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Milk has played such an important part in my life that it should be spelled in this story in capital letters: MILK. The idea sounds laughable at first: what should milk matter to a child bereaved of her mother since the earliest infancy, and fed dairy milk with a glass bottle and a rubber nipple? The dairy milk on which I was nurtured was the Bird brand very well known in this country. But—I want to make it clear—the milk with which my life has been concerned, and which I take so much to heart, is human milk produced by human mothers.

I didn’t learn the distinction between the two kinds of milk at school. The days I went to school could be counted on one’s fingers, since the many odd jobs a small child could do were more useful than education. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t busy all the time. I had a lot of spare time during the summer holidays, when my uncle and his wife and all my cousins went on vacation. But of course the schools too were closed at that time, so I had no hope of studying. What a nonsensical situation: when I was busy, schools were open; when I wasn’t. . . . But leave it. I will tell more about it later.

To be frank, I must confess that until I became a mother for the first time, I didn’t really realize the importance of nursing a baby with one’s own milk. Had I brought my child up naturally and simply, as other women did, I would not have to spin a long yarn about it now. But my story is rather . . . well, I’ll tell it in full.

My uncle now and then set forth ideas which sounded rather eccentric, but the small child I was then could only listen to what seemed beyond my powers of thinking and imagination.

My uncle was clearly a learned man (at least I presumed so), for he talked and talked of the East and the West, of the past and the present, with no intermission and without consulting any book. He usually opened with, “According to books,” to give more emphasis to his speech and to show people that he was a man of letters and not a poor fellow.

I must point out again that my unsophisticated mind was then like a wilderness, which would have to be cleared with an axe. My uncle gave the first stroke—too hard a stroke, it seemed to me. But as I was the lowest person in the household, I could hardly protest against his judgments.

How petty and humble is the position of an infant orphan in a family! I realized it better than anyone, so I tried to make myself smaller—the smaller I could be, I thought, the better. But unfortunately, nobody would take the trouble to understand what I was doing. They took it for granted that I was disobedient, unfeeling, a liar, and had all the bad qualities possibly inherent in a naughty child.

But all the insults, and even some bloody floggings, were not so painful that they produced a sense of outrage at my uncle’s half-pitying, half-depressing looks and his disheartening speeches:

“This small girl is done for!” he would exclaim to his wife. “And you still beat and scold her! What’s the use of it? It only makes your hands and body tired. You see, I . . .”

He looked at me and sighed, leaving his sentence unfinished, but I understood what he would have added: “There is no hope for you, and I’m sorry for you. You are an untamed child, unable to turn over a new leaf. Even a rag can be used to wipe up dust, but you are less useful than a rag! Rubbish—no more, no less. Not only that, you are a burden to me.”

I understood everything. As I stood there, my eyes would be dry, but my heart was wounded, paralyzed. Youth is generally reckless, though; it wouldn’t take long for my sorrow to fade away. The next time, I would feel only surprised when my uncle unexpectedly stared at me with the same discouraging look, and began again.

“If you are . . . it’s owing to those three Frenchmen [a customary way of referring to the French],” he might say.

This comment struck me as strange indeed. What had the French to do with a helpless creature like me? How could they be responsible? Who knows . . . (my active imagination would work on a lot of hypotheses), had they murdered my mother, burned or plundered my house? Such a riddle was too hard for a small child to solve. It only made my head ache. Since I had nobody to ask for advice, the riddle remained a heavy unanswered burden on my heart.

After some time, I noticed that whenever my uncle talked to his friends or relatives, he constantly referred to two topics: milk, and “those three Frenchmen.” Milk and Frenchmen were two topics of which he never tired; I, too, found them rather attractive.

“Look,” he would say, whenever he had an audience. “These three Frenchmen are liars, dishonest people, plundering, raping, seizing other people’s land. They are merciless beyond imagination, and they never flinch from any cruelty. And do you know why? Why are they so barbarous?”

Here he would stop, clear his throat, and pause so as to excite the curiosity of his listeners and make them eager for the answer. If his listeners were young men who hadn’t heard this speech before, they would press him eagerly to go on. Others, like Mr. Hinh, a night watchman, would only laugh and say, “We don’t know, tell us.” Some, like my aunt, remained unruffled as they always were.

But whatever the attitude of his audience, my uncle always knew how to treat them. His pause was never so long that the enthusiasts cooled down, nor was it so short that his subject could be treated as other than one of momentous import.

At exactly the right moment, he would continue, “No surprise at all, my friends. It’s because none of those Frenchmen is allowed to suck the breast of his mother. White men are not human beings; they are all devils. If a child is fed with animal milk, he is deprived of all human sentiments when he grows up. Believe me, I’m telling the truth. Worse yet, these barbarous people are now planning to corrupt the Annamite [Vietnamese] in the same way.”

