Perhaps no one truly lives just one life. For some, memories intertwine, roles trade places, and the soul is reshaped by unseen hands. And only when everything that was once called “me” becomes distorted, do we begin to understand: there are selves too fractured to be named.

Since the light returned after the darkness of conspiracy and injections, An—or rather, the being that once bore that name—was no longer a single person. She was a shattered mirror, each shard reflecting a fractured identity:

• A Vietnamese man who once loved across the shores of prejudice.
• A Western woman bound by an unfulfilled vow.
• A child abused between two cultures.
• A former wife, still in love but unable to return.
• A twin sister—replica of a soul.
• A victim, whose body and memory were violated.
• And above all, a survivor—of the past, of war, of human cruelty.

She—no longer accurately called “he”—was exiled from the West with a letter drenched in pity:
“You do not align with the institution’s current cultural direction.”

What they didn’t say aloud was the truth: fear—fear of a being too complex to classify.
They didn’t know which gender box to place An in, which language, which identity.
So instead of understanding, they erased.

The plane brought her back to Vietnam—the land of her mother, the body’s birthplace. But the moment she stepped off the plane, she knew this was no longer home.

People stared at her with strange looks:
“What kind of boy looks like a girl?”
“Has that mixed-race kid caught some Western sickness?”
“What’s wrong with those eyes—they look like they’re seeing through you?”

No one saw the broken mirror inside her—only unfamiliar traces on the surface.

An international education organization reached out. They didn’t truly care about her past. They simply saw a “multi-purpose” commodity: fluent in English, with a bit of past fame, and above all… an Asian appearance with Western eyes. They offered her a “mission”: to be a bridge in talks about gender, culture, and ethnic reconciliation.

They wanted her to be “the face of identity harmony.”

What they didn’t know was:
She no longer had a face to represent anyone.

She was paired at a public event with a conservative Vietnamese scholar—one who once declared on national television:
“National identity must be pure. No mixing, no distortion, no dilution.”

They made her smile. Made her hold his hand. As if two extremes of the world could be reconciled with a single publicity photo.

She stood there, smiling, while within her, the screams of fragmented souls echoed:

• The man in her whispered: “We are betraying ourselves.”
• The woman sobbed: “We’re being used as tools again.”
• The child asked: “Who’s living in my place?”

No one heard. Only her.

That night, she vomited violently in the hotel bathroom. The face in the mirror was no longer whole. Every time she touched her eyes, she saw someone else’s gaze. Each voice in her head had a different timbre. She no longer knew who she was—nor who was real.

Some mornings, she awoke speaking in a hoarse male voice.
Some days, she looked at her hands and found them foreign, moving without conscious will.
Some nights, she wrote love letters in French—perfectly, without having learned. Each word, each flourish, matched the old woman from her dreams.
Some mornings, she stood before the mirror, applied lipstick, and smiled—not her own smile.

People said she was acting.
But the truth was:
She no longer had a self to perform.

A journalist came to interview her, wanting to write a feature on “the phenomenon of An—the one who carries many souls.”

She agreed, on one condition:
“Do not assign me a label.”

The article was published. It caused a stir.

Some praised her as a living emblem of diversity.
Others condemned her as “a cultural aberration.”
Online, her name was slapped with every tag: genderless, traitorous, progressive symbol, Westernized joke...

She smiled—a smile crumbling at the edges.

“No one is wrong,” she said during a speech.
“Because I am everything you say I am. But also none of it.”

One day, she received a handwritten letter. No sender.
Inside, a single line:

“Every wounded soul needs a place to rest. You are that place. But who will rest you?”

She read it over and over. And finally, wept.

No one had ever asked her that.
Not one person who stood beside her in the crowd had ever stopped to wonder what she needed.

No one asked:
Are you tired? Are you in pain? Are you afraid?

She asked herself.
And didn’t know the answer.

That night, she didn’t sleep.

She wrote a letter to a future “me”—some version of herself, if still alive, who might one day remember:

I was once the face of harmony, but in truth only a stage for endless battles.
I was once the bridge between East and West, but in truth a rope pulled from both ends.
I lived under many names, many genders, many memories.
But at my core, I was just a soul no one believed was real.

If one day you—my future self—read this letter, please forgive me:
Forgive me for wanting to die.
Forgive me for trying to live behind someone else’s face.
Forgive me… for still not knowing who I am.

She folded the letter and tucked it beneath her pillow.

Then looked up at the ceiling—where there were no mirrors, only darkness.

And in that darkness, she was no longer alone.

Because all the broken pieces—man, woman, victim, survivor—were gathering again.
Not to form a perfect figure,
but to form a human—one who needs no name.