Your only reaction was to glance again at the dark kitchen. I had considered never telling you at all, just letting you find out on your own. Now I could see that you had already done that. The old people call it a sixth sense, but I knew it was that mystical connection you shared with your father. On some level, I truly did believe that he was watching over you, that he had passed me over and whispered his farewell in your ear alone. You needed nothing more from me that night than confirmation.
After a while you said, I hope he visits me every night. You climbed back onto the sofa and wrapped yourself in your blanket. I waited for you to start crying to yourself, that distant lonely sound you made, but all I could hear were your cousins snoring in their room nearby.
In the coming months, you would befriend your cousins, play games with them, learn their American ways and bicker with them like a stubborn baby sister, eventually sharing their room while I slept alone on the sofa. You started kindergarten and soon spoke words I could not understand. You enjoyed hot dogs and hamburgers and other foods I could not eat. You watched television and sang songs I did not know. Not once, that entire time, did you mention your father. If you mourned him, you did so in your own way and kept that part of you, as with every other part, closed to me.
I wonder now if he did visit you again in the night. As you got older, did he ever appear at your bedside or walk past the doorway of your cousins’ bedroom? Or did you grow up and stop believing in ghosts?
I should tell you now that I am writing these letters in a room that is not my own. I am alone and it is always night when I am here. Outside my hotel window, I see lights glittering and flashing. You’ve seen these same lights, I’m sure. They never stop, never go out, not even during the day. Perhaps that is why I’ve remained in this city for as long as I have. Here, the world outside always feels awake and alive with the stories it wants desperately to tell you, so long as you are willing to listen. Nothing here to remind you that the lights will one day go out, that all stories end whether you want them to or not.
Son ended up telling us about his ear. It was drizzling at the promontory one afternoon, and as you and I and the boy sat together beneath some tree branches, Son sat happily in the open, shirtless as always, with water trickling down his lips.
My father loved to drink, he said suddenly. When I was thirteen, he was stabbed in a fight and was too drunk to know how bad it was. I came home from school that day and the house was empty. Everyone had gone to the hospital. The only thing I found was a bloodstain on the couch the size of our cat.
Son was grinning as he spoke. From the way the boy was listening, I could tell he had never heard this story. But Son was not looking at him or at you. He was speaking directly to me, as if sharing the proudest experience of his life.
His father, he said, had fought the North Vietnamese for years, almost half of Son’s childhood, and he returned from the war a drunk and a gambler, disappearing sometimes for two or three days to booze and play cards with people who weren’t even his friends. He would then come home and pass out on his bed for an entire day.
He had gotten into an argument that afternoon with a man who owed him money from a card game. In their scuffle in the street, the man pulled out a switchblade and stuck him in the belly. People tried to help, but Son’s father shooed them away. He walked the two blocks home all on his own, holding his belly like someone with a stomachache, and collapsed onto the front couch. When the family found him, they thought he was passed out as usual. They would have ignored him if not for the blood.
The man who stabbed him owned the bar down the street and had a wife and two young children. He also had ties to the local gang. No one dared report the incident. Son’s father, after all, had walked away from the fight as if nothing had happened.
So while his father lay in the hospital and his mother prayed all day at church, Son sat at a café across from the bar for over a week and watched the man eat dinner with his family, beat his kids in the street, yell at his wife, and play cards all day with his buddies. One afternoon, on a full-moon day, after the man and his family had walked off to temple, Son stole into their home through a back window. Even at that age, he was expert at prying open anything with a hinge.
He was carrying a kitchen knife from home, which he used to slash their bedsheets and pillows, their couch, the posters and tapestries on their walls. In the kitchen, he poured out every liquid he could find. Milk, soup, alcohol, cooking oil, fish sauce. All over the floor. He opened their rice canister and urinated into it. He spit into their jars of bean curd and shrimp paste. He did all this as quietly as he could.
The last thing he remembered doing was going to their Buddha shrine and breaking all the candles and incense sticks, shoving the banana offerings in his mouth and spitting out mush onto the Buddha figurine. This was when he felt a hand grab hold of his hair and jerk him backward. He saw the man’s calm yellow eyes for only a second before a punch knocked him to the ground. His face felt broken.
Son was chuckling as he was telling this part of the story. I spit out bloody gobs of banana! he exclaimed and glared wildly at me. I tried to smile for him, shaking my head in disbelief despite not knowing what perplexed me more, the story he was recounting or the way he was recounting it.
The man was a head taller than Son and twice his weight. He dragged him by his hair into the kitchen. Son was crying at this point. Bawling. He tried to get up and run but slipped on the wet floor. The man kicked him in the stomach, which knocked the life out of him. Then he planted his shoe on Son’s face.
You think I don’t see you out there every day? he said. Spying on me like some Viet Cong? Tell me, what should a man do to someone who destroys his home? He unsheathed a switchblade.
Son squeezed his eyes shut, too petrified to struggle as the man seized a handful of his hair and sawed it off, then another handful, then another, so rough and vigorous with the knife that Son hardly felt the blade slice the tip of his ear. Then he screamed, but the man did not stop.
When he finally opened his eyes, the man was standing over him with an unlit cigarette between his lips. He pocketed the blade and tossed Son a towel for his ear. He pulled out his wallet, counted out some bills, and reached down and shoved the cash into Son’s mouth.
Stop crying or I’ll cut your throat, he said. That’s the money I owe your father. I would have given it to him if he had asked nicely.
Son’s ear hurt too much for him to know yet that he wasn’t going to die. What’s more, it spooked him how calmly the man spoke, how clean he looked despite the mess around them.
He ordered Son to stand up. Look at me, he said. Are you satisfied? Is all this enough for what I did to your father?
All Son managed to say over and over was, I’m sorry, sir, I’m so sorry.
The man shook his head. Don’t be sorry, you idiot. Be a man. Next time you want to get back at another man, stab him in the heart. Don’t piss in his rice.
He called out a name, and a big ugly fellow appeared as though he’d been waiting outside the kitchen the entire time. After he was given instructions, he took Son by the arm and led him away. Son waited until they reached the alley behind the house, and then he threw up all over his own feet.