Ba had just been crowned the city’s youngest police chief and when the ladies looked at him they saw a new day. The noodle shop was his favorite eatery in the entire five-district area he canvassed. He dropped by before and after every shift. He ate pho for breakfast and lunch Monday through Friday. The waitresses whispered behind their cupped hands at how sexy he was when he ate. They liked watching him dab ever so politely at the corners of that sinful mouth.

My father had his pick and he picked my Ma. “Because I fed his hunger,” she says. She always says it with a sly smile like she smells something fragrant in the air that nobody else can smell. I imagine him on tipped toes reaching through leaves to pluck that singular perfect milk fruit. It hangs from a weighted branch, a sweet deep purple, the same shade my nipples have become now heavy with you. In Vietnamese, milk fruit is called vú sua, which translated means breast milk.

Ma was seven months pregnant with me when she kissed my Ba good-bye for the last time. He was off to fight a campaign near an area now called the Ho Chi Minh trail. Older brother Marcel was three and a terror even then. He was kicking at her ankles and begging to go to battle with Ba. Meanwhile, I was kicking harder than a mule with a burr in its ass. She put his hand on her swollen belly and with those broad fingers he caressed me with the lightness of butterfly wings. He kneeled down and whispered something Ma didn’t hear. It was a prayer or maybe a poem, whatever it was, she says, “Like a salve you settled back into your cocoon.”

“I think you wanted to come out and say hello or good-bye?” Ma says it in a question with her famous sad eyes and defeated smile. He didn’t come back after that.

On the last day I was in his presence, he was wearing that officer’s uniform, pressed and starched. His movie star looks fooled Ma into thinking that it wasn’t real. She had lived in the shadow of her older sister, Huong the beauty, her entire life. It had led her to believe that beautiful people don’t die. In fact, it appeared that such beauty made you invincible. Later she said, “And I was right because he didn’t die. He just ended up in prison which was the same as dying.”