An awoke in a stark white room—no windows, just the cold flicker of fluorescent light glinting off a crumbling ceiling. The scent of antiseptic mingled with the metallic tang of old blood, as if her past had never been washed from her body.

She didn’t remember who she was.

Not in the way that people forget things temporarily. It was a complete, rounded, absolute erasure. Even the name “An” was something others called her, not something she recognized as her own. Linh—the woman who claimed to be her friend—had told her it was over now, that the past was a burden best shed.

“You’ll thank me later,” Linh had said as she injected a clear liquid into An’s veins—a so-called memory-erasing drug, imported from China, “quick and clean, like the past never existed.”

But what Linh didn’t know—or refused to admit—was that erasing the past meant erasing identity, roots, and the very blood flowing in her veins.

At night, when shadows crept across the walls, An heard voices within her—soft, spectral echoes in different languages. Some nights, it was French, whispering like wind through the stone corridors of Versailles. Other nights, it was classical Chinese, solemn like ancestral prayers from cold tombs buried deep in Yunnan. But most often, it was the lullaby of a Vietnamese woman—faceless, yet with a voice like stitches across a wounded heart.

She didn’t understand the words, yet they felt familiar—like her blood was not one, but three rivers flowing into the same ocean—an ocean of isolation.

One morning, she walked out of what Linh had called a “mental wellness sanctuary.” The city greeted her with chaotic sounds and faded sunlight. People passed by as though she were invisible. No one looked her in the eye—except for an old bookseller at the mouth of an alley.

“You carry a strange wind,” he said. “Like someone born of three seasons caught in one contrary gust.”

“I’m Vietnamese,” she replied. But even as she spoke, her own voice unsettled her. It held the cadence of southern France, the lingering softness of the North, and a nasal tone both gentle and firm, characteristic of midland Vietnam.

“No,” the old man replied, “You are diluted. And that’s not bad. Just... dangerous in a world that worships purity.”

An left without saying goodbye, but his words clung to her like a shadowed sun behind her back. She began noticing—the glances of passersby. At first careless, then shifting to suspicion, as though they smelled something off in her—something unplaceable.

She sought refuge in an old temple hidden in an alley. There, the old monk asked her to sit and listen to the bell.

“When the bell rings, what do you hear in your heart?”

She closed her eyes. There wasn’t just one bell—but three:
A long chime echoing from Indochina.
A short ring like a French legionnaire’s final farewell.
A strained, trembling hum like Chinese silk torn in half.

“Three spirits reside in one body,” the monk said. “You are a confluence—where memory is not erased but equally divided between three powers.”

“But I no longer know who I am,” An whispered, almost in tears. “Should I live as a Vietnamese? A Frenchwoman? Or as someone with Chinese chemicals running through her blood?”

“You are all of them,” he replied. “That is your burden—and your liberation. You belong to no one place—but you can be the bridge.”

Back in the white room, An was no longer the old An. But she didn’t yet know who the new An was. She began to write.

In Vietnamese—writing about a nameless sorrow.
In French—writing about a love that was never acknowledged.
In Chinese—writing about a promise betrayed by the past.

Each line of text became a bloodstream.
Each page, a peeled layer of skin—searching for the soul that had once been wiped away.
And the more she wrote, the clearer she heard the breath, the sobs, the hopes—of three souls living inside her.

One night, Linh returned. She smiled as she saw An holding a pen, her eyes as clear as rain after a storm.

“You remember now?” Linh asked, worried.

“No. You erased it all,” An said calmly. “But I’m rewriting—crafting a new self. One that carries the blood of three cultures, but is not beholden to any name.”

“How will you live?” Linh asked.

An whispered, “I’ll live like the wind—without a passport, without a past, without a form—but with a voice. And I believe that somewhere in this world, someone will hear my wind and realize they, too, are a child of history’s crossroads.”