AoNikki

He's a little corner of myself that I've been keeping.

I've watched him since his first day of life, when I was 8 years old and his mother lived alone in the house behind us, deeper in the alley. He's certainly not the most healthy child I know. More times than I can count in a year, his mother would appear in my parents' clinic's doorsteps - worried and weary - with him lying faintly in her tanned, skinny arms. "Again?" She nodded.

He survived all that illness somehow.

He grew up, not the liveliest boy I've ever known either. Although I was never fond of babies, my sister loved to play with him; and it often - unofficially - became our responsibility to look after the one-year-old when his mother was out there doing everything she could for a few crinkled bills, and his visiting grandmother had to deal with her own health problems. "Really?" Many people asked. Yeah, really. For some people, usually the best solution available to a situation is not even a wise one. Not that I understood it back then.

He survived us too, somehow.

In the later years, on really humid and overheated afternoons, he followed other children in the area, picking up litters on the street and selling them to some mysterious middleman. And, oh gosh, yes he changed. Or should I say, he grew up. There was this one guy, one year older than me, who wandered the streets selling lottery tickets everyday. I knew his name and his age because I attempted to start a conversation with him once (and now whenever I'm back in town, I still see him - with the same hat, the same tattered bag and lottery tickets in his hand, walking on the same streets). He too had changed since our first and last words. They both became canny as hell, they resembled so much these people that my mother angrily talked about every dinner: that seller at the market who had tricked her into buying rotten food, that colleague who attempted to do this and that bad thing,.... Occasionally I had a fight with him - the boy living deeper in the alley - and he once called me "slut". "Slut' in Vietnamese is a common insulting term (think of "bitch"), and it's not that I wasn't used to hearing that. Nonetheless, it got on my nerve and I slapped him. "Who taught you to call names like that? Do you even know what it means?" I asked. I did not really "know" what the term meant. This was before I started going out with my ex-boyfriend.

I saw him less and less in the next years, as I wasn't in town often. Nevertheless, there's always been some kind of special bond between he and me that I can't really explain or make sense of. He's been always the first person I visited when back there - well of course, he's nearby, but it's more than that. It's usually summer when I was back, and I'd just come up to him, usually in the evening. Blank gaps of memories gave things a new importance, I guess, because in times like that I could always see the shy lottery-ticket boy of my age that I first talked to the other day long ago. How are you? Are you going to school? Why not anymore? How's your mother? You know, things like that. The answers were always honest and carefree, and - once in a while - interrupted because of his mother telling him to bring me a glass of water, as said the usual etiquette. I did this, and did that - I told him. "Are you happy there?" he often asked. That's the Vietnamese way of asking how things have been - they ask if you feel happy with them. I always said yes.

The latest time that I saw him was the recent summer, before coming to Boston. "Find a random guy, get married, and stay and enjoy a happy life in America," he told me. That, is a common path that many people went - or thought that they would go through. Americans have the American Dream. Well, other people also have their dreams of that sort, you bet.

Well, not me, even if that should be taken as a joke I wasn't in the mood to enjoy it. My ex-boyfriend and I broke up a while ago to become something intimate but unnamed to each other. People asked me why, I told them I didn't know - but I in fact knew that that didn't matter. At all. Ever since the very first time that I ever left this town (and even now), my mother has been calling me to say two same things again and again:

- Do not have sex or involve in any sexual activities. If your future husband knows, he will disrespect you for that.

- Do no trust people. When a friend say that your hairstyle is nice, they're just jealous with you and don't want you to look good, and are probably laughing at how ugly you look. Listen to your family, only they will tell you the truth.

And, you know what, my mother wasn't born with a single parent, wasn't deprived of the privilege of education, didn't spend all her childhood finding her way to survive among all sorts of people on the streets. She just grew up while interacting with people who did.

And when I talked to this boy after an interval of separation and he was so shy, I'd been always at a loss of what to really say. No matter what questions I asked or what I told him, I felt like there was always something more meaningful to be told. You know, something that isn't cynical, isn't cliche, isn't trivial, isn't what he has witnessed everyday. Something like I loved him and he should have known that there were indeed people who loved other people.

Much to my disappointment, I never told him something like that. But I do love him, I care about who he would become, and he's one of the very few people that bind me to this land. I've always wanted that he would fall asleep when I was talking to his mother, so I could just look at him and sing the lullaby that my father had sung to me every night when I was small... you know, a lullaby about how a child is meant to be loved, a human is meant to be loved - and when it's not the case? Something is wrong.