After my mother’s funeral it was as if the house transformed and turned against us. What was once a comforting reflection of her individual style was now a symbol of our collective failure. Every piece of furniture and decorative object seemed to mock us. They reminded us of the stories that had flooded in while she was alive—of cancer patients who had survived against all odds. How someone’s neighbor had conquered her own death sentence by way of meditation and positive thinking. How so-and-so’s cancer had spread to multiple lymph nodes, but through envisioning a new, unblemished bladder, a miracle occurred, and he was now in remission. Anything seemed possible if you just had an optimistic attitude. Maybe we hadn’t tried hard enough, hadn’t believed enough, hadn’t forcefed her enough blue-green algae. Maybe god hated us. There were other families who had fought and won. We had fought and lost—and among all the natural, heartbreaking emotions we had expected to feel, it also felt strangely embarrassing.

I packed her clothing into garbage bags, disposed of half-used QVC creams, donated the hospice equipment and leftover protein shakes. In the kitchen my father sat slumped over the glass tabletop with a large plastic cup of red wine and called credit card company after credit card company to cancel the cards in her wallet, repeating over and over to each customer service representative that his wife had just died and we’d no longer be needing their services.

Traveling to some far-off place seemed like a good idea at the time. A mental breather from a house that felt like it was suffocating us. So, one morning over breakfast while my father drank his coffee, he searched online for potential places we could vacation. Maybe an island, he suggested, where we could relax and lie on a beach, but the idea of full days staring dumbly at gorgeous water frightened me. It felt too stagnant, too much time to get caught up in dark thought. Europe reminded him too much of vacations they’d taken together. Eventually, we zeroed in on Southeast Asia, a region of the world that had always captivated us. Neither of us had been to Vietnam and it was relatively inexpensive thanks to a strong American dollar. We figured that maybe if we were busy taking in a place neither of us had ever been, we could manage to forget, just for a moment, how much our lives had fallen apart.

We booked the flights two weeks after the funeral. My father wisely reserved separate rooms so we could have our personal space. We stayed in luxurious hotels with rainwater showerheads and grand breakfast buffets. Trays teeming with exotic fruits and imported cheeses, made-to-order omelets, and cookie-cutter versions of local Vietnamese fare. In Hanoi we sat in silence on a boat gliding across H? Long Bay. We passed the beautiful limestone islands jutting out from the water, privately weeping without a comforting word to impart to the other. We booked an overnight train north, to Sapa, on a service called Fanxipan, and when we wound up at the wrong station, my father ran around frantically asking the locals, “Where is fancy pants?” while I bought us bánh mì at a cart nearby. We ate the sandwiches in our bunk beds, capping them off with .5 mgs of my father’s Xanax, and worked our way through a plastic bag full of glass bottles of 333 beer until we were impaired enough to sleep through the train’s violent sways along the track barely two feet wide. In Sapa we rented motorcycles and rode the foggy, winding roads that overlook the terraced rice fields that never seemed to end. But every moment of wonder was quickly followed by a halting sock to the stomach, a constant reminder of why we were there.

Every time a front desk attendant asked if he needed an extra key for his “friend,” my father would blush, “No, no, this is my daughter.” “This is my dad!” I shrieked at the Hmong guide who took us back for a handful of fried larvae at her home stay. “Then where is Mommy?” she asked as I crunched into a flaky bulb. “She’s at home,” my father said, tight-lipped and teary-eyed, unsure of how to move forward. This was still when it seemed best to lie and not get into it, when we were still too afraid to say it out loud. “It’s just a father-daughter trip,” I added.

Most nights, after an early dinner we’d return to our hotel rooms and I’d crumple onto the bed and sleep for fourteen to fifteen hours. Grief, like depression, made it hard to accomplish even the simplest of tasks. The country felt wasted on us. We were numb to all spectacle and feeling, quietly miserable and completely clueless as to how to help each other. By the time we arrived in Huê, we’d reached the halfway point of a two-week trip that was beginning to feel far too ambitious, even painstakingly long. All I wanted to do was go home. I longed to hide in my bedroom and dissociate with the comforts of my PlayStation and its soothing farming simulation games, not wake up at six a.m. to take a van tour of another pagoda and marketplace while my father bartered for half an hour over the equivalent of a couple of USD.

But that day in Huê, things started to look up. We were pleased that the weather was nicer than it’d been in Sapa, that the atmosphere was more tranquil than in Hanoi. The relentless honking of scooter horns we’d become accustomed to as Vietnam’s second national language was not as fluently spoken. Life moved at a slower pace.

We shared lunch, bánh khoái—a greasy, crispy, yellow crepe folded over shrimp and bean sprouts—and washed it down with cold Huda beer. We swam in a gigantic, beautiful pool outside our gigantic, beautiful hotel. We watched our boat driver’s wife model souvenir T-shirts and proffer snow globes and wooden bottle openers, shaking our heads with guilt as we repeated “No, thank you” to each ware while gliding along the Perfume River.

In the evening we took a cab to Les Jardins de la Carambole, a highly recommended French-Vietnamese fusion restaurant near the Imperial Citadel. The restaurant looked like a large manor out of the French Quarter of New Orleans. The exterior was painted bright yellow. Three large archways, each with its own balcony, ran along the second story, and a porch with tables extended out elegantly from the facade.

We got cocktails to start and decided on a bottle of Bordeaux to share with dinner. We ordered voraciously. The pumpkin soup, the beef in banana leaf, fried spring rolls, crispy squid, a bowl of bún bò hu?, and a seafood mango salad recommended by the waitress. Ordering food so as to maximize the quantity of shared dishes and an exuberance for alcohol are the two things my father and I have always counted on for common ground.

“You know,” my father said to our waitress as though he were letting her in on a secret. He stabbed his finger in my direction a few times. “She used to do—what you do!”

“Excuse me?”

The waitress was a pretty Vietnamese woman who looked to be about my age. She had long black hair and was wearing a red ao dài, an ankle-length dress with high slits, and loose black pants underneath. She spoke English with a nearly undetectable accent. Whenever her hands were empty she stood with them clasped, one over the other, like a serene buddha.

“My daughter—she used to work as waitress. Many years!” my father said.

From years of communicating with my mother’s family, my dad had developed this way of addressing non–English speakers that involves dropping articles and wildly gesticulating as if he were talking to a three-year-old.

“And me,” he pointed to himself. “Long time ago.” He stretched his arms wide. “Busboy!” Then he slammed his big hand on the table, rattling the cutlery and glasses, and let out a loud laugh.

“Oh!” the waitress said, miraculously unrattled by an American man nearly overturning a table.