Give Me a Ticket to Childhood Read online

  “You blockhead!” Hai cried in a booming voice. “We ganged up on you to stop you wasting a beautiful story on a boring conference paper that no one outside the lecture hall would read!”

  “You don’t mind that I wrote about all our foibles and fantasies?”

  Tun inhaled deeply. Her face shone.

  “It was a great idea!”

  “So you’re not afraid your students and their parents will read the hot text message that I sent you at eight?”

  “Honestly, I’d forgotten all about it,” Tun said. “But what a wonderful memory. And what a wonderful message—sent in all innocence. I’m grateful to have recovered it.”

  “How about the CEO whose shareholders discover that he tried his own father?” I asked Hai.

  “Every kid tries his parents,” Hai said. “In every way,” he added, laughing. “And parents sometimes need to know that they’re on trial. He picked up a flowerpot and banged like a gavel. “All rise.”

  Ti was not at all surprised when I told her about my two visitors, and the surprise they gave me.

  “I was in on it,” she said, with a guilty smile.

  “The stories would have been lost forever if you hadn’t told them in a novel. They would have disappeared into the dusk, by the river, with their tails between their legs, like the dogs did.”

  “Are you better at cooking instant noodles now?” I asked her, embarrassed at how much I felt.

  “What about you? Are you better at cooking them?”

  Then she rummaged in her pocket. “I also have something for you to sign,” she said.

  “A cancelled ticket?” I stared at it blankly.

  “Not cancelled—validated. Let’s just say it’s a ticket on the train to childhood. Your book gave it to me, and I took the ride.”

  But you can, without a ticket, revisit your childhood any time. Just slip out of the shallow manmade canal and into the deep water.

  Nguyen Nhat Anh is an acclaimed writer and poet who has authored books for both children and adults. He won the Southeast Asian Writers Award in 2010. Ticket to Childhood, his first book to appear in English has sold hundred of thousands of copies worldwide. He lives in Ho Chi Minh City.

  Jacket design by Anthony Morais

  Jacket illustration: © Shutterstock

  Author photograph courtesy of the author

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