For Mikey

August 1979

New Orleans is at war. The long howl in the sky; what else can it mean?
Hương drops the dishes into the sink and grabs the baby before he
starts crying. She begins running toward the door—but then remembers:
this time, another son. She forgets his name temporarily, the howl is so loud.
What’s important is to find him.
Is he under the bed? No, he is not under the bed. Is he hiding in the
closet? No, he is not in the closet. Is he in the bathroom, then, behind the
plastic curtains, sitting scared in the tub? He is not in the bathroom, behind
the plastic curtains, sitting scared in the tub. And as she turns around he’s at
the door, holding on to the frame, his eyes watering, his cheeks red.
“Mẹ,” he cries. Mom. The word reminds Hương of everything she needs
to know. In the next moment she grabs his hand and pulls him toward her
chest.
With this precious cargo, these two sons, she darts across the apartment,
an arrow flying away from its bow, a bullet away from its gun. She’s racing
toward the door and leaping down the steps—but she can’t move fast enough.
The air is like water, it’s like running through water. Through an ocean. She
feels the wetness on her legs and the water rising. And the sky, the early
evening sky, with its spotting of stars already, is streaked red and orange like
a fire, like an explosion suspended midair in that moment before the crush,
the shattering, the death she’s always imagined until someone yells Stop,
someone tells her to Stop.
And just like that, the sirens hush and the silence is violent: it slices, it
cuts. “Hurricane alarm,” Bà Giang says. The old woman drops her cigarette. “Just
a hurricane alarm. A test. Nothing to be afraid of.” She reaches over and cups
Hương’s cheek.
“What do you mean?” Hương asks.
“A test. They’re doing a test. In case something happens,” Bà Giang says.
“Go home now, cưng ơi. Go home. Get some rest. It’s getting late.”
Home.
Late.
Getting.
There.
“Late.” Hương understands, or maybe she does not. A thousand thoughts
are still settling in her mind. Where were the sounds from before? Not the
alarm, but the grating calls of the grackles in the trees, the whistling breeze, a
car speeding past—where are they now?
She notices Tuấn at the gates. Her eyes light up.
“Tuấn ơi,” she calls.
Tuấn holds on to the bars of the gate and watches three boys riding past on
bicycles. One stands on his pedals. Another rides without hands but only for a
second before grabbing—in a panicked motion—the handlebars. A younger
one tries to keep up on training wheels. Three boys. Three brothers.
“Tuấn ơi,” Hương calls again.
Tuấn waves as the boys ride leisurely past. When they’re gone, he returns,
and Hương feels a mixture of pure happiness, comfort, and relief.
Up the dirt road. A mother and her sons. Hand in hand.

Hương 1978

Hương and her sons had been in the country for only a month, but already
they were having problems.
Their sponsor, a white Catholic priest, paired them with the Minhs.
“Both thirty-two,” he said while driving. “You will like them.”
The priest—she never remembered his name—was old and serious and
restrained. He walked with his hands behind his back as he took long,
sweeping strides and had a habit of keeping his head slightly bent forward as
if he were listening to something everyone else could not hear, giving him a
look of arrogant superiority. He reminded her of the priests who came to her
childhood village with hard European candies and boxes of Bibles in hopes of
converting someone in their bad Vietnamese. She remembered one priest
who couldn’t pronounce bạn and instead said bàn, and they made fun of him
behind his back, calling him Father Table. Still, Hương did not not like this
New Orleans priest. She was lucky, she told herself. She was alive. She made
it to America.
The priest took an exit onto another highway. He didn’t use his blinker.
They had been on and off highways all morning, dropping off other
“refugees”—the word still felt strange in her mouth, in her mind—at
temporary homes. Earlier that morning, the priest dropped off a couple from
Vũng Tàu at a tall building. Then a single Saigonese girl at a short house
painted pink. Another family of three was given to an American fisherman
and his wife, and they greeted each other with hugs as if they had known each
other all their lives; the wife gave their son a pink stuffed elephant. Hương
and her boys were the last to be dropped off. Bình slept in an infant seat as Tuấn kneeled by the window and watched as
the world slipped by, pointing and calling out the names of everything he saw:
xe hơi, xe đạp, cây, nhà. What Hương noticed the most was the concrete—
the buildings, the roads, the sidewalks, the fountains, the statues. So much
concrete, she thought. She imagined them rubbing against her, scraping her
knees and hands, leaving bruises and scrapes and marks. She was thinking
that way nowadays: what can hurt her, what can leave a scar.
The priest turned onto a road, and just like that, the hardness of the city
disappeared, replaced by flat plots of parched grass and a traffic light. Beyond
that, a billboard advertised a deep red sausage with rice grains inside.
As they waited, the priest glanced up into his rearview mirror and smiled.
“Gần tới rới,” he said, Almost there, in an accent Hương found oddly
charming, like the way the Australian English teachers at the refugee camp
spoke, and that gave her something to latch on to, a type of comfort. The van
continued down the long stretch of road for another five minutes before
slowing down into a turn. In front of a house, a fat Vietnamese man waited.
“Mr. Minh!” the priest chuckled. Mr. Minh waved when he saw them.
“Welcome to America!” Mr. Minh shouted as the priest parked the car.
He pulled the door open and bowed extravagantly, making a show of the
gesture. His large hands came at her next and grabbed her wrists. He shook
them furiously. “Chị will like it here very much!” he said. “It’s America!
We’re all friends here!” His face glowed red. How unlike her husband he was.
Công was thin and suave, bookish and reserved, and, above all, neat; this man
was chubby and rude, drunk and loud—above all, loud. She could have
pictured Mr. Minh spending his time at bars and his poor wife coming to get
him at three in the morning. She thought, not without bitterness, that they
never would have been friends in Vietnam. They were two different types of
people; a friendship had little chance.
“We’re all friends here!” Mr. Minh repeated, confidently, caressing her
sloppily, stupidly. It made Hương feel little, like a bug waiting to be squashed.
She held on to her baby boy and motioned for her other son to stand closer.
The wife—Hương noticed her now—stood aside as if this were the regular
order of things. “He used to be a police officer,” the wife said in her scratchy voice. “Now,
he drinks!” She laughed and Hương didn’t know if she was supposed to laugh
out of courtesy or just nod sadly in agreement. She decided on doing neither
and stayed silent and stiff.
“Very well,” the wife said. Then, in English, she said something to the
priest, shook his hand, and grabbed Hương’s suitcase. The priest drove away.
“This way,” she said.
Hương walked up the porch steps and crossed the threshold. Right away,
she smelled the rotting wood, disarming at first but only because it came so
suddenly. The lights were off, and in the darkness, the room felt vast and
empty. As her eyes adjusted, she realized the room was small and arranged at
its center were a floral fabric sofa, a white plastic chair, and a small television.
A fan spun lazily above.
The wife told Hương it was called a “shotgun house.” Ngôi nhà súng, she
clarified. “See?” she said. She placed the suitcase down and mimed the shape
of a gun with one hand. With her other, she held her wrist. Closing one eye,
she looked through an invisible scope and the appearance of intense
concentration fell onto her face. For a few seconds, she stood silently, so
focused on something in the distance that Hương looked toward where the
wife stared, too. Then “Psssh!”—the imitated sound of gunfire. It was so
unexpected but also so childish. Hương jumped back and felt stupid for doing
so. Like a child tricked in a schoolyard, she immediately hated the Minhs,
their poverty, their obnoxiousness, their immaturity.
“See?” the wife said. “A house for guns.” She made the motion of dusting
off her hands. “But you don’t have to worry about that here. No war, not here,
not ever.”
“Of course,” said Hương, composing herself.
“That’s all in the past now,” the wife said.
“Yes,” said Hương, “the past.”
“Just stay out of the doorways to be on the safe side.” She broke out into a
cackle, though Hương didn’t find any of it funny. Nothing in America was
funny. Mrs. Minh’s tricks weren’t funny, their situation as người Việt wasn’t funny, and Hương felt outraged that people like the Minhs should even think
about laughing.
“Let me show you more,” said the wife. She led Hương through the
doorways and into the kitchen and the couple’s bedroom in the back. “You’ll
sleep up front. The phòng khách,” said Mrs. Minh.
The next morning, the priest arrived to take Hương downtown, dropping
her off at the church. Before coming to America, Hương had never been
inside a church. In Mỹ Tho there was none. In Saigon, only a handful. But
here they were everywhere, and all the other Vietnamese seemed grateful for
that. The first few weeks, as they slept in the pews, they seemed at peace.
Hương, for her part, slept uneasily under the watch of the statue of Jesus on
the cross. His sad, pleading eyes made her want to cross herself like all the
other Catholics did. She knew Công would have laughed at her for it, so she
didn’t.
“Here,” the priest said before letting her go. He tore out a sheet of yellow
paper from a legal pad he carried everywhere. For the last week they had
been finding her a job. “Because you need money to survive in New Orleans,”
he said as if he thought life in other countries were any different. They had
often gone out in groups, but today was her first day alone. Franklin’s
Seafood, said one line, followed by an address. Poydras Street Dry Cleaners,
said another.
“Franklin’s looking for cashiers,” he said, “and Poydras a clothes folder.
Oh, and…” He wrote something else down and gave another sheet to Hương.
“Be on the lookout for signs that say Œ–’‹.” She held the loose sheet of
paper and sounded out the word with her lips.
“Hi-Ring,” she whispered.
“Hi-er-ing,” he said.
“Hi-yering.”
“Hi-er-ing.” Hương mouthed the words and folded the paper away. The
priest gave her directions and she was on her way, pushing the stroller she’d
borrowed from the church for Bình with one hand and leading Tuấn with the
other. By the time she was on Magazine Street, she looked up and wondered
how a city could be so empty. Down one way, a driver had parked his school bus and was reading the newspaper and eating a doughnut. Down another,
two women talked to each other in smart business skirts.
As she walked, Hương reached into her purse for a pocket-sized notebook,
a gift from the church. Từ vựng căn bản, she had written at the top of the first
page, followed by the phrases she had remembered from her English lessons:
Hello.
How are you?
I am fine.
Thank you.
She practiced the words aloud, repeating them in whispers, analyzing the
pronunciation, the tones. English was such a strange language. Whereas in
Vietnamese, the words told you how they wanted to be pronounced, in
English the words remained shrouded in mystery.
She scanned the priest’s list, then returned to the notebook. So many
words, so many ideas, so many meanings. If only Công could see her now!
She imagined that she spoke English the way he spoke French, like he was
born there. She saw them sitting together on a porch looking out on a garden
—maybe like one of the gardens she’d passed here in New Orleans, with
immaculate flower beds and sprinklers and birdbaths—and she’s holding up
the words, helping him pronounce them. What she would tell him then, when
they were settled, successful, American, reminiscing of all that life threw at
them, the improbability of their survival, and yet nonetheless…
Suddenly, Tuấn pulled her arm.
“Look!” he said. “A cat!”
“Tuấn!” Hương grabbed him before he stepped into the street. A car
passed by. A horn sounded.
“But it was a cat,” her son said, “and it wasn’t like any other cat. Didn’t
you see it?”
“Stay with mẹ,” she said.
They walked two more blocks before finding the first address on the list. A
cartoon fish with huge eyes stared back at her from a tin sign. Leaning her
forehead against the glass, she peered inside and imagined herself holding a
tray of drinks and chatting with customers. A girl at the front counter waved at Hương to get her attention. When
Hương didn’t come in, the girl came to the door and asked her something she
couldn’t understand. Hương reached for the notebook in her purse then, but it
was gone. A sense of panic came over her. After emptying everything into
her hands, she realized she must have dropped it while Tuấn was running into
the street. She found the note the priest gave her—there at the bottom of her
purse, a piece of shining gold—and handed it over.
“Please,” Hương said in an almost whisper, unsure if it meant làm ơn.
Surely, it meant làm ơn! She forced a smile and hoped it didn’t appear too
eager. Then she stopped smiling altogether to avoid any possibility of looking
desperate. She remembered the women in their business suits. How confident
they were. How successful.
The girl looked at the word, then at Hương. She did this several times,
confused. “No,” the girl said. “No,” she said again, this time more forceful,
like the word was a pebble and she was flicking it toward what must have
been a strange Vietnamese woman, a woman who did not belong here, a
foreigner. “Do you want to eat?” the girl continued, slow and loud. “We serve
food. Do you want to eat?”
“Eat?” Hương asked. She didn’t know what that meant. It sounded like a
hiccup, one that you tried to suppress. Eat! Eat! Eat! What was the girl
talking about?
The girl became impatient, angry even, pointing inside, where people were
enjoying their grotesquely large meals.
“I am sorry,” Hương said, giving up, using the phrase she knew by heart: I
am sorry. It was a good phrase to know. This was what the Australian English
teachers taught her at the refugee camp. I am sorry for what happened.
Before the girl could say anything else, Hương turned around and walked
away with a steady stride. She didn’t know what had just happened, but she
felt, in the pit of her stomach, that she had done something wrong. The last
thing she saw on the girl’s face was a grimace. She was being told, she was
sure, that she had done something rude, against the country’s laws. They
would arrest her. They would arrest a woman and her children for not
knowing the rules. Would they even let her stay because she was arrested? What would happen to them all then? They crossed the street and took
another corner. She walked faster.
“Mẹ, what’s wrong?” Tuấn asked. He looked back toward where they had
come from.
“Don’t look back,” said Hương. She pushed the stroller and led Tuấn
away. “Don’t you look.”
Suddenly, she noticed, all around her people were talking. There were
couples talking, groups talking, children talking, a woman held a dog in her
arms and she, too, was talking to that small animal. Yet the words they were
saying didn’t make any sense. She repeated the words she knew in her head, a
chaotic mantra of foreign sounds that contorted her mouth comically,
strangely, like a puppet’s—Yes, no, thank you, please, yes, no, sorry, hello,
goodbye, no, sorry. The important part was to keep moving. She knew that
much. She saw a fenced-in and empty park across the street and without
looking ran toward it, but before she reached the gate, a man with beads
around his neck and oversized sunglasses bumped into her. She could smell
the alcohol on him. All of a sudden, the whole city smelled of alcohol and
everyone everywhere was drinking and smiling and laughing. What was
wrong with these people? What was wrong with this place?
She turned back and was stepping into the street, pushing the stroller with
both hands, when a car slammed its brakes and the driver pressed down on
his horn. It stopped before hitting her or the stroller. She looked down at her
shaking hands: she had let go. In the surprise of the car coming and its horn
sounding, so suddenly and so loudly—she had let go. The first sign of danger
and her first instinct was to let go and she’d nearly killed her son and the man
pressed down on his horn again and she realized she was still in the middle of
the street and she felt ashamed, the most shame she’d ever felt in her life. She
held back tears, but Bình cried. She clasped the handlebar of the stroller
more tightly.
“Stupid fucking lady!” the driver screamed.
“What did he say?” Tuấn asked.
“Let’s go home,” she replied. “He said we should go home.” They crossed
the street and headed down another. “But home is so far away,” said her son. “I’m tired.”
“What?” She had forgotten what she told him. She looked around for
anything that might have been familiar.
“Home is far away,” her son repeated.
“I know,” she said, more to herself than to him. “I know.”

The Minhs were home when Hương returned. After dinner, Mrs. Minh left
for a job cleaning at a university. Hương’s sons slept peacefully. She kept a
watchful eye on Bình. Did he understand that he’d nearly died today? Did he
know he had a horrible, reckless mother? She would have to tell Công,
wouldn’t she, about all that had happened? She would confess it to him,
everything she’d ever done—if only she were given the chance, an
opportunity to talk to him, to learn what had happened, to get him to
America and plan a way forward. For that she would confess it all.
At the camp, she had written him and mailed the letter to their home in
Mỹ Tho. When she received no answer, she wrote to their old home in
Saigon. She wrote as soon as she was able to. She must have sent a letter
every day. Noticing how many letters she had been sending off, another
woman at the camp reprimanded her.
“Are you so stupid?” the woman asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The Communists, when they see the letters, they’ll know you escaped and
they’ll know who to punish: your husband!” Hương stopped writing then.
As the sun rose, Mrs. Minh arrived home, smelling of detergent and
rubber gloves. Without a word, she joined Hương on the couch and watched
TV, which Hương had turned on for its soft glow. From her seat, Mrs. Minh
would glance at her temporary guest every few minutes as if to say something
important but ended up talking only about the shows. In this show, a witch
causes havoc by her misunderstandings but her husband loves her anyway. In
this one, there’s a magical talking horse. Here, a group of Americans are
shipwrecked. They settled on the shipwreck show, or at least Mrs. Minh did. In black
and white, it looked far away, a different place, a different time. Even if it was
a different language, it was easy to laugh at, easily understood.
Except Hương wasn’t laughing. It didn’t even look like she was paying
attention. The light on the screen bounced off her eyes.
This would happen multiple nights: Hương staring blankly at the screen in
the dark while Mrs. Minh sat on the edge of the couch in contemplation. It
made the air heavy, both of them knew, but neither one knew how to fix it.
Then one night Mrs. Minh asked, “What do you think of America?”
“Dạ thích,” Hương said. “It’s not Vietnam, but it’s not bad, either.” She
coughed to clear her throat. All day she hadn’t been talking to anyone in
Vietnamese except her sons. It felt so strange after so much silence, and the
words came out muddy and sticky.
“The priest said you left on a boat,” the wife continued. “Is that true?”
“Vâng.” Hương wanted to tell the wife about the way the water moved,
how you never got used to it, about the men on the boat and their constant
fighting, about the uneasy sense of knowing only water, knowing that it
connected the entire world—one shore to another—yet not knowing when
you might see land. There were so many things to say, and finally she decided
to ask a question, the most important question she could ask, the only one that
mattered—“Do you know how to get a message back to Vietnam? I have a
husband. He was left behind…”—but Hương stopped short of finishing when
there was shuffling noise in the bedroom, the rustling of sheets, the bouncing
of bedsprings.
She bit her lips and held her breath. Something was coming; she could feel
it. Mrs. Minh’s eyes wandered to the back of the house. Then came a scream
and the sound of glass hitting wall, one clash of impact followed by the
rainlike sound of hundreds of shards falling. The baby woke with a cry and
Hương got up to calm him. Tuấn stirred from his corner of the couch and
asked what was going on.
“Nothing,” she told him. “Nothing to be afraid of.” She bounced the baby
as footsteps made their way across the hardwood floor and the bathroom door closed and the shower turned on. The baby leaned his head on her chest and
quieted.
“I’ll go check on him,” Mrs. Minh said, standing up. “Yes. I’ll go do that.”
The couple would fight into the morning. Something else would break. At
one point, Hương thought she heard a smack on skin but she wasn’t sure.
By eight, Mr. Minh had left, slamming the door so hard Hương was sure
the house would fall down. Mrs. Minh mumbled as she prepared breakfast,
“Damn that man. Worthless…”
The next afternoon, Hương left the Minhs. With Bình in her arms and
Tuấn following behind, she walked several blocks until she saw a motel. The
word, she remembered, meant place to stay. She would stay at the motel for a
week, find a way to get in touch with Công, and get him here to New Orleans.
No one told her how to, but, she decided, no more waiting. It was time for
action. She paid in cash. The room was twenty-five dollars. She put the thirty
dollars she had left in her front pocket, holding her hand over it to make sure
it was secure. After she called him, the priest arrived the next morning. He sat in his van as
Hương led the boys out. The radio played gospel hymns, but he turned it off
as they made their journey downtown.
He had been searching for her all morning, he said when they were on the
highway. The window was down and the wind was more hot than cool. The
Minhs had told him she “just up and left,” without telling them where she was
heading. She hadn’t even left a note about where she was going, how to reach
her, or what her intentions were. She could have “dropped off the face of the
earth”—she had no idea what that could possibly have meant.
“I nearly had a heart attack,” the priest said. Did she know New Orleans
could be a dangerous place? he went on. People get murdered here. Robbed.
Beaten. She was a recent immigrant, and people could have taken advantage
of her. Why did she leave? She didn’t answer him right away. It could have been a rhetorical question.
But he didn’t have to live with them. He didn’t have to live with Mr. Minh’s
night terrors or his drunkenness. Or the couple’s arguments. He didn’t have to
live as if in a nightmare, where everywhere she turned something was strange,
askew, incoherent. That was what her time in New Orleans had been like. He
couldn’t have understood any of this. His life wasn’t complicated. He was a
priest, for God’s sake! He didn’t know a thing about suffering.
At the church, they filed into his office. The priest turned on the airconditioning and searched through the mess on his desk.
“They don’t like us,” she said finally. She didn’t know what she expected
him to say or do. Anger bubbled inside her. “You don’t understand,” she
managed to say before taking a seat.
The walls of the room were lined with certificates with fancy writing and
gold seals; crosses, some plain wood, others decorated with gold; and there
were photos, mostly of him—here with a group of nuns, there with a youth
baseball team, another a group portrait with other priests. And among all this,
a framed cream-colored piece of paper. An emblem sat in the middle and
below it, a motto: I’ —‰–š‡‰ ˜“ O’‰, ’ —‰–š‡‰ ˜“ A.
Finally the priest said, “I’ve been a priest for ten years.” He took off his
glasses, rubbed them with a cloth, and put them back on. “And I don’t think
I’ve ever taken on more than I have this year.” He went on to talk about God,
bringing up Bible stories about tests and hardships. God was testing him, he
told her.
For the first time since she’d met him, she realized she was less of a person
and more of a test to this man. She was a puzzle to figure out, a jigsaw, a
number among other numbers. He lived to serve not humanity but his ideas
and career. In that way, she thought, Catholics were not too dissimilar from
the Communists. She had been hoping this man was different. How foolish
she was to put her life in his hands.
“Don’t you understand?” he asked, rhetorically. He smiled dumbly, as if he
had reached an epiphany.
She breathed in and exhaled. She was exhausted. “Yes,” she said and left.
As she closed the door, a woman’s voice, somewhere, squealed, “Trời ơi!” Hương looked up. She scanned the pews to see if anyone was there, and
her eyes stopped at a closet door left ajar, a thin strip of light streaming out.
She paused at the threshold. Inside, Thủy, a girl younger than Hương whom
she knew from the church, was bent over a table.
“Chị Hương!” Thủy opened the door and cried out her name again. The
girl jumped up and down and reached out for Hương’s hands. “Come! You
have to hear this!” she said. Hương didn’t know how to react as Thủy moved
aside and showed her the cassette player on the table. She pressed a button
and it began to click. Soon, through the static, a man spoke.
“Thủy ơi!” said the grainy voice. “How I miss you so! It is raining here
again, my love. Can you hear the water? The heavens cry.” The voice quieted
to the sound of water pelting against mud.
The man was probably a young boy Thủy’s age. Hương wanted to laugh at
their young, naïve love. Instead, she took a step closer, inspecting the cassette
player—the spinning of the tape reel, the clicking of the movement, the
smooth buttons with their colorful symbols on top. She focused on the
spinning of the wheels. For a moment, there was no other sound except that
clicking as it echoed in that small closet.
“Thủy?” the man’s voice came on again. Hương stepped back.
“There he is!” Thủy squealed and clapped her hands in excitement. She
hugged Hương, and then, embarrassed, restrained herself.
“Thủy, when you return home, we should get married! I know that’s not
what your parents want, but…”
Thủy turned down the volume and Hương left the girl to her tape message.
Walking down Camp Street, Hương thought about the ease of making a
cassette. Unlike the letter, its content wasn’t obvious; instead, it was hidden,
unless the tape was played. But people would play it only if it looked
suspicious. If she were to label it “Uncle Hổ’s Teachings” or maybe just
“Communism,” they would not even bother looking any further into the
matter. Yet there was the cost of sending it. And would she mail it to their
Mỹ Tho address or their Saigon one? Would Công still be there? Was Công
safe? What if the Communists captured him? No, she had to wipe those
uncertainties from her mind. She needed to think positively; it was the only way. She would have to ask the priest about the tape recorder. After
apologizing for her behavior that morning, she would say politely, “Cha, cho
con mượn cái này.” Coyly, she would add, “I will return it, I swear. Just one
night.”
Công would be reached. They would be reunited. New Orleans looked
brighter and happier then. She smiled. It was the first time in weeks. Perhaps
even months.

At the motel, she set the tape recorder on the desk. She tested it, and thesound of her voice surprised her. She sounded young and immature, a littlebit needy. Did she always sound like that? She tested it again, changing hervoice and the pitch of the words. She wanted to make a good impression.When she was happy with her test recording, she cleaned up and dressed theboys as if the recorder could see what they looked like.“I don’t like this,” Tuấn complained. He pulled at his shirt. “Itchy.”“It’s only for a little bit,” she told him. “It’s important. We dress up forimportant things.” She told this to herself and changed into an áo dài, the oneluxury she had packed. After they were ready, she pressed the button and themachine began recording.“A lô, anh Công? Hương đây.” She paused. Where to start?It felt odd speaking to a machine now. She had practiced so much, butnow it meant something. She had to pick the correct words to get hermeaning across clearly, to describe her situation correctly, to express heremotions so that there were no questions about how she felt. Her lungsbecame heavy and her cheeks flushed red. She turned off the machine andthen turned it back on.“We made it to America,” she started. She turned the recorder off andtook another breath, then started it again. “But before, we were in Singaporein a camp full of other boat people. That’s what they call us: boat people.”She wanted to stop, but the words just kept coming. She had so much tosay and none of it would make sense to Công. They spent a week on a boat, she and Tuấn, and, somewhere within her,their baby. The only food they brought were a small bag of cooked rice andanother bag of bananas. (Công knew that already.) A few days in, this wassplit among the twenty or so people on the boat. (She had lost count of howmany there were.) She remembered that at one point the entire boat ran outof water, and all the babies, including her son, were crying and screaming ofthirst. Then it rained, the sky turning black, and water droplets fell down.They lifted their plastic bottles and bags to the air as the children openedtheir mouths. Soon came the lightning and thunder and everyone croucheddown, huddled in the mass of skin and bones as if the act of clutching on toone another was enough to save them if the boat were to topple over.The next day a ship found them, and their greetings were friendly. Theship sailed them to a camp in Singapore, where they stayed for severalmonths, long enough for her to have the child, which she was surprisedsurvived at all after the cruelties of the sea. Finally, they were told to get on aplane and that plane took the three of them—a mother and two sons—toNew Orleans, a place she never heard of before and still couldn’t place on amap.She held up Bình and the baby cooed into the recorder. She should havetold Công about him first. Why didn’t she? “This is our son, Công. I namedhim Bình. Isn’t he đẹp trai? He was born at the camp. I thought I wouldn’thave been healthy enough and that if he came he wouldn’t be healthy, either,but here he is. He’s healthy and he’s strong! He’s a miracle.” She held thebaby up higher and he laughed as if tickled. “That’s your father,” she said andpointed to the recorder. She waved his little hand and he laughed louder. Shewished he hadn’t. This was a serious moment. They, all of them, should beserious.“Công, are you safe?” she asked now. “Where are you now? Are youcoming over? How is our house? What are the Communists doing? Is it safethere? Are you safe?” There were so many questions. She opened her mouth,but nothing came out except a weak whimper. She stood up to get a tissue The last night in Mỹ Tho they packed an old suitcase. They had used it yearsearlier—before Tuấn, before there was talk of family—on a trip to Đà Lạt.Hương remembered the rolling hills, covered in morning mist and lookinglike giants: tall and sturdy, mysterious and unknowable. She told Công thatthis was where she would want to spend the rest of her life. Công, on theother hand, didn’t like Đà Lạt. He didn’t like traveling. He had left the Northwith his family when he was a child. A refugee, he associated movement withloss. Since then, he had looked for a place to put down his roots—to stay. Inthe days before Saigon was lost, everyone was trying to leave, but Công wasadamant about staying. They had just moved from Mỹ Tho to the city forCông’s job at the university. He had worked his entire life for this, he hadsaid, and now they were letting him teach literature—to talk about not onlythe great Vietnamese poets but about the great French ones he loved, too, likeRimbaud, Verlaine, Gautier, Apollinaire, and Hugo. At the age of two, Tuấnknew these names better than those of the other kids, and he sang themwherever he went: Rim-baud, Ver-laine, Gau-tier. Công was proud of all he’daccomplished, even if teaching was, at times, difficult. More often than not,he came home with two or three full folders of papers to grade, along withstories of troublesome students. He struggled with the ones who were closedminded, the ones who were stuck to their small-town ideologies and resistedbeing educated. The worst, he would tell her (looking around as if he weredisclosing a secret), were the students who joined the Communist clubs. Theywere so set in their ideologies there was no teaching them. (“You wouldsooner teach a horse to fly,” he would say.) Still, his life was coming togetherthe way he had planned. The look in his eyes said “hãy tin anh.” Trust me.And Hương did.They were finally getting used to Saigon, the loud vendors, the litteredstreets, the overbearing smell of motor exhaust. They had fallen into acomfortable domestic routine.Mornings, Công and Hương would wake up early. The day would startwith morning stretches in their small backyard as the sun rose and their coffeedripped into warm perfection. After, they’d cook breakfast together, oftenrice with nước tương and eggs. By the time the city woke up—with people walking to work and motorbikes taking to the streets—Tuấn was awake, andthey got him ready for school. She’d walk him there as Công biked to theuniversity. They’d arrive before classes started and she’d hand him over to hisfriends—three other little boys—and they’d play with a soccer ball. Hươngwould sit under the shade of the tree and watch until the teachers came tocollect their students.During the day, she’d clean the house and settle the family accounts. Côngbrought in the money, but it was because of her know-how with numbers thatthey could survive. Công appreciated her for this and often told her sheshould have gone to school and studied math. But that idea only called tomind abstract theories discussed in front of dusty chalkboards. And whywould she want that when she could calculate numbers with the sun streamingin through the window, a light breeze blowing now and then? No, that lifewasn’t for her. She knew her life and what she wanted, and having had it,there as if in the palms of her hands, she felt happy.In the afternoon, she would pick Tuấn up and they’d go to the market tobuy ingredients for dinner that night. It was the best time to buy because thesellers were tired by then and easy to bargain with. Though, of course, itmeant not getting the best picks of produce and meat. Still, it saved themmoney; their country was at war, after all (though, in Hương’s mind, the warwas always over there—someplace she’d only ever heard of). Công, if hewasn’t busy, would be home by the time they returned.They’d cook as a family, discussing their day. If Công had a particularlygood day or if he left his office early, he would bring home a treat for his son,the catch being he had to answer one of his riddles. But, of course, their sonwas so smart—the professor’s son—that he answered everything right andclaimed his prize with a kiss and a smile. Theirs was a house of love, Hươngwas sure. It was all they ever needed—love. And with love, they wouldsurvive. She believed this with all her heart.When the city fell, Công didn’t anticipate things changing dramatically.The Communists had won the entire country; what else did they want? Thewar was over, after all. Life would resume. He had a new class to prepare for.The week Saigon fell, he said he was dreaming about his syllabus and wondering if he could fit the works of Musset in there somehow. Thepeaceful shift of power and how easily everything returned to normal—theschool schedule, the bustling market—seemed to confirm what Công said.That was May 1975.But soon the curfews came. Tanks and soldiers with guns patrolled thestreets as everyone else went about their daily business. Hương rememberedhow young the soldiers were. She had assumed they would all be older men,but they were all younger than she was. She saw the soldiers eating atrestaurants, playing catch in the park, wooing girls. Surely these Communistscould not have been bad. They could not have conquered an entire country—these boys with bone fingers, hungry arms, optimistic smiles. They passed outpamphlets from the new government explaining how it existed to serve thepeople. She would grow to hate that phrase—serve the people—at firstbecause it was ubiquitous, then later, much later, as it became sinister,prickly.The next year, a letter came for Công, asking him to report to a militarytraining camp in Lăng Cô. As a member of the University of Saigon faculty,the future of the new nation depended on him, said the letter. It was time forthe teachers to be taught. Pack enough clothes for two weeks of reeducation.They held him for five months.When he returned to Saigon, shirtless and shoeless and emaciated, Hươngdidn’t even recognize him until he called her name—“Hương. Anh đây.” Sheran to him and held him gently. Nights after, the feel of bones would haunther.It took him a month to recover. When he was better, Công didn’t talkabout what happened at the reeducation center, but he decided they shouldleave Saigon. Immediately.They packed the suitcase—and Công gathered his favorite books into aknapsack—and took a bus back to Mỹ Tho, where Hương had grown up,where they had met. She still had a plot of familial land out there and a smallshack, both inherited after her mother died years ago. An hour outside thetown, the bus was stopped by a group of military officers and they werequestioned. What were they doing, going to Mỹ Tho? Did they have permission to go? Did they know they had to ask permission? Công told themthey were visiting Hương’s mother, who was very ill. The officers looked atthe couple suspiciously. The couple was let go. They told Công he looked likean honest man.Upon their arrival in Mỹ Tho, they stayed with a family friend for a fewweeks before setting up a meager, quiet home. If asked, by villagers ormilitary officers, they said Hương’s mother had died and they had decided tostay in her maternal village where they would farm a small plot of land.How life was different for them now. In Saigon, Hương was the youngwife of a professor and they were a professor’s family. Now she and Côngrooted around in a country garden, the dirt getting under their nails, the scentof earth and insects and sun baking themselves into their clothes and skin.They had planned on planting all types of vegetables—cabbages andcucumbers and lettuce—but the only thing that grew were bitter melons. Whywere they farming, she often asked, when Mỹ Tho was a fishing village? Saferand a better investment, was Công’s answer with an anxious look in his eyes.Or perhaps it was something else. She didn’t ask; the recent months had beenso much. Yes, of course, she reasoned, safety. So they farmed, and when theharvest was ready, Công took it to market.Having no school, Tuấn stayed home and became bored and listless. Hecomplained about not having books or toys. He asked about school and hisfriends. Somehow, he had the idea they were just a short walk away and hewanted to go there. He became grumpy when Hương said he needed to stayon their property.The change didn’t sit well with Công, either, who, though still loving, wasdistracted and distant. It was as if he was always looking over his shoulder,expecting someone there. Tuấn must have sensed this, too. During the day,their son would find little gifts for his father to cheer him up—a particularlypretty rock or an interesting flower. Công would smile and ruffle his son’shair. But then, again, his gaze would return outside to the quiet village, which,soon, became impossibly quieter, emptier.Men began to disappear. First here and there, but then more noticeably.Then some women. Then entire households were replaced with families with stale Northern accents and pale skin.

One night, in the dark of their bedroom, Công told her they should leave
the country.
“Leave?” she asked. “Why? Where?” The proposition seemed absurd,
more so coming from Công, a rational man who only ever wanted a home.
“We can go anywhere. Remember Cảnh?” he asked.
Cảnh was a fisherman. The village woke up one morning and his shack
had disappeared, the wood walls gone, the plot of land empty like he had
never existed. Everyone was sure he’d packed up and sailed away. Cảnh
became a local legend: one was not condemned to the oppression of the new
Socialist Republic of Vietnam as it eliminated its traitors, planted new seeds,
grew a new society. One could leave.
“Công,” she said, “go to sleep.”
Công got out of bed. He took out his notebook. He consulted his books
and wrote until the sun rose. He came to bed only to sleep for two hours
before getting up again, acting as if nothing had happened.
The nights would continue the same way. He became erratic. He wrote in
a mixture of French and Vietnamese, pages and pages of it. She couldn’t
understand anything. When one sentence started in Vietnamese, it ended in
French. She never knew he had this in him, this paranoia. Sometimes his
handwriting looked more like miniature drawings than words. And there were
letters put together that surely couldn’t have meant anything in any language.
Eventually, the government began a new economic program. They would
buy from the country’s workers—“the foundation of our new society”—and,
to ensure everyone got what they needed, sold the crops back to the masses
—“to serve the people.”
One day, a government official came for their bitter melons. He laughed as
his colleagues loaded up a truck. “Who eats mướp đắng anymore, sister?” he
said, though he took a load of the crops anyway and handed her not money
but a small book of vouchers. “Thank you for serving the people.”
“Serve the people!” she scoffed after they left.
Hương felt belittled and betrayed. As the official went door-to-door, at
times laughing at her neighbors, sometimes even yelling at them if they didn’t produce enough, she began feeling angry more than anything else.
“Ungrateful,” she said. “They’re stealing our food and giving us vouchers
that won’t buy even a kilo of rice and then telling us we’re heroes of the
country, the backbone of society.” It made her want to cry for the state of her
country.
But Công saw an opportunity. “Classic communism by the book! Now
aren’t you glad we grew crops?” he told her. Công’s plan went into motion.
They grew more than they would sell to the government. The surplus they
sold on the black market, mostly to traditional herbalists and of course to
starving families. After several months, they had the money for an escape—
for three seats on the boat, for the fuel for the boat, for the food they would
have to bring along. The money they had left over Hương sewed into their
clothes, along with whatever jewelry they could trade for what they needed.
When the time came to leave, Hương couldn’t believe it. That night, an old
man with a dirty beard arrived at the house. They packed the suitcase and
Công paid the man. They followed him into the jungle.
The old man, who must have been at least fifty, ran like a teenager, and
they tried to keep up with him through the thick, moist air that made it hard
for Hương to breathe and run and carry Tuấn at the same time. A storm was
coming; this was why it was so humid. Was it safe to go to the water now?
Tuấn cried and Hương had to cover his mouth.
“Please be quiet, Tuấn. Please!” she begged him.
He cried louder and she felt his hot breath on her palm. When there was a
sudden noise, she nearly let go but didn’t. They all stopped running. The
insects stopped their singing. The birds stopped their calling. It was the first
time she had ever heard complete silence in the jungle.
“It sounded like a gunshot,” said Công after a lengthy pause. “Are they
after us?” Then, in an accusatory tone, Công yelled at the old man. “Are you
one of them, old man? Are you ambushing us?”
The yelling made Tuấn cry louder, and the old man yelled back that he
would never do anything like that; he said he was a man of his word, that he’d
served for years in the South Vietnamese Army. The two men argued as
Hương tried to make out their figures. She began to walk toward a shadow she thought was Công, but, approaching it, she saw it was a tree with its top
chopped off like it was struck by lightning. The loud, sudden noise repeated
and everyone went quiet again.
“Anh Công?” she said, grasping out in the dark. “Anh Công?”
“This way,” she heard Công say. He grabbed her hand and they continued
running, rubbing against trees, stumbling over vines. Hương had to stop twice
because her stomach ached. For a month she’d had the idea that she was
pregnant, and the last four weeks of sickness confirmed it. When she gave
Công the news, she said she could have it taken care of before the trip, but he
was so ecstatic he wouldn’t let her. “Why would we want to do that?” he
asked and touched her belly. “Just let me name the baby,” he added. She had
chosen Tuấn’s name; he could have this.
Then, there was the beach. Several boats waited ashore. There were more
in the water—Hương could see flashlights in the distance—circles of light
floating and bobbing up and down, then disappearing. A woman was
screaming on the shore, pointing out to the water.
“My baby! My baby boy!” the woman screamed. “My baby is on that
boat! Bring him back! My boy!”
The woman looked familiar, but it was too dark and Hương couldn’t tell
for sure. The woman ran into the water and disappeared.
Hương squeezed Công’s hand. A sudden rush of energy came over her. All
this time planning and here they were.
“Let’s leave,” she said. “It’s time to go, Công.” She pulled him, but he
stopped to gaze back into the jungle. He paused. Eyes straight ahead, she
pulled harder and they ran toward the boat. There, a man waved them
forward. They were the last ones on before the boat was pushed out into the
water.
“Quick, quick,” said a man as the boat sputtered forward.
They were out at sea for ten days. Hương would stay sleepless for most of
that, holding Tuấn in her arms, his head against her chest, buried there, away
from the sea. How had Công’s hand slipped? she kept asking herself. That was
the only explanation. The only possible one. After she recorded her message, she wrote “The Teachings of Uncle Hổ” on
the tape and the address of their Mỹ Tho house on an envelope. In the
morning, she would ask the priest to take her to the post office. The message
would be sent. She would receive something back. They would be reunited. It
was the best she could hope for. She could hope.
After dinner—instant noodles from a Styrofoam cup the church gave out
—she cleaned up her sons and tucked them in. When she couldn’t sleep, she
turned on the TV and watched it with no sound. Images flashed on the screen:
men in business suits signing papers and shaking hands; reporters laughing
behind a desk and shuffling their papers; a man smiling in front of a map of
America.
Deep into the night, Bình woke up crying. Hương rocked him in her arms
and walked him around the room. Though the blinds were drawn, the lights
from the streetlamps streamed in. In the glow, Bình looked angelic and she
felt sorry he’d been through so much already. From the very first day, even.
His birth took ten hours and two midwives. When he was finally out in the
world, one of the midwives frowned. Something was wrong; he wasn’t crying,
he wasn’t breathing. The other midwife took the baby and examined him.
From where Hương lay, she could see the child in the midwife’s hands. She
was afraid he would be still, but his arms were waving frantically like he was
drowning. “I know,” the first midwife said. She took him and tapped him on
the back, once, twice, three times before the baby started coughing and the
first cry was heard as he took in a breath of air. Hương let out a sigh of relief
along with the midwives. Thinking about that now, she wondered what
hardships her children would have. What misfortunes? What heartaches?
What wars?
“As long as I am here,” she whispered, enclosing his small hands with
hers, “nothing will happen to you. I promise. I will protect you. The both of
you. I promise.” She felt a certainty in this statement, in her ability to keep
this promise. It was the most sure thing she’d ever uttered.
She took him in her lap and together they watched the evening news. Any minute now, she was sure, they would talk about home.

Tuan  1979

The Versailles Arms apartments were new. That much Tuấn could tell. The
white paint smelled fresh. The rooms had a crispness of touch to them, no
dust, no staleness. When they moved in—after living at the church, the
Minhs’, the motel, and the cha xứ’s house—everyone else was moving in as
well. Rows of cars idled outside. One car’s radio was tuned in to what
sounded like a sports game, though Tuấn couldn’t understand any of it and
couldn’t guess what was being played, either. It all reminded him of the motel
they’d stayed at, where people moved in and out of rooms and sat in their cars
waiting for someone to come out and meet them, or just sat with their
windows down, smoking or eating hamburgers. Except here everyone looked
like they meant to stay. That was the difference.
As men brought in boxes, women unpacked them. Tuấn and his family
had only one suitcase and a few plastic bags of things they’d accumulated
since getting here: a new pair of shoes for him, Styrofoam cups of noodles, a
blanket with baby animals on it for Bình. They had so little. His mother must
have seen him noticing, because she placed her hand on his shoulder.
“We won’t be here long anyway,” she said.
“We won’t?” He looked up. He couldn’t read her face. What she felt—for
she must have felt something—was undetectable. She had been like that since
they left Vietnam, a silent mother. Sometimes she cried, but most of the time
she was quiet and her face stayed serious.
“Yes,” she said. “Once your father comes, we’ll move someplace else.” She
nudged him forward and he walked up the steps.
“Where?” “Garden District, maybe, with a fence and a garden.” She smirked when
she said that, and he knew everything was going to be fine then. Sure of it.

Versailles was built on the eastern outskirts of New Orleans, across the
Industrial Canal, where the tall buildings were replaced by swampland. Gated
by a chain-link fence on the front and flush against a bayou in the back,
Versailles held ten apartment buildings, each with two homes, one on top of
the other. The buildings dotted the sides of an unpaved road that ran through
the middle of Versailles until it ended at the water.
For weeks, they didn’t unpack. Everything stayed in their suitcase. It made
Tuấn uneasy. None of this belonged to them; they had to be careful not to
break anything, dirty the carpet, mark the walls—it was not theirs. His
mother continued sending tapes to their father. They sat on the floor in front
of the cassette recorder, talking into it as the spokes spun. She ended each
message, “See you soon,” and Tuấn echoed: “See you soon, cha!” She’d tuck
them in after, and, though he knew it was impossible, he heard his voice
bouncing off the blank white walls: “See you…soon…cha!”
It wasn’t until summer that his mother started decorating. From the
church, they got a used couch and an old dinner table and a painting of a
moss-covered tree. One day, Tuấn’s mother thought flowers would be nice.
Saying that, she emptied a pickle jar into a bowl and rinsed it out.
“Something nice,” she said.
“What if cha came home and there was nothing nice!” Tuấn added.
She smiled.
Together, the three of them wandered the banks of the bayou, just outside
their apartment since they were the last building in Versailles, searching for
flowers. From a distance, as she held on to Baby Bình, Tuấn thought his
mother looked younger, brighter, and his brother looked like a perfect toy,
more of a doll than a real boy. He bet she picked flowers when she was a little
girl, too, and made a note to ask her later. He picked up a fist full of the
brightest ones he could find and ran up to her. She giggled and shook her head. She didn’t like the yellow ones. The blues, she liked, and the purples
and the whites, too. When they gathered a good bunch (even Bình managed
to pluck a baby violet), they walked back inside. She threw the flowers in the
jar and started on dinner.
Just then, someone knocked. They stopped what they were doing and eyed
the door. All this time, they had lived alone. And when Tuấn thought about it,
no one had ever knocked on their door before; no one visited. Who could it
be? His mother cleared her throat and turned off the stove. She wiped her
hands on a towel. Tuấn followed after. Maybe someone had seen them
plucking flowers and they weren’t supposed to. What if they were in trouble?
The idea flashed in his mind. He wasn’t so sure about opening the door. He
wanted to tell his mother to stop, but her hand twisted the knob and the door
popped open.
An old woman’s weathered face greeted him when it did. He heard the
sticky movement of her lips as she moved them into a smile. Slowly she
shuffled in. In one hand, she held a cane and in the other, a box wrapped in
shiny red paper. Tuấn watched in amazement. That such an ancient woman
could do all of this without a cry for help caught his attention. She reminded
him of an elderly water buffalo: her large flaring nostrils, the frowning lips, a
lumbering gait.
“You must be Hương,” the old woman said.
“Yes,” his mother replied, “I’m Hương.” She, too, seemed mesmerized.
She wiped her hands on the towel again, though they were already clean and
dry. Her mouth opened to say something but she was interrupted.
“Bùi Thị Minh Giang,” the old woman said. “Or how they say it here,
Giang Bùi, from downstairs,” she added. She handed his mother the box.
“Almond cookies,” she said. “If you get the cà phê ready, we can get started
on those!”
Tuấn sat with them while they talked about themselves (she was the wife
of a businessman who died during the war) and New Orleans (“The coffee
here is good, isn’t it?”) and Versailles (“Can you believe they call this place
Versailles?”). At one point he stopped paying attention and she left. They never invited her back, but she returned anyway. The next day before
dinner and then the next and then the next, until Bà Giang’s visits became so
expected, a part of their regular lives, Tuấn couldn’t imagine a day without
them or her playful teasing.
At some point during her time there, she’d poke his arm or his belly and
he’d jerk his body back. “You’re getting so big now!” she’d say. “Chubby
hands, chubby arms, and that tummy. As fat as an American!”
At the word American, Tuấn would spring up on his chair.
“I’m not American!” he would say, reciting from memory what they taught
him in school. “I am người Việt Nam. My father teaches the great and
honorable literature of our nation. My mother is the daughter of our beautiful
countryside.”
At the end of his speech, they would clap and he would bow.
“Good boy!” they’d cheer.
“My boy,” his mother would say.
He’d blush. His whole body would feel warm and loved. It almost felt like
home, or a type of home.

Because of her age, Bà Giang didn’t work, or she couldn’t find work. To make
money she took in the children of Versailles, the ones who needed
supervision when their parents were out.
Besides Tuấn and Bình, there were three other kids. Trúc was a girl and
nine and the oldest. She didn’t like watching TV—what Bà Giang told them
to do most days—because it rotted the brain and made you stupid; she
watched anyway. Ngọc was the second oldest, a skinny boy with long legs and
a monkey’s laugh. Then there was Đinh-Fredric, a boy of seven—two years
older than Tuấn—who was lai, which meant his dad wasn’t người Việt but no
one knew what he was, either. It was why he had two names, one Vietnamese,
another from somewhere else, or at least this was what Bà Giang told Tuấn’s mother.

