70 pages • 2 hours read
Andrew X. PhamA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
This chapter describes a Thanksgiving in the early 1990s, when Pham’s younger brothers were in college. His mother called Huy just before the holiday and Huy’s friend Laura answered. Pham’s mother told him that she hoped Huy and Laura weren’t a couple because she didn’t care for Laura, a punk-rocker with a nose ring. Pham said not to worry, that Huy was gay. Huy had told him that he was tired of lying about it and wanted to get it out in the open. Their mother was shocked, however, so Pham refrained from telling her that Hien was also gay. She was silent for some time before telling Pham, “An, you tell him Laura is a nice girl. I like her. He should date her. Bring her home for dinner” (316).
When Thanksgiving arrived, everyone came with a different dish; the family had stopped trying to create an American menu and had taken to creating a potluck of various cuisines for the holiday. Huy brought his boyfriend Sean, though he introduced him as just a friend. Their mother inquired about Pham’s and Huy’s prospects for getting married. Huy replied that he was different from Pham and their brother Tien (who was there with his girlfriend) but said no more. She then started asking about Sean and how they had become friends. She declared that they were good college buddies and left it at that.
Pham writes that Huy had told him he was gay a few months earlier. They were out for dinner, drinking quite heavily, when Huy opened up about it. At first, Pham gently urged him to try dating girls, implying that perhaps he didn’t really know his true orientation. Huy replied, “Why don’t you try a guy?” (317) and Pham got the point. They continued talking about it, as Huy filled him in about his past. Pham writes that it felt good to be open and honest with each other.
This chapter takes place several months before Pham leaves for his bike trip to Vietnam. One morning at 2 am, he and his father sat up in the kitchen talking. His father expressed regret that he hadn’t taken Huy and Hien to prostitutes, thinking that would have prevented them from being gay. They talked about certain topics but avoided others. Pham tried to reassure him that he had nothing to regret, but his father continued. He said he should have been a better father, more like an American father, and that he should not have beaten Chi that time that led to her running away. He said, “My father beat me. I didn’t know any other way” (320). Pham consoled him, telling his father that he knew he meant well. Not done, his father stated that his own father had abused him and concluded that he in turn had abused his children. Pham writes that he wished his father had not said that; it was too much of a burden to bear on an old man. The fact was that he was a product of a different time and place, and Pham thought he should not try to hold himself to American standards of parenthood.
Returning to the story of his cycling trip, Pham describes his time in Nha Trang, where he meets up with his friend Cuong from Saigon. Cuong, who also goes by the English name Calvin, is a tour guide who travels coastal cities like Nha Trang. He wears penny loafers and smokes Marlboro cigarettes, signs of his status as being well off. The two first met at a café, where they struck up a conversation. Pham liked Cuong immediately after the latter said he never used the term Viet-kieu because it had too many negative connotations. He had worked himself up from a modest background and a childhood spent wasting time and opportunities. When his mother was dying, however, he promised her he would improve himself, and he enrolled in English classes and tour guide training.
Cuong is curious about Pham’s trip and wants to hear all about it. They talk into the night, and the topic turns to America. Pham asks Cuong if he wants to go there, and Cuong answers he does, but only to visit. He explains that in Vietnam he is a big fish in a small pond, but in America Vietnamese aren’t truly accepted and can never really feel American. Pham objects, saying that everyone in America is equal, even though he knows that theory and reality are two different things. Deep down he knows that Cuong is right.
Cuong asks him if Americans look down on Vietnamese, even hate them, but Pham turns the question back to him, asking how he likes taking around rich foreigners on tours. Pham wonders if Cuong hears the things these rich people say about Vietnamese, or if he sees their faces when they encounter the great poverty there. Cuong admits that it is not easy: “Sometimes I feel like a pimp,” he says (329). The deeper they go into this topic, the more truthful Cuong becomes. The pecking order is undeniable: At the bottom are Vietnamese living in Vietnam, then come Viet-kieu, and at the top are Westerners. He points out that although he dresses in a suit and Pham is wearing old jeans, it’s clear who is superior. Vietnamese, he confesses, call Viet-kieu “lost brothers” because they become ever more Westernized over time. Despite this, Pham senses that Cuong wishes he could be more like him.
When they part late at night, Pham rides his bike down to the beach, where he meets a beautiful, tall Vietnamese girl wearing a traditional ao dai. They chat a bit, and he is smitten until he realizes she is a prostitute when she says, “You go with me very cheap. You go. Me very cheap, very good” (331). He tells her he needs to go meet a friend and rides off “with my money, my opportunities, my privileges, my life” (331).
This brief chapter relates Pham’s last memory of Minh (Chi) before he killed himself. They were walking alone together outside on a night around Christmas. Pham asked if he was okay and Minh replied that he was just going through a tough time. They shared a memory of eating star fruit on their grandmother’s rooftop back in Vietnam. When they parted, Pham said they should spend more time together. Now he wished he had reached out more. He ends the chapter by writing, “Some nights I lie in moonlit fields, thinking of him, star fruits, and dying angels” (334).
