Her sister Kim had moved across the city to the Mission with her little Sophia and Marcel. Huong didn’t worry about Kim. She was tough as nails, blade sharp, whip-smart and as soon as Duc was sponsored over, they’d be fine. Her brother Lam had followed his job with a computer software company to San Jose. He bragged that this place called Silicon Valley was the “Hollywood of the next decade.” It was the new dream making machine in America. Despite his bravado, Huong hoped it was true for his sake and the sake of the boys.

Huong prayed this new job and the better pay would appease Lam’s demons. Throughout the years on 22nd Ave., her insomnia made her witness to his tantrums. In the middle of the night, she could hear the slap of his belt on skin. The double insulated walls did nothing to muffle Trang’s cries or the boys’ pleading. Huong hated those thin walls. She hated what she had learned about her own brother; how his bitterness about this new life beset those he loved most. She hated the excuses she made for him in the mornings in order to look him in the eye again. And most of all, she hated that everyone in the house probably heard it too. Yet nobody spoke out in the cowardly name of not betraying one’s blood. Not ever her, the self-righteous outspoken girl of the family. She hated what she had discovered about herself.

At their new apartment, Huong most cherished the new-found privacy in which to live her life. She didn’t care that it wasn’t beautiful. She didn’t mind that it was a box-like duplex on the second floor, stuffed between people above and below like a sandwich. It was clean, in walking distance to the Park, and most importantly, it was all hers.

She could hear her father saying, “It has to have the right essence and the proper proportions to be a healing tool.” He was known to be the best doctor in the South because he combined his French education with the folk methods. She prayed she had inherited his sensibility as she was sifting through a pile of twigs.

Michelle ran up bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked and said, “This is it.” The little one was right. The stick fit right through the xu.

Huong said, “Let’s keep looking.”

Michelle said, “But why?”

“I’d like something smoother.”

“Mom, it’s impossible to find a smooth one.”

Huong said, “Are you talking back to me? Do you know I have to use it as a handle? You want me to get calluses? My hand to bleed?”

Michelle rubbed her tennis shoes together. She scrunched up her face like a cabbage. “But I want to go play.” She pointed into the fenced playground. Her attention was focused on a child spinning on a merry-go-round.

“Your sister’s sick in bed and you want to play?”

“I wish I was sick like Elle. Sicker even!” Michelle began to cry. Snot ran down her lip. She sniffled, “You only love me when I’m sick.”