Also by Ocean Vuong: Night Sky with Exit Wounds. In this chapter the narrator expands the memoir with a series of fragmented vignettes that reveal ongoing physical abuse, moments of artistic escape, cultural dislocation, and the monarch‑butterfly migration as a metaphor for intergenerational trauma. The narrator recounts childhood memories in Hartford with his schizophrenic grandmother Lan, the protective nickname “Little Dog,” scenes of war‑time trauma, bullying on the school bus, his mother’s (Ma) attempts to teach him English and instill “American” habits, a spiral metaphor for memory, and his emerging role as family interpreter during domestic hardships. The chapter expands the backstory of Lan, revealing her escape from an arranged marriage, the naming of herself, and her life as a mother to a daughter named Hong; it depicts a wartime checkpoint scene where Lan and Hong confront armed soldiers, includes a brutal macaque‑brain ritual by the soldiers, and ties the events to 1968, the Year of the Monkey, deepening the memoir’s intergenerational trauma motif. The narrator discovers his grandfather Paul’s wartime past, his marriage to Lan, and learns that Paul is not his biological grandfather, a truth revealed by Ma; Paul’s cancer remission and his present life in Virginia are also detailed. Narrator is violently taken in a tan‑and‑rust Toyota by Ma and Lan, fearing a killer targeting Mai; they race to a house where a white man with a shotgun confronts them, learning that Mai has lived in Florida for five years; the car withdraws as a boy with a toy pistol mimics shooting. Ma waits at a kitchen table while her son lies wounded beneath pine trees; the son, addressed as Trev, shares a secret and declares he is no longer afraid of dying, and the chapter introduces a bullet metaphor for his lingering trauma. Ma’s nail‑salon work is shown as a toxic, underpaid immigrant labor site where she cares for a prosthetic‑leg client, and the narrator later tends her back with Vicks‑coin scrapes. The narrator’s first job at fourteen is a summer harvest on a Connecticut tobacco farm (2003), meeting crew‑leader Manny, owner Mr Buford, and other undocumented workers (Nico, Rick, Rigo). He learns the farm’s rhythm, hears “Lo siento,” and later encounters Buford’s grandson Trevor, prompting a son‑to‑mother apology. The narrator’s relationship with Trevor deepens into a volatile mix of mutual hatred for paternal figures, drug‑driven escapades, and explicit sexual intimacy; Trevor’s family background—an abusive father, an absent mother living in Oklahoma, and a cluttered mobile‑home life—is revealed, and the narrator’s memories of childhood trauma and his grandmother Lan surface alongside vivid scenes of farm work, a barn radio game, and a series of violent flashbacks. The narrator confesses a queer identity to Ma during a tense conversation at a Dunkin’ Donuts, learning that Ma has an older brother who is dead and that she once aborted a son in 1986. The chapter revisits childhood memories of a first pizza bagel from a boy named Gramoz, a violent episode with a pink bike that teaches the narrator about the danger of color, and a later night of dancing in a tobacco barn in a red dress with Trevor. Additional references to a teenage acid‑attack in Vietnam and the Orlando nightclub shooting underline the theme of violence intersecting with identity. The narrator and Trevor escape a drunken, violent father figure, ride together along the Connecticut River, catalogue a sprawling cast of neighborhood residents and forgotten histories, and end the night confronting the electric glow of Hartford and the realization that seemingly opposite brands (Coca‑Cola and Sprite) are the same corporate entity. The chapter intensifies Trevor’s portrayal: he is a sixteen‑year‑old with a rusted, unlicensed pickup, a blood‑splattered jean, a scar on his neck, and a loaded shotgun; he engages in reckless driving, violent sexual games, and a disturbing veal metaphor shared with his father, deepening the narrator’s visceral, conflicted bond with him. The narrator discovers that Trev has died, travels from New York to Hartford, briefly meets a drunken Trev at the Town Line Diner before his death, and then returns to Grandmother Lan’s home where they share a mournful, intimate moment while Lan tends to his injuries; the chapter introduces the kipuka metaphor to frame their surviving fragments. The narrator writes a late‑night letter to Ma detailing a war‑like personal struggle, the deaths of seven friends (including overdoses and a fatal car crash on fentanyl), a year working at Boston Market under an evangelical boss, Trevor’s OxyContin addiction after a broken ankle, the overdose deaths of Marsha’s sons Kevin and Kyle, a graffiti “FAG4LIFE” incident, night‑walk prayers in Arabic, and reflections on addiction, art, and memory. Lan’s stage‑four bone cancer culminates in her death at home, the family’s desperate caregiving, her final memories of “purple flowers,” and her burial in Vietnam; the narrator later calls Paul, learns of his lingering regrets, and reflects on the lingering trauma that binds the family across continents. The chapter adds the recurring “table” metaphor, a memory of a burning room in Lan’s Hartford apartment, Salvation Army coupons for “Old‑Man Chicken,” a Virginia garden scene where Paul prepares pesto, the narrator’s father’s market wages counted in copper coins, a Thanksgiving gathering with Lan’s fried eggrolls at Junior’s house, and a Saigon drag‑performer funeral rite (“delaying sadness”) after Lan’s death, plus ant‑colony and ash imagery that link memory, trauma, and identity. The narrator, at fifteen, wakes on the Connecticut tobacco farm with Trevor sleeping beside him, engages in a night‑time conversation about buffaloes running off cliffs and the “law of nature,” receives the nickname “Little Dog” from Trevor, asks Ma for the “monkey” story which she tells about men eating monkey brains and identifies herself as a monkey, and then runs through the tobacco fields visualizing a metamorphosis from buffaloes to monarch butterflies, reinforcing the intergenerational‑trauma motif.