The name goes on the lantern in the first month of the new year.

It is not her name. Tú Bà chooses it in about nine seconds off the top of a list she has kept for twenty-two years, and it is two characters, and it means nothing much, and it is the name that is said in Hàng Châu for four years and that Kim Trọng will read off a lantern in the street of the lantern-makers and cross out.

There is a fee at the door.

Eleven men pay it on the first evening. There is a screen of eight panels and a low table and one lamp, and she plays the court piece, which is thin and cold and very fine, and she says perhaps forty words in three hours and eleven merchants go home and tell people.

Four of them come back inside the month. Two of them bring somebody.

By the third month there is a fee to be told the date.

She is very good.

That is the thing that will be hardest to hold in the mind later, when it matters, when a man in a tribunal is trying to decide what she is. She is extraordinarily good at it, better than Tú Bà has seen in twenty-two years, and there are evenings when the room goes so quiet that the boy filling the lamps in the courtyard stops to listen, and she can feel the whole house bending toward her, and she is running it.

An evening in the second year, because the book has said she is good at it four times and has not once shown it.

There are four of them. A rice factor called Đường who has been six times. A cousin of his, first visit, brought to be impressed. A man from the salt office. And a young one of about twenty-five, a nephew of somebody, who has been given the evening as a present and who arrived at the gate an hour early and had to be walked round the block by the boy.

She comes in at the correct moment, which is not when they are ready and not when they have begun to wonder.

She sits.

She does not speak for a count that she has never told anybody and that Tú Bà gave her in the third week. In that time the four men rearrange themselves without knowing they are doing it, and the young one stops talking, and the cousin, who came in loud, puts his cup down.

Then she says the second thing rather than the first thing.

The first thing is you are welcome. The second thing is: "Ông Đường. Your brother's boat."

Đường's face opens like a door.

His brother's boat went aground at the bar in the eleventh month and he mentioned it once, four months ago, for about nine words, in the middle of something else. He has not thought about the fact that he mentioned it since the moment he did. He talks about the boat for eleven minutes and it is the happiest he has been in a fortnight, and at the end of it he says, to the table, "She remembers everything," and it is not quite true and it is exactly what he was going to say.

She has produced the fourth-least important thing she knows about him. That is deliberate. The most important thing she knows about Đường is that his wife's family have money and he does not, and if she produced that he would go home cold and not know why.

The cousin she leaves alone for half an hour.

He came in wanting to be unimpressed, which is the fifth kind and is not on Tú Bà's list, and the way to handle it is to be visibly not working on him. So she does not, and he spends thirty minutes watching a room enjoy itself without him in it, and by the fourth cup he says something into a gap, deliberately, to be heard, and she turns and gives him the whole of her attention for four minutes and he is finished.

The salt man wants to be forgiven for something. She has known that since he came through the door and she will never find out what it is. She gives him the chess board.

And the young one, who is twenty-five and has been given an evening as a present and is frightened, gets the thing nobody in that room can see her doing, which is that twice in three hours she asks him a question he can answer.

That is all. Two questions with an answer in them, at the two moments where the conversation was about to go over his head and leave him sitting there. He goes home believing he acquitted himself well in front of three older men, and he will believe it for thirty years, and it is the single most expensive piece of work she does that evening and no one will ever pay her for it.

At the hour of the pig she plays the war piece.

At four minutes before the moment when Đường would have begun, faintly, to think about the road, she puts her hand flat on the strings.

"Ông Đường," she says. "You have the tide."

He has the tide. He had forgotten the tide. He is up and grateful and slightly wrong-footed and he will be back inside the month, and all four of them go out into the lantern-makers' street at the exact minute at which they were most content to be in the room.

The boy shuts the gate.

Kiều goes up the east stair, and sits on the edge of the bed, and takes the pins out of her hair one at a time and lines them up on the table.

Three hours. Perhaps two hundred words. Not one of them true.

She is twenty years old.

She learns the town through the men who come.

She knows, by the second year, which of the four rice factors is in trouble and which one is lying about being in trouble. She knows the name of the sub-prefect's mistress and the name of his wife's brother and which of the two costs him more. She knows there is going to be a difficulty about the river tax in the autumn eleven weeks before there is.

She never once uses any of it. She simply cannot stop collecting it, and it sits in her, and it is the only part of the work that is hers.

There is a ledger. She keeps it herself.

That begins in the second month as an argument and becomes, by the fourth, an arrangement nobody remarks on. She checks Tú Bà's arithmetic twice a month and finds an error in the fifth month, eleven taels, in the house's favor, and says so, and it is corrected, and neither woman remarks on it then or ever.

