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They perch among us, on windowsills and chain-link fences, clotheslines still blurred from the just-hung weight of clothes, the hood of a faded-blue Chevy, their wings folding slowly, as if being put away, before snapping once, into flight.
This is gorgeous - monarch butterflies
I stood bewildered, my toy army helmet tilted on my head. I was an American boy parroting what I saw on TV. I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.
Woah.
“I’m sorry,” you said, bandaging the cut on my forehead. “Grab your coat. I’ll get you McDonald’s.” Head throbbing, I dipped chicken nuggets in ketchup as you watched. “You have to get bigger and stronger, okay?”
I am crying.
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.
If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin.
Come back and ponder this. Not the first use of this theme
“Help me, Little Dog.” She pressed my hands to her chest. “Help me stay young, get this snow off of my life—get it all off my life.”
My mom is similar. She never asked me to pluck gray hairs, but she has always been disciplined about dying her hair black. I've never seen a gray hair on her though I'm sure her hair is mostly gray by now.
Knowing the face I possess, its rare features in these parts, I pushed my head harder against the window to avoid them.
He was only nine but had already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers.
I know this dialect quite well.
I stared at my feet, at the shoes you bought me, the ones with red lights that flashed on the soles when I walked. My forehead pressed to the seat in front of me, I kicked my shoes, gently at first, then faster. My sneakers erupted with silent flares: the world’s smallest ambulances, going nowhere.
I’d drink it down, gulping, making sure you could see, both of us hoping the whiteness vanishing into me would make more of a yellow boy.
As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.
The vodka poured into shot glasses, some ringed with rust from being stored in a metal bullet case from the previous war. The heavy glasses thunk on the table, the burn swallowed into a darkness invented by thirst.
There’s a breeze through the cracked window, and with it an August night, sweet but cut with the bleach smell of lawn chemicals—the scent of manicured suburban yards—and
My favorite nights to grill back in Wichita. Also when a storm was moving in. It was always the best grilling on an evening after mowing the lawn because not only did it smell of fresh cut lawn, but I could grill with peace of mind feeling accomplished.
Everything I wrote began with maybe and perhaps and ended with I think or I believe.
Ooohhhh Id like to hear Jenny's thoughts.
It’s receded, he thinks. It wants to stay inside me. It is nothing without me. Because a bullet without a body is a song without ears.
A new immigrant, within two years, will come to know that the salon is, in the end, a place where dreams become the calcified knowledge of what it means to be awake in American bones—with or without citizenship—aching, toxic, and underpaid.
One of them, seeing me, waved me over, saying something I couldn’t catch. When I told him I didn’t speak Spanish, he seemed surprised. Then a flare of recognition flicked over him and he lit up. “Ah!” He pointed at me and nodded. “Chinito. ¡Chinito!” I decided, it being my first day, not to correct him. I gave him a thumbs-up. “Sí,” I said, smiling, “Chinito.”
It’s too neat, so clean a symbol I must have made it up. And even now, in all the pictures I looked through, I can’t find him wearing it. Yet here it is, tilted to hide Trevor’s eyes, making him seem anonymous and easy to look at.
Is the army helmet real
And so he eats. He is eating still.
The memory of Lan persists
I got what I wanted—a boy swimming toward me. Except I was no shore, Ma. I was driftwood trying to remember what I had broken from to get here.
And I knew this was why there was a space for us: a farm, a field, a barn, a house, an hour, two. A space I never found in the city, where the tenement apartments we lived in were so cramped one could tell when a neighbor had a stomach flu in the middle of the night. To hide here, in a room in a broken-down mobile home, was, somehow, a privilege, a chance.
I only have the nerve to tell you what comes after because the chance this letter finds you is slim—the very impossibility of your reading this is all that makes my telling it possible.
What do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? A martyr? A weakling? No, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop. Yes, the period in the sentence—it’s what makes us human, Ma, I swear. It lets us stop in order to keep going.
“Fuck me up, fuck me up.” By then, violence was already mundane to me, was what I knew, ultimately, of love. Fuck. Me. Up. It felt good to name what was already happening to me all my life. I was being fucked up, at last, by choice.
“There’s a gas station up there.” He pointed to a Shell station ahead of us. Surrounded by the vast night, it looked like a spaceship had crashed on the side of the street.
The train barrels past them all, these towns I have come to know only by what leaves them, myself included.
The girl Grandma knew back in Go Cong, the one whose sandals were cut from the tires of a burned-out army jeep, who was erased by an air strike three weeks before the war ended—she’s a ruin no one can point to. A ruin without location, like a language.
I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don’t get enough of one or the other. They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, “It’s been an honor to serve my country.”
I considered the stars, the smattering of blue-white phosphorescence, and wondered how anyone could call the night dark.
Maybe we’ll be the opposite of buffaloes. We’ll grow wings and spill over the cliff as a generation of monarchs, heading home. Green Apple.
To ask What’s good? was to move, right away, to joy. It was pushing aside what was inevitable to reach the exceptional. Not great or well or wonderful, but simply good. Because good was more often enough, was a precious spark we sought and harvested of and for one another.
The father whose only connection to Paul was metal: the shell lodged in his old man’s brain from the day he stormed Omaha beach; the brass Paul lifted to his mouth to make music.
Metal for bullets; metal for music. The same material can be used for such drastically different purposes, like us.
Do you understand? I was a gaping wound in the middle of America and you were inside me asking, Where are we? Where are we, baby?
“Remember. Remember. You’re already Vietnamese.” You’re already. You’re all ready. Already gone.
I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.