He would give a distressing sigh, as though he were pitying the whole Annamite race thus on the road to ruin.

Once, after listening thus far to his discourse, I moved closer to him, plucked up all my courage, and asked, “Honorable uncle, may I ask you something? I did not feed on animal milk, did I? I sucked . . . I drank bird milk, and bird is not an animal; bird is a . . .”

“Oh! Blockhead! Who told you that? You fed on bird milk? A bird is just the brand-label stuck on the milk tin. It would take too long to say, for example, This cake is of dragon make,’ so instead we say ‘dragon-cake.’ This does not mean the cake is made of dragon meat. It’s the same with milk: the bird is merely a brand name, but the milk comes from cows. Birds never have any breast at all; even if they did, it would be too small to hold a reasonable amount of milk. And it’s no easy matter to catch them, anyway. Really, I must salute your stupidity. Listen carefully (now he was stressing every word): you were drinking cow’s milk. Do you understand—the milk of cows!”

I started as if struck by thunder, but before I could start to cry, my uncle began to shout. “But how dare you ask a question, you saucy girl? Children don’t know anything. Really, you are too bold!”

His anger made my legs shake and my head swim, but he soon completely forget all about his unfortunate niece. He sipped some tea to wet his throat and soon, more eloquent than ever, he was citing evidence to make his argument more convincing. For instance, he said, Emperor T’sin Tche Hwang never enjoyed the suck of his mother’s breast, so he remained quite unmoved even by a “river of bloodshed” or a “mountain of corpses.” But Mencius and Confucius, the celebrated philosophers, had sucked the milk of their mothers until four years of age. So had Jesus Christ. As for Buddha Shakya Muni, he was reared by his aunt since he lost his mother. (My uncle did not specify what Buddha’s aunt did with her own baby while she nursed her nephew, or whether she had recourse to the dread animal milk. But I dared not voice my questions. And I heartily wished I had such an aunt.)

My uncle also cited western examples: Nero of ancient Rome, and Ulysses of Greece. The Roman emperor did not suck at his mother’s breast, he said, but the Greek king did. So it was no surprise that Nero did not shrink from any cruelty, while Ulysses was a wise man.

In Annam, he added, we also had two illustrious men, genius Tran Hung and sage Trang Trinh. Both fed on their mother’s milk until they could read. In short, all the wise men, outstanding philosophers, and gentlemen of this world had sucked at their mothers’ breasts, and all the cruel men and merciless murderers had not.

I drank in all these words from such a wise mouth, and was almost lost in thought when suddenly my uncle looked straight at me and said:

“Furthermore, man is the highest of all living creatures. According to books, among all the beings—the flying-in-air and the running-on-earth, the four-legged are the lowest. ‘As silly as an ox’ is a phrase we use all the time. Yet these devil French have imported a lot of cow milk to our country, and we have been foolish enough to use it in rearing our children. The extermination of the Annamite people is only a hair’s-breadth away!”

I shivered from head to toe and my hair stood on end as I listened to these words. I understood every word of his speech, even the Chinese names (although I barely knew how to hold a writing-brush). I felt overwhelmed with shame as I recalled how I had boasted of myself to my friends. I told them that if I was cleverer than all of them, it was because of the bird’s milk I had drunk as a baby. Birds, I proudly said, belonged to the superior feathered creatures.

“Superior feathered creatures? What does that mean?” the children had asked, staring at me with wide eyes. I had explained as clearly as possible: “Superior means high; feathered creatures means birds, and superior feathered creatures means birds flying high in the sky, dignified and noble.”

Not content with stopping there, I had gone on: “Opposite to superior feathered creatures, there are inferior hairy beings such as oxen, buffaloes, pigs, horses, etc. Inferior hairy beings are animals moving basely about on four legs, almost crawling on the ground, forever enslaved to human beings.” I pointed to the buffalo on which I was riding and said, “For example, we use oxen and buffaloes for plowing, and horses for riding, and pigs for meat.”

The whole group of boys and girls had greatly admired my eloquence, and I felt so delighted that I went on lecturing, like a professor: “Superior feathered creatures are also called ‘flying feathered creatures’; flying means moving in the air and feathered creatures means birds. As for the inferior hairy beings, they may also be called ‘running beasts’; running means moving rapidly on the ground.”

On and on I went; as my audience showed no sign of wearying, I talked nonstop. Now and then, I threw in an “According to books,” to impress the listeners. All at once I realized that I sounded just like my uncle, and stopped, startled. But I had proved myself a fine speaker. Sitting up on the buffalo’s back, I had felt very light—so light that I might almost have flown up to the sky like a bird.

