Re: Personal story to share

[Kien Pham]

Atsuko and Friends:

We have a promising author in our midst.  See emails below.

Our dear Atsuko wrote that short fiction (scary) story and got a literature prize in Palo Alto!

Make sure you have someone nearby when you read her story lest you dare not go to the bathroom alone. :-)

By the time stamp on this email, you can see I read it at 3:30am under delayed jetlag in San Jose.  Now, I am too scared to go pee alone.  I need Mom. :-)

Atsuko:  We love and admire you.  Keep writing.  You really are good at this.  Captain Tim shoots laser into the sky and you shoot warm fear into the heart.

Let's see if I can go back to sleep now.

Love to all of you, kp

Kien Pham

Imperfect Servant of the People

VN Mobile and WhatsApp: +84-98-5656-566

"You make a living by what you get and a life by what you give"

Sorry if you see typos.  This email comes from a blind man on mobile device!

On Jun 30, 2026, at 7:22 PM, Lam Nguyen <lamn...@redsquarevietnam.com> wrote:

Dear anh Kien,

Please see below the  short story Atsuko wrote a few months ago,  awarded Second Place in the Palo Alto Weekly's Short Story Contest. Best Regards, QL./.

BEGIN:

A Birthday Visitor

Dusk is slowly giving way to the dark blue curtain of night — the hour when light fades away and ordinary households settle into the warm ritual of the evening meal, mothers’ voices calling for children, and children’s laughter gather around the table.

And yet, at this ordinary hour, a young man stood alone at the bus terminal of the station.

Late twenties, perhaps. He gave no sign of knowing that the next bus wouldn't come for another hour and a half — no glance at a wristwatch, no reaching for a cell phone. He simply stood, his gaze drifting toward some middle distance, as though watching something the rest of the world couldn't see. Call a taxi, at least, the taxi driver thought. You have a phone, don't you?

The young man's face was unfamiliar — a stranger, clearly, though not the tourist sort. No rolling suitcase, no backpack slung over his shoulder. Odd. And yet, not unsettling, threatening nor unnerving. Almost peaceful in his posture and gaze. His skin held the deep, honest tan of someone who worked beneath the sun in open sky, and his build carried the quiet solidity.
Solidity of the nature, maybe the ocean. He looked like the fishing lads from around town — but this face, the driver was certain, he had had not seen. Or had he? Somewhere in the folds of memory, there was a flicker of recognition he couldn't quite place.

It was, strictly speaking, none of a taxi driver's business. The day's work was done. The meter was turned off. Home was waiting, as it did every evening, in its reliable, routine way. And yet
— something stirred him. Call it curiosity. Something told him to converse with this young man. Call it the instinct of a man who has spent a lifetime reading strangers whom he has driven in and out of the town.

He rolled down the window.

"Hey — did you miss the bus? The next one won't be here for a good while. Need a lift?"

The young man turned. "Ah — yes. Please. But... I've left my wallet behind."

"If it's nearby, don't worry about it. I've already clocked out anyway. I’m on my way home. I will
drop you off. No charge."

"Thank you. I'm sorry to trouble you."

"No phone either? You haven't lost them, I hope?"

He knew it was meddlesome the moment he said it. But the young man reminded him, in some ways, of his own son. A young man of his son’s age is too proud to admit he is in trouble and avoid parental interference. Best not ask anything more. The driver kept his well-intended parental meddling at bay.

 
The young man approached and slid into the back seat without hesitation. Carrying a passenger for free was against the company policy, of course — but an act of kindness, the driver decided, was a reasonable explanation. Besides, a small town taxi company never enforces its policies.

They leave it to the drivers’ discretion.

"Could you drop me at the post office in Minato-cho, 3-chome?" "Sure thing. Off we go."
"Visiting family?"

"Something like that… Ah, a distant relative." "From Tokyo?"

"No. A bit farther."

His answers came briefly and vaguely, without elaboration. The driver recognized it well. After years behind the wheel, you learned to read the silences and vagueness as easily as the words. Some passengers fill the cab with the whole of their lives, in detail, with emotions, even asking for endorsement; others barely breathed. You adapt and adjust. You let people be.

Minatocho, 3-chome, he thought. The ward that barely survived the Great Tsunami.