Đinh-Fredric never sat with them for Sesame Street or The Electric
Company or Rocky and Bullwinkle. Instead, he stayed in Bà Giang’s room
with the door closed. What he did in there no one knew.
Once, during a commercial break, Trúc told them Đinh-Fredric wasn’t
người Việt at all: he was American, one-hundred-and-ten percent.
“Listen to his name,” she said. “It doesn’t even sound like người Việt.
What kind of name is Fredric?” Ngọc nodded; what kind of name was
Fredric?
Trúc continued, “Why does he stay by himself? He’s planning something
in there, right now. Against us! My dad says Americans are bad, bad, bad
people, and my dad is always right.” Tuấn tried to remember if his dad said
anything about Americans or America. Before they left, he had talked about
Australia and France. “Australians are friendly,” Tuấn remembered him
telling his mother when they thought he was asleep. “The French, at least we
know some French.” They never told him they were leaving, but he pieced it
all together from their late-night conversations. The only shock was when they
actually did, and, after that, the fact that his dad didn’t come along.
“What makes them so bad?” Ngọc asked.
Trúc let out an angry puff of air. “What makes them so bad?” She leaned
forward. “Remember the boat?”
Ngọc nodded. Tuấn remembered the boat, too, though it wasn’t the same
ones Ngọc or Trúc were on. They were all on different boats. He remembered
his dad not being there and the waves and the sick feeling in his stomach like
there was too much water in there. He remembered his mother telling him to
go to sleep, always telling him to sleep, even if he just woke up. And when he
asked where they were going, she just shook her head as if “No” was a place.
“The Americans made you do that,” Trúc said. “They took your home.
They made you get on that boat. And now your mom cooks their meals, your
dad cleans their houses, even if he used to be top boss, and they both come
home smelly. The Americans are the reason for everything bad that has ever
happened. Do you understand?”
Ngọc nodded.
“What about you?” She looked at Tuấn pointedly. “Do you understand?” “I don’t know,” he mumbled. All this talk confused him. He wanted to be
alone and think it all through.
“What did you say?”
“Dạ, I said dạ.”
For lunch, Bà Giang gave them store-bought cupcakes, her favorite. They
were made of chocolate and had cream in the middle. Each plastic packet had
two. As Trúc and Ngọc returned to the TV, Tuấn paused at the hallway
leading to Bà Giang’s room. Who was Đinh-Fredric? Could Trúc be right?
Was he bad? Was he an American? It didn’t seem likely. After all, there were
no Americans in Versailles. Everyone was người Việt. It was a rule: you had
to be người Việt to stay in Versailles.
Tuấn wrapped the second of his cupcakes in a paper towel and tiptoed
down the hall. Outside the room, he tapped on the door. When no one
answered, he tried again, whispering into the keyhole, “Đinh. Đinh-Freerock.”
To Tuấn, Đinh-Fredric was a ghost. He’d only ever seen glimpses of the
boy, a bright shirt running through the halls. He didn’t have any hair or a head
or eyes or nose or body. He was just a shirt. At times, Tuấn wasn’t even sure
Đinh-Fredric existed. He was an idea, not a boy. “Đinh!” he whispered
louder.
The door opened slightly and a smell like old perfume, stale but flowery,
sprang forth. Between the door and its frame, Tuấn saw eyes gazing at him.
“Bánh!” Tuấn unwrapped the paper towel. The cupcake was falling apart
and the white filling oozed out. Tuấn wiped a hand on his shirt. “It’s still good
even though it doesn’t look like it. You can have it if you want.”
The boy stared back. His eyes traveled down to Tuấn’s bare feet then back
to his face. The door squeaked nervously as it moved back and forth.
“What are you doing?” Trúc interrupted. Tuấn hadn’t even heard her
coming. Trúc crossed her arms. She looked at Tuấn then at Đinh-Fredric then
back at Tuấn and her eyes lit up. “Are you American, too, Tuấn?” she asked,
a smirk sprouting on her face.
“No!” Tuấn exclaimed. “No! I’m người Việt. I’m người Việt! My father…
He…” He all of a sudden forgot what to say. The words were in his head, but they were in the wrong order. Trúc’s eyes stared down at him and made him
feel like hiding. He dropped the cupcake and ran back to the television, where
Ngọc sat, not even hiding his eagerness. The TV volume was on low.
“Did you see him? Did you see the American?” he asked.
Tuấn remembered the shadow figure in the dark, its thinness and
smallness. He could tell Đinh-Fredric’s skin was dark, darker than his own.
His hair was short, and to Tuấn’s surprise, stiff-looking and curly. ĐinhFredric wasn’t a ghost. He wasn’t a monster. He was just a boy.
The bedroom door opened and closed with a quick yet noticeable squeak
and clap. Tuấn stretched his neck to see if Đinh had come out. The hallway
was empty and the cupcake was gone. Tuấn imagined Đinh in the room,
licking the sweetness from the paper towel happily. It made Tuấn smile. They
would be friends. Good friends.
“Nothing,” Tuấn said to Ngọc. “I saw nothing.”

That night, his mother recorded another tape message. She sat on the floor bythe glass sliding doors that looked out onto the bayou. Their apartment wason the second floor, and a metal railing stopped you from walking out andfalling. Tuấn wondered why they even bothered putting a door there, butmaybe that was the way things were in this country.“I am in another country,” he often whispered to himself to feel theheaviness of the words fall out. “Out there, far far away,” he would go on butonly in his head, “is a large piece of land called Vietnam with differentpeople, different trees, different houses, and that is where cha is and hecannot just walk out of it. Vietnam is not like a room, it’s like a school andyou can’t leave because there are different rules in school and you can’t gountil thầy giáo says so, so we are waiting for thầy giáo to say he can go or forcha to sneak out and not let thầy giáo know.”As his mother rewound the cassette tape and began addressing theenvelope, Tuấn asked, “When is cha coming?”“Soon,” she said, sealing the envelope. She pressed her fingers against it tomake sure it was tight. She crossed her legs and patted them. Tuấn climbedonto her lap.“Would he like it here?” Tuấn asked.“Sure he will,” she replied. Her voice was certain. How could he everdoubt her?“What do you think he will like the most here?” Outside, the moon shinedonto the bayou and reflected there, a mirror image.“Us.”On Tuesday the next week, Bà Giang let them play outside. Ngọc wanted toplay hide-and-seek, but Trúc said it was a baby’s game, so Ngọc didn’t wantto play it anymore.Then Trúc said, “I have an idea! It’s called ‘I’m Not American.’ ”“That’s not a game,” Tuấn said.“We played it all the time back in Saigon,” Trúc said. “You wouldn’tknow. You’re from Mỹ Tho. Your family is all country bumpkins.”“Hey!” Tuấn hollered back.“How do you play?” Ngọc asked.Trúc reached into her pocket and pulled out a red ribbon. She held it up,and the sunlight made it shimmer. “Easy. If you wear this,” she said, “you’rethe American.”“This is stupid,” Tuấn said. “I’m not playing.”“If you’re not playing, you’re just ngu and we don’t like you.”“Play, Tuấn!” Ngọc said. “He’ll play! How do we play?”“So,” Trúc began, “if you’re the American, you wear this. The only waynot to be the American anymore is to tie it on someone else. So you chase usaround. When you catch someone, you knock them to the ground and tie itaround their wrist.” She pulled Tuấn’s arm and demonstrated. She tied adouble knot. “Ta-da!” she said.“Then what?” Ngọc asked. “Then you run away, dummy.” She gave Tuấn a shove. “You’re It,dummy!”Ngọc burst out laughing.Trúc began running and yelling, “The Americans are killing our people!The Americans are killing our crops!”“Not the Americans!” boomed Ngọc. “Not the Americans!”“The Americans are killing our people! The Americans are killing ourcrops!” Trúc repeated.“Not the Americans!” Ngọc boomed again, this time with more fakehorror. “The Americans!”They did this for several minutes, running around dumbly while Tuấntrailed behind. They’d run around Bà Giang’s apartment when Tuấn saw Đinhat the window. He had been watching all along. Caught, the boy hid behindthe curtains, but Tuấn had already seen him and saw him still watching frombehind the thin fabric.“What you doing, American?” Trúc tapped him on the shoulder. “Do youwant to play or kiss your American friend over there?” She made kissingnoises and pointed to the window. She stared down at Tuấn, her tall bodycasting a shadow.“Stop calling me American!” He threw out his arms to push her, but Trúcwas already ahead of him. In the next instant, he tumbled on the dirt andfound himself facing the bayou.It was then that he heard Ngọc screaming, “Stop, you guys! Stop it!” Hishigh-pitched squeal pierced the air. “Stop it! Stop! You both ruined it. Thisisn’t fun!” He stomped toward the apartment. Tuấn and Trúc stayed wherethey were until they heard the door slam.“I’m not playing anymore,” Tuấn said, untying the ribbon. He rubbed hischeek. There was no bruise, just dirt. “You can be the American.” He flickedthe ribbon toward her, but it fell slowly to the ground like a feather. He beganwalking away. His body ached. He felt that there should have been a bruisesomewhere. He’d have to check when he got home. “I’m người Việt,” hebegan muttering. “My father teaches the great, honorable literature of ournation….” “Your father’s probably dead,” Trúc yelled. “They probably killed him.He’s probably gone.”Without thinking, Tuấn turned back and ran into Trúc. When he got toher, he kept on going until they reached the bayou and they fell into the water.“He’s not dead!” he screamed. “He’s coming. He’s coming for us. Youdon’t know him. He’s coming for us!”He tried to slow his heavy breathing as Trúc stared back at him seriously.Whatever had just happened, he didn’t know he had that in him. It made himfeel powerful, until he heard Trúc laughing.“American lover, American lover,” she sang as if it was the nastiest thinganyone could call someone. “American lover.”“You’re not my friend!” Tuấn screamed as he got up.“I was never your friend,” she said back, laughing. “Why would you eventhink that?”—It was the one-year anniversary of Versailles. They—or most of them—hadbeen there for one full year. To celebrate, they had a party.“Because we’ve been here one year,” said the mustached man into themicrophone. “Because our community is full of love. Because we are, all ofus here, survivors.” He stood on a crate in the middle of the road. “Today wecelebrate Versailles! Today we celebrate the true Republic of Vietnam!”Everyone cheered. A gun was fired into the air. There was confetti. Tuấnheard it all from their apartment.For the past week, everyone in Versailles decorated their homes as if itwere Tết. Paper streamers hung like moss from trees. Pots of marigolds(because no one sold mai vàng plants in New Orleans) sat outside doors toinvite good luck. Lanterns swung in the light breeze on laundry lines. Tuấndidn’t know what an anniversary was, but he hoped there would be more inthe future.At noon, he changed into his swim trunks and, together with his motherand brother, walked toward the water, where the celebration had already started. Someone played Vietnamese music from a recording. A group ofteenage boys played đá cầu in a wide circle, joking while the beanbagbounced off their shoes. The smaller kids splashed in the bayou. Trúc andNgọc waded in by themselves, a cloud of mosquitoes and gnats swarmingtheir heads.Tuấn had just touched the bayou when Trúc bent down and splashed waterinto his face. “Hey, American!” she said. “What are you gonna to do,American?” She splashed him again.Tuấn spat out the dirty water and coughed until the taste of mud and stickswas gone. “I’m not American,” he said. “I’m not talking to you anymore,either. Get away.” Turning toward the forest on the other side of the water, hesaw a boy sitting by himself. Đinh, who else?Trúc grabbed him by the arm. “But we’ll forgive you,” she said. “Justprove you’re not American. Prove you’re not like him.” She pointed to Đinh.His back was turned to them. He didn’t notice them.“This is ngu,” Tuấn said and tried to walk away, but Trúc pulled him back.He looked to the adults. They were talking and listening to music. His motherwas sitting in a plastic lawn chair beside Bà Giang, who fanned herself with anewspaper. They wouldn’t even hear him even if he wanted to cry for help.“Listen,” Trúc said, tapping Tuấn’s cheek. They looked eye-to-eye. “Yousee Fredric over there? You see him all by himself?” She let go of Tuấn’s armand dipped her hands into the water. “Put this down his shirt,” she said. Asmirk lit up her face. A guppy swam in her hands.“Give me your hands,” Trúc said. “No, make it a bowl.”Tuấn looked into his hands. Surprisingly, he didn’t feel much. The fishmoved but didn’t tickle. “I don’t want to do this,” he said. “I don’t want to.”He tried to sound firm and mean the way Trúc always did.“Đi,” Trúc commanded. “We’ll watch you.”He walked out into the bayou toward the other shore. It surprised him thatthe water wasn’t that deep, only up to his belly button at its deepest in themiddle. Passing the lone tree that grew out of the water in the middle of thebayou, he looked up and expected to see a bird, but there was nothing. Heremembered the boat they left Vietnam on and the water they sailed through. The water in New Orleans acted differently. Out on the shores of Vietnamand beyond, the water had been violent, shaking anything that lay atop it. Buthere, the water didn’t move; it stayed still, lazy. In the distance, ducks floatedwithout a single care in the world like they were on vacation.He found himself just behind Đinh. He dropped the fish into the water andit swam away. He smiled. Back in school, in Vietnam, the teachers told himabout releasing captured animals for karma. It was like helping out one smallthing so that someday, perhaps in the next life, the universe would return thatgenerosity. Maybe if I let this go…he thought, but didn’t finish the sentence.Tuấn took several more steps before Đinh turned around and saw him.Their eyes met. They said nothing.“It’s okay,” Tuấn said. “I’m your friend!” he added. He dusted some of thedirt off one side of the log and straddled it to take a seat. He inched his waytoward Đinh but not too close. Đinh reminded him of a small animal, abutterfly, perhaps, that flies away when it’s scared. He wiped his hands on hisshorts. “I’m Tuấn,” he whispered. Then, “I know your name. Your name’sĐinh. Đinh-Fredric.”The sun sat high in the sky. In the evening, the sun would begin its descentbehind the trees, making silhouettes out of them before turning them intoshadows. But now it just sat there, the same way the two of them sat on thelog, avoiding looking at anything for too long.He heard his name being called in the distance. He looked back. Hismother had gotten up. With one arm she held Bình, with the other she heldher hand above her eyes and looked out into the water. “Tuấn,” she called.“I don’t like it here,” Đinh interrupted.It surprised Tuấn. The boy was barely audible. “My mother came here tofind cha. He came here, she said. She said she had a letter from him. But shelied and he isn’t here.”How funny, Tuấn thought, that he didn’t have his father here, either. Whata coincidence! They were the same! They were exactly alike!“Tuấn,” his mother called again.Đinh picked up a twig and bent it, snapping it into two then throwing it away. Tuấn wanted to tell Đinh about his own father, about the man who missed
the boat, the man who they were waiting for. He wanted to tell him about the
tape messages—in themselves, like letters—his mother made. And how they,
too, were waiting. He imagined they could wait together.
“My cha,” Tuấn started, but Đinh threw his twig down, turned around, and
started walking toward the other shore.
“Whatever happened to your cha isn’t going to happen to my cha,” he said
accusingly. “Mày không biết!” he said, almost yelling now, almost crying.
“You don’t know anything.” He got up and walked through the water toward
Versailles.
Tuấn watched him and saw his mother meet Đinh in the bayou. The boy
pointed to the woods and continued on his way toward Versailles.
As she waded her way to him (Tuấn could hear the water splashing), he
slid down the log until he settled onto the dirt.
“There you are!” said his mother when she was behind him. “You got your
mother worried.” Bình giggled in her arms. She sat down on the log beside
Tuấn. The baby grabbed Tuấn’s hair and stroked it playfully. “What you
doing all the way out here?”
Tuấn looked up at his mother. The sun made her glow beautifully. He
wiped his nose. He hadn’t realized he was crying.
“Nothing,” he replied, embarrassed.
“Don’t lie to your mother,” she said. “People don’t go somewhere for no
reason.”
She looked out into the woods. For a few seconds, something caught her
attention, and they, the three of them, sat in silence. Tuấn looked where his
mother was looking and saw what she was seeing: white flowers on the top of
a tree. There were no other flowers on the tree, but there was that bouquet,
there, growing on the edge of a branch. Tuấn smiled.
“Did you pick flowers back in Vietnam,” he asked, “when you were a little
girl?”
She looked down at him, as if remembering he was there.
“Yes,” she said with a smile. “Mẹ used to keep this flower book. I pressed
flowers into it. Later, I wanted to know what flowers they were. So I went to the library, the small one in Mỹ Tho. I met your father there. He was a
librarian and he helped me find a book about flowers not just in Vietnam but
all over the world.”
“Where’s that flower book now?” Tuấn asked.
His mother stood up and let out a small sigh. When Tuấn looked up, she
turned away to hide her frown. “Let’s go home, Tuấn.”
Tuấn jumped up with a smile, the widest and brightest he could make to
make her smile again. “Let’s go home!” he exclaimed.
They waded through the water toward shore.

Hương    1980

A splash of water in the bayou shook Hương out of her thoughts. Shelooked out her window and a saw a light in the water, a small circularspot of yellow that must have been a flashlight. The light flicked off as ifnoticing Hương, and then, after a few seconds, it was back on again.It was nearly midnight and no one should have been out there. She putaway the letter she’d been reading, grabbed the keys, and walked out.“A lô?” she called and the light began moving. She walked toward thewater and tried to see who it was. She wondered if it was one of theteenagers. The light moved back and forth, as if whoever was holding it weretrying to hide. It annoyed her. She had work in the morning, and heresomeone was making a ruckus. She hadn’t been asleep, but if she were, shewas sure it would have woken her up.“Hello?” Hương called, this time in English. “Somebody there? Hello?”When no one answered, she called out louder. The light dimmed as sheapproached the water. The bayou lapped against the shore steadily.She took a step forward and there she saw the boy—Thanh’s boy. Thedarkness made him look smaller than she remembered, but she saw himclearly, a half-Vietnamese, half-black boy about the age of Tuấn. He stared ather as if thinking he couldn’t possibly be seen if only he didn’t move. Hereminded her of a bird, a small orphaned sparrow, perhaps, who fell out of itsnest, and with that, her annoyance melted away into something else, a mix ofrelief and pity.“Get out of there,” she said. She’d forgotten his name and waved for himto come along. “Let’s go. Your mother’s probably worried sick.”“No, she’s not,” he said. That he spoke back so sharply surprised her.“She doesn’t care at all,” he added.“Of course she does,” she replied. “Come along, tối rồi.”Hesitantly, the boy dragged a cardboard box out of the water and walkedto shore.“It’s a boat,” he told her.Hương didn’t know what to say to that, so she nodded, then said “Comealong” again, pointing for him to the lead the way.They walked to his apartment near the main road. All the way, the boydragged the cardboard box—bigger than he was—behind him. Seeing himstruggle, Hương reached over, but he pulled the box closer to his bodyprotectively. Hương let him have it and continued ahead of him, looking backevery few feet as he stumbled across the dirt road that ran through Versailles.When Hương knocked, a light came on and the door opened. The boy’smother shook her head. “You should know better,” she said and opened thedoor wider for her son to come in. She let out a heavy, exhausted sigh.Hương wanted to say something else, but she didn’t know what. The doorclosed and was locked before she had a chance.It was past midnight by the time she returned to her room. Though shewas tired, she pulled out the letter.—The next morning, Kim-Anh went on and on. They were the only twoVietnamese working in the Coke factory in Gert Town and, because of that,were drawn together magnetically, inseparable because of circumstance.Kim-Anh was a spritely twenty-one-year-old with fair skin and aboisterous laugh who had no business being in America, let alone NewOrleans. She had left Vietnam on—of all things—a cruise ship.“I was told we were going to Úc,” she told Hương. “Turns out it was HồngKông. Turns out my parents were right. Saigon was going to fall any day and Ileft just in time. And I was only sixteen! Imagine, a girl so young on a cruiseship without even an older brother to protect her!”In Vietnam, Kim-Anh would have a husband by now, and a child, too. Thegirl had neither of those. She shared a house in Metairie with an Americanman who was much older than she was.“He has so much money!” Kim-Anh always said. “I don’t have to work.That’s the truth. I just work because I get so bored at home.”It was an absurd claim. The other factory workers called her Princess.It was the second Friday of the month as they stood in line waiting fortheir paychecks when Kim-Anh paused whatever she was talking about—Hương had stopped paying attention—and exclaimed, “Have you ever been toMadame Beaumont?”Hương said no.“The American and I are going tonight,” Kim-Anh went on. “The menwho go there buy me drinks on Fridays.” She giggled. “Ladies’ night,” she saidin English.“I have children,” Hương said. She had nearly said responsibilities butcaught herself before telling Kim-Anh she had to pick them up from theirbabysitter. “It’s not that I don’t want to go, but I’d have to pay Bà Giang moreand this paycheck’s already going to rent.”“What you need, chị Hương, is an American,” Kim-Anh told her. “WhenI came here, I was lost, confused. Then you know what happened?” Shesmiled excitedly, silently begging Hương to ask what happened. “I met theAmerican! Americans are so wonderful,” Kim-Anh blurted out. “They’reugly, but they have money, which is all that matters sometimes, thoughsometimes it doesn’t at all.”When they walked outside, the sunlight struck Hương’s eyes. She squintedat the factory gates. The sound of idling cars and radios filled the air. A lonecloud floated in the sky, a perfect white against blue.Kim-Anh opened her purse and drew out a clutch wallet decorated infleurs-de-lis. “Chị Hương, I’ll pay your babysitter overtime. You’ve been herefor so long, and you never have any fun. You work too hard!” She handedHương two bills. Two twenties. The man on them, someone told her, wasnamed Andrew Jackson. His face looked strong and determined. On his head,white and wavy hair grew thick as grass. “I can’t. I shouldn’t.” Hương tried to hand the money back, but Kim-Anhstuck a cigarette in her mouth. She lit it up and waved Hương away.“You’re young, too, chị Hương,” Kim-Anh said, smoke blowing out of herdelicate lips. “Enjoy yourself a bit. You deserve it. You’ve worked so hard. Iknow that. Everyone knows that. Look at those bags under your eyes. There’sa cream I got at D. H. Holmes for that, you know.”Hương touched the space under her eyes.After a few more casual puffs, Kim-Anh’s eyes brightened and sherounded her lips. When she couldn’t make any smoke rings, she clasped herhands together and laughed at the fun of failing.Hương looked down at Andrew Jackson in her hands.“Ông già Mỹ and I will pick you up later tonight. We’ll head out aroundeight.” She spoke with confidence, a quality Hương always envied.“But—” Hương said.Kim-Anh giggled and waved to a car. The American waited for her. “Iwon’t take no for an answer, sister,” she said. “I am not that kind of lady,” sheadded in English.—On the bus ride home, Hương reminded herself she wasn’t old. Twenty-sevenwasn’t old. She was nearly Kim-Anh’s age. And she had missed out on somuch. When she was younger, she’d heard of tango lounges in Saigon, but shenever visited. She became a wife. Then a mother. When the Americans cameto Saigon, the city was a place no self-respecting woman would find herselfgoing to day or night. And when the Americans left—that was another story.The war made her miss her youth. She owed this to herself.At Bà Giang’s, the kids sat in front of the TV watching puppets, exceptThanh’s son. They were both strange, sad people, that mother and that son.No one knew where the father was, but everyone said—Bà Giang said—Thanh came to New Orleans to find him. Thanh let herself in behind Hương.Hương didn’t even have to look behind her; she knew the peanut-oil smell ofthe fast-food restaurant where Thanh worked. While Hương talked to BàGiang, Thanh went to the bedroom and knocked on the door. Of course herson was hiding! He was always doing that.“I’m going out tonight,” Hương said to Bà Giang.“So you’ve met a man!” Bà Giang replied.“No, no!” Hương laughed. “There’s no other man for me, Bà Giang. KimAnh is taking me out to see this place. Madame something or other. I won’tbe long. I can’t imagine staying out all night.”Hương gave Bà Giang one of the two twenties and went to her sons. Bìnhwas sitting with the other kids watching TV. Tuấn was in the love seat byhimself with one of Bà Giang’s sets of playing cards. They were facing down.After a few seconds, her son picked one up, then another. Unsatisfied, hereturned both cards.“Tuấn,” Hương called. She sat behind him and watched his game. “Whatabout that one? I remember seeing a queen there.”“No,” he said. “Can’t be.” He picked it up anyway. Four of diamonds.“Told you.”She rubbed his hair and leaned down to kiss him. “Mẹ will be out latetonight.”From across the room, Bình saw her and ran toward his mother. Hetripped on the way and stayed where he fell, having decided staying on thefloor was easier than getting up. She lifted him and patted his head. “Be vânglời for Bà Giang, okay?”“Dạ,” he said with a nod.When she set him down, he followed her to the door. She picked him upand set him back on the sofa. But this time, as she left, he burst into tears.She held him and cradled him.“Be good for Mom,” she said. “Be good for Bà Giang. Why are you alwayscrying?”Bà Giang ran to him then and took the two-year-old in her arms.“Mommy’s coming back,” she cooed. “Is that what you’re afraid of? Don’t beafraid. Don’t cry. Mommy’s coming back.” Then to Hương, “Have funtonight. Have a drink. You deserve it!”Bình cried even louder. Hương was about to grab him but stopped herself.Yes, she told herself, she deserved it.“Goodbye,” she called out as she left. Thanh and her son followed after.—She settled on a modest dress, a teal piece with a fabric belt. Before NewOrleans, she wore mostly black and white polyesters—simple clothes thatwere also lightweight, because Vietnam was hot and there was a war and youdressed for practicality. But in New Orleans, the weather was not as hot, andeverything was colorful already. She thought of the houses in the Marginy,the cars that passed by as she rode the bus, the flowers in the parks, sodabottle labels. She told Công about the colors of New Orleans, how it shookher awake and made her feel alive, how she had grown fond of the placebecause of the colors.“You would like it here,” she often found herself repeating, “when youcome here.”All in all, she sent dozens of tape messages to Công and several shortletters. They all went unanswered. Some were returned with a rude stamp—–‰˜™–’ ˜“ —‰’ˆ‰–—next to the postmark. Others came back damaged,packages ripped apart, as if inspected. (By whom, she would wonder.) Shekept everything that came back. Yet she still hoped some of the messagesfound their way to Công. She could hope.She could hope for a hundred years. She could hope for a thousand years.She imagined her body made of hope, made for hope. Until the day his firstletter came.It came in a thin aerogramme tucked in between a Kmart circular and amagazine of coupons. It said “Trần Văn Công” and had the address of theirSaigon home. Her heart stopped. Then it quickened wildly. The letter fellfrom her hands and she went to get a glass of water. The image of their oldhouse flashed in her mind. It was saved, was her immediate thought. Perhapseverything was fine now. Perhaps they would even move back. (Sheimmediately admitted to herself that it was a silly thought.) She waited until after dinner to open it. In the dim light of her room—shehad only a floor lamp with a weak bulb—she peeled back the flap. She did itcarefully, afraid one slight clumsy move might rip apart the thin paper,leaving the message unintelligible.She saw the letter in her drawer as she grabbed her earrings. Kim-Anhrang the doorbell.“Are you ready, chị Hương?” Kim-Anh asked. She stepped inside andlooked around. When her eyes settled on Hương, she grabbed the fabric ofthe dress, handling it with a surprising roughness. “You’re not wearing that,are you, chị Hương?” Kim-Anh announced.“What do you mean?”Kim-Anh, for her part, wore a flowing pink lace shirt with a matchingskirt. “We’re going to the Quarter. You can’t wear this. You can’t.” Kim-Anhheld the fabric higher and shook it to emphasize her meaning. “Maybesomething shorter? This makes you look like a mom.”“What am I supposed to look like?” Hương asked.“How long have you been in this country?”“Long enough.”“Things are different here.”“I know that.”A car horn sounded and Kim-Anh glanced down at her watch. “No time,”she said. “This will have to do.” She walked down the stairs. Hương followedafter.Kim-Anh’s American was not an unattractive man. He almost looked likeAndrew Jackson—a strong face, wrinkles of wisdom, and rich white hair,which, from the backseat, looked like soft white fire.“You’re as pretty as Kim,” he said as they drove toward downtown.“Kim-Anh,” Kim-Anh corrected him.“Kimmie. My Kimmie,” he replied. He reached over and rubbed her hand.“Keem-On,” she said, slower this time as she pulled away her arm.“Kim-Anh,” he repeated.“I told her to change, but we running out of time,” Kim-Anh said. “No, she looks all right,” he said. “She looks pretty. What’s your nameagain?” He looked at Hương in the rearview mirror. His eyes were pale grayand kind.“My name Hương,” she answered.At one point, they drove on an overpass looking out over the city. Howdifferent it all looked at night, how it felt—at least from the car—less messy.She imagined putting the city into neatly labeled boxes. In here would be theBusiness District. There, Mid-City. In a tiny box the French Quarter could fit,while Gentilly would need a big one.Because of traffic, they slowed down to a creep. Kim-Anh fanned herselfwith her hands.“Hot,” Kim-Anh said.Already, Kim-Anh must have forgotten the heat of Vietnam and thoseblistering days when you couldn’t even touch the ground with your bare feet.Back then, Hương and Công didn’t have cars, they had bicycles. On hotterdays, he didn’t want her to work hard pedaling, so he told her to climb on hisseat and he would stand and pedal them instead. Everyone did that in thosedays, but riding down the avenue she felt self-conscious. Together they wouldride to their favorite little bakery, where they served bánh cam and, accordingto Công, the best salted lemonade in all of South Vietnam. Her favoritememories were of Công and her there, eating and laughing, the world fadingaway from around them, the only world that mattered the one they made.Those memories felt haunted now. In her mind, they appeared smokesmudged, and, watching, she felt uncomfortable, as if she were an intruder—these weren’t her memories, they were another woman’s, from a differenttime and a different place.In the Quarter, the American drove in circles to find parking. At one pointhe found a parking spot between two cars, but his was too large to fit. “It’s theproblem with a car like this on nights like these,” the American said. “Youknow what I mean?”“I take bus every day,” Hương said.“A beauty like you doesn’t belong on a bus,” the American said. Then, asif remembering, “Kim said you were married.”“Kim-Anh,” Kim-Anh said.“Kimmie.”“My husband,” Hương said. “He coming soon. Really soon.” She said thesame thing at work when the other ladies saw her simple gold band. Whatelse was she supposed to say? If she told the truth, she would have beenembarrassed. They knew she had been waiting a long time. What could shetell them now? The letter Công sent said this much: that he could not followafter her. She had to go on without him. Please don’t try to contact him again.Please have forgiveness.The letter was very unlike Công. Even the handwriting was sloppier.Almost every night, she looked at it again before going to bed, convincingherself at times that this was a prank—a cruel prank from someone inVietnam or even someone in Versailles. She’d eye the people outside. Howcould people be so mean? She felt like a schoolgirl again, and the otherstudents were laughing at her, pointing and laughing. She wrote back: “Whatdo you mean?”Eventually, they found parking near Lafayette Square, seven blocks fromMadame Beaumont. Kim-Anh took off her shoes and walked barefoot. Aftertwo blocks, Kim-Anh stopped. Hương stopped, too, but the Americancontinued, not noticing.“I can’t walk for so long,” Kim-Anh yelled after him.The American came back. “You’re a strong girl,” he said. He rolled histongue against the inside of his cheek and pressed his lips together like hewas going to say something else but stopped himself. “Both of you are stronggirls. All you’ve been through, the boat, the sea—”“Cruise ship,” Kim-Anh said.“Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “A cruise ship. Of course. A cruise ship.”Kim-Anh rubbed her right foot and continued walking.“Kimmie,” the American called after her. He took off. “Kim-Anh.”Madame Beaumont sat on the corner of Chartres and Conti. Loud musicplayed from outside speakers, and gaudy Halloween decorations spilled outfrom its doors: a plastic skeleton sitting on a rocking chair and holding a glassbeer bottle; a table with unlit tea candles; a stained wooden board with oldfashioned letters printed on it. Kim-Anh shook the skeleton’s empty hand.“Every day is Halloween!” she sang. She tried to pull the bottle away fromthe skeleton’s grip. When it didn’t budge, she moved toward the neon lightsinside, giggling all the while.

The girl was wilder outside of work. Hương wanted to say it aloud, but theAmerican went after Kim-Anh and she followed him into the bar, whereKim-Anh was already sitting on a stool. The dance floor lay bare and thelights spun, illuminating graffiti here and there on the walls and the floor. TheAmerican massaged Kim-Anh’s shoulder and pointed to a booth in thecorner. She pulled away and waved at the bartender. He put down his rag andshe talked into his ear as if she already knew him.“Over there,” said the American, leading Hương to the booth. “What doyou want? How about a Coke with rum? My treat.”“I don’t like Coke anymore,” she said. “What they have?”“They have everything. It’s America. We have everything.”“Something sweet,” Hương said. “No beer.”“I know just the thing,” he said. “You stay here.”A glittery silver ball hung over the center of the dance floor, where KimAnh now danced alone with a beer bottle in hand. The song changed tosomething faster, but the lights spun around at the same pace. Kim-Anhflailed her arms and closed her eyes.Was this what she and Công missed during the war years? If so, Hươngwasn’t very much impressed. Within minutes she felt bored and wanted to gohome. She thought about the laundry she would have to do tomorrow and thetrouble of going all the way to the Laundromat and sitting and waiting. Shethought about what she should pick up from the grocery store. Would the bagof rice she had now last another week? She wondered about her boys. Hermind drifted to Bình crying. She’d felt terrible when Bà Giangswept in and hecalmed down. As his mother, she should have comforted him, perhaps evenstayed home. At times like this she wished Công were there. Parenting washard enough; parenting alone and in a different country was something else altogether.  The American came back and handed Hương a tall glass of what lookedlike milk.“What it is?” she asked.“Piña colada,” the American said. “Tropical. Thought it’d remind you ofVietnam.” He sat down next to Hương. “It has several entire servings of fruit,believe it or not.” He picked up the glass and pointed at it as he talked. “It haspineapple. It has coconut. It has rum, which is sugar, which comes from aplant, which should count for something.”Hương laughed. “You are funny man, Mister…”“Just call me Frank.”“Mr. Frank, you are so funny!”“No, just Frank.”“Mr. Frank.”“Anyway, you’ll like it. Drink up.” They knocked together their drinks,and Hương sipped from her straw as Frank drank from his bottle.“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” the American said as he watched Kim-Anhdance.“Very,” Hương replied.Men were beginning to join Kim-Anh. She danced with several, neverstaying with just one. One minute she’s dancing with a man with a goatee,and the next the man is shorter and wearing glasses. It was then that Hươngsaw how the bar was full of white men and how the few women there werelike her, if not Vietnamese then at least Asian. The men were different fromthe type of men Công would have acquainted himself with, the womendifferent from those Hương would have known. It seemed as if they were adifferent species of human altogether, living different kinds of lives shecouldn’t imagine.She wondered what Kim-Anh was like before she left Vietnam. She had aslack Saigonese accent. She was a Buddhist, because she wore a bodhi seedbracelet, which she refused to take off even on the assembly line, hiding herhands in her pockets as they entered and exited the factory floor. Once shethought she had lost it in the machine and somehow (through her charm orwit, for Hương would give her that much—Kim-Anh was charming) got theoperator to stop it. She frantically searched the conveyor belt and stuck herhead in a compartment where the gears were hidden at the bottom of the vastmachine. She eventually found her bracelet—fallen on the floor—but Hươngcould not forget the image of Kim-Anh squatting, her legs splayed apart, herback hunched so she could get her head inside. She looked froglike. It was sodifferent from the confident yet delicate way she always held herself. Howmuch had Kim-Anh changed since she’d left Vietnam and how much effortwas it? Who was Kim-Anh, really?“I saved her, you know,” the American said. He pressed the beer bottle tohis lips. When he put the bottle back down, his hands wandered on the tableand returned to the drink. “She was nothing, you know. Just some poor citygirl. No mother, no father.”He paused as if he had finished, and a silence sat clumsily between them.“She must love you. She love you very much,” Hương said, not knowingwhat else to say, just wanting to say something, anything, so the air betweenthem didn’t feel so heavy anymore.He continued, “In Saigon, she worked at a bar where she had to dancewith older men. She was so little, how could those men? Those men weredisgusting. They touched her, gave her bruises. I’m not like those men.“I saved her,” he repeated. “I told them she was my fiancée. That we weregoing to marry, but then I was forced to leave. I gave her money. She left byherself, you see. It wasn’t a cruise ship. Just a regular fishing boat. When shegot to Hong Kong, she wrote to tell me she was safe. She said I wasn’t likeany other man she’d met. I was different, she said, and she couldn’t wait to seeme again. I asked my church to sponsor her. And that’s how she came over. Iam not a bad man, you see. I go to church. I’m a good man. I saved her.”“Which church?” Hương asked. Everyone in Versailles came throughSaint Expeditus. She didn’t know any other church in the area that did thesame.“What?” He looked confused. He took another drink of his beer.“Which church?” she asked again.He paused and swirled his bottle around. “Church? St. Mary’s. InMetairie. You wouldn’t know it,” he said. “I’m not like the other men, Hương.You got to believe me. I saved her.” He wiped the sweat from his forehead,which shined even in the dim light, and folded the napkin until it was toothick to continue.The song changed again and now Kim-Anh became more audacious. Sheheld on to a man and swayed as he rested his hands on her hips. He was morehandsome and better dressed than Frank. He wore a metal watch thatreflected the disco lights. Frank wore no watch. When Hương comparedFrank to this man, he looked pitiful and nervous. He was becoming evensweatier despite the air-conditioning.He wiped his hands on his pants and stood up. “And this is how she treatsme,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else.When the man Kim-Anh danced with moved a hand away from her hipsand latched on to her backside, Kim-Anh smiled and nodded. She seemed atease, familiar with it all. Hương was sure Kim-Anh knew what song this was,the exact lyrics, and when it would end. Hương imagined her coming hereevery night after work—she knew the bartender by name, knew the happyhour specials by heart. She had a calculating look in her eyes; Hương saw thatnow.Frank grabbed Kim-Anh’s wrist, and Hương heard him say “No” to theother man as he pushed him on the shoulder.“What you doing?” Kim-Anh shrieked. “Why you like this?” She pulledaway. “Why you don’t go home?”“We’re going home, Kimmie. Let’s go.” He tried to steady his voice butcouldn’t. His fingers fidgeted.Hương stayed in her seat. The next thing she knew, Kim-Anh raised herarm and slapped Frank’s cheek. A crowd formed around the couple. Hươngstood up to see what was happening, though everyone was in the way.Yet even with the loud music, she heard it all. Kim-Anh was shouting, “Gohome, Frank. Go home!” When he didn’t answer, she continued, louder.“Poor man, go home! Go home, poor man!”—Hương left Kim-Anh and Frank at the bar, walked out of the Quarter, andfound a bus stop on Canal. After the bus arrived in New Orleans East, Hươnggot off, walked the four blocks to Versailles, and stopped at Bà Giang’sapartment before heading up to her own. She carried Tuấn while Bà Giangfollowed behind with Bình. They tucked them in and drank tea to end thenight.As Bà Giang began to leave, she asked, “Did you find a người đàn ôngmỹ? Those kids need a father. Any father is better than no father.”Hương laughed, though she didn’t know why. “They have a father,” shesaid.“The fates would have brought him here if they wanted him.” She stoppedtalking until they got to the door. “Do you pray?” Bà Giang asked.“I don’t,” Hương said.“That’s the problem. You don’t pray. You need to pray.”“I don’t believe in that. You know that. We believe in different things.”“It’s worth a try,” Bà Giang said. “Why don’t you try? Have you forgottenabout Công?”Hương opened her mouth to say something but found herself grasping forwords. For a moment, she wanted to confide in Bà Giang, to tell hereverything. That Công had abandoned her. That he was staying in Vietnam.That he was living in their home in Saigon right now. That she was all alonein the world. All alone with two sons.But none of this produced any words. In the silence, Bà Giang realized hermistake and reached out for Hương’s hands.“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”They told each other good night and Bà Giang left.Outside, Hương sat on her steps and looked at the moon. How did she getinto this situation—to be right here, right now? She weaved back throughtime and wondered if there were warning signs. Yet another part of herselfwas outside of her body, watching her and calling her a stupid woman. Shehad thought there was love—pure and simple love—and she was duped,tricked. Life was a shell game dealer, and under every cup what she thoughtwas there or could have been there was not. She looked at herself with pityand shook her head. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, she toldherself, holding herself.What kind of man would abandon his family? That was the question shetried desperately to answer. Not only abandon them but lead them out to sea.Did she ever really know Công? Did she know he could be so cold, sounkind? What were his thoughts all along?That he could betray her was less upsetting than the fact that he would behurting their children—her children. What if they learned their father hadabandoned them, did not—in the end—love them? How would they take thatpiece of knowledge? How would it be imprinted in their minds? How fastwould it break their hearts?And what if everyone found out? Wasn’t it the fatherless boys you werealways told to be careful around? How did those fatherless boys feel hearingthis? Her body shuddered. She looked around and everything becameunfamiliar and threatening. The world was cold and wild. A country couldcollapse. A father could disappear. She would have to protect her sons, shewas thinking, protect them from all the cruelties of the world.She decided what do then. She ran upstairs and headed for her room. Allthe returned cassette tapes she had left in a shoebox. She grabbed that and hisletters and the last postcard he sent in reply to her confused message. On thefront, a yellowed black-and-white photo of Paris’s Latin Quarter, where he’dlived as a student studying abroad. She remembered they kept it in their deskin Saigon. It was a memento of the past, kept but never used until he had towrite her back: Please don’t contact me again. It is the best for the both of us.Please understand. Love, Công. She threw it into the shoebox and hid it in thecloset. No one would ever see this, she was thinking.If her sons asked about their father, she told herself, she would tell themsome kind of truth, what she knew of it: their father would not be joiningthem in New Orleans; this was all beyond their control and they had to trytheir best, she would say, to move forward. She would keep from them thefather who stayed behind, the family they could have been, the injustice ofwhat they had lost. She could protect them, if only they’d forget. She wouldprotect them, if only she’d forget. Forgetting, she was so sure, was easy, theeasiest thing that could be done; we forget all the time—we forget names andaddresses, the color a childhood dress, the name of a favorite song. We couldforget anything and everything, if only we tried, if only we made the effort.

Tuấn   1984

The year Tuấn turned eleven two things happened: he had to repeat sixthgrade and his mother told him his father was dead.It was late summer when she did, the last weekend before schoolstarted again. She borrowed Bà Giang’s sedan and the three of them headedto Grand Isle Beach for the day. They woke up early. Bình was asleep whenthey left the city, and Tuấn stayed up front with the map in his lap.“It’s been a long time since we’ve been to the beach,” she said as they goton the highway, and she nodded at him as if this was their secret.Halfway into the two-hour drive, she stopped at a Gulf station for gas andsnacks. She got him a Popsicle, though it wasn’t even nine yet. Is it for me? heasked. Of course it is, she answered, who else would it be for? He unwrappedit and ate it happily.When they got back on the road, she said she wanted to tell himsomething, something important.He was still thinking of school. He didn’t want to take the same classesagain, especially Mr. Landowski’s English class. Mr. Landowski was a toughgrader, and the only reason Tuấn was repeating sixth grade was becauseMr. Landowski—whose real name was Toby—didn’t think he knew English,which was wrong because Tuấn did know English; it was what he heard everyday, everywhere. He’d stopped thinking entirely in Vietnamese nowadays—his thoughts were half in English, half in Vietnamese. The other day he forgotthe word for “orange”; he kept trying to think of it but all that came up was“orange.” He wondered if his mom knew that, that he was held back notthrough any fault of his own, but because Mr. Landowski was a terribleteacher. It made Tuấn think of his own father, who was also a teacher. And whereas his father was kind and gentle and patient—all qualities of a goodteacher—Mr. Landowski had a temper and was easily flustered and gave badgrades that no one deserved.“Your father,” she said after a brief pause. His ears perked up. He stoppedthinking about Mr. Landowski. He stopped thinking about oranges. Hisfather! Perhaps he was coming after all these years. Perhaps they were drivingto him now. Cha, he thought, was the word for “father.” Finally! They wouldhave so much to catch up on. And maybe, he thought for a brief instant, hisdad could have a stern talking-to with Mr. Landowski, teacher to teacher, andtell him how wrong he was for holding Tuấn back for a year.“Your father,” she said finally, “your father is dead.” She let out a sigh andadded, “He died a while ago, but I think you’re a big boy now and you shouldknow the truth.”“How?” was what he managed to say. “Why? What do you mean?”Tuấn bit his lip and looked out the window and at the passing cypresstrees, which became blurry, and he didn’t know why until he realized he hadtears in his eyes. His mother said something then about Communists andpunishment and attempted escape and this was why we left and understand thathe loved you, loved you dearly…that he did what was best…for you…for us…died a hero…“Why?” he asked again.“Things like this happen,” his mother said. She said some more things, buthe covered his ears because he didn’t want to hear any of it. When his mothertried to touch him, to comfort him, he pulled away.The rest of the day was a blur. As Bình played in the water, Tuấn realizedit was true—it had been a while since they’d been to the beach. He hadforgotten beaches existed and oceans, too, and how the water was so violent—how could he forget that? The entire day he was thirsty from looking at thewater and tasting the salt air.His father was not coming, he realized with a sudden, heavy finality. Hisfather was no longer in this world—not here in Louisiana, not there inVietnam, just nowhere.Once, in Saigon, they were playing hide-and-seek, the three of them. Hewas the seeker and he counted all the way to thirty (the biggest number heknew back then). He found his mother easily; she was hiding in her wardrobe.But his father was nowhere to be found. Tuấn was sure he’d be in his library.When he got there, though, it was empty. He searched the kitchen after that,then the backyard. Surely, he thought, he must be in the backyard. It was thelast place he could have run off to. But no one was there. He looked up theirtree, stared up at its branches for a few seconds. Nothing. He began to headback toward the house. Sadness was not the feeling that came over him. Itwas something else entirely, something heavier, darker. He felt as if he hadlost something and that he would never get it back, when suddenly his fatherran through the gate, singing, “You haven’t found me, you haven’t found me!”and Tuấn ran to him and was happy again. But that feeling—that heavy, darkfeeling of having lost something—he would always remember.That feeling came back when they’d left on the boat. It came in the middleof the night when they were camped out on the island with all those strangers.And it came back now. It gave him shivers down his spine, made his handsshake and sweat. Then it made his head ache until it throbbed and he had toclose his eyes really tight. As he lay on the beach, he became angry—angry atthe beach for reminding him of Vietnam, angry at his mother for bringinghim out here to tell him the horrible news, angry at his brother for being sohappy through it all—Had she even told him? Tuấn wondered, which madehim angry at his mother all over again. He clenched his fists and banged themagainst the sand. He screamed, and his mother told him to sit in the car. Hestopped what he was doing and looked her straight in the eyes. Into thesilence, he pounded his fists on the sand again and screamed even louder. Hismother rushed to him, grabbed him by the arm, and carried him to the car ashe cried Help, help, this is not my mother, this is not my mother, this is not mymother! She slammed the car door and stomped away. She left the AC andthe radio on.Through the windshield, he watched as his mother and brother collectedseashells. The last time he went to the beach was back in Vietnam after they’dleft the city for the countryside. His dad had been worried about something atthe time, and his mom thought it was a good idea to take a break fromfarming. She said they were thirty minutes from a beach; perhaps they couldmake a day trip out to it. At first his dad said he didn’t want to go, that hedidn’t even really like the beach. But then, one Sunday, the three of themtook the bus to the shore. Though there were plenty of other people, theyfound a clear, quiet spot on the sand. Tuấn remembered how—after monthsof frowning—his dad was finally smiling and laughing as they builtsandcastles. He hadn’t smiled like that since Saigon, and Tuấn was glad he gothis old dad back again. They even had a sandcastle-building contest, andthough his parents’ sandcastles were obviously better, they told Tuấn his wasthe best.As he watched his mother and brother now—a brother Tuấn’s father didn’teven know about—Tuấn felt somehow let down. Dad wasn’t here to enjoy anyof this. Dad would never be here to enjoy anything ever again. Who werethey, any of them, he thought, to have fun? He let out a scream, the loudest hecould, pushing all the air he could out of his lungs until he felt his chest andthroat hurt, until he felt like they were on fire and his eyes were watering. Butno one heard him.When it was time to head back to New Orleans, Tuấn stayed in thebackseat. His brother sat back there, too. “Why didn’t you play with us?”Bình kept asking. “Look! Shells!” A towel full of seashells lay between them.Bình picked one up and another, showing them to Tuấn.“You’re not paying attention!” Bình cried and threw a shell at his brother.The shell pricked his arm. Something in him snapped just then, a rubber bandin the back of his head releasing a stone from a slingshot. In the next instant,he grabbed the towel of shells and threw it out the window. The shells spreadout like wings before falling and scattering on the empty highway. And thetowel, a faded blue, floated and followed them for a few seconds before givingup and falling, too.The car stopped. Tuấn met his mother’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Theydidn’t look mad; they looked sorry. She opened the car door and walkedtoward where the shells and towel had dropped. Tuấn looked out and saw herscurrying down the highway, picking up the shells and the towel. A car cameup from behind, slowed down, and drove around her and their car. When shewas making her way back, Tuấn sat back down.“Why’d you do that?” Bình asked. “What was that all about?”“Dad died. That’s what it’s all about.”Bình looked at him a long time without saying anything. Then, “Died.What does that mean?”The car door slammed shut. Their mother set the shells and the towel onthe front seat. They drove in silence all the way home.—When school started back up again, his dreams returned him to Vietnam,their old house in the city, and his father dressed not in the ragged T-shirt andshorts of the day they left, but in his school clothes, a clean and stiff whitebutton-up with black slacks, a brown briefcase by his side. The sound of thecity—mopeds, bicycle bells, and the occasional car—drifted in from outside.Tuấn would stand on their front balcony eating a frozen banana and see hisfather coming home from around the corner, calling his name. Tuấn…Tuấn…One night in the fall, he heard his name inside their apartment. Over andover again, his father was calling him the way he did when he had a surprise,a toy or a piece of candy. For one second, he wondered if it would be thosesoft, chewy durian candies, and his mouth watered. He hadn’t had durian inforever. Could durians grow here? he wondered. He opened one eye andthought about asking his father, who would surely be in the kitchen right then.His father was a smart man and could answer that question: Did durians growin New Orleans? But then he opened his other eye and realized the sound wasnothing like his name at all. It was a dog, a dog barking in the distance. Howcould he be so stupid? And to dream of durians in a country where no oneknew about durians!He couldn’t go back to sleep then. The dog just kept on going. Head tiltedto one side, ear in the air, Tuấn listened until the bark became a yelp.Quietly, because Bình was asleep on the other side of the room, Tuấngrabbed his pillow and left. In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator anddrank orange juice straight from the carton, something his mother wouldnever let him do. A Payless shoebox sat on the table and an ancient taperecorder with the stickers for the buttons missing. He took a seat and openedthe box to find cassette tapes and a whole bunch of papers. He fell asleepbefore he could make anything out of it. By morning, he found himself stillsitting at the table, head on wood, drool puddling near his mouth, pillow at hisfeet. The orange juice carton was gone. So were the shoebox and taperecorder.His mother nudged him awake. “You’ve been chasing ghosts again?” shesaid. The water from the teakettle boiled and whistled into the air. Sheyawned.“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Tuấn said. “Ghosts don’t exist.”Steam from her mug rose to her face. “It’s just a saying. There are noghosts. We know that.” She looked around as if pointing out the evidence. Noghosts, not here.She blinked her eyes and rubbed them. Her painted fingernails lit up themorning darkness. It was her new job in the Quarter: she painted nails. Toshow customers what the colors would look like, she used herself as a modeland always forgot to clean off the paint. The rainbow of reds and blues andpurples made Tuấn think about the women who stopped by her salon. Whocould have worn such loud colors?In the bathroom, Tuấn washed the gunk out of his eyes, brushed his teeth,and took a hard look at his hair. He hated his hair. There was too much of it,and he couldn’t spike it up like the other boys in school. He splashed wateronto his hands and combed his fingers through his hair. It didn’t help.“The bus!” his mother yelled from the kitchen. He ran out and she stood atthe counter. “Mau! Lẹ đi!” She opened the door. Sunlight flooded in, and theshadows of the outside railing made prison bars on the floor. “And don’tforget your lunch.” She stuffed a container into his backpack, zipped it up,and pushed him along.In the distance, a large vehicle squeaked to a halt. Before Tuấn ran downthe steps, his mother pulled him back. “Forgetting something,” she said. Shehanded him the house key tied around a shoelace into a necklace. Sincestarting her new job, she had given him that responsibility. “Your brother’stoo young to carry around a key,” she had said. “Be home quick after schoolto let him in. Do this for mẹ. Please.” He was her big boy, the man of thehouse, the keeper of the house key.“Yeah,” Tuấn replied. He took the key and ran toward the bus stop. Heheld it tight in his fist, the teeth of the metal pushing against his palm, theshoelace swinging in the air.—“Is that dog meat?” Donald asked, and his friends snickered. Lunch hadbarely started and already they were surrounding Tuấn’s table.Donald Richard lived outside the gates of Versailles at the corner, in ahouse that looked too old still to be standing, in the shadows of theapartments. Next to the large gates, Donald’s house looked small and lonely,though Tuấn could never have pictured Donald being small or lonely. With fatarms, a potbelly, and a snout of a nose to match it all, Donald reminded Tuấnof an oversized pig.Donald and his friends poked at the thịt nướng. “Ja-uan,” Donald calledhim. Donald and his friends called him that—Juan or Ja-uan—though he hadno idea how they came up with that. Juan was a Mexican name, and he wasfrom Vietnam. “Which isn’t even near Mexico,” a teacher had pointed out.Still, the name stuck. He was Juan.The kids at school were stupid like that. That was why he was there, hewas sure.

