Let me begin again.
Dear Ma, I am writing to reach you, even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are. I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with *because*. But I wasn't trying to make a sentence - I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey. I think of you staring at that taxidermy buck over the soda machine, how you saw in its glass eyes a death that won't finish. The war is still inside you, Ma. It echoes in the way you flinch at a boy's “Boom!”, and in the way your hands, a flash and a reckoning, have found my face. But those same hands, chipped with polish from a week of pedicures, would offer me a square of Godiva chocolate in the mall, a small and singular sweetness. You are a mother, Ma. You are also a monster. But so am I - which is why I can't turn away from you.
Grandma Lan was a different kind of wildness. In our Hartford apartment, her schizophrenia was a fractured radio, tuning in and out of the past. She'd call me Little Dog, a name meant to ward off spirits, to make me worthless and therefore safe. In exchange for plucking the “snow” from her hair, she paid me in stories. Kneeling behind her, I watched our small room dissolve into the Vietnam of her youth: myths of manlike monkeys, tales of her own making - how she met an American soldier in a Saigon bar, his shy hands in his lap, how you were born from a different man, a ghost, making you a ghost-girl, your skin too white for the country that made you. “Help me stay young,” she'd plead, pressing my hands to her chest. “Get this snow off of my life.” And I would pluck, the white hairs falling around me as the past unfolded.
To be a boy in this country was to be a boy of confusion. On the school bus, their laughter was a wind behind my neck before a hand shoved my face into the glass. “Speak English,” a boy named Kyle said, his breath sour with vinegar. I let his name out of my mouth, a password to my own survival. When I told you, you grabbed my shoulders, smoke leaking from your lips. “You have to find a way, Little Dog,” you said, your voice a blade. “I don't have the English to help you. You have to be a real boy and be strong.” The slap that followed was meant to be a lesson, a hardening. The next morning, you filled a glass with American milk. “Drink,” you said, your pride a fragile thing. “You already look like Superman!” And I drank, hoping the whiteness vanishing into me would make more of a yellow boy.
Then, one summer, I found a different way to be a boy. I found him in the tobacco fields, his name a gearshift in my throat: Trevor. He was Buford's grandson, with eyes the gray of a river beneath a shadow and a scar on his neck like a comma. He was the first boy to see me, to hold my gaze until I felt myself anchored to the world. We spent our days under the sun, our nights in the cavernous barn, the scent of curing tobacco and his skin filling the air. He was white and I was yellow, and in the dark, our facts lit us up while our acts pinned us down. We talked of his guns and your nightmares, of his father's drinking and the sunflowers he loved because they grew higher than people. “Sometimes I wanna just go that way forever,” he'd say, pointing west, and I wanted to follow him into the heat, into the fiction we made of everything else.
Our world was his father's Easter-yellow mobile home, the smell of stale beer and Neil Young on a duct-taped poster. It was the rust-red Chevy we drove too fast through cornfields, high on the cocaine and OxyContin that smoldered at the edges of his life. Our love was a frantic and messy thing, born of hunger and fury. He would press his cock between my legs and I would hold him in my fist, a friction that was almost the real thing. When we finally broke through, the pain was a white spark in my head, a feeling that my body had no choice but to accommodate by dulling it into a radiating pleasure. “Fuck me up,” I whispered, because violence was what I knew of love, and in his grip, I finally had a say in how I was taken apart.
But the rules were already inside us. He couldn't shake the fear of being a “faggot,” and the drugs became a landscape he could not climb out of. The last time I saw him, he was high in his truck outside a diner, his veins bruised and blackened. “You're gonna kill it in New York,” he said, his voice a ghost of itself. A few years later, the texts came in a flood: *u hear abt trev?* He had overdosed, alone in his room. I think of him now and hear his voice from that night in the barn, lying on our backs as a Patriots game crackled on the radio. “Why was I even born?” he asked. I didn't have an answer then. I only have the memory of us laughing, of cracking open under the weight of it all.
I came out to you in a Dunkin' Donuts, the word “boys” feeling dead in my mouth. “They'll kill you for that,” you said, your eyes red. And then you exchanged my truth with one of your own: I had an older brother, one you were forced to abort in a Saigon hospital, scraped out of you “like seeds from a papaya.” You told me you named him, a name you would not repeat. We left that day heavier, cut open by what we knew of each other. The body, I've learned, is a cage, and to be an American boy with a gun, or a boy who loves other boys, is to move from one end of it to another. Trevor, for all his fury, refused to eat veal, couldn't stand the thought of those calves locked in boxes the size of their bodies, kept still so their flesh would stay tender. He couldn't eat the children of cows.
All this time I told myself we were born from war, but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence - but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it. I remember you pointing to the bare winter trees, inventing blue birds, red birds, glittered birds, coloring the branches with your voice until I saw them, too. You taught me that a word, a story, can be a roof, a place to hide. I am writing this to you from inside a body that used to be yours. I am writing to build you a house of words, a place you can enter and be seen. I am looking at you now, across the garden, as twilight stitches our edges deep red. You are walking toward the house where, inside, we will wash our hands, speak, and then, with no words left between us, we will set the table.