He'd begun to say it aloud — something about the Tsunami, about how close that neighborhood had come to disappearing entirely — but stopped himself. It’s been fifteen years. What did that mean to someone this young? He would have been a child. Maybe the memory was faint, not personal, something like a TV documentary. Or maybe it lived in him the way televised disasters do — enormous, and terrifying. Either way, it wasn't the driver's story to open. Frankly, the
driver doesn’t know how to open that story to a stranger. In his township, there are certain ways to open that story, but not with a stranger.

His own memory of that day lives vividly, every day, likely forever. He had been driving when it came — the waves that swallowed the whole road, houses, telephone poles, shops, trees, trailers, trucks, buses, baby carriages, baseball bats, basketballs, bicycles, running shoes, backpacks, dog leashes, Hello Kitty sandals… The waves turned his taxi into a vessel adrift in a gray, roaring swirl. He remembers thinking, with a strange and weightless calm: So this is how it ends. Then nothing. Then, hours later, he saw a white ceiling and a face leaning over him. A nurse, concerned-eyed, middle-aged with tightly permed hair with streaks of gray, wearing a green striped turtleneck under her white uniform. Oddly bright orange lipstick. Every time he recalls that day, it comes with seemingly unnecessary visual details.

"Near the post office — that's close to the Wakame-ya seaweed shop, isn't it?"
 

"Yes, that's right." The young man's voice brightened slightly, warmed in the ending. "I’m going
to the owner's fiftieth birthday celebration. She is a distant relative."

Ah. The driver felt the years move through him like a quiet tide. The Wakame-ya’s owner — she is fifty already. He remembered her from before. He remembered the woman she had been in the wreckage: a young, hollow-eyed, devastated by the absence of the boy beside her. She carried that absence everywhere. Her son was a lively child like many others. The kind of a boy the whole neighborhood seemed to know. In fact, the whole neighborhood knew all the boys and girls who were taken by the sea into the unreachable distance and depth that day. Their absence turned the ruined town into something more than rubble — a silence, a grief that sat in the streets of the town and wouldn't leave.

The taxi company had nearly collapsed. Six months of nothing — no wages, savings were dwindling. A little bit of help from disaster relief funds and the generosity of strangers were the lifeline. The whole town had seemed to teeter at the edge of erasure. And then, slowly, quietly, and almost astonishingly, the town kept breathing. It did not become a modern era ruins.
Townsfolk did not leave. They stayed. Not merely out of inertia, but out of something that looked, improbably, like determination. And then — stranger still — some people came. Young people from Tokyo and beyond, arriving not to visit but to stay, some rolling up their sleeves, some quietly comforting and caring for the injured, putting down roots, becoming, over fifteen years, as local as the salty air itself. Disaster, it turned out, could remake a place as surely as it unmade one. The driver wasn't entirely sure he believed the town will recover. And yet here it was — the evidence, living and breathing, all around him. Even the taxi company and the Wakame-ya seaweed shop.

This young man, perhaps, was one of those — a wanderer drawn by some invisible thread, showing up wallet-less and bus-less at a long-distance relative’s birthday party. He was probably curious about the town’s recovery story. Maybe he is jobless and has nothing to lose. Maybe he has friends – Tokyoites, young urban refugees who escaped the big shiny corporate life, who came after the disaster and became locals. Now sporting the suntan of the native fishermen. And yet, something does not add up. It’s the youth, the driver reflected. Youth often does not require logical explanations.

Near the Wakame-ya seaweed shop, the sound of laughter spilled from somewhere behind the wooden hut storefront only six feet wide — warm and unhurried, the chatter of folks who had eaten well and had good number of sips of sake. The young man stepped out of the cab, bowed his head briefly, and offered a quiet "I'm truly sorry for the trouble" — and then, with something almost like eagerness pulling at his heels, he disappeared down the narrow alley beside the shop.

Three days later, a fare brought the driver back to that same corner. He parked a moment, stepped out, and looked in on the Wakame-ya seaweed shop. The owner stood behind the counter, arranging packets with brisk, familiar hands. Fifty years old, she looked perhaps forty-two. The shop had done that for her, people said — given her hands something necessary to do, given her days a reason to move forward, and reasons to be jovial and even chipper. After the loss of her son, she had drifted for a time through the hours like mist. And then one morning, without warning, she had decided: a shop - a place to sell the bounties from the sea to the people who remained and who visited. It had saved her not all at once, but incrementally, task by task, box by box, strand by strand of seaweed she organized for the patrons.