They put all the stupid kids in one school, where he had to takeremedial English (for the extra dumb, like he was) with Donald, where theywent over flashcards and read books that still had pictures in them.“Farmer Jim has two cows. Say,” Mrs. Trahan, the remedial Englishteacher, would say, “Fa-arm-er J-im. Say, too k-ows.” Tuấn couldn’t help butfeel like a baby in her class.Now Tuấn smacked Donald’s hands away. “Not for fat pig,” he said.“Oink, oink!” he called out. “Oink, oink!”They all laughed and Donald grabbed Tuấn’s shirt, twisting the collar, butthe sound of Ms. Swanson’s heels clicking against the floor made him let go.“He’s not worth it,” one of Donald’s friends said.“Yeah, leave him.”“For now.”As the others left, Donald leaned in and whispered, “Dog eater.” He said itagain, pausing between the words—“Dog. Eater.”—before catching up withhis friends.“Are you sitting alone because they made you?” Ms. Swanson asked whenshe found him. Ms. Swanson was a tall woman, taller than any of the otheradults. A permanent wrinkle marked her forehead, making her look angry orannoyed. She wore suit jackets with skirts, but they always looked small onher bulky, uneven body. The upper part of her body bulged against the fabric;the lower part seemed dainty. Tuấn thought that if she looked like thatgrowing up, perhaps she understood what life was like for him. In his mind,he saw her standing in a line, waiting to be chosen for dodge ball or sittingalone during lunch. She placed her hand on her hip and frowned when hedidn’t answer. “Or do you like sitting by yourself?”“Yes, ma’am,” Tuấn answered.“Well, which is it?”“I like sitting myself,” he said. He stuffed a spoonful of rice into his mouthand she walked away.After the bell rang, everyone headed for class while Tuấn waited. It wasthe easiest way, he learned, to avoid the too-crowded hallways. When all thestudents were gone, Tuấn headed for the door. As he rounded the corner forMrs. Trahan’s class, Donald jumped out, his hands stuck in the air like amonster’s.“What you doing, Ja-uan?” he asked. “Don’t you know the bell’s gonnaring in a minute? You’ll get in trouble if you’re late, Ja-uan. You can’t be late,Ja-uan.”Tuấn looked down the hall behind Donald. Everyone had disappeared. Hetook a step forward, and the bell rang.“There it goes,” Donald said and shoved Tuấn down to the floor. His headhit a locker.“Go back to China, Chinaman,” he heard Donald say.He wanted to say “I came from Vietnam. I am Vietnamese.” But he didn’t.—As Tuấn approached their apartment, he saw his brother standing outside.Bình swung a plastic bat in one hand and palmed a crumpled-up Coke canwith the other. The bat they got from the Dollar General. The Coke can heprobably found near the bayou because people were always throwing awaystuff out there.His brother threw the can up and swung the bat. He missed.“You have to keep your eyes on the can-ball,” Tuấn said.Bình looked up. “I know.”Can-ball, they called this.“But I have to blink, don’t I?” his brother asked.“Yeah, but you have to follow the can-ball still.”“Impossible.”Tuấn chuckled and they ran up the stairs and he let them inside.He was making their afternoon snack—rice with Maggi sauce and lunchbologna—when Bình came to him with his notebook.“They’re giving you homework in second grade nowadays?” Tuấn asked.His brother opened it up and showed him two words. On the left, hisname, Bình. On the right, Ben.“That’s what I want people to call me from now on,” his brother said,pointing to Ben.“Why?” He pointed at Bình. He couldn’t imagine his brother being calledsomething else. Everything had a proper name.His brother shrugged and gave a disappointed look. “I don’t know. Easier,I guess.” Then he added, “For everyone.”“But it’s your name,” Tuấn said.“I can choose my own name. No one says I can’t.”“Mẹ will be mad.” He imagined their mother throwing up her hands likeshe did a lot of the time and saying, You boys give me a headache—why can’tyou be good? “And Dad…” Tuấn added but couldn’t finish the sentence; hedidn’t know where it would go.“I don’t care what Mom thinks.” His brother grabbed the notebook back.“And Dad’s dead.” He walked away.He didn’t even look like a Ben.—Tuấn couldn’t sleep that night. The dog—out there—was barking again. Itwas nearly three. Tuấn went to the window and tried to find it. No one inVersailles was allowed to have a pet. He squinted and looked out beyond thefence. It had to be somewhere out there. Something moved, and he took astep back.A gecko. Just a gecko. They were always around. Them and palmettobugs.For a brief moment, he had the idea of leaving the gecko on his brother’sbed and imagined him squirming and screaming. Bình (he would never callhim Ben) didn’t like any of the things Tuấn liked. Tuấn thought geckos werefascinating. He heard that if a bird grabbed a gecko, the tail would just falloff. In an instant, the gecko would escape, and later the tail would grow back.Bình didn’t like any of that. It reminded Tuấn of their father. He didn’t likehim going outside to play and getting dirty. He remembered one time he wasplaying and it rained and he ran home muddy. His father looked up from hisbook and nearly screamed. His face screwed up in disgust. Tuấn couldimagine Bình doing that; his face would be like their father’s.Tuấn reached up and held out his palm. “I’m not gonna hurt you, buddy,”he coaxed. At first, the gecko avoided the hand, but eventually it stepped on.Tuấn cupped it in both hands—“What I tell you?”—and walked out of theroom. In the distance, the dog began to howl, a long, whining howl thatbecame almost like a cry.  “What could it be crying about?” Tuấn asked, looking at the gecko. “Let’stake a look-see.”He opened the front door. Not knowing what else to do, Tuấn sat downand listened to the howling mix with the hum of air conditioners and thesound of frogs and crickets somewhere in the thickets of bushes and trees thatsurrounded the Versailles bayou.When he was little, what he loved most was going to the bayou. In hismind, it was the best place to be because no one bothered him there. Beingalone, he could do whatever he wanted.One time he pretended he was a pirate, and Cô Lam, who lived in theapartment across the dirt road from them, called out from her window: “Norespect!”“I’m sorry!” he replied. “I’ll be quieter.”“And I have to work tonight!” She threw a rolled-up newspaper at him, butit hit the water instead and sank.People were always throwing things into the bayou. Heineken cans andcigarette butts littered the water along with whatever else was useless—broken lawn chairs, burned and scratched cookware, cardboard boxes. Thetrash of Versailles convened in the brackish brown waters of theneighborhood’s back bayou. It convened and stayed and floated until it wastoo heavy and sank.Nothing could survive here. But then there were the frogs and the cricketsand that dog. He closed his eyes and listened.—In the morning, Tuấn woke up to his mother’s shrieking.“What are you holding?” his mother cried.He felt something in his hands and remembered the gecko. To hisamazement, it had stayed there all night. He felt its little claws. His mothershrieked again and Tuấn held his hand closer to his body. The lizardsquirmed.“Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! Let it go and come inside! Why are you outside? Doyou know what time it is?”Tuấn looked at the lizard, then at his mom. Hesitantly, he let the gecko goand went inside. At the doorway, his mother swept it down the steps and heswore he heard little pings as its body bounced.After his mother pushed him out the door for school, he walked out ofVersailles. As he passed Donald’s house, he quickened his pace as the frontdoor slammed shut and Donald came out. A brown-and-black dog withpointed ears was tied up to an old oak tree and began to run after him. Itstopped as it reached the end of its rope. Disappointed, it howled the samehowl that kept Tuấn awake at night. He knew then it must have been the samedog.Donald stopped at the end of the driveway and was surprised to find Tuấn.“You always had dog?” he asked.“None of your business,” Donald said.A woman, the same large and bulbous shape as Donald, lumbered out.The fat woman carried a smoking cigarette in one hand and a bottle in theother.Tuấn whistled to the dog and held out his hand.“Quit it,” Donald said. “He doesn’t like you.”The dog whimpered.“He likes,” said Tuấn.It didn’t have a tag, it didn’t have a collar. Just a rope around its neck. Helooked at the dog’s fur. Patches of it were missing like somebody had pulledthem out.Out of nowhere, Donald said, “Race you to the bus stop, Ja-uan,” andpushed him aside.As Donald disappeared, the woman got to the curb.“That boy forgot his drink,” she said and shook her head. She let thecigarette drop and stomped on it with her sandal. Her toenails were paintedlime green. “Do you want a soda?” she asked.—That afternoon before lunch, Donald met Tuấn at his locker.“See here, Ja-uan,” he started. “I wanted to tell you I’m sorry.” Tuấn didn’trespond and Donald repeated himself as he wiped his face with the back of ahand. “Sit with us today.” He reached an arm around and slammed the lockershut. “We’ll start over. You and me and Tommy and Pete. We’ll be friends.”Donald led Tuấn to his table, where Tommy and Pete, two other whiteboys, were already seated. Gripping his shoulder, Donald guided him to thebench.“Doesn’t Mrs. Trahan look like a horse?” Donald said as he sat down.“She has to be part horse, am I right?”The boys laughed, though they weren’t in Mrs. Trahan’s class. One boymade neighing sounds while the other clapped his hands on the table to makea galloping noise. Donald eyed Tuấn.“Maybe?” Tuấn answered.“Maybe!” they echoed and took out their lunches.“Oh, man!” Donald exclaimed. “Margaret forgot my soda. That’s howstupid Margaret is. My dad’s more stupider for marrying her.” He opened hisbag and took a bite of his sandwich. “Hey, Ja-uan. Old friend, old pal,”Donald said, “do me a favor? Here’s two dollars. Get me a Coke, why don’tya? And get something for yourself, too. Maybe milk, ’cause you’re smallstuff.”Tuấn looked at the crowded line. He looked back at Donald, who beamed.“It’s Tu-hung,” Tuấn said. “My name is Tu-hung.” He said it slowly,enunciating the words the same way Mrs. Trahan did in class.“Okay, okay,” Donald said. “I get it. Now, a soda?”When Tuấn came back, Donald was whispering to one of the boys.“Thanks, buddy!” he said when he noticed Tuấn. He grabbed the soda canand rubbed off the water.Tuấn opened his lunch and stirred the leftover noodles with his chopsticks.His mother was angry that he and Bình hadn’t eaten the leftover noodles shemade two nights before for their after-school snack. “I don’t make food to goto waste,” she said. She went on about how money was tight as she threw inslivers of beef and packed it for his lunch. Tuấn lifted his chopsticks to hismouth and Donald screamed: “Bug-eater!”In the Tupperware, a black lump moved. By reflex, Tuấn threw thecontainer in the air. Tommy and Pete screamed but then laughed, anuncontrollable hoo-ing and hollering. The noodles landed on the table and inthem a cockroach moved. More came out of hiding. Everyone in the cafeteriastood up, not knowing whether to run toward the mess or away from theroaches. Ms. Swanson came over.“Who made this mess?” she demanded. “Whoever made this mess has toclean it up. Donald, was it you?”“No! I swear! I hate those things! Yuck!” He screwed up his face andmade it look like he was about to puke. “Ja-uan brought them in his lunch. Iswear.”Tuấn stood up and started to gather the bugs into the container. It was notright to treat animals that way. They were living beings. How would Donaldfeel if he were treated that way?“Look, he’s saving them! He wants to eat them!” Donald yelled.Tuấn put the container’s top on. The bugs crawled around in their enclosedsafety as he walked away. “Mẹ mầy,” he mumbled.“Y’all heard that?” Donald asked the cafeteria. “He said he’s going to eatthem anyway! He said it in his ching-chong!”The kids laughed and their laughter echoed.“Both of you! Detention! After school!”—In Ms. Swanson’s room, Tuấn and Donald sat as far away from each other aspossible until she told them to sit closer together toward the center of theroom.“I want to keep an eye on the both of you,” she said.Tuấn looked at the clock. They had an hour. Donald smirked as he drew inhis notebook. Ms. Swanson came over and ripped it away from his desk.“Eyes forward, Donald,” Ms. Swanson said. “Straight ahead.”“He’s not looking forward!” said Donald.“Lie!” Tuấn said. “Your fault! Everything, your fault!”“Settle down, both of you,” said Ms. Swanson. “What both of you need isdiscipline. Haven’t your parents ever spanked you?”“I don’t deserve to be here. It’s all his fault!” Donald reached over andpoked Tuấn, but Tuấn grabbed his finger and twisted it around. Donaldwhined in pain.“Enough, you two. Do you want me to call your mothers?”“I have no mother!” Donald yelled.“You mother fat, too!” Tuấn added.“Enough!” Ms. Swanson yelled, slamming her fists on the desk.At three thirty, Ms. Swanson allowed the two to call their parents to pickthem up.The last time he got into a fight (in the first week of school when Donaldcalled him a slant-eye and Tuấn slapped him on the cheek), his mother wasbrought in for a parent-teacher conference. He remembered her looking smallin front of the teacher. “Yes, sir,” she kept on saying. The teacher made hersign something and they left. On the bus ride home, she fumed. She wasembarrassed, she said, with how he’d behaved. Tuấn said Donald started it;Donald called him a name and made fun of him.“Then you look the other way,” his mother replied. “You make yourselfbetter than him by being a better student. You don’t hit. You don’t hitanybody. Not ever.”“That’s stupid,” Tuấn said. “He won’t stop unless I hit him. He’ll just keepon doing it.”“Unless you hit him?” his mom repeated, incredulous. “What would yourfather say? Unless you hit him? Ridiculous!”She went on: Did he know it made her look like a bad parent? What wouldeveryone say about their household? That she raised a savage? An ingrate? Itdidn’t help that she was in this all alone—all alone. Those last words hurt himthe most—“You don’t have a father and your mother is in this all alone.” Ifshe was alone, what did that make him? It stung him. And he didn’t knowwhat to do with it; he didn’t want to feel that way ever again.  Tuấn pretended to dial a phone number and spoke Vietnamese into the
receiver. Afterwards, he went outside. He remembered an RTA bus stop near
a grocery store. It must have been five or six blocks away. Not too far.
As he began to walk toward the main road, Donald’s stepmother pulled up.
“Versailles, right?” she said, then looked over at Donald.
“Why don’t we drive your friend home, too?” she said to Donald. Donald
knitted his eyebrows, and his stepmother reached back to unlock the door.
“Jump in,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Tuấn.
To Tuấn’s surprise, the inside of the car was clean. Donald’s stepmother
turned on the radio. The music sounded like plastic bottles hitting each other,
the notes rising with a woman’s voice, singing who knew what. With each
passing second, the song seemed to go faster. It reminded Tuấn of the car
chase scenes on TV.
Donald’s stepmother looked into her rearview mirror. “It’s Donna
Summer!” she said. “I wish I could get this goofball up here to listen to good
music, but all he listens to is noise. All of it is noise.”
Donald let out an angry sigh and rolled down his window. His mother took
a right and then a left into Versailles.
“Donald, why don’t you invite your friend over sometime?” she asked,
slowing the car. “I can make tacos or something! He never invites his friends
over. He’s always playing with his toys. Two weeks ago, we got him a dog so
he’d at least go outside. It’s his only friend.”
“His name’s Walter!”
“His father says the problem is he’s too much like his mother—too
unfriendly. But look at you two! Golly!”
“Margaret!” Donald kicked the dashboard. “Will you just shut up? God!
So embarrassing.”
The car eased to a stop. Tuấn jumped out and watched as it pulled away.
The apartment door opened and his mom called his name. “Why are you
home so late? And who was that?” She stood on the landing, her hands on her
hips.
“Nothing, mẹ,” Tuấn said.
She grabbed him by the shoulder and bent down to his eye level. “Look
your mother in the eyes and tell her that,” she said.
“Nothing,” he said and ran in to his room. He slammed his door.
“You don’t make things easy for your mother,” he heard her say.
—
Walter barked into the night. Tuấn knew where the dog was. He went to the
window. Stars dotted the sky. It reminded him of nights in Mỹ Tho. When he
couldn’t sleep, his dad told him to count the stars. Một, hai, ba…you could
never get to one hundred without falling asleep. He remembered that. He held
the memory in his mind like a breath.
In school, they made him count different numbers. He couldn’t get his lips
to say the words. “Won” was fine, “too” was easy, but it got harder. “Tree.”
“Far.” “Fire.” Donald would make fun of him and then Tuấn would count as
fast as he could in Vietnamese—Một-hai-ba-bốn-năm-sáu-bảy-tám-chínmười! You can’t count, he’d tell Donald. You know nothing. Donald would call
for Mrs. Trahan to tell her Tuấn was cussing at him, and she would believe
him. She would make him sit in the corner for the rest of the period like he
was in time-out in kindergarten.
Tuấn looked under the bed. The lunch container from that afternoon was
still there. The bugs dotted the plastic, not moving except one on the lid near
the hole he had made for them to breathe. Tuấn shook it gently, and the dots
began crawling again. He counted all six.
He left the apartment barefoot and started down the road carrying the
Tupperware of roaches. Dirt caked his feet and the rocks bit into his skin. For
a second, he wanted to go back and get his shoes, but he was so far already. It
was cooler than nights before. A cold front had come through, and the
weatherman said it was perfect “sweater weather.”
Under the stars, the apartment buildings became silhouettes. Walking, he
heard birds singing. He didn’t know birds sang at this hour. He felt delighted
and surprised.
Tuấn passed the gates of Versailles and walked toward the bus stop. When
he got to Donald’s house, he stopped.
The lights were off. The dog stopped barking when it saw him. It began
whimpering and pacing from one corner of the lawn to the other, stopping
when its rope couldn’t go any farther.
“Walter?” Tuấn whispered. He felt as if someone was spying on him, as if
Donald was outside knowing he’d come this night, though he had only come
up with this idea while brushing his teeth. He walked closer to the dog. A
light came on and Tuấn froze.
When no one came out, he set the container down and went to the dog. It
barked, then whimpered again. Its voice was weakening, vanishing from
endless barking. Tuấn petted its head. It seemed more a phantom of a dog
than a real dog, what a real dog should be—its size, its shape. It needed a
bath. It needed food. The dog licked Tuấn’s hand.
Tuấn moved to the tree to look at the rope knotted around it. When the
dog began barking again, Tuấn whispered, “Shhh…” until it quieted down.
With all his strength, Tuấn pushed his fingers into the knot and tried to
unravel it. The burning of the rope made him sweat and his palms became
slick. It was tighter than he could have imagined.
After a couple of minutes, the knot was loosened and the dog began
moving again, wagging its tail and panting with its tongue sticking out. Tuấn
dropped the rope to the ground.
“Go,” he said, too excited to whisper anymore. “Go!”
And, as if understanding, the dog ran out of the yard and into the street.
Tuấn watched until it disappeared. He stood and waited to see if it would
come back.
“Anh,” a voice called out. Brother. Bình stood barefooted on the sidewalk
under a streetlamp. “It’s cold,” Bình said, tiptoeing closer. “You got up. I
followed you.” He wiped his nose with his hand.
“It is cold,” Tuấn agreed.
The two stood under Donald’s tree in silence.
Then Bình spoke up. “Is the dog coming back?” he asked.
“No,” Tuấn answered.
“Where do you think he’s going?”
“Somewhere” was all he could answer. “But he’s not tied up anymore. He’s
free.” He liked the sound of those words—He’s free—in English. They felt
light and floated off his tongue: He’s free.
Tuấn placed the Tupperware of cockroaches under the tree, next to the
rope. “You won’t tell anyone,” he said.
“No one,” said Bình.
“And nothing happened tonight.”
“Nothing.”
“Let’s get back, then.”
And they ran back to the apartment. For the first time in a long time, Tuấn
felt happy, as if he were where he was supposed to be, out in the starlit night
under such a full moon. He swore he felt a breeze run through his hair,
though the air was still.

Ben 1987

Most of Versailles was Catholic. There was one Buddhist family long ago,
but they’d moved away. Where do we belong? Ben’s mother would ask.
It happened after every Mardi Gras. After the streets were cleaned of
streamers, the king cake eaten, the tiny plastic baby tossed out with the trash
(though Ben always wanted to keep them), and the beads packed away for the
next year (a tangled mess no one would use again), Versailles became quieter,
calmer, more severe.
On Sundays, the neighbors—the Phạms, the Ngôs, the Nguyễns—dressed
up for church, the women in plain áo dàis and the men in button-ups tucked
into their pants. Are you going to Ash Wednesday service? they asked Ben’s
mother. What about Palm Sunday? What about fish dinners? Do you have any
new and exciting ways to cook fish? Fish on Fridays? His mother was
offended.
Leave me and my children alone, she seemed to say with her eyes, though
it would have been too rude to say it aloud. She learned a new phrase from
one of her customers at the nail salon: “Bless your heart,” which meant,
secretly, that they were dumb or lacking mental faculties or were otherwise
impaired, but there was not a thing to be done about it—how pitiful they
were, how one could pity them all day long until the cows came home. She
said it to them all the time: Bless your heart! Bless your heart! Bless, your,
heart!
From February to April, Ben’s mother tried not to talk to anyone in
Versailles if she could help it. After work she would walk to their apartment,
her breath held in, her posture rigid, her eyes down. A year without talking
about Easter or Lent was a successful year, she would say to the both of them, Ben and his brother. Their family was never one for ideologies, she would
say, and their father would have been against it all; Catholicism or
communism, it would have been all the same to him.
Ben never knew his father. He was killed, according to his mother, after
the war. The war, from what he had gleaned from books and TV, had been
between communism and non-Communists. The Americans came to help the
fight against the Communists. His own father was not a Communist. He was a
teacher and a freethinker who despised Communists, and because of this they
killed him. He died a hero. That’s the word his mother used, hero, whenever
Ben asked about him. Whatever else he knew of the man were echoes of
would haves, could haves. He would have thought this…he could have done
this, your father….Not a real-life father but a ghost of a father, an afterimage
of a father.
“That’s why we don’t live in Vietnam. We live in America,” she would
continue, “where we can think what we want and not get arrested.” Last year,
they became citizens—one of two families in the neighborhood so far—and it
was something she took pride in. Ben didn’t know what it meant, how their
lives would be different than before, but he knew it was something important,
momentous: that night they ate cake at Gambino’s.
The summer between third and fourth grade, as the sun was setting one
evening, a priest arrived in Versailles. He had a dark blue car with woodgrain panels. No one recognized it, and at first everyone stuck their heads out
their windows to have a look. When the priest stepped out, he carried a large
stack of door hangers. He began his journey door-to-door. Ben could hear his
fist on wood every few minutes, at first hard and vivacious, but as the night
continued it became softer, quieter. By the time he arrived at the last
apartment, their apartment, they didn’t hear his knock and knew he was there
only because they were expecting him.
He introduced himself as a priest who had come from Houston by way of
Saigon to set up a brand-new church in New Orleans. A very special church.
A Vietnamese church. It would also be a community center and safe place for
everyone. Imagine ping-pong tables, he was saying, and basketball courts.
And classrooms for catechism classes, English lessons for adults, and
Vietnamese lessons for the kids. The priest looked at Ben, who stood behind
his mother at the door. Ben smiled and he held his hands behind his back. His
mother didn’t look like she was paying attention.
“That’s the dream, anyway,” explained the priest, “the Almighty willing.
Right now, we rent a storefront off Chef Menteur. Next to a Winn-Dixie.”
“Ah, Winn-Dixie,” his mother said, as if, out of everything she was told,
this was the one thing she understood. She looked at one side of the door
hanger and flipped it to the other. But in the motion of it, the paper—thick
like cardboard, so it would stay put on all the doorknobs—sliced her finger.
In the next instant, the hanger flew out of her hands and dropped down off
their landing.
“Trời ơi,” she whispered as if she didn’t want anyone to hear. She turned
around and walked to the kitchen sink. Ben moved out of the way, so intent
she seemed to get there.
The priest came running after her. “I am so sorry, cô. So very sorry.”
Ben closed the door because he wanted to be helpful.
The priest was younger than Ben expected. On TV, when you saw a priest,
they were always chubby, old, pale men who mumbled when they spoke. But
this priest was skinny with golden brown skin and a thick head of black hair.
And, of course, he was Vietnamese. You never saw Vietnamese priests on
TV. You never saw Vietnamese anything. A Vietnamese priest in real life—
that was amazing!
His mother ran the water over her finger as the priest stood by. He kept on
apologizing, and his mother was obliged to keep on telling him, annoyed, it
was no one’s fault. She rummaged around the drawers for a bandage. They
kept their first aid in the last drawer, but she kept looking elsewhere in her
frenzied state.
“Let me help,” the priest said.
“No. Thank you,” his mother said when she found the box of bandages.
She emptied it onto the counter. They were all different sizes, so she had to
look through them before finding the right one.
The priest left after that, telling her she should consider joining their
congregation: Our Lady of Saigon. They could come to mass tomorrow or
Sunday. “Or anytime, really,” he said. “Our doors are always open. We’re
here to serve the community.”
His mother didn’t answer.
“We hope to see you,” the priest repeated, and she closed the door.
“Catholics,” she proclaimed after watching his car pull away, “they can
believe whatever they want, but that doesn’t mean they can go around telling
you what to think or do or believe!” She opened her eyes wide at him as if
she were about to say something important, a lesson he should learn and take
note of. “That’s why we left Vietnam, you see?”
“But you left Vietnam because of the Communists,” said Ben.
“We left,” she said, as if he should’ve remembered, “because people like
that are dangerous.” She peeked through the blinds. Ben wanted to know
what she meant by “dangerous.” “I can’t believe everyone is falling for it.
Bless their hearts. Bless all their hearts!” Suddenly she gasped and pulled
away from the blinds. She walked toward her bedroom, and Ben wondered if
the priest saw her spying.
“We’re Americans,” she said. “This is ridiculous!”
—
The next day, it was all he could talk about with Addy: the priest, his woodpaneled car, the door hanger that cut his mother. He showed it to Addy.
Addy lived out on Bullard Avenue, where all the families were from Haiti,
the same way all the families in Versailles were from Vietnam. But instead of
apartments, they were all in houses, small one-story buildings of whitewashed
wood that made them look old and fragile. Ben thought they looked like they
were made of paper.
In third grade, Addy had been the new girl in school. Ben’s previous best
friend, Shirley Daigle, had just moved away last summer (they promised to
keep in touch through letters, though they both knew it wouldn’t happen,
Shirley being an overall bad writer and Ben not knowing what to say in these
letters), and Ben’s ears had perked up when Mrs. Brownworth said they had a
new student. A counselor brought her in. She was a small black girl who wore her hair
in an afro. She wore jeans and a pink Minnie Mouse shirt, and her backpack
was a bright cherry red. The frames of her glasses were red, too, and so was
the plastic ring she wore on her pinkie, Ben would later notice.
Mrs. Brownworth introduced the new girl as Adelaide Toussaint and said that
she just moved to New Orleans from Miami.
The girl corrected her then—interrupting the bulky, scratchy-voiced
Mrs. Brownworth!—saying that she was actually called Addy and that they,
her family, were in Miami for a while, but they, her dad and her, were really
from Port-au-Prince in Haiti—did Mrs. Brownworth know where Haiti was?
—which is very far away from New Orleans, and the weather was nicer there
than it is in New Orleans, though she didn’t have much room to complain
because her daddy, she said, said complaining was the devil.
Mrs. Brownworth didn’t know what to say after the lengthy speech and no
one else did, either. Addy stood at the front of the class beside
Mrs. Brownworth. It was silent until two blond girls in the back, Shannon and
Ashley, started giggling, and soon the entire class was giggling, too, except
Ben, who didn’t see anything funny about anything. Addy stared at them all
and shook her head. “Timoun dyab,” she said, like an adult reprimanding a
school of children. No one knew what it meant and they kept laughing. Ben
knew, for reasons he did not understand, he wanted to be her friend.
At recess, as she sat alone under an oak tree watching other girls play
hopscotch, Ben approached her and sat by her side. They both watched the
girls skip across the chalk-drawn squares. There were five girls in all,
including Shannon and Ashley. The entire group had been through the
hopscotch once and were starting all over again when Ben said, “I have
marbles.”
Addy didn’t say anything back. He wasn’t even sure she’d heard him, so he
said it again: “I have marbles.” For good grades, Bà Giang had gifted him a
set of marbles, and Tuấn became infuriated because he said (in his broken
English that always made Ben cringe, though he would never admit that to
anyone) first grade was for babies and easy and it was all unfair. (He stomped
off to their shared room and their mother yelled back, “Well, life is unfair!”)
The marbles came in a mesh bag, but that didn’t keep up for too long so he
stored them in a Ziploc bag instead. He opened it and showed her. Each
marble was different. Ben often thought there were as many marbles as there
were people. This one, the first one he showed Addy, was white with
different-colored polka dots. It was the size of a grape, larger than all the
others. He held it in his palm and showed her another one, a clear one this
time with a brown swirl in it that reminded him of the Cinnamon Toast
Crunch they served for breakfast at school. He reached in again and took out
a handful. He jiggled them and they clattered against one another. (This is
what teeth sound like, he always told himself.)
Out on the hopscotch squares, it was Shannon’s turn. She wrapped her hair
in a scrunchie and was telling her friends, “I can do it backwards,” and they
were all saying, “No way. No way, Shan. You can’t do it! No way!”
“I bet,” she insisted, “with my eyes closed even.” Her hands were in the
air, already triumphant, celebrating. “Here I go,” she exclaimed, jumping into
the first square with one leg. She landed perfectly. She jumped again and
landed safely.
“Look,” Ben whispered when Shannon landed on the next jump, a pair of
squares side by side. He slid his fistful of marbles across the blacktop, aiming
for the chalk-drawn squares. Addy squinted her eyes. At this distance they
were so small he couldn’t even see them. Addy smiled.
Shannon stepped on a marble, then suddenly began losing her balance. She
let out a moan as she flapped her hands—her hands like birds trying to grab
on to something (a crumb of air, maybe) to keep from falling, but it was too
late. Within the next second, she flew across the hopscotch squares and
landed on her back on the ground at the edge of the blacktop, half her body
in the dirt. The boys playing basketball stopped and watched. A few laughed.
Shannon let out a long, wailing cry, not of pain, but of embarrassment, Ben
was sure. The other girls ran away.
Ben and Addy held in their own laughter, covering their mouths, under the
shade of the old oak tree.
“That was good for sure!” Addy said.
They became quick friends after that.
—
Addy studied the door hanger.
“Sai-gon,” she read.
Ben told her about the priest and the new church and how his mother
slammed the door on him. (This last part Ben made up to make the story
more exciting.) He said his mother didn’t like Catholics because they were
like the Communists.
Addy was not offended because she didn’t know anything about
Communists. She was Catholic; her father, too. What Catholic meant, Addy
didn’t really know, but she said this: “It’s like a club. A secret club. We have
to wake up early on Sundays and we go to this small, little building out in
Little Woods. They chant and we stand up and sit down. Sometimes we stand
on our knees.”
Ben pictured exercise videos on TV with women and men in neon pink
and green leotards jumping up and down to music. “And the adults eat
bread,” Addy added, “and sip wine. And the kids, we go have playtime in the
back, where there’s juice and animal crackers and music on a tape player.”
She thought for a moment. Addy’s father, inside the house, was cooking
joumou, and the smell of cooking beef wafted out into the sticky summer air.
It made Ben hungry. “It’s like a party,” Addy said. “Every week, a party.”
“Like Mardi Gras?” Ben asked.
“Exactly like Mardi Gras,” she said.
—
The priest returned to Versailles the next week. On Saturday morning, Ben
heard laughter outside by the bayou. He heard the sound of a rubber ball
bouncing against skin. He got dressed and ran out. And there they were: the
priest and the teenagers of Versailles. Ben ran down barefooted.
Two metal poles with a net in the middle were staked into the ground.
Five teenagers stood on one side of the net, four on the other. A volleyball
rallied back and forth, the teenagers jumping into the air to hit it with both
hands. The priest stood to the side watching. He was wearing the same
clothes he wore last time he visited, but this time a whistle, like the ones gym
teachers wore, hung from his neck. His forehead was slick with sweat and
glistened in the sun. Every few seconds, he wiped a paper towel across his
entire face. Other times, his head went back and forth, following the ball’s
trajectory in the sky. Ben did the same. Then a boy, one of the Nguyễns’ sons
(Ben remembered his name being Huy but everyone called him Joseph),
jumped right up close to the net and slammed the ball down. It bounced on
the dirt hard and ricocheted into the bayou. Water splashed the players but
didn’t reach Ben or the priest.
“Holy hell!” someone said.
“Why you gotta do that?” said someone else.
The priest blew into the whistle and held his hands in the air to signal a
time-out.
“Maybe we should break,” the priest said. “And Joe, get that ball, will
you?” Joseph shook his head with a grin and the teenagers dispersed, some
heading to a blue cooler off to the side and popping open cans of Coke.
“Is this what Catholics do?” Ben asked.
The priest took a quick breath as if he’d just noticed Ben was there. He
patted his head.
“Hương’s boy,” said the priest. “You scared Cha Hiệu.”
Cha meant father, Ben knew that much, so he asked, “Who’s Father
Hiệu?”
The priest laughed, a good belly laugh. “I’m Father Hiệu!” he said.
“Oh,” Ben replied, not able to think of anything else to say. Then “Whose
dad are you?” He scanned the teenagers.
“I’m not anyone’s dad,” the priest said. “They just call me that. It’s…we
take care of everyone. Like they’re our children. I’m a priest.”
Ben noted that he said “we,” and he imagined a whole sea of fathers,
wearing the same black jeans and black shirts with white squares on their
collars. They moved with synchronized movements like marines in a parade.
“My father died,” Ben said. It felt appropriate, while they were on the
subject of fathers.

“I’m so sorry!” The priest looked worried now.
“No. It was a long time ago. Before I was born. He died like a hero in
Vietnam. That’s what my mom says.”
“Still. No child should go through that. We’ve been through a lot, all of us.
But on top of that! No child should grow up without a father.” He looked like
he was about to tear up, and Ben felt bad he’d even brought it up.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re here now.”
“Ah!” the priest exclaimed, as if suddenly everything made sense. “Yes, of
course.”
Just then, Joseph came up to Father Hiệu with a Polaroid camera. He’d
taken off his shirt and wore only his shorts. His body was wet. Ben thought he
should look away.
“Take a picture with us!” Joseph said.
“But who?” Father Hiệu said. “Someone needs to take the photo.”
“Hey, you, kid! Hey!” Ben realized Joseph was talking to him. “You know
how to use one of these?”
—
Ben’s mother found the picture later that evening.
“What’s this?” she asked, holding it up.
They were having dinner. Tuấn was in the living room watching a kung fu
movie. From the kitchen, Ben could see Bruce Lee’s body flying into the air.
“Where you find that?”
“Outside, by the steps.”
“So that’s where it was.” He’d forgotten all about it. After he took the
picture, Joseph had switched places with him. In the picture, he stood next to
Father Hiệu, a full-teeth smile glowing on his face. After the picture, they let
him play volleyball, though he wasn’t any help (too short!). He got in the way
more than anything else, but the teenagers didn’t seem to mind. He held out
his hand to his mother.
“Didn’t I tell you not to play with these kids? With ông cha Hiệu?”
“But they were playing volleyball. I haven’t played volleyball before. And
they let me. They let me play with them. I didn’t even have to ask. They asked
me. What was I supposed to do?” He held out his hand again. He should keep
it in his journal. Last year in school, they had to write in a journal once a
week for thirty minutes. Ben liked it so much he’d made it a habit all through
summer. He would write the day’s date in the top corner and glue the picture
inside.
But his mother didn’t look at him. She went to the drawer and took out a
pair of shears, the kind she used to cut through meat. She headed for the trash
and began cutting up the Polaroid. Each piece fell heavily. “In Vietnam…”
she muttered. “Your father…In Vietnam…Embarrassing…Your poor
mother…”
“Tuấn!” she shouted when there was nothing else left to cut.
“What? Why bring me into this?”
“You’re supposed to take care of your brother.”
“I do. Who says I don’t?” He was in the kitchen now.
“Make sure he doesn’t hang out with Cha Hiệu and those other kids,” she
said. “If only your father was here; he’d be ashamed of all of us.”
“It’s not like he matters anymore!”
“How can you say that? We sacrificed everything—so you can have a roof
over your head in a free country. Have some respect!” She was shaking now.
She looked like she was about to say something else but stopped herself. “Eat
your dinner,” she said and left for her room.
—
For the next several weeks, Ben stayed inside with his brother. They watched
TV in the morning, and around lunch Ben would go to his room and read. By
the window, he could hear the teenagers and Father Hiệu. Sometimes, they
played volleyball. Other times, they played in the bayou.
One day, Tuấn asked if he wanted to play can-ball. Summers past, when
they played can-ball, Tuấn would tell Ben about their father. He had black
hair like they did, and he had their same long nose. He had big hands—big at
least to a five-year-old, which was the last time Tuấn saw their father—and he
had a hard spot on this left thumb from writing too much. Yes, he was lefthanded—like you, Bình. Sometimes he wore glasses when reading. He was
what you would call “bookish” or book smart. He was also kind. Often he
came home with candy but only if you answered a question. Sometimes the
questions were easy: What is the capital of South Vietnam? (Sài Gòn.) Or:
What is the name of the river that passes through the city? (Sông Sài Gòn.)
But sometimes you had to think really hard: If a tree falls in the woods but no
one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Is this cup half full or half
empty? He was a man who thought a great lot, Tuấn would conclude, and
after running out of ways to describe him—or maybe he forgot everything
else about him—their can-ball sessions stopped.
Tuấn stood at their doorway with a bat and the plastic bag they used for
recycling. They now had not only soda cans but soup cans, too. For quick
meals, their mother diluted Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom and stirred in
rice and peas. None of them liked it, but they ate it anyway.
Ben stood in one end of the small front yard of their apartment (where the
adults parked their cars) and Tuấn stood on the other. Ben was the first to bat.
They would each have five swings. Like baseball, they had nine rounds.
Whoever hit the most cans at the end won. Tuấn wound up his arm. A Coke
can was first.
“I haven’t done this in a long while,” he yelled across the yard, “but I’m
not gonna go easy on you, you hear?”
“Show me your best,” said Ben. He scuffed up the dirt in front of him with
his shoes, the way baseball players did on TV. He spat on the ground.
“Here I go,” Tuấn said, spinning his arm. “And here it comes!” He let go
and Ben swung and missed. The can flew past him.
“What I tell you?” Tuấn said.
“I was just warming up. Throw me another,” Ben said.
Tuấn reached into the bag. A volleyball flew between them and rolled
toward Ben. It stopped a few feet short of him as one of the teenagers ran to
retrieve it.
“My bad,” he said. He kicked the ball up like it was soccer and caught it
with both hands. “You can join us if you want, both of you. We’re just
playing volleyball over there.” He pointed to his friends, who waited with
their hands on their knees.
Ben looked at Tuấn, and Tuấn hesitated for a second before telling him
no. The boy left, running toward his friends.
Tuấn, meanwhile, returned to the bag and dug out a Campbell’s can.
“They’re not having fun anyway,” he said, throwing the can up and down. Ben
followed its movement. “They’re not better,” his brother continued, “I’ll tell
you that much.” In a quick motion, Tuấn turned around and threw the can as
hard as he could toward the teenagers and the volleyball net. The both of
them watched as it sailed through the air and fell soundlessly onto the dirt. It
didn’t look like anyone noticed at all.
—
Ben’s mother didn’t care that Addy and her father were Catholic, the same
way she didn’t seem to care that Bà Giang was Catholic.
She had met them once during parent-teacher conferences. Ben had
introduced them as “my friend” and “my friend’s dad.” They sat in the
hallway waiting for their turn with Mrs. Brownworth. As Ben and Addy
talked about last night’s episode of Punky Brewster, Ben’s mother and Addy’s
father bonded over the fact that they were both immigrants—how hard it was
to get the foods they grew up with, how their kids would never know what it’s
like to live a difficult life, how easy their kids had it.
But, Addy’s father added, what a gift that is—to give your child
opportunities you never had, a life you couldn’t even dream of.
“But they don’t even know how lucky they are!” Ben’s mother replied.
Addy’s father laughed. “Yes! How true!”
On the bus ride home, Ben’s mother told him how she thought Addy and
her father were good people.
She allowed him to go over on weekends, and on Saturdays Ben would
ride his bike over to Bullard Avenue. Most of the time they played in Addy’s
tree house. For lunch, they ate ham sandwiches with extra mayonnaise. (They
didn’t eat mayonnaise at home, so Ben ate as much as he could when he was
with Addy.)
Some nights he stayed over, and early the next morning Addy would tell
him to stay asleep; they’d be back in an hour. He would look up from the
couch where he slept and she would be dressed up in a clean and simple black
dress. She wore white stockings and black shoes with buckles. Proud of
herself, she would curtsy and spin around to show off. Behind her, her dad
would be dressed in tan slacks with a button-up shirt, a tie, and a jacket.
Addy’s dad painted houses for a living. To see him dressed up for church was
a surprise to Ben. When he saw him like that for the first time, Ben wondered
if his dad ever dressed up. He tried to picture an Asian man—he had no idea
what his own dad looked like since they had no photos of him—in a suit with
his hair combed back nicely. He could picture only Father Hiệu.
Addy and her dad went to church at seven in the morning. They would
come back by nine, and the three of them would have breakfast together, with
Ben staying through lunch.
He saw this happen enough that he got an idea. One Saturday before his
sleepover, he packed an extra-large bag, the one Tuấn used for gym class. He
packed his regular stuff: clothes, pajamas, toothbrush and toothpaste, a book
of ghost stories (because they read them at night with the lights off and a
flashlight on), and, without anyone noticing, his special clothes—black pants,
a white button-up shirt, and a black jacket, which he’d worn when they
became citizens. He didn’t have any fancy shoes with buckles the way Addy
did, so he just cleaned his sneakers with dish soap in the bathroom. He’d
never been to a church before, but he knew it was a serious place. He couldn’t
wear muddy shoes there. He imagined people sitting in rows and rows of
wooden seats, bowing their heads in prayer, all of them with clean shoes.
When his mom asked him why he was bringing a bigger bag, he said they
were going to play Sorry!. He even opened it to show her; the Sorry! box lay
over his clothes. She inspected it for a long second before telling him to be
safe. He hopped on his bike, smiling all the way to Bullard Avenue.
When he saw Addy’s dad, he asked if they could go to Our Lady of
Saigon. “It’s a Catholic church,” he told him. He gave him the door hanger
and he flipped it over. If he noticed the small bloodstain, now brown, where
his mother cut herself, he didn’t say anything about it. Addy’s dad said, “I’ve
never been to this church before,” and took out his map to scan the network
of roads.
“It’s near Winn-Dixie,” Ben offered.
Addy didn’t understand what was happening or why he was asking this,
but her father smiled then. “We get up at six thirty sharp,” he declared. They
would all go to Our Lady of Saigon together. For Ben’s sake, Addy’s father
added.
They didn’t stay up that night reading scary stories, though it took a long
time for Ben to fall asleep. He dreamed of going to church and Father Hiệu
standing at a lectern—like the priests did on TV. In the dream, the church
was a tall building with stained-glass windows, and the pews were made of
dark brown wood. In the front seats, nuns kept their hands together, and
Father Hiệu, seeing him enter, nodded his head. After church was over, they
were all back in Versailles and had a picnic and played volleyball.
When six thirty came, Ben was already awake. They got dressed and were
out of the house at seven.
“Now you see what we do every Sunday,” Addy said.
“But different,” said her dad.
“But different,” she echoed.
All the way, her father kept looking at his map, spread out in the
passenger seat. He got lost twice before they found it.
As Father Hiệu had said, it was just a storefront. Still, Ben was
disappointed. It wasn’t like the church from his dream, and it wasn’t like the
only other real church he had ever seen, St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson
Square. They had always passed it without a second glance, but now he tried
to remember what it looked like and how this storefront, with shopping carts
left stranded on the sidewalk, disappointed him. Addy’s dad parked the car
and rushed them out.
“Late,” he said. “We’re very late. Go, go!” They ran toward the storefront church and Addy’s dad ran ahead to reach
the door first. The door creaked as it opened, but no one seemed to notice.
They shuffled inside and rushed toward a row of empty metal chairs in the
back.
A boom box played organ music as everyone stood. From where he was,
at the end of the row, Ben couldn’t see anything except that everyone was
Vietnamese. He looked across the aisle and saw Joseph. The sun was beaming
on him like a spotlight. He wore a blue button-up shirt and a pair of dark blue
pants. He had a red tie. His shoes were brown leather, and he bounced back
and forth on his heels while mouthing the prayers. Ben couldn’t imagine him
saying these words; he’d never heard Joseph talk in Vietnamese.
Ben stuck his head out into the aisle and saw Father Hiệu standing in the
front next to an older man with white hair wearing an elaborate green robe
with gold thread markings that looked almost like a dress but bulkier. Father
Hiệu wore a robe, too, but his was white and had no markings. There was no
lectern, only a small table that reminded him of the desks at school. A woman
walked toward the stage then, holding a book in the air. When she stood
behind the table, everyone knew to sit down. She opened the book and read
from it. It was all in Vietnamese, of course, and when Addy looked over at
him in confusion, he just shrugged. Her dad, meanwhile, stared ahead as if he
understood all the words, and when the woman was done he nodded as if in
agreement just like everyone else. The woman walked off the stage, the organ
music started again, and everyone stood up. Another prayer commenced.
Everyone bowed their head and lifted their hands in the air and chanted in a
singsong voice. Ben bowed his head and did the same, minus the chanting.
Suddenly, something pulled him out and everything became a blur. He felt
nails on his shoulder. He looked behind; his mother’s angry face looked back.
“No son of mine,” she told him, dragging him out. The prayers stopped
abruptly, Ben noticed, and everyone watched. He felt their eyes on him and
he felt his face turn red. Joseph was looking at him and so was Father Hiệu
from all the way up front, standing on his toes to see over the crowd.
How did she know? Ben was thinking. How could she possibly know? He
closed his eyes tight. Maybe, he was thinking, in the back of his mind, they
can’t see me if I don’t see them. It was so quiet, almost silent, except for the
dragging of his sneakers across the linoleum floor, that he couldn’t believe
what was happening until his mother spoke up again.
“You embarrass me,” she said. “You embarrass your poor mother. And
your father. Your father would not approve.”
He shut his eyes even tighter. He would like to know this father. This
father who would not have approved of anything he’d ever done. He would
like to meet him and give him a piece of his mind.
Feeling like it was taking an awfully long time to get to the door, Ben
opened his eyes. A long black scuff mark followed him on the floor. A trail of
guilt. He heard their whispering now. Everyone from Versailles. All of them.
He looked up at his mother, who was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Jeans and a
T-shirt, in a church! And her shoes were dirty!
He closed his eyes again and started pinching himself, hoping it was all a
dream, that he’d wake up any second and he’d be somewhere he’d never been
to before, with a different mother, a different brother, and maybe even a
father. He would be sweaty in bed and near tears and they would all surround
him lovingly and ask worriedly, “What’s going on? What’s wrong?” chanting
that until they realize he’s only had a bad dream. “You’re fine now,” they’d
say. “It was a bad dream. You’re fine now, Ben. You’re fine!”
He opened his eyes when they were outside and had half a mind to run
away. But the look on his mother’s face was serious and tired. She didn’t
bother talking to him or looking his way. She took up her Winn-Dixie bags
and he followed her to the bus stop.

