Letting the bird go and the art of being bored

When I was seven years old, I cooked up a plan with my older brother to catch a sparrow and raise it. We bought a cage for it. We bought food and a water dish too. Three days in, the old man found out and gave us a beating that scattered the whole menagerie. While he was hitting the two of us, he was also teaching us: do you two know what this is about? Because you raised a few batches of fish you think you're some big shot? You don't even know that if you forget to give the bird water, it dies? Fish in a bowl are happy — but a bird in a cage suffers terribly, did you think about that?

The first time I set a bird free, I saw my father was right — when the bird was happy.

Then later, growing up, I'd watch films and see Westerners feeding wild birds. I went online and bought a feeder to try it out — in Vietnam nobody sells them, maybe because our people prefer to hand-raise each little orphan themselves every day, so I had to wait for one shipped from overseas. Bought some millet, hung it up under the eaves.

Three years went by; the feed in the tube never went down, the millet had gone black, and once in a while I'd peek to see if any friends had been helped yet. Never saw anyone being helped. Then one morning, my wife told me some friends had gotten stuck in the feeder. Which friends, I asked. You know, those sparrow and swallow friends, dad — they crawled in to eat and got stuck in there for a while before they could crawl back out. Really? I was over the moon at the reward for all that waiting. The backup bag of millet had already been thrown away, so I went and bought a few bags just in case!

His way of being bored is to do everything, to try everything.