This is still in a really rough draft stage. Please mind the gap: grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
2 Weeks go.
Kieu and her siblings were the poorest of the poor, who lived near Le Loi and Le Van Liem Street in district 3, Sa Dec, Dong Thap, Vietnam. The house mostly empty excepted for few near-end-of-life furniture: a table with a broken leg, an altar on top of a closet with a left door missing, a wooden bed built to fit one lie scatter on the corner and on top of it were blankets with more holes than stiches.
Most of their days revolved around finding the next meal; a simple luxury that many enjoyed, but to the poor children of Vietnam, where a family with no source of sustainability and no help from government for any social programs, even thought the country proudly stated in their slogan that it’s a socialist country, finding food for daily living is a struggle. Being resourceful Kieu’s brothers learned early in life that scouring grub was an important skill early in life.
Even at a young age, for Vuong, who was seven; a skin covered bones, with set of ribcage protruded from his torso, frail, unnaturally unbalanced head compared to the rest of his body, had to wake up at the crack of dawn to follow Kieu out to a nearby river. Grabbed his fishing rod, walked zigzag in a morbid sleep to the riverbank. While they poked around for earthworm, “I’m hungry,” Vuong would often complained, before they even started. An, the oldest of the boys threaten the young Vuong into submission of finding worms for baits every time Vuong protest, regardless of how tired and exhausted from lack of nutrition.
After couple hours of angling, if they got lucky Kieu would cheerfully sell the big catch for some meager pennies, buy some treats to quench their starvations. But often time, in an environment that catered to the poor, the catches were seldom just a few sunfishes the size of two fingers. Kieu being the oldest had the responsibility to clean, and cook the fish, often added more salt than needed during the cooking stage to ward off her brother from overbearing the meager rations that was available to them.
After an early morning excursion at the river, the children hurried home, dressed and went to school, ignoring the crucial meals of the day: breakfast. It was not that they didn’t like to eat. It just there was nothing to eat really. The fish that they caught was the meal for the day and if they didn’t catch any, it would be the watercrest that Kieu had to collect in the nearby paddy or the sweet potatoes that Kieu secret steal from the field across the school. Every night at the dinner table, the sure plate that could be count upon were white rice and fish sauce, everything else was extravagance.
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