After my mother’s funeral it was as if the house transformed and turned against us. What was once a comforting reflection of her individual style was now a symbol of our collective failure. Every piece of furniture and decorative object seemed to mock us. They reminded us of the stories that had flooded in while she was alive—of cancer patients who had survived against all odds. How someone’s neighbor had conquered her own death sentence by way of meditation and positive thinking. How so-and-so’s cancer had spread to multiple lymph nodes, but through envisioning a new, unblemished bladder, a miracle occurred, and he was now in remission. Anything seemed possible if you just had an optimistic attitude. Maybe we hadn’t tried hard enough, hadn’t believed enough, hadn’t force-fed her enough blue-green algae. Maybe god hated us. There were other families who had fought and won. We had fought and lost—and among all the natural, heartbreaking emotions we had expected to feel, it also felt strangely embarrassing.

I packed her clothing into garbage bags, disposed of half-used QVC creams, donated the hospice equipment and leftover protein shakes. In the kitchen my father sat slumped over the glass tabletop with a large plastic cup of red wine and called credit card company after credit card company to cancel the cards in her wallet, repeating over and over to each customer service representative that his wife had just died and we’d no longer be needing their services.

Traveling to some far-off place seemed like a good idea at the time. A mental breather from a house that felt like it was suffocating us. So, one morning over breakfast while my father drank his coffee, he searched online for potential places we could vacation. Maybe an island, he suggested, where we could relax and lie on a beach, but the idea of full days staring dumbly at gorgeous water frightened me. It felt too stagnant, too much time to get caught up in dark thought. Europe reminded him too much of vacations they’d taken together. Eventually, we zeroed in on Southeast Asia, a region of the world that had always captivated us. Neither of us had been to Vietnam and it was relatively inexpensive thanks to a strong American dollar. We figured that maybe if we were busy taking in a place neither of us had ever been, we could manage to forget, just for a moment, how much our lives had fallen apart.

We booked the flights two weeks after the funeral. My father wisely reserved separate rooms so we could have our personal space. We stayed in luxurious hotels with rainwater showerheads and grand breakfast buffets. Trays teeming with exotic fruits and imported cheeses, made-to-order omelets, and cookie-cutter versions of local Vietnamese fare. In Hanoi we sat in silence on a boat gliding across Hạ Long Bay. We passed the beautiful limestone islands jutting out from the water, privately weeping without a comforting word to impart to the other. We booked an overnight train north, to Sapa, on a service called Fanxipan, and when we wound up at the wrong station, my father ran around frantically asking the locals, “Where is fancy pants?” while I bought us bánh mì at a cart nearby. We ate the sandwiches in our bunk beds, capping them off with .5 mgs of my father’s Xanax, and worked our way through a plastic bag full of glass bottles of 333 beer until we were impaired enough to sleep through the train’s violent sways along the track barely two feet wide. In Sapa we rented motorcycles and rode the foggy, winding roads that overlook the terraced rice fields that never seemed to end. But every moment of wonder was quickly followed by a halting sock to the stomach, a constant reminder of why we were there.

Every time a front desk attendant asked if he needed an extra key for his “friend,” my father would blush, “No, no, this is my daughter.” “This is my dad!” I shrieked at the Hmong guide who took us back for a handful of fried larvae at her home stay. “Then where is Mommy?” she asked as I crunched into a flaky bulb. “She’s at home,” my father said, tight-lipped and teary-eyed, unsure of how to move forward. This was still when it seemed best to lie and not get into it, when we were still too afraid to say it out loud. “It’s just a father-daughter trip,” I added.

Most nights, after an early dinner we’d return to our hotel rooms and I’d crumple onto the bed and sleep for fourteen to fifteen hours. Grief, like depression, made it hard to accomplish even the simplest of tasks. The country felt wasted on us. We were numb to all spectacle and feeling, quietly miserable and completely clueless as to how to help each other. By the time we arrived in Huê, we’d reached the halfway point of a two-week trip that was beginning to feel far too ambitious, even painstakingly long. All I wanted to do was go home. I longed to hide in my bedroom and dissociate with the comforts of my PlayStation and its soothing farming simulation games, not wake up at six a.m. to take a van tour of another pagoda and marketplace while my father bartered for half an hour over the equivalent of a couple of USD.

But that day in Huê, things started to look up. We were pleased that the weather was nicer than it’d been in Sapa, that the atmosphere was more tranquil than in Hanoi. The relentless honking of scooter horns we’d become accustomed to as Vietnam’s second national language was not as fluently spoken. Life moved at a slower pace.

