Village people, especially the women, very quickly became familiar with her storage sheds. She did not have ten spacious sheds as Mr. Quang had. Having long been wealthy, his compound was arranged in the old-fashioned style: three buildings formed a U around a square tiled patio; each building had five spacious rooms, with thick tiles, high ceilings, and wooden doors that shone like mirrors. The five rooms in the left building were reserved for the youngest son, Quynh, who would marry and raise children. The five other rooms in the building on the right were for storing provisions, staples, and every kind of tool. When anyone would ask him where were the rooms for Quyet and Quyen, he would say:
“Those two are destined to live with their in-laws. I consulted fortune-tellers seven times on this and they all said the same thing.”
Martial Artist Vang’s house, with five rooms, is much too large for Miss Vui, unmarried and childless. That is why she decided to convert three rooms into storage as city people do. In her storage units, everything is organized neatly, lined up like soldiers; from tools for gardening, carpentry, drying tea, making noodles and raising bees to boxes of provisions. Each numbered, neatly and cleanly, in a most professional way. Because of her single woman’s habit of extreme orderliness, Miss Vui designates for her guests those dishes that she thinks will not demand too much effort. Therefore, villagers are treated by her only to basic entrees like sticky rice with beans, five-spice cakes, or savory sesame balls. Not to be imagined are steamed or roasted chickens with sticky rice or other more painstaking creations.
Very quickly did the villagers accept the spinster’s household rules. Even if they missed the festive atmosphere of Mr. Quang’s kitchen as a paradise lost, their practical eyes forced them to value Miss Vui’s kitchen as a pleasant inn for tired pedestrians. The smell of lam ngu porridge was not as tantalizing as that of sticky rice with chicken, but porridge was still enough to warm one’s stomach on cold days. And that year it was brutally cold. No one had ever experienced such a terrifyingly cold winter. People did not exaggerate when they said it was so cold it shrank your ears, froze your brains; so cold it congealed your breath in your nostrils. From October to December, the cold hung on without a break. It seemed as if there was not a single sunny day. Looking up to the top of Lan Vu, not even a green dot of a tree or rock could be seen. It was not snow, but fields of clouds piled up layer upon layer to create a vast, frigid and white sky so that when the wind blew, those fields of white clouds shoved one another, moving and floating to project silvery cold effluent. It was rare for the sun to rise; if it did, it was pale and wrinkly like an orange eaten by a worm, and then it disappeared without a trace.
That year, to be more accurate, there was not one winter but two, continuous without a break. The Lunar New Year passed in a hurry; nobody seemed to remember it because of the cold rains. Nobody cared to celebrate; there were no drums of any kind. There were no games at all; no pigs or buffalo were butchered. No one let the kids run around outside. The only pastime was gathering around the kitchen fire making rice cakes and all kinds of sweet porridges. One day at the end of February, when trees should have started to launch their buds but, because of the lingering cold, were still totally naked, people gathered in Miss Vui’s kitchen. The hostess realized that she had two containers of chicken fat of the best quality, used only to make the sweet kinds of sticky rice, with shredded coconut and sesame seeds, and decided to make that special treat, a decision that everyone welcomed. Immediately in the kitchen, the women briskly started to soak the beans and the rice and to clean the steamer pot, while in the upper part of the house, the men sat and smoked around the fire, munching on five-spice cakes. Out on the patio, the rain continued, a rain with heavy drops accompanied by a north wind; the type of rain that hurts the bones, that holds those who want to leave more tightly than the clinging arms of lovers. Just when the pots started releasing the fragrant steam of red sticky rice, Mrs. Quang suddenly appeared with her raincoat in the middle of the patio. At first nobody recognized the new guest. To get from the upper section down to the middle one has to cross several hills; it was raining relentlessly; the cold cut through skin and flesh. Nobody thought that an old lady of sixty would walk such a road to come here. When Mrs. Quang took off her hat and her raincoat made of light blue nylon, people understood that she sought out this warm kitchen because her own had become cold and empty. A sixteen-year-old boy could not cook and take care of someone afflicted with hunger cravings like her, especially when he was used to being served himself.
The hostess was the first to recognize the uninvited guest. Miss Vui was talking to a group of men in the parlor. She hurriedly took a hat belonging to some guest to protect her head, then rushed out onto the patio to greet Mrs. Quang. She warmly and cheerfully welcomed her to the house. The cheerfulness was special because she realized that just a winter ago, Mrs. Quang had owned the grandest kitchen in the village, to which guests had flocked from three villages, and that, for more than three decades, the name of Mr. and Mrs. Quang were famous throughout the entire district because of their wealth and their hospitality.
Mrs. Quang acknowledged everybody very slowly with a vague general salutation to all at once, as she didn’t greet anyone by name. Then she sat down on the corner of the settee that Miss Vui had arranged for her, and turned her face to look out at the patio, where the rain was falling sideways without stopping.