Working far from home, she watched her kid's Mid-Autumn night through a phone

Full-moon night. Shift over, she gets back to her rented room and opens a video call home before she has even changed. The screen fills with her daughter's round face and a paper star lantern: "Mom, look, I have a lantern!" She says yes, it's beautiful, hold it up for me — keeping her voice steady.

The girl turns the lantern in front of the camera and says grandma bought it. She looks at the red and gold star and knows the money for it was what she sent home last month. She is in her daughter's night tonight — as a lantern, not as a person standing next to her. She hangs up, takes out the mooncake the factory handed out, and cuts it.

Midway through the call the question she dreads: when are you coming home? She says Tết. Then the girl turns back, grinning, showing off the lantern again as if the question had weighed nothing. And she understands: her daughter isn't missing anything tonight. The one missing someone is her. The mooncake box on the table is still tied — she opens it and eats alone, on the right night.

Three Mid-Autumn festivals now without going home, because a round-trip bus ticket costs almost a month's wages. Next year the girl will be bigger, different; tonight won't come back the same. But grandma says: the moment she picked up the lantern, she wanted to call and show mom first — before grandma. She takes a screenshot of her daughter holding the lantern and leaves it there.

I missed my daughter's full-moon night. She has never once missed me.

Some mothers are watching their children grow up through a screen. If that were you, what time would you call home tonight?