We shared lunch, bánh khoái—a greasy, crispy, yellow crepe folded over shrimp and bean sprouts—and washed it down with cold Huda beer. We swam in a gigantic, beautiful pool outside our gigantic, beautiful hotel. We watched our boat driver’s wife model souvenir T-shirts and proffer snow globes and wooden bottle openers, shaking our heads with guilt as we repeated “No, thank you” to each ware while gliding along the Perfume River.

In the evening we took a cab to Les Jardins de la Carambole, a highly recommended French-Vietnamese fusion restaurant near the Imperial Citadel. The restaurant looked like a large manor out of the French Quarter of New Orleans. The exterior was painted bright yellow. Three large archways, each with its own balcony, ran along the second story, and a porch with tables extended out elegantly from the facade.

We got cocktails to start and decided on a bottle of Bordeaux to share with dinner. We ordered voraciously. The pumpkin soup, the beef in banana leaf, fried spring rolls, crispy squid, a bowl of bún bò huế, and a seafood mango salad recommended by the waitress. Ordering food so as to maximize the quantity of shared dishes and an exuberance for alcohol are the two things my father and I have always counted on for common ground.

“You know,” my father said to our waitress as though he were letting her in on a secret. He stabbed his finger in my direction a few times. “She used to do—what you do!”

“Excuse me?”

The waitress was a pretty Vietnamese woman who looked to be about my age. She had long black hair and was wearing a red ao dài, an ankle-length dress with high slits, and loose black pants underneath. She spoke English with a nearly undetectable accent. Whenever her hands were empty she stood with them clasped, one over the other, like a serene buddha.

“My daughter—she used to work as waitress. Many years!” my father said.

From years of communicating with my mother’s family, my dad had developed this way of addressing non–English speakers that involves dropping articles and wildly gesticulating as if he were talking to a three-year-old.

“And me,” he pointed to himself. “Long time ago.” He stretched his arms wide. “Busboy!” Then he slammed his big hand on the table, rattling the cutlery and glasses, and let out a loud laugh.

“Oh!” the waitress said, miraculously unrattled by an American man nearly overturning a table.

“My daughter and I love food,” he said. “We are what you call foodies.”

I wasn’t sure if it was the boat ride we’d just taken or my father’s usage of the word foodies and the care he took in pronouncing it FOO–DEES that was making me feel queasy, but suddenly the seafood mango salad I had ordered was not so appealing. There are few things I detest more in this world than an adult man proclaiming himself to be a foodie, much less my own father dragging me in to share the title when only moments before he had asked me if I’d ever heard of a ceviche.

“Oh, really?” the waitress said with an enthusiasm that managed to feel genuine. She was really an exceptional waitress. In her shoes I would have pretended to be occupied polishing spoons thirty minutes ago.

I wasn’t necessarily proud of my work as a waitress, but I did feel a sense of honor in it. I loved the camaraderie, the shared disdain for the customer—the Groupon users, the picky eaters, the people who asked for steaks well-done and if the fish was “fishy.” There was some joy in exchanging your time for cash, blowing it all on the hour before last call, basking in the glory of ordering drinks after serving them all day. The downside was that the experience had metamorphosed me into a neurotic diner. I developed a compulsory need to stack all my dishes neatly after finishing, tip 25 percent even if the service was horrendous, and never, unless it was royally fucked, send a dish back just because it wasn’t to my taste. So when my father asked why I hadn’t eaten my salad, I would have preferred stuffing it into my napkin rather than cause a fuss.

“I think I’m feeling a little nauseous from the boat,” I said. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Excuse me,” my father called to the waitress from across the room. “She doesn’t like,” my father said, pointing to the seafood salad. He pinched his nose and then wafted the air, pantomiming, I suppose, the smell of a pungent harbor. “It’s too fishy.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” I said. “Really, please, it’s fine. Jesus Christ, Dad, I told you it was fine.”

“Michelle, if you don’t like something, you should say so.”

The salad was fishy. After all, it was a seafood salad doused in nước mắm, in a country where fish sauce is a staple. But the fact that I wound up not eating it wasn’t the waitress’s fault. On top of it all, my father had to go and use the dreaded f-word, parading us around as some type of know-it-all food critics and then disparaging the local fare.

“I have no problem returning food on my own,” I said, shifting in my seat. “I’m an adult. I don’t need someone to put words in my fucking mouth.”

