Before the Change

She rides before the city wakes all the way up, when the air is still thin enough to breathe without tasting exhaust, when the street sellers are only beginning to lift the metal shutters that complain like old knees. The bike is too big for her, a hand-me-down that makes her stretch for the pedals, toes searching, finding, pushing. The chain clicks like a small animal following her.

This is still Saigon, not because of maps, but because of mouths. The word stays on people’s tongues like sugar stuck knowing it will melt later. Her mother says it softly when she counts money at the table. Her uncle says it sharply when he argues with the radio. Her grandmother says it the way you say a person’s name at an altar, careful, stubborn.

She takes the long way to school on purpose, skimming along the canal where the water is the color of old tea and the morning light makes it look almost clean. A boy on a motorbike passes too close and laughs, the laugh trailing behind him like smoke. She holds her line. She has learned that the street rewards the steady, not the fearless.

At the corner by the bakery, heat spills out the doorway, bread and butter and something sweet she cannot name. She imagines swallowing that warmth, keeping it under her ribs for later, for the hours when the day turns loud. A man pushes a cart of crushed ice, the cubes clinking like glass. A woman balances baskets of herbs on a pole, green leaves trembling as if the city itself is breathing.

She pedals harder, the spokes turning into a silver blur, the wind lifting her hair from her neck. For a moment she is not a student, not a daughter, not anyone’s responsibility. She is only motion. She is only the thin line of road ahead, and the name of the city still holding together, just long enough for her to pass through it.