But now, my speaking career seemed to be at an end. How could I face my friends? I felt like an animal who had once had a fine coat of fur, but who had been shorn and now showed nothing but an ugly skin infected with boils and itching. Until now, I had been looked down on as a beast; from now on, I was in danger of regarding myself as even lower than that. I felt as if the earth were sinking under my feet and the sky darkening over my head.

But my uncle did not perceive my terrible state of mind. He went on speaking volubly of outstanding men all over the world; he quoted other extraordinary names, told anecdotes about them, and offered many convincing proofs to strengthen his theory. But I took no more pleasure in hearing his words. I confusedly heard something about Mahatma Gandhi, and that was all. To the rest, I was deaf.

What did Ulysses matter to me? And Nero? And even Tran Hung Dao? Did those illustrious men pay the slightest attention to me? Did they realize that I wished only one small thing to comfort me—to have been reared on the milk of birds—but that my dream was not to come true?

Suddenly, in the midst of his discourse against “those three Frenchmen,” my uncle stopped and put his finger on the forehead of one of his daughters standing near him (he had many daughters), and shouted in a severe voice: “Mind you! If ever in the time to come, you snobbishly follow this ‘civilized way’ and rear your children with cow’s milk, I’ll beat you to death!”

From that day on, whenever he looked at me with his deep, sharp eyes, I understood what he was thinking: “Oh, saucy girl, I take pity on you. If you become rough, unfeeling, incorrigible, it is because of your mother’s early death. You had to feed at the expense of a foul, inferior, four-legged being. Now the beastly nature has infiltrated to the very core of your backbone and dominated your nature. I feel awfully sorry for you, but there is no way to save you, no way.”

One day, as his talk proceeded to its vehement climax, he suddenly pointed his finger at one of his daughters and sternly shouted, “Take care of you . . .” At this, my aunt smiled sourly and cut him short: “Don’t worry, your teaching has had good effects. Your niece says she will suckle her children with her own milk.”

My uncle turned to her, his face crimson with anger. I really feared for my aunt, for I was sure he would scold her for her ironical remark; at the same time, I hoped he would show me some affection and praise me for my response to his preaching. But alas! he expressed his anger another way.

“You’re quite a fool, aren’t you?” he said to his wife. “I never mention this saucy girl; it’s quite useless to teach her. I give lessons and advice to your children only, do you understand? But this evil girl will probably . . .”

I understood him, even though he did not finish his sentence. My face hardened and became as rough as stone. My uncle saw this, and was pleased to see his farsighted prophecy coming true so quickly. “You see?” his look of triumph seemed to say. “Look at her face right now. Nobody else could be worse than she is.”

That night I wept, and I could hardly sleep. My tears, held back for the whole day, now flowed like rain’ I cried until I felt relief from all my pain, and then I pondered my fate.

I regarded myself as a human being like other people; I knew I had not been transmuted into an animal. My circumstances, while unfortunate, were extraordinary, I thought: because my mother had died so early, I could hardly have done otherwise than drink bird’s milk—or rather, Bird brand cow’s milk. I could not deny my uncle’s assertions (whatever he said had to be true), but I decided that he must have overlooked the special nature of my case. Only those who lived with their mothers but still did not suck their mothers’ milk, surely, were turned into beasts by cow’s milk.

Kneeling in the dark with my hands joined together, I prayed earnestly to God, Buddha, Christ, the Spirit of the Mountains, the Spirit of Rivers, and even Providence to have mercy on me and help me to safeguard my human nature. Afterwards, feeling much better, I fell into a sound sleep full of sweet .dreams. I came across Ulysses and Gandhi, looking kind and noble and very much like the pictures of Sir Happiness and Sir Fortune on my uncle’s Chinese calendar. One after the other, they caressed my head and said, “Don’t worry, I will help you. . . .”

Suddenly a shouting voice rang in my ears and chased away my sweet dream: “You! Still lying stiff like that? Look, the sun has risen nine masts up the sky!”

I crept out of my sleeping mat, but I wasn’t too frightened; “nine masts up the sky” just meant that the fifth watch was over and it was close to daybreak. Quickly I washed my face and led the buffalo to the rice field. I had not felt so calm for a long time.

Since that time, I have always prayed to Ulysses and Gandhi, as well as to the other gods, when I ask for protection.

