By inviting Huong to have supper with my family I am opening up my universe to her. In her quilted blue Chinese dress, and with her hair in two plaits the good little schoolgirl wins my parents over. After supper, I offer her some tea and invite her to my room. She crosses the threshold as carefully as someone stepping into a dream.

To show her how magical this old room really is-it is one of the few to have escaped the bombing-I turn out the lamps and light the candles. Scrolls of calligraphy and paintings loom out of the darkness and gradually blend with the tinted frescoes on the walls. There is a majestic set of shelves full of books at one end, and on my lacquered table little painted birds frolic among the leaves. Two pots of go-stones have pride of place atop an old carved wardrobe, to watch over me at night. Huong picks up a manual about go and leafs through it. She takes one of the combs I collect, long and fine, made of polished silver and decorated with feathers. She fingers my pearls. A long silence falls between us.

Then she sits on the edge of the bed and opens her heart to me: she was born out in the country and she lost her mother when she was eight years old. Her father remarried and was completely crushed by his new wife’s bulk and drive: she would set off every morning with a pipe in her mouth to oversee work in the fields. The stepmother hated Huong, and it was not long before the arrival of her twin stepbrothers deflected her father’s affection. To them she was just a slut. As they grew up, the boys took pleasure in hurting her: they tormented her like two young cats toying with an injured sparrow. She was constantly insulted by her stepmother, who was peculiarly eloquent when it came to insults. Huong was exiled to a little maid’s room and, at night, she would count the raindrops falling on the roof. They were innumerable, like the sorrows she had to endure.

When she was twelve she was sent to school: the stepmother was rid of the thorn in her side and Huong discovered freedom.