Hà Nội
The Old Quarter in Hanoi was a cacophony of rumbling motorbikes and screaming vendors. The perfume of incense swirled in the heavy air with the smells of car exhaust and burning charcoal. But at Hồ Hoàn Kiếm—the Lake of the Returned Sword—the world felt still.
Legend has it that hundreds of years ago, the great Vietnamese emperor Lê Lợi broke decades of Chinese domination using a magical sword gifted to him by the Dragon God. Following his successful military campaign, the emperor went boating on this lake to relax and rest. A golden turtle god surfaced and asked for the sword back—to which the emperor obliged.
At the age of 33, I still think this story is cool as hell. Dragon gods. Magical swords. A powerful and wise Vietnamese hero. It’s unlike any other story I’ve heard about Vietnam. There’s no Hueys flying to the strains of “All Along the Watchtower,” no refugee trauma. Just a badass tale about a badass Vietnamese warrior.
As my family walked along the lake on our first day in Hanoi, I found myself eyeing the waters. When the turtle god surfaced with a glowing sword in its beak, would I be ready to take it—to wield my Vietnamese identity like the sword itself and lead my people into a glorious age of prosperity and cultural dominance? There’d be a bánh mì stand on every corner and phở in every pot, and anyone who uttered the words “Ching chong, ling long” to an Asian person would be swiftly beheaded.
“Is anyone hungry?” my mom asked. Since we had eaten two hours before, my mom had asked us if we were hungry no less than a dozen times.
“Honestly, I could eat,” my brother said.
“Let’s get lunch at the other end of the lake,” I said. “We’ll work up an appetite.”
All around us, the city felt like a Friday pep rally before a big game: excitement, pride, nerves. Hanoi, like the rest of Vietnam, was preparing for one of the biggest celebrations in the country’s history: the 50th anniversary of the end of the war. While it made cosmic sense that we were here now, the timing was pure coincidence. We’d been talking about this trip for years, but there were always excuses: new jobs, layoffs, moves across the country, holidays, a pandemic, a breakup. But then, finally, everyone’s schedules lined up for April. The universe had stopped giving us reasons to put it off.
Now the Tran family found ourselves in the country during its celebration of a pivotal moment in its history: the end of a war that killed millions of Vietnamese and scattered millions more to the wind, blown into the world as refugees.
My parents were among those millions. They alighted in Iowa, where they ran a restaurant and raised me and my brother. Now they were bringing us back, or we were bringing them back, and I wondered how they would react to this nationwide holiday—especially my dad, who served as a paratrooper in the South Vietnamese military. He used to tell me stories about jumping out of planes, firing his gun at people he couldn’t see hidden in the thick jungle, fishing with his friends by throwing live grenades into a pond, watching those same friends die after their bodies were hacked to pieces by the buzz saw of a machine gun. I couldn’t imagine how he would cope among the people who did this to him. How would he feel, I worried, seeing them celebrate the loss of his friends, his family, his country?
“By the way, I was in the South Vietnamese army, you know,” he told the waiter at the restaurant on the far end of the lake. He grinned, showing off the veneers he had gotten years before. “I hope that’s OK that I’m eating here!”
He felt fine about it, I guess.
The waiter, a young man, smiled and laughed politely. Plenty of South Vietnamese soldiers have come back to visit, he assured my dad. It’s completely fine—normal, in fact.
I couldn’t help but wince as my dad freely informed strangers that he fought against them, possibly even killed some of their friends and family.
“I’m not mad or anything,” my dad continued. “I’m just here with my family to visit. We haven’t been back for 30 years! Can you believe that? I just hope I don’t get arrested. Ha!”
My mom smiled, but I saw her squeeze his arm. He turned to her. “What?”
I understood my mom’s annoyance. He’d told everyone from the hotel clerks to our breakfast bánh mì vendor that he had served for the South before escaping the country. My parents had spent years explaining the viciousness of the North Vietnamese, how corrupt the government was—how they’d throw you in jail or make you disappear if you said or did the wrong thing. I knew now that the truth was more complicated than this, but I still couldn’t help but wince as my dad freely informed strangers that he had fought against them, possibly even killed some of their friends and family.
