1
It is late summer on the southern coast of England, and nearby is a sign warning them of the abrupt edge, the plunge into wet rocks below. The wind is gently cool, not as salty as the air of his hometown, possibly because here they are so high up from the face of the water. In Đà Nẵng, they would be nose to nose.
Grass, green and slender and rising in mid-air, flutter to catch the sea breeze. Tùng spreads his arms left to right, as Jiayu and Vy have done, their feet planted at the precipice, their heads tilted back to let their dark hair—coarse for one and silky for the other—unfurl, their bodies catching the sea breeze as well. Vy opens her eyes to look at him, his hair, growing but not as long as hers, also dancing to the air waves. She smiles, her slender teeth reminding him of pearly kernels of glutinous corn, and he slips his hand around her wrist, around the rainbow bracelet that is one half of the pair that she had braided for them. He lifts her hand up above their heads and shouts a non-word into the expanse between the blue above and the blue below, the way that he had seen before in so many films.
The girls laugh and follow, their shouts varying in pitch and gusto, Jiayu almost singing her happiness. This is the summer before their final year of university, and Jiayu has just completed her first internship. As the wind surges, they wobble with threaded hands, and in peals they retreat from the cliff’s edge, Jiayu tripping on a hiding rock, Vy pulling her phone out to try and immortalise some of the exhilaration.
Tùng stumbles up towards the treaded trail where they will resume their walk and complete the circuit, slipping down to the chattering pier where they can get ice creams and donuts. Converging with their path is another strip of earth barren against the grass, and rolling down it are three men on bicycles, wearing T-shirts and face coverings, like bikers in the desert. Pulled by the curve of the cliff, they freewheel towards Tùng and his friends, where suddenly the freedom is curbed and the men slow down, their eyes curious, conspicuous, cutting. Then, loud and clear, from one of their throats, comes the non-question, “Where are your rubber dinghies!”
With that, they are off again, overtaking Tùng and Jiayu and Vy on the path towards the pebbly beach. The quiet grass trembles at their feet. The three of them descend, arms outstretched at times to keep balance.
Later, biting into his donut, Tùng wonders whether the men would’ve been more or less likely to have said what they did if his hair was shorter.
2
Jiayu doesn’t leave the flat much these days, even when the summer heat becomes itchy in her single-bed accommodation. Her parents tell her not to go out onto the streets—news of the riots have travelled home to them. Don’t go out when it’s dark, they tell her. Why don’t you just come back, they ask.
Jiayu’s dissertation is due in September. She has been given an extension to complete it. Meanwhile, friends from her cohort have been leaving one by one, most enjoying a brief summer before internships, first jobs, starting another degree. The student city is now a shell of the place she thought she knew.
When Jiayu does leave the flat, she feels something prodding at the base of her ribcage, like the acute angle of an elbow or a knee, like there’s a squirming baby inside her. On the phone, Tùng tells her that it is her dissertation baby finally wriggling its way out. Jiayu wonders if it’s actually her hunger evolving with her irregular schedule, developing into something solid so that she would have to address it.
At the Asian shop where they all used to go together, the Vietnamese shop assistant, whom Tùng called the “student support officer” of their “graduation committee,” is stacking heads of flat white cabbages into the fridge by the entrance. She sings a warm “Hello” as Jiayu walks in.
The sight of food calms the worming creature in Jiayu’s belly. She reaches for a selection of instant ramen and a box of luncheon meat. At the frozen section, she pulls out a bag of fish balls and a tray of dumplings. At the snack rack, she picks up some dried jackfruit, a staple of the all-nighters she, Tùng, and Vy used to pull. One night, having gone through almost a whole bag by herself, Jiayu started deleting paragraph after paragraph from her dissertation. She places the jackfruit back on the shelf.
Jiayu finds her way back to the till, and the Vietnamese lady slips behind the cashier, pecking in the price for each item on the number pad. She says something to Jiayu in Vietnamese but her trusted translators are not around. Jiayu is apologising for not understanding and pulling out her phone to indicate she’ll pay by card, when the door swings open and in rushes a dark-haired man, out of breath. By the till, the narrow rectangle of glass window that isn’t covered with old posters thrums with fists. Two pale faces peer in, their eyes darting between the Vietnamese lady, Jiayu, and the man, who is still catching his breath. Then, the faces in the window split into smiles. The restless creature inside Jiayu coils into itself. From behind the till, the Vietnamese lady reaches her arm out to pull Jiayu back.
And then the dark-haired man in the shop, who is stood not far from Jiayu, cackles and cracks the air open like thunder in Jiayu’s ears. She looks at him, at his impish face gleefully smiling back at his friends, who have stopped knocking on the glass and are now slipping into the shop, apologising for the alarm they’ve caused. They’ve just been joking around with one another, chasing the dark-haired boy down the street until he slipped in here to hide.
The boys buy some prawn crackers, and Jiayu lets them check out before her and leave, the mass inside her still tightly wound. With a soft smile, the Vietnamese lady starts inputting Jiayu’s shop into the cashier again, pointing out the total at the end. As they wait for the payment to go through, she starts speaking and rummaging behind the till before adding a head of cabbage on top of Jiayu’s pile. “Veggie,” she says. “Free.” She raises a thumb towards Jiayu.
