Offerings

Nguyệt had left Ngọc a note. Ngọc hadn’t told her mother about it, even though it didn’t say much: just that Nguyệt wanted to leave Ngọc her entire collection of CDs and her treasured portable CD player that she’d thrifted from Vinnies. Plus, her whole wardrobe and all her books. Please chuck the porno mags tho, Nguyệt wrote. I’ll die twice if she finds those. So, Ngọc spent an afternoon in their back garden, among the husks of potted plants, burning every old-school porn magazine Nguyệt had collected over her last five years of debauchery. She thought of her mother burning paper money and paper clothes and paper Mercedes convertibles for her family, and figured Nguyệt would read these in the afterlife, with Buddha or whoever was over there.

It was a six hour bus to their hometown; she’d arrive in the early hours of morning. Ngọc had no trouble booking the tickets. Mẹ had a stash of Vietnamese đồng in the drawer under her altar and Ngọc spoke passable Vietnamese. But even so, there must have been something about her that marked her as foreign-born, Việt kiều — a Western Sydney twang to her pronunciation, or the way she couldn’t look the clerk in the eye. She sat all the way at the back on the bus and changed the CD. Maybe, Ngọc thought, she should sacrifice some CDs for Nguyệt to have in heaven too, so she could listen to them while browsing her porn.

The fluorescent lighting of the bus reflected off the silver surface of the CD player. Someone was singing in Japanese. She didn’t understand Nguyệt’s obsession with foreign language media. Music, movies, translated literature. Nguyệt never listened, watched, or read anything in Vietnamese. Once, Ngọc had tried to show her a song — one of the classic ones their parents used to duet late at night on the karaoke machine, when their father was still alive — and Nguyệt had recoiled from her. But once, Ngọc had walked past the bathroom and heard her singing the lyrics of that song. She sang both parts.

Ngọc watched the people on the bus as it juddered over potholes and steep little bridges. A lot of university students her age, sleeping on backpacks or scrolling on phones. A woman surrounded by plastic shopping bags full of clothing. A wrinkled old man with a straight back and eyes serenely shut. A little boy asleep with his head in his father’s lap, tiny knock-off Crocs poking into the aisle. A baby howled from the front despite shushing from its parents. It all felt bizarrely like the bus home from Cabramatta Station. If she blinked, she would find herself back in Sydney, Nguyệt beside her, blathering about some community drama or her latest failed hookup. She tried to remember the last time her and Nguyệt had been on the bus together.

The bus jolted to a stop. Ngọc opened her eyes. The CD had long played out, but the device was still clutched in her hand. She tugged the headphones out of her ears and examined the ear wax on the buds. Was that hers, or Nguyệt’s? Her stomach lurched. Hands shaking, she looped the headphones and put them away. She shouldered her backpack and stepped off the bus, finding herself on the side of the busy main road, outside the entrance for the market. Motorbikes tore past with long, torturous cries of their horns. Across the street, Ngọc watched a stray dog lift its head to look at her with dark eyes. Then it turned and wandered down the road.

Her mother’s family house stood opposite the marketplace. It was the original building here, when all of this was farmland that her aristocratic great-great-grandfather had owned. It was a tall and narrow house with a storefront attached to the front. Her family repaired motorcycles — the land had been divided up, by invasion, inheritances, so on, and they no longer farmed here, in the town that had grown up around them. She knew they did out past the town, in the rừng, the forest. Her father’s relatives still raised shrimp in their ponds and lived among the cicadas. The graveyard was out there too. They were going tomorrow, her and Nguyệt. They were going to return Nguyệt to the land.

Ngọc watched as they opened the grate of the storefront. Had they hired someone new to work for them? That man didn’t look like her uncle — though maybe the decade away had made her forget. She squinted as a woman walked out of the house, a baby on her hip. A curious sinking feeling unfurled in Ngọc’s chest. Her auntie was too old for another baby. She hadn’t told her mother she was going to Việt Nam; she hadn’t thought to ask her whether their family even still lived here. This house had always been here, since she was born. She thought her family would always be here too.

Ngọc stood and watched the family set up their business for the day. The man that wasn’t her uncle was talking animatedly to two boys that had emerged from the bowels of the house, dressed in faded tank tops and knock-off slides. A woman from next door came over with a tray of drinks. They all converged around a concrete table — the one that she had eaten on so many times with her family, when they used to come every few years to visit.

Ngọc turned away, eyes burning, and walked down the road the same way the dog had gone. She stopped to ask an old woman sitting outside a house where the forest graveyard was, and the woman pointed her further down the road, well into the farmland. Child, do you have anyone? she asked in Vietnamese. Ngọc just nodded and bade her goodbye. She could feel the woman’s eyes following her as she kept walking, past family food stands and shopfronts and businesses, past kids walking to school and women walking to the market. The weight of Nguyệt grew heavier with each step Ngọc walked.

The buildings petered out into rice fields, bordered by the creek running parallel to the road, and banana trees shading the water. Ngọc watched the swallows swooping above her as she walked. The sky had brightened to a seamless blue. The sun felt different here — not as sharp as the Australian sun, it warmed her entire body. She thought about what it would be like to live here. To wake up in the mornings and sink into the water with the rice plants. To hear all around her unfamiliar birdsong and Vietnamese spoken like how her family spoke. People shouted to one another across the road, from motorbikes grinding past, from their small stands selling produce. Meanwhile, the cicadas chanted unceasingly. Ngọc walked on.