After all, to be a South Vietnamese soldier was to stand on the fault line of two worlds. To the North Vietnamese, you were a traitor—fighting alongside Americans and other Western allies who had bombed your country and killed your people. In the eyes of the South, you were defending your home from communist takeover. Either way, it meant you had chosen a side in a war that split the nation in two, and you’d have to carry that choice for the rest of your life.
But most everyone seemed just fine with it. They’d ask him how our trip was going and talk about how there were a lot of Việt kiều—overseas Vietnamese—visiting, despite what they referred to as “the American War.” (More often, though, they just called it “the war.”) “It’s in the past now,” said a man who sold my brother a novelty chess set.
Hanoi seemed to want us to remember that past more than ever on the occasion of this anniversary: The blue-and-red flags of the National Liberation Front adorned lampposts and doorways; murals and photographs of Ho Chi Minh seemed scrawled on every surface; statues venerating the soldiers who had liberated the city from the French in 1946 waited around each corner. The city and country were primed to explode with nationalistic and patriotic pride in the sacrifices made to free the nation of colonizers and invaders—not to mention traitors like my dad.
As my dad told that waiter and every other person we met, it had been 30 years since my parents had seen their home country. While they often told us stories about growing up in Vietnam—and even took us on a visit when we were little—I couldn’t quite identify their feelings toward the country as nostalgia. My mom and dad spoke of Vietnam as somehow both a lawless hellhole where people robbed and took advantage of you and a totalitarian hellhole where the government robbed and took advantage of you. Other than war stories, when my dad spoke of the country, it was to contrast his upbringing with the way my brother and I lived our lives. “When I grew up, we never ate this,” he said when I was 8, indicating my plate of dino nuggets. “I remember crawling through a landfill in Saigon for food when I was your age. Once, I found rotten pork floss and ate it with my sister.” Then he got a strange, wistful look on his face, as if his fondest memory were eating moldy meat in a dump. As if that were better than chicken shaped like a stegosaurus.
Well into my 20s, I found my understanding of Vietnam shaped by my parents’ stories—and Hollywood’s. I knew the country as a place of trauma and horror, of napalm and shrapnel, of young, angry soldiers and the slant-eyed gooks who killed them. Growing up, I must have watched every Vietnam War movie, from the jingoistic, rah-rah Missing in Action and We Were Soldiers to the gritty and cynical Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, and Deer Hunter. If Vietnamese were depicted in these movies, we were bloodthirsty Viet Cong, helpless peasants, or Da Nang prostitutes selling their bodies to whatever soldier had the cash.
But in the past decade, American culture has shifted in the way it sees Vietnam. Anthony Bourdain drank beer and slurped noodles with Barack Obama in Hanoi. YouTubers, TikTokkers, and Instagram influencers post videos of themselves zipping through the mountains in the Hà Giang Loop.
Then there was the shift in how Vietnamese people saw ourselves. Vietnamese actors like Hong Chau, Kelly Marie Tran, and Ke Huy Quan began appearing in TV shows and movies. HBO premiered a miniseries based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Sympathizer, starring a Vietnamese cast (and Robert Downey Jr.). My walls and bookshelves began to fill with the works of other Vietnamese artists and writers. I heard more Vietnamese voices and saw more Vietnamese faces. I began to wonder if the country my parents spoke of in the tones people use when telling a ghost story was a place we didn’t need to be afraid of. Perhaps if Vietnam was the type of place to make Pulitzer winners and Oscar-winning actors, I could be proud of it. If it was good enough for the Bourdains and Obamas of the world, it could be good enough for the Tran family. Vietnam was a place that broke part of my parents a long time ago. Maybe bringing my parents back would help them start to heal.
But I also wanted to go back for a simple reason: My parents are getting older. Each time I visit them—which, according to my mom, isn’t nearly enough—I see the way that time doesn’t just pass, it takes. Time steals the quickness of their movements, the steadiness of their steps, the clarity of their thoughts.
It terrifies me to think that I might visit Vietnam in the future and not have them there with me to experience it—to hear the sound of the boats motoring, or feel the oppressive heat of the sun, or taste fresh rice. I wondered if they understood, when they left to go to America, that it would be the last moment for so many things they’d taken for granted: smelling their home, hearing their family’s voices, stepping through their doorway.
They’ve lived the rest of their lives without the people they left behind. It reminds me that one day, I’ll have to do everything without my mom and dad.
Later we walked near the lake again and spotted a crowd gathered in a courtyard. A sign out front read “Nhân Dân.” “Oh, I know this place,” my dad said. “Nhân Dân is the Communist Party’s official paper. Very famous.”
