Lan has been dead five months now, and for five months has sat in an urn on your bedside table. But today we’re in Vietnam. Tien Giang Province, home of Go Cong District. It is summer. The rice paddies sweep out around us, endless and green as the sea itself.

After the funeral, after the monks in saffron robes chant and sing around her polished granite gravestone, the neighbors from the village with trays of food lifted over their heads, the ones with white hair who recall Lan’s life here nearly thirty years ago, offer their anecdotes and condolences. After the sun dips under the rice fields and all that’s left is the grave site, its dirt still fresh and damp at its edges, strewn with white chrysanthemums, I call Paul in Virginia.

He makes a request I don’t expect, and asks to see her. I take my laptop and carry it the few yards toward the graves, close enough to the house to obtain three bars of Wi-Fi.

I stand, the laptop held out in front of me, and point Paul’s face to Lan’s grave, which is embossed with a photo of her when she was twenty-eight, roughly the age when they first met. I wait from behind the screen as this American veteran Skypes with his estranged Vietnamese ex-wife, just buried. At one point, I think the signal had cut out, but then I hear Paul blowing his nose, his sentences amputated, struggling through his goodbyes. He’s sorry, he says to the smiling face on the grave. Sorry that he went back to Virginia in ’71 after he received notice that his mother was ill. How it was all a ploy to get him home, how his mother faked her tuberculosis until weeks turned to months, until the war began to close and Nixon stopped deploying troops and Americans started pulling out. How all the letters Lan sent were intercepted by Paul’s brother. How it wasn’t until one day, months before Saigon fell, a soldier, just home, knocked on his door and handed him a note from Lan. How Lan and their daughters had to leave the capital after the fall. How they’ll write again. He said sorry that it took so long. That by the time the Salvation Army called him to let him know there was a woman with a marriage certificate with his name on it looking for him in a Philippine refugee camp, it was already 1990. He had, by then, been married to another woman for over eight years. He says all this in a flood of stuttered Vietnamese—which he picked up during his tour and kept at through their marriage—until his words are barely coherent under his heaving.

A few children from the village had gathered at the edge of the graves, their curious and perplexed stares hover on the periphery. I must look strange to them, holding the pixelated head of a white man in front of a row of tombs.

As I look at Paul’s face on the screen, this soft-spoken man, this stranger turned grandfather turned family, I realize how little I know of us, of my country, any country. Standing by the dirt road, not unlike the road Lan had once stood on nearly forty years earlier, an M-16 pointed at her nose as she held you, I wait until my grandpa’s voice, this retired tutor, vegan, and marijuana grower, this lover of maps and Camus, finishes his last words to his first love, then close the laptop.

* * *

—

In the Hartford I grew up in and the one you grow old in, we greet one another not with “Hello” or “How are you?” but by asking, our chins jabbing the air, “What’s good?” I’ve heard this said in other parts of the country, but in Hartford, it was pervasive. Among those hollowed-out, boarded buildings, playgrounds with barbed-wire fences so rusted and twisted out of shape they were like something made out of nature, organic as vines, we made a lexicon for ourselves. A phrase used by the economic losers, it can also be heard in East Hartford and New Britain, where entire white families, the ones some call trailer trash, crammed themselves on half-broken porches in mobile parks and HUD housing, their faces OxyContin-gaunt under cigarette smoke, illuminated by flashlights hung by fishing lines in lieu of porch lights, howling, “What’s good?” as you walked by.

In my Hartford, where fathers were phantoms, dipping in and out of their children’s lives, like my own father. Where grandmothers, abuelas, abas, nanas, babas, and bà ngo?is were kings, crowned with nothing but salvaged and improvised pride and the stubborn testament of their tongues as they waited on creaking knees and bloated feet outside Social Services for heat and oil assistance smelling of drugstore perfume and peppermint hard candies, their brown oversized Goodwill coats dusted with fresh snow as they huddled, steaming down the winter block—their sons and daughters at work or in jail or overdosed or just gone, hitching cross-country on Greyhounds with dreams of kicking the habit, starting anew, but then ghosting into family legends.

In my Hartford, where the insurance companies that made us the big city had all moved out once the Internet arrived, and our best minds were sucked up by New York or Boston. Where everybody’s second cousin was in the Latin Kings. Where we still sell Whalers jerseys at the bus station twenty years after the Whalers ditched this place to became the Carolina Hurricanes. Hartford of Mark Twain, Wallace Stevens, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, writers whose vast imaginations failed to hold, in either flesh or ink, bodies like ours. Where the Bushnell theatre, the Wadsworth Atheneum (which held the first retrospective on Picasso in America), were visited mostly by outsiders from the suburbs, who park their cars valet and hurry into the warm auditorium halogens before driving home to sleepy towns flushed with Pier 1 Imports and Whole Foods. Hartford, where we stayed when other Vietnamese immigrants fled to California or Houston. Where we made a kind of life digging in and out of one brutal winter after another, where nor’easters swallowed our cars overnight. The two a.m. gunshots, the two p.m. gunshots, the wives and girlfriends at the C-Town checkout with black eyes and cut lips, who return your gaze with lifted chins, as if to say, Mind your business.

Because being knocked down was already understood, already a given, it was the skin you wore. 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.

Here, good is finding a dollar caught in the sewer drain, is when your mom has enough money on your birthday to rent a movie, plus buy a five-dollar pizza from Easy Frank’s and stick eight candles over the melted cheese and pepperoni. Good is knowing there was a shooting and your brother was the one that came home, or was already beside you, tucked into a bowl of mac and cheese.

That’s what Trevor said to me that night as we climbed out of the river, the black droplets dripping from our hair and fingertips. His arm slung across my shivering shoulder, he put his mouth to my ear and said, “You good. You heard, Little Dog? You good, I swear. You good.”

* * *

—

After we put Lan’s urn in the ground, polished her grave one last time with cloth rags soaked in wax and castor oil, you and I return to our hotel in Saigon. Soon as we enter the dingy room with its choking air conditioner, you turn off all the lights. I stop midstride, not sure what to make of the sudden dark. It’s early afternoon and the motorbikes can still be heard honking and puttering on the street below. The bed creaks, you had sat down.

“Where am I?” you say. “Where is this?”

Not knowing what else to say, I say your name.

“Rose,” I say. The flower, the color, the shade. “Hong,” I repeat. A flower is seen only toward the end of its life, just-bloomed and already on its way to being brown paper. And maybe all names are illusions. How often do we name something after its briefest form? Rose bush, rain, butterfly, snapping turtle, firing squad, childhood, death, mother tongue, me, you.

Only when I utter the word do I realize that rose is also the past tense of rise. That in calling your name I am also telling you to get up. I say it as if it is the only answer to your question—as if a name is also a sound we can be found in. Where am I? Where am I? You’re Rose, Ma. You have risen.