I sit up on the side of the bed and listen. Maybe it’s a cat wounded from a skirmish with a raccoon. I balance myself in the black air and head toward the hallway. There’s a red blade of light coming through a cracked door at the other end. The animal is inside the house. I palm the wall, which, in the humidity, feels like wet skin. I make my way toward the door and hear, in between the whimpers, the animal’s breaths—heavier now, something with huge lungs, much larger than a cat. I peer through the door’s red crack—and that’s when I see him: the man bent over in a reading chair, his white skin and even whiter hair made pink, raw under a scarlet-shaded lamp. And it comes to me: I’m in Virginia, on summer break. I’m nine. The man’s name is Paul. He is my grandfather—and he’s crying. A warped Polaroid trembles between his fingers.

I push the door. The red blade widens. He looks up at me, lost, this white man with watery eyes. There are no animals here but us.

* * *

—

Paul had met Lan in 1967 while stationed in Cam Ranh Bay with the US Navy. They met at a bar in Saigon, dated, fell in love, and, a year later, married right there in the city’s central courthouse. All through my childhood their wedding photo hung on the living room wall. In it, a thin, boyish Virginian farmboy with doe-brown eyes, not yet twenty-three, beams above his new wife, five years his senior—a farmgirl, as it happens, from Go Cong, and a mother to twelve-year-old Mai from her arranged marriage. As I played with my dolls and toy soldiers, that photo hovered over me, an icon from an epicenter that would lead to my own life. In the couple’s hopeful smiles, it’s hard to imagine the photo was snapped during one of the most brutal years of the war. At the time it was taken, with Lan’s hand on Paul’s chest, her pearl wedding ring a bead of light, you were already a year old—waiting in a stroller a few feet behind the cameraman as the bulb flashed.

Lan told me one day, while I was plucking her white hairs, that when she first arrived in Saigon, after running away from her doomed first marriage, after failing to find a job, she ended up as a sex worker for American GIs on R&R. She said, with barbed pride, as if she was defending herself before a jury, “I did what any mother would do, I made a way to eat. Who can judge me, huh? Who?” Her chin jutted, her head lifted high at some invisible person across the room. It was only when I heard her slip that I realized she was, in fact, speaking to someone: her mother. “I never wanted to, Ma. I wanted to go home with you—” She lunged forward. The tweezers dropped from my grip, pinged on the hardwood. “I never asked to be a whore,” she sobbed. “A girl who leaves her husband is the rot of a harvest,” she repeated the proverb her mother told her. “A girl who leaves . . .” She rocked from side to side, eyes shut, face lifted toward the ceiling, like she was seventeen again.

At first I thought she was telling another one of her half-invented tales, but the details grew clearer as her voice stammered into focus on odd yet idiosyncratic moments in the narrative. How the soldiers would smell of a mixture of tar, smoke, and mint Chiclets—the scent of the battle sucked so deep into their flesh it would linger even after their vigorous showers. Leaving Mai in the care of her sister back in the village, Lan rented a windowless room from a fisherman by the river, where she took the soldiers. How the fisherman, living below her, would spy on her through a slot in the wall. How the soldiers’ boots were so heavy, when they kicked them off as they climbed into bed, the thumps sounded like bodies dropping, making her flinch under their searching hands.

Lan tensed as she spoke, her tone strained as it dipped into the realm of her second mind. She turned to me afterward, a finger blurred over her lips. “Shhhh. Don’t tell your mom.” Then she gave my nose a flick, her eyes bright as she grinned maniacally.

But Paul, shy and sheepish, who often spoke with his hands in his lap, was not her client—which was why they hit it off. According to Lan, they did, in fact, meet at a bar. It was late, nearly midnight, when Lan walked in. She had just finished her work for the day and was getting a nightcap when she saw the “lost boy,” as she called him, sitting alone at the counter. There was a social that night for servicemen in one of the ritzy hotels, and Paul was waiting for a date that would never arrive.

They talked over drinks and found a common ground in their shared rural childhoods, both having been brought up in the “sticks” of their respective countries. These two unlikely hillbillies must have found a familiar dialect that fused the gap between their estranged vernaculars. Despite their vastly different paths, they found themselves transplants in a decadent and disorientating city besieged by bombing raids. It was in this familiar happenstance that they found refuge in each other.