Hương    1990

The car purred like a tiger. A vague, blue, metal tiger. The salesman, a
người Việt—though Hương didn’t ask where he was from—named Vinh,
said it was a 1975 Oldsmobile Omega with a 4.3-liter V8 engine, a threespeed automatic, 170 horsepower—old but runs like a dream. A classic!
What this meant, Hương couldn’t tell. What she needed, she told Vinh,
was something to help her get around. She lived all the way out in New
Orleans East; everything else was over the bridge: the grocery stores, the nice
restaurants, work. She couldn’t keep on borrowing Bà Giang’s car.
When Vinh asked her where New Orleans East was, she said it was away
from the city—part of it yet not.
“An interesting place,” she said. “I live in Versailles. All of us are người
Việt; we all came after the war.” She guessed the man must be new in town.
She’d been seeing new người Việt coming to New Orleans, replacing those
who left for Houston or California.
“I don’t want anything fancy,” she added. “Something that is enough.”
“Chị,” he said, “you need something pretty and something that lasts long.
Something that can take you out of the city, out of the state, but also to work.
All in style.” He patted the car, then wiped his handprint.
“Bà Giang told me to come here and I won’t be cheated,” Hương said,
“but I’m seeing that I should take my business elsewhere.”
“Don’t say that, chị…” He took a step forward, so she took a step back.
“Hương. Tên tôi là Hương.”
“You can trust me, chị Hương. This runs like a dream. Would a fellow
người Việt deceive you?”
Yes, she thought, a fellow người Việt would deceive me.

“Let me take you for a ride,” the salesman added.
“It’s too fancy,” she said. “What’s a V8 engine? What’s that? Who needs
that? I just need a car. How about another one?” She couldn’t understand why
car shopping had to take so long, why someone couldn’t buy a car like they
would buy an apple or a bag of rice. All this chitchat. “What else have you
got?”
She took a tissue from her purse and wiped the sweat from her forehead.
After all this time working inside an air-conditioned nail salon, she was now
unaccustomed to the early July heat.
“This car is the perfect car for you, chị Hương. Why don’t you take it for a
ride? A ride around the block?”
“Does it have air-conditioning?” Hương asked.
“It does. The best cool air in America.” He waved the keys. A small smile
lit up his face.
—
First, Hương drove down small neighborhood roads, then onto Claiborne.
Vinh turned on the radio. “See, chị, this is the radio.”
He turned on the air-conditioning. “See, chị, this is the air-conditioning.”
He pressed down on the horn to show her its vitality, its strength and
loudness. “For when you’re stuck in traffic,” he said.
At one point, while he showed her the space in the glove compartment and
flipped through the car manual, she veered off onto a ramp and before she
knew it, most of the traffic disappeared. Hương saw a speed limit sign: sixtyfive miles an hour.
As Vinh rattled off more car specifications, the city faded from her
rearview mirror. Gone were the high buildings, the glass-windowed towers,
the concrete. Ten minutes more of driving, and it all disappeared.
A sense of happiness came over Hương as she realized this was the first
time in a long time she had left the city by herself. She reminded herself
there was more to the world than New Orleans, more than that city. She felt
she needed to celebrate as she crossed the city limits. She imagined leaving.
Her boys were off at school and they would come home and wait and she
would not be there! The next day they wouldn’t go to school. They would stay
home all week. They would fail their classes. The schools would visit. Not
finding her there, they would call. Ms. Trần, they’d say, how could you
abandon your sons? Yes, abandon, and all at once she felt guilty for thinking
it. How could she abandon her sons? How could she even think of doing that
to them? They were all alone in the world. She was just weary; that’s what it
was—tired, old, and weary.
“Anh Vinh,” Hương said, “which way back?”
“You’re doing just fine. Do you like the car? That sound you hear means
the engine is working great—just great!”
“Anh Vinh,” she repeated, “which way back?”
Vinh leaned over the center console and peered into Hương’s face and saw
the fear in her eyes of driving too far, too fast.
“Chị Hương,” he said. “Would you like some longans? They don’t sell
fresh longans here in the States very much, but there’s this woman…” He
paused and looked out the window, watching the signs pass by. “There’s this
woman in Buras. She owns an entire orchard of them, an entire orchard of
longan trees.”
Hương remembered the longan trees of her childhood. She remembered
the leaves blowing in a soft breeze, the inescapable fragrance hanging in the
air, the sound of rough fruit as it fell to the dirt with a muted thud. She hadn’t
thought about longans in years.
“Yes,” she said, at last. “Longans. Take me to the longan trees.”
—
The drive took over an hour. As she drove, her body sat stiff; she was afraid
she would be caught any minute. But the farther away they got, the more
relaxed she became. She drove with one hand and leaned back. After a half
hour of driving, the radio became static and the two started talking.
Hương told Vinh she was a professor’s wife. They, the Communists, called
for her husband. After his time in a reeducation camp, they migrated to the
countryside. Then they migrated out of the country, or at least that was the
plan.
Things got complicated after that. He got left behind as she sailed on. She
tried to contact him—she still kept her letters and cassette tapes in a shoebox
in her closet—but to no avail. One day, out of the blue, he did write back,
telling her to give up her search. At first, she was devastated. But Bà Giang
had a different perspective. She said the Communists were monitoring the
letters. Yes, Hương could agree on that—but what of it? Most likely, the old
woman said, they confiscated the letters and he never saw them, except for
the ones he did answer. Maybe, she went on, he stopped writing because he
was trying to protect himself; who knew what was going on over there across
the ocean, what happened after he sent Hương his final, brief postcard? In the
end, perhaps it was fate that they should never meet again. That didn’t
explain, however, Công’s long silence. If he was truly trying to get to her, get
to them, he would have written earlier, wouldn’t he? And then there was the
night they left. He had paused, she remembered. But perhaps Bà Giang was
right: the fates—or whatever force was behind the universe—must have had
something else in mind for their destinies. It didn’t make it hurt any less, any
of it. In fact, it made it hurt more: in the grand scheme of things they’d never
stood a chance.
Still, sometimes she wrote to him in the way a schoolgirl might write in a
diary; it calmed her, imagining talking to him, giving him her innermost
thoughts. Dear Công, Another day in New Orleans, she would scribble down.
Your sons are growing up so fast, fast as light, fast as seconds, you wouldn’t
recognize them because I don’t. They are not like you and I don’t know what to
do.
She didn’t say any of this to Vinh (he was a stranger, after all) and simply
said things got complicated. Life is already complicated, she said, and when
you add war to that, no one gets what they want.
Vinh agreed. He told Hương he’d been in the South Vietnamese Army.
“The South Vietnamese Amy,” he said, “was the best army there ever was
in the world.” After the war, they sent him to a reeducation camp. “When I
left Vietnam for good, I first went to Malaysia, then to Alaska, then Oregon,
then Texas, and now here!” He sounded like he wanted to say more, but
Hương didn’t urge him on. Besides, he told her they were almost there; just
take the next exit and get on Highway 11.
The trees on the highway gave way to flat wetlands, empty of everything
except water and mud. Hương felt the need to slow down—the land was
bereft, holy even—but Vinh said to keep up the speed.
When they came to an old trailer house, Vinh motioned her to stop, so
Hương parked the car and they got out.
Vinh walked leisurely as they passed the house and into the backyard. He
knew this place; he walked confidently and knew where he was going. Hương
tried not to slip in the mud as Vinh told her the woman who owned the
orchard was from the Philippines. She wondered how Vinh and the woman
knew each other.
In the backyard, to Hương’s surprise, trees stood in rows and rows,
everywhere. Her mouth opened in astonishment. There must have been
hundreds of them, and each stood heavy with leaves—and longans, bunches
of longans, hanging there among the leaves. She wanted to grab them all,
carry them in her arms, bring them home.
Vinh led her to a table and tent to the side of the orchard. The blue of the
tent made everything inside seem underwater. There, a small, elderly, brown
woman sat alone peeling longans. A radio played old jazz as she worked. The
woman looked up when they approached.
“Longans!” she said. “We have longans! So many!” Suntanned skin,
wrinkle lines, and small smiling eyes—she could have been someone’s
grandmother, someone’s great-grandmother, even.
“You back again!” the woman said to Vinh. The woman clapped and let
out a laugh. “I told you—longans really good! Good for health! Longevity!”
She looked at Hương and nodded her head. “You try longans?” she asked.
“Good for health! Longevity! Beauty! Here, here, here!” The old woman
picked up a longan and pushed her thumb into the fruit. Once the rough
exterior gave way, she began shucking the shell-like skin.
“See?” she said when all that was left was a thick white ball. She held it up
and turned it around like she was a showgirl on a game show—What a
wonderful fruit! A most gorgeous fruit! This fruit could be yours! She
reminded Hương of Vinh in the car lot.
“They called ‘dragon eyes’ because the seed—the seed big, black, shiny—
look like eye of dragon,” she said. She handed Hương the fruit.
From her hand, Hương could already smell the sweetness. She
remembered the subtle crunch it made when you bit into it, the feel of the
seed in the mouth, rolling like a marble on the tongue when all the flesh was
swallowed. Hương held it gently and bit into it slowly, wanting the flavor to
last, wanting to picture herself in an orchard, so very much like this one, on
the outskirts of Mỹ Tho, the hot, aching sun warming her neck, the juices of
the fruit cooling and giving her relief from the heat, a time that was simpler,
before war, before marriage, before the fall of a country….
She put the rest of the longan in her mouth and chewed.
What refreshment, she thought. What pleasure. What memory.
Vinh handed her a cluster of longans still hanging on their branch. She felt
their roughness, then his warm skin as it touched hers. She wanted to bring a
whole bag home, for Tuấn, who hadn’t had these in so long, and for Bình,
who never had.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, anh Vinh.”
—
Hương did not buy Vinh’s car. She decided on a cheaper one from the
dealership that sat across from his, but it wasn’t the last she saw of him.
One Saturday, she drove by to see if he was in. Coincidentally, he told her,
it was his lunch break, and she said she knew a sandwich place down on
Magazine Street, if that wasn’t too far. She said she could drive them there in
her new car.
At Casamento’s they both ordered oyster loafs and cans of Barq’s.
“This was the first American sandwich place I went to when I got here,”
she told Vinh. “We went out on a group lunch and I didn’t know what I was
getting. So imagine how surprised I was when they bring out this behemoth.”
She pointed to her own sandwich, two thick cuts of white bread trying to
contain a mountain of fried oysters. “It’s not the best sandwich I’ve ever had,
but it brings back memories. But don’t tell anyone here that.”
Vinh said he’d never been to any place that took food more seriously than
New Orleans. He said he once made the mistake of calling a muffuletta just a
sandwich, and the cashier—a petite-looking woman with a scratchy voice—
refused to give him his food.
Hương laughed. “Yes, that sounds about right.”
“Why here? Why New Orleans? Why stay?” Vinh asked.
“I could ask you the same question, anh Vinh,” Hương replied, and then,
“We just ended up here and we never left. But you, you’re a traveler, anh
Vinh. Why New Orleans?”
“I go where the jobs are,” he said. “Simple as that.”
There was more to that. Hương saw it in his eyes, as if he were waiting for
her to ask him to tell more. But she didn’t press him. She knew everyone had
their own pasts they wanted to leave behind. Not secrets, exactly, but
something to be guarded just the same, with some guarding it more urgently
than others. It gave her a vague feeling that they were the same type of
people.
After lunch, she drove him back.
Every weekend, somehow, she found herself on that side of town and he
was always working then, too. She drove them to her favorite places in New
Orleans—“Think of it as a welcome gift,” she said—and they alternated who
paid.
It was when they were strolling along the river walk, eating ice cream
cones, that she realized this had become her city, the place she lived but also
a place that lived in her. She’d picked up its vocabulary, developed a taste for
its foods, grown accustomed to its weather—the heat, the humidity, even the
minor hurricane here and there. She remembered how scared she was when
she first arrived, how she clutched her belongings (and her sons) close to her,
afraid that something might happen. Nowadays, she walked freely, unafraid.
Vinh pointed to the St. Louis Cathedral looming across the street. “It’s
been forever since I’ve been to a church,” he said. “I wasn’t raised with religion” was all Hương said. “Though everyone in
Versailles seems pretty religious. They even built their own church with
everything in Vietnamese—services, Bibles, pamphlets. But I don’t
understand.” If war had taught her one thing, it was that ideology—how you
believed the world should be, what you would die to uphold—was always
flawed, and though innocent on its own, it could lead to tragedy.
“For me it’s always been a private matter,” Vinh said as if feeling Hương’s
uneasiness.
“That’s all I ask,” she said. They had been quiet for a while when she said,
“They give tours. We can go.”
“No, that’s fine,” Vinh replied.
“If you want.”
“No, truly,” he said and took her hand.
Together they walked back to the car.
What kind of man are you, anh Vinh? Hương thought along the way but didn’t ask.

Ben     1990

Ben grew suspicious when his mother told him to call the man Uncle Vinh
and said he was going stay with them for a week. He was going through
bad times because he’d lost his job, she said. Uncle Vinh wasn’t family,
but they should treat him as if he were.
Vinh came in during the first heat wave in years, and the temperatures
were over one hundred degrees. A fan blew in the living room because the
AC was out. Vinh told them, Ben and Tuấn, he came from Galveston and
Coos Bay and Homer—Texas, Oregon, Alaska.
Ben questioned his story like Ben questioned everything else. “How can
you be from so many places?” he asked. “You can’t be from two places, let
alone three.” Vinh looked at him as if he didn’t understand his words, so Ben
said instead, “You’re lying.”
“I never lie,” Vinh said. To prove it, he showed them his tattoos, his travel
marks: the head of a longhorn with smoke puffing out its nostrils on his right
arm; a majestic red salmon flying above the water on his left; on his chest, a
bear, huffing and puffing, its eyes red, its teeth showing like it was hungry and
ready to gorge. Watching Vinh, Ben saw how different they were. There were
bumps and grooves of muscle instead of flatland flesh and xylophone rib
bones, and most of his skin, exposed to the sun, was tanned to a darkness.
But underneath his shirt, Vinh’s color was the same as Ben’s, a pale caramel,
like they, the both of them, were made of the same clay. He wanted to stand
closer to Vinh, but Tuấn took a step forward and poked a finger at the bear.
“That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “What you gonna get
while you’re here, a stork? A Louisiana stork?”
“It’s a pelican,” Ben interrupted. “The state bird is a pelican, stupid.”  Tuấn continued, “That’s not a tattoo. It’s a teddy bear.” He stopped
laughing when Vinh grabbed him by the shoulder. Ben saw his fingers making
craters on his brother’s skin.
“Respect your elders, child,” Vinh said.
For a second it looked like Tuấn was in pain. Then it looked like he was
annoyed. With a push, Vinh let go and pulled his shirt back on.
“What do you kids know, anyway?” Vinh mumbled.
Their mom walked in from the kitchen, chopsticks in hand. It was one of
her days off. She pointed the sticks at her sons.
“There won’t be any fighting in my house,” she said. The scent of sizzling
fish and chili peppers wafted into the living room. “Pretend Uncle Vinh is
family. Pretend this for your poor old mother. Tuấn, don’t push Uncle Vinh.”
“I didn’t push him. He pushed me.”
“Just do this one thing for your mother. Làm ơn!”
—
Ben carried Vinh’s suitcase down the hall and showed him the room he and
his brother shared. With one foot, he slid over a pile of books from the
library. Unlike elementary school, the middle school let you check out as
many books as you wanted; he’d stuff his backpack with mystery novels, sci-fi
stories, and Choose Your Own Adventures until he couldn’t fit any more in.
Ben set the suitcase down. It wasn’t heavy, at least not in the way he
expected for someone who’d packed up his life and moved across the country.
He must have left in a hurry or he didn’t have many things. Ben let go of the
handle, hoping the suitcase would drop and fall over, the flimsy locks opening
to reveal the contents; but it didn’t.
“This is our room,” he told Vinh. He pointed to a bed against one wall.
“That’s my bed, but that’s where you’ll sleep.” He pointed to Tuấn’s bed. “I’ll
share with Tuấn.” They were both twin beds. In earlier years, Tuấn and Ben
shared one bed. Tuấn said Ben took up too much space, and in the middle of
the night Tuấn would hold him in headlocks, squeeze him at the throat with
his knees, or push him against the wall. One time, frustrated with it all, Ben
bit his brother on the arm and left a mark that didn’t disappear for months. It
wasn’t until Ben was five that they got the second bed.
“Nice view,” Vinh said, opening the window. He leaned against the bars
that covered half of the window.
“You gotta be kidding me, right?” Ben said. “It’s ugly here. I don’t know
why anyone would ever want to come here.” He joined Vinh and looked out
at the dead grass and the mud. And beyond that, the bayou, where a plastic
trash can floated in aimless circles. It was time someone went out and got
that, but no one ever did anything. “I mean on purpose,” he added.
Vinh tapped his hands on the bars and laughed. “I won’t be here long,” he
said. “I’m just a guest.” He went to his suitcase and opened it. In the next
instant, Ben was disappointed to see only clothes and not many of those,
either. Vinh pulled off his T-shirt to change into another one. And again, that
same skin flashed before Ben’s eyes before it was replaced by two large owl
eyes and the word Œ““˜‰–—.
“Just call me Vinh, no ‘Uncle,’ ” Vinh said.
—
That first night, Ben couldn’t sleep. He felt eyes on him, though his nose was
pressed against the wall. Tuấn’s sweaty back, slick and pungent, pressed
against him. For the first few minutes, he tried to push back, but his brother
didn’t budge.
He must have lain awake for hours before he heard the springs on the
other bed move. When the padding of feet faded, Ben climbed over his
brother, bounced on the hardwood, and stood for a minute looking into the
dark.
Vinh was gone. The sheets lay disheveled, the door open.
Walking into the hallway, Ben saw light under his mother’s door. At first
he hesitated. But when he heard his mother and Vinh talking, he walked
closer, trying to make out what they were saying. At the door, he squatted and
aligned his eye with the keyhole.
Nothing—he could see nothing.
“Vinh,” he heard his mother say. They both laughed. His mother was
happy. As far as he knew, she was never happy. She went to work and came
home and cooked dinner and went to her room, where she sometimes
watched Paris by Night and listened to Vietnamese folk music on cassette
tapes. Unlike other parents, even Addy’s dad, she didn’t go to PTA meetings
or parent-teacher conferences, at least not any longer. And you could forget
about parties like Versailles Day or Mardi Gras. She didn’t even buy king
cakes anymore. (Too expensive, she would say when he asked.)
Her present happiness made the air feel electric, made it hum and vibrate.
It made him realize that perhaps she was lonely all this time. She needed a
friend. He almost smiled, but when the sound of bare feet hit the floor, he
made to run back to the room. The door opened and Vinh came out. Hoping
he wasn’t found, Ben detoured into the bathroom and slammed the door. He
let the water run for a good minute before coming back out.
—
At school, Ben talked to Addy about Vinh. He told her about the tattoos,
about Alaska, about the whispering in the middle of the night.
“He sounds interesting,” Addy said.
It was after school and they were waiting for Thảo, Tuấn’s girlfriend. Thảo
was a year older than Tuấn and gave Tuấn rides because he didn’t have a car.
Since Ben’s school was on the way home, they picked him up, too.
“Is he good or is he bad?” Addy asked.
“I don’t know,” Ben said. “He’s supposed to be gone by the end of the
week.”
“Then what?”
A white van pulled in to the parking lot.
“He’s on his own. He’s new to New Orleans, he said. He hasn’t got a tattoo
from here yet.”
“Is he staying?” Addy asked. “I mean, is he staying in the city?”
“Don’t know.”
“Maybe,” Addy began, “he might be your new dad?”
“Gross! Don’t say that, Addy!” Ben stuck out his tongue. He couldn’t
imagine his mother falling in love. She was not the type to believe in love.
Love didn’t pay the bills. It didn’t cook dinner. It didn’t provide for a family.
For all intents and purposes, love was too impractical.
The van pulled up and its front passenger window rolled down.
“In,” Thảo said. She played with the rearview mirror and readjusted her
bandanna around her hair. The speakers blasted a song with flamenco guitars
and heavy maracas and bongos. The lyrics were in Chinese. “ ‘In,’ I said,”
Thảo said, this time in Vietnamese.
“What happened to your other car?” Ben asked.
“Fire.”
“Fire?” Since he’d met her, Ben had the feeling Thảo was a liar. She was
quick and invariably had an explanation for everything. They always sounded
unlikely. “What kind of fire?” Ben asked.
Thảo rolled her eyes. “A big fire,” she said. “Now, the both of you, get in.”
Ben opened the side door and found Tuấn sprawled across the middle row.
“Move over,” he said.
“Sit in the back,” said Tuấn. He lifted his head, then dropped it back. He
laid a Saints cap, which he got last Mardi Gras, on top of his face. As Tuấn
had been walking in the Quarter, it fell off a balcony and landed right on his
head, at least according to Thảo.
“How’s your father, Adelaide?” Tuấn asked, his voice muffled.
“Fine, Tuấn.”
“How’s his painting business coming along?”
“He’s fine, just fine.”
“What’s with the attitude? Can’t a brother ask? All I’m saying is that I
haven’t seen him in a while. That’s all I’m saying.”
“He’s fine,” she repeated.
“Walgreens run!” Thảo said, making a sharp left turn. A car honked its
horn and Thảo cussed at it in Vietnamese. She parked the car in a handicap
spot and unlocked the door. “Bình,” Thảo said (she called Ben only by his
Vietnamese name), “why don’t you get whatever you want? I’ll pay for both
you and Addy.”
“Why don’t you two go in, too?” Ben asked.
Thảo reached into her purse and pulled out a crumpled ten. “You can keep
the change,” she said. “Get a Coke for me,” Thảo added. “Tuấn, what do you
want?” She slapped his knee. “Get him nothing.”
Inside, a white man stood by the cash register reading a magazine. When
he saw them come in, he laid it down.
“We’re not no hangout for kids, you know,” the man said.
“We’re just getting sodas,” Ben said, projecting his voice. “Just keep
walking,” he whispered to Addy.
The man raised his voice. “We’re not no hangout. If you come in here, you
have to buy something. Are you buying something?”
“Yes, sir. We’re buying, sir.” Ben shook his head.
Someone else came in. The man went back to his magazine.
Through the glass door, Ben couldn’t see Thảo’s van anymore. He didn’t
like Thảo. He’d first met her when she came over to Versailles to pick up
Tuấn. Their mother wasn’t home and Tuấn invited her in for Café Du Monde
coffee. As they let it brew, Thảo said chicory coffee was good for hangovers.
They talked about the party they both went to the night before and how late
she had stayed and how much Tuấn missed out for not staying. Ben was
struck by her beauty—her highlighted hair, her pink fingernails, and her sense
of fashion: she wore a plaid skirt and white blouse and leather cowboy boots
that went up to her knees. Despite this, there was an unexpected roughness
about her. She was loud and wore a suspicious smirk. Worst of all, she made
Tuấn act weird. He became meaner to everyone when she was around, as if
he was competing with her. Their mom didn’t like Thảo, either. “If you ever
bring home a girl like that,” she would say, “I’ll chop off your hands,” though
Ben didn’t know what hands had to do with anything.
After Ben paid for their sodas, they walked outside but couldn’t find the
van.
“They could’ve parked somewhere else,” Addy reassured him.
There were two sedans, a blue private-school bus, a bike tied to a
lamppost, but no van. They walked behind the store, where the dumpster sat, and there they
found the van alongside a yellow sports car. Tuấn and Thảo were standing and
talking to a group of older Asian boys. When they saw Ben and Addy, they
hushed and looked at Tuấn.
One of them said something in Vietnamese and slapped Tuấn on the chest.
“Em bé mày”—your baby brother—was the only thing Ben could understand.
The older boys cackled. All of them wore matching black tank tops. Most of
them had tattoos on their arms. When he took another step, Ben noticed one
of them had a gun strapped to his belt. Another had a gun hanging out of his
back pocket. Another held one by his side. All of them had guns except Tuấn
and Thảo.
“Tuấn, watch out!” Ben began, but his brother stampeded over and
grabbed him by the arm.
“What’s wrong?” Ben asked. “Who are those boys?”
Tuấn pulled Ben and squeezed his arm tighter. When they were out of
sight of the boys, Tuấn released his grip.
“Don’t you ever do that again!” Tuấn said.
“Do what? What do you mean? What did I do?” Ben dropped the bag and
the soda bottles began rolling. He started to go after them, but Tuấn pushed
him down.
“Don’t you ever do that again,” he said, yelling so loud this time his spit
sprayed the air.
—
Vinh stayed with them past the end of the first week. He stayed another week.
Then another.
He was always there when they got home; they’d find him sitting in their
kitchen and drinking coffee, Vietnamese style, or he’d be sleeping in their
room. When Vinh came to, he would look startled, then a smile would grow
across his face and he’d ask them if they were hungry or if they wanted
anything to drink. He played host in their own house.
He’d fix them something—noodles or rice, chrysanthemum tea or Tang—
make small talk, and then return to sleep shirtless as his chest inflated and
deflated and the bear tattoo grew and shrank.
Ben was fascinated. He learned Vinh used to be a fisherman, a farmhand,
and a used-car salesman. He was fired from all of them, he said. Vinh liked to
watch boxing on TV and didn’t like spicy food. That he was Catholic
surprised Ben the most. His mother did not seem to like Catholics as a whole,
though she made exceptions for those she liked. She tolerated his praying
voice each night before bed, a singsong voice that was melodic and sad. Vinh
went to church on Sundays, too, walking to Our Lady of Saigon late in the
morning instead of borrowing Ben’s mother’s car or taking the bus because,
Vinh said, walking gave him fresh air and time for reflection.
Ben wrote a story for school about a man who went from town to town,
marrying widows and stealing their most precious items—a metal urn of a
husband’s ashes, a wedding band that was no longer worn but still cherished, a
wedding day photo with a bride and groom smiling. In the story, Ben made a
twist: the man was misunderstood. He stole these pieces of personal history
because he had lost his own; he had amnesia and wanted to make a new life.
As Vinh slept one afternoon, Ben went through his suitcase. The only
thing of interest was his wallet. Vinh still had an Alaska driver’s license.
There was also a credit card, a stick of cinnamon gum, ten dollars in ones,
and a card with what Ben concluded was the Virgin Mary on one side and a
prayer in Vietnamese on the other. Disappointed, Ben put the wallet back
where he’d found it.
How could a man, unbound by life and responsibilities, be so boring? If
Ben were to leave, he would collect everything he could find, keepsakes of a
life lived and lived well. It dawned on him that Vinh was a silly old man. He
would never be like him, didn’t want anything to do with him. It made him
sad for his mother.
Was his own father anything like Vinh? Did she go out of her way to get
his favorite beer? Did she make his favorite desserts on her days off? Did he
make her smile the same way? And did they take long walks in the evening,
strolling into the sunset, two figures hand in hand? He would never know.
For a brief time he thought Vinh might be his actual father—not dead
after all these years but miraculously alive—and his mom was just waiting for
the right moment to reveal the truth: she was wrong and he hadn’t been killed.
They had the same skin color, after all. A part of him waited for the
revelation. He imagined himself acting surprised, then blushing bashfully
because he’d confess he knew all along. Smart boy, they’d call him, and
afterward they would all go to Gambino’s to celebrate.
But everything was wrong—the nose was fat, not thin and long; he didn’t
wear glasses; his hands were big, but where was that hard callus from writing
on the left? The theory would not hold up. He threw it away.
—
The next afternoon, Tuấn and Thảo were late. The buses came and left. Soon
the parking lot was empty, too. Mrs. Easton, the music teacher, asked if they
needed a ride home. Addy said yes, but Ben said they were waiting for his
mother to pick them up. Mrs. Easton said, “Great,” and left.
Thảo always came on time. She was punctual if nothing else. When the
sun was setting and the shadows of birds flew into the distance, Ben became
anxious. Addy made him more anxious.
“What if there was a car crash? What if your brother did something
wrong? What if she did something wrong?”
“Like what?” Ben asked.
“I don’t know,” Addy said. “Rob a bank? She’s the type who would rob a
bank.”
“Yes,” Ben agreed. “Yes, she is.” He smirked, imagining Thảo and his
brother robbing a bank, Thảo with her southern twang and Tuấn with his
mangled accent like their mother’s. “Maybe there’s an accident and they’re
stuck in traffic,” he said.
“That girl is an accident,” Addy said. Ben laughed and they high-fived each
other.
As it got later, Ben imagined Tuấn dumping Thảo—that was why he was
late. He didn’t have a ride but he was walking. Hours later, into the night,
even, his brother would arrive at the school.
“Let’s walk home,” he’d say. And they’d walk and talk. They hadn’t talked
in a long time. It was like he didn’t know who his brother was anymore. God,
he thought, Thảo is terrible; girls are terrible!
An hour later, Thảo’s van pulled up. She unlocked the door and waited for
Ben and Addy to hop in. Inside, Tuấn was lying in his seat, a T-shirt covering
his face. He didn’t say anything. Ben closed the door.
“How you feeling?” Thảo asked Tuấn when they got back on the road. He
let out a groan and Thảo snickered. She turned up the music and made a
right-hand turn.
—
After Thảo dropped them off, Ben saw the bruised eye, the right one circled
in purple and black.
Ben gasped. “What happened?”
“Shut up, will you?”
“Was it a fight or something?”
“Open the door,” his brother said.
“Was it Thảo? Did Thảo do this?” After Ben said it, he realized how
stupid it sounded, a girl beating up a boy. “Thảo did something,” he said after
a pause. “Thảo’s fault. It’s all Thảo’s fault, isn’t—”
“Open the door, will you? Stop being gay already!”
Ben unlocked the door. Vinh was doing push-ups in the living room when
they walked in. He looked up, stopped his routine, and walked over. When he
got to them, he placed his hand on Tuấn’s face.
“Trời ổi. Your mother won’t be pleased.” He touched the bruise, and Tuấn
turned his head away.
“It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t,” Tuấn said.
“You shouldn’t be fighting. Especially if you can’t.”
“Shut up,” Tuấn said. “You’re not my father!”
Not my father, Ben repeated in his head. Not my father, as if it was a
useful phrase. Vinh ruminated over the words, and, amused, he went to the freezer and
filled a plastic grocery bag with ice. When he came back, he guided Tuấn to
the couch and eased the cold bag over the eye.
“Rest,” Vinh said, “but don’t let this happen again.”
After several minutes, Tuấn left for his room and Vinh followed after. The
last thing Ben heard was Vinh telling Tuấn, “Let me tell you something, son,”
before they both disappeared into the bedroom.
Later his mom told Vinh Tuấn should’ve known better than getting into a
fight. She had told him before—don’t engage, look the other way, move on.
“I try so hard,” his mother said, “to raise them right. You’ve no idea. If
something were to ever happen…I don’t know. It’s my job to keep them out
of trouble, to make sure they become good people.” She paused. “Their
father…” she said, and trailed off. She stood up and her voice became
muffled as she walked across the room. “These letters…They would be
devastated if they knew. That’s why…”
Ben strained to hear more and waited a few more seconds before giving up
and walking back to his room. He climbed in beside Tuấn, who lay belly-up
with a cool, wet paper towel on his bruised eye. Ben couldn’t sleep that night,
and Vinh didn’t come back to his bed.

Tuấn    1991

The Southern Boyz said Tuấn was a good recruit. He did what he was told.He knew where to be and when. Tuấn was a good man, and they trustedhim. And Quang, smoking a cigarette, said his new nickname should be“Handy” because he was useful.“Hey, Handy!” said Sáng, testing out the name in his thick accent, whichmade it sound like “Hon-dee.” He twirled his Heineken bottle to see howmuch beer he had left. “Hon-dee, come over here. Hon-dee, go run this overto Quang.” Everybody giggled.Tuấn lifted his bottle to his lips. Already, he could feel his cheeks heat upand redden. He rubbed at the scruff on his face—an attempt to look older—to hide his blushing, though he was sure the beer made him glow.They were in Quang’s laundry shed behind his house. The three of themgathered around a roughed-up coffee table with ring marks from sweatybottles and cans and cups while Thảo was out getting more beers. They wereall under twenty-one, but Thảo could sweet-talk the toughest of them; Thảoalways got what she wanted. The washing machine was going, banging itselfagainst the concrete floor, so Tuấn got up and kicked it a couple of times,which did the trick.When he sat back down, Quang, the King of the Southern Boyz, placedhis empty bottle on the table and leaned back into his chair.“But, Tuấn,” he said, his voice becoming serious, “you still have to proveyourself. Do something for the team.” The way he said “something” made theword sound heavy and foreign. Quang took a drag of his cigarette. He held itlike a Vietnamese man, or so he claimed, with three fingers instead of two the way they did back in the Motherland, though none of them had seen Vietnamin a very long time. “Then,” he went on, “you can be part of the gia đình.”That word. Tuấn noticed it every time. Quang never called them a gang,though they were that and a notorious one, too. (They even made it to thefront page of the Times-Picayune—twice. Once for arson and another for ahome robbery down in Uptown, both before Tuấn’s time with them.) Quangnever called them a gang; it was always family. And soon, Tuấn saw it wastrue. They took care of one another. They were there for one another. Ifsomeone messed with you, you just tell the Boyz and they’d nod and they’dgrin and you know you could consider it taken care of. Sure, they fought andargued sometimes, but what family didn’t? He felt at home in Quang’slaundry shed more than in his own apartment, where his mother was alwaystired, annoyed, or dissatisfied (something was always wrong: his behavior; theobnoxious tourists in the Quarter, who she felt invaded an otherwise decentcity; the other people who lived in Versailles—including those who movedaway, abandoning their apartments and letting vines grow on the walls andbricks turn green, making a place where hooligans from all of New OrleansEast trespassed to get high), and his brother lazed around, reading bookswhile sprawled out on the bed with a blank, bored look on his face—a type ofdissatisfaction of life in itself. And then there was Vinh, his mom’s boyfriend.Tuấn didn’t know what to do with Vinh. He was supposed to stay with themfor a week but then ended up just staying. He felt like an extra organ on abody, like a third arm or an additional leg. The man—his habits, his ideas, hisbeing—didn’t mesh with the rest of their family. To add to that, Vinh stayedhome day and night, becoming a persistent presence that made home feel lesslike home.Tuấn was through with all of that. The Southern Boyz offered the oppositeof that—meaning camaraderie, family.“Do something,” Quang repeated and picked up a bottle cap from thetable. He began flipping it in the air. Three throws and he let it fall to thefloor, where it bounced off the concrete and went rolling in a circle beforesettling.“What?” Tuấn sat up in his chair. His pulse raced. To be part of thisfamily, to get that tattoo—the crescent moon–shaped outline of Vietnam with—†ž written vertically—Tuấn knew he would do anything. “Anything. Nói đi,”he said.“Wei Huang Market,” said Quang, “on Bourbon.” Just then the dooropened.“Trời ổi,” said Thảo. “Hôi quá. Smoke outside, y’all. How many timeshave I told you?”“It’s my place,” Quang said. “I do what I want.”Thảo coughed. With a case of Heineken in her arms, she walked over toQuang and grabbed his cigarette. She took a quick drag before throwing it onthe floor and crushing it beneath her cowboy boots. The leather was as thickas Tuấn imagined it would have been if it was freshly cut from a cow; its deepbrown color reminded him of dry blood. “Help me with this, will you?” shesaid, tapping the box with her fingers.“Good haul,” said Sáng, reaching for the case.“I got a discount,” she replied.—The story from Quang is, the Southern Boyz, as it is now, started in 1975,when the first Vietnamese refugees were just settling in the States, to protectthem from being taken advantage of in their new home. But if you wanted toreally understand the Southern Boyz, Quang said, you had to know its fullstory, and it starts during the American War. “Which is what we call the warover there,” said Quang, who liked to tell this story around a bonfire when thewhole family was over on summer nights.“The Americans were leaving our Motherland behind. And theCommunists, they were coming, you see? So these men, they set up a militiaof their own to protect the women and the children, because it is always thewomen and the children. These men, they called themselves Lực Lượng MiểnNam. The Southern Force. They watched over Saigon and all the otherSouthern towns. But the thing was, they pretended they were like otherpeople. No special uniforms or anything. That way, the Communists didn’tknow who they were, and when they least expected it, they attacked.“But, of course, they had to leave like the rest of us. Still, they promisedno one would ever hurt their people again. This I heard from a man on theboat, Chú Long. He came to New Orleans with us, too, where he continuedthe Southern Force, but with a new name.“Remember a couple of years ago,” Quang continued, “when Ông Nguyễnthe fisherman and his men were vandalized: ‡Œ’‹ ‡Œ“’‹ ‹“ Œ“‘‰?Remember what happened to those three white fishermen?”Everyone nodded. Everyone knew. One night, after a successful haul fromthe Gulf, the fishermen went to a bar in Bayou St. John. They were so drunkby the time two o’clock in the morning came, they were stumbling out ontoSt. Philip Street. It was when they turned the corner, down a street withoutlight, that they were attacked. The fishermen were found lying out on NorthLopez Street the next morning, bruised and bloodied; one was missing a fronttooth.“It was a sign to these men,” said Quang. “Don’t fuck with us!” Here, youcan imagine Quang squeezing the rest of the lighter fluid into the fire and theflames jumping wildly and the bottle itself dropping into the heat, where thewhite plastic melted. He lit up a cigarette. “Can you imagine how life wouldbe if we weren’t here? If men like Chú Long never came to New Orleans withus? What kind of world would this be? That kind of world is the kind ofworld I don’t want to live in.”Tuấn nodded. Yes, it was something to believe in. Yes.When Vinh told him the Southern Boyz were bad news, Tuấn told himthis history with pride as if it were his own. Vinh laughed in his face andcalled him gullible. “Those boys don’t know anything,” Vinh said. “Just abunch of kids playing. You want to know the real story about Vietnam.”“I know the story,” Tuấn said.“But you don’t,” Vinh said.—Wei Huang Market was one of the last Asian grocery stores left on the 500-block of Bourbon Street. It was where Tuấn’s mother went because it carriedthe rare Asian foods she couldn’t find anywhere else: fish sauce, lemongrass,sticky rice. In its small space, it seemed to have everything.Madame Wei, a seventy-something-year-old woman who wore her grayhair in a bun, ran Wei Huang by herself even after all the Chinese shops onBourbon Street left. The business was her father’s. Her brother had inheritedit, but he left. So did everyone else. Everyone except Madame Wei. If it hadnot been for the Vietnamese coming, Tuấn had heard her say, years ago whenthey started shopping there, Wei Huang would be out of business.But Wei Huang was bad for the Vietnamese of New Orleans, said Quang.Though it was in the Quarter and they were out east, people are creatures ofhabit and would continue to buy from her despite the Vietnamese-rungroceries right in their backyard. This was why Tuấn was sent. To give her amessage so violent that she would pack up and go away. Sayonara, ChinaLady—or whatever it was they said.“Người Trung Quốc don’t like us anyway,” Quang added. “Know ourhistory,” he said. “Know your history.” The Chinese, Tuấn learned, occupiedVietnam for a thousand years. Then came the French.The next week, in the afternoon, Tuấn walked down Bourbon. Wei Huangsat between a liquor store and a shop selling souvenirs. As he came up on it,Tuấn slowed his pace. With his head down, he moved his eyes toward thewindow. The shop was empty, except for Madame Wei, who stood readingbehind the counter at the front. The loud teenagers in the souvenir store nextdoor made Wei Huang look and feel emptier. He walked into the souvenirstore—the Fleur de Lis Gift Shoppe, one of maybe four in the Quarter—andpretended he was interested in the spinning rack of bike license plates. All ofthem had names not like his: Ted, Tom, Tommy, Tony. The teenagers giggledsome more.Quang told him to first scan out the place during the daytime. Then, later,at night, when she was about to close, come in with a weapon. Threaten theold hag. Knock stuff to the ground. Smash her window. Tell her to give youmoney. And when you’re done, tell her who you are and where you’re fromand what you’re about. Tell her all of this so she knows, that old woman, thatthis isn’t her territory. Not any longer. Tuấn pictured himself yelling atMadame Wei, who was shorter than he was and who wore wire-frameglasses.“Not anymore,” he would say. “This is not your place anymore. Out!” he’dscreech. “Out!”It would be easy, wouldn’t it? He’d fought younger, stronger guys before.Big Black boys with bulging muscles. Sweaty Mexicans who thought theywere big shots and sprayed over the SBZ signs across town. An old lady? Hewould only have to scream and she’d run.A white man with a neat haircut came up to him then.“Having trouble finding your name?” he asked. The man wore a name tag.Tuấn didn’t see his name, but he saw ‡“-‘…’…‹‰–. “What’s the name?” theman said. “We can see if we have it.” The man bent over to inspect thelicense plates. “Is it Tommy? You might be a Tommy. You know, we haveother names in the back, too. I can check. You can’t leave New Orleanswithout a souvenir!” The man smiled.“No,” Tuấn said. He shook his head. “Never mind.”He walked out of the store and past Wei Huang again. The neon sign onher window didn’t light up anymore and there were oily handprints on theglass. Inside, Madame Wei was now eating lunch next to the cash register.Then, out of the corner, a familiar figure came toward the counter with a twoliter bottle of Coco Rico soda, the kind his mother used for cooking. Vinh.He stopped at a case and grabbed a bag of bean sprouts. He said somethingand Madame Wei laughed. As she began ringing him up, Vinh took out a penand a small pad and wrote something down or crossed something out. Hiseyes scanned the store and stopped at the window.Tuấn began running as Vinh came to the door.“Tuấn,” Vinh called.Tuấn looked back and saw Vinh standing on the sidewalk. When he turnedback straight ahead, he bumped into a tourist and they both fell.“Sorry,” Tuấn said. “Sorry, sorry.” He helped the woman up. He wasabout to start running again, but a hand gripped his shoulder. He tried toshake it off, but it was too strong.“Tuấn,” Vinh said. “What you doing here? Don’t you have school?”“Let go!” He tried to pull away.“What you doing here?” Vinh repeated.“I could ask you the same. What you doing here?”“I’m a free man,” Vinh said, and laughed.“I’m eighteen. That makes me an adult. Let go!” It made him feel like achild again, begging to be let go. He pulled harder. Vinh tightened his grip.“Let go. I’m an adult! You can’t do this to me.”“Eighteen, but you’re still a boy. Still a kid.”“You can’t tell me what to do. You’re not my father!” Tuấn said. Did hescream it? Was everyone looking now? Where was the tourist he ran into? Asense of embarrassment came over him. His face was red, he knew. Heclosed his eyes. “You’re no one, Vinh. God, you’re nothing.”Vinh let go, and, suddenly released, Tuấn fell down heavily.“Kid” was all Vinh said in a shaky voice, as if a nerve had been hit, and walked away.Two nights later, everything was planned.Quang gave Tuấn a steel bat. Wei Huang closed at ten. At 9:55, Tuấnwould arrive at the store. Madame Wei would be standing behind her counter.She might be reading her book or she might be closing up, counting hermoney. Tuấn would push the door, and as it opened there would be the soundof the bell tied to the door. Ting-ding! Madame would look up from whatevershe was doing. “Oh, allo!” she would say. “We about to close. Can I help?”And Tuấn would say, “No. I’m just getting back from baseball practice andwas hungry. Can I look around?” To this, Madame would answer, “Yes,”because she never says no and she is not one to be rude. And anyway, extramoney—like a dollar for a snack—is a dollar she wouldn’t otherwise have,and because the Chinese are greedy, greedy people, she would wait. If shewas counting money, maybe she tries to hide it. Meanwhile, Tuấn would walkaround. It is a small shop. Just four walls and a long shelf in the middle. Afterone loop around, he would come back to the counter, empty-handed exceptthe bat, which by now he is swinging threateningly. “Are you looking forsomething?” she would ask, pushing up her glasses, which would be greasy,too, because the Chinese are not a clean people. “Oh, me?” Tuấn would say.Then he would raise the bat and bring it down on the glass counter. Crash!Next, he would bring it down on her display case, shattering the glass in oneswift movement. Slam! Finally, he would smash down that annoying wavingcat on the counter. She would be screaming now and asking you what is it youwant. Is it money? And it is now that you explain. You explain everything toher: you tell her who you are and where you’re from and what you’re about.And she would understand. She would run out of the store, arms waving inthe air. Wei Huang would be closed the next day. It would disappear in thenext week. It would be replaced by another souvenir shop with tacky trinketsin a month. Tuấn would be part of this strange, violent family with a strange,violent history. He would create a new New Orleans.—When Tuấn came home, his mother, brother, and Vinh were already there.She walked between the stove and the kitchen table. In recent months, she’dtaken on bookkeeping for the nail salon. She’d look at the numbers in theledger open on the table and return to the frying pan on the stove.Tuấn headed for his room but stopped when his mother called him.“Are you staying for dinner?” she asked him.“I’m not grounded.” He looked over at his brother, who was reading aweathered paperback book.“That wasn’t the question,” she said. “Are you staying for dinner? Youshould stay for dinner. I work all day so you have food on the table. And youdon’t even eat at home most days.”“I’m busy, mẹ.”“Are you still hanging with that girl, Thảo?”“He is,” Bình chimed in.“No one asked you, retard.”“No need for name calling,” said Vinh. “In this house, we respect oneanother.”Bình rolled his eyes.“No, mẹ,” Tuấn told his mother.“Don’t nói láo.”“I’m not lying, mẹ.”“That girl bad trouble,” she said in English. 

“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.

