better world for you to be a small part of.

The moment you were born you were better than me.

Every moment after that is to be determined.

Thousand Star Hotel

Vietnamese people joke that they don’t need a four-star hotel—even the homeless, sleeping in the wide open, are treated to a thousand star hotel every night. 1996 in the countryside of Vietnam, I front like I’m better than a tourist simply because I was born here. Hot-spring water is piped into a spartan concrete pool, so gray you can tell its color in the pitch dark. Overhead are the most stars I’ve ever seen in my life. They take what little breath I have away. The night is so deep and gorgeous without the light. I can’t swim, not even to save myself, but still I soak and look overhead. I am self-conscious because my body is rail thin and pale. I am frustrated because the hot water fogs up my glasses constantly. I curse my bad luck, my bad eyesight. What I should have done is kept wiping, and kept gazing, if only for a second at a time. Because luck is returning to a homeland you are too young to embody. Because you never know if you’ll get a second chance to be a witness to beauty. Because stars don’t care about inconvenience; their gorgeousness took an eternity to reach us and they have done the work and are worth it. So wipe away. See what your parents had to tear from themselves. And the even less fortunate count the drowned ’til they can’t. Only scientists could measure the journey of starlight. A thousand perfect songs you hear by yourself. A thousand belly laughs meant for someone else. A thousand lines between a thousand points of light until our ancestors stopped counting and named it all sky. A thousand butterflies that never land on you. A thousand windows rolled down to the wind, eyes always on the road. A thousand gnats, their bodies so light they blow back from your breath only to seek you again. A thousand breaths during a thousand dreams folded and folded and folded again, a thousand unfolding, creased things to let go.

Refugerequiem

Our daughter hits me, fists tiny dough balls socking my forearm. Since we are trying to teach her about consequence, I tell her I need to go sit somewhere else, without her, until she can apologize and promise to stop hitting. She is already crying, and she runs toward me, arms outstretched, and says she wants me to hold her. My resolve gives me nowhere to go but to run from her around the dining room table, and she chases me, blubbering tears, as if she were a war orphan in Vietnam and I her C-5 Galaxy. That’s the way it is in this country, my mother will tell me in Vietnamese, if it were you, you’d be afraid of me spanking you. Here’s the part where I make money by telling you Vietnamese people are abusive and backwards and should be glad to be living in whatever puddle or efficiency or condo or project or suburb is seen fit to contain our stink in the United States. Instead I wonder if our daughter is not as far from the war as I hoped she’d be. I wonder what ghosts made of gunpowder and spilled oil and jet stream live in her tiny muscles, if oceans drown her veins so she could run at me like this, to test the caliber of my resolve, the buoyancy of my memory, the times my body feels too small to do what I ask it to to survive, her heavy steps leaving bomb craters around the dining room table, jagged holes that will through rain and time and surviving hands become rice paddies. I pick her up and hold her; she puts her chin on my shoulder, and through teary eyes she sees everything behind me.