When I first started writing, I hated myself for being so uncertain, about images, clauses, ideas, even the pen or journal I used. Everything I wrote began with maybe and perhaps and ended with I think or I believe. But my doubt is everywhere, Ma. Even when I know something to be true as bone I fear the knowledge will dissolve, will not, despite my writing it, stay real. I’m breaking us apart again so that I might carry us somewhere else—where, exactly, I’m not sure. Just as I don’t know what to call you—White, Asian, orphan, American, mother?

Sometimes we are given only two choices. While doing research, I read an article from an 1884 El Paso Daily Times, which reported that a white railroad worker was on trial for the murder of an unnamed Chinese man. The case was ultimately dismissed. The judge, Roy Bean, cited that Texas law, while prohibiting the murder of human beings, defined a human only as White, African American, or Mexican. The nameless yellow body was not considered human because it did not fit in a slot on a piece of paper. Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.

To be or not to be. That is the question.

When you were a girl in Vietnam, the neighborhood kids would take a spoon to your arms, shouting, “Get the white off her, get the white off her!” Eventually you learned to swim. Wading deep into the muddy river, where no one could reach you, no one could scrape you away. You made yourself an island for hours at a time. Coming home, your jaw would clatter from cold, your arms pruned and blistered—but still white.

When asked how he identifies his roots, Tiger Woods called himself “Cablinasian,” a portmanteau he invented to contain his ethnic makeup of Chinese, Thai, Black, Dutch, and Native American.

To be or not to be. That is the question. A question, yes, but not a choice.

* * *

—

“I remember one time, while visiting you all in Hartford—this must be a year or two after you landed from Vietnam—” Paul rests his chin on his palm and stares out the window, where a hummingbird hovers at the plastic feeder. “I walked into the apartment and found you crying under the table. No one was home—or maybe your mom was—but she must have been in the bathroom or something.” He stops, letting the memory fill in. “I bent down and asked you what was wrong, and you know what you said?” He grins. “You said that the other kids lived more than you. What a hoot.” He shakes his head. “What a thing to say! I’ll never forget that.” His gold-capped molar caught the light. “‘They live more, they live more!’ you shouted. Who the hell gave you that idea? You were only five, for Christ sakes.”

Outside, the hummingbird’s whirring sounds almost like human breath. Its beak jabs into the pool of sugared water at the feeder’s base. What a terrible life, I think now, to have to move so fast just to stay in one place.

After, we go for a walk, Paul’s brown-spotted beagle clinking between us. It’s just after sunset and the air’s thick with sweetgrass and late lilacs frothing white and magenta along the manicured lawns. We veer toward the last bend when a plain-looking lady, middle-aged, hair in a blond ponytail, approaches. She says, looking only at Paul, “I see you finally got a dog boy. Good for you, Paul!”

Paul stops, pushes his glasses up his nose only to have them slide back down. She turns to me, articulates, “Welcome. To. The. Neighbor. Hood.” Her head bobs out each syllable.

I hold tight the dog’s leash and step back, offering a smile.

“No,” Paul says, his hand raised awkwardly, as if waving away cobwebs. “This is my grandson.” He lets the word hover between us all, until it feels solid, an instrument, then repeats it, nodding, to himself or the woman I can’t say. “My grandson.”

Without a beat the woman smiles. Too widely.

“Please remember that.”

She laughs, makes a dismissive gesture before extending her hand to me, my body now legible.

I let her shake my hand.

“Well, I’m Carol. Welcome to the neighborhood. I mean that.” She walks on.

We head home. We don’t speak. Behind the row of white town houses, a column of spruces stands motionless against a reddish sky. The beagle’s paws scrape the concrete, its chain clinking as the animal pulls us home. But all I can hear is Paul’s voice in my head. My grandson. This is my grandson.

