“Those other boys she hangsout with. If your father were here, you know he wouldn’t approve.” She shookher head. Then, as if remembering what she’d asked in the first place, sherepeated, “Are you staying for dinner?”“No, mẹ.”“I’m just trying to take care of you,” she said.“I know, mẹ.”She held him by the shoulder and looked into his eyes for a long time. Hewondered what she was trying to find. “Okay,” she said.Bà Giang let herself in and Tuấn’s mom began setting the table.He went to his room and packed the bat and the black clothes he needed.By the time he got out, Vinh was sitting on the steps, reading a Bible anddrinking a Coke.“It’ll be a while until dinner,” Vinh said. “You know how talkative BàGiang is.”Tuấn wasn’t going to answer but decided to, feeling the way they leftthings on Bourbon Street hanging in the air. They hadn’t talked about it since,and it didn’t seem like Vinh had told his mother. “Yeah,” Tuấn said.“Where you going?”“Friend’s house.”“It is the Southern Kids?”“Southern Boyz,” he corrected, trying not to raise his voice.“You want to know the real story of Vietnam, kid?”“I don’t have time right now. I have to go.”“Well, I tell you this. Look at me. Look.”Tuấn sighed and looked Vinh in the eyes.“Everything was a mess,” Vinh began. “War makes everything a mess.And everyone is guilty of doing something bad. No one came out of it notdoing anything bad, even all the good guys. It was a mess. That’s why Ibecame Catholic.” He grabbed on to the small gold cross necklace he alwayswore. “A nun at the refugee camp, she said our past—we can make up for it.We just have to choose to do it.”“What’s that supposed to mean? Why are you telling me this?”“I’m saying we can always choose to do good, even if we’ve done bad,”Vinh said. “It’s why I look after you all. It’s maybe the one good thing I cando in the world. I’m here to stay, kid. I’m here to look after you and yourbrother and your mother. That’s what families do, you know?”“What does this have to do with anything? I’m gonna be late.”“You have a choice,” Vinh said as Tuấn walked away, not yelling butkeeping his voice steady. “You always have a choice.”“I don’t need a guardian angel,” Tuấn yelled at the bottom of the steps andran off.When he got to Quang’s laundry shed, Thảo was flipping through amagazine on the couch. The radio played “Motownphilly.” Outside, the sunwas setting, marking the sky purple and blue and orange.Thảo pulled the blinds closed and they sat down on the couch. He spreadout lengthwise, laying his body down, and Thảo spread herself on top of him.She placed her head on his chest and held his hands. Her own hands,somehow, were always cold.“What you’re doing,” she said. “It’s very brave.”“Really?”“Yeah. Really. None of the other guys would do it. But you, you steppedright up. That’s why I like you, Tuấn. You’re a doer. You do things. The otherguys just like to talk. They’re talkers. They’re more like…I don’t know,managers!” She laughed and massaged his hands. Her hands were freezing,and he wanted to pull his away. Tuấn moved his eyes to the door, then theblinds. Thảo tugged his chin and her lips met his. When she let go, shemassaged his chest and moved down his torso.The first time they had sex, all he remembered were hands. Her handswere everywhere. Freezing. He imagined it was what snow felt like. Notknowing what to do, he moved his hands, too, but they fumbled and shookbecause he was so nervous. She wasn’t. Thảo was experienced, and she didnot approve of his slowness and clumsiness. After he came, she got off himand he closed his eyes. When he opened them she was gone. He called her athome. She said he looked so peaceful she didn’t want to disturb him, so sheleft. He didn’t tell her, but he felt used. Though he enjoyed it, the feeling ofher body against his, the speed of it all, he couldn’t shake that feeling. Hewanted more of her.When he first met her, he had never met a Vietnamese girl so proud ofbeing Vietnamese. All the other girls acted, somehow, more American. Theyhad their Vietnamese names—beautiful names, he thought—but they toldeveryone to call them by their American names—Samantha, Becky, or someother bland name. But Thảo was Thảo. She spoke Vietnamese fluently and,though he had forgotten most of it, it still sounded beautiful to him. It gavehim butterflies, still, when she said người yêu or cưng ơi, less because theywere terms of love but because they were Vietnamese. That she hung out withthe Southern Boyz made sense.“The Việt girls here with their white names and straight As think if theydo everything right they’ll be fine, they’ll have a happy life,” she once toldhim. “But they forget they’re người Việt. We’ll never be American enough forthe people here. People look at us a certain way and they always will.”There’s truth in that, Tuấn thought. He’d lived most of his life in NewOrleans, yet there was always a feeling that he didn’t belong.“That’s why I like SBZ,” she went on. “They have Việt pride.”When they finished this time, he didn’t fall asleep. He looked at his watch.Nearly seven. He had time to kill.“Do you want to grab a burger or something?” he asked as she got dressed.She looked up as if surprised he was there.“I’m not hungry,” she said after a long silence.“Okay.”“I’ll see you later, Tuấn.”“When?”“Later,” she said.“Okay,” he said.She picked up her purse and left.—At 9:50, Tuấn sat beside a trash can on the corner of Bourbon and St. Louis.The sidewalk was moist because it had rained on and off during the day.Clouds hung in the sky under the moonlight. Tuan took in a breath of air andheld it there until he couldn’t take it anymore, letting it out furiously. Hishands shook and the bat shook, too, making a soft, tinny, irregular rhythm onthe concrete.At the laundry shed, Quang had told Tuấn he was proud of him. He hadpatted Tuấn on the back, and it made Tuấn smile. As he had walked downBourbon, passing all the tourist bars, he was confident. Yet now on the cornerof St. Louis, he couldn’t even walk anymore. He collapsed and leaned on thetrash can. Then an idea occurred to him: they didn’t want to scare an old ladythemselves, so they’d handed it off to him.