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It only takes a single night of frost to kill off a generation. To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing.
But that act (a son teaching his mother) reversed our hierarchies, and with it our identities, which, in this country, were already tenuous and tethered.
And that’s where I stopped. Where I decided to write to you. You who are still alive.
Our hands empty except for our hands.
The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.
What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?
How, in my screeching delight, I forgot to say Thank you.
I am twenty-eight years old, 5ft 4in tall, 112lbs. I am handsome at exactly three angles and deadly from everywhere else.
I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.
When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?
“I’m not a monster. I’m a mother.”
“You’re not a monster,” I said. But I lied.
What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.
What happened was that I was a boy once and bruiseless.
To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield. A Little Dog shield.
Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan.
so that others would see my face, and therefore yours.
I don’t know if you’re happy, Ma. I never asked.
It’s true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English.
A woman, a girl, a gun. This is an old story, one anyone can tell.
story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. To open a mouth, in speech, is to leave only the bones, which remain untold. It is a beautiful country because you are still breathing.
because nourishment, too, is a force.
“Everything good is always somewhere else,” you said after a while, and changed the channel.
I didn’t stop him because you don’t stop nothing when you’re nine.
Throughout the pews other people were also shouting, in excitement, joy, anger, or exasperation. It was there, inside the song, that you had permission to lose yourself and not be wrong.
