Lê Thị Hồng was fifty years old; she was sitting at the kitchen table at four thirty-four on the first of May, in the house in Bắc Giang where her bricklayer husband still slept with the radio on in the other room, the radio giving the news of the mangosteen market of the North-Central Belt (market down nine percent, average price fifteen thousand đồng a kilo); she had been holding the phone for forty minutes, ever since — at three fifty-four exactly, three fifty-four she had not seen with her own eye but with the eye of the phone, because the hours in the kitchen were marked by the phone's clock — the video call from her daughter Linh had come in from a Philippine number and had cut off after nine seconds.

Nine seconds: what fits into nine seconds; how many words; how many images. Hồng had counted the seconds during the call (an old habit, one that came to her from the years in the shirt factory, from the stitching of a sleeve, six seconds a sleeve if the machine ran well, eight if the machine's belt was tired); she had seen, in those nine seconds, Linh's face, in close-up, against a background of white wall blotched with damp that was not a wall of their house nor of any house the mother knew; she had heard Linh's voice, a voice that was Linh's voice but in a language, an intonation, a rhythm that were not those of the Linh who had left ten months before.

There had been one syllable. Linh had said "mam," not "mẹ"; and "mam" — the mother knew it because she had heard the girls from the north of Lạng Sơn province say it to their own mothers when she went to the market in Hà Nội, when she still went to the market in Hà Nội — was not a pronunciation of their house: it was a pronunciation you learned by listening to Chinese television, or by listening to a roommate from the north; and behind Linh's voice, in those nine seconds, there was another voice, a man's, in Mandarin, a voice that said, with the same intonation she herself used to say "enough!" to a dog that had got into the pantry: "enough, hang up."

Hồng had cleaned the kitchen three times, afterward, while she waited: once with the wet cloth; once with the dry cloth; once running her fingertips along the edge of the sink to gather the sand her husband carried home from the building sites under his shoes. Bắc Giang sand, reddish. She wondered whether the white blotched wall was in Manila; she wondered whether the lavender plastic handcuffs she thought she had glimpsed — a reflection, a flash — at her daughter's right wrist, under the sleeve of the pyjama (the pyjama: a faded beige the mother had never bought for her), were really handcuffs or some new electronic watch the girls wore now. She wondered these things without allowing herself to answer. To answer meant to know; to know meant to decide; to decide, in the kitchen, at four in the morning, before a Formica table with a crack down the middle covered by a straw coaster, was still premature.

The phone rang. Same number. Hồng answered; she saw her daughter on video, in close-up: Linh's eyes were Linh's eyes, the eyebrows were the eyebrows, the mole under the left jaw (a tiny mole the father had had on the same jaw and that she had carried as an inheritance) was the mole. Linh's voice was calm. It said: "mama, everything's fine, I'm in a police station, I'm well, the police are here." Linh spoke northern Vietnamese, perfect, scholastic, slow — a Vietnamese that was not the Vietnamese of home, it was a Vietnamese you speak to be recorded.

Hồng decided not to ask her where she was; decided not to ask her whether it was really the police; decided — in a span measured in breaths, not in seconds — to ask her one thing only, a thing the daughter did not expect, a thing the daughter, if she was free to answer, would answer one way, and that, if she was not free, she would answer another.

She said: "Linh, tell me our dog's name."

Linh was silent for two seconds. (Two seconds: the time of a sleeve, not even, in the factory.) Then she said: "Mèo."

The dog was called Tâm. Mèo was the neighbor's cat, the cat that came into their house to steal the heads of the dried fish the mother left on the windowsill.

Hồng nodded, on video, so that her daughter would see her nod. She said: "good girl." She ended the call.

She opened the kitchen window. The season's rain wet the mangosteens in the yard, and the smell — a smell of earth and freshly cut red rind — entered the room like a second inhabitant. She dialed the number of the Vietnamese consulate in Manila (she had written it down five months earlier, on the back of a water bill, hoping never to have to use it); she waited three rings; when a man's voice answered in official Vietnamese, Hồng said, slowly, with the cadence of one composing a prayer: "my daughter Lê Thị Linh, twenty-seven years old, is alive, she is held by Chinese men in the Philippines, today is the first of May, it is four forty-two, take this down."