“Motherfucker,” Tuấn said. He looked at his watch. 9:54. He took inanother breath and let it out. His lungs burned.It was cold. It was October, and nights would be in the fifties, maybe theforties. He bet it was warm in Wei Huang. He began walking. Wei Huang wasthe third store on the block. At the door, he paused.Inside, Madame Wei counted money and wrote down her calculations on apiece of paper. Tuấn touched the door handle and pulled and, as in their plan,a bell rang.Madame Wei looked up from her money.“Oh, allo!” she said. “We about to close. Can I help?” She smiled and putdown her pen and crossed her hands in front of her.Tuấn licked his lips and tapped the bat against the floor. The steel made ahollow sound.“I’m just getting back from baseball practice,” he said and pointed to thebat. “I was walking,” he continued, “and I’m hungry.” He rubbed his stomachto let her know. “Can I look around?” He was speaking slowly and loudly likepeople sometimes did when they assumed he didn’t know any English, and hefelt ashamed.“Of course,” she exclaimed. “Take time!”He began walking down the aisle. As he inspected the shelves, a pang ofnostalgia came to him as he saw the foods of his childhood: haw flakes in redtubes, salted dried plums in small plastic boxes, White Rabbit candy. Whenhe was out of Madame Wei’s sight, in the back near the refrigerator, he tookone of the bags of White Rabbit candies and stuffed it into his pocket. Heslowed his pace.He knew what lay in the end. He bit down on his lips. The store lookedsmaller. It seemed, almost, to collapse onto him, all of it—the walls, theshelves, the packages of food with gold Chinese characters.Soon he was back to the front counter again, but this time Madame Weiwas gone.For a second, Tuấn was relieved. He imagined what he would say. “Shejust up and disappeared,” he would tell Quang, and everything would happenaccording to plans. The store would disappear and he would join the SouthernBoyz. Easy! Tuấn told himself. Piece of cake!A microwave signaled, a steady beeping sound.Madame Wei came out of the back room. She held up a Tupperwarecontainer. The sides were fogged up and he couldn’t tell what was in it.As she walked to the counter, Tuấn saw that she had left the money there,next to the cash register, out in the open. She uncovered the container andsteam rose out. “For you,” she said. “Here, here.”At first Tuấn didn’t understand. “No,” he said. “No.”“But you hungry,” she said. “Here, here.” She pushed the container towardhim until he was forced to hold it. He looked down and saw noodles andpieces of vegetables and thick cuts of meat, all in a brown soup. “Here, here,”Madame Wei said again. She handed him a plastic fork. “Eat, eat,” she said.“But,” Tuấn said. He smelled the broth. Beef. Like phở but not. “Eat, eat,” she repeated.Finally, he dug down the fork, lifted it to his mouth, and chewed. It wasnothing special. It was not salty enough and needed more pepper. But it waswarm and he drank all of the broth before slurping up the rest of the noodles.Madame Wei smiled the whole time.When Tuấn was done, he didn’t know what to do, so he gave her a fivedollar bill and left, dragging the steel bat behind him.Outside, Tuấn felt the chill of the air. The temperature must’ve droppedfive or ten degrees, somehow, in minutes. He pulled his hood over his head,held the bat under his arm, and placed his hands in his pockets. Not wantingto go home, he sat on a bench in Jackson Square.He woke up near midnight and opened his eyes to a woman and her kid inthe distance. He saw only their silhouettes, but they were the same size as hismother and brother. For a second, his heart stopped. He was thinking it wasthem, that they had found him out. She would grab him and drag him home,screaming and yelling and embarrassing him. (She did that once to hisbrother in a church. For a month, all of Versailles gave them mean stares, andshe told Tuấn and Bình what they thought didn’t matter because they weren’tfamily.) He stood up, prepared to run, and as they came closer, he saw he waswrong. He ran away anyway, and the mother pulled her son closer to her, outof the way, away from danger. Running down the streets of the Quarter, herealized he was nearly disappointed it wasn’t them. He took a bus home.Tuấn would avoid Quang and the others that night and the next night andthe entire week.Later, he would go to Quang to confess. The woman was old and fragile,he would say. He couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t do it. They shouldn’t do it. Hehad good reasoning, too, he would say. The old woman would die very soon.She had no family. The business would die. There would be no more Chinesein the Quarter, perhaps in all of New Orleans. The Quarter could beVietnamese territory.But Quang would have found out about it already. He would have takencare of it by then, too. Quang, with a smirk on his face and beer bottle inhand, would stand over a bonfire and tell his story: how he made that old hagcry, how he drove her out of her own store, and how, to make sure she wouldnever come back, he smashed everything—the display case, the shelves offood, the neon sign, the window. And he took the money and he walked out.“The old lady just left it there on the counter. That stupid cunt,” he wouldsay. “Here’s the thing…” And he would see Tuấn from the corner of his eyesand he would shake his head and stop talking. Everyone else would quietdown, too. He shared secrets only with family, Quang would say then, andTuấn wasn’t family.