Summary

Remembering her journey to her mother’s ancestral village to fetch her uncle’s portion of the money from the sale of the house, Hang remembers when she first met her Aunt Tam, her father’s sister. Aunt Tam is old now and hunched and frail. Her house is the most opulent house Hang has ever seen. At dinner Hang and her mother are served a feast and Aunt Tam tells them about her life since Hang’s mother left the village. After her land was taken away, she worked hard for others and slowly cultivated what she had, when the Vietnamese government paid retribution by giving some of the acreage back to landowners she cultivated the land to grow rice and oranges and other crops. From this, she made a large sum of money and is now rich. She worked hard during those years rarely...