Ben    1992

That summer, Addy wanted to join the swim team. In her front yard, she’dstretched like a swimmer, straightening her legs and touching her toesbefore racing across the grass as Ben watched from the porch.“Imagine that’s me in the water,” she would tell him.By July, she was ready for the pool, all the way out in Gentilly, and Benfollowed along despite not knowing how to swim.He sat on a vinyl lounge chair off to the side with a book and watchedboys jump off the diving board, each yelling playfully before hitting thewater.“I get seasick just looking at it,” he told Addy.“Don’t, then,” she said.“I can’t help it.”Another boy hit the water and Ben imagined himself doing the same, butinstead of popping up on the other side, he’d drown and die. He shook hishead and returned to his book. There was summer reading to do, and he wasalready ahead, with two of the three books done. He read a chapter beforedeciding it was a good time to stop. He let the book lie open facedown on thechair and left for the concessions stand.By the time he got back, a skinny, older white boy and what must havebeen his father sat in their chairs. The father had a bad, uneven tan that madehim look like he was wearing a pale shirt. The boy was just pale all over.Ben’s book sat on the concrete, closed.He ran over. “Hey, hey, hey!” he yelled. He waved his arms in the air toget their attention. “Don’t you see our stuff?”“What stuff?” said the boy. His voice was sharp and it sounded like he waschewing gum or had something in his mouth.“Our stuff,” Ben said, then to clarify, “our bags, our towels, my book!”“Where?” The boy held his arms in the air and shrugged his shoulders,cool—Ben would remember later—as a glass of lemonade. “Where? Where?Where?” The boy was mocking him now. And his father, having set down hisglasses, walked away.“There,” Ben said.The boy looked under the chair and picked up the book. Water hadsplashed on the cover; a dark patch stained the front. “Oh,” he said. “These?”“Duh, those!” Ben reached over and grabbed his stuff with such force thateverything fell out of his hands and scattered on the ground. He picked it allup and began to leave.“Hey, you! Hey, kid!” the boy called after. His voice was loud, tightlycoiled, controlled. “You forgot something.”Ben looked around and saw the boy waving Addy’s shirt and shorts, bothhot pink. He turned his head toward the pool. Addy was still doing laps,oblivious to what was happening. He imagined what he’d tell her. “This whiteboy…” he would begin with a smack of his lips, the way they always beganwhen they told stories about the crazy white people they met—This whiteman thought I stole something from his store; this white lady thought I wassomeone else because apparently all of our kind look the same….Ben walked back and grabbed them. “My friend’s,” he huffed.“This white boy…” he said to himself. Addy would enjoy his story.—Addy came up and, without drying, took a seat next to Ben. Her bodysqueaked against the vinyl.“What happened?” she asked. “Why you change seats? Took me a goodminute to find you.”“So this white boy took them,” Ben started, putting his book down, “whenI was getting snacks.”“You shouldn’t leave our stuff alone, Ben,” she interrupted. “You knowhow folks around here are.”“But our stuff was there.”“But nothing. You know how people are.”Addy was raising her voice; he was raising his. He imagined peoplelooking at them, assuming they were a couple. He felt embarrassed andlooked down at his hands.Addy smacked her lips. “Just be careful. That’s all I’m telling you. That’sall I’m saying.”She dried herself and he returned to his book, though he couldn’tconcentrate. He read and reread the same sentence over and over a dozentimes before Addy started talking again.“Can you help me with this?” she asked. He looked over and Addy heldout a bottle of waterproof Hawaiian Tropic. “I’m supposed to reapply everyhour. It says right here on the bottle.”He grabbed it and Addy turned away. He squeezed the lotion onto hishands and spread it across Addy’s back, first with only a finger, then,hesitantly, he used both hands until her entire back was all white and pasty.Under the sun, the chemical scent of the Hawaiian Tropic intensified. Itreminded him of cleaning supplies and made him gag. He tried to think ofsomething else, anything but Addy’s skin and the smell and texture of thelotion until he spotted the boy sitting where they’d sat. Shirtless, the boystretched out on his chair, faceup, his sunglasses reflecting the sun. Even fromthis distance, Ben saw his breathing.“Make sure you don’t miss a spot,” Addy interrupted. “I don’t wanna getcancer.”“You’re not going to get cancer. Who gets cancer?” he said. “Done. I’mgonna wash my hands in the bathroom.”“Just use the pool,” Addy said.He looked at the water, then back at Addy, and nodded and walked to theedge of the water, where he bent his knees into a squat. As his hand broke thecool surface, Addy dove in. The drops of the splash scattered in the air, andfor a second Ben saw a rainbow. He let his hand sit as she became smallerand smaller the farther away she swam. Soon the pink cap was out of sight.His eyes wandered back to the boy, but his seat was empty. He let out a quietsigh—of relief or disappointment, he wasn’t sure—and, when the lotion wasgone, headed back to the chairs. To his surprise, the boy was there.Ben couldn’t help but smirk as he ran. “You again,” he called out, trying tosound serious and angry, but all he wanted to do was giggle. “Do you takeeveryone’s seat? Is that your thing? Is that what you always do?”“Are you new here?” the boy asked.“What?”“I’m here every summer,” the boy continued. “Been coming here everysummer, and it’s just—I’ve never seen you before.” He took off his sunglassesto reveal serious blue eyes.“It’s ’cause I live in New Orleans East,” Ben said. He felt himself blushing.“Don’t you have your own pools there?”Hearing that, Ben felt offended. He looked around. He and Addy were theonly nonwhites here. He straightened his posture. His chest tightened and thehair on his skin stood up.“It’s a free country, you know. Anyone can go anywhere if they want to.It’s written in the Constitution. It’s, it’s…”“Relax,” said the boy. “Relax. I’m from Metairie. There’s no pool there,either. No good-quality pools anyway. There’s no pools in New Orleans East,either?” The boy barely moved his lips when he talked. It must be the reasonfor his accent—part mutter, part muddled melody.“Yeah,” Ben said, calming down. “There’s nothing in New Orleans East.There’s one stretch of highway, strip malls, then there’s the apartments andhomes. Not the most fun place.”“Metairie isn’t, either.”They agreed that neither New Orleans East nor Metairie had much goingfor it. The boy stretched out on Addy’s chair and Ben found himself watchingthe boy, examining him. Ben took a seat himself, and his muscles relaxed.“Name’s Howie,” the boy said.“Ben.” He looked out into the water, trying to find the pink cap.“What brings you here?” Howie asked.“Here?”“This summer, I mean. Today. Right now.”“Oh,” Ben said. “My friend’s out there. The pink cap? She’s trying out forthe swim team. Wesley High has a swim team.”“You go to Wesley?” Howie asked.“We’re both going to Wesley,” Ben said. “Freshmen.”“It means we’re supposed to hate each other.”“What do you mean?”“I graduated from Caddo last month,” Howie said with a wry smile.Dimples appeared on edges of his lips. The lips themselves were full and red,swollen in the prettiest of ways. Ben stopped himself from staring. “We’rerivals,” Howie continued. “That’s what you should know. Cowboys andWarriors? They don’t get along. Never have and they never will.”“What?”“Wesley, your mascot’s a cowboy. Caddo, we have Chief Red Corn. Youdidn’t know that?”“I don’t go there yet,” Ben said. “We haven’t even had orientation.”“Well, cowboys and Indians don’t get along.”“Of course they don’t. The cowboys stole land from the Indians. I read thatin a book somewhere.”“Well, you’re a cowboy now.”“What?”“You’re a cowboy, now, white man.” Howie put on a thick, ridiculouscountry accent. “You gotta get over that.”“Hey!” Ben reached over for a friendly shove, but his body began to fall.Howie miraculously caught him. How strong he was, how his muscles bulged,and how they didn’t even shake holding him up.“Whoa there, cowboy,” Howie said. “Be careful, now, you.”—Because of Addy, they went to the pool every day. And every day, to Ben’ssurprise, Howie was there, too. Ben and Howie sat by the pool and talked asAddy practiced her breaststroke and butterfly, her backstroke and freestyle.Ben told Howie about his love for books and writing. His favorite writerswere Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, and that guy who wrote Lord of theFlies. He felt he was smart for saying all this and wondered if Howie wasimpressed. Howie told Ben he never got into reading. When asked what heliked to do, he said he played sports. Junior varsity football freshman year,varsity baseball sophomore through senior, wrestling during junior.Ben said he couldn’t imagine being finished with school and that Howiewas lucky, at least for being done with high school. It wasn’t that he didn’tlike learning. He liked books and the feeling of knowing more about theworld around him. He went to the library every week and could finish aregular-sized novel in three or four days. All the same, his classes were slowand he became bored. Teachers mistook this for stupidity and laziness, andone summer, even, he’d had to retake seventh-grade math.It disappointed his mother. “The son of a teacher has to retake classes,”she said and shook her head.And the teacher, a short, elderly man who wore a cowboy hat and ahandlebar mustache, said if he was struggling with homework, “just ask yourpa for help. I bet he’s a smart man.” Ben didn’t correct him. “Orientals arevery good at the mathematics. Just ask him for help. No shame.” It wasn’tworth the effort, any of it.If it were up to him, he would skip the whole rigmarole and travel theworld and learn from that instead, maybe even write a book.“Like Jack Kerouac,” Howie said.“Like who?”“He’s a writer. Was a writer. Dead now.”“Never heard of him.” He took out his notebook and penciled in “JackCarrot.”“You’ll read him in tenth grade,” Howie said. “On the Road or Going onthe Road or In the Road or something like that. I don’t know. I’m not thatsmart, you see.” He laughed. “Anyway, he went everywhere and wrote aboutall the places that he went.”“Where did he go?”“I don’t know,” Howie said. “I never finished reading it.”“Oh,” Ben said. He closed his notebook, leaving the pencil in as abookmark.“He drove from Boston to California or something. But this was in thefifties, when cars weren’t that good, so it was a big deal, I guess,” Howie said.“My point is there’s a whole country out there.”“Tell me about it,” said Ben.“There’s an entire world.”“Yes, there is.”When Ben asked Howie what his plans were after summer, Howie toldhim he was going to Lake Charles for college. “Undeclared for now. Until Ifigure it all out.”“Will you ever figure it all out?”“Maybe.” Howie said it confidently and pulled down his sunglasses. Benreached for his, which he’d bought at a souvenir shop only after meetingHowie. They looked at each other conspiratorially.—When August began, Howie told Ben he wanted to teach him how to swim.“All this time here,” he said, “and you don’t even touch the water!”After Howie led Ben to the pool, he told him to lie down.“No,” Ben said. “Bodies don’t float. Unless they’re dead.”“Don’t be silly.” Howie held his wrist. “Relax. Relax.”“How can you be from New Orleans and not know how to swim?” Addyasked. Ben almost forgot she was there. She lay in the water to demonstrate.Howie did the same, and they both floated effortlessly, arms out, legs out. Benwondered if, from above, they looked like floating flowers. The two movedtheir arms, and slowly their two bodies started to move more purposefully.Ben looked one way and then the other. His eyes settled on Howie.Howie made him nervous. Numerous times he found himself shakingwhen he talked to him or was close to him. Yet it wasn’t an uncomfortablefeeling. He liked it. He wanted it to linger.Ben turned his head to where Addy was and she was gone. He lookedaround.“Addy?” he called out. “Addy?” Where was she?Suddenly, something latched on to his leg. By reflex, he let out a scream.What was happening? He shook his leg, but it moved laboriously, sluggishly.He couldn’t swim and he would die. He tripped and went under and in aninstant everything became blue and there was no air. He began moving hisarms, karate-chopping the water. But he wasn’t going anywhere.In the next second, he was above the water again. He breathed in all hecould. Addy held one arm, Howie the other. When he realized he was aliveand safe, he remembered what had happened.Addy had disappeared. Addy pulled me under.He stared at Addy, furious. “Addy! Why you do that for?”“I was just playing,” she said.“That wasn’t funny,” Ben said. “Why would you do that?”“I was just joking.” She let go and took a step back.“It wasn’t funny. It’s not funny, Adelaide Toussaint.” He took his arm fromHowie’s grasp and left the pool.—That night, Ben returned to the pool with Howie. He told his mom he wasgoing back to the pool and wouldn’t be home until late. When she asked himwho he was going with, he said a friend.He was going to learn how to swim. He felt determined. The reasons forknowing how to swim were numerous: Addy wouldn’t be able to make fun ofhim anymore; it was an important skill to have in case the city sank—becauseit was below sea level, he read somewhere, and the water could just pour inlike in a bathtub; he was Vietnamese, and Vietnamese people are supposed toknow how to swim. And Howie had offered to teach him.The pool glowed. At the entrance, Howie motioned his head to the fence.“Climb,” he said.“I can’t climb,” Ben replied.“You can try.”Anything for Howie. Anything.Ben held on to the metal and stretched an arm upward. Next, he took astep up. With another movement he slipped and gasped aloud, but, to hissurprise, Howie caught him and pushed him up. After some more struggle, hefound himself at the top and dropped down to the other side. He landed onhis feet. Howie followed after.Together they walked to the pool’s edge. At the shallow end, Ben removeda shoe and sock and touched the water. At the cold shock, he pulled back.Howie began stripping off his jeans and T-shirt.What surprised Ben was that, though he had seen Howie shirtless—nearlynaked—countless times, it always gave him a sense of—what word was therefor it? Awe? Excitement? Wonder? The sight of Howie’s skin made Ben’sheart stop for a second, then the next he would feel it beating too fast andcatching fire and burning him alive.It felt strange, but he didn’t want to feel any other way. Soon it began tomake sense: the way boys were supposed to want girls was the way Benwanted Howie. Wanting—what a strange feeling, what a queer idea to havetoward another person! You could want food, you could want rest, you couldwant safety, and—it dawned on him—you could want a person, too.He was terrified. What had he become? What would his mother think?(“The son of a teacher…” she would scoff with enough shame in her voice fortheir entire family, his dead father—the college professor! the hero! themartyr!—included.) Or his brother, the tough boy—no, a man now—whohung out with the Southern Boyz? The realization had scared him, and hecouldn’t look at himself in the mirror for the longest time until the day Addypulled him under and he nearly drowned. He’d left the pool in a huff andheaded for the locker room to change. There, he passed a mirror and hecouldn’t avoid it, that image of himself. He looked at his reflection and it waslike he saw himself—really saw himself—for the first time. There had to be aword for that, too.“Dunk yourself in first,” Howie said when they were hip-deep in the water.“Get a feel for it.” When Ben didn’t answer, didn’t move, he added, “It’s justwater. Good ol’ H-2-and-O. Remember that. It’s just water.”“It’s just water,” Ben repeated.“The whole world is covered in it.”“Yes,” Ben agreed.“I think we’re made of it, too.”“We are.”“On the count of three. Okay?” Howie said.“Okay.”“One. Two. Three.”Down.Ben had expected a trick, had anticipated the feeling of Howie’s hand onhis head, pushing him down, but he bent his knees and he opened his eyesand he was underwater and still alive. Everything was blue and bright, butnow it wasn’t scary. 

There was a strange serenity to it. A strange but peacefulsilence. He stood back up.“Good,” Howie said. “Very good.”They would try to float next. When Ben said he was unsure, Howie laid hisown body in the water and Ben watched as he floated.Howie had a beautiful body. Ben wanted to say it aloud. Beautiful. Hemouthed the words instead. Like a secret. Then he, too, lay down. He wasprepared to sink, but he didn’t. To his astonishment, he floated. More thanthat, there was a feeling of weightlessness, of floating in not water, but air.Looking at the sky, Ben saw himself reflected in space.And there it was: he was wrong. From above, they didn’t look like flowers.Not even close. They were both stars, the two of them. Together in the water.Floating. Free.—A kiss. A kiss getting out of the pool, walking toward the edge of the pool.Walking and still up to the waist in water. A kiss in the pool with water at thewaist. A kiss in the pool at night with water and hands at the waists, wethands on the waists, as they stand in the pool, standing to kiss, to try—because I have never done this before—but really it is nothing—but have youkissed a boy before—but I have kissed plenty of boys before—but plenty ofboys, plenty of boys in pools? plenty of boys in pools?—of course plenty ofboys, but never plenty of boys in pools—so I’m your first boy, your first boyin a pool—yes, you’re my first boy in the pool, ha-ha—okay—ha-ha, you’refunny—a kiss: a kiss in the pool. Two boys in the pool: two boys kissing in apool.—After the swimming lesson, Ben and Howie went out for ice cream in a placein the Quarter with a cow on its window and its doors propped open becausethe AC was always broken. Howie said it was the only place to get ice creamin New Orleans because they had more toppings than anywhere else and theirscoops were fist-sized huge.They took their bowls to a secluded booth in the back. A lightbulb with astained-glass cover hung above the table, making the shadows green. Afterthey ate a spoonful of their sundaes and tried each other’s, Ben asked Howiehow long he’d felt that way.Howie nodded. “Since I first saw you, honest,” he replied, and they bothblushed. When Ben asked Howie how long he’d felt anything, Howierecounted one winter when he was a junior at Caddo.The boy was named Anderson. Anderson was a senior. Anderson andHowie were both on the varsity wrestling team. One time after practice, thetwo of them stayed behind to work on a takedown. For it to work, Howie hadto take hold of Anderson behind the knees and push him up, then slam himdown. The problem, he said, was that Anderson was bigger; he’d hold hisground.“Anderson,” he said now, pushing his spoon down into his ice cream andpicking it up. He placed it gingerly into his mouth and swallowed beforecontinuing. Ben watched his Adam’s apple jump. “He was all big muscles.Pecs the size of grapefruits, I swear; calves bulging like baseballs. Sturdy,built guy. Beautiful.” Howie spoke nervously and his eyes twitched back andforth, watching and waiting for something. Then he set down his spoon whenone of the shop’s employees started to clean the next booth over. She took hertime wiping the table with a white rag in slow, large circles. Ben and Howiesat silent, moving spoons in their sundaes but not eating.When the worker left, Howie went on. “At Caddo, we had open showers, asquare room with showerheads lining the walls. Usually, only the real buffseniors like Anderson used it. I stayed away from that.” He fidgeted with hisspoon and Ben leaned in closer, feeling himself sliding off the vinyl seat.“Anyway,” Howie said, “when we were done that night, we hit the lockerroom. I was gonna change and drive on home, but Anderson started to teaseme. ‘You’re gonna stink up the highway….’ he says. ‘I swear that’s yousmelling up Route 10,’ he goes. ‘I always thought that was roadkill orsomething,’ laughing all the time. He grabs my shoulder and play-shoves itand goes off to the showers. I hear the water turning on, the sound of wet feeton tiles.“I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but even then I knew Anderson was…he made me feel a certain way, you know? So maybe it was that, or maybe Ireally did stink or whatever, but I go and strip off and walk to the showers.The whole time, I try to keep my eyes on the floor, you know, and go to myown showerhead, far, far away from him. And I’m soaping myself up when Istart feeling a hand massaging my neck.”Ben filled up his spoon with melted ice cream, lifted it a few inches, anddropped it back into the bowl. He didn’t know how to respond, anticipatingwhat happened next. He did it four or five times before Howie began talkingagain.“We did stuff in there, us. And we did it for the rest of the season. Andthe rest of the year, though we both played different sports. In my mind, wewent steady, but he was thinking something else. I don’t know. He moved offto college, went up north or something. He hasn’t kept in touch. We haven’tbeen talking.”“I’m sorry,” Ben said. He felt sorry and saw the hurt on Howie’s face evenif he was trying to hide it.“Nothing to be sorry about,” Howie said. “Nothing at all.” “Do your mom and dad know?” Ben asked.“No. Yours?”Once, his mother found his journal. In it, he had written his innermostfantasies: stories of boys holding hands under moss-cloaked oak trees; menkissing on camping trips in the woods; men touching each other out in asecluded bayou at night. She showed it to him and asked him what it was. Shehad an angry frown, and he had never seen her like that before. He told her itwas all fake, it was something for school, and that she’d misunderstoodeverything because she didn’t know English anyway. He threw away thejournal that same night.“My mom? No,” he told Howie.“What about your dad?”“Dad? My dad’s gone.” He didn’t want to say “dead” because it alwaysmade him look pitiful; he was tired of pity. It was the same reason he neversaid aloud that he would have wanted to know more about his father beyondthe vague descriptions his mother gave, to have just one glimpse—forcuriosity’s sake, of course. But people would pity him for that and he wouldbe embarrassed for their pity, would not know what to do with it. “But mymom’s boyfriend lives with us,” Ben added.“What would he think?”“I don’t know,” Ben said, trying to imagine what Vinh would say. “Whathe thinks doesn’t matter. He’s not my dad.”“My parents would rip me to shreds. My dad especially,” Howie said.“I’m sorry.”After ice cream, they walked around the Quarter, which was quieter thanBen expected. Howie pointed out a used bookstore (“Because you said youlike books”), a candy shop that specialized in pralines (“ ’Cause you sweet!”),and Club Paradise, a gay bar (“I’ve been there once or twice or maybe more,”he said and broke into a boyish laugh). As they approached Toulouse, Ben gotthem to turn around because he didn’t want to pass his mother’s work, thoughhe knew at this time of evening no one would be there. They ended the nightwatching ferry boats in the Mississippi, and Howie drove him back toVersailles.When he got home his mother was sitting in the kitchen in her pajamas,writing what looked like a letter. She stopped him on the way to his room to,as she said, check up on him. His brother wasn’t home much anymore, andshe was checking up on him now more than before. She asked him how thepool was. He said fine.“Are you trying out for the swim team,” she said, “now that you’relearning how to swim?”“Swim team?” Ben asked. He’d forgotten all about it. His mind wasfloating elsewhere. “Yes. Yes, I guess. Maybe. I don’t know.”“Your father,” she said, folding up the letter she was writing, “was a goodswimmer, too. Not when I met him, but eventually he learned. He learnedquick, your father. Like you.”He didn’t know why she kept bringing him up. He was tired of this fatherhe’d never met, though she talked about him as if she didn’t want him toforget. But he wasn’t there to remember anything in the first place; what, then,was there to forget? The man played no role in his life, and Ben resentedalways being compared to him. Perhaps if he had known him, had memory ofhim, it would be different. Perhaps then he would say to himself, “This is theman I want to be.” But that was never the case. To want anything more,anything else, seemed useless.He asked her what that had to do with anything. She said she didn’t know.He closed his room door harder than he’d meant to.—Ben wanted to call Addy to tell her everything, to confess it all.He was gay. Gay. He said the word over and over in his head. He was gay,he would tell her, but it was something he needed to say in person. It neededa human touch. After the light in his mother’s room turned off, he got hisbike.When he arrived, the lights were out except for the uncovered bulbattracting moths on the porch. Even from the sidewalk he could see them.Somewhere, an owl hooed.He stood in her front yard, thinking about other things. About what bookhe would read next after he finished his summer reading. About the fact thathe wasn’t afraid of the water anymore, at least not like before. About howHowie helped with that. He wanted to think about a million other things, buthe looked up and he was still on Addy’s front lawn. He rolled his bike acrossthe dry grass and opened the fence into the back. Mr. Toussaint must haveoiled the hinges, because it was not a week ago that they squeaked. Thesilhouette of the swing set looked ominous, and so did the back fence. In thedark, it felt like a different, unknown country.At Addy’s window, he threw a pebble to get her attention. Because therewas no answer, he did it again, creating a slow rhythm of small rocks pingingagainst glass. After a few more pebbles, Addy opened up and, squinting,looked down.“Ben?” she asked into the darkness. “Is that you?” She left the windowopen, disappeared, and came back with a flashlight. It looked big in her smallhands. “Ben?” she asked again.Did I wake you up? he wanted to ask. How long have you been asleep? AmI bothering you? He wanted to say anything and everything except what he’dcome to say.“I need to tell you something,” he whisper-shouted, but still, inside hishead, his voice sounded loud and booming. He leaned his bike against thechinaberry tree, and there was a soft crunch as the metal touched the bark.“It’s kinda important. Can you come down?” He scratched his head, then hishand. He felt restless. “So I can talk to you?”“It’s late, Ben. It’s like eleven.” She faked a yawn. She hadn’t beensleeping, he could tell. He imagined her lying in bed all this time, waiting.She stood at the window watching him and he looked up, watching her. Theyheard a bird fly away.“Okay,” she said.The next minute, Addy stood outside. She wore her pink paisley-printednightgown, though in the dark, under the night sky, it looked white. Herpajamas were always pink. He remembered their childhood sleepovers. Itseemed so long ago now—a history’s worth of time had passed. She huggedher body as if she were cold, though it was humid. The air conditionerhummed.“Addy,” he said. He took a step toward her.“What is it?” She sounded impatient. “What happened?”“Addy,” he said again. Her name hung in the air—Add-dee—and he heardhis teeth chatter. Maybe it was cold. He tightened his jaw to stop it. Heremembered how Howie’s jaw always looked tight, too, how square andstrong it seemed. He shook the image out of his head.“What is it?” Addy asked again. She began pacing and circling him. Hereyes were aimed at the ground as if she were searching for something she hadlost and come out to look for specifically. It made him more nervous.“Stop moving, will you? I’m trying to say something.”She stopped and pressed her back against his. He faced the house as shefaced the back fence. He felt her breathing and, automatically, he synched hisbreathing with hers like they were one.“The moon is so big tonight,” she said. “You should see it.”Ben shook his head. “I want to tell you something.”“It’s beautiful,” she continued. “The way the moon makes the other houseslook. Look! You have to look.”“I want to tell you something. It’s…” He felt his hands shaking. He heldthem together.“What are you talking about?”“The thing I’m trying to tell you is this,” he said. He rubbed his handstogether. There were words in his head; they repeated themselves over andover again until all it sounded like was the buzzing of bees in a small,compact space.Shhh, he said in his head, quiet down, quiet.“What is it, Ben? You know I’m always here for you. Whatever happens,I’m always here.”Ben said, “We went to the pool tonight. Howie and me.”Addy stopped breathing, and so did he.“Just me and Howie, at the pool,” he said, “and there, that’s when Irealized something. Something about myself.” Addy said nothing.
“Addy,” he said. Then, “I kissed him. We kissed, Addy. And I liked it. I
liked kissing him. Imagine that, I liked kissing him. I liked kissing Howie.
Addy.” He took a breath. Addy did not. “I like Howie the way I’m supposed
to like girls. Addy, I like boys the way I’m supposed to like girls.”
Addy released the breath she held. He heard her take a step. Then another.
Soon, he turned around and saw her circling back to the house.
“Addy?” he asked, though it didn’t look like she was listening. He grabbed
her elbow before she passed him, clutching it with all his strength. When she
yanked away, he let go and she nearly fell, as if she were expecting him to
keep holding. After steadying herself, she took another step.
“I think you should go home,” she said.
“Addy,” Ben insisted, “are we cool? Are we still friends?”
“Sure, Ben, sure.” Her voice trembled.
“Are you sure, Addy?”
She looked at him as if she wanted to reach out and touch him, but didn’t.
“But the people at school, Ben.”
“What about it?”
“You know,” she said. “They’re not gonna like you.”
“But you like me, don’t you, Addy?”
“Sure I do,” said Addy. “But just imagine this.” She stopped herself as if
gathering her thoughts. “Imagine us walking down the hall and everyone
knows this about you. And then they see me. What do you think they’re
gonna say?”
“Are you embarrassed of me, then?” He couldn’t believe it. “Is that what’s
eating at you?” He felt himself getting angry.
“No,” she said and began walking away.
“Addy,” Ben called out.
“I have practice in the morning,” Addy said. “They’re not gonna let me on
the team. If I don’t practice.”
“Addy,” he called out again. He tried running after her, but the door
closed before he could get to her, and he was left alone again, under the stars
and the moon and the branches of the tree and not even the owl was there
now, not even the moths.
—
His mind was everywhere all at once, replaying everything that had happened
that day at lightning speed. He pedaled as fast as he could until his legs
burned and gave up and, exhausted, he let the bike fall out from under him
and onto the sidewalk. The wheels spun as he rested on someone’s lawn and
listened to himself panting and watched the stars shine down. The stars, their
lights glittering, lulled the images in his head. The words in his head quieted.
In school, one of the teachers had a poster of constellations on one of his
walls. They had names that reminded him of the Greek myths he learned
about in English. Sailors, he remembered reading, used to look at the stars to
find their way back home or whatever their destination was. It was a map
written in the sky. When he said this in class, the teacher told him this was
science and that he was off subject. The other kids laughed. He didn’t think it
was funny. He spent the rest of the class period drawing stars, and he failed
the pop quiz because he was too angry to think.
Weeks later, after Howie left for school and the pool closed up and the
August heat gave way to cool September air, he thought about how the stars,
too, were once used to tell the future, like the words to a story written in dots,
holding everyone’s fate. How he wanted to run his fingers across those stars
and read what they said, every single word, every piece of light.

August 1994

The weather woman on TV says it’s going to be a real scorcher today andeven the cartoon sun is sweating. The heat wave, says the weather woman,will last all week, maybe into the next. Stay inside, pull down the shades,and turn on the AC, because it’s going to be hotter than hot. Thetemperatures keep rising: 100, 101, 102.“It will feel like a hundred and fourteen today,” says the weather woman,smiling. “Because of the Code Red, RTA will be providing free bus rides.”Hương runs her hands under the kitchen faucet and splashes her face withcold water. The AC is broken. Again. She wishes Tuấn still lived with them;he was always the one who fixed things. But now he lives in Tremé (out of allplaces!) with his girlfriend, the one she doesn’t like. She tries to visit everyweekend if she can but doesn’t like seeing the girl. She is on the cusp ofasking him to choose—his own mother or some cheap, thrill-seeking girl.That is something she never thought would happen.Hương fills up a glass with water and drinks it all in one go. Vinh says he’stired of news of hot weather and changes the channel. Maury comes on. “Andyou are not the father!” Maury says. Vinh changes the channel again.Hương wants to go for a swim, submerge her body in water, but thebayou’s too dirty and, she swears, it’s disappearing. She stuck a stick by theshore, marking the water level with a permanent marker. Yesterday morningthe water was lower again.It must be happening all across the state, she says. She thinks of thefishermen, how in the heat wave they must be struggling.“We’re disappearing,” she tells Vinh. “The water keeps this place alive—the crawfish, the crabs.”“The shrimp,” adds Vinh. “The shrimp,” Hương says. “Soon, everything will be gone.” The wordssound melodramatic, something a soap opera wife would say. An infomercialpops up on TV; they’re selling life vests. “I mean, we’ll have to movesomewhere else. You can’t live in a place without water.”Vinh says, “You can’t live in a place with too much of it, either.”—Vinh sits at the kitchen table. Today, like any other day, it’s rice noodles andfish sauce with sliced-up lạp xưởng for breakfast and Hương is at work. Hewishes she didn’t work so much. Work is overrated. Anyone can do work, butit takes a man to let it all go.“It’s the American dream,” said Hương, “to earn a living, to provide foryourself.”“What about the Vietnamese dream?” he asked.“This is not Vietnam,” she told him. She had a point.It is a Friday and his job is to find a job. When he first came to NewOrleans, they let him sell cars, but he was “let go” because he was “toofriendly.” He moved on to a factory, managing and repairing machines untilhe was fired because he didn’t know what he was doing. (He’d thought itwould have been more self-explanatory.) For a while, he stocked cannedfoods at Langenstein’s, but eventually they laid off some of their workers. Hehas the worst luck. He flips to the classifieds. The pages are littered with redpen marks from Hương.Cemetery Foreman Quán lý: Provide leadership to cemetery staff toaccomplish goals and objectives while working within companyguidelines…Fabricator Nguròi sận xủất: The job requires the employee to fabricatefrom piping drawings. The ideal candidate must be able to operateall equipment used in the fabrication department.CDL Driver Người lái xe: Candidate should have experience with…You’ll drive a truck, Vinh.At the very back is a full-color ad with masks and beads and frosty mugsof beer with foam spilling out. A festival, it says. Southern Decadence.It’s been a long time since he’s taken Hương out. He means out out, notthe Chinese restaurant they go to once a week and order the same thing andnever finish it, eating the leftovers for breakfast the next day. Last week thefortune cookie said: Pick a path with heart.He decides: he will pick a path with heart. Tonight, the Southern Festival.Tomorrow, a job.The heat is too much; where is that fan?Ben lies in bed watching TV: Paris Is Burning on VHS from the library. It’sthe second time he’s checked it out and it’s two days past due. He can’t getenough.It was Georges who said he should watch it. Behind the bar at ClubParadise, the bartender rattled off everything a gay boy needed to know—what movies to watch (Paris Is Burning, The Boys in the Band, My BeautifulLaunderette), what books to read (Tales of the City, The Boys on the Rock,Giovanni’s Room). Ben has spent plenty of time at Paradise over the pastmonth, skipping summer school (remedial algebra) for, in his mind, adifferent type of education.For the past year, every time he was on Bourbon, he’d made sure to findthe establishment and observe it from a distance. He thought homosexuals(the word always made him gasp in his head) would have had more shamethan to go there so openly in the daytime. It eased his own guilt. It was onlywithin the last couple of months that he found the courage to step inside.That first Saturday afternoon, there was a bodybuilding competition ofsome sort. Men in Speedos walked onstage and flexed their muscles to thecheering crowd. Everyone was smiling. Ben wandered in and sat for an hourbefore anyone noticed him. They were supposed to kick him out, but Georges—bald, tattooed, fatherly—said, in his lisp, “The youths need to know,Veronica” (Veronica being the lesbian who owned the place). “How else willthey ever know?”Georges teaches Ben everything he needs to know about being gay: say noto drugs, say yes to safe sex (though Ben has never even had drugs or sex); ifyour family kicks you out, build your own—no one needs a bad-vibe familia,Bambino. (He calls Ben “Bambino.”) Everyone else at Paradise calls him thebar cat, the baby gay, the one-day-you-will-turn-eighteen boy. They are afriendly bunch. Unlike everyone at school.Once high school started, everyone seemed to stop being friendly with oneanother and started hanging out with people more like themselves. Therewere the jocks, who always gave him threatening scowls and called him a fag.And there were the geeks, who no one wanted to hang out with except othergeeks, and Ben knew you couldn’t be both a geek and gay because that wassocial suicide. And there were the art kids, who got high all the time anddidn’t pay attention to anyone.Addy, his best friend all throughout elementary and middle school, waswith the jocks because she swam. She didn’t swim too well, but that seemedto be beside the point. She was on the team and ate lunch with burly footballplayers and thin cheerleaders every day. Ben saw her between classes or afterschool, but they had a hard time finding what to say to each other. And by thetime one of them was ready—perhaps just a simple “Hi”—one of Addy’s newfriends would guide her away, leaving him alone. Another reason to skipclasses, he thought.Onscreen, Venus Xtravaganza says, “You’re just an overgrown orangutan!”“You’re just an overgrown orangutan,” Ben repeats and laughs.Tonight is the kickoff for Southern Decadence, and he has it in his mind togo. He wants to be fabulous. He wants to be fierce. These are the wordseveryone in Paradise throws around, and he has started adding them to hisvocabulary, whispering them in front of the mirror.Outside, his mom and Vinh are getting ready for a night on the town.(Vinh’s words, not his: “a night on the town.”) Even with his door closed, hecan hear her going through her closet while Vinh paces the hallway.“I made reservations,” Vinh calls out.“Almost ready,” says his mom. More shuffling.Soon his mom’s out and Vinh is saying, “Let me take a look, just wait onesec, let me take a look.” Ben imagines his mom spinning around, her arms inthe air. “Price tag,” Vinh says, followed by the movement of feet, the openingof a kitchen drawer. Scissors, Ben thinks. Snip, snip.The door opens. Ben lowers the volume. No one knocks in this house.“We’ll be home around ten,” his mom says. “Maybe nine.”“Ten.” Vinh leans in.His mom looks around the room. Her face screws up as if she’s thinkingabout saying something but doesn’t know what.Last night, he came home late. He tried to sneak in before his momstopped him. She had been in the kitchen the entire time; paperwork litteredthe table.Her torrent of questions: Where have you been? Why were you out? Doyou know what time it is?She had sniffed the air and found the smell of cigarette, the smell ofalcohol, the smell of Paradise and the Quarter and New Orleans. She walkedup to him and felt his shirt. Dirty.“And your father, if he saw you like this,” she went on, “he’d roll over inhis grave. Times like this I wonder why we even came here. This wouldn’thappen in Vietnam. We should’ve stayed in Vietnam.”Something snapped in him and the next thing he knew, he was yelling,“This is not Vietnam. Fuck Dad and fuck you!” All his life, it felt like she wastrying to shape him, to mold him like a piece of clay into the man he’s nevermet. Didn’t she understand he was his own person? That he had his own fleshand blood and mind? That he was unique, one-of-a-kind? Why couldn’t shesee that? He stomped off to his room and slammed the door. Something,somewhere—a picture, a decorative bowl of plastic fruits, a vase—fell down.He heard her sweeping up afterward. He took a breath and bent down to lookthrough the keyhole. It was a picture on the hall table. She was bent oversweeping the bits and pieces into a dustpan. She paused for a second,squatting there on the floor.Now her face softens. “Be good,” she says and leaves. As she closes thedoor, Ben swears he hears her sigh.—Thảo is here somewhere, in the sea of people and the rap music shaking thefloor. She said seven o’clock. It’s ten past seven.A man grabs him by the shoulder. “ID,” he says.Tuấn reaches into his pocket and realizes it’s with Thảo. Thảo needed tenbucks that morning (for something), and he’d told her to just grab his wallet.They share a place together, a duplex in Tremé; what’s ten bucks? Tuấnpretends not to understand the bouncer. He cocks his head to the side. I noundohsten?“ID or you’re out, little guy.”Little guy? The fuck?“He’s with me.”“Thảo!”“This way.”“Where’ve you been?”She doesn’t answer, just pulls him and walks. Any other man would havedemanded an answer from his woman, but he and Thảo don’t work like that.The bouncer goes away, too, and tries to disappear among all the bodies,but he can’t. He’s just too big, too bulky. Who needs that much body,anyway? Not Tuấn!Together Thảo and Tuấn move, slick as snakes, to the third floor, to abalcony overlooking the dance floor, and the whole gang’s already there.They’ve been waiting a very long time.—It’s seven o’clock and still very hot. Hương’s dress sticks to her legs, andthough she didn’t want to go out (her back is killing her), she humors Vinh.She feels like eggrolls tonight.He drives out of Versailles. He passes their usual Chinese restaurant.“Where are we going?” she asks.“The Quarter,” he says.“No, no, no!” She waves her hand to tell him to stop.“What? What is it, hun-ey?” He’s never called her “honey” before, but sawit on a TV show, a husband calling his wife “honey.” Now is as good a time asany to start using it, though they’re not married. Yet.“I just came from there,” says Hương. “Why would we ever want to gothere?”He stops at a red light. “But it’s different at night. Parties, music…”“Did you know New Orleans is one of the most dangerous places in thecountry? I read that in the Thành Phố. The store across from me was robbedjust last month. And they sold Mardi Gras masks! Mardi Gras masks!” shesays. “Nothing is safe! Mardi Gras masks!”Then there were the tourists. Loud, drunk, obnoxious tourists. She hadplenty of them during the daytime. That morning, for instance, she found atourist asleep in front of the salon, a puddle of neon vomit around his head.She had to ask one of the city workers for his hose.The light turns green. The car accelerates.“Turn back,” she says.“This is going to be fun.” When Vinh sees he’s over the speed limit, thirtyfive miles per hour, he slows.“Tell me this: What are we going to do out there, anyway?”They drive under a small overpass. A wad of green gum falls down andsticks to the windshield.“Stop the car!” Hương yells.Vinh brakes. There must have been something in the road, but then hesees Hương stepping out, head turned upward toward the bridge.“You kids!” she yells. Her voice can be shrill if she wants it to.One kid wears a football jersey—not the Saints (that’s the important part,Vinh notes). Another one drops a Styrofoam cup. Blue ice splasheseverywhere. It splatters onto her shirt. The smell is astringent. A hurricanedaiquiri, for sure.“You go home!” she says. “We don’t want you here!”They laugh.“You think this funny?” she asks.Vinh doesn’t know much English, but he knows she has an accent.“You go away,” Hương continues. “Go home. This not your city!”“Hương! Hương!” Vinh runs and leads her back into the car. “You’reruining a good evening, dear.” “Dear” is another word he heard on TV. Sincemoving to New Orleans, he’s had a lot of time to himself. He takes napkinsout of the glove box and presses them on her dress where the slush splattered.“Those kids!” says Hương. “They come here and make the city dirty. Theydon’t belong here.”—Tuấn’s in the backseat of Sáng’s car (stolen, he is sure), speeding down RoyalStreet, though you shouldn’t speed through the Quarter, not even if astampede of gators is chasing you. The roads are made for horses, not cars.Tuấn bites his lip and Thảo pats him on the knee. “Lighten up,” she says.Up front are Quang and Sáng, and Sáng is driving with one hand. Hepresses down on his horn and a lady standing on a corner yells at them to slowdown.“Mẹ mày,” he shouts out the window. Then to his friends: “In Vietnam,they used to speed like this in their Citroëns and motorcycles. I mean, haveyou ever seen pictures of Saigon? We người Việt don’t care about speedlimits,” Sáng says.Tuấn doubts it. He’s beginning to doubt everything Sáng and Quang andeven Thảo say. They all came to America as kids and spent more time in NewOrleans than Saigon. How much could they remember? There must have beena limit, a moment of transition when they were more American thanVietnamese, and there was no going back. Maybe they were fighting that, hethought, then he wondered what the point of fighting it was.Quang passes a bag of Cheetos to the back. His arm is hairless like a boy’sbut has the SBZ tattoo, a bit faded like it’s on an old T-shirt, not as vibrantand attention-grabbing as it used to be. “Where you taking us, anyway?” Thảo asks. She laughs. She laughsbecause the speed is fun or funny.“You’ll see!” says Quang.“Anh Quang sạo quá!” Thảo exclaims.The Cheetos are spicy and taste like cigarette butts.—When Ben hears the car start, he runs to the window to see it back out anddrive away. He waits there for a full minute before knowing for sure they’regone. It’s seven. If he can get ready quickly, he can leave by seven thirty, getto Paradise by eight thirty at the latest. He told Georges he’d be there by eightto help with some setup. He might run late, but Ben doesn’t think Georgeswill mind; he wants Ben to experience the gay life, he wants to have a positiveinfluence on the youths. After all, Georges always said, children are thefuture.“Southern Decadence,” Georges had told him, “is like gay Mardi Gras.”“What’s more gay than Mardi Gras?” Ben asked.“Southern Decadence!” everyone within earshot said.

They swung theirbeers and cocktails in the air as Madonna’s “Vogue” played. All the liquidsloshed around, spilled to the ground. A guy in roller skates passed by as heframed his face. A chubby drag queen chased a muscular woman into theback room. Someone came in and asked if anyone had seen their dog—apurple-hued poodle wearing a leather vest with fake diamond studs whoanswered to the name Martha. It was only noon.—They sit down on the patio of a restaurant named after a captain. It has a bigfish above its name. The fish wears an eye patch. Everything in the Quarter isin bad taste, Hương thinks. Even the salon has a fleur-de-lis sticker on thewindow. She wanted to take it off, but Miss Linh said it made the salon moreauthentic, more New Orleans. (“They don’t want a Vietnamese manicure;they want a New Orleans one.”) It almost made Hương laugh—the fleur-delis on the window, Miss Linh’s Buddha statue in the corner, the smell ofsewage and alcohol that wafted in from outside. What mishmash was this?Who was responsible for this mess gumbo?That was what Bình smelled like last night, she remembers. Sure, she wasmad that he was coming home late (he’d been doing that for a while, and aslong as she knew where he was, she was satisfied), but the smell of theQuarter told her something else. He was heading off the rails (just like hisbrother!). She imagined him coming under a bad influence that was distinctlyNew Orleans (which, she’d learned only recently, was also called the City ofSin) and rued the day she came to this city. Where did she go wrong and whatcould she do?As an exercise, she wrote to Công. She never stopped writing to him.Writing was the only way she’d survived the last fifteen years, a way to putdown her thoughts, make the world make sense. On loose-leaf paper, she’dput down the date and write the words Dear Công and all her thoughts wouldflow out, organizing themselves or at the very least making themselvesapparent. Dear Công, Another day in New Orleans…and our sons are indanger. She could have used anybody’s name, she convinced herself, but oldhabits do not die.Hương looks over the menu.They’ll have dinner and after that they’ll make their way down to thefestival, Vinh thinks. The ad said there would be music and performers anddrinks. He decides he will not drink here. They’ll find a bar where they canshare a daiquiri.“Too expensive,” says Hương. “I can cook this at home for a third of thecost and we could feed the entire family, too.” She eyes Vinh.How are we paying for this? say her eyes.“Don’t worry. You’re worth it, darling!” says Vinh.Credit cards, Vinh has learned, are the bricks of the American dream. Thetrick is to have several cards, so you can pay each off with another. Borrowedmoney, borrowed time, borrowed country.“What do you think Bình is doing right now?” asks Hương out of the blue.Maybe she should be gentler with the boy. She is always angry, she’sbeginning to recognize. She uses the menu to fan herself.“Do you want to end up like your brother?” she had asked when shelearned he had to retake a class (again!).“And what’s wrong with Tuấn?” Bình huffed.“Everything!” she huffed back. She hadn’t meant to say that. She hadmeant to point to one or two things. But “everything” just came out, and shecouldn’t take it back. She felt flustered. “He just went down the wrong path,”she said. “I want to save you from that.”How unrecognizable America had made them, she was thinking, all ofthem. If Công were here, he would not know any of them, would not evenknow her. At times like these she missed him the most—how life would havebeen different if he hadn’t stayed behind. Thinking about it made her mad atCông all over again.“I should check on Bình,” Hương says to Vinh, rising from the table. “I’msure they have a phone I can use. I’ll be right back.”—The outfit comes together better than he’d planned: blue jeans, a white tanktop, a sprinkling of glitter on his face, a bright blue feather boa he got at athrift shop. He looks at himself in the mirror and smiles. They’ll take hispicture, he’s thinking, for Out on the Town. But something is missing.Something more. Lipstick, perhaps. Lipstick—of course! The clock says7:20, so he hurries to his mother’s room.He checks her bathroom. Nothing. He checks her drawers: a stick ofChapStick and a compact mirror. Not useful. He goes to the closet. The firstbox (a tin for butter cookies) he sees is full of sewing supplies: spools ofthread, a cushion for needles, loose buttons. He stands up to see where elsethings might be and sees the top shelf lined with shoeboxes. It is already 7:26.He must hurry up!He’s too short, so he stands on tiptoes. When that isn’t enough, he beginsjumping with one hand reaching out in the air. He jumps and he jumps andhe jumps. He’s almost reaching the shelf, just so close, so he pushes off thefloor even harder and reaches out his pointer finger. And then—bang!—theycrash to the floor, all four boxes plus a Polaroid camera that flashes when itfalls to the floor, a scattered mess. But the task is almost complete. It is 7:28.One box spills out important documents, passports, and citizenship papers.Another is completely empty. One of the smaller boxes holds what he needs—unused blush, eye shadows in sealed plastic containers, tubes of eyeliner, abottle of perfume, and two tubes of red fiery lipstick. He reaches for thelipstick, but it’s the box that fell behind it that catches his attention. A box ofletters, a postcard, pictures, cassette tapes.It is 7:31. The phone rings.—Sáng slams on the brakes. A parade.“Fucking parade,” says Thảo.“Fucking queers,” says Sáng.“Fucking fags,” says Quang.Tuấn peers over the headrests of the front seats but sees nothing butpeople and flags waving high. One is the Louisiana flag with its pelican, theother has stripes of colors like a rainbow.“Where are we going?” asks Thảo.“The Lot,” says Sáng.“But look at Bourbon,” says Quang. “It’s always Bourbon.”“We should just take Canal,” says Thảo.“Canal has traffic.”“I hate sitting here.” Thảo opens her door. “Park it and walk it, boys,” shesays. It amuses Tuấn, a Vietnamese girl with a southern accent. “I said park itand walk it!”They park it and they walk it.—“Bình,” says Hương, sitting back down, “isn’t answering.”“Boys will be boys,” says Vinh.Boys will be boys, she repeats in her head. It’s stuff like this that makesHương believe Vinh could never be a father. Too unserious. Too immature.“Do you know how hard it is to raise children?” she asks him. “Did I tellyou about that one time I left the boys home alone and they threw an entirebox of bang snaps on top of the Phạm girls, and…”“And those girls had sand in their hair for a week and smelled like fire.”Vinh completes her sentence. He likes completing her sentences. It’s whatcouples do.“And the little one had to get her hair shaved off. Trời ơi, it was monthsbefore she grew it back.”“That was ages ago. Tonight, relax!”“And last night the boy comes home late! What’s a mother supposed todo?”“Relax, Hương.”“I can’t relax. It’s hot and look at all these people, listen to all this noise.It’s all giving me hives!” She takes a sip of water but stops when she seessomething in the distance. “They’re having a parade or something tonight,”she says.“Yes,” says Vinh. “Exactly.”—“The Lot is past Bourbon,” says one of the guys.“What do you need there?” asks Tuấn.“Someone owes me money,” says Sáng. “Three Mexicans.” Sáng is notlooking where he’s going because he’s busy eyeing Thảo. Tuấn has an urge topush him or punch him, but the guy bumps into a tall lady with anoverwhelmingly pink wig.“Dahling! Be careful!” says the woman. “A boy like you, someone willsnatch you up!” It’s now that Tuấn notices it’s a guy in a dress.“Faggot!” says Sáng, offended or scared or shocked or surprised. The wordcomes out like a gasp.“Hey, keep your voice down,” says Tuấn. He doesn’t want to get into afight. He always loses fights.“What he means,” says Thảo, “is to shut up, Sáng.”“Who’s calling who a fag?” someone yells in the crowd.A set of beads with a gold medallion on it flies toward them. Tuấn sees itclearly. It sparkles in the light of the streetlamps. Like a shooting star. Hesees it coming until it slams down hard on his face.“Who’s a faggot?”“Where’s a faggot?”“There’s a faggot!”“We’re all faggots here!”—All the letters are in Vietnamese, the whole stack. Ben can’t read it, but hecan tell that much. It’s the squiggly marks on top and below the letters. Eachpiece of lined paper starts with “Công.” Each ends with a signature that startswith jagged mountains that become rolling hills. There are fewer envelopesthan letters. The envelopes are stamped –‰˜™–’ ˜“ —‰’ˆ‰–.There is one postcard. The picture on it looks like a place in Europe:cobbled streets, old buildings, moody sky; a man in the background strollswith his hands in his pockets. A couple sits outside a restaurant eating pastriesand drinking coffee. The postmark, though, is Bangkok and the date says 25-04-1980. The message is in Vietnamese. The signature at the end is asquiggle that looks almost like a snail unraveling itself.The photographs are what shake Ben the most.There’s one with a man holding a bicycle between two buildings, an emptyalley. Laundry lines hang between the buildings. Ben sees in the distance ashirt, a pair of pants. The man in the photo wears neat pants and a button-upshirt and sunglasses that look too big. The corners of his mouth curl up butonly slightly, as if he’s not in the mood to get his photo taken. This photo,says his face, is a favor. The man lifts his eyebrows, waiting. Ben imagineshim tapping his foot.The same man is in the next picture, though he’s maybe a few years olderand this time he’s kissing a woman. It’s a wedding. They are wearing áo dàis—is that what they’re called? Very traditional. This must be in Vietnam. It’san up-close photo. The man holds the woman’s face. The woman holds on tohis shoulder. They’re both smiling, even as they kiss. They are the happiest,perhaps the happiest they’ve ever been and will ever be. Ben looks closer andfeels like he’s seen this woman before, known her all his life.In the last picture the man is a bit older again. He’s standing in what lookslike a classroom—a chalkboard in the background, a desk in the center. Abriefcase lies on the desk next to a small stack of books. The man holds hishands in front of him, holds them together. His posture is relaxed, and Bencan tell he’s comfortable here in the classroom. His face is serious—he’s notsmiling. But his eyes, they light up. Ben swears he’s seen this man before, too,known him all his life.—They walk toward the parade. Hương carries a plastic bag of the food theydidn’t eat around her wrist. How does anyone finish a “surf ’n’ turf”? Bình willlike it. He’s American and will like this kind of stuff. This, she imagines, is apeace offering.“What’s this here?” she asks when they get closer to Bourbon.“It’s a parade!” says Vinh. “A celebration of something Southern or other.You know the people here have parades for the smallest reasons.”“It’s New Orleans.” Hương shrugs. “It’s what we do,” she says like a trueNew Orleanian. When someone asks her where she’s from, she tells themNew Orleans, and they always say, “No, really.”It’s when they reach Bourbon that Vinh realizes he’s made a mistake. Hedidn’t understand something in the advertisement. A word was missing. Thiswasn’t what he imagined: the half-naked men holding each other; the dragqueens riding floats, waving like they’re Miss America; a woman with shorthair and a leather suit whistling at Hương.“Not bad,” says Leather Suit. “Do you remember where we parked, Hương?”“What do you mean? We just got here.”Vinh takes her hand and they turn around. He pulls her and walks faster.“I don’t understand. You said you want to take me out, so why don’t youtake me out?”“There was a mistake,” Vinh says. “There’s been a huge mistake.”—“Who’s a faggot? Where’s a faggot? There’s a faggot! We’re all faggots here!”—It’s the face. The man’s face. His tall nose, his eyes, his serious lips. Wherehas Ben seen it before? He has a suspicion.He runs into the bathroom (his mother’s) and gazes into the mirror. Hisglitter-speckled face stares back seriously. He holds up the picture of the manstanding by the desk. His eyes move back and forth—two seconds on his ownreflection, two seconds on the man, two seconds here, two seconds there. Heruns down the hall to his own bathroom, turning on all the lights on his waythere. For a second, he’s sure the other mirror’s lying to him and this one, theone he’s used to, will not.He holds up the picture. He looks at his face. Uncanny, he thinks.—In the chaos of high heels and leather boots, Tuấn is on his hands and knees.The bruise on his right eye, where the gold medallion hit him, aches, swells.He closes it and crawls forward with one eye open. He’s trying to find Thảo.His heart pounds. His forehead is soaked with sweat. Someone steps on hisfinger.“Fuck!” he screams, though no one hears him. “Fucker!” He could gettrampled on tonight and die and no one would care. He stands up and tries tomaneuver through the street. An empty beer bottle falls from above. He tripsover a blond girl barfing into a bag. Her friend rubs her on the back. For aminute, he finds reprieve outside of a closed cigar shop. The window ispolished and, somehow, still clean, no smudges or oily marks from hands. Hesees himself reflected there and doesn’t recognize what he sees—a black eye,unkempt hair, baggy clothes that make the wearer look smaller than heactually is.And what was he, exactly? Who is he? He tries to straighten his hair,which is greasy with gel. He licks a finger and cleans the dirt off his cheek.He remembers, years and years ago, his mother dressing him up (for what, hedoesn’t remember), wiping his face with a thin cloth and combing his hair.When was that?Out of nowhere, Thảo grabs his wrist.“There you are!” she says. “What a party! What a parade!” She laughs andslaps his back.“Let’s go,” he says and pulls her out of Bourbon toward Dauphine andthen Canal. He sees the tall business buildings ahead, the palm trees onneutral ground, the cars stopped at a red light. Someone throws a bottle, andit crashes on the ground in front of them. They step over it and Thảo is stilllaughing. Laughing with her mouth wide open, air pushing out from the gut.She’s laughing and can’t stop because everything is so wickedly fun, so wildlyfunny. What a party, a parade! she keeps saying. Tuấn’s mouth, meanwhile,has gone all dry.—Ben lays everything on the kitchen table and gets the boom box out of hisroom. He plugs it in and pops in the first tape. His mom’s voice, unmistakablyher voice, goes:A lô, anh Công? Em Hương đây. Em và các con đã tới Mỹ. Đang ở NewOrleans. Trước đó, em và các con ở Singapore trong nhiều tháng, ở trại tị nạnchật ních thuyền nhân. Thuyền nhân, boat people, là cái tên họ đặt cho nhữngngười có hoàn cảnh như em…Em nhớ anh vô cùng….He doesn’t know what’s being said, but he remembers the words,remembers what was happening when she said those words. It’s less an actualmemory than an impression of a memory, many memories: shadows movingin soft lighting, a quiet clicking of a spinning tape, the feeling of buttons withtheir small indentations for fingers, the smell of new plastic.—Tuấn and Thảo wait at the bus stop. Thảo is still laughing.“What the hell happened there?” Tuấn asks.Thảo keeps on laughing. Every time she tries to answer, she can’t help butlaugh some more, louder.“Thảo,” he says. He says it several times to get her attention. “Thảo,maybe we should stop—”Thảo leaps to his lips. She tastes like Cheetos and cigarettes and alcoholand lipstick. He pushes her away.“No,” he says.“What do you mean, no?” she asks.“This”—he points to himself, his clothes—“it’s not me. None of this”—hepoints to her tattoo on her arm—“is me.”A bus comes, stops, then continues on its way. It is a hot New Orleansnight.—The car pulls into Versailles and Hương is still giddy.After they turned away from Bourbon, they found a jazz bar on Burgundy.Surprisingly, barely anyone was there and they stopped in for a drink. A brassband played music from the seventies and they, nearly alone, danced. Thewhole evening made Hương feel young again and unleashed a side of hershe’d almost forgotten was there.Hương and Vinh walk up the stairs to the apartment hand in hand. Fromoutside, Hương sees all the lights are on. She looks at her watch. Eleveno’clock and he’s still here. She unlocks the door, pushes it open. Then her voice.
A lô, Công?
She looks up, and Bình’s standing over the kitchen table. His dented boom
box sits in the center.
Em Hương đây. Em và các con đã tới Mỹ.
The boy presses Stop. Her voice clicks off.
It’s now that she notices the letters scattered across the table, the pictures,
the postcard. She runs to grab them, but in the same instant Bình takes them
in his hands and throws them out the back window. They flutter down and
scatter on the ground.
“You lied to us,” her son cries. “This…it’s proof,” he says. He reads,
“1980.”
“I can explain,” says Hương, steadying her voice.
“1981. 1982. 1983. 1984. He wasn’t dead.”
“I can…”
“1991, 1992…What is this? He didn’t die.”
“…explain.”
“I had a father and you kept him away from us.”
Things got complicated, she wanted to say. You don’t understand, and she
is twenty-five again. It is 1978. And she is on a boat, she is on an island, she is
on a plane, she is living with the Minhs and Mr. Minh smashes a lamp and
the lamp shatters into hundreds of pieces and they are yelling all night and
she is staying up all night then she is living in a motel then she is living in a
church then she moves to Versailles then she’s trying to contact him, trying to
contact their father….
“Your father…” she says.
“You were talking to him. See? See?” He balls up more letters and throws
them out the window.
It is 1978 and she is twenty-five again. She’s writing letters. She’s
recording messages. The letters, the packages, they get returned until the day
they are not.
It is 1980 and she is twenty-seven again. Please don’t contact me again, his
message reads. It is the best for the both of us. It is 1980 and she is twenty
seven.
“Are you listening to me?”
In this new country, by herself, all alone in the world.
“I was all alone…”
He ejects the cassette tape and throws it out. He takes the entire box and
throws it out, too. The contents splash into the bayou, into the mud, the
receding water.
“…trying to protect you, Bình; the truth…”
“What kind of life are we living? What else are you keeping from us?
What else?”
“Just let me explain, Bình. Let me explain. Your father aban—”
“What else?”
“Us. What else was I…”
“What else?”
“…to do? To say.”
“What else?”
“L-Let her explain, son,” Vinh stammers.
“Don’t call me that. You don’t get to call me that. Don’t call me that!” He
pushes Vinh. Vinh stumbles back. It’s true, Vinh thinks, he’s not the boy’s
father. It hurts him all the same. He tries not to let it show.
“Bình,” says Hương.
“Leave me alone.”
“Bình.”
“Who are you, even?”
“Son.”
“No mother…”
“Son!”
“You’re no mother.”
It’s as if her body is acting on its own then—her hand reaches out and
strikes his skin. The smacking sound of flesh on flesh echoes in the air, hangs
in her mind.
“Son?” Hương says.
She doesn’t know what’s come over her. She sees herself from far away.
What has she done? What will she do now? She peers into his eyes and there
it is—a burning, hot look, a mean, scolding look. She touches her own
impossible hand.
What has happened? they all think. How did we get to this point? And what
will happen now?
—
Ten miles south, Tuấn sits with his head in his hands. Thảo is thrashing
about, knocking stuff down, packing up her belongings, making the most
noise possible.
We should stop seeing each other, he had said. You should leave.
Fine, she said, but say goodbye to the life you’ve had.
She knocks over a chair (several chairs) and breaks a lamp.
SBZ will come after you, she says.
She flips over a table, kicks away the couch.
We will ruin your life.
On the way out, she grabs a bat, takes it through the front window. And
then she’s out, slamming the door, and there, on the wall, a family picture
falls down, the crash the sound of a cry.
In the ensuing silence, he thinks of his mother, he thinks of his brother.
They are lying on the floor under broken glass. He wants to check in on them
now, give them a call. Yes, that’s what he’ll do; he’ll do that and go to sleep.
He picks up the phone and dials home. It rings and no one picks up. Yes, this
will calm his rapid heart, he is thinking as he waits, he is sure; this will calm
him down so he can sleep. It rings and no one picks up.
Yes, everything will be okay; he just needs to hear their voices, it’s
everything he’s ever needed, all this time, why didn’t he think of it before,
he’s so stupid….
—
The phone rings and everyone just lets it ring until it stops ringing.
Hương steps back, lets out a breath. Her hands shake.
“We’re not the bad sons,” Ben says. “You’re the bad mother.” He feels a
weight lifted off his chest.
“Mẹ xin lỗi,” she says. Mom is sorry.
It is calm like before a storm. She remembers her first days in Versailles
and a hurricane alarm howling out of nowhere, without warning. How
frightened she was, but also how prepared: grab the boys, run, and escape.
Escape. It was later that she realized there were no wars in New Orleans: no
wars, not here.
The last war was on a different shore, with different people, in a different
country, and there’s no going back, back to that life. She realizes this now,
but that doesn’t make it ache any less. In fact, the ache grows. It grows into
two boys, and the two boys grow into two sons, and those two sons grow to
look like their father, uncannily like their father in their moods, their
movements, their voices, so that it’s always like she’s losing him again—to the
world, to life, to fate.
She reaches out a hand, but he turns, walks away, closes his door. She
stays frozen where she stands, not trusting her own body, what it would do,
what it’s capable of doing.
And a gentle breeze blows in from the window. And the gentle breeze is
cool. And she realizes how strange it is on such a hot day in the middle of
August in the middle of the night. Chilled, she wraps her arms around her
body and starts for her room. The night is silent.