She’d asked her mother, once, why they had stopped visiting their hometown. They’d gone so often when her and Nguyệt were younger, seeing relatives from both sides of their family, a big feast held every time, to celebrate family come home. Mẹ had just said that she was too busy, there was so much work to be done after Ba died. But still, after they got back from that final trip, Ngọc snuck to her mother’s room and peered through the crack of her door. Mẹ knelt at her altar and only mouthed the words of a prayer. The loudest sound she released from the confines of her body, in those days, was a sigh — deep, gusty. Ngọc half expected to see blue whorls of incense smoke passing her lips.

And maybe a part of it was that it was easier not to go home. They had no other family in Australia. Ngọc could go to school and see all her friends and they didn’t know who her father was, they didn’t know he was dead, it wasn’t something that she ever had to discuss or live with or see in their eyes the way she’d seen it in her family’s eyes when they burnt offerings for him at his grave. It was Ngọc, Nguyệt, and their mother. That was all she’d needed, for a long time. And then Nguyệt had to leave her too, and that fragile dream, their life in Cabramatta, shattered.

It was cooler in the trees. Ngọc turned down a concrete path towards the forest, passing ponds full of shrimp and fish. A motorbike sounded far off in the distance, the sound vaguely drawing away from her. She passed a couple of people on the path, at which point she’d have to angle her shoulders sideways to let them pass. They looked at her, openly curious, and she slid her eyes into the trees to avoid their gaze. The forest smelled green. She let her feet carry her, trying to place the glimpses of dwellings she caught between the trunks. They seemed to emerge from the trees, houses tiled in pastel colours — a cry against encroaching nature — with little fenced gardens of potted plants. Ngọc watched a child watch her through the tines of a fence. The child stood still, only her eyes moving to follow Ngọc as she continued to traipse down the path.

Ngọc turned away, taking a left at the next fork. She could almost feel the graveyard nearby. The forest grew thicker here, a bit darker under the canopy. Fewer and fewer houses. A stream bubbled up alongside the path. A memory, suddenly. Nguyệt slipping into the stream, splashing water all up her trousers. Her sulking the rest of the way to the graveyard. Ngọc had put her sandalled feet into the wet footprints Nguyệt left behind.

The graveyard was a clearing at the end of the path, where the stream joined an elder creek. There were several altars and other markers laid around the place. Ngọc knew there was a proper cemetery outside of the forest, where people’s bodies were buried under shining marble tombs. But she knew the body didn’t need to stay behind; it was simply a vessel for the spirit. Now, Nguyệt was somewhere else. A new body, maybe. Or maybe she really had made it beyond.

She recognised her father’s altar. It was a stone that her uncle had carved flat on top — carrying a tiny, framed photo and a few sticks of incense. Ngọc knelt and brushed some dried leaves from the stone.

Hello Ba, she said. I missed you. Mẹ missed you too.

Ngọc realised, here, the cicadas did not sing. Just the subtle murmur of the creek and her own breathing, percussive in her ears. She slipped her backpack from her aching shoulders and gingerly removed the white box. Nguyệt is here to see you too, she told her father’s grainy photo. Ngọc swallowed, then stood. She stepped over Ba’s altar to the creek. The box opened too easily. The ashes felt gritty on her hands. She began to scatter Nguyệt into the creek. She floated, pale on the surface, for seconds, before sinking away. Ngọc crouched down. The water seemed to sigh as she trailed her hands through it, washing the last of the ashes from her fingers.

A framed photo of Nguyệt was placed beside her father’s. Ngọc brushed a bit of dust from it, tracing a finger past Nguyệt’s grin. This was a failed passport photo; when Ngọc told her not to smile, Nguyệt burst into laughter. Ngọc reached into her bag again and retrieved a bag of salt and vinegar chips — Nguyệt’s favourite — and opened them. She tucked the corners of the bag underneath so it would stand on its own. Finally, she struck a match, watched the flame lick at the air for a second, then lit an incense stick.

The smoke coiled into letter-like shapes in the still air. Ngọc regarded the two of them, now slightly facing one another. Maybe now Nguyệt could talk to Ba. Ngọc couldn’t remember what his voice sounded like anymore. She pressed the incense stick between two fingers and bowed her head. She’d never known what to say during these offerings — when she was younger, she’d just counted seconds until it felt appropriate to set the incense into the rice grains.

Ngọc wished them well. Hopefully Buddha was nice; she wanted to believe they were beyond now. She would send them both KFC when she got home, Wicked Wings, not Original. And maybe she’d bake them a cake too. Nguyệt had always loved the lemon cakes made with the lemons in their backyard. Would there be fruit, Ngọc wondered, by the time she got back home?

Ngọc tucked the matchbox and remaining incense sticks in the shelter of the stone. She nodded at Ba and Nguyệt in turn, and said, I have to go. But I’ll visit soon. Then Ngọc stood, dusted the dirt from her knees. Her gaze passed over the other makeshift altars, the platters of fruit and cups filled with incense ashes. The photos of people that looked like her.

Movement above. A swallow, flitting from branch to branch. Ngọc picked up her backpack, now so light. She began to trace her steps back. She turned, once back on the path, and saw the bird land on the altar. It swooped into the bag and grabbed a chip in its beak. As she watched, it turned to watch her too. It cocked its head, regarding her for a second. Then the swallow leapt back into the air with its offering, up through the leaves, back to wherever it had made its home.☆

Written: 11/05/2025

Last edited: 11/05/2025

Status: Finalised.