"I heard it was your birthday," the driver said. "Happy Belated Birthday."

"Oh, you heard? Everyone knows! There's no hiding it now. Fifty — can you imagine? Feels like life is running out from under me."

"You're only halfway there," he said. "Everything's still ahead."

She laughed — the genuine kind, unguarded. "It was a good evening, actually. Just us, the old friends in the neighborhood. Fifteen years now, and we changed a bit, you know. We were… less 'how sad,' and more 'do you remember when?.' More laughing than crying, for once. It felt like..." She paused, her eyes going somewhere else for a moment. "It felt like my son had come back into the room. Everyone was laughing the way he used to make us laugh. He was going to be a fisherman, you know. He always said so. He would have been twenty-seven this year — a proper young man, out on the water every morning. He was bad at school and textbooks, but so fearless in the sea. On stormy days, he'd stand on the breakwater just to watch the big waves.
Like they called to him."

The driver almost opened his mouth.

"And the young man? — Th relative who came? — I dropped him off that night—"

Something stopped him. Not a sound exactly. A feeling — as though someone just behind his shoulder had pressed a quiet finger to their lips. He turned. No one was there, of course.

He stood very still.

"Hey? Are you alright?", the birthday woman asked.

He came back to himself. "Yes -- nothing. Nothing at all. Happy birthday, truly. Take care of yourself. Another fifty years!" And he returned to the car with more haste than he'd intended.

He recalled over and over, a hundred times on the drive home.

He had picked the young man up. He was certain. The conversation -- he told me about the birthday -- the route, the sound of laughter from behind the seaweed shop -- all of it was solid in his memory, clear as crystal. But the meter had been off. There was no record of the trip.
Nothing to prove it had happened at all.

And then -- carefully, the way you might handle something fragile -- he tried to reconstruct the young man's face.

It drifted and settled.
 

And where it settled, he saw the owner of the Wakame-ya seaweed shop. The same cheek bones. The same quiet small wrinkle at the edge of the eyes. Late twenties. A fisherman's build. A tan earned by wind and water.

A boy who had loved the sea so much he used to stand on the breakwater in a storm, just to be closer to it, fifteen years ago. He is now twenty-seven.

Outside, the harbor lay still beneath the early evening sky -- patient, luminous, and merciful. The sea that had taken so much, now giving, as it always had for centuries: fish and kelp and livelihood, the bounty that the town had always known how to receive. The children who survived had grown up and returned to the water's edge. Fishermen. Market workers.
Shopkeepers who sell the sea's harvest and cheerfully thanked it every morning as they lifted the barrels and boxes.

And one of the boys who hadn't survived -- who had said, at twelve years old, that he wanted to be a fisherman when he grew up -- perhaps he had simply kept his word.

Twenty-seven now. Broad-shouldered. Capable. At home on the water in a way no years of living could have taught him any better.

Perhaps he slips aboard the fishing boats at dawn, unseen, riding out with the crews each morning. Perhaps he watches over the nets and the weather, and the fishermen who still love the sea regardless.

The harbor holds its peace. It holds peace on brightly sunny days and dark stormy nights. People of the township gather at the harbor for jovial matsuri festivals and for solemn prayers, to dance and sing, to rhythm and syncopate taiko drums, and for chants and laughter.

The waves come in and go out again, hundred times, thousand times, the same as always. And somewhere in the disappearing sunset on the water, something almost like a shadow of a young man stands. He is glad, but unavoidably nostalgic. Happy Birthday, Mom. As the curtain of darkness slowly surrounds the harbor, the shadow of the man floats away to the horizon.

END.

Lam Nguyen (Ms.)