After that day, too, I kept my ideas to myself. I had made the mistake of telling my cousins that I wanted to breast-feed my children; my words had found their way to my aunt and—worst of all—to my uncle. From now on, I would tell them nothing. I also stopped bragging about my knowledge of “superior feathered creatures” and “inferior hairy beings” to the boys and girls who drove buffalo to the fields. Soon I had almost completely stopped talking to them, too.

Instead of talking to others, I began to examine myself over and over to make sure that my actions and ideas were still human. I often caught myself looking into my own being as if it were a stranger, to search and scrutinize. I watched over myself as vigilantly as if I were an enemy. If I caught myself wishing or wanting something, I immediately checked the thought and said to myself, “Beware; the cow milk may still be lingering in your body and poisoning you.”

One day my aunt told me to take some pigs to the market to be sold. It promised to be an unpleasant job, since I should have to sit close to those grunting pigs, each one shut up in a separate bamboo crate, all the way to the market. But I was pleased to be going by myself, enjoying a little freedom. Besides, my aunt was trusting me to take the pigs safely to market and bring back the money; this must mean I was getting to be a responsible grown-up person.

As we waited on the platform for the train to leave, my aunt gave me a bright silver ten-piaster coin and said, “This is for you to buy some food on the train whenever you feel hungry. But don’t be in too much of a hurry. Wait until the train stops, then look around and choose the nearest food hawker. And always get the food before paying. If you don’t, the train may pull out and then you’ll be without both food and money. Also, mind you don’t . . .”

I stopped listening. I could only absorb so much advice at once, and wished fervently that the train would leave at once, so I could be by myself. “Mind this, mind that, what else yet?” I was muttering in a low voice, when suddenly the train rumbled and began to move. But my aunt still shouted advice from the platform: “Mind you, don’t stand on the wagon steps when the train is about to start, or you’ll fall. . . .”

I was rather moved by her worry, especially when she called me “my dear,” as she never had before. I might have been carried away by emotion, had I not caught her next words on a last breeze: “If something happened to you, who would take care of the pigs?”

I was tempted to cry, but the giddiness of a freedom such as I had never enjoyed, and the scenery on both sides of the train, diverted me from my unhappiness. Only when the train came to periodic stops at small stations did I realize that it was quite unpleasant to ride in close quarters with pigs in a cattle car. The rest of the time, I was quite contented.

At one stop, an old woman appeared on the platform. With one hand she leaned on a stick; with the other, she begged alms from the passengers at the train windows. Muttering unintelligible words, she waved her quivering hand up and down, back and forth, in front of the passengers for a long time. Getting no response, she moved in the direction of the cattle car, where I was. She groped her way step by step, looking quite wretched and miserable. With her eyes showing but their white corneas kept stiffly open, and with her nostrils now swelling, now deflating, and vibrating all the time, she was a sight both funny and pitiful. I felt deeply sorry for her, and put my hand in my pocket for my silver coin. I was just about to hand it out the window when I heard giggles and voices from the passenger car.

“Ha! The old woman is going to ask for alms in the cattle car! She must be blind. Nobody is there but the pigs!” But I was there, half hidden inside, and I saw two smartly dressed girls about my age lean their heads out of their coach to get a better look at the beggar; they acted as though they were enjoying a circus. I stood dead still, lest they should see me. The old woman moved on down the platform, patiently waving her hand to and fro and muttering insistently.

After a long, shrieking whistle, the train started up again. Brusquely I sat down on the floor, close to the pigs, and cried. I felt deeply grieved at the scene I had just witnessed. At the same time, I was angry with myself for having missed a rare opportunity of doing good, just because I was ashamed of being seen. I was afraid I should never have another silver coin in all the rest of my life.

Later, when I recalled that incident, I was gnawed by remorse for failing to do a good deed. But at the same time, I felt proud of myself for having acted more human than the other passengers. In fact, I later realized, the giddiness of liberty I had felt in the train had made me totally forget to keep my usual close watch on my thoughts and actions. If I had felt like doing a charitable thing, it was really and truly a natural impulse—a very noble human impulse. Having thus proved my humanity again to myself, I felt very cheerful. I wanted to shout, so that everyone could hear me, “Look! I still have a human nature in spite of having drunk cow’s milk.”

Of course, I didn’t shout, or even speak of the incident to anyone. I had learned my lesson. If I couldn’t even confide in my uncle, who was my closest relative, who could I talk to?

Even though I didn’t hold a grudge against my uncle for his lack of sympathy and understanding, I was far from tolerant of everything and everybody. I hated “those three Frenchmen” terribly and relentlessly. If I was forsaken, despised, and morally tortured, who else but those French could have caused my misery? They were responsible, according to my uncle, for bringing tinned cow’s milk to our country.