This last chapter describes the end of Pham’s cycling trip in Vietnam. Near Ca Na, he stops at a roadside café for a cup of Vietnamese coffee and then leaves his things there to run to the beach nearby. He strolls along the shore, remembering how he and Chi once played on the rocks and climbed a cliff there during a family vacation. Children appear, and he gives them candy from his backpack. One of the kids goes to get a watermelon, which they all share, and he leads them in a seed-spitting contest. He remembers winning such a contest at summer camp shortly after he moved to America; afterward, everyone cheered for him and it was the first time he felt some acceptance in his new country.
Now he feels a longing for America and its diversity. He misses hearing the English language, and he realizes this quest to find his roots has become one to find his true home. Although Phan Thiet, the city of his birth, is close by, he’s not ready to end his journey yet. He spends the night sleeping on the beach and the next few days relaxing in this beachside village. The vast ocean is soothing and timeless, drawing away much of his inner turmoil: “The blue here is so vast, no war could ever measurably sap it, not even the one in me. My faults, all my shortcomings, my wrongs against Chi-Minh, pale away, disintegrating, in this desert-ocean-peace” (338).
Pham remembers something his friend Ronnie said in Oregon when they parted: “The perfection of intention. In the end, it is all that matters” (338). Going for a swim in the ocean, he soon hears someone calling from the beach. It’s an old Vietnamese woman, entering the water herself and coming toward him. She says something to him in English, but he can’t make it out. She tries French and he shakes his head. Then she remarks in Vietnamese how beautiful and peaceful it is there, asking if he agrees. He understands her but just smiles. Enjoying the anonymity, he doesn’t want her to identify or categorize him in any way. He realizes there is no guilt or forgiveness, just the pureness of one’s intentions.
Back in Saigon, Pham gets together with his cousin Hung, and Hung’s friend Son, to say goodbye just a few hours before his flight back to America. They’re drunk and having a good time. Four of Son’s girlfriends come by to drink a little and say goodbye before going back to work. As a parting gift, Son wants Pham to choose a girl to sleep with before his flight, but Pham declines. When Son asks him what he’ll do back home, he replies, “Be a better American” (341).
His plane back to America is full of Vietnamese immigrating under a special program for those who worked for the US during the war but ended up imprisoned afterward. As land comes into view on the West Coast, Pham and an old man look out the window in their row. The man looks eager and impatient to get there. He asks Pham if that’s America, and Pham replies, “Yes, Brother. Welcome home” (342).
These final chapters and the Epilogue tie up all the loose ends of the story, for both Pham’s cycling trip and the tale of his family’s immigration to America. Chapter 42 discusses the circumstances surrounding Pham’s brother Huy coming out as gay to the family. When the two brothers first talk openly about it over dinner at a restaurant, Pham writes that it felt good to be open and honest with each other. He contrasts this with his final interactions with Minh, related in Chapter 45: To the end, he never fully opened himself to his sibling. He was also going through a tough time then, having broken up with Trieu, and though he told Minh they should hang out more, that’s as far as he went. Pham writes, “Maybe he wished I’d said something. And I him. Perhaps we should have shared our troubled hearts” (334).
Chapter 43 addresses Pham’s relationship with his father. When they talk late one night not long before Pham’s trip, his father admits that he abused his children, just as his own father had abused him. Pham says he knows his father meant well; he’s now mature enough to realize that his father’s actions stemmed from his begin trapped between two cultures—just as Pham himself suffers from this entrapment. Seen from Vietnamese culture, his father’s behavior was normal and accepted; seen from American culture, it crossed a line that others considered abusive. Though perhaps troubling for a Western audience, the topic of abuse here underscore Pham’s belief in the pureness of one’s intentions.
Pham and Cuong end up in a heated discussion about their differences stemming from their country of residence. Pham has always liked Cuong for his reluctance to use the term Viet-kieu. His friend says, “Vietnamese are Vietnamese if they believe they are” (326). But his true feelings come out now, and it’s clear that he sees Pham as different from himself. Likewise, Pham admits in Chapter 46 that he misses America, and in the Epilogue, the words he speaks to the old man in the plane as they approach San Francisco equally apply to himself: Welcome home.
Yet Pham resists a perfectly black-or-white categorization. When he meets the old woman swimming in the ocean near Ca Na, he lets her speak to him without one word in reply:
So, I let her interpret my half-truths. At this I am good, for I am a mover of betweens. I slip among classifications like water in cupped palms, leaving bits of myself behind. I am quick and deft, for there is no greater fear than the fear of being caught wanting to belong. I am a chameleon. And the best chameleon has no center, no truer sense of self than what he is in the instant (339).
The woman doesn’t know what to make of Pham, who he is, or where he is from—and that’s what he wants. Pham is content to share the moment with her, to drink in the beauty of nature as equals.