One night, two months after they met, Lan and Paul would be holed up in a one-room apartment in Saigon. The city was being infiltrated by a massive North Vietnamese advance that would later be known as the infamous Tet Offensive. All night Lan lay fetal, her back against the wall, Paul by her side, his standard-issue 9mm pistol aimed at the door as the city tore open with sirens and mortar fire.

* * *

—

Although it’s only three in the morning, the lampshade makes the room feel like the last moments of a sinister sunset. Under the bulb’s electric hum, Paul and I spot each other through the doorway. He wipes his eyes with the palm of one hand and waves me over with the other. He slips the photo into his chest pocket and puts on his glasses, blinking hard. I sit on the cherrywood armchair beside him.

“You okay, Grandpa?” I say, still foggy from sleep. His smile has a grimace underneath it. I suggest that I go back to bed, that it’s still early anyway, but he shakes his head.

“It’s alright.” He sniffles and straightens up in the chair, serious. “It’s just—well, I just keep thinking about that song you sang earlier, the uh . . .” He squints at the floor.

“Ca trù,” I offer, “the folk songs—the ones Grandma used to sing.”

“That’s right.” He nods vigorously. “Ca trù. I was lying there in the damn dark and I swear I kept hearing it. It’s been so long since I heard that sound.” He glances at me, searching, then back at the floor. “I must be going crazy.”

Earlier that night, after dinner, I had sung a few folk songs for Paul. He had inquired about what I had learned during the school year and, already steeped in summer and drawing a blank, I offered a few songs I had memorized from Lan. I sang, in my best effort, a classic lullaby Lan used to sing. The song, originally performed by the famous Khánh Ly, describes a woman singing among corpses strewn across sloping leafy hills. Searching the faces of the dead, the singer asks in the song’s refrain, And which of you, which of you are my sister?

Do you remember it, Ma, how Lan would sing it out of nowhere? How once, she sang it at my friend Junior’s birthday party, her face the shade of raw ground beef from a single Heineken? You shook her shoulder, telling her to stop, but she kept going, eyes closed, swaying side to side as she sang. Junior and his family didn’t understand Vietnamese—thank god. To them it was just my crazy grandma mumbling away again. But you and I could hear it. Eventually you put down your slice of pineapple cake—untouched, the glasses clinking as the corpses, fleshed from Lan’s mouth, piled up around us.

Among the empty plates stained from the baked ziti, I sang that same song as Paul listened. After, he simply clapped, then we washed up. I had forgotten that Paul, too, understands Vietnamese, having picked it up during the war.

“I’m sorry,” I say now, watching the red light pool under his eyes. “It’s a stupid song anyway.”

Outside, the wind is driving through the maples, their rinsed leaves slap against the clapboard siding. “Let’s just make some coffee or something, Grandpa.”

“Right.” He pauses, mulling something over, then rises to his feet. “Let me just put on my slippers. I’m always cold in the mornings. I swear something’s wrong with me. It’s getting old. Your body heat retreats to your center until one day your feet are ice.” He almost laughs but rubs his chin instead, then raises his arm, as if to strike at something in front of him—and then the click, the lamp goes out, the room now swept with a violet stillness. From the shadow, his voice: “I’m glad you’re here, Little Dog.”

* * *

—

“Why do they say black?” you asked weeks earlier, back in Hartford, pointing to Tiger Woods on the TV screen. You squinted at the white ball on the tee. “His mom is Taiwanese, I’ve seen her face, but they always say black. Shouldn’t they at least say half yellow?” You folded your bag of Doritos, tucked it under your arm. “How come?” You tilted your head, waiting for my answer.

When I said that I didn’t know, you raised your eyebrows. “What do you mean?” You grabbed the controller and turned up the volume. “Listen closely, and tell us why this man is not Taiwanese,” you said, running your hand through your hair. Your eyes followed Woods as he walked back and forth across the screen, periodically crouching to gauge his stroke. There was no mention, at the moment, of his ethnic makeup, and the answer you wanted never came. You stretched a strand of hair before your face, examining it. “I need to get more curlers.”

Lan, who was sitting on the floor beside us, said, without looking up from the apple she was peeling, “That boy don’t look Taiwanese to me. He looks Puerto Rican.”

You gave me a look, leaned back, and sighed. “Everything good is always somewhere else,” you said after a while, and changed the channel.

* * *