I was lucky enough to be gifted with a strong human nature, I told myself; otherwise, the “animal substance” of cow’s milk would have supplanted it and spoiled my whole life. I vowed that if I ever had children, they would all drink only my milk. I would never let them live in such a miserable situation as I did. “Oh Lord the Mighty,” I prayed. “I pray Thee not to let me suffer death so early as my mother did. Pity, pity!”

And there you are, my friends and readers. Now you know the reason for my determination to feed my children with my own milk. If I did not, they might grow silly, cruel, or inhuman, according to the wise preaching of my uncle. The story sounds very simple, but it was written with the tears of a child.

Until I had my fifth child, I kept my vow to the letter. All my first four children had drunk milk from my breasts until they were able to eat rice. Even the fifth one fed smoothly for six months, when suddenly my milk began to go dry. One morning, when I got up, my breasts felt less tight than the previous day; they remained unchanged even at feeding time, and the baby seemed unsatisfied even though it sucked longer than usual.

I tried not to think about it, but my brain worked feverishly at possible answers to the riddle. Had I wronged my breasts in any way? I had not: I abstained from wine, cigarettes, spicy dishes, even tea; ordinary rice, common sugar, peas, and kidney beans were my usual foods. At 9 p.m. I shut myself up in my room and carefully barred the door, lest my husband disturb my rest. With all that trouble just for the sake of my milk, how could I be having this trouble?

“Take it easy, my dear,” said a friend of mine, who was also my midwife. “Why make a fuss over a trifle? It’s natural to have less milk after several confinements. I’ve experienced it myself.”

“Take it easy!” I retorted. “That’s easy enough for you to say. You don’t have my worry I don’t have enough milk to feed my child!”

She frowned. “Have you given him his bottle yet?” she asked.

“His bottle? Oh no, I don’t bottle-feed him!”

“But I advised you to bottle-feed him when you were confined, didn’t I?”

“Well, at first I was going to, but then I decided not to. I didn’t think I needed to, since I usually have a lot of milk.”

“Good heavens! Well, hats off to you, my dear, but do give him an extra bottle now. There’s nothing to worry about; he’s old enough to do without breast milk.”

All right, since there was no better solution. But it was hard to accept her suggestion. If you gave birth to a child, I thought, it was your responsibility to feed it by yourself—otherwise what was the use of women’s showy breasts?

Looking for the first time at a bottle filled with strange milk intended for one of my children, I felt vexed and angry. My hands shook and could hardly hold the bottle. The baby seemed to suck on the hard nipple unwillingly. Unaccustomed to the makeshift rubber, he tried now and then to push it out with his tongue.

As I struggled with the bottle and with my wounded pride, I suddenly remembered a time several years earlier, during the resistance fighting, when condensed milk had been as scarce as gold. While all the other mothers worried about where they would get milk, my mind was untroubled. From time to time, my husband would ask me, “Darling, won’t you buy some tinned milk for the children? It may be impossible to get when we need it.”

“Thanks a lot for your advice, comrade,” I would teasingly reply. “But your humble companion can produce enough milk for them. Please don’t worry about it; just mind your grand affairs.”

Usually my jokes would make him laugh, but sometimes he continued to nag at me: “You are never serious, but the situation is, and you don’t care a bit.”

It wasn’t that I didn’t care, I thought, but what could I do about the world beyond my baby and my breast? In time of war, people had better get closer, love each other, and not fight among themselves. So I thought, but I said nothing, and gave my teat to the baby.

My husband seemed to regret his outburst; he came closer and started to talk, just as I was trying to reach a glass on a nearby table. “Do you want a drink?” he asked. “I’ll make it for you.” I shook my head gently and took the glass from his hand. I put it under the other nipple, and within a minute the glass was almost half full of milk. I put my head back and drank it before his amazed eyes.

“You certainly have plenty of milk, haven’t you?” he said admiringly. Getting no answer, he went on, “But don’t you find it unsavory?”

“Do you think I’m a fish?” I retorted. “It’s my own milk!”

“Is it really good? Tell me frankly.”

“Why not?” I vaguely said, adding to myself, Aha, he wants some himself! “Why do you want to know? Tell me. If you want some milk I’ll buy it for you. But don’t pretend to worry about the baby; you know he’s never lacked enough milk. Tell me the truth.”

Red-faced, he denied it: “You’re joking all the time! I’m not a baby.”

We both laughed. Then I said, “I lied; my milk isn’t good at all; it’s a bit creamy and sweet, and difficult to swallow. I was just teasing you.”

“Then why did you drink it?”

“Because I didn’t want to waste it. In order to recycle it for the baby, I had to drink it. and if I didn’t finish it in one gulp, I might not have been able to finish it.”

