Even though she had café au lait skin, thick wavy hair, African blood, deep scars, she was Vietnamese, only Vietnamese, she repeated incessantly. She begged me to translate for the policeman her desire to go back to her own jungle. But the policeman could only release her into the jungle of the Bronx. Had I been able to, I would have asked her to curl up against me. Had I been able to, I’d have erased every trace of dirty hands from her body. I was the same age as her. No, I don’t have the right to say that I was the same age as her: her age was measured in the number of stars she saw when she
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