My memory drifts back to the vision of an afternoon when the sun was shining in every corner of my house. I was three years old. That day, my parents were in the hospital taking care of my younger sister. My brother had gone fishing and my eldest sister was at the market selling vegetables. I stayed at home playing with my second eldest sister, Tomorrow. We were playing on the swing under the Longan tree in my family’s garden. Tomorrow would push me up and I would laugh out loud as I sailed high into the air. Suddenly, we heard the family dog barking, and we saw a lady who seemed to be around 30 years old. She was riding a bicycle, and she entered our yard. Tomorrow and I ran to the yard to talk to her.

“Hi, I am your aunt. Your parents want to see your sister and asked me to take her to them,” she told Tomorrow, pointing at me. Tomorrow did not have enough time to figure out who the lady was, as she continued. “And my bicycle was broken, so I will have to take your family’s bicycle to go there.”

While Tomorrow was still confused about what was going on, the lady grabbed the bicycle and prepared to leave. I realised later when I was older that my family’s bicycle at that time was really expensive and our most valuable asset; not many people in my village could afford to buy one. My father had saved money to buy it as a gift to my mother, so that she could use it to commute safely to the market every day.

The lady lifted me up onto the bicycle and rode away, leaving my bewildered sister behind. I, on the other hand, felt excited to go see my parents. After the lady took me about 500 metres away from my house, I suddenly heard a familiar voice: “Don’t go, Huong (my Vietnamese name).” A few seconds later, the person with the voice stopped in front of me and the lady. He must have been sprinting after us because he was panting.

It was my brother. “I want to take my sister home. She isn’t going anywhere. She is still too small to go to the hospital.”

“But your parents want to see her,” the lady insisted.

My brother stood his ground. “My parents told us to take care of her at home. She will stay with us. You can go there alone. I have never seen you before,” he said sternly.

The lady gave up arguing with my brother’s determined words, so she rode away as soon as she could. My brother held me tight and I could feel his heart beating in his chest. I didn’t realise what had just happened, why my brother was breathing so rapidly, and why he ran as he took me back home. My brother was horrified, while I, the victim, felt happy as an innocent would-be kidnapped baby. I only came to deeply understand that terrifying feeling that my brother had two years later when he held me tight after saving me from drowning in a river. I understood he was terrified because he’d almost lost his sister.

Nobody had any idea who the lady was, but everyone believed that she was a kidnapper. At that time in Vietnam, people kidnapped children to earn small fortunes by selling them in China. Some children in my province were kidnapped and I was thankful to be saved. That was why there were many movies about successful people who grew up abroad then went back to find their birth parents in Vietnam. As I grew up, I would sometimes joke with my mother that I could have become a successful businesswoman abroad and then come back to find them. My mother would always tell me it was the silliest idea she had heard of.

Deep within me, unconsciously, I knew that I didn’t need to be kidnapped to be successful but that I could just decide to become it. Deep within me, unconsciously, I felt incredibly thankful to have been given the golden chance to be me, as part of my wonderful and loving family.

We don’t need to wait for anything to happen to decide to become somebody. We just need to decide who we want to become. We don’t need to wait for anything to happen to feel how thankful we are, to just be alive, to have another chance to be who we want to be. We just need to decide to be thankful from today. We just need to decide to live a life with PASSION from today. Every day. Every moment.