Remembering this conversation, I also recalled a friend’s words about something called the law of compensation. I wondered whether this law applied to my present situation. When we had been poor and sometimes had to eat weeds instead of rice to ease our hunger, my milk was always plentiful; but now, when I could have anything I wanted, I was denied what I wanted most—milk.

I also thought about the other women with whom I had become acquainted in recent years. None of them breast-fed their babies. Some said it would be unhealthy, or spoil their complexions; others thought their own milk was unfit for a child’s constitution. Many said it would take too much time (although they did not spend their time working, but rather strolling, shopping, or otherwise entertaining themselves). One woman said, “Whenever I let the baby feed at my breast, I feel so tired!” Another held her husband responsible: “A queer fellow, my husband. He is against my old way of nursing.”

All these excuses sounded like a Greek poem to me. Although these women were my friends, I paid no attention to their ideas on breast-feeding. Instead, I took advice from women who suggested precautions for insuring a constant flow of milk.

One of my cousins told me, “Now, drink as much milk as you can. The more milk you drink, the more you produce; just as eating pork liver is beneficial to our own livers.”

I asked everyone for advice: everyone prescribed differently. My neighbors from the North suggested:

“Cook some pork trotters with papaw; that kind of food will give you a lot of milk.”

“Banana flowers are the best.”

“Glutinous rice soup is excellent. Eat it and your milk will be flowing like a stream.”

A grand lady from Hue suggested, “There is no better thing than nenuphar seeds cooked with deer’s stomach.”

A friend from Saigon urged me to drink beer. Guffawing, she said, “Believe me, gulp it down and you’ll have as much milk as you like. I’m not joking.”

When I first experienced a shortage and had recourse to tinned milk I followed all this advice indiscriminately. I ate everything my friends advised. I even asked some religious people, though they know nothing about milk; they gave me a recipe for a decoction of fried cotton seeds, which they said was very simple but would have good effects. Since I was nervous, I not only drank the decoction, but also crunched the seeds. At first I sensed a creamy good taste, but soon got a sore throat from the seeds.

I began going to doctors, and dosed myself with every French medicine having remotely to do with lactation: mammary extract, Galactogil, Galacta syrup.

I grew heavier by the day, losing little by little my good figure, but it didn’t worry me. I knew many ways of losing weight quickly, and could very easily regain my figure. Besides, my figure wasn’t my biggest concern. I only wanted to be able to say that all my children had been raised only on their mother’s milk, and had never drunk even a drop of tinned milk.

A sympathetic friend sent me a preserved deer foot, still coated with dirt, with instructions to cook it with kidney beans. Even this I ate, loathsome as it was. More than once, as I tried all these remedies, I could not help throwing up what I struggled to swallow.

It must be said that I accepted any and all advice because I had no organized theory of child-rearing myself. I always relied on my female intuition and on my own experience; this practice, I felt, would keep my babies healthy, less susceptible to disease, and able to recover quickly from sickness. In later years, after reading many books and articles on child-rearing, I became even more firmly convinced that this method had been the right one.

If the baby had a temperature, I would sense it in my nipple as the baby sucked; I had no need of a medical thermometer. If it caught a fever, I would try to discover the cause: a draft, too-cool bath water, or a tooth coming in? If it belched, it might be sick, or it might just have sucked too hard. If it had diarrhea, it might be because we did not cover it warmly enough; but more often, it was because we ate too many vegetables.

My love of the child, and the tender attention I paid it, gave me the ability to feel beforehand what would happen to it next. Because I had lost my own mother so early, I threw myself totally into being a mother to my own children. I learned by myself what had to be done, while I brought them up.

At the beginning, after I brought my first child into the world, I took minute care of my breasts, and they were the source of my deepest joy. While the baby fed on my milk, our mutual love grew deeper and deeper. While the baby sucked at my breast, I was listening attentively with my heart, my brain, and my senses. Overwhelmed with pride and happiness, I watched my child, that innocent infant who knew nothing but the suction of that vital motherly fluid. My heart overflowed with joy; I felt myself transported and ready to fly.

I became much stronger and steadier, feeling as if I could move rivers and mountains. I felt like a soldier waiting eagerly for the battle hour because he had entire confidence in the victory. When I held my child in my arms, all my griefs receded, and my disappointments disappeared; all the sorrows which lay heavy in my heart seemed to float away. All the hard trials of the past, the present, and the future became unimportant; I was well armed to face and overcome them.

