Flowers Before Bread

I was fourteen when literature found me, not in the pages of a textbook, not through perfect grammar or clever punctuation, but in a quiet room with a teacher Ms Phương, who saw something more.

I wasn’t the best student in the class, not in literature anyway. Numbers came easier. Logic felt safer. Words were slippery things - too soft, too open, too close to the truth. But I was sent to study after school anyway, to catch up. To be good. To make my father proud.

Ms. Phương wasn’t like the others. She didn’t drown my sentences in red ink or make me feel small for getting it wrong. One afternoon, she handed back my paper, looked at me and said, “God gave everyone a gift. Yours is your heart. Don’t be afraid to use it in your words.”

That was the moment something cracked open. Just enough for light to slip in.

I didn’t write to impress. I wrote because it felt like breathing. Because stories held me when no one else did. Because somewhere between expectations and corrections, I finally heard someone say: you’re allowed to feel.

The next assignment was a contest to get into Quốc Học high school. “The eyes are the windows to the soul- how has literature touched yours?” My grammar stumbled, but my heart did not. I wrote of the girl with the matchsticks. Of poetry scratched into war trenches. Of the quote that said if I had two coins, I’d buy bread with one and a flower with the other. Because I believed - still do - that the soul needs feeding just as much as the body.

The essay wasn’t perfect. But it was mine. And somehow, that was enough. I got in.

I kept writing - quietly, constantly. For the girl sitting on the curb after school with scraped knees and a too-old soul. For the boy who couldn’t cry but whispered poems into the dark. I left scraps of kindness for strangers on park benches. Words were the only currency I had, and I spent them generously.

Writing became refuge. A room of my own when the house was too loud. When my parents’ tempers rose and the silence after fights echoed through the walls. I didn’t write to escape - I wrote to stay. To soften what felt too sharp. To survive in a world that didn’t often ask me what I felt.

And then, I left.

At seventeen, we boarded a plane to America. I traded my mother tongue for silence. Vietnamese, once a current that carried me, became a whisper in my throat. English wasn’t poetry - it was armor. Something I wore to get through school, to get through conversations, to get by.

For a long time, I stopped writing. Not because the stories were gone, but because I couldn’t find the words to match what lived inside me. It’s a strange thing - to be a writer without language. Like having wings but no sky.

But the heart remembers. Even when the mouth forgets, the soul keeps humming.

And now, years later, I’m beginning again. Slowly. Bravely. One word at a time. One memory at a time. The girl who bought flowers with her last dollar is still here. I write now not to prove, not to perfect - but to say: this is how I survived. This is how I loved. This is how I’m still becoming.

Because even now, if I had two dollars -

I’d still choose the flower.

To my son: I see that same kindness in you. That quiet way you notice the world. If you ever wonder where it came from - it came from here. From stories and match girls and poems shared like prayers. From a mother who always believed beauty and bread both matter. And from a heart, just like yours, that always leads with love.

A note to you, dear reader:

Maybe you’ve forgotten your voice too. Maybe you traded it for something that helped you survive. I hope this reminds you that your softness still matters. That your story still matters. That even now, you’re allowed to choose beauty - not as a luxury, but as a way back to yourself.