Ben    1994–1998

Tuấn rented one-half of a duplex house in Tremé. It sat off Highway 10
and rumbled every time trucks passed by. Ben had visited only once and
could not remember where exactly it was, except that it sat off the
highway, somewhere on Ursulines. The bus let him off half a mile away.
When he got there, he walked up and down the street, trying to remember
what it looked like. Start with the color of the place, he told himself—was it a
white house or a yellow one? What sat across from it—another house or a gas
station?
By eight, his shirt was sticky with sweat as people left their houses for
work. He fanned himself with a magazine and dragged his suitcase across the
sidewalk until he saw his brother kneeling on a front porch, sweeping up bits
of shattered glass. It was a blue house, the only blue one on the block.
“T!” he called out. At first his brother didn’t hear him. He walked up and
tapped him on the shoulder. When he turned around, it was the bruise on his
brother’s eye that Ben noticed first.
“Is something wrong with mẹ?” was his brother’s first question.
“No, nothing,” Ben replied. “Why would you ask that? What happened to
you?”
“She didn’t pick up last night. I was calling and no one picked up.”
Ben pointed at his brother’s eye. “You’re too old to get into fights, aren’t
you?”
“What? This?”
“Is Thảo here?” Ben realized he had to deal with her now. “Should I go? I
can go.” He didn’t want to go; he had nowhere else to go.

“Thảo left. We broke up.” He held up the broom and pointed at the
shattered glass.
“Oh, God, geez. I’m so sorry, T,” Ben said, though he didn’t mean any of
it. “Wow. God. What happened?”
“Look, I don’t want to talk about it, okay? Why are you here, anyhow? It’s
like almost nine. Don’t you sleep in? It’s Saturday. You don’t even get up
before ten.”
“Well, you wouldn’t believe it, but”—Ben walked in and settled his
suitcase on the sofa; he sat down and took off his shoes—“Mom went crazy.”
—
After Tuấn cleaned up the shattered window, he made breakfast (cereal with
soy milk from the can) as Ben told him about the cassette tapes with their
mother’s voice, the photos of their father (“Undeniably him,” Ben said.
“Looks kind of like me, but exactly like you”), and the fact that their mother
had been writing to him all this time.
“She lied to us,” Ben said. “All this time she said he was dead and here she
was, writing to him. What was she trying to hide, that’s what I’m thinking.”
Tuấn paused, then shrugged his shoulder. “There are many things we
won’t ever understand,” he said. He finished his cereal and walked to the sink.
“Why didn’t she—” Ben grasped for words with his hands as if they were
right in front of him but he couldn’t catch any of them. “Tell us?” was what
he settled on.
“There was a war, Bình.”
“Ben.” He stood up and followed his brother. The sun streamed in through
the window over the sink; there were no blinds there.
“Ben. There was a war, Ben. Things go horribly wrong during wars. Even
without wars, things go horribly wrong all the time. You pick yourself up, you
move on, be glad with what you do have. That’s the best we can do
sometimes.”
Ben stood by his brother’s side as he washed the dishes. There had to be a
better explanation, he felt. What was his own brother hiding from him? And
how could he stand there so calm?
“Aren’t you angry?” Ben said then.
Tuấn went on washing; the water was now steaming. It fogged up the
window, so he leaned forward and wiped it with a sudsy hand.
Ben continued, “It’s like, I don’t know, I’ve been seeing a ghost my entire
life and now I finally see him, have proof of him—but I can’t grasp him, can’t
show him to anyone else. But that ghost is more than just some dead man,
some stranger. It’s me. Or part of me. All my life it feels like a part of me has
always been gone, a ghost.”
“I know what you mean.”
“And she could have stopped that from happening. But she didn’t. She
didn’t, T, she didn’t!” He heard his own whiny voice and hated it. He changed
his tone. “You knew the man—don’t you wanna know what happened?”
Tuấn let the water run and looked out the window, into the distance. He
squinted and Ben thought he must be hurting his eyes and wondered why he
was doing that, what he was looking at, out there beyond the bright morning
sun.
“I don’t go into people’s business. I’m over that,” Tuấn told him finally. “I
don’t question anybody anything. Everyone has to make choices. Sometimes
there’re only bad choices, all of them, each way you look it’s a sea of bad
choices, and we just have to pick one, the best one, or maybe just any one.”
Ben balled his hands into fists, then he let them go. “You don’t
understand,” he said, more sad than angry.
“There was a war,” Tuấn said. “You don’t understand.”
Ben looked at his brother then and swore he saw tears welling up in his
eyes. The sight of his brother on the cusp of such sadness nearly frightened
him. He took a step back and felt embarrassed for coming, for bringing any
of this up.
Later that morning, their mother banged on the door. As Tuấn went to
answer it, Ben hid in the hall closet. Tuấn’s black eye didn’t seem to reassure
her of anything. They were speaking in Vietnamese, which made it hard for
Ben to understand, but she sounded angry nonetheless. She left just as
abruptly as she came, probably because of work. The last thing Ben heard his
brother tell her was “Whatever happened,” something more in Vietnamese,
and the word “family.”
“What you tell her?” Ben asked when she was gone.
“I pretended I didn’t know what she was talking about.” Tuấn looked at his
own watch. “She’s upset,” he said and began getting ready for work.
—
Over the next month, Ben stayed at Tuấn’s. Tuấn thought he’d be helpful
because he could stay home all day and be on the lookout for Thảo and the
Southern Boyz, who were mad at him for wanting to leave. For two weeks
straight, they came and asked where Tuấn was; Ben answered the door and
told them he’d moved away and they weren’t in touch anymore.
Ben, meanwhile, planned what he would do next. School, he felt, was out
of the question. He hated it and it hated him, and if his brother did fine
leaving, he, too, would carry on the (only) family tradition they had. (Tuấn
said he hated that he called it that, and Ben said it was true.)
He scrapped the plan to move to a different city for now—too expensive,
even if he had a job. He kept the idea in the back of his mind; it was always a
possibility later.
A job was a good place to start. His brother worked as a busboy at an
oyster house in the Quarter. He couldn’t work in the Quarter since his mother
worked there, too. (For the same reason, he stopped going to Paradise
altogether.) One afternoon, Tuấn came home with a flyer he found stuck in
the window of a coffee shop. ‘——’‹ it said on the top, and under that
showed a picture from last year’s yearbook. They were plastered all over the
Quarter, his brother said. “I feel like I’m housing a felon here.”
He started job hunting by circling ads in the newspapers. He’d visit the
place before he applied to make sure he liked it enough, and if he did, he
asked for an interview. With all the time in the world now, he encountered
places in the city he never had before. The old clutter of Tremé and the
Quarter gave way to the rundown housing projects in Iberville, which
transformed into tall, clean buildings in the Business District, which was a
world away from the Garden District and its opulent homes behind iron
fences.
The large white house on St. Charles Avenue with purple trimming and a
wraparound porch was the address the man on the phone gave him. They
were a couple: two professors at UNO who were too busy, the man said, to
pay attention to the smaller but necessary things of life. They were looking
for someone to do housework—cleaning the mildew from the shower;
laundering the clothes (his word, “launder”), the bedsheets, and kitchen
towels; some light food preparation now and then. They’d placed an ad in the
Times-Picayune. Ben did not usually read the Times-Picayune but one day, on
a whim, decided to get a copy.
Ben walked up the steps. He tightened his tie. How odd, he was thinking
when he reached the door, that this was the first time he’d ever seen a
doorbell. None of the apartments in Versailles had them. Neither did any of
the homes he visited in New Orleans East. He knew this was an embarrassing
fact, and he swore he would not say it aloud in case they would think of him
differently. He pressed the doorbell.
The man, Mr. Lars Schreiber—no, Professor Schreiber, or was it Doctor
Schreiber?—opened the door. He wore a polo shirt tucked into his pants. His
arm muscles bulged under the shirt’s tightness. The head of thick hair was
already graying, matching his mustache.
“Early,” he said, pleased. “Come in!” The professor led Ben to his library.
Wood shelves lined the walls, each filled neatly with books. Two leather wing
chairs sat near the window, which looked out into the street. Between the
chairs was a large marble globe. It was what Ben expected from a professor.
The interview commenced. What experience did he have with cleaning?
Did he have experience in housekeeping? Laundry—did he know not to wash
clothes on Hot? Why was that? Did he know how to treat a spot? The man
had a light accent. It was vaguely European, not English or French, but
something else that made his words topsy-turvy. What has he cooked? No
real matter. Could he follow directions? That’s what this all really is:
directions. When could he start? Great.

“Great,” Ben said, shaking Schreiber’s hand. He had a strong grip, and
Ben was tempted to squeeze back even harder, though he knew he couldn’t.
Up close, Ben noticed, the professor had a strong woodsy, earthy scent, some
type of cologne. “Tomorrow, then.”
“Tomorrow,” Schreiber repeated as he waved goodbye and closed the
door.
Ben arrived at Schreiber’s every weekday at eight in the morning. The first
day, he was given the key to let himself in. On the kitchen counter, a note
would be left telling him what needed to be done. Sometimes the Schreibers
would be gone; often they were still getting ready for work. Over time, the
job turned out to be more than housework. Sometimes, they had him outside
doing yard work. Other times, they had him help with their research.
Mrs. Schreiber—Elaine—was an art history professor and asked him every
now and then to go up to NOMA to take photos of art or look up books at its
library and photocopy pages. Schreiber, on the other hand, was a literature
professor. When he asked Ben to go to the UNO library to check out a few
journals, Ben told him he couldn’t: he wasn’t a student, being a high school
dropout and all. Schreiber said he would take care of it and the next day gave
him a library card to UNO. It had Ben’s name and a barcode, and under it all,
Special Assistant/Guest of Faculty.
“You’ve been, how they say, upgraded,” Schreiber said.
Because the library was bigger than any other he’d ever been to, Ben used
the card to his advantage. As he checked out archive copies of The
Comparatist or the Journal of Modern Literature, he also borrowed books he
meant to read: Jane Eyre, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Germinal
—books assigned to seniors in high school. He could enjoy them now. He
went through them at his own pace without having to wait for the dumb
students to catch up. He read them during his lunch breaks in between
mopping the floors and having to catch the bus to the museum to take a
photo.
Schreiber didn’t even know about his reading habits—Ben didn’t feel he
needed to know—until nearly a year after hiring him, before the start of the
fall semester, when Ben had to return to the professor’s house; he’d left his
copy of Madame Bovary.
He rang the doorbell, and Schreiber answered. They were about to sit
down for dinner. The professor asked if he needed anything. Ben didn’t
answer (they were at that stage of their relationship, employer and employee,
but also friendly and casual—Ben did clean their bathrooms, three of them,
after all), but walked past the professor and into the library. He searched the
desk, then the chairs.
“Did you leave something behind?”
“Madame Bovary. I left Madame Bovary behind.”
“Oh, I shelved it,” said Schreiber, walking over to the bookcase. His
fingers glided over Faulkner and Fielding and Fitzgerald and stopped at
Flaubert. “I thought it was mine.”
“The spine sticker should’ve been a giveaway,” Ben said. He took the book
and threw it in his backpack. Before he left for the door, he said, “Sorry.”
Ben would read several pages each night. Each morning, before heading
off to work, Schreiber would ask him how the reading was going, what he
thought about this aspect of the book or that, what kind of ideas did he have
about what it was trying to say and how it was going about saying it. What
was it saying? He must have seen him as some type of novelty, Ben thought:
an immigrant boy who dropped out of high school who cleans houses (one
house) and reads books. He was not a novelty, he was not some monkey. It
reminded Ben of the tourists in the Quarter, pointing and staring at
everything. The professor was no better. Ben answered the man’s questions.
When he finished the book, the professor gave him another: The Sorrows of
Young Werther, Crime and Punishment, and, for the sake of diversity, the
Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge. By the end of the year, when
Ben was looking at the instructions for putting up a Christmas tree, Schreiber
said: “You’re an intelligent young man. Very intelligent. You shouldn’t be
here.”
“Your house?”
“Putting up a tree. Sweeping kitchens. Laundering.” He was drinking
whiskey, but he was not drunk.
It was the first time anyone had called him that: intelligent and young man.
“Don’t waste a life. Let me help you.” Schreiber said.
With Schreiber’s help, Ben passed his GED test after his eighteenth
birthday and got into Delgado Community. Two years later, he quit his
position as the professor’s assistant and started at UNO as a junior, thanks to
Schreiber’s pulling of a bureaucratic string here and moving a stack of papers
there. Ben came to UNO with a scholarship for gifted literature scholars with
Schreiber his strongest advocate.
Ben remembered thanking the professor so many times when he learned
about being accepted into UNO. He felt silly—“embarrassed” was more the
right word—for being overly thankful. But he was.
“No one has ever cared so much,” he wrote in a Hallmark card. He never
had a chance to mail it off or give it to him. It sat in a drawer in his desk in
his dorm—his very own room, the first in his life.
—
At the end of his first semester, Ben was invited to Schreiber’s year-end
dinner. It came as a surprise to Ben: the dinner was just for the professor’s
graduate students. He was the only undergraduate, but Schreiber said, “You’re
on their intellectual level.”
He arrived at Schreiber’s place early, a tub of store-bought cookies under
one arm. He thought it was important to bring something.
There was one other student when Ben arrived, a girl who had curly brown
hair and orange freckles on her pale cheeks. The frames of her glasses made
her eyes look bigger than they really could have been and her turtleneck shirt
made her look skinnier and taller than she was.
Schreiber introduced her as Stella and then he pointed at Ben with his
hand and said, “The junior I’ve been telling you about,” which made Ben
blush. Elaine was explaining to Stella about the art they collected. While her
specialty was modernism, she collected Asian art—ceramics, lacquerware,
woodblock prints. Ben followed them around the living room as Elaine talked
about her collection. The doorbell rang and two other students came in. They introduced
themselves and were pouring bottles of wine when the doorbell rang again
and another student entered. All of them were white, and Ben had trouble
telling them apart. For the evening, he noted a particular feature each had and
in his mind called them that. The guy wearing a blue cardigan was called
“Cardigan.” The other guy who had a nose ring became “Rings.” And the girl
wearing knee-high, multicolored socks was named “Socks.”
“Tati is not feeling well,” Cardigan announced. Ben could not imagine
anyone among them being named Tati and assumed it must have been short
for something else.
They had all come from across the country to work with Schreiber. Most
of them were studying poets and their works. Rings and Socks were both
doing their dissertations on Emily Dickinson, while Stella interjected to say
that she didn’t care for Dickinson that much.
“Take away my feminist badge!” she trumpeted. “I don’t like her
experimentations. It just isn’t my taste. If you’re gonna say something, say it
straight, don’t stay it slant, for Pete’s sake.” Stella, Ben learned, was a secondyear PhD student, and she was the outlier out of all of them. Her dissertation
was going to be about more contemporary writers. She liked the dirty realists
most of all. (“I would let Raymond Carver fuck me,” she would say later that
night.)
Cardigan, who threw away his research and was starting all over again on
something about Flannery O’Connor, held up his wineglass to say that he
agreed and that he didn’t like the political correctness of the day and that it
hindered good, serious scholarship. If only Bob Dole were president,
Cardigan said. He’d voted for Bob Dole, and life would have been different if
Bob Dole had won. Sometimes he called Bob Dole “Bobby.”
The dining room was set with eight plates for the six students plus the
hosting couple. Elaine took away one set since Tati wasn’t able to make it,
which she said was “a shame.” The smell of what must have been roasting
chicken drifted out from the kitchen as both Schreibers ran back and forth
between the kitchen and dining room, each time carrying a bowl or plate of
food for the table. When they got up, Ben felt, as if by reflex, he had to get
up, too. The first time he did it, Elaine patted his hand.
Before dinner started, Professor Schreiber said he wanted to have a word.
“Every year at the end of the first semester, I love to bring together my
best pupils for a dinner celebration. A life in academia is not easy. It’s
thankless work. And obscure work!” Here everyone laughed. “But we are
doing important work. We’re adding some great and necessary thinking to
our fields, and the canon will be better for it. This dinner celebration is not
only for what we have done but what we will do.”
“Hear! Hear!” someone said.
“To the stuff of life!” Schreiber said, and everyone raised their glasses and
drank.
It was not the first time Ben drank alcohol, but it was the first time he
tasted wine. It surprised him how sweet it was, how very unlike the beers he’d
had. And with that, the dinner began.
—
At one point, after the main course but before the dessert—a choice between
pecan and apple pies, frozen because the couple still didn’t have time—
Cardigan, who wasn’t wearing a cardigan anymore, asked Ben what it was that
he was studying.
“You’re the undergrad he’s always yakking about in class. The one doing
comparative lit,” he added.
“That’s him?” Rings asked. “I didn’t know that.”
“We’ve read your paper, you know,” said Stella.
“I remember the title: ‘False Temporalities in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary:
The Misuses of Time and Realism and the Advent of Postmodernism,’ ”
pronounced Socks.
Ben blushed. Outside of the library, outside of Schreiber’s office, it
sounded ridiculous. Who out there cared about Madame Bovary or Flaubert?
His mother had wanted them, Tuấn and him, to one day have proper,
practical jobs. Ben would be a lawyer, she told him, and Tuấn would be a
doctor. They would use their minds and skills to make the world a better
place. None of that happened. Nothing ever happened the way you wanted.
“I only liked the title,” Cardigan was saying.
“It was a bit underdeveloped,” said Socks. “I mean, it seems clever on one
level but then unsubstantiated on another.” She used her hands as if to
diagram the situation in question, her right one atop the left.
“But it was good enough for the SCMLA in March,” Rings added.
Someone gasped.
“Oh,” said Stella. “He’s bringing you?” Her mouth was open, shocked, it
seemed, but also disappointed. “I didn’t know that. I didn’t know he made a
decision yet.” Her hands shook as she set down her half-empty wineglass.
“He did,” several chimed in.
“He did?” Stella asked again.
Socks said, “He did,” and held her hand.
“Yeah,” said Cardigan and finished his wine. “We should be happy. Very,
very happy. Ben is so lucky! We should congratulate him. Congratulations,
Ben! Congratulations! Everyone should congratulate him. C’mon, now!” He
pointed his empty glass at Ben. When no one said anything, when he was
greeted with complete silence, Cardigan yelled, “Everyone, congratulate
him!”
Everyone laughed and Cardigan put down his glass violently. “And it
seems like his kind is always lucky. I mean.” He laughed. Socks touched his
arm and told him to take it easy. For a second, she held both of her friends as
if they were in a séance. But he pulled away, knocking her arm off the table.
“They’re everywhere these days, you know,” Cardigan continued. “These
Chinese kids. And you’d think they’d just stick in the sciences and math and
all that junk and you think just because you’re an English major, you’re safe
because these kids, these always-lucky kids, don’t even know English. It’s not
even their first language. But Ben here, Ben, buddy ol’ boy—if that’s even his
real name—he proved us wrong! He got a scholarship ride here, and now he’s
going to South Central!”
Socks pulled Cardigan’s empty wineglass away and stood up. “I’m going to
check in with Schreiber. The pies,” she said, then went off.
“Your paper isn’t worth shit,” Cardigan said. He banged his hand on the
table and got up. Ben stood up and backed away. Everyone else gasped.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Ben said. He tried to steady his
voice. He took another step back.
Cardigan’s face was red and sweaty. “You know you’re not supposed to be
here. You and I both know that. Goddamn, everyone here knows that.”
Just then the kitchen door swung open and Schreiber yelled, “Enough of
this!”
He stood at the top of the table and held on to his seat. “This is supposed
to be a celebration,” he continued. His accent came out more noticeably.
German, Ben remembered Schreiber telling him. “A celebration, and I will
not have anyone criticizing anyone else’s work. This is a dinner. We leave
academics out of this. We leave politics out of here.”
He paused and looked at each of them. “Ben is as intelligent and
hardworking as anyone in this room. He is probably more civilized than some
of us.”
Cardigan put on his cardigan and walked out of the room. They heard the
front door slam shut and a car start up.
Then, looking uncomfortable in his own home, Schreiber called to his
wife, “Are the pies ready yet, Elaine?” and left for the kitchen.
“This could be a Raymond Carver story. It has everything. It could
definitely be a Ray story,” Stella said later that night, smoking outside after
dessert, as zydeco music—something celebratory, Schreiber said—played
inside. “I’m gonna write that story.”
—
The night ended with a slurry of apologies and goodbyes. No one had touched
Ben’s cookies, and he went back inside to get them as everyone left. Schreiber
followed.
“Thanks for sticking up for me out there,” Ben told Schreiber. “You didn’t
have to.”
Schreiber shook his head and laughed. “Those students. They get into a
PhD program and they think they’re better than everyone else. Even me,
sometimes—you should see some of them in class or department meetings!
But, like I always tell them, talent isn’t limited. Anyone can be talented. It’s
about nurturing. And you, you, Ben, you shall be my legacy.” He pointed at
the cookies, and Ben let him have one.
“Thank you,” Ben said as he was about to leave. “I wouldn’t know what to
do without you, where I would be.”
On the bus ride to campus, Ben wondered how long he had to be grateful
in this type of situation and if gratefulness amounted to outward expressions
and actions or if it was simply a state of one’s mind, a feeling. How much did
he owe this man and what did this man mean to him? He wondered if this
was what having a father felt like, though he wasn’t looking for that. His
father, dead or alive, was out of the picture, had been out of the picture for a
very long time. Any idea he had of him was null. And his mother, too, as a
matter of fact. As the bus let him off, he reminded himself to write to his
brother. He tried for a postcard each month but had been too lazy lately.
The entire student body was gone for winter break. The campus was
empty. A cloud covered the moon. It was cold, but not too cold. His hands
slipped into his pockets as he walked through an empty parking lot and then
into his dorm building, up the steps, and down the hall to his room. He didn’t
bother turning on the light or closing the blinds. Just slept off the feeling.

Hương     1998

There was a boy,” Hương said, closing the bedroom window. She had
been late coming home and Vinh was already in bed, a newspaper
folded in his lap. She wanted to tell him why she was late. “There was
a boy” was the only way she could have started. On the drive home through
torrents of rain, his dejected face was all she remembered.
“It was fifteen minutes to closing,” she said. “I was sweeping up, wiping
down the tables, totaling the sales. Miss Linh was gone, of course. I was the
only one. No one ever comes in at that time. You can’t do much with nails in
fifteen minutes except maybe trim them.”
She closed the door and sat on the bed.
Outside, the rain came down slanted, the wind was so much. It was always
like that here. Tomorrow morning there would be pools on the road and water
running like small streams in the gutters. The bayou would be engorged for a
week then shrink back to its normal size.
“Then I saw this boy coming toward the store. He must have been about
nineteen or twenty, and he wasn’t from around here.”
“How did you know that?” asked Vinh. “That he wasn’t from around
here?”
“He looked…odd,” she said. “He was wearing a coat like he was cold, but
you know what the rain’s like here.” Wet but hot. At times violent, at times
dreamy, even in October. “He didn’t know what the weather’s like around
here, is what I’m saying. That’s how I knew. And besides, he had this look on
his face like he was lost. Like he wasn’t sure where he was, and, spotting the
shop, didn’t know if he should come in or not. “At first, I tried to ignore him. A guy like that wouldn’t want his nails done
anyway. But he came closer then, and he put his hands around his eyes and he
leaned into the window. I was sweeping and he was looking in, this boy in a
coat. We both stared at each other for a minute. I didn’t want him to come in
because it was nearly closing and I had Khánh Ly playing.”
Vinh threw the paper to the floor. It smacked the wood and startled
Hương.
“But then he moved toward the door and came in. What could I do then?
What else could I do?
“ ‘How are you?’ I asked him, leaning the broom against the front desk. All
of a sudden, I felt ashamed of the music and the broken store sign and the
Buddha in the corner. What was this boy doing here? This boy in a nail salon
on a Thursday night? It didn’t make any sense.
“But then I saw his face. He looked familiar, like a face I’ve known before,
like when you watch a movie and you know a face but you can’t name it. His
face reminded me of Vietnam.”
“How could a face remind you of Vietnam?” asked Vinh, turning to her
now. “He was either Vietnamese or he wasn’t.”
Even Vinh’s face didn’t remind her of Vietnam, didn’t bring to mind the
dirt paths, the bicycles, the wild barefooted kids of her youth, the wet smell
of a river, so unlike the dirt smell of New Orleans. She had lived here for so
long now, but she would always remember there.
“I don’t know. He looked like người Việt. He had the bone structure, the
broad nose, the round face. Yet he wasn’t người Việt, either. His hair was cut
close to his head. It would curl, I could tell, if he’d let it grow out. He was
part Mỹ đen.
“He was pretty in a way,” she said. “A pretty boy. Pretty in the way a child
should be. When you hold a child in your arms—he was that kind of pretty.
Anyway, you wouldn’t understand. You don’t have any children.”
Here she paused to see if Vinh changed his face. When he didn’t, she sat
down on the bed.
“He didn’t answer, so I pointed to the clock and told him we might not
have enough time for a manicure because that’s the only thing men get if they
come to get anything, and they don’t come in by themselves. I told him what I
would’ve told anyone else: that we would open the next day at ten, and we’ll
have more people there to help him with anything he wants. I should have
continued sweeping to show him I was busy closing up, but then he unzipped
his coat and took it off.
“ ‘Maybe you can help me,’ he said. ‘I’ve been walking for a very long
time. Since this morning.’
“I then remembered that it had been raining all day. I hadn’t noticed
because I was inside the whole time. And he didn’t have an umbrella. Poor
boy! No umbrella! That was why he was wearing the coat. The coat was
soaking wet.
“It was then that I walked over and took his coat. Up close, I saw he had
beautiful but sad eyes. His nose, it was either runny from a cold he was
getting or it was the rainwater. I wanted to get a tissue and clean him up, but I
told myself one thing at a time. First, the coat.
“It was still dripping so I took it in both hands and twisted it, this big
thing, wringing the water out, the way we used to do laundry, you know. And
all this rainwater became a puddle on the floor.”
Hương looked over at Vinh, who had already stretched out under the
covers, his head pressed into the pillow. His eyes were closed.
“I’m still listening,” he said. He opened his eyes. “All ears. I swear.” He
reached over and turned off his lamp. Hương turned hers on.
“Listen,” she continued. “After I hung the coat on the rack, I came back,
and he was still standing there, listening to the music. It was that tango song
about a girl who wants to dance, but she can’t find a partner and it’s getting
late and she has to return to her poor village. It must have sounded like
gibberish to him, this song. I wanted to turn it off, tell him sorry. I didn’t turn
it off, but when I told him I was sorry, he didn’t answer, so I walked closer.
“ ‘I’ll stay a little late,’ I told him. ‘Manicures don’t take too long.’ ”
If he wanted a manicure, she would give it to him. If he didn’t, what else
could he want? Hương had heard of homeless people coming into stores at
the last minute, begging for a place to stay. She knew, looking at this boy,
that she would have said yes.
Hương went on. “He took his hand and wiped his nose and then looked at
me as if he just noticed I was there. When he saw me, his eyes lit up like he
remembered why he was there in the first place, like this was the place he was
looking for all along and I was the woman he needed to help him. Without
waiting another second, he dug into his pockets, trying to find something.
“For a minute, he looked like he was lost in his own pockets. Like he
didn’t know if what he was searching for was there. I was standing, trying to
guess what it was, like it was a game. Would he pull out a map? A piece of
paper with an address? Then he pulled it out. It was in his back pocket.”
Hương smiled; the best part of the story was coming.
“And I was right, in a way: it was a piece of paper. He unfolded it and I
saw it was wet, too. This boy, he was wet all over. And it was at that moment
that I felt I wanted to become his mother. I wanted to sit him down, make
him cháo like I used to make the boys when they were sick. I wanted to tuck
him into bed. Tell him everything was all right. Whatever it was that was
troubling him, it couldn’t be that bad. You just had to look at it a different
way, I wanted to say.”
Her own boys were older now and away. Tuấn lived in Tremé. When he
moved, she had begged him to stay: “We don’t have much family,” she was
telling him as he packed. “We’re not like those white people with aunts and
uncles and grandparents. You, me, your brother, that’s all we have. That’s why
we have to stick together.” More than the troublesome girlfriend, more than
befriending the wrong people, she feared her sons’ going away, leaving her,
abandoning their family. She implored Tuấn to stay, but all he did was smile
and laugh. “It’s only Tremé, Ma! I’ll come and visit. You can come and visit.”
Ma, instead of má or mẹ, told her everything.
Her youngest, though, Bình, he ran away. She woke up one morning and
he was gone. She didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye. At first, she kept
quiet about it. She was thinking about the neighbors and then her own shame
—How could she not control her own son? Didn’t she teach him to respect his
elders? These questions soon became: Why wasn’t she a better mother? How
could she hurt her own flesh and blood? She stapled missing flyers around
town, until Tuấn came to her one evening with a bundle of them ripped off
from telephone poles.
“Enough, Ma,” he said.
“You’ve found him? Where is he?”
“No, Ma. He’s fine. He’s doing okay. Trust me. He’s fine, he’s happy.”
Over the next few months, when she brought him up again, Tuấn was
prepared. “Look,” he’d say and pull out a postcard. He had his father’s
handwriting.
She decided then: If being away from her brought him happiness, who was
she to stand in his way? Who was she to say no to her sons? That’s what it
came down to when it came to raising children: their happiness.
Yet at times she wondered, with a sense of dread in the pit of her stomach,
what they were doing and how they were feeling, the both of them. Did they
get enough to eat? Were they in good health? She had only ever wanted to
protect them and prepare them for what’s next, whatever that might have
been. In Vietnam. Aboard that boat. Those first days in New Orleans. It was
why she’d hidden their father from them. Whatever happened to Công,
whatever his reasoning, the fact was his love did not hold up, he was never
coming, and that was what he chose. How could she tell her sons that?
Wouldn’t they be hurt—devastated—to know they weren’t worth the journey?
Better if they knew a comforting lie, she thought, if that lie meant a kind of
shelter.
“It reminded me of a conversation,” she said to Vinh. “A conversation I
had years and years ago with Tuấn, before Bình was even two years old. He
had this frog, you see. We caught it in the bayou. He named it Toto. We kept
it in a Tupperware container with tall walls but never sealed it, so he could
breathe. But then one day, Toto was lost. He must have hopped out, jumped
out the window or something. I remember Tuấn cried so much, like he had
just been shot or someone had died. We looked all over the house, but Toto
must have escaped, I told Tuấn. I told him that he was free somewhere, that
Toto wasn’t really lost, just free.”
She had wanted to tell the boy that story. Perhaps it would make him feel
better. Perhaps he would leave with a smile. Perhaps all his problems would
be solved.
“So the boy unfolded the paper,” she said. “And he came walking toward
me. I began to ask him: ‘Did you lose something? Was it a cat? Was it a dog?
A frog, maybe?’ I was convinced it must have been one of these things. Then
he handed it to me.
“It was a picture of a man. A Black man in a clean marine uniform with
brass buttons and a white hat. An American flag in the back. I stared at it for
a second and then looked up at the boy.”
Was he looking for his father? An uncle? No, it must have been his father.
They looked nearly identical—that was undeniable. Did his father live here a
long time ago, before Miss Linh bought the building and made it into a nail
salon?
“ ‘Have you seen this man?’ the boy asked me.
“At first, I didn’t understand. I saw many people; how could I remember
just one of them? Then the boy said he used to live in New Orleans. He and
his mother, he said, used to live in government housing on the outskirts of the
city. He said he remembered a bayou in the back and how dirty it was. He
said he remembered the metal gates in the front. It sounded like Versailles,
very much like Versailles, but he didn’t say Versailles.
“But if he had lived here, I would’ve remembered him, wouldn’t I? If
someone was from somewhere you lived, you would remember them,
wouldn’t you?
“I didn’t tell him any of this, though. I was quiet. I kept listening. So he
went on.
“ ‘I was born in Saigon,’ he said. ‘I never knew my father, but my mom was
sure he was from New Orleans. Said she remembered it in a conversation one
time or in a letter. That’s why she moved here after the war. But she gave up.
We moved to San Jose then to be with my aunt.’
“I looked at the photograph then back at the boy in his rain-soaked
clothes. Did he fly here? Did he drive? All that effort! I mean, some things,
they’re lost, but what was lost is perhaps best forgotten. The past is the past.
Most of us know this. I know this. You, Vinh, you know this. But this kid—
why didn’t he know that? What made him come back?

“At the same time, I wanted to tell him that his father was around in the
city somewhere. It was a gut feeling. It’s a big city, but it isn’t that big. When
it comes down to it, New Orleans is the type of place where everyone knows
someone else you know. It’s possible to know everyone here in that way. But I
couldn’t tell him that,” said Hương. “I couldn’t be cruel.
“ ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know who this is.’
“I handed the picture back, and he looked at it longingly one last time
before folding it and placing it into his back pocket.
“ ‘Thanks anyway,’ he said.
“I went to get his coat and he left. It was only after he left that I
remembered his name. I remembered him as a child, so small and quiet you
sometimes forgot he was there. I remembered his mother.”
Sitting on the bed, Hương remembered how he always scowled as a boy.
That, along with his shyness, made everyone in Versailles somehow
suspicious of him, mean to him, though he was only a child. Once, she
remembered, she found him out back by the bayou in the middle of the night.
He was holding a large cardboard box, something that once held a large
appliance. She asked him what he was doing, and he told her he was trying to
get back to his Vietnam: they left on a boat and he thought they could go
back on a boat. His response took her breath away. She didn’t know what to
say to him then. So she just shook her head and told him he had to go home.
She remembered that scene now and wondered what she could have said,
what she should have said, and if that could have changed the outcome of
things.
“What do you make of all of it, Vinh?” Hương looked over and saw Vinh
was already asleep.
It was still raining outside; the wind had picked up some more.
Hương wondered if the boy was still walking around New Orleans now,
head down, pushing against the falling water. She wished she could have
helped him, could have picked out the father he’d lost in the crowd.
She imagined the reunion—the tears, but also the questions that needed to
be answered. Why had he left? Why had he never come back? Where was he
all this time?
In another life, the boy would find his father and they would be happy. In
another, he would find him and everything would be ruined: his father had left
him in Vietnam, never thought about him in the last twenty years, resented
him. In yet another, it would have been the father who came to her that night.
She imagined her own sons flying to Vietnam and wandering the streets
aimlessly. How lost they would be. How disappointed they would become.
What sadness they would encounter that she could not protect them from.

