“WHEN I WAS HERE as a high school student, I looked down into the tiger cages, where they kept the prisoners of war and the political dissidents. I thought: It could be me down there. Me. If I had been born at another time.”

Ha and Evrim were in the ruined prison, looking down through the bars into the dark wells of the tiger cages. The roof of the building had partially collapsed. Plaster, splintered wood, and leaf litter were scattered around the platform from which guards had once thrown caustic lime down on prisoners. Sunlight poured in through the smashed roof, lacing across their faces. Mold climbed walls that had begun to shed their plaster onto the floor.

“I remember the tour guide,” Ha continued. “Their job was to make us angry at the injustices that the Americans had visited on our ancestors. They told us one terrible story after another. Prisoners blinded by lime, prisoners with their fingers cut off in torture. Thieu Thi Tao, who was beaten on the head by truncheons and went insane. She believed she was a lapdog who could only eat bread and milk. She didn’t sleep for fifteen days, and when the wind blew, she thought she could fly.

“The tour guides meant it, I suppose, as educational. I’m not sure what they wanted from us. The world had long ago moved on. None of us could even imagine the war, much less be angry about it. The government had moved on as well. The Ho Chi Minh Autonomous Trade Zone was more frustrated by not being able to develop tourism on the island than interested in its history—but the tour guides somehow still had that old Hanoi Communist fervor. It had been so many decades since it all happened, but you would think not a day had passed, for them. But whatever they wanted from us, whatever their intent was, whatever feeling they wanted to create in us … that wasn’t what happened to me.”

“I didn’t even know you had been on this island before,” Evrim said.

“I’m not even sure Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan knew I had been here. But yes. It was an orphanage trip. We spent several days here, being shuttled around.”

“I realize now,” said Evrim, “that I mostly am acquainted with you through your work. I did not even know you were an orphan.”