As a member of the American fake news media, I was interested in what its Vietnamese counterpart looked like. The courtyard was full of people posing for pictures, journalists reporting on an anniversary event, and displays recounting the newspaper’s wartime history.
The last thing I expected to see, though, was an enormous North Vietnamese tank—or, rather, a cardboard cutout of one. Behind it, two kids posed with their parents on a raised platform, holding an NLF flag. Behind them stood a replica of the Presidential Palace. It was an Instagram-friendly photo op of the fall of Saigon. The horror of war flattened—in every sense of the word—into kitsch.
My brother and I laughed. “We have to get a picture with this thing,” I said.
The author (far right) with his father, mother, and brother.
Tony Ho Tran
Near the tank, a woman wearing a shirt with the Vietnamese flag on it held a microphone. She’d taken the NLF flag from the children once they were finished with their photo. “Are you American?” she asked. “Would you like to be interviewed for Nhân Dân?”
My brother shot me a look. Do it, coward. She motioned for her cameraman. “So why are you, an American, here in Vietnam today?”
I told her that I was Việt kiều, a term that felt strange coming out of my mouth. It’s not often I have the opportunity to call myself a “foreigner” to other Vietnamese people. She nodded politely, though her eyes said No shit. I said that I was here visiting the country with my family.
“What do you think of the celebrations?”
It was fun, I said. “It’s great to see everyone so happy.”
She smiled. Then, her eyes narrowed. I felt the pressure shift and sensed that a turn was coming. “And what do you think of Vietnam? It is a beautiful place,” she said. “Even better than America?”
Sweat prickled along my back. I cleared my throat. “Well, you know, Vietnam is very beautiful. Everyone I’ve met is so kind and friendly.”
“Yes, better than America, yes?” she asked.
I could feel her yes sandwich leading me where I didn’t necessarily want to go. “I think both countries are quite different, but—”
“Vietnam has changed a lot since I’ve been here,” my dad interrupted. “Very different. I was in the South Vietnamese army, you know. It’s funny! Now I’m on top of the tank that ran over the gates of the Presidential Palace.”
The woman gave my dad a serrated stare. Her fist gripped the flagpole, and I waited for her to spear my father through the chest with it. “Be quiet, Grandpa,” she said, her voice slicing into the air between them. “We’re on television, and I was talking to this man.”
My dad’s smile withered. The woman immediately shifted back to her TV persona, bright, bubbly, as if nothing had happened. For a moment, I wondered if anything had happened, or if I had just imagined it. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen my dad get yelled at or argue with others in public. Lord knows my mom has torn into him plenty of times. This was different, though. He wasn’t arguing with a mechanic about the price of new tires, or with my mom about something embarrassing he said at a party. This woman cut into him as if he were inferior, second class. She scolded him as if he were a child.
As we left the courtyard, my mom admonished my dad. “Stop telling people you served for the South, Thanh,” she said. “We’re in the North now. They’re going to kill you up here.”
“It was a joke!” he yelled. “It’s OK to joke around. Nobody cares.”
Ninh Bình“They’re slow,” my dad said, his mouth filled with papaya salad. He eyed the entrance to the kitchen. “Why are they so slow?”
We sat at a large table outside our resort in rural Ninh Bình. It had been a few days since that first day in Hanoi, and we were now further into the country. My brother found a tour service that would take us through the scenic region of Ninh Bình before heading to the coast to see Hạ Long Bay. It was April 29, the day before the 50th anniversary. We’d spent the day climbing mountains and paddling through rivers, and now, slumped into our seats at dinner, we felt it.
It had taken just four days for me to get annoyed by my parents’ travel habits.
“Slow, and so salty,” my mom said, grimacing, while she popped yet another slice of fried fish into her mouth.
My parents, restaurateurs for decades, love to complain about food. In America, they got used to complaining in Vietnamese so no one around them could understand. But here, everybody understood them. Everybody within earshot knew when they disapproved of the food or, for that matter, when they thought the hotel’s decor was ugly or that an art gallery wanted to charge us out the ass for a photo of a water buffalo. Embarrassed, I took to loudly praising whatever they complained about. “I think it tastes really great,” I said now. “The best I’ve had in Vietnam, in fact.”
