I JUST WANT YOU TO LIKE ME | ✓

▬ 14: domestic bliss...

I fill up the final copper bowl on the altar with fresh water, ensuring that the gap between all seven is equal. I'd like to make more elaborate offerings like fruit and flowers, but since I live in England where I can't pick them for free from the garden year-round, water, light, and incense have to do for now.

Photos of Ba and Bà Ngoại frame the Buddha statue at the centre. All the pictures that go further back on Má's side of the family were lost in the war, and it would be awkward to ask Bà Nội, so the rest of my ancestry is left for me to imagine.

I prostrate thrice and sit in front of the altar to pray. Bà Ngoại taught me a chant for every situation, though I've forgotten most of them by now. I wasn't that interested as a kid, and the language used in them isn't the kind I would use in daily speech. My Vietnamese even in casual conversation stumbles. But I've managed to re-learn the main ones: kinh a di đà, kinh vô lượng thọ, and bát nhã tâm kinh. I found some scripts in English online, but it feels wrong to worship my ancestors in a language so removed from them.

I hope they find their way without photos. I hope they're not lost wandering around Vietnam, ghosts among the living, trying to find the ancestral homes that likely don't exist anymore. I hope that they can hear my prayers, that they know I haven't forgotten them even if the root that connects me to them is weak. I hope they bless me...

Ziri's shuffled footsteps move to my side, followed by the unravelling of his prayer rug. He angles it away from me, toward the qibla, and begins his own prayer.

We don't talk much as we get ready for work. During breakfast, Ziri occasionally interrupts my reading of the newest volume of No. 6, which Sonia put me on, to show me a Vine. He thanks me when I take his empty bowl to wash it. I grab my car keys, and he pulls his bike helmet over his cornrows, apologising when he elbows me in the tiny entrance.

But when we walk down three flights of stairs, he excitedly rambles about the Great Gatsby film coming out next month — not because he cares about the story, he just loves Carey Mulligan and would watch a movie of her eating cereal. He has to cut himself off when I know he still has more to say when we reach the ground floor.

'Anyway, I love you. Enjoy work.'

'I love you.'

*

With his narrowed eyes adhered to the telly with super glue, I have to guide Ziri's hand to the bowl of cá kho tộ so that he doesn't drop it onto the sofa. The news is discussing yet another petition letter left by several Tory MPs to David Cameron to change his stance on legalising gay marriage.

Ziri picks up a piece of cod only to drop it back into his bowl with a hiss. 'Hot.' He finally tears his eyes from the TV to cast me a betrayed look. 'How am I supposed to eat this?'

I snap my chopsticks at him as I sit.

He hums contemptuously. 'Fingers are God's chopsticks, innit. That's an African proverb.'

I wrestle back my smile. 'Wise people,' I muse and watch in my periphery as he tentatively picks up another piece of caramelised fish, blowing on it before he eats it. 'They say "innit" a lot in Africa?'

'I didn't ask for your input.' His voice is sour to cover up the laughter in it.

As much as we hate it, our eyes glue to the telly. The reporter is interviewing one of the Tory MPs. They all look the same to me, so I couldn't name him for a cash price. I've always been too stupid to understand how politics work so, outside of listening to Ziri's rants, I don't normally pay attention. Until now.