Hương   1999

A Vietnamese woman called Hương with the news. She told her her
husband had died.
“Husband?” Hương was confused. It was five in the morning. The sun
was not yet up.
“Chị Hương,” the woman said. “You were the first wife. You must come.
He will not rest.”
Later that day, a thin white envelope arrived by express mail from
Vietnam. Inside, Hương found a small clipping, only a few inches wide, from
a newspaper glued to the front side of a postcard, covering a picture of a
government building:
Professor Trần Va ˇ n Công, 43 years old, of District 2, died of lung
cancer. He is survived by a wife.
Hương read and reread the obituary on the airplane. She reread the date:
August 4, 1999. What was she doing on August 4, 1999, just a few days ago?
What was she doing when Công took his last breath?
“He started smoking,” she said to no one in particular. Tuấn slept in a seat
across the aisle, and Vinh had been angry and silent since the letter came.
Hương told Vinh he didn’t have to come, but he insisted—for her own
safety, he said—though she was sure he was jealous. Hương said that she
wasn’t in love with Công anymore. Công was married to someone else. And
she had him, Vinh.
She opened her window shade and was surprised to see water. She wanted
the water to be blue, like in the maps. In her memory, it was blue the first time she flew over, a fluorescent blue that was strange and wonderful and
alive. On the boat ride, she remembered the water being black and
threatening. The water was black now, too, but flat; it looked plain and
boring. Disappointed, Hương closed her eyes and tried to remember what
Công looked like and why this woman, his wife, had called to tell her the
news and ask her to come.
“I feel his spirit,” she had said. “He will not rest.” The woman made it
sound like Hương would be doing her a favor.
—
As they walked through customs, people swarmed beyond the glass that
separated the inside of the airport from the outside that was now Ho Chi
Minh City. Hương felt like one of those celebrities she saw on TV, greeted by
screaming fans as they stepped off their planes.
Lan, Công’s wife, would be among them. Lan had said, over the phone,
that she was a short and simple woman, whose hair was stringy and flat so she
tied it in a bun. Her clothes were simple, too.
“Not extravagant clothes like you have in America,” Lan said. “They’re
simple clothes. I’m a practical woman, chị Hương—có hiểu không?”
Lan might as well have been describing everyone in Vietnam. They all
looked the same: small, tired, dirty. Hương felt pity for them, then she felt
guilty for feeling that way. They were her countrymen, and she was returning.
Her eyes scanned the crowd as a customs agent inspected her bag. He
tapped her shoulder and held up a makeup purse. Plastic and transparent, it
looked as harmless to her as anything else. Its contents—her compact,
lipstick, a brush, a small pack of ear swabs—couldn’t hurt a fly if she tried.
“Cô,” said the customs agent. “You can’t bring these in here. These are
illegal.”
“What do you mean illegal? It’s makeup. Women everywhere—”
“Cô không phải đang ở Mỹ. Rules are rules here,” he replied with a smirk.
He had a sloppy way of pronouncing words. He had too-thick eyebrows and
oily skin. Then she realized how young he was. Perhaps Bình’s age, this boy
was born after the war. “Rules are rules,” he repeated, raising his caterpillar
eyebrows.
Vinh pushed her aside. “Here, take it.” He threw a crumpled American
bill at him, grabbed her bag, and moved her along. Tuấn followed behind.
They passed through the doors and an old woman grabbed her. “Phương?
Phương? Is that you? It’s your Auntie Bích!”
“Không,” said Hương, pulling back her arm. “I’m not your niece.” She
walked on.
Another woman, a younger one, grabbed her wrist. “Is that you?” the
woman asked.
Hương stopped. “Are you Lan?” she asked. “Are you Công’s wife?”
The woman paused. “Yes,” she said. “This way; I have a taxi waiting for
you.” She pulled Hương through the crowd, pushing anyone else who got in
her way while Vinh and Tuấn trailed behind.
When they reached the curb, the woman let go of Hương’s hand. “Five
American dollars, please,” she said. She stuck out a palm.
“What?”
“I walked you through this crowd, didn’t I?”
“Who are you?” Hương asked.
“How about one dollar? I have two kids to feed.”
“Get out of here,” Vinh yelled, shooing her away.
“Who asked you, anyway?” the woman said to Vinh.
“Đi!” Vinh said, and the woman ran back into the crowd without another
word. “Panhandler,” Vinh said.
Hương turned back. “Lan?” she yelled through the crowd. “Lan? Lan?”
At last, she spotted a poster board sign: Chi Hương va Gia đình từ New
Orleans. She rushed over.
“Lan?” Hương asked the woman.
“Chị Hương?” The woman looked at Hương intensely, then her eyes
opened widely in recognition: Yes, I do know this woman. On the walk to the
waiting van Lan told Hương, “It’s like I’ve known you in another life. Yes,
that’s what it must have been, why you look so familiar.”
—
Công had settled in Ho Chi Minh City, across the river, in An Lợi Đông,
District 2. His wife kept a calm voice as she directed the van driver down a
long stretch of highway and down smaller streets. Behind, the city—its
buildings still under construction—faded.
“I’m sorry I was late,” Lan said. “The funeral preparations. We’re behind
on everything. I’m behind on everything.” The body had been cremated the
way Công had wanted, but there was still more to do. She had not yet notified
all the extended family, had not yet sent out the mourning garments, the
white headbands and the thin tunics. She had trouble deciding which poems
and prayers to have read at the memorial ceremony. Decisions were so easy
with someone else. Now, alone, she told Hương, everything was up to her.
Remembering her own first days in New Orleans, Hương almost said she
knew how Lan felt but stopped herself from saying it.
“You must be strong, Lan,” she said instead.
Lan said she had not even given Công a posthumous name for his afterlife
yet. She was afraid if she didn’t choose a tên thụy soon, his spirit would not
leave. He would show up every time someone called his name and his family
would suffer the consequences of a restless spirit. Think of not being able to
go home, Lan said; it could make one mad. Lan didn’t believe in much, but
she believed in this: that life was a temporary stop, and death a journey home,
wherever that was.
Công never cared much for religion and neither did Hương. She asked
herself how Công could have fallen in love with this type of woman.
The van stopped on the side of the road. Lan hopped out with a flashlight.
Together the four of them walked a dirt path that cut through a thicket of
trees.
“You see these trees, Tuấn?” Hương asked aloud. “These are rubber trees.
Like in your shoes or tires.” She had to look back to make sure Tuấn was still
there, he was so quiet. For half a mile, they walked until the path ended and
they came to a clearing and a house with marble steps. Lan slid open the front
door.
Inside was spacious, bigger than Hương’s Versailles apartment. Compared
to Versailles, Lan’s home was a palace. The polished wood floors led to
polished, clean rooms, several of them, immaculate with neat beds, white
sheets, and bamboo art panels on the walls. It felt like an insult, this house.
What you could have become, who you could have been, where you could
have lived. As Lan led them to their rooms, she told them it was built for the
entire extended family. With the family wealth on her side, she wanted a
family home, where everyone could belong. But no one ever made it to the
house. After she showed Tuấn his room, Lan walked Hương and Vinh to
theirs.
“Sorry it’s a small bed,” Lan said. “We usually don’t have guests. Maybe a
family friend, but no one else.” She turned on the light and wiped a finger on
the sheets as if checking for dust. “You need more pillows,” she declared.
“Don’t,” said Hương. “We couldn’t have asked for more. Thank you, Lan.
Thank you.” Hương shut the door. There was a long pause before Hương
heard footsteps walking away, bare feet slapping the floor, repeating until they
faded behind another door.
—
The next day was Wednesday. The memorial would be held Saturday, the
most auspicious day, according to Lan. They would walk, along with Công’s
lifelong friends, through the neighborhood to a creek at the edge of the
woods, where they’d let his ashes float.
When Hương woke up, Vinh was gone, though she heard his voice
outside. He stood leaning against a doorway in the back of the house. “You
and me have a lot in common, then,” she heard Vinh say when she got to the
door.
Outside, Lan squatted in front of a hole in the ground where a grill rested
over a fire. She placed a wok over it and threw in minced garlic.
“Chị Hương,” Lan said. “Did you sleep well?” She fanned the fire. The
garlic sizzled. She added more oil.
“I slept well enough,” Hương answered.
Lan smiled and threw in vegetables and meat. The frying meat sounded
like electricity until it was put out with fish sauce and steam rose from the
wok. She tossed the vegetables and used chopsticks to turn over the pieces of
meat.
In another life, they would have been rivals, vying for the same heart and
the same lives. But in this life, Lan had won, and a pang of jealousy came
over Hương. It was unjustified, she knew, though it didn’t make her feel any
of it less.
“Let me,” said Hương, walking over the threshold and toward Lan. “You
look tired,” she said. Then, looking at Lan, Hương realized she did look tired,
not a sleepless tired, but a gripping weariness that seemed like it took hold
weeks or even months ago and did not let go, did not give any sign of letting
go. “I’ll finish cooking breakfast. You rest.”
Lan fussed but gave in. When she was gone Hương asked Vinh, “What do
you think about her?”
“What is there to think about?” he said. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know what I think,” she said. “What should I think?”
—
After breakfast Vinh and Tuấn left for a city tour, leaving Hương and Lan to
plan the memorial. They walked through the house and out into the backyard
where Lan had been cooking earlier. Beyond the sheltered outdoor cooking
space, there was a small plot of land with a clothesline hanging between two
wooden posts. Beyond the clear plot, thick trees blocked out the rest of the
world.
Hương looked up into the sky. A gray cloud bloomed into a bigger one. A
flock of birds flew past.
“It’s supposed to rain today,” Lan said, squatting down over a basin of
water. She poured in soap and began scrubbing. There was plenty to wash.
“I met Công while he worked at Open University,” Lan said. “We were
both in the Humanities Department, though we taught different things.” She
told Hương about the classes she had taught. A folk poetry class, a class on
folk songs. “The trick,” she told Hương, “was to tell the officials you were
teaching about Vietnam’s honorable peasant history. But then in the
classroom, you do something else completely different. Hồ Xuân Hương
didn’t just write about peasant things, you know.” She laughed and Hương
tried to do the same, though she had no idea what Lan was talking about.
Hương found herself, in her mind, competing with this woman. She
imagined she was in a race, but when the gun went off she realized someone
had strapped cinder blocks to her feet. She told herself that she could have
been teaching folk poetry—or a foreign language or even chemistry—if only
there hadn’t been a stupid war. Had they thought about that when they started
the war, she asked herself, that they were ruining so many lives? Yet she
knew this was a lie. She was a housewife from a small village. She would
have always been a housewife from a small village.
“He never told me about you, you know,” Lan said. “He told me he had a
wife who went away after the war with his child.” Hương thought she heard
an accusatory tone in her voice, but decided she was imagining it. “But it was
his mother who told me your name.” She shook a pair of chopsticks to dry
them off and moved on to a spoon.
Hương’s eyes lit up. “Is she still alive?” she asked. “Is his mother still
alive?”
She remembered Công’s mother now, an especially tall woman with a long
nose and tiny eyes. She didn’t want them to leave the country. She didn’t want
Công to leave the country.
“No, she died last year,” Lan said.
Hương remembered the night on the beach. She remembered feeling his
hand one second and then, the next, it was gone. He hadn’t let go, she had
concluded, but he had paused. And she, in the mad rush, in the chaos of the
night, must have gone on without him. Yet still, he hadn’t followed them, he
hadn’t followed her. After years of contemplation, she was sure it was
because of that woman, his mother. He could not leave her behind. That was
at least part of it. At moments Hương hated her, but then she understood his
love for his mother, a different kind of love that bonded them, and Hương
admitted to herself that she would have wanted the same from her sons. She had to ask Lan then, “Did he stay because of her?” Her throat felt dry
and scratchy. “We, all of us, were supposed to escape together. But he stayed.
And we lost contact, of course. Was it because of her? Did he stay because of
his mother?”
Lan paused. A look of thinking came upon her face, and she licked her
lips before continuing.
“The truth is,” she began.
Hương stopped breathing for a second.
“He said his feet stopped moving at the shore,” Lan said. “The coldness of
the water was a shock to him and he couldn’t move.” She finished cleaning a
plate and dried her hands on a towel. Hương did not understand.
“Let me begin again,” Lan said as if realizing a mistake. “He told me,
years into our marriage, about the reeducation camp after the war. In Lăng
Cô, the officers were these skinny boys from the countryside and they hated
Công. They called him the Professor, locked him up in a cell by himself.
During questioning, they asked him the question he most dreaded. What did
he think of French literature, the literature of the colonizers? He knew, when
he entered that camp, they would ask him that question. He had thought
about it ahead of time, but none of the answers he came up with would have
satisfied those prison guards. What could he have said to make them happy?
In truth, nothing. So, he told them the truth,” and here Hương imagined
Công, younger, idealistic—the way he always was in her head—but also
afraid. “Công told them art transcended boundaries, beauty crossed borders.
He said, one can’t contain life and the stuff of life. It was impossible, he went
on, to imprison that; it was impossible, he said, to imprison beauty and truth,
no matter who was in charge of Saigon—no person, no ideology, no
misguided boys.
“He believed that, Công did.”
Hương agreed. He would have said that; he would have believed it.
“The prison guards, they laughed at him then and spat on him. The spit hit
his cheek and before he could wipe it off, they grabbed him by the arms and
took him away from the cell. Outside, they dragged him through the fields.
Tied his hands together; his legs, too.
“ ‘Confess!’ they shouted at him. One of them kicked him.
“ ‘What?’ Công asked, because what did he have to confess?
“ ‘Confess!’ they continued. But he had nothing.
“They left him for an hour. When they came back, they were carrying
buckets of water. They started pouring them on him. The water kept coming.
Bucket after bucket. Wave after wave. Like magic, they did not run out. He
barely had time to breathe before the next one came down.
“They would do this for days, he told me,” Lan said. “For weeks. Can you
imagine? Weeks? Two weeks into the regimen—that’s what they called it—
they stopped feeding him. They only gave him this rice water. But even then,
he was so afraid—scared of the water—he could scarcely drink it. He
endured this for a month before he found a way to escape with a group of
other men. There was a hole near a fence. He escaped by foot.”
Hương remembered Công knocking on their door after five months away.
He’d collapsed into her arms. Her hands still remembered those bones. Even
now, she felt them on her skin. He had told her nothing. Her eyes welled up.
“He decided he had to leave. All of you—him, you, the boy.” She looked
up and around, as if afraid to speak. “Vietnam, he said, was no place for a
family. He would get you out. He had to get you out. So…”
“He planned everything,” Hương interrupted.
“Yes, yes he did. But at the edge of the water, when his foot hit the ocean,
something came back to him. Memories,” Lan said.
Memories, Hương repeated in her head.
“He remembered—he told me—about his trip to France once. It was
before he met you. He was studying abroad for six months. He thought he
would love Paris. He thought he would have wanted to move there. But it was
so different from everything he knew: the food was difficult on his stomach, it
was always cold, the people were rude.
“One night, he was walking the streets of Paris alone after class. He was
tired and he sat down on a bench. He fell asleep. When he woke, he forgot
where he was and couldn’t find his way back. He flagged down a small old
French woman to help him. ‘Where am I?’ he asked her, ‘I am far away from
home,’ but she, seeing who he was, started screaming. ‘Un Chinois!’ she called
him. ‘Un Chinois!’ A Chinese. She started crying for help. No one came. She
spat in his eye and ran away. That was one of the memories he saw as he
stepped foot into the water.
“Then, another memory rushed back to him: the reeducation camp. The
water falling over his head. Those breathless moments. Those men laughing
with revenge in their eyes.
“He said he became another man at that camp. Something, he said, in his
soul broke. How could he ever return to his previous life after all of that?
That was the question he asked himself as his body froze on the shore, on that
water.
“Chị Hương, you have to know this: all he ever wanted was here, in
Vietnam, among his people, in the life he had always known. He realized he
couldn’t have it then. Not ever. He had become a different man. He could not
be the husband you needed. He was not the man you loved. His life was over,
he said, but at least they could start again, they could become something—the
two of you—and it will be beautiful and that was all that mattered. That was
all that mattered to him, chị Hương: that you escaped, that you survived.”
He would be captured again. When he was released, he was put under
house arrest. That was when he sent the letter, Hương realized. That vague
letter. Please don’t contact me again. It is the best for the both of us.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She wanted to be back in
New Orleans suddenly, she wanted to be in her own bed, someplace to nurse
her own grief, hold it tight greedily, let it engulf her.
Lightning blazed the sky, followed by a strike of thunder. Suddenly, rain
poured.
“The clothes!” said Hương, getting up, glad to have something else to talk
about.
“Don’t worry,” said Lan. She motioned with her hand for Hương to sit
back down. “They were wet anyway. And I have more clothes inside besides.”
Hương sat down and watched the clothesline sag. Lan left and came back
with a box of tissues. Lightning flashed again; the wind picked up a little.
Water pelted the ground into mud. It reminded Hương of hurricanes. Though
it wasn’t as strong, it was still frightening. Lan continued washing. Every few
minutes, she stopped to massage her hands.
“I’m sorry you have to hear all that from me, Chị Hương,” she said. “In a
way, I’m jealous you knew him before. You knew the real him.” She started
washing another spoon.
“Let me help, Chị Lan,” Hương said after drying her tears. “You must be
tired. Let me help.” They switched places. Hương cleaned the rest of the
silverware and then the plates and then the bowls before she found what else
she wanted to say, what else she must say.
“There was another baby,” Hương started. “I was having pains before we
fled. I didn’t tell him.” But she did tell him and she remembered thinking
what life they would have together—the four of them—in another country.
She continued, “I had to stop so many times. We were running through the
jungle to get to the beach.”
The rain came down harder. Hương watched as the wind blew at the
clothes. A solid yellow shirt, a pair of brown pants—simple clothes swaying
mournfully. It felt like a terrible, lonesome place to stay during a storm.
After the funeral, they would celebrate Công’s life. There would be, she
was sure, loud music and food and alcohol. The kids would have a table, the
adults their own. They would talk over each other, each proclaiming he knew
Công the best, could give evidence of his great life. Remember when he did
this, remember when he did that, wasn’t he a kind man, a smart person. All of
them would wear white mourning bands around their heads, half smiling in
remembrance. By the end of the night, they would be too drunk to feel the
pain of loss.
“Anyway,” Hương continued, “we decided long ago one of the children
would be named Khoa. Công wanted to name Tuấn Khoa, but I argued
against it.” She had thought it was an ugly name, and, in the end, he
surrendered to her. It was like him to do so, she remembered that; he liked
her happy. “When I gave birth to Bình at the refugee camp, I had forgotten
about Khoa.”
Hương repeated the name. “Khoa.” Now, she realized, hearing the rain and the water stroking a porcelain
bowl in her hands, it was a lovely name. Indeed, the loveliest: the way a short,
abrupt sound from the throat rushed sharply to the lips to be held lovingly
before it left to become a word and disappear in the storm-time air: Khoa, Khoa: K-hwaah.
“Công should have that name,” said Hương, standing up. “His tên thụy. He
would like that name,” she said.
When Hương was finished with the dishes, they both went inside. Lan
gave Hương the mourning garments and showed her the map of the
procession—how they’d pass the library, the temple, and a school to get to
the creek. There they’d scatter the ashes into the water. Công would ride the
current into the Saigon River, then into the Nhà Bè. From there he would be
led out to sea. At some point, she thought, he might even see the Gulf and
Lake Pontchartrain and then perhaps the Bayou Versailles, where she’d lived all these years.

Tuấn   1999

Tuấn wanted to see his old home. After his mother gave him the address,
and after Lan checked the maps to give him the right street name
(because all the streets were renamed), he and Vinh headed out into
Saigon together on a motor scooter. Vinh sat up front because he knew how
to drive, and Tuấn held on to the seat.
Since his mother told him they were going to Vietnam, he’d started
dreaming about the country again. In those dreams, he walked through the
maze of Saigon. The city was wrapped in morning haze, and he couldn’t see
much ahead. He’d take a step forward and immediately forget where he was.
When he got close to something—a store or a restaurant or a church—he
couldn’t make out the words on the sign and became frustrated. He needed to
get back to Vietnam; that was what those dreams meant.
They passed the large concrete compounds of the suburbs and made their
way onto busier streets, stopping at a wide boulevard. Scooters and
motorcycles and bikes and the stray car crisscrossed the road.
Vinh paused and laughed. “I remember!” he said.
“What do you remember?” Tuấn asked.
“The traffic. The awful traffic,” Vinh said. “Just hold on tight.” He revved
up the engine and pulled ahead.
Tuấn let go of the seat and held on to Vinh. “Fuck,” he said.
Everyone else, it seemed, wasn’t bothered by the reckless traffic. A woman
was eating a stick of meat as she sped past them. A child sat sidesaddle as his
bike pulled forward. A motorcyclist popped up his bike and rode on one
wheel before disappearing ahead. Finally, Vinh slowed into a right-hand turn
and then a left and the traffic faded. They rode straight for another five minutes before stopping at a block of storefronts. Some were closed and had
their aluminum doors slid down shut. Others were open, but it didn’t seem
like many people were in them. It was nine in the morning.
Vinh parked the scooter and they both hopped off. Tuấn reached for the
piece of paper with the address.
“This can’t be right,” Tuấn said more to himself than to Vinh. “We lived
on a block with other houses. There’s only…” The store signs told him
nothing; he couldn’t read them. A woman came out of her restaurant and set
out small red plastic chairs and several matching plastic tables. She held a
cigarette in her mouth the entire time until she noticed them and took it out.
“Are we lost, brothers?” she asked.
“No, no,” Vinh answered. “The kid”—he pointed at Tuấn—“he’s looking
for his old home. Before the war. We’re from America.”
“There haven’t been houses here in ages,” she said. “At least as long as I’ve
been here.”
“How long have you been here?” Vinh asked.
“ ’Ninety-one or ’92?” she said. Tuấn looked disappointed. “Do you
remember if it was at the end of the street?” She pointed to the far end, a
couple of yards away. “Or was it closer to the park?” She pointed behind
them at a gated field. A lone boy dribbled a soccer ball.
Tuấn tried to think. He pictured a narrow, tall building with a balcony. He
remembered that much. He wanted to see if he could get up on that balcony
and take a photo looking out. It was what he remembered most, the place
where he waited for his father’s arrival home. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Well, I can tell you this,” said the woman, “when I came here these
buildings were new.”
Tuấn walked past the woman as if not hearing her and down the street.
“Thank you,” Vinh said, following after.
No, this couldn’t be the street, Tuấn thought. He turned around. It was
exactly like his dream—cruelly, a dream come true. Except nothing was
covered in fog. It was all clear and he was still lost.
—
The funeral was more like a party than a funeral. After they walked to the
creek, where Lan let him throw a handful of ashes into the water, the
procession walked back to the house. Food was already laid out and a man
was filling an ice cooler with beers. Music, reedy horns that reminded Tuấn
of bagpipes, blared from speakers. Everyone gathered in small groups for
conversations. Tuấn, not knowing anyone, stood to the side. At one point, Lan
took his arm and walked him around. Công’s son, she would say, and they
would comment on how strong and smart he looked—a spitting image of the
old man, they’d say—and they would tell him how sorry they were. He
wanted to tell them he didn’t know the man. To him, his father had died a
long time ago. He’d grieved already. Now it just felt like everyone was
catching up to the fact, fifteen years late.
By three everyone had left, and Lan cleaned everything up. Tuấn and his
mother tried to help, but she seemed determined to do it alone, so they went
back inside and began packing. They would leave tomorrow morning.
“Did you see the old house?” his mother asked him.
“It wasn’t there anymore.”
“A shame.”
“They must have torn it down, built over it. Nothing but shops now.”
His mother sighed with a defeated look. Her wrinkles seemed more
defined now. She was quiet and still for a while, as if she were remembering
something, and Tuấn wished she would say it aloud, so they could both
remember it together. “A shame,” she repeated and shook her head. Her lips
trembled. Tuấn reached out to hug his mother and she leaned in to him.
“Another shame your brother’s missing all this,” she said.
“I know. I tried to get him to come,” Tuấn said. “He’s not ready.”
“Not ready for what?” She let go and began packing again.
Ready to be back with his family, Tuấn thought, ready to face the death of
a father he never knew.
When Tuấn had called him with the news, his brother had shrugged it off
—“People die every day, T.”
“But he was your father,” Tuấn had said.
“No, he was your father. There’s a difference.”
“You should come. It’s the right thing to do,” Tuấn insisted.
“Have fun,” his brother had said.
Tuấn didn’t tell any of this to his mother, and now she added, “You can’t
expect to be ready for everything. Sometimes things just happen whether
you’re ready for them or not. Haven’t I taught you boys that?”
Before they left, Lan gave him some of his father’s things. “I wouldn’t
know what to do with them. It would only make me cry if I kept them.”
When they landed, it was already ten at night in New Orleans. As Tuấn
turned on his phone, he saw he had five text messages. All from his brother.
“I need to talk to you,” said the last one. “TONIGHT,” it read. It was from
yesterday.
He hoped it wasn’t an emergency. As his mother dropped him off, Tuấn
couldn’t remember the last time he had talked to his brother face-to-face. For
a while, they lived together in his one-room house in Tremé. It was almost
like they were kids again, with beds on opposite sides of the room. Then he
got into UNO, which made Tuấn really proud—his own brother, a college
student!—but also somehow suspicious. How did he pull it off? Who was the
professor he hung out with: Schultz? Schmidt? Scheibe? When his brother
came out, that was what Tuấn worried about: that some older man would take
advantage of him. (Or AIDS, which the newspapers were always talking
about, that gay cancer.) Was that the case? From his dorm, Ben would send
him postcards semi-regularly, the kind you could buy at tourist gift shops. As
time passed, the message would become vague: Doing fine, he would write, or
Am fine, he would say, or sometimes just Fine, which Tuấn thought was an
amazing waste of paper, and their mother thought so as well.
“What’s wrong?” his mother asked him when he got out of the car.
“Nothing, Ma,” he said through the open window.
“Was that your brother? On the phone?”
With his mother and brother not talking to each other, Tuấn was their
mediator. The role tired him sometimes. They were both adults now, and
Tuấn had no idea why he had to be in between their issues. But he hated
seeing his mother’s mixture of anger and anxiety, hated to see it simmer.
“No, Ma,” he said. His heart sped up for a second and then slowed down,
the way it always did when he had to lie. He looked at her to see if she could
tell.
“Oh. Okay” was all she said. As his mother got older, Tuấn noticed, she
put up less of a fight. A resigned dignity came on her face and she nodded.
“Take care, okay?”
“Okay, Ma.”
—
“Zup?” Tuấn texted back after he set down his luggage. He set the phone
down and got something to eat. The only thing he had was Lucky Charms. He
ate it dry. It was Ben’s favorite cereal growing up, and over the last couple of
years he himself had developed a taste for it.
An image popped into Tuấn’s head then: His car sat outside their
Versailles apartment and he was standing there with the hood open. It was the
radiator that needed fixing. It was, for a long time, the radiator that always
broke. He was taking a look at it when Ben ran out and, out of nowhere, said
he wanted to take the car for a drive. Tuấn must have been nineteen or twenty
then and Ben fourteen or fifteen, about to start high school. It was the end of
August—’92 it must have been—and his girlfriend at the time, Thảo, was
away at Catholic camp, where she worked as a camp counselor (funny, he
would think in hindsight). Ben smelled like a pool. He was always going to
the pool back then, at first with his friend but then the two of them stopped
being friends and Ben had to ask for rides or take the bus.
“Why?” Tuấn asked. “You don’t even have a license. You’re not old
enough.” Tuấn filled the radiator with water. It was always heating up; it
needed a way to cool down, that was his thinking.
“Please,” Ben was saying. “Just one time. I just want to know what it feels
like to drive.”
Tuấn remembered smirking. “Fine,” he said. He threw the keys at his
brother, which flew past him and landed in the dirt. He was never good at sports. Within five minutes, Tuấn finished what was left of the Lucky Charms and
his phone glowed green and vibrated. The power of the vibration made it
jump off the table. His brother was calling now. Tuấn took hold of the phone
and, deciding he needed to air out the staleness of the house, walked outside.
“Finally,” Ben said. No hi or hello. “I’ve been calling you all week.”
Tuấn leaned against the house. His legs felt like mush; funny how sitting
for so long made your legs tired. He slid down and looked up at the moon,
and the air around it bent like the mirages he saw in films.
“T, are you listening?” he heard on the phone.
“Oh. Yes. Yes. What’s up?”
“I’m leaving,” his brother said. He sounded far away, like the phone was
on speaker and he, for whatever reason, was whispering.
It made Tuấn whisper, too. “Where you going? And for how long?”
When they were teenagers, his brother kept a map by his desk. He always
wanted to travel. When the chance came up for him to go to Vietnam, Tuấn
was surprised he didn’t want to come. During the entire trip, he kept thinking
how his brother should have been there and how he would have enjoyed it.
And how having his brother there might have made him feel less out of place.
Tuấn rubbed his eyes and looked at his watch. Eleven.
“I’m leaving leaving. Out of the country,” said his brother.
“What?” He rubbed his face. “What do you mean? When?”
“Soon,” he said. Then after a pause, he added, “Meet me at Daisy Dukes.
Now. I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
There was a long silence before Tuấn began talking again. “Why don’t you
just tell me what’s going on right here on the phone?” he said before realizing
his brother had already hung up.
—
Tuấn got his bike from inside the house and began pedaling toward the
Quarter. By the time he got to Daisy Dukes, Ben was standing at the entrance
under a flickering neon sign. He wore an UNO hoodie and jeans, though it
wasn’t too chilly outside, and greeted him with a casual two-finger salute
army-style as Tuấn slowed down and got off. Tuấn locked up his bike and,
wordlessly, they entered the restaurant.
“Long time no see,” Tuấn began as they were seated.
“I’ve been busy,” Ben said. He scratched his head and looked down at the
floor. Tuấn looked down, too, trying to see what Ben was seeing, but he saw
only scuff marks and french fries and napkins and straw wrappers. He looked
up and saw a waitress taking a couple’s orders.
“Hey, do we know her?” Tuấn asked Ben and pointed with his chin. “She
looks familiar. But I don’t know where I know her from.”
Ben turned to look and quickly pulled the menu over his face.
“Fuck,” he said.
“What?”
“Addy Toussaint. I went to school with her. I didn’t know she worked
here. Shit.”
Tuấn remembered now. Addy. A small girl, Haitian, liked chewing gum
and Coke. She came over sometimes on her bike and waited for Ben. He
remembered she was close enough friends with him that his mother was
comfortable having her wait inside the apartment.
He looked at her now. Obviously, she grew up, but her smile was still
childish. The word that came to Tuấn’s mind was innocent, like she wouldn’t
hurt a fly. He wondered what ever happened to the two of them, Addy and
Ben. He was quick to think it was Ben’s fault.
“Tell me when she’s gone,” said Ben, still hiding behind the menu.
“Not yet, not yet.” He tried to hold in his laughter. How childish they were
being, like teenagers hiding from their crushes.
Addy looked over at their booth, and for moment she paused. She looked
like she was about to walk over, but another waitress called her and she
walked away.
“Now,” Tuấn said and let out a laugh he couldn’t help.
“Thank goodness!” Ben said.
“What you ever do to her? You couldn’t have possibly broken her heart.”
Ben didn’t answer. A waitress came by and filled up their water glasses.
“So tell me about things,” Tuấn said now, sighing. “How’s school going?
You got that degree yet? What’s it in?” He looked at his brother, who was still
small—always more of a boy than a man—and tried to find any changes.
When people haven’t seen each other in a long time, there was always a
comment on how different one of them looked. He searched and searched,
but couldn’t find anything different about his brother.
“English,” Ben said. Then, as if to clarify, “Books and reading and writing.
That kind of stuff. I just graduated, actually.”
“Congrats, my man. I’m proud of you. I am. I always wanted to go to
college, you know,” Tuấn said, though they both knew it was a lie.
“Yeah?” his brother answered.
“Yeah. Learning and stuff. A man can go far.”
After they ordered—a bacon cheeseburger and fries for Tuấn and a veggie
burger and a pickle for Ben, who said he was watching his weight—Ben told
him where he was going.
“France,” he said. “Paris. To be exact. There’s a school there. It’s a
summer program.” He looked out the window and took a napkin from the
napkin holder.
“But you’re done with school. That’s what you said.”
“I am,” he said. “I am. It’s something extra. You wouldn’t understand. But
it’s important, you see?”
“Do you need money? Is that what you need, why you needed to talk to
me? Or are you asking for permission?” He pictured his brother on the streets
of Paris. Tuấn had never been, but he’d seen it in enough movies and on TV.
It was always cold and rainy. There were cobbled streets and old cafés and
expensive apartments. He pictured his brother lost and unable to speak the
language, unable to survive. You shouldn’t go, he wanted to say now, you’re
being ridiculous. “You always do what you want.”
“It’s what Dad taught,” Ben interrupted him, “wasn’t it? French literature?
Or language? Or something like that?” He unfolded his napkin and began
tearing off pieces.
The question caught Tuấn off guard. Now he remembered his father’s wife
and her library of books, all in different languages, not just Vietnamese. It
occurred to him that some of those might have been his father’s and not his
father’s wife’s. It made more sense, somehow, in his head.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think he did. In Vietnam he had this big library.”
“I wonder,” said Ben, “if he’s read anything I’ve read.”
—
Ben drives cautiously but above the speed limit. He holds the steering wheel
with both hands and bites his lip; still, he pushes down hard on the gas. Tuấn
wants to tell him to slow down—the car’s engine’s not in good condition—but
his brother seems very focused. Maybe he’s afraid of driving, Tuấn thinks.
Ben slows down when they reach Seabrook and turns in to Wesley.
“Ol’ Wesley,” Tuấn says. “Haven’t been out this way in forever.” He had
dropped out in the middle of senior year. He was always getting in trouble
with everyone there. He was living two lives back then: one in school and one
outside of it. He had to make a choice and at the time he was proud of it, but
sitting in the parking lot with his brother makes him question it.
Ben is looking around as if he’s anticipating something.
“Why’d you drive here?” Tuấn asks.
“Wanted to see it in person before school started,” he says. He rolls down
the window and turns off the engine. The humid night air seeps in. Cicadas
hum in the bushes. Tuấn unbuckles his seatbelt.
“How does it feel,” Tuấn asks, “to drive? It’s freeing, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” Ben says. He opens the door and walks out to the front. He looks
out into the empty parking lot, dimly lit by a single lamppost. Four or five
parking spaces away, two crows fight over a slice of pizza.
Someone was here not too long ago. Tuấn pictures teenagers hanging out
and listening to music and eating pizza. He wonders what he missed by
dropping out. He opens the car door and stands by his brother, who is now
sitting on the hood, staring into the night sky.
“I’m so glad we don’t live in the city, downtown,” Ben says. “You can’t see
the stars down there. Too much light.”
Tuấn looks up. His brother’s right. He’d never noticed it before—all the
stars spotting the sky.
“Did you know,” Ben says, “sailors used to use the stars to find their way
home. They’re constellations, you see, and if you knew what group of stars
was what, what you were looking at, you knew where you were. Isn’t that
neat?”
“Neat,” Tuấn says. (Looking back at this memory, Tuấn will think of his
brother’s inheritance: the intelligence of a man he never met, the ability to
hold on to facts, a pure love of knowledge.)
They sit silently.
Whenever a car passes, Ben stiffens and watches it drive by. When it’s
gone, he lets his body relax and looks disappointed. Tuấn doesn’t know what
to say, so he says nothing.
“I wanted to tell you something,” says Ben, breaking the silence, “but I
forgot what it was.”
“It probably wasn’t anything important,” Tuấn jokes.
“Probably.”
After a few more minutes, Ben tosses him the keys.
“He was right,” Ben says out of nowhere, pointing to the school’s emblem.
“It is a cowboy.” They get in the car and Tuấn starts the engine. He drives.
He’s exiting I-10 when the car starts to smoke.
“What’s wrong?” Ben asks, shouting his words over the sound of the
sputtering engine. “Something’s wrong.”
“Not sure,” Tuấn says. There’s a grinding sound he hadn’t heard before.
He pulls off to the side of the road, across from a shopping center.
Tuấn pops open the hood. The smoke makes him cough, and he waves his
hands to get it out of his face. It’s smoked up before, so this doesn’t surprise
him too much. He had gotten the car extra cheap from a friend of Thảo’s. At
the time, it felt like a bargain. Now, everything makes sense.
Ben rushes over with a bottle of water and Tuấn pours it over the engine to
cool it off. “Thanks!” he says when the smoke clears and the bottle is empty.
“It was for you,” Ben says. Then, “You were coughing.” They look at each
other, then at the car, and laugh.
Tuấn plays around with the engine before he turns and sees a Kmart
across the street.
“They might have something we need,” Tuấn says, already beginning to
walk.
“Like what?”
“Something. We can see. Maybe coolant. I should’ve used coolant in the
first place, not water. I’m stupid.”
“Nah,” says Ben, walking with his brother. “Just bad luck.”
The four-lane road is empty. They walk over. Once on the other side,
though, they realize it’s too late—the store’s closed for the day.
“They close at eight,” Ben says after reading the store hours. “Who closes
at eight?”
“One hour late,” Tuấn said, looking at his watch.
Tuấn leans his head against the window. He could break in. He’s done
worse things in his life. He could list them all in his head, but when he looks
over, Ben’s heading toward the shopping carts in the parking lot.
And when he’s there, he takes one, begins running, and lets go. The cart
flies a few yards until it hits a lamppost at the end of the lot and falls over, the
metal banging against the asphalt. They both laugh, though Tuấn doesn’t
know exactly why, or what is so funny.
He says only, “Hey, I have an idea!” and runs and gets another cart.
It is Ben in the cart first and Tuấn at the handlebar. Pushing the cart down
the street, Tuấn laughs and Ben says this is ridiculous. He exaggerates the
word: ree-dic-coo-liss! He waves his wrists in the air and his hands look like
they’re about to take flight. Not too fast, not too fast—but not too slow, either,
not too slow! says his brother. Tuấn listens and does the opposite of what his
brother wants: fast means slow and slow means fast and everything is fun.
Tuấn pushes for a few minutes, then it’s Ben’s turn. He’s small, but what he
lacks in strength he makes up in energy. They switch back and forth, riding
the cart until Versailles is on the horizon and they make it home. After they finished their meals, Tuấn told Ben to come home with him.
“For a quick second,” he said. He let Ben ride his bike as he followed
behind.
“Where do you live now?” Ben asked as they went down the streets.
“Same place.” Tuấn trailed behind as his brother took the lead.
“Working at Royal Oysters still?”
“Nah. Now I’m a guide for Swampland Tours. It’s an okay gig.”
“You gotta learn a lot for that, don’t you. A lot of history and geography
and stuff like that.”
“I guess so. But I’ve lived here for so long. You know, you kind of just
absorb that sort of stuff.”
“Look! No hands!”
“Don’t do that. You’ll fall. Quit it!”
They turned onto Esplanade and made their way toward Claiborne.
“I’ve lived here all my life, and I still don’t get it,” Ben said. He stood up
on the bike and stomped down on the pedals. The front wheel zigzagged
down the street.
“New Orleans is not for everyone,” Tuấn said, “but it’s home.”
“Yeah,” Ben said, like that was all he had to add. Then, “How was
Vietnam? How was the funeral?”
“Everything changed,” Tuấn said. “I tried to find our old home.”
“Yeah?”
“But it was gone, built over. Even the street names changed. Our street
used to be named after a type of flower. Now it’s named after some guy.”
“Bummer.”
They turned down a dark street. Ben slowed down, so Tuấn took the lead.
“And our father, he was married to this woman. Another professor. He
became a professor, you know, at a state-sponsored university. It was the
same building he worked in before, just a different name. She works there,
too, his wife. Very nice. Quiet. Younger than Mom.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah. It made me wonder.”
“Wonder what?”
About what we hide from each other, Tuấn wanted to say, about what we
don’t know about the people closest to us. “I don’t know.” Then, “There was a
war. Things happen.”
“I know,” Ben said.
They went two more blocks before Tuấn pointed out his house.
“Still blue, I see,” Ben said, pointing at the stoop.
“Fresh paint,” Tuấn said. “Stay here,” he said at the door. “I have
something for you.”
It had occurred to him while they were eating that there was something his
brother needed to have, something of their father’s—a necklace with a gold
coin engraved with some other language. With the way it looked, it was
probably from France or somewhere in Europe. It didn’t belong in Vietnam.
It didn’t belong anywhere in Asia. Maybe their father had been to France and
brought it back. Maybe Ben would know more about it, find it useful in his
travels. It belonged to Ben, Tuấn felt; it was already his.
He rummaged through the pockets of his suitcase until he found it and ran
outside, feeling the small metal chain jingle in his hand. When he opened the
screen door and let it swing closed behind him, he found his brother wasn’t
there anymore. The bike leaned against the house and next to its front wheel
sat an envelope. Tuấn picked it up. It felt heavier than he’d expected. Inside
were a few fifty-dollar bills and some twenties. About five hundred altogether.
Tuấn looked out into the streets and there was nothing. The night was silent.
No cars, no people, no animals, no Ben. Ben was gone. Ben disappeared.
Like he wasn’t even there, like he never was. Not a trace. He was so much
like his father.

Ben    2000

Professor Schreiber told him history happened in cycles. One thinghappens, something reacts to it, it all disappears from consciousness onlyto return later. His mother came to the United States to escape theCommunists. It seemed fitting, then, at least to Ben, that—years later—hewould leave New Orleans and fall in love with a communist—in France.The communist was named Michel, and Ben was stunned by hisruggedness and energy. There was a wildness in him, in his eyes especially,that made him seem out of place in a city as sophisticated as Paris.He reminded Ben of the construction workers he saw in New Orleans.They had rough hands, sun-tanned skin, and bulging muscles from work. Formonths, there was construction work across from Paradise. Ben would watchthem work diligently and marveled at the way their muscle, visible beneaththeir skin, moved—machinelike but at the same time somehow erotic. Themen would come over and ask to refill their bottles of water. When theylearned it was a gay bar, they seemed embarrassed, but it didn’t stop themfrom coming over.Michel could’ve been one of those men—easily. Surely, Ben thought, hecouldn’t have belonged to this world, a dimly lit bookstore in Le Marais,counting money and chatting with customers.That Wednesday night, Michel stood behind the counter, talkingintimately with a girl who must have been maybe Ben’s age, twenty-two at themost, with bobbed hair and a light spotting of freckles that did not make herlook unattractive. Michel wore a beard that made him look older, though hecouldn’t have been that old. Ben pegged him at no older than twenty-five or twenty-six. They were laughing, the two of them, at something one of them had said.It was so funny the girl had to cover her mouth with both hands and catchherself from falling backward. Then the girl looked at her watch and her eyesopened wide.“Tard, tard,” she kept repeating as she gathered her shopping bags. “Late,late.” They pecked each other on the cheeks and she ran out the door.Ben had planned to stay in the city for as long as he possibly could. Hehad graduated in May of last year, and with money from the extra studentloans he took out for living expenses, he was in Paris before he knew it. Hechose Paris because after reading Henri Murger—a used hardcover of Scènesde la vie de bohème in English with yellowing pages—he knew it was wherehe was meant to be. And then there were the news reports always announcingriots and protests over little things—an increase in stamp prices, taxes,changes in school curriculum. Parisians, he was sure, cared more thanAmericans, who were too content for their own good.When he was nearing graduation, Schreiber sat him down in his office. Heasked Ben what graduate schools he was applying to.“I have a good friend up in New York,” the professor said. “Theirdoctorate program is world-class. And you’ll have all the resources you’ll needat your fingertips as well as a sizable stipend, if you’re willing to teach.”“I think,” Ben said then, “I’m going to take a year or two off.”Schreiber was surprised, perhaps even shocked. “You have a bright careerahead of you,” he said. He furrowed his brows. “Why would you do this?”To me was what Ben thought he would add, but the professor didn’t.For the last four years, Ben had been grateful for all that Schreiber hadfreely given to him. Yet there was the feeling of incurring debts—debts thathe could never repay. It was unfair to the professor, who acted like a father tohim. It was unfair to his own father, who he never had the chance to know,who never had the chance to know him.Ben told Schreiber it was time he got some life experience, to spread hiswings on his own, to fly.“And what is your plan? How do you plan on surviving?”Ben told him he would travel to Paris and find a job and settle down. Fromthere he would live and write.“That’s more than a year or two,” Schreiber said. Then, “As long as you’rewriting, I guess that’s at least something!” Schreiber threw his hands in theair; he was being sarcastic—he was mad. In the past, when they hadarguments, they were always theoretical, philosophical, abstract. Ideas wereinvolved but never people. Now it seemed personal.“Remember,” Ben said. “You, too, moved to this country with a dream.”“Go to Paris, then,” Schreiber said. “Go to Paris and be a writer!”Yet when he got to Paris, he hadn’t a clue what to write! His words failedhim. He was waiting to be inspired, though he found himself in bookstoreslike Livres avec des amis—with its charming hand-painted store sign, its bookcarts scattered on the sidewalk—more often than not. It surprised him that,after several months of living in the city, every other day sitting in the aislesof his favorite bookstore, skimming the pages of a book he had no intentionof buying, he had just noticed Michel.At closing time, while the customers emptied from the store, Michel andthe manager reshelved books, rang up customers, and dusted the shelves. Benstayed and fingered the same pages of an antiwar novel he’d been reading forthree days.The manager whispered something to Michel and pointed to Ben. Benwent back to his book, anticipating the tap on the shoulder and the notice thatthey were closing in cinq minutes—those lips saying cinq minutes and thosefingers pointing to a clock or the door or a watch. Ben heard footsteps.Then “C’est trop tard. C’est presque minuit.”Ben cleared his throat. “Cette,” he said, holding up the book.Michel smiled and took the book with him to the cash register.“A good one,” Michel said. When Michel spoke English, his words glidedin a way a native speaker’s words wouldn’t, like he was preparing to sing.“Tourist?” Michel asked Ben.“I just moved here,” he corrected Michel. He felt like he should haveadded something—where he was from, why he was in Paris, what broughthim to the bookstore today. He dug into his pockets and fished out a fewcrumpled euros.“Where from?”“New Orleans,” Ben said. Then, as if to clarify, “America.”“I have friends in America,” said Michel, smirking. “Have you heard ofPeter Johnson?”“No.”“Johnson Peter?”“No.”“You must know Pete Johns, then?”“I’m sorry.”“I’m just joking with you. I do not know any Americans.”“We’re not that bad.”“You’re not that bad.”Ben blushed and took his book. When he was out of the store, he realizedhe’d forgotten his change. The manager locked the door. The bookstore lightsflickered out.“Fuck,” he told himself. He took out his wallet to count his money. Hehad to be careful. The cost of living here was high. Everything was doublewhat it was in New Orleans. In addition to that, he had yet to find a job.He began walking. The January air was cold and made his skin ache withdryness; he held his hands in his pockets. Though it was late and winter, thebars and brasseries were still busy. Passing by, he saw tourists huddled aroundwine bottles. He could tell the tourists from the locals now. Tourists weremore excited to be alive, to be in the moment, while the locals had a gentlemelancholy about them. Both groups could be heard saying “Oh, Paris!” butone said it ecstatically and the other said it forlornly.He heard a tourist group laugh through a window. Over at the next table, awaitress was texting on her phone.Ben made his way through the small, old streets, leaving all the touristsbehind, and headed toward the 10th arrondissement, a mile or so walk, butParis was a walking city and he enjoyed that. He felt as if he finallyunderstood why Vinh went on long walks. It gave you time to think, to bealone. And Paris was that, at its core: a lonely city.When he arrived at the flat, he stopped himself. It was too early. TheAustrians hated when he came home early, though he didn’t understand whythey should have a problem; it was his place, too. They were a boy and a girl,a couple, who came from Graz. Like Ben, they were artists, though notwriters. The boy was a photographer, the girl a singer. Ben was excited toroom with other artists. He believed they would be carefree, exciting, andpassionate: bohemian.Instead, they left dishes in the sink (they would do it later, they said),tossed their clothes every which way (they were their clothes to toss everywhich way they pleased), gave off body odor (deodorant is an Americaninvention). And, despite renting the place together, they didn’t like him thereand tried to convince him he’d be better off elsewhere, if only temporarily.For the first month, the girl left flyers on his bed for concerts and bookreadings and, on more than one occasion, postcard-sized pieces of paperadvertising a gay club on the other side of the city. From anyone else, it wouldhave been an act of kindness. But from the girl, it was her attempt at gettinghim out of the flat and out of the way. Ben could tell by the way she wouldclench her jaw, waiting to see if he would take her bait and leave. It was thelack of intimacy they had in such a space, Ben came to understand. Theyhated to see him home, their shared flat too small for even one person.“Bean,” they would call him, “why don’t you go see the city more?”They’d smile crookedly and speak slow English, the words slurring into oneanother and then yanked in different directions. “Yes, Paris is a beautifulcity.” “They call it the City of Light.” “You can see the light only at night.”Afterward, the girl would say something in German to her boyfriend. Theydidn’t bother whispering, the same way his mother spoke Vietnamese inpublic, which he always found too loud, too obnoxious.That night, he had promised he would stay out longer. “Don’t wait up forme. I’ll be out late, mes amis,” he said, though he was sure they didn’tconsider themselves his friends.“We will miss you!” said the boy.“But don’t make so much noise when you come back!” said the girl.Ben looked up at his room’s window. The Austrian girl was leaning out.She was wearing underwear but not pants or a shirt. She held the curtains toher chest, but they were paper-thin and Ben saw her small breasts anyway.She let a cigarette fall, and he sped away just in case she saw him.Because it was a weeknight, those who were out in the 10tharrondissement were walking home from their jobs, the homeless, or no-goodteenagers. And then there was Ben, a foreigner away from the tourist centerof the city, the historical sites, the hotels and hostels.In America, Ben felt like a foreigner, too, but in a different way. Hecouldn’t have explained it. In New Orleans, he couldn’t have explained howhe and his family got there. There was a boat, a wind led them this way, and,like pilgrims, they settled. Here, in Paris, there was some choice in thematter. It was not a familial myth—a story told and retold, each time a littlebit different, each time a little bit more holy. His hero of a father sacrificedhis life under Communist bullets while his mother played reverse Penelope,cast away from her homeland waiting for her Odysseus until the news of hisdeath arrives and she is transformed into a tragic widow who weaved fablesfor her children (because that was what his life was—a fable, a series oftwisted truths, outright lies). His immigration to Paris was a story made offlesh and bones written by himself, and no matter how horrible things turnedout, he was the one who wrote it. That was the important part—to be thewriter of his own story.He walked into a convenience shop and bought a pack of cigarettes and asoda. The cashier, a brown-skinned man in a turban, was talking into his cellphone and held it on his shoulder as he counted the money. Outside, Ben litup a cigarette and coughed out the smoke.He was disappointed in Paris. When he thought of Paris, his mind driftedto independence and liberty. A European paradise of writers and artists. Heknew the risks he took. He would be poor and there would be challenges ofcommunication, but he’d find others like himself and they’d all be poor buthappy.Instead, the nights were cold, the streets smelled like urine, and theaverage Parisian was rude and just as idiotic as any American.His first week in Paris, a beggar ran away with his backpack and, with it,his wallet, a pen, a French-to-English paperback dictionary, a plastic keychain in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, and a diary. Ben walked two blocksand found it dumped in a trash can. The wallet was gone; everything elseremained.When Ben finished smoking and found himself at a park, he sat on abench and threw away the rest of the cigarettes. Murger lied, he thought.Madame Bovary was right: France was a bore. And Paris, for all its Europeansophistication, was not that different from New Orleans.Everything was clear now. This was no place for him. He would leavesoon enough. Somewhere else he would go, but here he would not stay.—“C’est le gars à la librairie,” Ben heard someone say. He opened his eyes andsat up. Three silhouettes under streetlights. Who could they be? “It’s you,” thesame voice said.Ben readied himself to run, but when the figures came closer, all three ofthem wearing hoodies, one of them looked familiar—Michel, the bookstoreboy.Michel came up close and patted Ben’s face lightly three times. “You areafraid?” he said; his breath was sweet. “Did I scare you?”“Non,” said Ben. “I was just lying down. You surprised me. That’s all.”“You shouldn’t sleep in the streets. It is very dangerous.”“Michel,” said one of the other men. “Qui est-ce?”“Un Chinois?” said the other.“Non,” answered Michel. “American?”“Oui,” said Ben.“Américain,” said Michel. The others let out a sigh jokingly, as if in relief.Ben looked at his watch. It was midnight. He had been asleep for nearly anhour. He checked his pockets to make sure he still had his wallet, and, findingit there, he let himself relax. Then he said, “I have to go. Good seeing youagain.” He began toward his flat, but Michel grabbed his arm.“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “We’re not unfriendly. We’re communists!” Helaughed. The other men did the same.Ben freed himself from his grasp and began walking again, but Michel ranto catch up to him and, to Ben’s surprise, took a step in front of him.“The night is young, mon ami,” Michel said. “Que faites-vous ce soir?”“Going home, I guess,” Ben replied. The Austrians should be asleep bynow.“Going home!” Michel scoffed. He chuckled. “Il est trop tôt. La nuit estjeune! Nous sommes tous les jeunes! Come, come!” He grabbed Ben’s arm.He tried to move, but Michel’s grip was tight. He couldn’t have run fromthis strong man even if he wanted to, and the realization made him smile.“Where are you taking me?”—The other two left Michel and Ben alone. Michel lived fifteen minutes away.It was less of a proper flat than an abandoned apartment complex. A piece ofplywood with condamné painted on it was nailed to the entrance.Michel opened the door. “A perfectly good building,” he said, “left here allalone.”Ben strained his eyes. There was no electricity, possibly. He saw theshadows of a wardrobe, boxes, a table, and on top of that, piles of something.Michel closed the door and Ben jumped as the darkness enveloped them.“Something to drink?” Michel asked. He took out a lighter and presseddown on it several times before a flame jumped up and just as quicklydisappeared.Ben took out his book of matches and handed it over. Michel swiped amatch against the book and a small flame appeared in his hand. He took a fewsteps forward and lit a candle.“You live here?” Ben asked.“Oui.” Michel took Ben’s hand. “Avec mes amis.”Together they walked, stepping over piles of books and bricks and boxes,and then a row of glass bottles. Michel led Ben to the far side of the room,where there was a table and, on top of it, a plastic cooler. He let go of Ben’shand and dipped his own into it. There was the sound of water splashing.“Merde!” Michel said. He fished out a bottle and handed it to Ben. “Wait,”he said. Michel took the bottle back and laid the capped top against the table.He held the cap in place with one hand and pulled the bottle away with theother. The bottle cap popped off and rolled onto the floor before settling. Heopened another.“Salut!” said Michel.“Salut!” Ben repeated.“To new friends!”After the beer—two or three or four bottles more plus some type of hardliquor—they fell into bed passionately, or as passionately as two drunk mencould. Afterward, Michel got up to wash himself from a tub of collectedrainwater, because the building had no plumbing.“We have our ways,” Michel said, though Ben was too tired to rememberall that was said.—When Ben woke up, one of the boys from the night before, one of Michel’sfriends, was shuffling cards. The sound seemed louder than it should havebeen. The boy said good morning, and then to Michel (still lying in bed, halfawake from the look of it) said something about bringing outsiders over andabout rules and agreements, and Michel mumbled sharply, “Baise les règles!”and the other boy replied “Baise-toi!” the word said firmly with a sly yetserious smile.The other friend, sitting with a bottle of beer, said they should go getbreakfast. At this, Michel stood up and stretched his limbs.“Room 210!” Michel said.“Room 210!” the others said in unison.

