Still, I wasn’t ready to forgive him, and now that I had my bearings I decided to look for a place to get a drink. I figured I could maybe find some Australians on holiday to buy me a round when I ran out of money, but there were no tourist spots nearby and I was worried I’d get lost if I wandered too far and drank too much. I doubled back to a local bar down the street called Cafe L’ami.

I took a table on the terrace and ordered a beer. About halfway through the bottle a lanky waiter informed me that the music was about to begin and asked if I wanted to come inside. The bar was dark, lit by a purple light and a slowly rotating disco ball. There were small circular café tables decorated with fake plastic roses. It was mostly empty. There were no foreigners, just a group of locals in the back and a couple seated a few tables away.

Onstage was a Casio keyboard, an acoustic guitar, and a small television monitor in the corner hooked up to a laptop. A hostess picked up the microphone and made some sort of announcement. Two young men took the stage. One with glasses got behind the Casio and the other picked up the guitar and began to play. The hostess sang a song in Vietnamese, and I wasn’t sure at first if the players were just miming along to a backing track or if it was a preset accompaniment on the keyboard. The hostess was a surprisingly fantastic singer, and the song was a compelling, emotional ballad I wished I knew the name of to look up later.

I ordered another beer and out of nowhere, a young Vietnamese girl took the seat beside me.

“Excuse me. What are you doing here?” she asked. She had a strong accent and it was difficult to understand her, especially over the music. She started laughing. “I’m sorry. I never see tourist here. I come here every day.”

When the hostess finished, one of the men from the back of the bar approached the stage, looking back at his friends for encouragement as he took the mic. A waiter came to our table with a ceramic pot and a teacup and placed it in front of my new companion.

“My name is Quing,” she said. She poured herself some tea and wrapped both hands around the cup. She placed her elbows on the table and leaned closer to me so I could hear her better. “It means flower.”

“Michelle,” I said. “I’m just on vacation. I’m staying at a hotel nearby.”

“Michelle,” she repeated. “What does it mean?”

“Oh, it doesn’t really mean anything,” I said. The man onstage had started to sing and I was struck again by how good his voice sounded. I wondered for a moment if Vietnamese people were born with perfect pitch.

“I come here because I am sad,” she said. “I love to sing. I come here every day.”

“I’m sad too,” I said, my second beer starting to unravel me a bit. “Why are you sad?”

“I want to be singer!” she said. “But my parents think I must go to school. How come you are sad?”

I took a sip of my beer. “My mom died,” I said finally. I realized it was maybe the first time I had let the words leave my mouth.

Quing put down her teacup and put her hand on top of mine. “You should sing something.”

She leaned in closer and stared into my eyes, like she was certain this would solve all my problems. It was how I’d felt about music once, back before everything happened. A pure, childlike belief that songs could heal. I had believed that with such conviction before I’d confronted a loss so consuming it had rattled my clearest passions, made my ambitions appear frivolous and egomaniacal. I took another swig of beer, pushed out my chair, and made my way to the stage.

“Do you have ‘Rainy Days and Mondays’?” I asked the hostess, who typed it into the YouTube search bar, clicked on a MIDI karaoke video, and handed me the mic. Quing stood against the stage and let out a cheer. When the music kicked in she closed her eyes and smiled, swaying side to side.

“Talking to myself and feeling old…Sometimes I’d like to quit, nothing ever seems to fit…” I began, realizing the microphone was heavily drowned in reverb. I sounded fantastic. There was literally no way you could sound bad with this thing. I closed my eyes, leaning into it, channeling my best Karen Carpenter—that tiny, tragic figure. That starving woman in the yellow dress, slowly crumbling under the pressure to seem happy for the camera, slowly killing herself on live television, striving for perfection.

The bar applauded. Quing took the plastic rose from our table and presented it to me ceremoniously. When it was her turn she of course selected none other than “My Heart Will Go On,” an anthem that reigns on as an unstoppable classic in Asia nearly two decades after its release. I thought of my mother’s Celine Dion impression, of her quivering lip. The sopping reverb spread Quing’s voice across the bar as she belted, “Near! Far! Wherever you are!” and I collected more roses from the surrounding tables and threw them at her feet.

“Quing! That was so great!”

As the other patrons took their turns at the mic, we continued to collect roses from the tables and throw them onto the stage. We danced to all the songs, cheering the loudest when they were through. She told me about famous Vietnamese singers. We talked about our dreams. I finished my last beer and we hugged goodbye, took down each other’s emails, and promised to keep in touch, though we never did.

In the morning, my father and I met for breakfast at the hotel buffet. We didn’t talk about our fight and continued on with the trip as if it had never happened. We took the train to H?i An and spent two days there. We walked around Old Town, the historic district, taking pictures along the canal. The streets were lined with stalls selling bright, multicolored lanterns and three-dimensional cards. From the famous Japanese covered bridge, we paused to watch the locals push small paper boats lit with candles out onto the water, completely unaware that “H?i An” means peaceful meeting place.

16

Jatjuk

We had come to Vietnam in search of healing, to emerge closer to each other in our grief, but we returned just as damaged and separate as ever. After a twenty-hour flight, we got back to the house at eight, and I fell straight to sleep, exhausted from travel and jet lag. Around midnight I woke up to a phone call from my father.

“I got in an accident,” he said. He sounded calm. “I’m about half a mile from home. I need you to come get me. Michelle, bring mouthwash.”

Panicked, I kept interrupting him with questions, to which he just responded firmly with my name until he hung up. I pulled a coat over my pajamas, searched frantically for my mother’s car keys, grabbed a bottle of Listerine from the bathroom cabinet, and started the drive.

By the time I got there, an ambulance had already arrived. From the look of it I was certain my father was dead. The car had rolled and landed on its side between two telephone poles. All the windows were shattered.

I parked my mother’s car behind the wreckage and ran toward the scene only to discover him sitting on the edge of the ambulance, breathing in and out as the paramedics instructed. His shirt was off and a large contusion was already forming along his collarbone. Small cuts were scattered over his arms and chest like they’d been struck multiple times with a cheese grater. Police officers crowded around us, everyone just as stunned as I was that he’d survived. It was impossible to pass off the mouthwash inconspicuously.

“I was going to check in on my office,” he said. “I must have fallen asleep at the wheel.”

My father’s office was next to the Highlands, his favorite bar. “They want me to go to the hospital,” he said. “But I don’t think I need to.”

“You’re going,” I said.

“Michelle, I’m really all right.”