Jamie played me the section of Miss Saigon right after Kim and Chris first sleep together, and she tells him she’s never been with a man before, which Chris says must be a lie. Kim then tells the story of how everyone in her family died during an American attack, which was why she moved to Saigon to become a bar girl, a verse that’s rendered in low, determined notes: “I have had my fill of pain / I will not look back again / I would rather die.”

“A lot of women can’t even sing those notes, but we can,” Jamie said when the section finished, and he rewound so we could sing along with Lea Salonga and then shift to our falsettos once her voice got higher. He played me the Korean recording, where the girl who played Kim had to go up an octave because she couldn’t hit those low notes. He played me recordings from Germany and Japan, but they only highlighted how rare of a singer Lea Salonga was, the coolness of her timbre and the evenness of her voice quality across the span of her range, as we listened to the whole original album together.

It was the first time I’d listened to Miss Saigon in several years, ever since the disillusion of dreaming an America that did not materialize when I actually got here, which left me feeling deceived by that show. But sitting in bed with Jamie, I realized I’d found my own American dream to fulfill, one that depended not on a lover’s beneficence but rather on my industry and will.