It had taken just four days for me to get annoyed by my parents’ travel habits. Each time my brother or I spoke Vietnamese to anyone—waiter, tour guide, family friend—my mom would laugh and repeat what we had said word for word, as if they might understand it better coming out of her mouth. My dad kept commanding us to say hello and goodbye to elders, instantly making me feel as though I were a kid again. Now I felt my exasperation growing as my parents kept up their critique of the friendly hosts serving us dinner.
We shared the table and the meal with another Việt kiều family, here from Texas. We swapped stories of our travels and the surreal experience of being back in a country they once called home. They were a lot like my family: two adult children, a brother and sister traveling with their older parents, who have the rare and surreal chance to view their homeland as tourists. “It’s so much walking,” noted the daughter, who spoke with a Texas drawl that seemed to slip out more and more with each sip of her beer, of their recent sojourn to the mountains of Sa Pa. “Once we got to the top of the mountain, it was so cloudy we couldn’t see shit!”
“I wanted a refund,” the mom told my mom in Vietnamese. “But, of course, you know how they are here. Once you give them some money, they’ll hold on to it no matter what.”
My brother and I laughed. We could relate. It was nice to hear we weren’t the only Viet Americans experiencing the way that the country seemed to swerve our expectations at every turn. It was neither the lawless hellhole my mom made it out to be nor the authoritarian hellhole my dad made it out to be. It was much more complicated: vibrant, welcoming, and beautiful, and also crowded and noisy and, yes, hungry for our cash.
After my parents left and the country imposed several policy reforms, Vietnam’s economy grew at an eye-popping pace. Foreign companies and countries have invested in the nation. Manufacturing has flourished. Tourism is now one of the pillars of Vietnam’s economy—thanks, Obama (and Bourdain)—making it a hotbed for influencers, digital nomads, and expats. Now it’s a place known for its gorgeous nature, vibrant nightlife, and, of course, delicious and plentiful food.
Not plentiful enough for my dad, though. “How do they expect us to be full?” he asked, gesturing to the single bowl of rice accompanying the braised catfish and stir-fried morning glory. “You can’t have a meal with so little rice. I’m going to ask them for more.”
“Bố,” I said, trying to keep my voice to just above a whisper, “calm down. They’re probably going to bring out more.”
“What? I’m not doing anything wrong,” my dad said, at the volume of someone hailing a taxicab. He genuinely didn’t understand why I’d asked him to sit: “You’re being ridiculous.”
The family next to us stared down at their bowls, trying to ignore us. I felt my face grow hot and was sure my cheeks were flushed. “All right, fine,” I said, going back to my meal. Let him make a scene! Surely everyone would see just how ridiculously he was behaving. He stood up and walked into the kitchen. Through the doors I could hear him say, “Hey, we need more rice out here. We can’t have our meal with so little rice.”
He returned to the table, and we ate in silence. Soon the waiter delivered a second bowl steaming and piled high. “Ah,” my dad said, a proud hunter posing with his fresh kill. He motioned toward the bowl, telling the other family, “Please feel free to eat it,” as if he had cooked it himself. No one did.
The other family told us they were turning in. I waited until they were out of earshot before I erupted. “At least we got the rice, huh, Dad?” My family turned to look at me. “I hope it was worth annoying everybody. Nobody even touched a single grain.”
My dad’s face was all ridges and wrinkles, as the pressure of his own anger swelled and shifted. Before he could say anything, though, my mom admonished me. “Calm down, Đông. Your dad was just trying to help.”
“Yeah, I was just trying to help,” my dad said. “We didn’t have enough food. It wasn’t my fault. It’s their fault. Why are you angry at me?”
“Yeah, man,” my brother said. “Dad was just trying to help. You’re causing a scene right now.”
I threw my hands up. “OK!” I said. “Fine. Whatever.”
My mom looked across the room, as if there were another family fighting over there. My dad seethed with barely concealed fury. It was then a staff member came up to our table and began to clear away the dirty dishes. “How was everything?” she asked.
“Great,” my mom said, smiling brightly. “We had so much to eat.”
Hạ Long Bay
It was April 30. The anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War was here. I had learned that the national holiday was a lot like July 4 in America. Hạ Long Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage site, was filled with tour boats packed to the brim with foreign and Vietnamese tourists alike.
