Photo – family pagoda on the hillside
Families have an altar to their ancestors in a special place in their sitting room. Here they can talk to the people they love that they have lost. Here, in the village headmaster's house where we are staying, there is a special presence. Above Uncle Ho, above the carved wooden lions with giant tusks, above the incense burners and plastic flowers, is a large faded black and white photograph of a young woman. It is the headmaster's wife who died of kidney stones twenty years ago; young mother to five sons. I am reminded of the stark stripped down vulnerability of newly apprehended prisoners' identity photos. Her beautiful face with its full mouth looks strained, pained and I see in her dark eyes the loss of the children she left behind. Her sons are now the same age as her. Does raw loss of the mother turn into tenderness as they talk with her? Will she become their mother-sister? Their mother- child? 'I am frightened of ghosts' one son tells me. 'I sleep with the light on.' There is tangible loss here, in this house. The adjoining thatched room is closed up. Here lived the mother's brother, a well known academic in Vietnam, who died two years ago in a car accident. We are allowed to enter. There are more ancestor shrines, and family photographs covered carefully with scarlet cloths. On the side of the crumbling hillside nearby we pass daily the family pagoda overseeing the landscape, protecting the bodies.
Despite the father being a teacher, the family did not have enough money for food, not even for rice. The eldest son left home for Europe aged 18 (as soon as his mother died) to earn money to support his brothers. At the time it was possible to get airfairs subsidised by the Russian government for work and training in Czeckoslovakia. Later he travelled onwards as an illegal immigrant to the UK to work in a restaurant in London, sending money home. The house we are staying in here was built using this money. After 20 years this brother left London because thieves repeatedly stole his money. Burglars knew he had to keep his money in cash hidden in the house and that as an illegal immigrant he couldn't report them for theft of money and scant posessions. I feel moved and chastened. I have the privilege of living here and being treated as one of the family, in the village house of the toiling lonely grieving young man who was assaulted, abused and robbed in England.