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my life back together. I’ve got to pay off four “Tomorrow I want you to have these pictures 5
credit cards and my student loans and hope my laminated,” Mr. Ly said, sorting through the
house won’t be taken from me.” photographs Vivien had sent. “We’ll make an
“But — ” album from them.”
“I won’t have time to worry about a little “What for?” Phuong said, tossing the letter Viet Thanh Nguyen
sister.” Now it was Vivien who seized Phuong’s onto the table.
hands with her own tear-dampened ones. “Can “What do you mean, what for?” Mr. Ly was
you understand that? Please?” incredulous. “So that we’ll have something to
When the attendant opened the door, their 120 remember her by until she comes back.”
father was waiting, disposable camera held to Phuong studied her father as he sat on the 125
his eye, his wife standing behind him with the couch, surrounded by her mother and brothers,
boys. The Ferris wheel rotated at its measured clutching the photographs as if they were equal
pace, slow enough for them to step out, Vivien to the hundred-dollar bills Vivien had given
first. A week later their father would develop the him. Once again she felt a surge of pity for him,
photograph, but it would take Phuong a moment certain not only that her father would break his
to examine the laminated picture before she daughter’s heart but also that the daughters
remembered what was absent underneath the would one day break his. She contemplated
clear plastic. Vivien was visible in the doorway, telling him this truth, that Vivien was never
eyes moist and makeup smudged, but by an going to return, and that one day, perhaps not
accident of timing and composition Phuong soon, but eventually, Phuong would leave as
herself could not be seen. well, to a world where she could fall in love with
someone she didn’t already know. It was merely
• • •
a matter of momentum, and she now knew how
While it had taken Vivien twenty-seven years to begin.
to mail her first letter home, it took her only By nine the next morning she was alone in
a month to send the second missive. Phuong the house, the boys gone to school, her parents
returned one evening from Nam Kha to find at work. She wore her sister’s gift, and over
her parents and brothers clustered around the the lace donned a blouse and Capri pants. It
table in the living room, sifting through a stack would be best, she thought, to do what needed
of pictures that Vivien had included. A smiling to be done outdoors, and so she placed a stool
and cheerful Mr. Ly waved the letter at Phuong, by the living room gate and a tin bucket on
a single sheet that she read sitting on the arm the pavement of the alley. When she opened
of the couch. The letter recounted Vivien’s the envelope of photographs, the first picture
wonderful memories, dining on a floating featured her father and Vivien shivering in the
restaurant on the Saigon River, being fitted for Ice Lantern at the amusement park, their last
a custom-made ao dai, riding on a pony cart stop that day. In the foyer, an attendant had
around Lake Xuan Huong in Da Lat, the best day handed them polyester parkas, hooded, knee
her arrival and the worst her departure. I looked length, and in neon hues of yellow, pink, orange,
out the window of the airplane until I couldn’t see and green. Even wearing the parkas, stepping
the country anymore, she wrote. Everything’s so from the foyer into the Ice Lantern itself was a
green. The moment the clouds covered it, all I shock, for it was in essence an enormous freezer,
wanted was to return. And so the letter went, a frigid, echoing hall that offered a walking tour
her sister’s hypocrisy making Phuong so ill that of the world’s tourist landmarks, rendered as
it was all she could do not to tear the letter in half. ice sculptures no taller than a man’s height.
31
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