin mirrors, past and present, split by the glinting blade of the river.

Now, I live in New Orleans, Louisiana, near the Mississippi. America, too, is a nation of wanderers and the uprooted. Life here feels both alien and oddly familiar—as though the same story were being told again, but in a different tongue.