When Jiayu returns to her flat, she sits by the window and deletes words from her dissertation document. She looks out from the second floor, glad that no one else can knock at the glass. Later, as strips of cabbage soften in bubbling ramen broth, Jiayu’s stomach rumbles and prods.
3
After their shift at the shop, Viên and Ánh make their way back to Ánh’s place.
The other girls are already huddled in the kitchen as they walk in, their chatter lapping over the grumble of peanuts rolling in a heated pan. Ánh swiftly joins and pulls out a plastic bag she had hidden in an overhead cupboard. To the girls’ delight, she pulls out from this bag three meaty green mangoes.
“Where did you find these?” Viên asks, incredulous. She rolls a mango from one hand to another, runs her thumb over the snipped stem where the sap has congealed.
Ánh smiles. “I know a guy.”
Viên knows not to prod. Instead, she slides a fruit knife against the thick mango skin, revealing pale flesh. She cuts this into wedges as thick as two of her fingers zipped together and drops them into a bowl with some fish sauce, some sugar, some out-of-date spicy plum salt that she had brought back from the shop. She tosses the mango wedges with soft flicks of her wrists, watching the sugar and salt draw water from the fruit.
In the living room, the girls have laid down broadsheets over the carpeted floor and set down bowls of roasted peanuts, coppery with their skin on. Ánh deals deftly, cards flying across the newspaper. Viên sets two bowls of spicy salty green mango on the floor and slots herself in next to Ánh, who is organising her cards. It looks to Viên like an average hand, but from Ánh’s palm the suits and colours spin out in a striking sequence, a dance with the rest of the cards as they reveal themselves on the floor. Ánh wins the first round.
Viên shifts back, happy to snack and provide appropriate gasps and chuckles as the girls warm up and bank notes begin to exchange hands. As flakes of peanut skin float down to the papered floor, Viên checks her phone. Her husband hasn’t texted yet, he usually stays out on Saturdays. She goes on Facebook, where there appears her brother’s livestream recording from three hours ago. He was selling clippings of his rare orchid to late-night browsers back in Vietnam. Viên used to help him after returning from her shift at the hotel in the city centre, wrapping the clippings into neat bundles in preparation for delivery the following morning.
On the floor, Ánh has conceded for a second time that night, and she isn’t happy about it. She grabs a spicy piece of mango and eats it in one voracious bite. Viên smiles. Ánh’s competitive edge sometimes reminds Viên of her brother. Neither like to settle. He still tells her during video calls that he’s been saving up, from the orchid sale and the farming. If she isn’t going to help him come over as a relative, he was going to find his own way.
On the phone, Viên keeps scrolling as she snacks, past more people selling things, skin-whitening creams, clothes, homemade cat food. Past images of people gathered like ants, red-and-white asterisks on blue rectangles flying above their heads, the golden clock tower looming in the background. Past a photo of a former colleague at the hotel in Vietnam, posing with two daughters. And a video of a bespectacled woman, with sleek black hair and clad in a blazer, sitting at a table with her hands clasped in front of her. Viên watches as the woman speaks in soft, clear Vietnamese, saying that over the last year, the number of people arrested for trying to enter the UK illegally has increased by 70%. The screen shifts to show a small boat packed with people bouncing on the waves, police cars, officers in bright yellow vests, vans swallowing handcuffed men and women. Don’t throw your life away, the gentle woman resumes. Don’t come illegally. You will be sent back.
Ánh twists around to look at Viên. “Turn that off, will you!” Viên dials the volume on her phone down. “I’m trying to focus here,” Ánh says, returning to the game.
“Ánh’s losing her cool,” someone goads.
“I’ll show you cool,” Ánh responds, smacking her final cards on the ground, sending fray peanut skin fluttering. She wins the game. And then she wins another after that.
Viên lies down on the sofa as one of the girls asks, “Ánh, you’ve got to give us a chance. Why don’t you swap out with Viên?”
“That’s not how this works,” Ánh shrugs. “Besides, Viên isn’t interested. She doesn’t need the money like us. She’s got a British husband.”
From the sofa, Viên traces a crack across the ceiling. Flat on her back, she can feel the mango pushing against her diaphragm. She may have had too much. Her head feels heavy from the salt and the chili. Viên sinks into a sleep that warps the sounds of sliding cards and simmering gossip. She dreams of the mango tree at home, of her brother climbing it to reach the furthest ripe fruit but it slips from his fingers and plummets. As its soft flesh splatters, Viên startles.
The girls laugh at her. “Bad dream” Ánh asks. Viên shakes her head and turns to her phone to check the time. She has slept for nearly an hour. On the screen, there are texts from her husband asking where she is.
Thảo Tô is a writer from Vietnam. Her short story, “Love in the Time of Migration,” is the winner of the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for fiction, and her other stories have been published in Sine Theta Magazine and diaCRITICS.