I wandered to the back of our boat, where I saw my dad sitting on a bench, staring out at the bay. Before he was my dad and after he was in the South Vietnamese army, he was a statistic: one of the millions of Vietnamese boat people, refugees who risked their lives fleeing by sea. He spent a week floating on the ocean, packed in a tiny fishing trawler with hundreds of other people fighting starvation, thirst, and one another. Finally, he landed on a tiny Malaysian island, where he lived in a refugee camp for three years. He made it to America in 1983.
His story is harrowing, but it isn’t all that unique. Even now, refugees make dangerous crossings every day. Talk to any Vietnamese American and they’ll have a story, their own or a friend’s, of a journey just as desperate. They’ll tell you the story the same way: as if it were just another thing that happened to them.
My dad hadn’t noticed me yet, so I got to see him as he is when nobody is around. Gone was the furrowed brow and pinched anger that I’d seen yesterday. What replaced it was something calmer and contemplative. I couldn’t imagine what he was going through on this anniversary.
“Hey,” I said. “Mind if I sit with you?”
He looked at me with enormous surprise, as though I were the last person he expected to find on this boat trip I helped book for the family. Then he scooted over on the bench to make room. I sat down and handed him my beer. We sat in silence as he sipped from the bottle and gave it back.
I’d told my friends, my therapist—even Tinder dates—how desperately I wanted this trip to go well. I considered telling my dad that I was sorry, that I didn’t mean what I’d said yesterday. Instead, I just drank my beer. Finally, I said, “How are you feeling? This has to be a big moment for you and Mom. Fifty years and all.”
He closed his eyes. “Sad,” he said.
“Why?” I asked, even though I knew it was a stupid question. Before I could help myself, I added an even stupider one: “The war?”
If he thought it was dumb, he didn’t let on. The boat rounded one of the towering limestone islands that stand sentinel all over Hạ Long Bay, and the sun disappeared for a moment, cooling the boat deck. He said, “I’m just thinking about my sister.”
Below us, the water was emerald green. I realized—really realized—what it meant to be on a boat, today of all days. He’d told me stories about his sister, Nhung. From America, he and his brothers had sent her money so she could pay smugglers for a spot on a boat—her, her husband, and their baby son. The hope was to reunite all of the siblings in America. There they’d be able to work, live, and thrive together at the restaurant where both my parents had worked, lived, and thrived my whole life. They’d be a family again. They’d be a home.
But that never happened. Their boat, and everyone on it, was never seen again. Thousands of lives were lost this way in the decades after the war. While the battles and bombs mostly ended, people still died. Families were still torn apart. And my dad still lost his sister.
“I’ve been thinking about her a lot on this trip,” he said. I quietly handed him the bottle. “She was the first person I saw after the war, you know.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I left the South Vietnamese army days before April 30. Every soldier abandoned it by then. The day Saigon fell, I went straight to the city and found her walking in the street.”
I tried to imagine it. Civilians searching the alleys for family. North Vietnamese soldiers filling the boulevards, AK-47s at the ready. Tanks—maybe even the one we pretended to stand on top of for Instagram—rolling down the street. And there he found my aunt, just a teenager, just walking.
“What was she doing in the street?” I asked.
My dad shook his head and scowled at me, as if that were somehow the dumbest question I had asked all day. “She was looking for me,” he said. He finished the beer and stood up. “She knew I’d come back home.”
Sài Gòn
It was our last day in Vietnam. I wanted to make sure we all saw my dad’s old neighborhood in Saigon. “So much has changed,” he said. But so much of it also remained the same: the apartment where he had lived with his siblings and dad, the rough edges of the notoriously dangerous part of town he grew up in, the columns he climbed as a boy to bother the people in his building.
After a long trip where he seemed lost in a country that was once home, I finally saw my dad ease into a familiar place. I saw the kid he used to be. “I used to climb up these,” he said, pointing to concrete columns supporting the ancient-looking apartment building. He grinned, a tide of memories returning, a flood of stories to tell. “I’d go up onto the roof to prank people who lived in the rooms below.”
We climbed the steps to the second floor, headed to his old apartment, a place he lived with his three brothers, one sister, and father. A place he once called home. He pointed out the apartment where his crush used to live, the home of his schoolyard bully, the doors of so many friends who were gone now because they had died in the war or vanished in the sea. Or just disappeared, the way old friends sometimes do.