“You don’t have to say it that way,” he said, glancing back at the waitress. “Keep your voice down.”

“Would you like me to take it away?” the waitress asked.

“Yes, please,” he said. She seemed generally unfazed, but I couldn’t help but envision her having to explain to her manager that it wasn’t her fault two American “foo-dees” were surprised to find their seafood salad did indeed taste like fish as she reenacted my father’s hand gesture. I wondered what the Vietnamese words were for stupid tourists.

“Jesus, I can’t believe you,” I said. “Now she feels really bad. What if she has to pay for it out of her tips or something?”

“I don’t appreciate being scolded by my own daughter in front of strangers,” he said. He spoke slowly, pacing himself as he stared at his wineglass. He was holding its stem with a fist. “No one speaks to me the way you do.”

“This whole trip you’ve been bartering with everyone. The taxi drivers, the guides—now it just feels like you’re trying to get food for free. It’s embarrassing.”

“Your mother warned me not to let you take advantage of me.”

And there it was. He had committed the unspeakable. He’d put words into the mouth of a dead woman and used them against me. I could feel the blood rushing to my face.

“Oh well, there’s plenty of things Mom said about you, too, believe me,” I said. “There’s a lot of things I could say right now that I’m choosing not to.”

She didn’t even like you, I wanted to say. She compared you to a broken plate. When could my mother have told him this and what could it have possibly been in reference to? The words kept circling my head. Sure, I had taken my upbringing for granted, I had lashed out at the ones who loved me the most, allowed myself to flounder in a depression I perhaps had no real right to. I had been awful then—but now? I had worked so hard the past six months to try to be the perfect daughter, to make up for the trouble I’d caused as a teenager. But the way he said it made it seem like it was the last piece of wisdom she’d imparted before shuffling off the mortal coil: Watch out for that kid; she’s out to take advantage of you. Didn’t she know I was the one who slept on the hospital couch for three weeks while Dad stayed in a bed at the apartment? Didn’t she know I changed the bedpan because he couldn’t do it without gagging? Didn’t she know I was the one swallowing my feelings while he blubbered on?

“God, you were so difficult,” he said. “We always talked about it. How you could treat us so cruelly.”

“I wish I never came here!” I said. And because there was nothing left to say, I pushed my chair out and took off before he could stop me.

I could hear my father’s frantic call fade from behind as I charged forward, leaving him to hastily pay the bill for our tense, uneaten meal. I turned the corner alone and stormed full speed into the dark. Our proximity to the citadel made it easier to navigate the city. I vaguely remembered which direction we’d come from and was able to follow the Perfume River back toward the hotel. It was a ways away but I wasn’t sure I had enough currency to cover a cab ride back.

I figured it was for the best to walk it off anyway, and spent the time plotting a way back to Hanoi on my own. I could take a train and stay in a cheap room and avoid him for the rest of the week instead of flying to Ho Chi Minh City like we’d planned. But then I’d still have to see him on the plane ride back to America. I wondered how much an early flight back to Philadelphia could cost, how much I’d pay to never have to speak to him again.

By the time I’d managed to find my way back to the hotel, my father was already waiting at the top of the wide staircase that led to the hotel lobby. I expected him to look angry—pacing back and forth waiting to really lay into me about walking off like I did, but I was surprised to see how somber he looked. He was leaning his chin on his hand, resting his elbows on the marble railing, and gazing into the humid night with a look that can only belong to someone who is thinking, How did I get here?

I ducked behind a building so he wouldn’t see me. I watched him push back his thinning black hair, and instead of feeling angry or victorious, I felt really, really bad. My father had been the last of his brothers to cling to his hair. Now it had thinned to nearly a third of what it had been before my mother got sick. It felt like just another thing he’d been cheated out of, and I got to thinking he really had been cheated his whole life in a way I had never experienced and could maybe never comprehend. Cheated out of a childhood, out of a father, and now he’d been cheated again, robbed of the woman he loved just a few years shy of their final chapter.

Still, I wasn’t ready to forgive him, and now that I had my bearings I decided to look for a place to get a drink. I figured I could maybe find some Australians on holiday to buy me a round when I ran out of money, but there were no tourist spots nearby and I was worried I’d get lost if I wandered too far and drank too much. I doubled back to a local bar down the street called Cafe L’ami.

I took a table on the terrace and ordered a beer. About halfway through the bottle a lanky waiter informed me that the music was about to begin and asked if I wanted to come inside. The bar was dark, lit by a purple light and a slowly rotating disco ball. There were small circular café tables decorated with fake plastic roses. It was mostly empty. There were no foreigners, just a group of locals in the back and a couple seated a few tables away.

