THE CHOSEN CHILD -CHAPTER 2 – THE LANGUAGE OF POVERTY

Описание: CHAPTER 2 – THE LANGUAGE OF POVERTY
The chosen child is never announced.
No parent gathers the family and says, “This one will carry more.” In Vietnamese homes, responsibility is not spoken; it is felt. It settles on the shoulders of the child who listens too closely, who volunteers before being asked, who learns to read the silence between adults.
I became that child without ceremony.
By the time I was eleven, I already knew which sibling needed help with homework, which day the electricity bill arrived, which tone in my father’s voice meant worry. No one called me “chosen,” yet somehow I was often beside my mother when decisions were made, as if she were quietly teaching me a language she herself had learned from hardship.
That language was the language of poverty—
not dramatic poverty, but careful poverty,
the poverty of limits inside a respectable life.

The market became my first classroom.

Every morning I walked with my mother to the Đà Lạt market. The air smelled of wet earth, fresh cilantro, and the sweet smoke of grilled corn. Baskets of vegetables shone like small gardens. Vendors called out prices in musical voices, pretending indifference while watching each customer like a chess opponent.
Holding my mother’s hand, I learned more about money than any book could teach.
She moved through the stalls with gentle confidence. First, she greeted the sellers warmly, asking about their children, their health. Then she began to bargain—not with greed, but with necessity. I watched her touch a bundle of morning glory, tilt her head, and say, “A little less, chị ơi. I have many mouths at home.”
The seller would laugh, lower the price a few coins, and both women would smile as if they had completed a small dance.
From my mother I learned that negotiation could be kind.
That money did not need to humiliate anyone.
Yet I also learned the vocabulary of limitation. She rarely chose the finest cut of meat, rarely the brightest fruit at the top of the pile. “These are just as good,” she would whisper to me, selecting the second-best tomatoes, the fish a little smaller. Her choices were not stingy; they were strategic, shaped by twelve appetites waiting at home.
Watching her, I felt two emotions at once:
admiration for her wisdom,
and a quiet wish for a life where she would not need such carefulness.
Near the entrance of the market sat the peddlers and beggars. My mother never passed them without placing a few coins into their hats. Sometimes she had bargained fiercely only minutes before, yet generosity flowed from her hands without hesitation.
I asked once, “Má, why give when we don’t have much?”
She answered, “Con à, mình thiếu nhưng người ta còn thiếu hơn. We are short, but they are shorter.”
That sentence carved itself into me.
From her I learned that poverty and generosity could live in the same body. But I also wondered: must kindness always wear the clothes of scarcity? Could there be a generosity that did not count every coin afterwards?
These market mornings shaped my inner world more than school lessons.
The language of poverty was not only in words. It was in gestures: the way my mother folded money twice before putting it in her pocket, the way she hesitated before buying something for herself, the way she chose practicality over pleasure again and again.
No one told me to imitate her.
Children learn by breathing the air around them.
At eleven, I began to carry responsibilities that felt older than my years. I helped manage the shopping list, calculated how far the food must stretch, and reminded younger siblings not to waste. I felt important—and strangely heavy.
This is how the chosen child is trained:
through everyday errands that become destiny.
Yet inside me another language was waking.
While I admired my mother’s skill, I also dreamed of a different rhythm. I imagined walking through the market one day without calculating, choosing the best fruit simply because it was beautiful, giving to the peddlers without wondering what we would lack tomorrow.
I did not desire luxury.
I desired ease.
The sentences I heard around me shaped my beliefs:
“Save for rainy days.”
“Don’t aim too high.”
“Rich people suffer in other ways.”
These phrases were meant to protect us from envy and disappointment. But they also taught me to lower my eyes before looking at the horizon. I began to feel that our family lived inside an invisible fence called “enough.”