“There it is,” he said. A knot of people stood outside his old apartment. Not a complete surprise: My dad had stopped by yesterday by himself and discovered a funeral. It was still going strong; traditional Buddhist funerals in Vietnam are multiday affairs, the family of the dead keeping vigil over the body, welcoming anyone who comes to pay respects and share memories.
A man sat outside the door, a white bandanna around his head. A woman stood next to him, peering into the open window of the apartment. When she spotted my dad, she smiled, greeted him, and gave a bow. They had met the day before.
“Hello, sister,” my dad said to her. “This is my family: my wife and two sons.” Right on cue, he added, to my brother and me, “Say hello to this aunt.” We bowed to her, and I felt a tiny pang of nostalgia—not just for greeting an elder, but for the strange comfort of doing it beside my brother again, as we always had.
I looked into the apartment, the place where my father grew up. It surprised me how desperate I was to soak up the details of his childhood home—the one room he slept in with his siblings, where he played with his friends in the apartment complex, and where his mother died after a fall.
An altar dominated the room, covered in burning incense and dishes of oranges, pomegranates, and green mangoes. Surrounding these offerings were yellow chrysanthemums and white roses—the traditional Vietnamese mourning colors. Above the altar hung a portrait of the deceased: a man in his 60s wearing a suit and tie, the whisper of a smile on his face that was sad and familiar.
The other furniture in the room was covered by mustard-colored cloth, as if to remind you that the focus wasn’t supposed to be on anything other than the dead man. His body was somewhere in here too, in either a coffin or an urn. I turned away from the display, feeling as though I were looking at something I shouldn’t have been.
I asked the woman how she was related to the dead man. She told me he was her brother. “He had a heart attack,” she said, gesturing behind me toward a sign sporting the man’s name, date of birth, and date of death. He was born the same year as my father. I tried to swallow but found that my throat had gone dry. As if she knew, the woman held out a cold bottle of water.
“Cảm ơn, cô,” I said, bowing again. “Dad, do you want a water—”
Returning gives shape to memory. It allows us to feel the ragged trenches of its scars, map the landscape it creates—and that, in turn, changes us.
But he was gone. The man in the bandanna pointed through the window and said, “Your dad’s inside.”
In front of the altar, my dad stood, grasping a burning incense stick in both hands. Through the window I could see him raise the stick above his head and mutter something. A prayer? My dad has never been a religious man. He’d go to church with our family on Sundays but never gave any indication that he believed in God.
I had brought my family here because I thought it could fix something—heal a part of us that was broken long before we booked tickets, before Bourdain broke bánh mì with Obama, before Hueys tore across a movie screen. I wanted my dad to see his home again before he couldn’t make the trip—and I wanted to be there with him when he did.
I felt the past slide down the twisted ladder of my DNA. Returning, I realize now, was never going to answer any questions or heal us. Returning gives shape to memory. It allows us to feel the ragged trenches of its scars, map the landscape it creates—and that, in turn, changes us. But the past will always be with us: in the stories we tell strangers, the old enemies we welcome back, and the fights we have with those we love.
That’s what I started to understand as I watched my dad pray in front of a dead man’s portrait: a man who left a sister behind, who died in the same room where my father grew up with his own siblings, where he last saw his sister, and where he slept nearly every night of his life until the day he left to fight. He was in the South Vietnamese army, you know.
My mom chatted with the woman, while my brother stood nearby on his phone. I took mine out and pulled up the camera. The past is never dead—especially if you have a smartphone. Was it appropriate, I wondered, to take photos of this? Would it be better to just let it happen?
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Fuck that, I thought. That’s my dad.
My dad is bold. He is rude. He speaks up. He tells stories. He chews with his mouth open. He annoys his wife. He annoys his sons. He reminds his sons to greet their elders. He gets angry. He gets defensive. He gets sad. He misses his sister. He is here. He is alive.
My dad demands more rice—and so will I.
Here is what I will always see in the photos and video I shot greedily from outside the window that day: My father bows three times and places the incense in a bowl of sand. He steps back and looks beyond the altar to the inside of the house. He pauses, and the memories come back to him in waves the way grief so often does: playing with his friends, sleeping on the floor with his family, and eating with his sister again. I see time collapse, the years roll away over the city, the apartment building, the room where he stands. He is young and old. He is then and now. He is away and home.
Then he turns and walks through the door of his home for the very last time—again.