“Only if you want to,” Marcus said, yawning.
Until this moment, Liem hadn’t thought about what he would write to his father and mother once their letter had arrived. So he improvised, beginning with how the tone would be as important as the content. His letter, he said, would be a report from an exotic city, one with a Spanish name, famous for cable cars, Alcatraz Island, and the Golden Gate Bridge. He would include postcards of the tourist sights, and he’d mention how funny it was to live in a city where people who weren’t even Asian knew about the autumn festival. When enormous crowds in Chinatown celebrated the lunar new year, he’d be there, throwing down firecrackers at the feet of a dancing lion, hoping his family was doing the same. The crunch of burned firecrackers under his feet would remind him of his boyhood at home, and the letter he’d write would remind him of times when the family gathered around his father as he read, aloud, the occasional note from a distant relative. At the end, Liem would tell them not to worry about him, because, he’d write, I’m working hard to save money, I’m even making friends. And we live in a mauve house.
He heard the steady rise and fall of Marcus’s breathing, and, afraid Marcus was fading into sleep, he couldn’t stop himself from asking the other question he’d wanted to ask since the previous day. “Tell me something,” he said. Marcus’s eyes fluttered and opened. “Am I good?”
A light drizzle tapped against the windows, the sound of Friday night on a rainy day. “Yes,” Marcus said, closing his eyes once more. “You were very good.”
This much, at least, he could write home about.
After Marcus fell asleep, Liem slid out of bed and went to the bathroom, where he stood under a spray of hot water for so long he nearly fainted from the heat and steam. He had his pants on and was combing his hair when the phone rang in the living room.
“I just wanted to see how you two were doing,” Parrish said, loud and cheerful, as if he’d been out drinking.
“Just fine,” Liem said, eyeing the letter on the coffee table. “Nothing special.” He didn’t like speaking on the phone, where body language was no help in making himself under-stood, and he kept the conversation short. Parrish didn’t seem to mind, and said good night just as boisterously as he’d said hello.
Liem sat down on the couch and opened the letter carefully. When he unfolded the single sheet of onionskin paper, translucent in the light, he recognized once again his father’s script, awkward and loopy, as hard for him to decipher as it was for his father to write.
September 20, 1975
Dear son,
We got your airmail yesterday. Everyone’s so happy to know you’re alive and well. We’re all fine. This summer, your uncles and cousins were reeducated with the other enlisted puppet soldiers. The Party forgave their crimes. Your uncles were so grateful, they donated their houses to the revolution. Our lives are more joyful now that your uncles, your cousins, and their wives and children are living with us in our house. The cadres tell us that we will erase the past and rebuild our glorious country!
When you have time, send us the news from America. It must be more sinful even than Saigon, so remember what the cadres say. The revolutionary man must live a civil, healthy, correct life! We all think of you often. Your mother misses you, and sends you her love. So do I.
Your Father
After he read the letter a second time, he folded it, slid it back into its envelope, and let it lie inert on the coffee table. Restless, he stood up and walked over to the bay window overlooking the street and the sidewalks, empty this late in the evening. The light in the room had turned the window into a mirror, superimposing his likeness over the landscape outside. When he raised his hand, his reflection raised its hand, and when he touched his face, the reflection did the same, and when he traced the curve of his cheek and the line of his jaw, so, too, did the mirror image. Why, then, did he not recognize himself? And why did he see right through himself to the dark street outside?