Onstage was a Casio keyboard, an acoustic guitar, and a small television monitor in the corner hooked up to a laptop. A hostess picked up the microphone and made some sort of announcement. Two young men took the stage. One with glasses got behind the Casio and the other picked up the guitar and began to play. The hostess sang a song in Vietnamese, and I wasn’t sure at first if the players were just miming along to a backing track or if it was a preset accompaniment on the keyboard. The hostess was a surprisingly fantastic singer, and the song was a compelling, emotional ballad I wished I knew the name of to look up later.

I ordered another beer and out of nowhere, a young Vietnamese girl took the seat beside me.

“Excuse me. What are you doing here?” she asked. She had a strong accent and it was difficult to understand her, especially over the music. She started laughing. “I’m sorry. I never see tourist here. I come here every day.”

When the hostess finished, one of the men from the back of the bar approached the stage, looking back at his friends for encouragement as he took the mic. A waiter came to our table with a ceramic pot and a teacup and placed it in front of my new companion.

“My name is Quing,” she said. She poured herself some tea and wrapped both hands around the cup. She placed her elbows on the table and leaned closer to me so I could hear her better. “It means flower.”

“Michelle,” I said. “I’m just on vacation. I’m staying at a hotel nearby.”

“Michelle,” she repeated. “What does it mean?”

“Oh, it doesn’t really mean anything,” I said. The man onstage had started to sing and I was struck again by how good his voice sounded. I wondered for a moment if Vietnamese people were born with perfect pitch.

“I come here because I am sad,” she said. “I love to sing. I come here every day.”

“I’m sad too,” I said, my second beer starting to unravel me a bit. “Why are you sad?”

“I want to be singer!” she said. “But my parents think I must go to school. How come you are sad?”

I took a sip of my beer. “My mom died,” I said finally. I realized it was maybe the first time I had let the words leave my mouth.

Quing put down her teacup and put her hand on top of mine. “You should sing something.”

She leaned in closer and stared into my eyes, like she was certain this would solve all my problems. It was how I’d felt about music once, back before everything happened. A pure, childlike belief that songs could heal. I had believed that with such conviction before I’d confronted a loss so consuming it had rattled my clearest passions, made my ambitions appear frivolous and egomaniacal. I took another swig of beer, pushed out my chair, and made my way to the stage.

“Do you have ‘Rainy Days and Mondays’?” I asked the hostess, who typed it into the YouTube search bar, clicked on a MIDI karaoke video, and handed me the mic. Quing stood against the stage and let out a cheer. When the music kicked in she closed her eyes and smiled, swaying side to side.

“Talking to myself and feeling old…Sometimes I’d like to quit, nothing ever seems to fit…” I began, realizing the microphone was heavily drowned in reverb. I sounded fantastic. There was literally no way you could sound bad with this thing. I closed my eyes, leaning into it, channeling my best Karen Carpenter—that tiny, tragic figure. That starving woman in the yellow dress, slowly crumbling under the pressure to seem happy for the camera, slowly killing herself on live television, striving for perfection.

The bar applauded. Quing took the plastic rose from our table and presented it to me ceremoniously. When it was her turn she of course selected none other than “My Heart Will Go On,” an anthem that reigns on as an unstoppable classic in Asia nearly two decades after its release. I thought of my mother’s Celine Dion impression, of her quivering lip. The sopping reverb spread Quing’s voice across the bar as she belted, “Near! Far! Wherever you are!” and I collected more roses from the surrounding tables and threw them at her feet.

“Quing! That was so great!”

As the other patrons took their turns at the mic, we continued to collect roses from the tables and throw them onto the stage. We danced to all the songs, cheering the loudest when they were through. She told me about famous Vietnamese singers. We talked about our dreams. I finished my last beer and we hugged goodbye, took down each other’s emails, and promised to keep in touch, though we never did.

In the morning, my father and I met for breakfast at the hotel buffet. We didn’t talk about our fight and continued on with the trip as if it had never happened. We took the train to Hội An and spent two days there. We walked around Old Town, the historic district, taking pictures along the canal. The streets were lined with stalls selling bright, multicolored lanterns and three-dimensional cards. From the famous Japanese covered bridge, we paused to watch the locals push small paper boats lit with candles out onto the water, completely unaware that “Hội An” means peaceful meeting place.