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    Ticket to Childhood: A Novel
    Ticket to Childhood: A Novel
    Ticket to Childhood: A Novel
    Ebook86 pages1 hour

    Ticket to Childhood: A Novel

    By Nguyen Nhat Anh

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    About this ebook

    “This charming short work recalls The Little Prince in its depiction of childhood sensibilities pitted against an often illogical and absurd adult world” (Publishers Weekly).
     
    A fable for all ages and a massive bestseller in the author’s home country of Vietnam, Ticket to Childhood captures the texture of childhood in all of its richness. Narrated by a man looking back, it explores the small miracles and tragedies, the misadventures and misdeeds, that made up his life. We meet his long-lost friends, none of whom can forget how rich their lives once were. Even if Nguyen Nhat Anh can’t take us back to our own younger days, he proves himself a master at capturing those innocent times with great deftness—in a novel that also offers “a startlingly vivid portrait of 21st-century Vietnam and its growing pains” (Shelf Awareness).
     
    “A hugely appealing and engaging author.” —The New Criterion
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateNov 26, 2014
    ISBN9781468310320
    Ticket to Childhood: A Novel

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      Book preview

      Ticket to Childhood - Nguyen Nhat Anh

      1. When the day is done

      One day, I suddenly realized that life was dull and boring.

      The first time this happened, I was eight.

      I had the same feeling at fifteen, when I failed my high school entrance exam; at twenty-four, when I got my heart broken; at thirty-three, when I lost my job; and at forty, when I was fully employed and happily married, but then it didn’t matter.

      There are many shades of boredom, though, and eight was a dark year: I felt that the future had nothing in store for me.

      Many years later, I would discover that philosophers had, for millennia, been turning their minds inside out like a pocket looking for the meaning of life, to no avail. But when I was eight, I understood: there was nothing new out there.

      The same sun shone every day; the same curtain of darkness dropped every night; the wind in the eaves, and in the trees, moaned the same moans; the same birds sang their same songs; the crickets always chirped the same chirping; and it was true for the chickens squawking the same squawks. In short, all of life was of a sameness: worn out and dull.

      Before going to bed every night, I knew for sure what the next day would bring.

      Let me tell you: In the morning, I would try my best not to get out of bed. I would pretend to be fast asleep, ignoring my mother’s voice and lying there like a log while she shook my shoulders and tickled my feet. Once she roused me, I had to go brush my teeth and wash my face before being forced to sit at the breakfast table, listlessly chewing on something disgusting. My mother’s major concern was to make me (and the whole family, for that matter) eat balanced meals, whereas the only food I really liked—instant noodles—she considered junk.

      It is good to care about your health, obviously, especially as you get older. Who would deny it? Not me. A journalist once asked me which of humanity’s most common cares worried me the most: health, love, or money. Love, I said, was first, and health was second, and money can’t buy either, or so they say.

      But that’s for adults to think about. At eight, I didn’t like to eat balanced meals, and was forced to eat them, which I did reluctantly, which is why my mother always complained about me.

      After finishing breakfast, I’d hurry to find my schoolbooks and to load my backpack. I’d find one book on top of the TV, another on the refrigerator, and still another buried in a pile of bedding. Of course I’d forget something, as I always did. And then I’d dash out of the house.

      I walked to school, because it was near my house, but I never had a chance to enjoy the walk—I always had to run because I always got up late, brushed my teeth late, ate breakfast late, and wasted a lot of time searching for my stuff. Of this cycle my father said: Son, when I was your age, I always neatly loaded my backpack the night before, so the next morning, I just grabbed it! I don’t know if this was true or not—I obviously wasn’t around at the time—but now that I’m my father’s age, I say the same thing to my kids. I also boast about hundreds of other sensible things that I also never actually did. Sometimes, for our own reasons, we make up a story about our past, and keep repeating it until we can’t remember that we made it up, and if we continue to tell the same story over and over, we end up believing it.

      Anyway, as I said, that’s adult stuff.

      Now back to my story about being eight.

      I always took a seat in the back of the classroom. It was a gloomy spot, but it gave me the chance to chat, argue, or play tricks without fear of being caught by the teacher. But the best thing about sitting in the back was that the teacher never called me to the front to recite a lesson.

      How did I get away with this? Think about it: you probably have a lot of friends who aren’t on your mind all the time, right? Our memories have limited storage space, like a closet, so the names and faces that don’t get a lot of use are stored in the back, where you forget them until you see a familiar face on the street. Then, suddenly, you remember they exist. Hey, weird—I haven’t seen him for ages, you think. Last year, when I was broke, he lent me a twenty.

      Likewise with my teacher: out of sight, out of mind. The thick hedge of dark heads in front of me blocked her view

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