Then one day, the child who had sucked unconsciously became aware of me. It looked around; its brown limpid eyes, sparkling like drops of water, darted here and there. Then it turned up to stare at its mother and now and then loosed the nipple from its pretty mouth. Suddenly, it smiled, an angelic and miraculous smile. Time seemed to stand still; reclining on the bed frame, I refrained from smiling, speaking, or making the smallest movement, trying to prolong the moment, afraid that if I so much as breathed deeper, time might be startled and flap its wings more quickly.

What could be similar to that exalted state of mind? The feelings of a drunkard given a lot of wine, or of a military officer decorated for distinguished services? The immeasureable sensations of a countryman who returns home after long years abroad, or the rapture of a poet who uncovers some classical verse which has been lost for centuries?

None of these emotions seems analogous to that which I felt as I suckled my child. I cannot describe the sensation in words, but those who have experienced it will understand.

Because of the happiness it gave me—and also, perhaps, because of the lessons I learned from my uncle, I regarded milk as something of great value. When I wanted to throw out the surplus, I counted every drop. If, after a bath or before I suckled the baby, a few drops were squeezed out, I was annoyed.

I took pride in the fact that I had nursed all my children by myself—from the first one, whom I nursed in an unexperienced and awkward manner, to the fourth one, when I was better off and could hire a maid. The maid could do any of the housework except care for the children; that, I reserved for myself.

But now, with my fifth child, my record was being broken. I was rapidly growing fat from eating too much for the sake of my milk. People I met on the street began to address me in a playful manner:

“My dear Thu, you are really looking well.”

“Milk has brought good effects on you as well as on your child.”

“Both of you are getting equally rotund; as our saying goes, the mother grows round and the baby grows square.”

These witty remarks at last aroused me, especially when I heard the giggles of my sisters-in-law. One afternoon I went surreptitiously to a weighing-machine, and watched in dismay as the needle climbed up, up—to 54 kilos. Nonsense! The machine must be out of order. I went to another druggist, and then another, but alas! every machine gave the same answer. I had become fat. All the food and remedies I had taken, instead of aiding my milk secretion, had merely stagnated in my body and made me fat.

Suddenly I was boiling with rage. According to my height, my normal weight was 48 kilos. I hadn’t wanted to become fat, but only to increase my milk production. Back at home, I threw out all the remedies and foods, and returned to my normal diet.

In the seventh month after my confinement, my milk was providing only one suck a day. These were the most troublesome days yet. From dawn to dusk I spun around like a top, cleaning, boiling, and washing the bottles; heating the milk; boring holes in the rubber nipples. The holes had to be of moderate size, to pass milk through in just the right quantity. If they were too large, the suction might choke the baby; if they were too small, the bottle would be refused. I would trust no one else to make milk for the baby. I was afraid the milk might be too hot or too cold, or the water not cooked enough, or the bottle not clean, or the amount of milk over or under the ration. . . . All day long I worked, sweating through my clothes.

One day, my husband remarked, “Darling, are you practicing the arts of the conjuror? What are you muttering about all day?”

In fact, I felt very anxious about the baby’s constipation. Often I started and woke up in the middle of the night. At meal time, if the maid came and signalled me with a look, I immediately put down bowl and chopsticks and left the table. Voices followed me:

“What’s so urgent?”

“My dear brother, our sister-in-law is going to investigate the baby’s excrements.”

“Even while eating?”

My eldest daughter said, “Mummy acts like a medical doctor, doesn’t she, daddy?”

“Maybe your mother is practicing the part of Cau Tien.”

When I came back to the table, all the children would be holding their noses. My husband would jokingly ask me, “Well, Sir Cau Tien, how are the excrements?” I might laugh with them, or stay sober, according to the result of my investigations.

I became a serious scholar of constipation. Books and journals on pediatrics piled up on my bed. I even read foreign books, giving my husband another opportunity to make fun of me. “In which points do you think the Vietnamese books are not so good as the others?” he would ask. To this, I remained silent, as if I didn’t hear him, and went on reading.

Once I shouted at my youngest daughter, “Mai! Bring me the dictionary!” The poor girl, who did not know what a dictionary was, stood in confusion before the disordered heap of books. Once more I ordered, “Hurry up!”

“Mummy, I can’t make out which is which!”

“Oh, what a stupid girl!” I reproved her, quite unthinkingly, and she began to cry. “Why are you crying? Nobody is hurting you.”

Only when, sobbing, she reminded me that she had not yet been sent to kindergarten did I realize my mistake. I burst into laughter, took her in my arms, and patted her on the head to soothe her.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I thought . . . Now please go quickly to my bed and pick up the biggest book. That is the dictionary.”

At once I resumed my reading, standing near the stove where the kettle boiled with the milk bottle inside.