They packed up their cards, theircigarettes, their beers, and ran to the door.Room 210 sat across the hall. It was the same layout as the otherapartment but less cluttered. It seemed just painted, and, indeed, Ben saw abucket of paint in the corner along with brushes and a roller.In Room 210, they sat at a kitchen table and passed around bread and jamand cheap wine by a window that looked out onto a street. Someone rode byon a bicycle. Pigeons flew on and off the window ledge of the building across.“Who is this boy here?” one of Michel’s friends asked.“This is the American,” Michel answered. “Ben,” he said.The boy shuffling the cards introduced himself as Mateo. His curly brownhair made him look young. He was twenty-three and a Spaniard but hadcome to Paris two years prior on a whim, hopping aboard a train and jumpingoff after they found him.Across from Mateo sat a Russian named Sergei. Sergei was twenty-fiveand wore thin wire-frame glasses. His hair was red and wavy. At university,Sergei read about the Soviets, how the Revolution had failed miserably, and,learning of this and seeing the conditions now, he felt disappointed with hispeople.“The Soviets didn’t try hard enough,” Sergei said.Mateo said something about the general dimness of Russians, and Sergeipushed the table forward, knocking Mateo over playfully. Only Russianscould make fun of Russians, he said.Everyone spoke French, though bent with different accents. It sounded likea bus depot or an airport, a place full of travelers trying to find where theyneeded to go. At times, Ben couldn’t keep up.Mateo took out the cards again. “We want to change the world,” he said.He shuffled the cards and dealt them. What they were playing, Ben didn’tknow; he picked up his cards anyway.“What do you mean?” Ben asked. “How do you change the world?”They did things, they said, for the betterment of society. They protested;they wrote pamphlets; they stole from grocery stores, department stores, andgave what they stole to the poor. Mainly themselves.Once Michel, Sergei said, broke into Parliament at night. He was arrested,of course. He convinced the police that he was drunk and they let him stay injail until he seemed sober enough.But they weren’t lawless, violent, fou.Sometimes, for instance, they were a band. They played an acoustic guitarand tambourine in Place de la Bastille to bring awareness to revolution.Mateo ran into another room and came back with a guitar, strumming a fewchords and singing off-key.Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça iraLe peuple en ce jour sans cesse répèteAh! ça ira, ça ira, ça iraMalgré les mutins tout réussira!It was a revolution song, Mateo said. Did Ben like it? Something by EdithPiaf, a little song by Edith Piaf, the Edith Piaf, Mateo said, as if there weremultiple Edith Piafs roaming the streets singing revolutionary songs. Ah çaira. Ah ça ira…it will be fine, it will be fine. Because it will be. Because theybelieved it. Because they suffered.“We’ve all suffered,” said Sergei, seriously now. They’ve never been in awar, but they’ve gone hungry, thirsty, sexless. And they’ve seen things—thevery nature of humanity and human evil and what people were capable ofdoing and what people were incapable of having, which was, in the end, theytheorized, the cause of all evil. They’ve seen it all and they concluded: theywanted no more suffering. For themselves. For the world. For the universe!L’univers, Ben repeated in his head. Pour nous-mêmes, pour le monde,pour l’univers!They passed a hand-rolled cigarette around. When it got to Ben, heinhaled and let the smoke stream out unhurriedly. As it passed his lips, hetasted something earthy and green, and it put him at ease and made hismuscles relax. He didn’t cough this time and it made him proud. He wasbecoming French. No, Parisian! Life was beginning again. Here was whathe’d been waiting for.“What makes you communists?” asked Ben finally after the cigarette wentaround the circle a second time.“It’s the belief that all men are equals,” said Sergei. “You and me, we’rethe same. I’m not better than you. You’re not better than me. We’re all thesame.”“Except for those no-good putains in the government!” Mateo exclaimed.He jumped up, joyous, and positioned himself in a fighting stance, hands up,legs ready to leap. “We should make them do work for us! Show them whathard labor is! If not, we ship them all to—”“Siberia!” said Sergei.“Siberia!” Michel repeated.“Siberia!” everyone said. They lifted hands in the air and cheered, andSergei stood with his hands on his hips and danced as if “Siberia” were an oldfolk song. He fell down when he was done and took a drink of wine as theothers clapped—Bravo, bravo, bravo!“And then we start from scratch,” said Mateo. “We’ve suffered so much!This is what we deserve! We deserve this much! At the very least!”Outside, the sun had risen fully. Ben heard cars starting, the squeak ofdoors opening, the hacking cough from an old man or woman. The pigeonswere gone. The window behind the ledge was open. A woman leaned out witha cleaning rag.The Spaniard gripped Ben by the shoulder. “Mon ami, we’ve all sufferedhere. Tell us, how have you suffered?”How had he suffered?The words repeated themselves in Ben’s head, the sound of them swirlingin a drunken haze. How had he suffered? How had he suffered? He hadsuffered, that was for sure, yet how—how had he suffered? How could heexplain in a different language? He took a sip of his wine and went deep intohis memory, a labyrinth of infinite clean-cut hedges, trying to find themoment he was most disappointed, most mad at the world. The imagesflashed in his mind. There were so many, but to pick the one—that was thechallenge. He saw hues of flesh, mouths moving, stars shining faintly.Then it struck him. Of course, he thought. It was a long story, but he couldsum it up. Slowly, he conjured the words in French in his head, and, sloppily,he began to speak.“My father,” he said. Mon père. “Mon père was left behind in Vietnam.”Au Viêt-Nam. “When we came to the States, my mom made these cassettetapes for him. She talked to him to tell him about life in America. She didthis for years,” he said. “For years.”The others nodded.Ben continued. “At the end of the tapes, she’d point to the recorder andtell us to say goodbye to our dad. I was still little back then, but for whateverreason, for the longest time I thought our dad lived in the recorder. I thoughtmy dad was the recorder. It wasn’t until I was in school that I knew what afather even was.”The wine came to him again, and he emptied it into his glass.“A few months ago,” Ben went on, “my dad died. My brother and mom,they board a plane to Vietnam. When they come back, my brother, he saysour dad was married to this other woman. This small, quiet, fragile womanwho taught poetry and didn’t have children or couldn’t have any children, Idon’t know. Anyway, my brother said they lived in this big-ass house withmarble floors and photos of the places they went to together and potted plantsin every corner, all healthy and green. Nothing like how we grew up. Also,they had a lot of food. Tons of it. A whole walk-in pantry. They had giantmeals each night and every morning and every afternoon. Nothing like wehad growing up—canned soup, instant ramen. My mom—ma mère—workedall day cleaning people’s hands, their feet, scrubbing calloused heels, inhalingfumes from nail polish removers. She’d come home tired, her head hurting.She couldn’t take care of us. We had nothing growing up. Not a thing.”How he was doomed to be disappointed his entire life, Ben thought. Andjust when he was beginning to like the idea of his father! How hisdisappointment led him across the world. At the airport, waiting in line toboard the plane, he was half tempted not to go. The reason he wanted to goto Paris was to know more about his father, a French literature professor, toconnect with him in some deep way. But going, he knew then, would not gethim what he wanted. As the flight attendant scanned his ticket, he toldhimself he was wrong for thinking this—wrong and stupid—and boarded theplane. Now Ben looked out the window, then around the room. How empty itwas here. How dusty and dark. He pictured his mother moving to Versaillesand entering the apartment for the first time. How empty it would have beenback then, too. How it would take a lifetime to make a place lived in. Heremembered for the longest time they didn’t have a kitchen table and how forsome time they had only one bed and then his mother got a bed and he andTuấn had to share one.He wondered what Tuấn was doing now, alone in that duplex house of his,and how he’d made it a home in no time. When Ben lived there, he felt like itwas home.And now where was he? What had he chosen? That thought came to himoften when he realized all of a sudden he was in another country, on anothercontinent, away from where he grew up. But now the question—What had hechosen?—felt heavy, a weighted item you palmed. He should write to Tuấn,he thought. Why hadn’t he done that since he got here? But then he realizedhe forgot the address; perhaps he never even knew it.He felt sleepy. He finished the rest of his wine, stood up, and shook hishead. He needed to lie down.“Are you okay?” Michel asked, reaching out his hand.“What? Oh, yes.” Ben reached out his and smiled. “I’m fine. Just sleepy.”—Ben and Michel became quiet lovers. Michel was a kind man who had grandideas. The man gave Ben chills and made his heart drop, and he felt like itwas love or something like love. For love, he thought, one would sacrificeanything. He would stay with Michel and his friends for the rest of the week.They spent the mornings with wine and coffee and conversations. Theywent to work in the evenings—Michel, a bookseller; Mateo, a busboy; Sergei,a professional beggar. They kept their money in glass jars, plastic cups,bottles. Communists didn’t trust the bank. The commune money was usedonly for certain things like supplies, revolutionary literature, food, alcohol,and cigarettes. Communists wanted revolution, but they also needed to eat.They had the entire four-story apartment building to themselves. There was ahole in the roof, and when it rained the top floor became soaked. WhenMichel said that he was sorry, that he wanted to give Ben a better life, andthat he was working toward that, Ben said he grew up poor so it didn’t make adifference.“Of course! I knew you would understand!” Michel said, giving him a kisson the cheek.The apartment was all they needed. They were self-sufficient. They hadfire, food, shelter; they collected rainwater for showers and were convenientlya block away from a metro stop and a public restroom. They would survive,Michel was sure; they would thrive.Ben, against all reason, trusted him, and, within two weeks, left theAustrians. They would miss him, they said. He had been so kind. The girlsaid she was happy he found love. She squealed gleefully when he told herand looked like she wanted to talk with him genuinely about it the way Benimagined girls gossiped over boys in high school. Michel was happy to havenot only a lover, but also, more important to him, another revolutionary.“You will join us, no?” Michel asked one night, his head on Ben’sshoulder. “Join us, the communists?”It was funny. No one in America would have so happily called themselvescommunists. What would his mother think, his mother who ran away fromthe Việt Cộng, barefoot peasant revolutionaries who changed the course of acountry and, consequently, the lives of millions? What would all those peoplethink of this?“Oui,” Ben said, “bien sûr.”He lay back into the bed and closed his eyes.He woke up later that night, hearing his mother’s voice. It sounded like itcame on the wind, like it traveled over land and water to tell him something—something important, something to be remembered and kept. But when heopened his eyes, there was only the wall lit by moonlight, a warm arm on hischest. The night was bitterly cold, and he got up to put more wood bricks intothe fireplace. He got back to bed and bundled himself tightly, pushing upagainst Michel for warmth. New Orleans nights were never this cold. Andwhat had he chosen?

August   2005

Bà Giang will not leave her apartment. Vinh and Hương stop by on theirway out. In a moving box, they’ve packed only what is necessary: food,bottled water, a family photo album, ID cards, passports, the boys’ birthcertificates, and all of their naturalization papers.“I can’t. I’m too old,” says Bà Giang. “These bones!” She pushes down onher cane to get up from the couch. It is the same corduroy couch she’s hadsince moving to Versailles. The color’s faded from navy blue to dirty cobalt.With her other arm, she holds her cat, a rescue kitten named Đường—Sugar.It’s white, though Bà Giang swears she’s only that way because her last ownerdropped her in a tub of bleach. Đường can’t see, either.“And besides, Đường can’t travel. Bác sĩ says so,” Bà Giang adds. “She’slosing her hearing, too!” She holds up the cat adoringly.“But the news reports!” says Hương. “Haven’t you heard? What are youwatching, Bà Giang?”Hương pokes her head inside and sees an old Paris by Night video playing.Women in áo dàis dance with pink umbrellas and sing, Sài Gòn đẹp lắm, SàiGòn ơi! Sài Gòn ơi!Hương walks in, turns off the VCR, changes the channel. The weatherreporter wears a poncho and holds his microphone with both hands, thoughnothing is happening yet. The screen cuts to a map of the Gulf with aspinning red disc moving toward the boot shape of Louisiana.“There!” says Hương. “It’ll be here tomorrow, Bà Giang.”“Oh, a hurricane,” replies Bà Giang, like she dropped a handkerchief andHương was kind enough to pick it up. “I’ve seen plenty of those. It’ll justpass.”“It’s getting stronger; the weatherman says so.” The screen cuts back to the weather reporter. He has a different hat now.It’s red and doesn’t match his yellow poncho.“Those men don’t know a thing. But if you’re worrying about me, I’ll tapethe windows.”“Bà Giang!”Outside, Vinh presses down on the horn. It’s nearly midnight. They aregoing to pick up Tuấn and his girlfriend, who gets off her job at midnight.They are planning to go to Baton Rouge.“Hương ơi! I’ve survived the collapse of a country. I’ll survive this. I’msure I’ll survive anything. Believe it or not, người Việt are like cockroaches.We’ll survive a nuclear bomb!” She laughs, turns the VCR back on. Thesinging, dancing women spin, spin, spin!The horn sounds again.“We have to go, Bà Giang. I can’t leave you here. I couldn’t live withmyself.”“You’ll live just fine,” says Bà Giang. “I promise.”—Addy pedals faster. Tuấn had called her at the restaurant.“My mother says it’ll be a direct hit,” he said.“Really?” She was folding napkins, holding the phone on her shoulder. Sheeyed the television. A cartoon was playing. Goofy the dog.“Just to be safe, she said she’s coming to pick us up.”“Where would we go?”“Baton Rouge. We’ll get a motel.”Addy turned down the volume and plugged a finger into her ear. “What? Ican’t hear.”“Baton Rouge,” said Tuấn. “We’ll get a motel.”When Addy asked Sebastian if she could leave early, he refused. “Youknow how long my family’s been here?” he asked.“A gazillion years, Sebastian!” Addy answered. She’d heard it too manytimes. Sebastian was a proud New Orleanian, but Addy never understoodbeing proud of coming from a place: you didn’t have any choice in the matter,it just happened. “A gazillion fucking years!”“Close. Two hundred,” he said. “We don’t let no freakin’ hurricane driveus out. We’ll be fine. This city floats. We’re practically a rubber duck.”She went back to her napkins. There was only one table of guests.Outside, the streets were empty. She tried to remember if any of the animalswere acting strangely. A documentary on TV once said animals had a sixthsense about the weather.“Watch the animals,” said a Utah park ranger, a canyon yawning behindhim. “They know everything.”She looked out the window. A plastic bag drifted by and disappearedaround the corner.At midnight, when the restaurant closed, she rushed out, a baseball cap heronly shield from the rain.Now Addy slows as she approaches Mr. Franklin’s Grocery. From thestreet, she can see him in there alone and standing behind the counter with abook.Some bottles of water to bring with us, she thinks. A little water wouldn’thurt anybody.—The water comes rushing at him. At first he tries to swim, but the waves pushat him, forcing their way past his lips, down his throat. He tastes the sea andthe salt; he tastes it all. On the water’s surface, in the distance, a boat. Hewhips his arms in the water. He needs to move or else he will die.Ben wakes up panicking.It was just a dream. A dream! Thank God! Thank all the gods, any ofthem! Another dream. He sits up and flicks on the light.He’d been having dangerous dreams all week. They always involved water.They felt so real that, for a split second, between the dreaming and thewaking, he confused them for memory.In this dream, he was on a boat.“Sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice,” they were chanting. Someone had to besacrificed for the safety of the others. In the middle of the chanting, he—asmall boy—was dropped into the ocean.“Ça va bien? Qu’est qu’il se passé?” asks Michel, massaging Ben’s back. Hetouches Ben’s forehead, then goes to the bathroom. Ben hears the squeakyfaucet turning on, then off. To think they lived in an abandoned apartmentwithout water or electricity for nearly two months before the city found themand kicked them out. That he put himself through that seems silly now,perhaps even dangerous. Michel comes back with a wet towel. He places it onBen’s head. “Fièvre,” he diagnoses.“Impossible,” says Ben. “I don’t get sick. It’s the nightmares. They get meworked up.”Michel gets ready for work as Ben goes to the window, opens the shutters.It’s so quiet and his dream was so loud. The water, especially. But it’s anordinary day here now, safe and ordinary.Michel comes out of the bathroom, tightening his tie. “Today is your dayoff, non?” he asks.“Oui. J’irai au marché. Nous avons besoin des pommes, des oranges, et destomates.” Ben has to undo the knot and retie it. Because the kids at the collègewon’t take him seriously without a properly tied tie.—Tuấn is packing when the door opens. It’s Addy.“They’ve been repeating the same thing all day,” he reports to her. “Higherground,” he says.“Higher ground,” the radio parrots.“Sebastian says to stay,” she tells Tuấn, walking to the bathroom. With thedoor open, she peels off her waitress clothes. Her black skin glistens withsweat. She smiles at Tuấn and pulls on shorts and a tank top.She was a friend of his brother’s. For a year, he went to the restaurantwhere she worked the late-night shift. He got off his shift late and ate dinneralone in a booth. At first he thought she didn’t recognize him, until one dayshe came up to him with his credit card and receipt and said, “Well, if it isn’tMr. SBZ himself.”It made him blush. He was never one of the Southern Boyz, and hewondered how far that rumor traveled and how long something like thatstayed in the air.“Let me tell you something,” she had said and sat herself down acrossfrom him.I’m in for it now, he was thinking. If she remembered the Southern Boyz,surely she remembered the type of guy he was back then. “People change,” hewas ready to say.“I always liked you,” she said, “you and your family.”Inside, Tuấn let out a sigh of relief.“And I wondered what happened to y’all.”“People change,” he told her anyway, and they spent that evening, andevenings after, catching up on how much they did change.They became friends quickly after that.Now, he wonders what took him so long, why he didn’t have his eyesopen. They’ve been together for two years now.“When’s your mom coming?” she asks.“Soon.” He throws more clothes into the suitcase.Addy walks over. “You’re doing it wrong,” she says, taking out what he’spacked. “Only what’s necessary.”—The AC is broken. It’s stuck on high and it won’t turn off. Since the night ishot, the windows fog up. Vinh stops the car, wipes the windshield with hishand. Everything is still blurry.“Can’t we go any faster?” Hương asks.“I can’t see a thing,” says Vinh.It has begun to rain harder, not the sprinkling they’ve been having allnight. It’s like a different storm and it sounds like nails falling.Vinh begins to drive again.“High-speed winds expected like you’ve never seen before. Rain, too,”says the radio. “Get to higher ground. Stay indoors.”Hương licks her lips and turns up the radio. Though he wouldn’t say italoud, Vinh knows Hương likes emergencies. She thrives on figuring out howto avoid danger, how to stay alive. Once, the news reported an earthquake inCalifornia. When Hương got wind of it, she went to the grocery store andbought emergency supplies—flashlights, a portable radio, batteries, a flaregun. “In case we get stuck in the wreckage,” she had said. It didn’t matter thatit was two thousand miles away; she would save them all if it came down to it.“I feel bad about Bà Giang,” says Hương. “She wouldn’t come. I tried todrag her. I literally tried to drag her. That’s why it took so long. My, thatwoman’s gotten fat.”“She’ll be safe. That woman’s a survivor,” says Vinh.“That’s what she said,” says Hương, “but what if she’s wrong? I can see itnow, the winds blowing the apartment away. They’d find her stuck up a treesomewhere.”“Now that’s funny.”“Not if it really happens.”Vinh speeds up. The streets are empty. Everything’s closed up. All thebuildings have plywood boards covering the windows, the doors.“Take a left up here,” says Hương.“Are you sure?” asks Vinh.“Yes, I’m sure.”—Ben sits on a bench with a thermos, a notebook, and a pen.Today, Ben is sure, he will write. But what? He wanted to write about hislife here over the last five years (he couldn’t believe it, either; it just happenedthat way). There was plenty enough to write about, several books’ worth ofstories. About his time with Michel and the other communists. About how thepolice kicked them out. (Other than a mattress thrown out from the thirdfloor along with a bottle of wine, it was rather anticlimactic, but words couldbring it to life.) About struggling in Paris and the various jobs he had—firstas a recycling collector (he kept telling Tuấn it was recycling, not trash,though he didn’t seem to know the difference); then for a while he worked asa housekeeper for a lycée; and now he cleaned dishes at a restaurant andwrote articles at night for a website for tourists and English productdescriptions for an online clothing company. He was sure he could findsomething to say about all of this, something of importance.Yet, if he were honest with himself, everything here was boring. Hethought he would find some connection to his father and in that way his pastas well. At the very least, he thought he would have a good time and learn tolive life passionately, the way the French supposedly do so well, and live it onhis own terms.Yet he had none of these. He had nothing. He regretted his decision tostay with Michel and in Paris. Michel was a kind enough man who once hadbig ideas. But nowadays he co-taught geography to middle schoolers. Howpeople changed, he thought and wondered if he had changed, and, if so, howmuch.But there was no time to worry about that. That was the past. He had tothink about the future and what he would do now.—“I’m sure we would’ve passed it by now,” says Hương. “Maybe we should’veturned back there.”Vinh steadies the wheel. The wind. He feels the car whipping back andforth. He is unsure if he can hold on to it, control it.“These houses,” Hương says. “They all look the same. Are we even in theright neighborhood?” They must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, but it’stoo dark to tell.“Should I turn back?” he says.“Just take this street and go around the block,” says Hương.Vinh slows down. There are no lights on this street, though there shouldbe. There must have been a blackout.Before Vinh can turn around, he realizes it’s a one-way street and a car iscoming toward them. He slams on the brakes but at the last minute decides tododge it. He feels the wind pushing the wheels, spinning the car. He sees alamppost, he sees a mailbox, then a wall comes toward him and disappears.He hears the crash before seeing it, feeling it. The airbags deploy, smashagainst his face. He feels his teeth biting his cheek, tastes the metal in theblood.“What happened?” he hears Hương say. “Vinh? Are you okay?” Shesounds far away, as if she’s outside the car.He reaches over. There, that’s her arm. Here’s her elbow. Here, there’sblood, warm and sticky.“Trời ổi, are you okay?” he asks.“Em không biết. My head hurts.”Vinh squeezes her arm. He realizes the water’s coming in. He reaches forthe car door. When it doesn’t open, he pushes—pushes as hard as he can. It’simpossible to open. He pushes harder. Maybe they’re in water, he’s thinking,but it doesn’t look that high. It couldn’t have flooded so quickly. He uses hisshoulder and tries again. This time the door opens a crack, but it’s enough forhim to slide through.When he climbs out, he sees the full damage. The front is smashed in, thewindshield cracked. The door on his side is dented, but Hương’s door is stuckagainst a telephone pole. He sees her struggling to open it and rushes over.“Can you open the window?” he asks.When he doesn’t hear an answer, he repeats himself and leans in closer.He hears her pressing the window button, releasing it, pressing it again.Vinh pulls at the back door, but, like the other door, it’s stuck. He pullswith both hands until it opens but only a crack.“Can you get to the back?” he asks.He sees her moving, climbing over to the backseat. She pushes at the door.“You have to go through the crack,” he says.She says something he can’t hear. She pushes again. He pulls. She hits thewindow.“Back away,” he hears her say, muffled.He backs up. Hương hits the window with something, but it bounces back.Seeing what she can’t do, Vinh begins looking around for somethingheavy. He walks several paces before he sees a piece of wood from a tree. Heheaves it up, tells Hương to back away, and hurls the wood through thewindow, which breaks into pieces. Hương smashes the flashlight at theremaining jagged edges and climbs out.Already, Vinh notices, the water’s rising. They must get to higher groundsoon. He pulls her up. He sees a bluish bruise on her forehead.“We have to go,” he says. “Somewhere safer.”“But Tuấn,” she says. She tries to gather where they are. “We have to getTuấn,” she says.“We don’t have a car anymore.”“His house,” she says. She pulls away and starts running.“Hương!” he calls. Vinh runs after her. He is soaked. He sees the waterdripping in front of his eyes. The air, he feels, is getting colder. “We shouldfind shelter,” says Vinh, trying to catch up. “Tuấn will be fine.”At the intersection, Hương pauses. “We missed a street,” she says. “Wemust have missed a street,” she repeats before running off.—On the radio, the mayor says, “This is the storm of the century.” A clipthey’ve been replaying all day. In the background are reporters, clicking theirpens, scribbling on notepads. “Mayor Nagin, Mr. Nagin, Mayor Nagin,” theyall say at the same time.“It’s getting late,” says Addy.They sit by the window even though they both know they shouldn’t. Addypresses her face against the glass pane.“I don’t see them. I don’t see anybody,” she says. Rain whips the window.She can feel the wind on the glass, can feel it bend. She knows it will all bebroken when they return. There will be plenty of cleaning to be doneafterward. She imagines all the cleaning they will have to do later: sweep upthe glass, remove the standing water, scrub and disinfect everything. But theywill get through this, Addy is sure. Their families fled their lives in othercountries and built new ones from scratch—out here in the swamp. They notonly survived but thrived. They come from hardy stock, and this makes herproud.“Let’s get away from the window,” says Tuấn.“…mandatory evacuation of the city of New Orleans…” says MayorNagin.The lights flicker and turn off. The mayor stops talking. The buzz ofelectricity is gone.“Babe, are you okay?” asks Tuấn.“Yeah,” answers Addy. He’s a sweet man, she thinks. Rough on the outsidebut sweet under that shell. She just had to get to know him and, from there,how easy it was to fall for him. She hears Tuấn stumbling over furniture thenlighting up a match.“Where do we keep the candles?” He walks to the kitchen.“Maybe we shouldn’t wait for them,” says Addy.“What?” says Tuấn.“I said, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t wait for them.’ ”“They’re on their way.” Tuấn returns with a scented candle. “I swearthey’re coming,” he says. The flame lights up. He almost looks hurt at thesuggestion of leaving without his mother.Sweet man, she thinks.The house begins to smell like lavender.—Hương imagines the road is not asphalt but soft, wet soil. Where is Tuấn’shouse? Why can’t she remember it when she needs it the most?She turns down another street. It’s familiar, though it’s all dark. All thehouses look the same, all duplexes or shotguns. Like when she first arrived.She can’t tell where she is now. The rain makes everything blurry, and herhair becomes wet, heavy, matted. Running, she pulls her damp hair together.Not finding a rubber band on her, she shoves the ponytail down the back ofher shirt.She feels blood rushing to her head, throbbing. The bruise is tender.Then comes an explosion. She sees it in the air, the sparks like fireworks.She wants to scream but stops herself.Guns, she thinks. Guns or bombs, guns or bombs, those must be guns orbombs, someone has a gun or a bomb.She imagines hoodlums with baggy pants raiding the city. She imaginestanks driving through the water.

She imagines skinny shirtless men in paddyhats, shoeless in the rain.Then the thought: they need to leave the city now. They must leave andnever return. This is her last night in the city, she is sure. She must leave.But her son.But my sons…Tuấn and Bình. Tuấn and Bình. Tuấn and Bình…Say theirnames. Keep them in your heart.—Ben closes his eyes. And again he sees water. He sees it everywhere. Hisbrother is screaming and his mother—she’s screaming as well, holding herstomach. He realizes now it is him in that stomach, him in that belly. So thatboy is another boy. He didn’t drown. It was another boy.A man grabs the boy by the wrists. From where Ben watches, the boy sitsin praying position, hands together, head toward the sky.“What are you doing?” a woman yells. It is not Ben’s mother, but another.Another mother. Another’s mother.The boat sways violently. There is a whirlpool. It is night. There is onlynight for miles in each direction. The boy lets out a yelp, but the man shakeshim so the boy quiets, his cries sucked into a vacuum.“Sacrifice!” someone yells.“He’s the youngest,” says the man. “He’s not losing anything. He hasn’tanything to lose.”The woman stands up and moves toward her son.The man jerks the boy away from the mother’s reach.“Sacrifice!” someone yells.“Just a boy!” someone replies.“Sacrifice,” another person cries, and before another protest, beforeanother word, the boy is dropped into the sea. The woman disappears into theblack.Ben clenches his hands into fists. He feels something coming up throughhis throat, something bitter. He looks at his mother and brother. With herhands, she covers Tuấn’s eyes.“Murderer!” someone yells.“Sacrifice!”“Just a boy!”“Murderer!”“Sacrifice!”“Just a boy.”—With flashlight in hand, Addy walks out the door. Tuấn comes out with abackpack. He throws the flashlight into the bicycle basket. Addy climbs onthe seat and sees Tuấn running back up the steps.“What you doing?” she asks. She feels her heart racing. The storm hasgotten stronger. The rain pelts her skin. She pulls on the hood on her poncho.If it floods, she can swim, she thinks. She hasn’t swum since high school, butshe’s sure it’s like riding a bike: your body remembers.“My mom’s not answering her phone,” Tuấn says. His hood blows off.“She’s coming. She wouldn’t leave without us.”“But honey, we need to leave.” The water is soaking her feet. The windblows and she can barely keep their bicycle up.“I’m leaving a note. So she knows.”Addy hears the sound of heavy-duty tape ripping from the roll. She hearsthis several times until Tuấn is satisfied.“She’ll find us,” he says. “Told her to meet us at the Best Western acrossfrom Touro Hospital.” He gets on the bike and Addy leans against him. Hestands on the pedals, presses down hard, and they start moving through theaccumulating water.“That’s the farthest I’ll go without her,” he says.Sweet man! Addy thinks.—“Tuấn!” she cries. “Bình! It’s your mother. We have to leave! We have to gosomewhere else. Tuấn! Bình! Where are you?”Then she sees the sign for Ursulines Avenue and she turns the corner andsees the house, Tuấn’s house. She can tell because it’s the only duplex paintedhalf red, half blue. The blue side is his side. They took a wrong turn, but theywere close all along.“Tuấn ơi,” she yells. “Your mother’s here. We have to go. Bão tới!”She runs up the porch steps and notices his bike is gone. On the screendoor she sees the note.“ ‘Ma,’ ” she reads, “ ‘meet us at Best Western, Touro Hospital.’ ”My boy, she thinks. He’s safe! She just has to get to him now.She runs down the steps. “Best Western,” she repeats to herself under herbreath. “Touro Hospital. Best Western. Touro Hospital.” She runs. She willget there, she is sure, if only she’d run faster. But is it this way? She isn’t sure.She has to face south. South is where she needs to go to see her boy. “BestWestern. Touro Hospital.” She picks up her pace, though the wind is gettingstronger, the rain heavier. “Best Western. Touro Hospital.”Lightning breaks the sky, and she hears the distinct sound of a treesnapping and falling.Hương remembers the old man with the beard and a cigarette in hismouth. She remembers running through the jungle, the rain—it must havebeen raining, too, that night.Her heart races as she hears the sound of boots behind her. She tries tospeed up because someone is out there.And they are after us. Again, they are after us.But her sons! Where were they? They must leave. They must leaveimmediately. Their lives depend on it. But where were the boys?“Tuấn! Bình!” she cries and picks up her pace, running as fast as she can.“Hương!” a voice screams. “Stop running!” She feels a hand grab hershoulder and her body spins around.“Công,” she nearly cries out until the lightning flashes and illuminates hisface.“Vinh,” she says, panting.“It’s not safe. We have to find shelter,” he says, but she pulls her arm, triesto break free. Vinh pulls back. He can’t make out if the water on her face israin or tears. He pulls her even harder, but it feels like the wind is ripping heraway. He thinks of trees and their branches ripping apart in a storm. Heplants his feet firmly and holds on to her arm tightly. He feels his feet soaked,but he also feels mud. It must be everywhere. Earthy and brown and dirty. Hesmells it, the mud. He pulls hard until Hương crashes into him and they crashtogether onto the flooding ground, her back on his front, her weight and thewater’s weight on him.For a minute, the only sound is their breathing. They become an island.They become a stranded ship. They are a boat far from shore. He holds hertight. He swears, if only to himself, not to let go.—A loud scream like a battle cry wakes Ben up.But he’s not in Paris anymore. He’s back in New Orleans, back inVersailles and the house of his childhood, and nothing is out of place. Exceptthe water.He’s in his room and water is gushing in through the windows. The wateris brown and smells like the bayou. It brings in twigs and branches and leaves;it brings in trash—plastic bags, candy bar wrappers, cigarette packs. Beforehe can think of what to do, he’s knocked over and is underwater. He gets upand pushes through to the door, and there, gripping the frame, he’s able tosteady himself. The water’s already up to his waist.Then, again, the piercing scream. He wades through to the hallway,holding the wall along the way. The wallpaper’s peeling. The hung picturesare falling down.“Hello?” he yells back. “Is anyone there? Mẹ? T?”He gets to the kitchen, and there the water’s bursting through the window,too. But no one’s there. Suddenly, the sink explodes with a deafening blowand more water spews up.The apartment steadily fills with water as he tries to walk to his mother’sroom. That’s where the scream must be coming from, he thinks. He can’t tell ifit’s a woman’s voice or a man’s (Maybe it’s both, he thinks, two peoplescreaming in unison), but he’s sure that’s where the scream is coming from.He grips on to the wall and part of it gives. He slips as a wave pushes himback and his body plunges in.No, he thinks. No.He holds his breath.Everything under is brown, murky. He tries to get back up, but the wateris heavy. He waves his arms, his legs. He must move, he thinks. He triesharder, but it’s useless. He feels himself sinking deeper. His heart quickens.He needs to stay alive, he tells himself. He needs to get up. Why can’t he getup? He wants to scream—he feels like he needs to scream—but he can’t.And somehow, the scream—the other scream in the other room—getslouder. It’s like someone is turning up the volume, and it’s all he can hear, thisscream.Sorry, he wants to say, sorry I can’t get to you.And he opens his eyes, and the sun is still shining.He’s in Paris again. He’s in the park, lying on a bench under the shade of atree. Ben feels sweat on his forehead, the beams of sun baking his skin. Hestands up and is amazed at the ordinariness of the day. A woman walks herdog. A man talks loudly on his phone. A group of runners jogs by. Like it’sany other day.—Vinh knocks on another house door. A car is in the driveway, though under afallen tree. Someone has to be home. But would they let them in?“We have to get to the Best Western. Near Touro,” Hương tells Vinh.“Tuấn’s there.” She dials his number and no one picks up. It lets her leave amessage, but she doesn’t.“He’s safe,” says Vinh. “He’s found shelter. That’s what we need to know.We’ll meet him in the morning.”“But—” Hương says.“We’re in no condition,” says Vinh.Then the door opens. It’s a silhouette that greets them.“Who’s that?” It’s a teenage boy. Even in the dark, Vinh can see the boy’swearing baggy clothes and that his posture is hunched.“Our car, it crash,” says Vinh, pointing out into the road, though the car isnowhere to be seen. They’ve walked a long way. “Can we please come in,please?” He squeezes his grip harder around Hương’s hand. She looks at theflooded street. She imagines Tuấn in a hotel room, sitting away from thewindow, calling her but not getting through.If only, she thinks, if only I can be sure. If only I can hear his voice.“Please,” Vinh repeats.“Marshall, let them in,” says a woman’s voice, “before the water comes.”The boy’s stance relaxes and the door opens. Vinh and Hương walk in. Inthe darkness, Vinh sees a short Black woman holding a flashlight. There isalso another child, smaller, a girl.“Come in!” the woman says. She waves her flashlight to see their faces.“Chinese!” she says. She sounds delighted. The flashlight shines on the stairs.“We’re staying up there,” she says, “if floodwater comes higher.”Vinh pulls Hương in. The teenage boy closes the door, delicately.—When the water is up to their knees, they hop off the bike and begin running.They’re running as fast as they can, but it feels like they’re going nowhere.The water is pushing them back; the raindrops are like BB gun pellets.But with enough walking, the water subsides and they see in the distance arow of streetlights and houses. The electricity is a sign of safety. They stare atit as they trudge through. A mailbox floats by. A pink flamingo lawnornament covered in mud goes after it.Addy falls down and Tuấn comes and pulls her up. She’s breathing hard.“Stay with me,” he says.Even exhausted, she is beautiful. When she nods, he stands her up, and,arm in arm, they walk against the water’s current, against the wind.Everything is cold. Everything is freezing.Tuấn thinks that if he survives, he’ll have a cold for a week. If he survivesthe cold, he will ask Addy to marry him. It seems like a fair idea.After several more minutes of walking, they notice the water leveling off.Addy falls down to her knees again. Tuấn kneels down beside her.“Are you okay?” he asks. “Babe?”“I’m all right,” she says, “just exhausted.” She leans on his shoulder,panting.“We should rest,” he says, pulling her up. He tries to think. Where exactlyare they? He needs to call his mother, tell her their change of plans. “There’rehouses up there. You see the lights?”—No one sleeps. Not the woman, not her son, not her daughter, not Hương, notVinh. They pace the attic. They look out the window. They pace some more.The kids play card games and make shadow puppets with the flashlight untilthe mother tells them to stop wasting the batteries.The woman turns on the radio. The radio is saying the same things overand over again: stay inside, get to higher ground, pray for New Orleans, pray.When she has had enough, the woman turns it off.Hương thinks about Tuấn. She tries to call him, but nothing goes through,not even text messages. But it doesn’t stop her from trying several more times.She leaves a voicemail, hoping it will reach him eventually. Her mind turns toBình. She wonders if she should call him, too, though she knows he’s in Paris.She’s thankful he’s not here, thankful he’s safe from all this.She looks out the window: a black night now that the electricityeverywhere is gone. She can’t see a thing outside.She paces around the room, the worry in her restless. She watches thekids, the boy and the girl. They’re lying down now. The boy is playing withcards by himself. The girl has a small doll, which she rocks gently.“Your kids,” says Hương. “So good! So quiet!”“That’s because they’re stuck in the house with me,” says the woman. Sheclaps her hands and laughs. She’s a good mother, Hương thinks.“I have two sons,” says Hương. “They’re away.”The woman’s face becomes concerned. “Are they out there?”A car alarms goes off. Lightning flashes in the sky.“They’re somewhere,” Hương says. “They’re somewhere.”The woman shakes her head, comes over, and gives Hương a hug.—They find a house with a wraparound porch and three floors. Because thelights are still on, they are sure they will be let in. After several knocks and aring of the doorbell, a man in a red satin robe greets them.“The storm,” says Addy. “There’s a flood down there.”“Can we stay for the night?” asks Tuấn.“Well, come on in!” answers the man. He has a high-pitched voice, agirlish manner. “You two look like drowned rats!”Inside the house, they stay on the top floor. “Just in case,” the man says.The man lives by himself here, has lived here all his life. Sometimes alone,sometimes not. He shows them a picture of his lover, who died in the eighties.“When they announced the evacuation, I couldn’t leave,” the man says. “Ijust couldn’t! I have roots here. I’m a pretty flower.

You can’t just pluck meout. I’m too pretty!” the man says. He laughs, and his laughter is so infectious,Tuấn and Addy laugh, too.Together, they watch the news. The water is rising, it says, and it willcontinue to rise.They’ve found safety, Tuấn thinks. They’re not out there. They’ll find hismother and Vinh in the morning. He hopes they’ve at least gotten out of NewOrleans East. The bayou would’ve flooded by now. And those trees wouldhave fallen in this wind. He knows the destruction of Versailles is possible,but he doesn’t want to think about it.He calls his mother. It goes to voicemail.“Ma,” he goes. “We’re on Coliseum Street at a nice man’s house. There’sbarely flooding here. Give me a call when you get this, okay, Ma?”They watch the news until it’s just repeating itself. There’s no newinformation. They’re all just waiting for it to be over.“What will stop the water? What will get it to stop?” they all ponder aloud.“Sebastian said we’d float,” mumbles Addy, more to herself than toanyone.“Well, he’s got it wrong,” says the man. “New Orleans is more like a…more like a…” He twirls his hands in the air, trying to find a word. “It’s morelike a bathtub,” he says.—The city is like a bathtub. The winds are the hands of a housewife. The watera mixture of tap and cleaning detergent. The housewife scrubs and scrubs.She is sure not to miss a spot. She wants to make sure no one forgets hername when she is gone and how good a housewife she was. She is bitter.—In the morning, there is a loud explosion. It shakes the house, sloshes thefloodwaters, moves the earth.“What was that?” asks the woman. She opens the window. Then she closesit and runs to the stairs.“Water!” she yells. “There’s water in the house!”Vinh runs to the stairs and sees water gushing in so fast it turns white. Hesees a table floating like a raft. Then a vase. Then a floor lamp.“The window,” says Hương. She walks over and opens it. For a second,Vinh thinks she’s going to swim away. When she lifts up a leg, he runs to her.Then he realizes she’s climbing.Half of her body disappears from view, and then her legs are gone, too.The girl is next to go up, aided by her brother. He goes up after. Vinh tries tohelp the woman up, but she wants him to go up first. He obliges and shecomes after.The air on the roof is icy. Vinh looks out and sees all the water, all brown,all flowing like they’re in a river, but instead of rocks, there are cars androoftops.All of a sudden, Hương screams, “God, oh, God!”The kids turn her way. The woman gasps and pulls her children towardher.Hương points out into the distance, not ten feet away from the house.Vinh turns his head, and, to his surprise, there’s a body.The body is a man’s, from what Vinh can tell. Dead for a while, probably.The body wears jeans and a long-sleeved plaid shirt. There are no shoes andno socks. For some reason, Vinh thinks he must’ve had a hat.The body floats facedown and continues moving with the current until itsshirt tangles with the branches of a tree and stops. From the tree branch, itsways. Vinh imagines lungs full of water, lungs full of mud.—Ben walks up the stairs with a tote bag of groceries. He tells himself heshould’ve brought two bags to divide the weight. He’s bought more than heshould have, but at least they’ll be stocked for a couple of weeks. He stopsafter the second flight, takes a breather. He wishes they didn’t live on the topfloor in an apartment building with no elevator.When he gets home, he drops the bag in the front hallway and changes tosweatpants and a T-shirt.He turns on the TV and begins unpacking. He’ll cook something simpletonight, he thinks. Maybe pasta with chicken. For dessert, fresh fruit. He putson a pot of water, salts it. Preheats the oven.On TV, a cartoon plays, something with badly drawn animals. He surfs thechannels and sees a familiar talk show, something that looks like a Britishmystery, and a kids’ show with puppets. Then he stops on the news. The firstthing he notices is that it’s New Orleans. Before he sees the text, he knows it’sthe city of his youth. The surprise, though, comes when he realizes it’sflooding. No, not flooding—New Orleans is drowning.He drops a metal pan. The sound of it crashing to the floor doesn’t takehim away from the screen, where muddy brown water fills the city as far asthe eye can see as people stand on top of houses and cars. The camera zoomsin to a woman waving her arms. The clip switches to a video of a strong windblowing against a tree at night. The tree bends and bends and finally snaps,colliding with a car. A boat evacuates a building. A helicopter hovers over ahome.Ben’s heart drops. He sits down. He feels himself getting hot and itchy. Hegets back up and opens a window. He turns up the volume and sits backdown. The images of New Orleans are replaced with a video of the mayor ata press conference.“The City of New Orleans,” he says, before his words are translated by aFrench newscaster. Un ouragan, the newscaster says. Catégorie cinq.Inondation. État d’urgence. Levées. The video returns to collapsed houses andbuildings and overturned cars and floating trash islands. People stand in linesand cry, hugging pillows, as if the floodwater hit their homes while they wereasleep. Un désastre complet, says the newscaster.Ben’s hands shake; his entire body is shivering.And what of his mother? And his brother? There are no reports of NewOrleans East, of Versailles.He feels cold all of a sudden and walks over to close the window. It shutssuddenly and the windowpane startles him with his reflection.The oven rings and the pot has boiled over. He turns it off and lowers thevolume on the TV. He rummages through the kitchen drawers for an addressbook. They play the video of the tree and car again. They play the one withthe boat and the people climbing off of roofs, holding plastic grocery bags oftheir belongings. It looks like it could be a different city, a different country,but it’s not. It’s New Orleans.He picks up his phone and misdials the number several times until hefinally gets it right. The phone rings and rings.—When the rain stops, the sun comes out. Water still flows in the streets, but itdoesn’t look like anything more than what a heavy thunderstorm would bring.Tuấn and Addy thank the man for his help. He gives them cookies. Theythank him again and leave.Tuấn and Addy walk for several minutes.“I thought I was going to die,” Addy says.“It’s times like these that we realize how short life is,” he says.Because of the debris—fallen trees and electric lines—they take the longway back—up through the Lower Garden District then east toward home.They are walking on an overpass as Tuấn checks his phone. The signal barlights up the screen. It dings when it receives two voice messages, one fromhis mother and another from his brother. He’s about to press Play when hehears Addy gasp.“Look!” she says. “Look!”Tuấn follows her finger and his heart stops when he sees it’s all rooftopsand people small as ants. “Where’s the city?” he wants to ask. “Where’s NewOrleans?”The people are waving their hands. They are waving their hands and they are yelling. They yell and wave their arms for help. But Hương doesn’t move. She staysseated on the roof, watching the dead body stuck in the tree. It waves with thecurrent, but it’s stuck.The others, including Vinh, are on their feet. The children tried to spellout HELP with their clothes but had only enough for HE. Now they jump upand down, hands in the air, reaching for the skies. They’ve seen twohelicopters in the last hour, but neither has stopped.“They’re ignoring us,” says the girl. “They don’t like us.”“We just have to try harder. Jump higher. Scream louder,” says herbrother.When they see another helicopter, the two kids try to jump higher, try towave their arms faster.“Help!” they yell. “Help! Help! Help!”“Maybe they don’t know we’re alive,” the girl says. “Maybe that’s theproblem.” She takes in a lungful of air and lets it out: “We’re alive! Help us!We’re alive!”The brother follows. “Help us!” they both scream. “We’re alive! Help us!We’re alive! Help us!”The helicopter seems to float in the air, then it starts to descend. The kidsget excited.“Finally,” the girl says, and does a little dance. The sound of the bladesspinning makes everything hard to hear.“Hương, it’s here!” yells Vinh. “It’s over, Hương. It’s all over.”The helicopter hovers over the house. They let out a rescue basket as aman talks through a megaphone.“Climb into the basket,” he says. His voice is loud, steady, and calm. Themegaphone squeals before he continues. “Two at a time,” he says, “climb intothe basket. Thumbs up when you’re ready.”The mother motions for the kids to go up first. The boy rushes to thebasket and seats himself. His sister jumps in and sits across from her brother.They both give the thumbs-up and the basket is pulled up. They throw theirhands into the air and holler like they’re on an amusement park ride.When the kids are safe, the basket is dropped back down again and themother rides it by herself. She sits and leans her head on her knees, headturned down to see everything one last time. “Oh,” Hương hears her say. Itsounds like she wants to say something more, but she stops herself. Thewoman covers her face with her hands and begins crying. She leans over andwaves goodbye to her house.When the basket is lowered the third time, Vinh grabs on and calls forHương.“Hương,” he says. “It’s time to go.”She hears him, but she can’t move. Instead, she watches the body in thetree. It shakes with the water, and the branches scratch the body.“Hương,” Vinh says. He hits the basket with the palm of his hand to gether to hear. “It’s time to go.” He climbs in and sits. The basket sways.Someone has to help the body, Hương thinks. The man must have a family.They must know what happened to him; it’s only right. Then she wonderswhere they were. She imagines them driving away from New Orleans in amad rush. Did we forget someone? they’d ask themselves.But what if he was alone? What if his family wasn’t here in the city? Whatif they lived far away, scattered across the country? Scattered across theearth? How would they ever know?The man in the helicopter shouts down in his megaphone, “We have to go,ma’am. Climb in.”The helicopter hovers and bobs up and down as if trying to balance.“Hương! Do you hear me?” says Vinh. “They’re going to leave! We haveto go, Hương. Do you hear me? It’s time to go.”Eventually, the tree can’t hold the body anymore. The shirt rips and thebody is released into the water, moving past the house and past another tree.He is heading somewhere, though Hương doesn’t know where.She looks around and is surprised she doesn’t know where she is. South,north, Uptown, Mid-City—with all the water, she can’t tell where anything isanymore. She closes her eyes and tries to remember what it had been likebefore.“Hương!” Vinh cries. The basket begins moving upward.Hương stands and grabs Vinh’s hand with both of her own. The basketsways as it moves and she holds on tightly, teeth clenched from all theholding, as she is lifted up into the sky, now so blue and now so bright thatthe roof fades and the trees below fade, too, the same way the shore shrankfrom view that night so long ago.She remembers staring out the back of the boat, pinpoints of starlightilluminating the land until it was gone. She was hoping that it would reappear—the coast, the sand and the rocks, the man she loved. Any minute now, shekept on thinking, until the sun rose up over the horizon and a woman tappedher on the shoulder.“You’ve been up all night,” the woman said. She nodded toward the centerof the boat, where the others were fast asleep. Hương turned around and sawmothers holding sons, fathers holding daughters, siblings huddled together, allof them far away from home. The woman held on to her shoulder.Hương held out her hand to the sea—a gesture of grasping or wavinggoodbye. But, she was thinking. But…“Time to go,” the woman said, this time in a voice softer and gentler.Hương nodded and clasped her shaky hands together—hands that would,years later, become steady hands, sturdy hands.Yes, Hương thought in a lull of calm and clarity. She turned around towardthe front of the boat. The sun was rising. They were facing east. The water,she realized, wasn’t that bad. The waves, you got used to them. With time.Vinh lifts her into the basket.And the phone rings as she leans out to look at her city.Yes, she thinks. She knows exactly where she is now. These weatheredbuildings. These streets. These waters. All these years.She flips open her phone. “A lô?” she answers. “Bình? Mẹ đây.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to the following people and organizations for supporting me, inspiring me, and motivating
me during the process of writing this book: Nayelly Barrios, Victoria Castells, Nivea Castro, Rea
Concepcion, Cristina Correa, Kristene Cristobal, Katya Cummins, Amy Fleury, M. Evelina Galang,
Craig Gidney, Nicola Griffith, Bruce Owens Grimm, John Griswold, Chris Herrmann, Angela Hur,
Anne-Marie Kinney, the Knopf publishing team, Lambda Literary, Caitlin Landuyt, Brian Lin,
Christopher Lowe, Kristina McBride, the McNeese State University MFA Program, Lori Mosley,
Michael Nguyen, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Haneen Oriqat, Thomas Parrie, Ruby
Pediangco, Roseanne Pereira, Julie Quiroz, Nancy Ruffin, Andrea Ruggirello, Matthew Salesses,
Talisha Shelley, Erin Elizabeth Smith, Julie Stevenson, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Karimah
Tennyson-Marsh, Tin House Writers’ Workshop, Jenn Alandy Trahan, and the Voices of Our Nations
Arts Foundation.

A  NOTE ABOUT  THE AUTHOR

Eric Nguyen earned an MFA in creative writing from McNeese State University in Louisiana.
He has been awarded fellowships from Lambda Literary Foundation, Voices of Our Nations
Arts Foundation (VONA), and the Tin House writers’ workshop. He is the editor in chief for
diacritics.org. He lives in Washington, D.C. This is his first novel.