I’m dragged into a hole, darker than the night around it, by two women. Only when one of them screams do I know who I am. I see their heads, black hair matted from the floor they sleep on. The air sharp with a chemical delirium as they jostle in the blur of the car’s interior. Eyes still thick with sleep, I make out the shapes: a headrest, a felt monkey the size of a thumb swinging from the rearview, a piece of metal, shining, then gone. The car peels out of the driveway, and I can tell, from the smell of acetone and nail polish, that it’s your tan-and-rust Toyota. You and Lan are in the front, clamoring for something that won’t show itself. The streetlights fling by, hitting your faces with the force of blows.

“He’s gonna kill her, Ma. He’s gonna do it this time,” you say, breathless.

“We riding. We riding helicopter fast.” Lan is in her own mind, red and dense with obsession. “We riding where?” She clutches the flip-down mirror with both hands. I can tell by her voice that she is smiling, or at least gritting her teeth.

“He’s gonna kill my sister, Mama.” You sound like you’re flailing down a river. “I know Carl. It’s for real this time. You hear me? Ma!”

Lan rocks side to side from the mirror, making whooshing sounds. “We getting out of here, huh? We gotta go far, Little Dog!” Outside, the night surges by like sideways gravity. The green numbers on the dash read 3:04. Who put my hands in my face? The tires squeal at each turn. The streets are empty and it feels like a universe in here, an everything hurling through the cosmic dark while, in the front seat, the women who raised me are losing their minds. Through my fingers, the night is black construction paper. Only the frazzled heads of these two before me are clear, swaying.

“Don’t worry, Mai.” You’re speaking to yourself now. Your face so close to the windshield the glass fogs a ring that spreads in equal measure to your words. “I’m coming. We’re coming.”

After a while we swerve down a street lined with Continentals. The car crawls, then stops in front of a grey clapboard town house. “Mai,” you say, pulling the emergency brake. “He’s gonna kill Mai.”

Lan, who all this time had been shaking her head from side to side, stops, as if the words have finally touched a little button inside her. “What? Who kill who? Who die this time?”

“Both of you stay in the car!” You unbuckle your belt, leap out, and shuffle toward the house, the door left open behind you.

There’s a story Lan would tell, of Lady Tri?u, the mythical woman warrior who led an army of men and repelled the Chinese invasion of ancient Vietnam. I think of her, seeing you. How, as legend goes, armed with two swords, she’d fling her yard-long breasts over her shoulders and cut down the invaders by the dozens. How it was a woman who saved us.

“Who die now?” Lan swings around, her face, made stark by the overhead light, ripples with this new knowledge. “Who gonna die, Little Dog?” She flips her hand back and forth, as if opening a locked door, to indicate emptiness. “Somebody kill you? For what?”

But I’m not listening. I’m rolling down the window, arms burning with each turn on the handle. Cool November air slips in. My stomach grabs as I watch you mount the front steps, the nine-inch machete glinting in your hand. You knock on the door, shouting. “Come out, Carl,” you say in Vietnamese. “Come out, you fucker! I’m taking her home for good. You can have the car, just give me my sister.” At the word sister your voice cracks into a short, busted sob, before regaining control. You bash the door with the machete’s wooden butt.

The porch lights turn on, your pink nightgown suddenly green under the fluorescent. The door opens.

You step back.

A man appears. He half lunges from the doorway as you backpedal down the steps. The blade locked at your side, as if pinned in place.

“He has a gun,” Lan whisper-shouts from the car, now lucid. “Rose! It’s a shotgun. It shoots two eaters at once. They eat your lungs inside out. Little Dog, tell her.”

Your hands float over your head, the metal clanks on the driveway. The man, huge, his shoulders sloped under a grey Yankees sweatshirt, steps up to you, says a few words through his teeth, then kicks the machete to the side. It disappears in the grass with a flash. You mumble something, make yourself small, cup your hands under your chin, the posture you take after receiving a tip at the salon. The man lowers his gun as you back away, shaking, toward the car.

“It’s not worth it, Rose,” Lan says, cupping her mouth with both hands. “You can’t beat a gun. You just can’t. Come back, come back in the helicopter.”

“Ma,” I hear myself say, my voice cracking. “Ma, come on.”