At first he hadn’t thought to ask why there were no young men. He didn’t think they were dead or soldiers in another war than his. Even after the Americans left, the war was not over. He’d heard about the many who came to power. Whenever some of them passed by he was hidden, or, if seen, the questioners were told he didn’t hear or speak. He looked like the village people. He worked with them, with the women in the rice fields, or at the river. When the enemy came by they thought he was a dullard, a stupid man, and even those who liked to hurt the vulnerable left him alone because he was a strong worker and they needed him. Otherwise he would have been teased to death, not by words. But they needed rice in the city. They needed workers.

He could still see Ma carrying the baskets of rice to them, walking up the white path, moss growing across it now because it had not been used for some time. Even the followers of Ho were hungry.

And then, the baby cried.

Lin looks like her father, yet she has her mother’s gentleness and narrow shape. She was a reed as she grew. She was a willow. She was a deer. Nature is her place, though she now lives in the city with traffic, motorbikes, phones, noise constant, in a city once called “The Pearl.” Saigon. Ho Chi Minh City. Yet there are still the country vendors, old-fashioned, hitting their sticks together, calling out their wares. There are street foods, and buyers.

From the plane, her seat at the window, she looks down at the world below, Vietnam, then the many green islands with the light blue water of coral reefs. Lin opens the map of the continents and looks again. Inside her mind is a boat, overloaded, sinking in the ocean, and people trying to swim, one young man being taken up, wet, skinny, by someone from a ship. She doesn’t think of what happens with the others. The stewardess now brings her a soda and saves her from her memories.

Just as her father would have done, she studies the map of the continents, always having to check and recheck the flight path, the world as it should be. She looks down at everything as if the world could vanish, and then it does. There is only cloud.

She had investigated as much as possible before she left. She found the map of America, his reservation, the nearest towns, where he was born. She looks at it now, as if she can see him, a tiny figure on the paper. He was born at home, like Lin, if she could call her only place home. When she had visited it once, after working near the region, nothing was there except rice fields, remnants, trash and a faded blue door lying on the wet road near a collapsed tunnel entrance. She didn’t know she was born behind that door.