“I don’t even know where in the city he lives,” I admitted. “Just that it’s near the financial district. That could be anywhere.”

My mother clutched my hand. “Oh, Hanh. What are we going to do?”

The whispers turned to open mockery by my sixth month. I was harvesting rice in a neighbor’s field—needing the money, unable to stop working despite my condition—when a group of women passed by.

“Shameless,” one of them said loudly enough for me to hear. “Pregnant and unmarried. What would her grandmother think?”

“Her grandmother is probably rolling in her grave,” another replied.

“No respectable man will touch her now. She’ll be alone forever.”

I kept my head down, kept working, kept moving. Because stopping meant acknowledging their words, and acknowledging them meant letting them win.

Someone started throwing garbage in front of our house. Rotting vegetables, torn paper, once even a dead rat. My father cleaned it up without comment, but I could see the shame weighing on him, aging him years in a matter of months.