Page 27

Chapter Twenty-Seven

LAN

“What are you looking at?” I ask Vivi, whose eyes are planted on the skyline in the distance. Behind us are noisy street food stalls, and the smell of bánh b ? t chiên makes me salivate.

“Just the city,” she says. Rowdy students bump into our table, apologizing before scurrying away.

My hand glides up and down her back, and I can feel her shivering slightly beneath my fingertips. “What about the city?”

“I keep thinking of Sài Gòn from decades ago—about what you and everyone else has told me about how different life was back then. All this time, I’ve been falling in love with the Sài Gòn that’s in front of us, and I didn’t think about the Sài Gòn that existed before I was born. The Sài Gòn my mom lived in.”

I sigh, understanding Vivi perfectly—the war. Although the war ended more than fifty years ago, and she and I weren’t even born yet, its ghost still haunts us today. I think about M á , about how she lived in the wake of a country recovering from war. Like her, most people living in this city still carry the scars from those days, even the people with us on this very street.

“Do you think… that’s why your mom left?”

She sighs. “I don’t know—and I’m not sure if I’ll find the answer when we visit my family tomorrow. From being here, living here, I’m learning that sometimes, people have reasons to leave the place they’ve always loved.”

Her words squeeze my chest, and the dream of getting outside of Sài Gòn returns. But I also think about Tri ? t, about how he left his B ? n Tre for this city, and my great-grandma, finding a home in Sài Gòn as an immigrant. “Maybe being in America takes away some of that pain, when you’re so far from home that the pain doesn’t hurt as much anymore.”

“How did my parents do it? How did they make a new home in a completely strange place? With all the insults that have been thrown our way and how we were never seen as American enough—no matter how hard we tried to be like them—my parents never looked back. If my mom ever felt homesick or out of place, she never wore it on her face, at least not in front of me.”

I look back at the skyline, and the heart of Sài Gòn stares back at me, neon lights dancing across the river. Landmark 81, Vi ? t Nam’s tallest building and the world’s seventeenth tallest building, glows so brightly that it seems to set the city ablaze. It makes me feel so small. “Maybe they never looked back because of you—because they have you. You’re their reason to get up every day and to survive.” It’s what M á is to me. She’s my reason to keep going.

“But I didn’t ask for that.”

“Maybe it’s not you… but it’s your mom wanting to give you the world, to protect you, because you’re the only one she has.” The words fly out of my mouth, feelings I’ve been repressing so long—things I wish I could say to M á every time she reminds me that I shouldn’t need to work so hard for her.

She sighs. “What if I don’t need protecting?”

“But that’s what we do for our family—we protect them from things that could potentially hurt them.”

“I just… I just want to know. I don’t want my mom to baby me and protect me anymore. Whatever she’s faced, I’m ready for it.”

I put down my chopsticks, the b ? t chiên overwhelmingly sour on my tongue now. “What if your mom never meant to hurt you? What if she’s only doing what she knows might be best?”

“What’s best for my mom isn’t always what’s best for me.”

I let those words hang between us, but my thoughts return to M á once again. Do I , her daughter, know what’s best for Ma? Am I hurting her by protecting her with everything I’ve got?

“Will you be okay tomorrow?” I ask Vivi.

She nods. “As okay as I’ll ever be when meeting a family I’ve never known.”