The four on the upper floor do not resent her, which she is braced for and which does not happen.

Cúc explains it in the second year, at the back of the kitchen, in about eleven words: the door fee is new money and new money is not their money, and a house with a name on the lantern gets a better class of trouble in the yard at midnight.

Đào resents her. Đào is twenty-four and was the one before, for about a year and a half, in a smaller way, and she is civil for four years and it costs her, and Kiều knows it and does not do anything about it because there is nothing to do.

Hạnh is nineteen and asks her to teach her to read.

She does. It takes fourteen months and it is done in the mornings and it is the single most useful thing Kiều does with those four years. Hạnh is not clever and works like a mule and gets there. In the fourth year she writes a letter to her mother at Thanh Hà, four lines, in her own hand, and has to be taken outside afterward.

And there is a salt inspector called Ông Hoè who comes for chess.

He is sixty-one and he comes on the second and fourth evenings of the month for four years and he pays the full fee every time and he has never in four years asked for anything except chess.

He is a bad player. He is very bad. He opens the same way every time, which is wrong, and he knows it is wrong and cannot stop, and he talks the whole way through about his wife, who died in the year of the flood, and about a house at Vô Giang with a wall he is having rebuilt, which is never finished in four years and which she comes to suspect does not exist.

She loses in the ninth move. Every time. Four years.

She could beat him in six and they both know it, and there is one evening in the third year when she is tired and does it in seven by accident and he sits back and looks at the board for a while and says, "Ah," and it is the worst moment of that entire year.

She never does it again.

An evening in the second year. The fourth of the month.

He opens the way he always opens, which is wrong, and she answers the way she always answers, which is the answer that makes it not immediately fatal.

"The wall is up to the second course," he says.

"That is quick."

"It is not quick. It is the fourth time it has been up to the second course." He moves. It is a bad move. "The man says the ground moves. I have been out and stood on the ground and the ground does not move."

"Perhaps it moves in the winter."

"That is what he says." He is pleased that she has said it, because it means he can be indignant about it, which is the entire pleasure of the wall. "That is exactly what he says. He says it moves in the winter and settles in the spring and that we must wait for the spring, and I said, we have had four springs, and he said, ah, but not four winters, and I could not follow him and he knew I could not."

She moves.

"She wanted a wall," he says.

"Yes."

"Not a good wall. A wall. She said it three or four times in the last year and I said we would see about it in the spring."

He moves. It is another bad move and he sees it as his hand comes off the piece and he does not take it back.

Here is what Kiều is doing while he talks.

She is holding, in her head, the shape of a board she could finish in three, and she is playing instead toward a position that will collapse on the ninth move for a reason he will be able to see and be annoyed about for the walk home.

She is keeping her face at nothing, because Tú Bà stood behind a mirror for six weeks.

She is aware that the wall is not being rebuilt, and that it was not being rebuilt last year, and that there is probably no wall, and that a man of sixty-one is coming twice a month at full fee to a house in the lantern-makers' street to talk to somebody about a dead woman's wall.

And she is aware that she is very glad it is the fourth of the month.

That is the part she cannot make come out. She has gone over it perhaps forty times. It is not pity, because pity is cheap and she has plenty. It is that on the second and fourth evenings of the month there is a man at this table who does not want one single thing from her, and who talks for two hours about a wall, and who leaves at the hour of the pig, and it is the only time in four years that she is not working.

Except that she is working. She is losing in the ninth move.

"Ah," says Ông Hoè, four moves later, sitting back. "There. There it is. You have done it again, madam, and I saw it coming and I could not get out of the way of it."

"You were unlucky in the sixth."

"I was stupid in the sixth."

He gets up. He always gets up immediately afterward, which is a courtesy she has never remarked on.

At the door he says what he says every time, which is, "Well. The fourth of next month."

And in the fourth year he stops coming, without any warning at all, between the second and the fourth of the eleventh month.

She never finds out why.

She asks the boy, who asks somebody, who does not know. She thinks about asking Tú Bà and does not, because she is not entitled to and because the asking would tell Tú Bà a thing about her that she would rather not have known.

Sixty-one, and a bad heart, or a son who found out, or a wall finished, or nothing at all.

She keeps the second and fourth of the month clear for three months.

Then she stops.

At the end of an evening she goes up the east stair and sits on the edge of the bed and takes the pins out of her hair one at a time and lines them up on the table, and she looks at the wall, and the wall is clean and the bedding is good and there is a lattice over the window that is nailed.

And on the other side of that wall, on any of four hundred nights, there is whatever there is.

The chapter is not written here. Nobody who has read this far needs it written.