…here is another chapter

If you resonated with the first two unedited chapters I shared, here is Chapter 8. Writing this one brought a lot back… and it was a beautiful feeling writing it.

It’s tender, honest, and one of my favorite chapters in the book.

Notes: I wanted to add more pauses and white space, but WordPress doesn’t quite allow it here (or show it the way I want). My editing principle is something I call Structured Chaos (inspired by my life, of course 😜). The book will show this much better than this page can.

If you know a way to add visible empty lines or spacing in WordPress, let me know. Thank you 💗

For now, enjoy!

CHAPTER 8: The First Window

Up until this point, you might think you understand that place where I grew up. But there is one thing I haven’t told you yet. 

At night, my world disappeared. 

Not metaphorically. 

Literally.

No streetlights.

No shop signs.

No glow leaking from anywhere. 

When the sun went down, the land returned to its original state—fields, water, trees, houses—all swallowed into one vast, unlit silence. Darkness wasn’t something that arrived. It was something that took over. The sound of nature—frogs, toads, chameleons—amplified that endless space. 

But because of that darkness, I saw the stars better than any city child ever could. The stars were not decorative. They were overwhelming. The sky didn’t just sparkle—it expanded. It pressed down on us, enormous and unowned. 

I didn’t brush my teeth in the bathroom. I was always with my toothbrush, sitting in front of our house, close to the big vases that contained rainwater (which was also our drinking water), and brushing my teeth under the stars. 

Back then, the sky was free.

Its beauty cost nothing.

More than twenty years later, I would spend thousands of dollars traveling across continents just to look at the Milky Way again—only to realize I had already lived that luxury for free.

My childhood was expensive. 

It was astronomically rich. 

Thatched-roof houses made of wood and coconut leaves. Roofs breathed with the wind. The ground was uneven, familiar under bare feet. And at night, there was no softening the truth of where we lived. The dark did not pretend to be kind. 

But every evening, at the exact same time, something impossible appeared.

A single square of light.

Not a star. 

Not the moon. 

A window. 

One neighbor, one house, one rectangle of light floating inside the night. 

Inside that window lived something magical:

a television.

That window was not entertainment. It was orientation. 

My family didn’t have a television—we were all dreaming of having one, but it simply wasn’t possible. The cost of the television alone was a lot, not to mention that we had to ‘save electricity.’ We only used it for essential work, and there was a ‘manual’ on when we should turn a light on and when we should all turn it off and go to bed. 

So the only way to watch anything was to walk through the dark to someone else’s house, stand quietly outside their window, and hope they didn’t mind being the unofficial movie theater of the neighborhood.

I was around five. My aunts were barely adults.

We were all poor, all hopeful, all curious, and that window was our shared escape.

I would run there barefoot, rain or no rain, darkness or no darkness.

My aunts followed behind, laughing, gossiping, whispering, “Nhanh lên, Nghĩa!” (Hurry up, Nghĩa!). Nghĩa was the boy’s name they called me at home; a name my grandma chose to confuse bad spirits and keep me safe, a small superstition stitched unquestioningly into my childhood. 

That little window was the brightest thing in our lives.

The neighbors knew people gathered outside to watch.

They never closed the curtains.

They never pushed us away.

Their generosity was effortless—the kind that didn’t need words: 

They simply left the window open.

And every night, we stood there—a tiny audience in the shadows—watching whatever happened to be on: dramas, cartoons, the seven o’clock news, shows I didn’t understand but stared at with the kind of focus only children possess.

No chairs.

No popcorn.

No subtitles.

Just the glow of someone else’s world touching our faces.

And without realizing it, I learned my first lesson about generosity:

When the world is dark, you move toward the light—even if it comes from a place that isn’t yours.

No one taught me that. My little body just… knew.

This ritual—these nights spent at a stranger’s window—became the earliest blueprint of who I would become:

A girl who trusts that there is always light somewhere.

A girl who isn’t afraid to walk toward generosity.

A girl who believes warmth can come from unexpected places.

A girl who shows up, again and again, even if the path is muddy and the night is cold.

Years later, when we finally got our first black-and-white television, we were still occasionally talking about those nights watching movies for free. Somehow, it became more complicated once we had our own than when we just spontaneously appeared at someone’s home and went with the flow. We didn’t have to fight over which channel we should watch or who got the right to decide it. Freedom came with some cost, too. 

And also years later, when heartbreak took over, when grief hollowed me out, when I lost my mother and myself in the same year, I finally understood:

Everything I became began with that window. 

Because it taught me the simplest, most powerful truth:

The light you run toward as a child becomes the courage you carry as an adult.

And in many ways, this book is me running toward that window one last time—to tell you where my journey started and to invite you to remember the first window that lit up your life, too.

——

If these stories resonate with you and you’d like to read the book when it’s finished, you can leave your contact here.
I’ll send it to you when it’s ready.