3 ideas
The adult narrator recalls being eight with his friends Hải cò, Tí sún and Tủn. Bored with the world adults handed them, they swapped the names of everyday things for invented ones and played games that put the grown-ups' rules on trial. The episode shows children actively rebuilding their world through play rather than simply receiving it.
The narrator suggests that what dulls with age is less the world than our way of treating its names and meanings. As children, he and his friends renamed things to see them freshly, while he observes that adults also change labels, but through euphemisms that hide wrongdoing rather than reopen wonder.
The narrator moves between the eight-year-old's certainty and the grown man's ironic commentary, so each memory carries both judgments at once. This double vision shows the child's 'nonsense' as clearer thinking, and the adult's wisdom as partly just resignation.