Things We Lost to the Water

by Eric Nguyen

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.

Theirs was a house of love, Hương was sure. It was all they ever needed—love. And with love, they would survive. She believed this with all her heart.

“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 one point, they drove on an overpass looking out over the city. How different it all looked at night, how it felt—at least from the car—less messy.

We could forget anything and everything, if only we tried, if only we made the effort.

But that feeling—that heavy, dark feeling of having lost something—he would always remember.

he’d never been to any place that took food more seriously than New Orleans.

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.

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.

“You have a choice,” Vinh said as Tuấn walked away, not yelling but keeping his voice steady. “You always have a choice.”