The piece opens as a letter addressed to “Ma.” The narrator recalls a Virginia rest‑stop where his mother recoils at a taxidermied buck hanging over a soda machine, describing the antlers as a “death that won’t finish.” He links the buck’s frozen death to lingering grief. The narrative then shifts to a scientific description of monarch butterflies migrating from Michigan to central Mexico, using the insects’ one‑way journey to echo the family’s impossible separations.

A childhood memory follows: at five or six the narrator jumps out from behind a hallway door shouting “Boom!” His mother screams, collapses in sobs, and clutches her chest. The scene establishes early violence. The next vignette places the narrator in third grade with Mrs. Callahan, his ESL teacher, reading Patricia Polacco’s Thunder Cake. He feels “unmoored” by the idea of baking a cake in a storm, and the lesson deepens his love of language.

He then recounts his first physical hit at age four—a “hand, a flash, a reckoning”—and later tries to teach his mother to read, reversing traditional roles. She slams the book shut, declares she “doesn’t need to read,” and retreats. A later incident with a remote control leaves a bruise on his forearm that he lies about to teachers.

At age forty‑six his mother suddenly takes up coloring; for months she fills the house with landscapes, portraits, and a half‑finished garden, using crayons in shades she cannot name. When asked why, she says she “goes away in it … I feel everything.”

The narrator lists further abusive moments: a box of Legos thrown at his head, a hardwood floor “dotted with blood,” a knife that he grabs before fleeing out the door, and a parking‑lot fistfight where his mother’s knuckles pummel him. In each case she later offers comfort—McDonald’s, chicken nuggets, or the promise to make him “bigger and stronger.”

He inserts a literary digression, noting he reread Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary and reflects on his mother’s ongoing life despite her mother’s death. He then describes low‑budget Saturday trips to the mall: makeup, a sequined black dress, gold hoop earrings, cheap Godiva chocolates, and the stark contrast between their humble corner‑store groceries (milk, eggs priced three times higher, apples stained with pig blood) and the façade of dignity.

A nail‑salon scene shows Ma consoling a grieving customer about a baby named Julie who died of cancer; Ma later mutters in Vietnamese, “A fucking horse!” revealing suppressed anger.

The narrator mentions a moment at a Chinese butcher where they compare roasted pork ribs to burned human bodies, again linking food to trauma. He recounts a broken milk jug that “burst on my shoulder bone,” a nauseating Six Flags Superman ride, a Goodwill haul of yellow‑tag items on his mother’s birthday, and the white dress she hands him, which later becomes a source of bullying at school.

In New York, a week after cousin Phuong’s car‑wreck death, he sees a man on the uptown 2 train who looks exactly like Phuong. He calls Ma in a panic; she hums “Happy Birthday,” the only English song she knows, while he clutches the phone, a pink rectangle imprinting his cheek.

Now twenty‑eight, he describes himself physically and declares he writes “from inside a body that used to be yours,” asserting both continuity and rupture. He returns to the monarch metaphor, noting that only the children of the butterflies survive the migration, just as memory passes down through generations.

Further reflections compare the human eye to “God’s loneliest creation,” recall opening a door to the first snowfall, and describe pruning green beans while his mother declares “I’m not a monster. I’m a mother.” He muses on the etymology of “monster,” on PTSD‑related abuse, and on the paradox that both mother and son are simultaneously caregivers and monsters. The chapter ends with the line “You’re a mother, Ma. You’re also a monster. But so am I—which is why I can’t turn away from you,” cementing the tangled bond.