Worried as I was about constipation, nothing distressed me more than feeding with a bottle this baby who never seemed to grow accustomed to it. Now and then, he rebelled against it, twisting his body right and left, and sometimes even pushing the bottle onto the floor and spilling the milk. In the face of such a reaction, I could only helplessly cross my arms and weep. So both of us, mother and baby, cried together.

The baby was still sucking at my breast once a day, but it seemed to be no more pleasureable than bottle-feeding. Often he grumbled and grunted while eating, and sometimes, when he drew in unsuccessfully, he turned abruptly aside and gave me a smarting pain in my heart.

Finally, the day I was trying to delay arrived: the baby had nothing to suck; my milk had gone completely dry.

Seeing that I was as wretched as a chicken in heavy rain, my husband said, “You’re really strange! Where did you get these ideas about breast-feeding, anyway? You treat the child as if he were a newborn, hugging and embracing him. . . . Besides, is your milk still nutritive enough to warrant mourning over it?”

Words choked in my throat; I shivered angrily from head to toe. But my husband calmly went on:

“There are plenty of tins of the best quality milk in the markets, and we can certainly afford them. Listen to me, and buy them for the baby; they would be much more nourishing.”

His voice rang deafeningly in my ears at first, then seemed to get further and further away until it echoed as if from a long distance. I turned away, hid my face on the baby’s shoulder, and used its clothes to dry my tears. Hugging the baby to my breast, I mourned again for the “golden days” when I could feed a baby from one breast and fill a glass from the other.

At least, I told myself, I had nursed this baby for nearly eight months without recourse to cow’s milk. Surely that was the major part of the job, and I had been up to it. Still, I decided that it was probably not a good idea to have any more children.

But my sixth child came into the world in spite of my intentions. This time I was not taking anything for granted, and in the second month I began mixed feeding with one bottle each day. But the reality was worse than I imagined: in the third month, my milk began to go alarmingly dry.

Frightened, I tried every possible remedy, though not so immoderately as the time before. But alas! the better care I took of my breasts, the less they responded. I felt displeased, restless, and haunted by my failure.

In order to pull myself together, I busied myself with sewing, cleaning, sweeping, washing the linen, and bathing the children. I even read books, if I had time. But God save me from childbirth books and reviews: I had read them over and over again, and learned all their instructions by heart; I was fed up with them.

I told myself, rather unconvincingly, that milk could not stream up adequately in the daytime because I was so busy, and concentrated on nighttime. I stayed awake during the afternoon siesta time so as to sleep more soundly at night. But when night came, though I was terribly tired, I would lie in bed staring nervously at the ceiling and listening to my heart throbbing. I strained with all my senses to feel the milk surge up into my breast, but could feel nothing. Perhaps at daybreak, I would tell myself, and wait apprehensively. Some nights I heard the “odo” in the sitting-room strike every quarter-hour until the sun rose.

Finally I did not sleep at all. Often during the night I would get up, tiptoe into the next room, put a blanket over one of the children, rearrange the mosquito net over another, open a window in my husband’s room. Then I would go into the sitting-room, where a very sweet moonlight showed everything at rest except my anxious and agitated self. I would sit down on a chair in a corner of the room and try to calm my nerves as I waited for time to pass. But instead, my grief would grow larger and larger, like an oil stain spreading on a sheet of paper.

After long days of anxiety and sleeplessness, I was taken ill. Always before, when I became sick, I had thrown off the sickness with my own natural vitality, without recourse to doctors and medicine. I thought I could do the same this time, but it was a big mistake. I sweated constantly, and my nose and eyes ran all the time. I felt so dizzy that when I tried to sit up I fell back down on the bed, and everything in the room seemed to turn round and round. I vomited up everything I tried to eat. For the first time in my life, I had to be helped to walk.

My grievances still troubled me, but in different ways; they changed from acute pains to more distilled, deeper sorrows. As I recovered gradually from my illness, my milk went completely dry, though I tried desperately to conserve the last few drops.

Anyhow (I tried to console myself) this baby had fed on my breast for four months. But what if there were more babies? Deprived of their mother’s milk, they would lose their most effective protection.

In spite of myself, my mind kept returning to my “golden days” of milk in abundance. I shut my eyes, and saw circles of all colors dancing before me—now approaching, now receding, now very small, now growing bigger and bigger like the wavy surface of a pond where the wind blows.

Suddenly my husband’s words rang in my ears: “Is your milk still nutritive enough to warrant mourning over it?”

Ah! Now your milk is. . . . What? I felt my breast hanging somewhat heavy and tense. A gleam of hope: milk? Feverishly I tried to get up, but fell back again, tired. No, not milk: only my old affliction acting up.