Bi's Scope - A Perspective on Culture and Life

A man at a roadside stall sent me up this hillside — I'd asked where to see the harvest up close, and he tilted his chin toward a dirt track and said to find whoever was up in the trees. The farmer up there never agreed to be written about, so he stays nameless here. He climbed into his own lychee trees the way other men climb a familiar staircase, without looking down, one hand finding a branch he'd clearly used a hundred times before, a cloth sack already slung crosswise over his shoulder. From the ground, his wife called up the count as clusters came down: four, three, six, a number scratched each time onto a scrap of paper held against her palm with a thumb. It wasn't six in the morning yet and the heat hadn't started; what had started was the smell — leaves crushed and bruised off the branches, and underneath that, the sweet rot of fruit that had dropped early and split open in the grass. Behind that unhurried pace sat headlines I'd been reading all week: a w...

The brazier had been burning since two in the afternoon. It sat in a glass cabinet on the sidewalk corner — charcoal low and patient, a pan of pâté resting on the grate above it, sweating gently into the winter air. Hanoi in the Northeast Monsoon is not cold by any standard that earns the word, but it is cold enough: a sky the color of unglazed pottery, a damp that settles in the wrists. The street was Lò Sũ, or somewhere near it — I have been back enough times that the corners have begun to rearrange themselves in memory. What I remember clearly is the plastic stool, shin-height, and the way the bánh mì was handed to me already warm, the crust still crackling from the grill, held in a piece of thin paper that immediately began to spot with grease. I had expected weight. That is the honest account of the expectation: a sandwich assembled with the logic of abundance, each layer a statement. I had eaten bánh mì elsewhere — in Saigon with pickled daikon pressing against cold cuts, in ...

He told me about the sound before he told me anything else. Not the varietal, not the score sheet, not the buyer he'd met in  Buôn Ma Thuột  that morning. The sound came first, the way the important detail in a story always seems to arrive out of order. He'd been standing in a coffee yard in  Đắk Lắk  — a private one, poured concrete in front of somebody's house — when his first step landed on a cherry that had been drying since sunrise. It cracked. Not a soft give, but a clean, brittle snap, followed by another under his other foot, and another, until walking across the yard sounded less like walking and more like something being methodically undone. Nobody around him looked up. That was the detail he kept returning to weeks later, over coffee that had long gone cold in front of us. If the sound had meant nothing, it wouldn't have needed an audience so unbothered by it. Its lack of drama was the first clue that it wasn't decoration. The yard itself was conc...