Inside those wide white hours, he often asked himself why he had deceived his mother in the first place. In the end, there was no good answer—only the image of her face brightening when he told her he was going to heal the sick, the cancer-riddled, the broken, the maimed, by becoming a doctor. After Bà ngoại died, his mother’s light dimmed, and seeing her shriveled in the corner of the couch, her head down and lit blue by her Game Boy, playing endless Tetris day after day, her hair thinning, he figured he had to do something. You lose the dead as the earth takes them, but the living you still
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