Rima Sings the Numbers

At Tết the market square filled with a stage made of planks and red cloth, and on it stood a caller in a shimmering jacket with a microphone in one hand and a bamboo tube of numbered sticks in the other.

“This is lô tô,” Rima told Ama and Tam as they squeezed onto a bench. “Watch the caller. She doesn’t just say the number. She sings to it.”

The caller shook the tube. A stick slid out. She glanced at it, grinned, and sang a short rhyming couplet about a river and a boat, and on the very last word, right where the rhyme landed, she sang the number.

“Mười lăm!” Fifteen.

The crowd cheered and slapped beans onto their tickets. Ama felt something bubble up inside her, a fizzy, happy feeling, as if the whole square had just shared a joke.

“Why sing it?” asked Tam. “Why not just say fifteen?”

“Listen to where the number goes,” said Rima. “Always at the end. The end of a line is where your ear waits. When the rhyme arrives, everyone knows: here it comes. And a rhyme sticks. You’ll remember that boat on the river tomorrow.”

Rima had sung lô tô at this market since she was eleven. She hummed along to every couplet, sometimes mouthing the words before the caller sang them.

The caller sang about a cat that climbed too high, and the rhyme landed on ba mươi, thirty. She sang about rain on new rice, and the rhyme landed on bảy, seven. Every line built a little picture, and every picture ended on its number like a door clicking shut.

Between games, Rima turned to Ama.

“Your turn,” she said. “Make up a rhyme for twenty-four. In English is fine.”

Ama’s cheeks went warm. “I’ll get it wrong.”

“There is no wrong,” said Rima. “Only lines that ring and lines that don’t yet. Try.”

Ama thought. Twenty-four. What rhymes with four? Door. Floor. More. She thought of the noodle seller who had given them extra spring onions.

“The noodle man gave us a little bit more,” she said slowly, “so we’re coming back for… twenty-four!”

Tam clapped. Rima laughed and clapped too.

“Hear how four rings?” said Rima. “Because you saved it for the end. If you’d said ‘twenty-four, the noodle man gave us more’, the number would get lost in the middle. Put the important sound last.”

On the way home they made up rhymes for every number they passed. A bus number. A house number. The number on a basketball shirt. Some of the rhymes were terrible, and those were the funniest.

That night Ama wrote in the call book, under the date: Lô tô. The number goes at the end. Make the last word ring. And next to it, in small letters, the noodle couplet, so she wouldn’t forget it.