Finally he set the teacup back onto its saucer and smiled again to her. She smiled back, warm and real, revealing blackened teeth. Somehow he had passed her test. Looking fully at her for the first time he could see the beauty that had carried over into Van and the strength that had no doubt held the family together through the years of war. Her eyes twinkled. Her skin was still smooth and unblemished. When she closed her full lips to self-consciously cover her betel-nut-stained teeth, he could peer so far into her face that he saw all the moments of her life mixed together. And he knew that she was kind.

“You have been very busy,” she finally said in Vietnamese.

“My boss needed me,” he answered, struggling for a moment to find the right Vietnamese words. “I was in Hawaii until last night.” He smiled self-consciously, knowing somehow that he could speak to her from his heart. “You make me feel very shy.”

She gave off an immediate, involuntary, girlish giggle, straightening in her chair and waving a hand at him, as if it had never occurred to her that she might have held this power over his emotions. “You’re so strong,” she said. “I’m only an old woman.”

“I am nervous to be at your family altar,” he answered.

Her face warmed with genuine affection. She stood and offered him her hand. “You are a very special guest,” she said. “We are honored.”

He took her hand and she grasped his, firmly and without hesitation, removing any doubts that she had fully accepted him. They walked together around a corner to another wall. The wall and a table in front of it were covered with pictures. At the center of the table was a hand-painted porcelain jar filled with sand.

She began explaining the pictures, introducing him to the ancestors, beginning with the oldest. An eerie calm crept over him as he saw the faces of her and Colonel Pham’s grandparents, parents, sisters, and brothers. In the often stoic poses of old black and white photographs and the changing styles of clothes he saw the grief-racked journey of an unbending people. Without industry, their thousand-year love of education suppressed by French colonials, their people then starved and bludgeoned by the Japanese, who could fault the lust for independence that launched them on another thirty years of war? Condley knew that he and Colonel Pham would never agree on the exact reasons the war had been fought. But the faces on the wall told him that somehow it had been inevitable.

Two young men stared at him with lifted chins and proud eyes, wearing military uniforms. “Bo doi,” she said. It was his former enemy’s word for what he and others simply had called Viet Cong. “My brother, Pham’s brother.”