Special Assistant

Mobile: +84-814-364-472

Email: lamn...@redsquarevietnam.com

Red Square Vietnam LLC

R601, 6th Floor, Beautiful Saigon Building, 2 Nguyen Khac Vien Street, Tan My Ward, Ho Chi Minh City

On Wed, Jul 1, 2026 at 9:10 AM Kien Pham <kien...@neverchange.com> wrote:

Kien Pham
Imperfect Servant of the People
VN Mobile and WhatsApp: +84-98-5656-566

"You make a living by what you get and a life by what you give"

Sorry if you see typos.  This email comes from a blind man on mobile device!

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Atsuko Jenks <ats...@j-accelerator.com>
Date: Wed, Jul 1, 2026 at 2:44 AM
Subject: Personal story to share
To: Tim Jenks <tsj...@gmail.com>
Cc: Pham Kien <kien...@neverchange.com>, Pham ToAnh <toan...@neverchange.com>

Kien,

As we left Karl Strauss, you made a short comment  about souls wandering in some villages in Vietnam. I believe your comment was made as part of a story about Susan. While listening to you, I reflected on a short story I wrote a few months ago. This was the first piece of "fiction" I wrote, and I eventually submitted it to the Palo Alto Weekly's Short Story Contest. To my surprise and delight, I received a congratulation yesterday from Palo Alto Weekly for being awarded Second Place :) 

In your busy schedule of work, work, work (and sleep and eat) and more work (this is according to ToAnh), if you find 10 min. of casual reading time, please open the attachment. This is the "Second Place" award winning short story. 

Hugs to you and your Phamily, 

Atsuko Jenks  

Managing Partner

ats...@j-accelerator.com

www.j-accelerator.com

[Anna Spevak]

What an absolutely beautifully written story, Atsuko. Thank you for sharing with us, Kien.

XO Anna

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[Walt Spevak]

Atsuko....you write beautifully.  

Thanks Kien for sharing.

[Atsuko Jenks]

Thank you for your kind words, Walt and Special Anna ❤️

Atsuko 

[M Margaret McKeown]

Thank you. This is beautiful. 

Thanks for sharing Kien. 

Get Outlook for iOS

---

From: Atsuko Jenks <ajen...@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, 02 July 2026 09:37:15
To: Walt Spevak <wsp...@gmail.com>
Cc: Kien Pham <kien...@neverchange.com>; GSB Vietnam 3 <gsbvi...@googlegroups.com>; Nathalie Roff <nho...@gmail.com>; ToAnh Pham <toan...@neverchange.com>; Susan Magee <su...@susanbmagee.com>; M Margaret McKeown <Margaret...@ca9.uscourts.gov>; KP Support Team <kpsupp...@vnfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: Personal story to share

 

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[Susan Magee]

Atsuko, Kien and friends,

Atsuko, I love your short story.  It evokes imagery and emotions. It is like reading poetry.  By all means keep writing. You write beautifully. 

If you will, please share new things you write with me. I published a book in 2012. My second book--WILD CONVERSATIONS/ The Wisdom of African Animals--is being launched this August. 

All the best,

Susan

Susan B. Magee

Modern Mystic | SusanBMagee.com

Author, Into the Light: The Healing Art of Kalman Aron | watch the video

Guided Circles of Meditation & Healing | Listen now | 

202.285.2200 | Blog | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram

 

On Jul 2, 2026, at 4:09 AM, Kien Pham <kien...@neverchange.com> wrote:



[Atsuko Jenks]

Susan and Kien,

Thank you for the encouragement to keep writing. I will share it with you, Susan, when I have something worth sharing 😉
Your comment about "poetry" is interesting... I have been reading my mother's poetry since she passed away a few years ago. She wrote more than 2000 pieces and it might have affected my writing. I wrote this story in Japanese first, and the Japanese prose definitely has a poetry-like feeling. 

Thank you again for your kind words of encouragement. 

Atsuko 

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[Winthrop Watson]

Atsuko - This is a beautiful story.

Kien - Thanks so much for sharing.

Winthrop 

On Jul 2, 2026, at 5:01 PM, Atsuko Jenks <ajen...@gmail.com> wrote:



To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/gsbvietnam3/CAPMQ5j_8WK3k7RijXQsRBC0jZqeqwFyVh4tca9g6FZecRj4V4w%40mail.gmail.com.

[Mary Ann Eddy]

Lovely!

MAE

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/gsbvietnam3/9662C7B7-678E-40A9-A0AD-54F0BC5727DF%40gmail.com.