“I’m nervous.” She felt embarrassed and again she was the one sweating.

It was a French dance. The air smelled of peach blossoms.

The streets were busy, but many had come to the dance and sat around on folding chairs or squatted on their own legs. Some of Lin’s people were there, the Ugly People, the tribes. No longer do we have or love nature, Lin thought when she saw those from places like her own. Now we just try to get by, like everyone, or to make money and build. After the reconciliation, comrades were forgotten, and everyone strove in new ways to survive. Some left to work on oil rigs in Thailand. Some worked for peace. Some built businesses. Some lost them.

When Lin and Tran married, they stepped on the pathway of flowers. All was flowers because Lin’s adopted mother insisted. It was a day of still ponds and plants. It was a day of baked food and a night of sweetness, even in the rains that fell.

Now, beneath the full moon, as she watches the bats, she is a young woman and she has done well with her life. She tells herself that she has made for herself a fortunate life. And it is true; this life was not given her, the girl who was once shoeless even though her mother had been a shoemaker. Now, she thinks, it is time to find her father.

RED FISH: HUMAN

Lin still remembers her father. How he’d made yellow paper into something that flew on a string and looked like the birds that once lived there. She held the string and ran with the kite down the hill toward the now-murky water and he’d say, “Not too high,” afraid of attracting attention. She remembers laughing at his monkey imitation, although she had only seen a monkey once and it had stolen her grandmother’s pearl hair comb. The soldiers had seen to it that no monkeys were left.

Mostly she recalls the day he walked up from the floating market and the houses on stilts with the red fish in a white bowl. He carried it proudly. He had earned the money for it himself, paid by Old Grandfather Uncle for his labor. And he brought a lotus flower for her mother that same day, sweet-smelling and with white petals, slowly opening. But she remembers only pieces. She calls them fractures, the way her life has been fractured. And some pieces have fallen away like the petals of a flower. She knows that her father, the American who didn’t look like one, was one of their many secrets. Her people had nothing but secrets. Now, as a woman, she understands the careful line they walked to remain alive, between alliances, enemies, politicians of low order, and boys with a desire to kill. She’d heard all the words and, even young, she asked, “Are we Minh? Are we allies? Are we communists? Did we help the Americans?” Her grandmother, golden-skinned, tall then and not yet broken, said, “You are too young for these things. Anyway, now it is the past. We live for tomorrow.” Lin could tell by her eyes, a closed look, her hair back in a twist, that she would never tell. The past had to be put in its place. Not so for young Lin.