Sanctuary

I could still remember the first time I went into a ramshackle, second hand book store in District Tan Binh, where bricks protruded beneath poorly cemented walls. My brother was trailing behind me and crying, since our mother had left us alone to work in the restaurant nearby. It was my family's first arrival at a new neighborhood; mother was worried to leave us alone by ourselves. Thus, with two children in baggy pants and ashy clothes, she implored the benevolent bookstore's shopkeeper to let us stay for a few hours until she completed her shift. I tried to console myself, that everything was alright, although the heart of a fourteen year old girl was far from iron and steel to face reality. My brother, frightened and naïve, began to wail loudly for mother, attracting vexing look from strangers. When one lady began to walk towards the storeowner to complain, I immediately dragged him to a quiet, deserted corner, in fear we might be kick out for disrupting the public. Blood flushed my cheeks crimson, as I tried to placate him with sweet promises that mother would be back by a few minutes, but brother remained recalcitrant and continued wailing. Distressed, and unsure of what to do, I reached for a book upon the upper top of the shelf, titled Grimm's fairy tale.

"You want to learn to read?" I asked him. He did not respond, but as his eyes shifted towards the beautiful illustration of a fairy, glittering in faded gold, and the fancy letters written in black and blue, he nodded timidly. Taken that as a sign of confirmation, I set him down quietly, then began tracing each letter, slowly, a, b, c, as he repeated after me.

The ramshackle bookstore received little visitors. The wealthy preferred golfing, or going to the swimming pool, but for us poor Vietnamese from district Tan Binh, we stuck together in our little apartment, near the rundown bookstore. Mother was pleased to see me keeping my brother well, but I attribute the achievement to the power of the words. Minutes by minutes, days by days, we began running our fingers through Dickens, through Dr. Seuss, through Roald Dahl, through Silverstein, through countless hieroglyphs, through mountain of the Alps, through foreign places and fantasy kingdoms, through monsters and demons, angels and elves. Sometimes, after school, I would pass by the bookstore just to have a few moments of absolute solitude. It was so easy to detach myself from the tedious reality, from the sounds of traffic, from the smoke in the sky through glancing at the pearly white pages. Just for a few seconds, I could reach unreachable places and imagine unimaginable beings.

Somehow we managed to move to a more affluent place, then settled in America with the help of our relatives. I still keep the ramshackle bookstore in my heart, its torn carpets bearing the imprint of my shoes and the shadow of my coming legs. I promised myself to revisit there when I could. But when I could and when I did, the whole neighborhood had already renovated. Towering buildings seared through the skyline. Roads and bricks and gray dusts covered what once was trees and grass. I turned to one of my neighbors, and asked for that ramshackle bookstore.

"They replace it with a new shopping mall nearby. Make tons of profits, they say" he laughed good-humoredly, and bade me farewell as he joined the stream of the mass.

He did not see me biting my lips and flicking my head towards the darkening sky. He did not see the swallowing of my throat and the shaking of my body as a I marched into the sickening folding of the horizon. The name of the bookstore was Sanctuary.