seemed like a ball kicked across the road, aimless, without any purpose…I 

ended up at the mouth of a sewer. The water sloshed toward the gutter 

through an old grate that was clogged with trash: a toothbrush, the remains 

of a comb, a duck egg, a tomato skin…I took a long bamboo pole and forced 

myself to free each object, trying to guess its origin…’How dare you play in 

this filth?’” (91-92).
Hung is just being a little kid playing around her village when her uncle swings by and finds her playing in what to him is filth because people are working in the streets. The only reason her uncle is there to is gather the money from the house, something even little Hung can see through, but to her mother it is everything to have her brother back. A present motif of family bond, where her uncle just sees a dollar sign her mother sees the memories, the blood, and the bond they share. 
 

beings dear to me, this silence, this loneliness, this backwardness, were all 

one; she was my blood, my source, my mooring in this world. No one was 

closer to me; yet no one could have been stranger. It was through her that I 

knew the tenderness of this world, and through her too that I was linked to 

the chains of my past, to the pain of existence. Confusedly, as if through a 

fog, I saw a vision of my future” (143).
Hung realizing how thick blood runs within Aunt Tam, all this time she thought her mother was molding her into who she is, but it was really the expecatations and live of her Aunt she was following.